94 - Spirituality for Our Time

What are the salient features in the teaching of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan that are creating a new spirituality for our time?

            In our challenging, decadent but promising world, there is a scent of hopefulness on the ubiquitous trail upon which we advance into the unknown. Perchance you may espy the fumbling emergence of a new spirituality keeping with the trend of our day and age! Yes, there was  -  there is a message at the scale of our global consciousness, offered by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  -  a pointer by a pioneer amongst the pioneers vying to build a new world, a mystic visionary, a holy man, amongst the holy men adumbrating with the clarity of futuristic insight, the beclouded horizon of our anguished ponderings.

            To fulfill our profound need for the sacred - for that perfume that makes sense of life: our spiritual dimension in our present day lifestyles - we now know that we need not leave the world, as our hallowed predecessors did. We need not team up in institutional conformism, or follow a guru. The religious heirloom bequeathed to us in the initiatic transmissions of a wide range of spiritual traditions offers bountiful food for the soul.

            Furthermore, we may consult our consciences, honor our scale of values instead of being dictated to by the "do's and don'ts" of religious reformers, past and present. Instead we may seek personal enlightenment (with the cost of shouldering our responsibilities.)

            We are moreover, invited to participate and contribute to the tidal wave of    global awakening that is occurring inexorably in our time. This was  -  is  -  the message of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan. 

            When asked: What exactly is that message?, he declared it to be:

The awakening of humanity to the divinity of man."

What does this mean in practice

            First of all, the emphasis is upon our interconnectedness in our quest for spiritual progress or enlightenment instead of seeking enlightenment for our personal selves, which has an egotistic flavor. Secondly, as the key to spirituality: we seek emancipation from the constriction of the commonplace individual self-image in order to extrapolate this dimension of our being with our cosmic and transcendent dimension, which Sufis call the divinity 'ulluhiyat' of our being.

            How can we achieve this?

            This does imply a dramatic reversal of our hackneyed views of God as "up there" and us "other" than God. It inevitably confronts us with modes of thinking that we may coin as "more advanced" than our middle-range thinking:  -  challenging and paradoxical if we are attached to our usual way of thinking: a super-logic, "reconciling the irreconcilables. How can we be the individual we think we are and at the same time incorporate in some enigmatic manner the totality of being? This was the very dilemma that faced Catholic theologians in their dogma which inevitably could not fit into the simplistic logic that we call reason: the dual nature of Christ divine and human. Here was a role model  -  a hint for our own identity.

   Know whereby you are God and whereby you are not God. 

Ibn 'Arabi

   Man is divine limitation and God is human perfection.  

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            This is the crux, the fulcrum upon which the new spirituality is precariously balanced in our sentient minds. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan demonstrated that the reality of what we project in our beliefs as spirituality is to be found in a person who is God-conscious.

   Where are you to find God if not in the God conscious?

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

But how does one do it in practice?

            This is exactly what Sufi meditation is about and is precisely the objective motivating the kind of practices taught in the Sufi Order and Sufi Movement.

            Of course there are steps:

(1)   In the physical and social environment: espying that which transpires from behind that which appears - this is contemplation;

(2)   in our own psyche: discovering our idiosyncrasies as the exemplars of the archetypal qualities, predicating reality, that we ascribe to the divine nature but are only knowable by inference;

(3)   rather than identifying with being the spectator of our experience, we need to envision our consciousness as the funneling of a cosmic/transcendent, impersonal global consciousness which we traditionally call the divine Spectator;

(4)   transcend the sense of "otherness" of God's presence, realizing that we are that presence. (This is the most difficult but most powerful step).

            You might ask: What is the gist of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan's teaching? The above are the four cardinal steps that you will find when scrutinizing the teaching.

Wherever I look, I see Thy beloved face. 

God is hidden in His creation. In matter, life unfolds, discovers, realizes the consciousness that has been so to speak buried in it for thousands of years.

The one who is conscious of his earthly origin is an earthly man, one who is conscious of his heavenly origin is the son of God.

By realizing their divine inheritance, they free themselves from all earthly inheritance.  The spirit of limitation is always a hindrance to realizing the spirit of mastery and practicing it. The experience of being powerless is man's ignorance of the power within him.

The outlook becomes wide, as wide as the Divine eye.

When we are face to face, Beloved, I do not know whether to call Thee me or me Thee!  I see myself when Thou art not before me; when I see Thee, my self is lost to view. I consider it good fortune when Thou art alone with me, but when I am not there at all, I think it is the greatest blessing.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            You will also find the same if you look into the teaching of the ancient Sufis.

God's eye sees the heavenly beauty through the godly.

Akibat

Wherever you gaze, there is the Face of God. 

Qur'an  

Wherever I look, all I see is God.

Kulli

By actualizing the divine nature which is the ground of my idiosyncrasies, I confer upon God a mode of being.  

He is both the Spectator and that through which He sees.

Ibn 'Arabi

Take away this "I am" from between you and me! . . . I am the One I love!

al Hallaj

            Of course we realize that these are unusual perspectives that we only clinch by dint of a lot of assiduous and ever-repetitive practice in the course of meditation. Then only can it be willfully applied in the everyday scenario. Eventually it will become an inveterate way of thinking and feeling and identifying. It does mean either drastically downplaying the commonplace perspective which might lead to otherworldliness or extrapolating between both perspectives. The latter is the very paradigm of the new spirituality.

            These steps are hewn into reliable supports for our realization by the means of training. The consistent drill of mental skills, volitional, and emotional attunement, results in the release of power, power that thrives on our reliance upon inherited faculties that need to be awakened.

            Here, this visionary pioneer of modern spirituality offers us a ladder out of the rut that we may not realize we are in (identifying with our self-image), by updating hackneyed articles of faith thanks to persuasive metaphors which prompt new ways of thinking. We commonly identify with those features of our personality that may be illustrated by the superstructure of a plant, neglecting its infrastructure: the root or seed which represents a more essential ground of what we unfurl as our idiosyncrasies. One learns to shift one's notion of identity from its surface to the very foundation of one's psyche that houses a bounty of which little is generally unfurled in our personality.

            You may think of yourself as a plant in which only a little bounty latent in the seed is manifest. Yet, in you the seed that caused the whole existence  -  God  -  is to be found.

The seed out of which the trunk, branches, leaves, flowers and fruit are made arises again at the end of the cycle. The same God so little of whose perfection manifested in the plant arises again and again in its pursuit of excellence trying to emerge as perfectly as possible in the midst of human imperfection.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            This crucial shift in one's identity could be illustrated by shifting one's glance looking at a cube on a blackboard in different ways or scanning a holograph. It is done by highlighting one perspective and downplaying another. This is where the attitude of the ascetic may nonetheless play a role in upgrading our accomplishments in life.

            Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan's vision of the interplay between interest and indifference offers an intriguing breakthrough. How can one reconcile these two objectives pulling one in opposite directions?

Indifference gives great power; but the whole manifestation is a phenomenon of interest. All this world that man has made, where has it come from?  It has come from the power of interest. The whole creation and all that is in it are the products of the Creator's interest. But at the same time the power of indifference is a greater one still, because, although motive has a power, at the same time motive limits power. Yet, it is motive that gives man the power to accomplish things.

So long as a man has a longing to obtain any particular object, he cannot go further than that object.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

By asceticism one can develop one's soul and reach ecstasy, but what is the use of Samadhi if we are not first human?

            It is difficult, but exciting, exhilarating, transforming and fulfilling. Moreover it helps us vindicate our wounded ideals  -  to save them from the wastepaper basket of our faltering faith in meaningfulness, and belief in a splendor behind its sometimes ugly distortions.

            By ecstasy the consciousness is freed from this body, from this confinement; it experiences its true existence. No doubt, the highest ecstasy is in the communion with God, and that ecstasy is completed when one has forgotten oneself to that degree that there remains nothing of himself or herself but God. And it is in that ecstasy that the purpose of life is fulfilled.
