CURRICULUM OF THE SUFI ORDER
The teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan
Presented and paraphrased by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
Including parallels with the ancient Sufis
LESSON 11
NASUT: WORKING WITH THE BODY

PREAMBLE

What does it profit a man if he would gain the whole world and lose his own soul. (Cf. Mathew)

When man has to choose between his spiritual and his material profit, then he shows whether his treasure is on earth or in heaven. (The Sayings of Hazrat Inayat Khan)

Renounce the world before it renounces you....It depends upon your discrimination whether to renounce things momentarily precious for everlasting things or everlasting things for things momentarily precious. (Social Gathekas.)

Things that people take to heart will seem of little importance, and he finds that all his life he has given his thoughts to something which does not last, which does not even exist....So long as you have a longing to obtain any particular object, you cannot go further than that object. (The Sayings of Hazrat Inayat Khan)

Here lies the wager: is the surreptitious motivation spurring the perennial adventure of the human mind in seeking knowledge - assuming power?

If that power covertly coveted is personal power, then the consequences to humanity and the planet - actually to the universe - can inevitably but prove catastrophic and precipitate untold cruelty and suffering. On the other hand, however much scientists may be authentically motivated in their exploration of matter to help humanity and upgrade the environment, they inexorably slip into the pending bind: is there any way to avoid that knowledge should open the lid of the Pandora' s box of terrors? Is there any way to avoid that their findings will be exploited by the ruthless for selfish purposes at the cost of the well-being of the innocent victims of their greed?

Damage to the environment recently worsened, the effects on weather by tampering with the ozone layers, acid rain, endangered species, tampering with recombinant DNA, myxomatosis, the mad cow disease, food pollution, the decadence in standards, drugs, the computer virus, the threat involved in cloning, etc., the appalling cruelty wreaked upon victims by crime, all evidence the challenge to our wisdom and social responsibility triggered by the momentous advance of our high technologies.     

The same bloated ego can and does escalate at a global scale into power plays and ideological feuds between nations, as in the terror in the Second World War, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, or lead to the devastating follies of genocides as in the case of Nazism, the Slavonik mass murder, etc.

Both Fermi and Oppenheimer were tormented by the use that could and indeed would be made by mass human destruction from their discovery of splitting the atom. Although Fermi contributed in Los Alamos to the research on the super H-bomb (1000 times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb), which could escalate at an inhuman scale to the point of mass suicide, he would consider its use only at the last resort as a deterrent, and feared that it could side-track falling back on conventional warfare. When it was discovered that the Soviets had wrested the secret, and predicted that they could harness it within 5 years (confirmed by the explosion in Siberia on August 29th 1949) and that it could be aimed against the very Government (USA) that fostered it, Oppenheimer's uncompromising, unconditional opposition to pursue further research on the H-bomb was considered by FBI Hoover as suspected collusion with the enemy. It averred itself, however, that it was Fuchs who betrayed the secret to the Soviets.  Oppenheimer wished for the Allies in the Second World War to arrive at a convention with the Soviet government to halt further research on fusion-fission and forego the use of the H-bomb.

Here is a clear demonstration of how one can slip into the horns of the dilemma: could knowledge of high tech know-how act as a deterrent for wanton reciprocal suicidal extermination?  Bernard Shaw: "Dare you wage war against war for the sake of peace?"

In the Bhagavad Githa, Krishna instructs Arjuna to fight as a knight to uphold right over wrong.

Action imprisons the world unless it is done by sacrifice, freed from attachment. (Stanzas 8, 9. Tr. Barbara Steller Muller, Bantam)  

Whereas Gandhi advocates non-violence, as, indeed, does Christ.

Those who take up the sword perish by the sword. (Matthew 26-5)

This was precisely the dilemma that my sister Noor and I were faced with as we heard the din of the advancing Nazi troops bracing to invade Paris in 1939. We had been preaching the message honoring all religions and races. Was this just lip-service to a cosmic ideology? Now we are faced with the question: what are we prepare to do to sustain it? How can we participate in upholding righteousness against evil, in honoring all the achievements of our great civilizations, without killing?

No sacrifice can be too great a sacrifice for one's ideal.

Man gives his life when occasion arises to defend his nation, the dignity, the honor, the freedom of his people. (Smiling Forehead)

This meant volunteering for the most dangerous positions without killing.

It is the sense of honor that teaches man self respect. (Esoteric Papers)

For a Sufi the sense of honor is not for his personality, he does not give his person a greater place than dust and the central theme of his life is simplicity and his moral is humility. Yet remember that the Sufi breathes the breath of God, so he is conscious of the honor of God.

It is not by the servility of those around him that the king is exalted; it is in the honor in which they hold him that his kingship exists. Gayan

Knowledge can benefit humanity in the hands of the magnanimous wise and destroy humanity in the grips of the egotist or despot. The power of money through the know-how to deal with and juggle it offers the temptation, if abused  (as is unfortunately often the case), of subjecting people to one's will or fancy, or oppressing people and constraining their freedom making them dependent .

One sees a constant striving in the life of the adepts to make themselves independent of outside things as much as possible. (The Art of Personality)

The issue at stake here is what we mean by spirituality. Is even our quest for awakening one more temptation for the personal ego?

This ubiquitous quandary lies at the crux of the human venture and affects the lives of all of us, and indeed the feasibility of the survival of our global civilization.

It flashed to our dim collective unconscious in the primeval myth of the tree of knowledge wrested by Adam when finding completion in encountering his twin-soul Eve, the legendary Sophia. It erupted forcibly in the Faustian paradoxes. Spurred by the antics of a celebrated sorcerer who claimed that he owed the miracles he conjured to having sold his soul to the devil, the German poet Goethe suggested that magic (divulging and applying the secrets of the divine strategy) could lead to disrupting that very programming, albeit freedom was a divine gratuity notwithstanding its trail of untold devastation and suffering.

The Sufi Niffari had warned of the danger of divulging the clue to the secret treasure.

God warned me: Thou mayest not, and again thou mayest not, and again seventy times: thou mayest not describe how thou seest Me, nor how thou enterest My treasury, nor how thou takest from it My seals through My power, nor how thou seekest the knowledge of one letter from another letter through the Might of My magnificence. (1935, p. 174)

And Hallaj was accused by Shibli of revealing that secret because it was sacred.  All genuine spiritual revelation is at that price.

The decisive criterion as to deciphering the divine code is therefore the motivation: if for selfishness or for service.

The whole manifestation is a phenomenon of interest. It is motive that gives man the power to accomplish things. 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. (The Alchemy of Happiness)

The purity of one's motivation from the concern about personal gain opens the door to the revelation of the divine intention in contrast with the pursuit of acquired knowledge where the personal ego is spurring the mind unawares.

Ibn 'Arabi:

When your soul has been purified and its mirror has been polished, do not consider the world as it appears in that mirror, but turn your soul towards the dignity of the Essence in its purity in the perspective of the cognizance that it has of itself. (cf. Valsan, ET 4-5/1952, p.129)

'Ayn ul-Quzat Hamadhani:                           

When the esoteric nature indicated by a man's inclinations and faculties has become pure, he contemplates therein whatever is of the same nature in the macrocosm. (Corbin, 1978, p. 69)

The clue to that is in whether one identifies with the personal dimension of one's being or one's divine dimension - in other words: God consciousness.
