88 - Review of Extending Consciousness and Turning Within

            Before exploring further dimensions of awakening, it is advisable to take stock of where we are and then anticipate new horizons. Therefore let us step back, then move forward.

            As a preliminary, it is good to have clear aspirations:

            If you are a sensitive person, bereft of the spiritual values in your human condition and have a need for the sacred, you will feel impoverished, incomplete, uprooted. You may even notice a tendency to slip into rank material greed which may lead unwittingly into unkindness with its attendant violence. Or alternately, you may simply sport a bad self-image

            You have the option between basing your value-system upon religious belief, complete with a set of "dos" and "don'ts" or cultivating your latent faculties of insight. The latter step is indicative of the evolution of consciousness in the human being which is being accelerated in our day and age in those who are at the prow of the advance of our civilizations

            With the maturity of the soul, one desires to probe the depths of life.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            This is precisely what has been highly prized by the initiatic traditions as "awakening".

            Clearly this is our objective here - your objective. In the Sufis tradition, we are moreover intent on applying the insight gained in fostering the unfurling of the potentialities latent in our personalities, and in it effect upon our accomplishments in real life situation.

            To resume the conclusions we have arrived at so far:

            (i) Extend the outreach of your conscious field beyond its middle-range purview, by decentralizing and expanding your conscious field. As we have seen, you will notice that your notion of yourself becomes increasingly bountiful; moreover your self-image dovetails with the psychic environment. We find an apt illustration for this if we were to throw pebbles on the surface of a lake: the eddies tend to merge into what physicists call a "wave-interference pattern". The peaks and troughs either reinforce one another or neutralize one another. You will confirm this in your relationship with people: sometimes your mettle is spurred, your self-confidence reinforced by discovering similarity with another person; sometimes you find solace in completing another who is quite the opposite to yourself.

            To pursue the analogy: as we try to earmark these eddies, at some point, we lose sight of the individual eddies, although physicists tell us that they can be retrieved. Precisely in the same way you will find as you expand your consciousness, your mind is confronted with a paradox because, while merging with the environment, you can at the same time maintain your identity.

            If you identify with your subtle body (arwah), in addition to merging with the physical environment, you will experience an osmosis with the psyche of other people: you will find traces of them in yourself and discover some quintessential whiff of yourself in them. This is the attunement of Ya Basit.

            If one is able to expand oneself to the consciousness of another person, one's consciousness becomes as large as two persons or a thousand persons.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            But what we are aiming at is: rather than blurring at the jagged ends, learn to sense the boundaries of your outreach. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan calls this your domain. Survey the areas in your life situations within which you exercise some measure of responsibility (Ya Wasi). Try to assess its boundaries. The more encompassing it is, the greater your sovereignty. Ya Wasi combines beautifully with Ya Wali. Envision your impact on circumstances as an expression of the divine nostalgia Ishq Allah to handle situations in such a way as to actualize the harmony underlying the divine planning, Ya Samad.

            It is owing to our limitation that we cannot see the whole being of God; but all that we love and admire belongs to that beauty beloved by all.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            (ii) Now compare this experience with how you feel when turning within. You discover a whole different relationship with the environment: instead of conceiving of yourself as a discrete entity merging with the environment, you now envision yourself as emerging as an individual out of an impersonal seedbed that is ascribed to what we mean by God as the One and Only Being: Ya Mubdi (the originator).

            Thou wast not aware that thou wast He. Then when the knowledge came upon thee, thou understandest that thou knowest God by God, not by thyself.

Ibn 'Arabi (Know Thyself)

            Those to whom unity is revealed see the absolute in the parts.

Shabistari (The Scented Garden)

            If you keep envisioning yourself as made of gossamer or a boundless aura, converged from the light of the galaxies, your sense of space and time will collapse. In this unfamiliar perspective where you have lost the sense of being located in a definite spot in space, your consciousness is spread out as it were "from inside". Consequently an uncanny realization dawns upon you:

            When a being becomes the truth, s/he reads into the hearts of all beings, like an open book ... While an ordinary person can see the action of another, the seer can see the reason ... the cause behind the cause ... the primal cause.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            You see how situations are interconnected at their roots while you would not have grasped that connection in your ordinary consciousness: You are awaking to a whole new dimension of insight which we ordinarily call intuitive.

            Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan refers to a situation in which you feel upset and on the way you witness an accident. Somehow these two are connected though not causally. This is a case of C. G. Jung's synchronicity.

            Retracing your steps you will recall that to clinch this alternate perspective, you needed to relinquish your ordinary notion of yourself and discard the usual focus of your consciousness as the observer.

            Our minds and bodies being reflected upon a portion of the all-pervading consciousness make that part of consciousness an all pervading soul which in reality is a universal spirit.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            You also had to give up your ordinary understanding and grasp, as Pir-o-Murshid says the understanding of the soul rather than of the mind.

            Indeed, for each level of identity corresponds a mode of thinking. You will discover this mode of understanding buried beneath your thinking. Envisioning yourself as the veiled one, (Batin) in the silence of the activity of your mind, will have the effect of freeing you of the compellingness of your ordinary thinking now seen as a veil.

            To withdraw your consciousness from the "pull" of the ordinary appearance of the physical world in order to turn within - try resorting to a curious blend of detachment and interest

            He who arrives at the state of indifference by going through interest attains the blessed state. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat invite the impact of the universe upon you, which is what is meant by the divine operation.

            The work of the spiritual man is to forget his false self and to realize the true Self which is God.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            You thus invite the divine operation upon you.

            Your sense of time will also be altered, so that you can see how new dispensations intercept the process of becoming. While identifying with your life-field, now think of yourself as recurrently reformed - that is as the emergence of the ever recurrent impersonal non manifest aspect of God manifesting itself to view.

            One thing is that a person asks himself

            Try to grasp qualities as they traverse the threshold between your unconscious and your conscious field to take root in your personality. You will reinforce them by your awareness.

            As the whole of nature is made by God, so the nature of each individual is made by himself.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            Now you are taping the source of creativity within your own self surfacing from impersonal unsounded depths. The corresponding "implicit' mode of thinking will appear as of the nature of metaphor

            I am a metaphor of god transported in man, not an analogy of man to God, nor a manifestation of God, nor an infusion of the spirit of God in a material receptacle.

al Hallaj

            Watch your thoughts surfacing out of the pool of what seems like the thinking of the universe. Your individual thoughts customize these cosmic seed thoughts which for the Sufis belong to the level of metaphor: al Mithal. You are thereby diversifying that which otherwise would appear as generalization, just like in music variations on a theme bring out the potentialities locked in them. Your processing the thinking of the universe enriches the universe. This is what creativity is about.

            In man, the Creator has so to speak completed nature. Yet the creative faculty is still working through man.

            Man is a miniature Brahma, the Creator. If man were aware of his creativity, he would create as he wished and would make a world of his own. this is the work of the masters who grow to become with their spiritual advancement creators of their own world.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            As you meditate, observe creative thoughts as they surface from the unknown in the vacuum of your Arwah body. Introspecting, you may ascertain that while indeed they were triggered off by impressions from "outside" they are not simply reactions to the challenge of the environment, but arise ex-nihilo as the church fathers say unpredictably. They eschew your will so unmistakably that perhaps more than ever you find it difficult to determine the edge between what is your incentive and what may be ascribed to God (or the impact of the universe upon each fraction of itself). In fact in creativity you encounter the basic paradox: while you realize that you are embedded in the ultimate oneness without a boundary, at some level of your being, you delegate the divine will by your incentive and thus enjoy some relative autonomy

            He creates of Himself. Therefore the creation and the Creator are not two. Or rather they are two but at the same time they are not.

Ibn 'Arabi

            Creativity is not only the fresh perception of new meanings, and the ultimate unfoldment of this perception within the manifest and the somatic, but I would say that it is ultimately the action of the infinite in the sphere of the finite.

David Bohm

            Moreover you will find that these geminations of original seed-thoughts gel into forms by dint of the very nature of your imaginative faculty. Try and see if you can fashion your aura by translating these creative thoughts into human features. R. P. Teilhard de Chardin calls this "the hominization of God"

            Thus the ascensions of saints are the ascensions of their spirit, and the vision of their hearts, the vision of forms in the intermediate world of pure spirits.

Ibn 'Arabi

            In this state of awakening, since you have ceased to interpret your problems as they appear to your personal assessment, your involvement with your situation assumes greater clarity, since you see what is in you that is involved in the situation and what are the implications, the issues enacted by the apparent situations.

            It is the situation we are in that makes us believe we are this or that.

            Moreover by grasping emerging thoughts, you are able to counter your problems creatively rather than being subjected to them.

            In this attunement you have forfeited any justification to mask your motivations which stand out unequivocally in the light of your sincerity.

            In a small affair, or in a big affair, first consult yourself and find out if there is any conflict in your own being about anything you want to do.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
