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 THIRTEEN
AWAKENING DORMANT FACULTIES

PREAMBLE

Normally we only use a few of our faculties. What are the 'dormant faculties' that Hazrat Inayat Khan declares we can arouse by awakening them? Are they physical? Or psychic? Scanning Hazrat Inayat Khan's teachings, they are both.

It would be a simplistic assumption to reduce these in the physical realm to magnetism and in the realm of the psyche to intuition. But these are working propositions to start with. Actually Hazrat Inayat Khan points out to the interrelatedness and inter-connection between both.

In matter life unfolds, discovers and realizes the consciousness that has been so to speak buried in it for thousands of years.

PRACTICE:

Imagine that consciousness, the Universe, is conscious of itself. And that you're consciousness is part of that consciousness. And that consciousness tends to awaken in matter, that is, in your body.

As you exhale, if you expand the outreach of your consciousness, you'll feel that the consciousness of the Universe seems to flow into your consciousness as, for example, the sea flows into the waves. That will give you a sense of vastness, of immensity. These are conditions that tend to make you lose the sense of your individuality. That is the way of the ascetic.

As you inhale, just imagine that in fact you are absorbing the Universe, not only in your body but also in your consciousness, and at all levels. You have a sense of convergence of the Universe as you, of the cognizance with the holistic paradigm: every fraction of the totality carries within it, potentially, the totality. 

Imagine that, because there is so much bounty, one would not be able to take in all the bounty. To start with, think of the galaxies and that your body started at the time of the big bang. It was like an explosion of radiance and the planets were formed. Eventually your body was fashioned out of the fabric of the planet. Somehow the past of the Universe is there in your body. The consciousness of the Universe is trying to awaken in you, as you. 

Dr. David Bohm (physicist):

If we go to infinite depths of matter, we may reach something that is very close to what we reach in the depth of the mind. (Unfolding Meaning, p 90.) Perhaps something analogous to mind might exist in matter. The mental and material are two sides of one reality. (ibid p 20)

Since consciousness awakens in matter by arousing dormant physical faculties, we need to discover, study and arouse these. And since matter and body functions are within the expertise of physics and biology, we need to inquire in what way our meditative practices affect our body functions. [see: Addendum]

BODINESS

What then are the body functions that we are not using and could arouse? What influence do they exercise upon our mind, our sense of meaningfulness, 'awakening?'

One could list a few that come to one's mind: hibernation (triggering off samadhi); the ability to enhance body heat (tumo); the ability to enhance the configuration of cell structures by an electro-magnetic coil (the research of Dr. Becker); fashioning our subtle bodies, including the aura, by the impact of mind upon body; developing magnetism by working with the chakras (Dr. Motoyama); body radiation (i.e. the Kirlian corona), most importantly, our body magnetism and bioluminescence. These are often ascribed to higher bodies (the subtle body and the aura).

According to physics, magnetism is a condition of matter, and so is light. However, in our experience there are degrees of energy ranging from the 'telluric' (earth magnetism) to what we call spirit. And since scientists acquiesce that all that they know of light is the way it interacts with the laboratory equipment or the way the experiment is devised and therefore do not know how light is if we are not perceiving it or experimenting with it, our question is whether we are, in our meditative explorations, stalking light beyond its physical expression. This means that we, in our meditation cells, are exploring levels of reality (perhaps including subliminal levels) that complement the area explored by scientists in their laboratories.

PRACTICE:

Let us try to become aware of the magnetic field of our body. Remember having poured metal filings around a magnet at school? A beautiful, complex pattern is seen surrounding the magnet. If we could see inside the magnet, we would ascertain that a complementary structure is in place within the magnet.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:

Man is constituted of three aspects of body: a gross aspect of the body, a finer aspect, and a causal body - or a controlling body, which directs activities.... I do not only exist as a physical body which I always see myself to be, but I also exist as a magnetism, an energy by the touch of which the body lives. (Philosophy, Psychology and Mysticism: Self-knowledge)

Now try to 'feel' this magnetic field around your arms, shoulders, back and head. If you 'feel' your magnetic field, you will notice that it does not have a boundary and consequently overlaps and intermeshes with other magnetic fields to form what physicists call a 'wave-interference pattern.' Dr. David Bohm distinguishes this perspective which he calls the 'implicate state' from the usual one in which the world is seen as fragmented - made of 'discrete' objects (the 'explicate state').

In a further step, notice different centers in your life field, which correspond to the plexi of the autonomic nervous system.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:

The mechanism of the body shows the nervous system as principle battery in which magnetism is prepared by the action of breath.

There are inner and finer parts of the physical mechanism which the mystics have called centers. When these centers are not used for many years, they become blunted.

Try to 'feel' the magnetism radiating from your heart chakra, (the cardiac plexus). Compare it with the way magnetism is resorbed in the void through that gate: the solar plexus, and renewed in the heart chakra. Now try to 'feel' the magnetism of the Hara (a chakra connected with the adrenal glands often concentrated upon by Zen masters). Now try to 'feel' the magnetism of your third eye (pineal gland), and even the magnetism overarching your head whose center is the pituitary gland.

The intensity of the magnetism of each chakra has been measured by Dr. Motoyama who has ascertained that by being aware of one's magnetic field, and more particularly by concentrating upon exploring the magnetism of each chakra, one enhances its power. This effect confirms the 'mind-body' impact.

The real existence of these chakras and meridians was made clear by myself in a series of physiological experiments using an electro-encephalograph....The data (measurement of the electrical potential and frequency) recorded in the case of electrodes placed in proximity to a chakra easily emitting energy through the subject's will were remarkably different from those data obtained when the electrodes were placed near a chakra not readily emitting energy through the will of the subject. (Cf. Future Science, Doubleday, New York, 1977, p 444, seq.) 

To nurture the realization of our inter-connection with the entire cosmos, as you meditate, in a first step, represent to yourself that your body is made, basically, of the fabric of the stars and galaxies and therefore is a fabric that existed since the beginning of time. 

Yet if you look deeper, you will learn that the fabric of the stars made a radical quantum leap at some dramatic moment in cosmic history to evolve into biological matter as our bodies. Suddenly, the crystalline inorganic macro-molecules that duplicate each other like frescoes begin to vary so as to be able to cooperate as organic matter, providing consciousness with a much more efficient infrastructure in order to foster the evolution of the awakening of consciousness in matter that had been incubated in the course of the eons of times, as Hazrat Inayat Khan pointed out.

The fabric of our body is a more evolved stuff than that of which the stars are made, as Schroedinger points out:

The difference in structure is of the same kind as that between an ordinary wall paper in which the same pattern is repeated again and again in regular periodicity and a masterpiece of embroidery, say a Raphael tapestry which shows no dull repetition, but an elaborate, coherent, meaningful design traced by the great master. (What is Life? Mind and Matter,Cambridge University Press, 1944, p 5)

To be truly self-organizing, the Universe needs to explore unforeseen possibilities; and likewise ourselves.

Eric Jantsch:

In an evolutionary spirit, creative processes ought to be permitted to interact freely and to find their own order of evolutionary structures. Dunn calls this approach "evolutionary experimentation."  (The Self-Organizing Universe, Pergamon Press, 1980, p 271)

Chuang Tzu:

He who wants to have right without wrong,
Order without disorder,
does not understand the principles
of heaven and earth.
He does not know how things hang together
(The Great and Small)

Hazrat Inayat Khan:

All activities of life are connected with one another, and if one thing is put in order another goes wrong. (Social Gathekas)

Teilhard de Chardin:

Then at a given moment, after a sufficient lapse of time, those same waters here and there must unquestionably have been writhing with minute creatures. And from that initial proliferation stemmed the amazing profusion of matter whose matted complexity came to form the last but one of the envelopes of the Planet: the biosphere. (The Phenomenon of Man, Harper & Row, 1965, p 78)

But we must not stop here. The evolutionary advance marches further to serve the awakening of the consciousness of the universe (called the divine consciousness in Sufism): the deployment of the noosphere.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:

As matter evolves, it shows signs of intelligence. When one studies the growing evolution of the natural world, one will find that at each step of evolution the natural world has shown itself to be more intelligent, reaching its height in the human race. But this is only the predisposition of matter which is manifested in the end. Everything in nature, even in the vegetable world is the seed of which the root is the evidence. Thus intelligence which is the effect is also the cause.

Teilhard de Chardin attributes this further quantum leap in the evolutionary advance to:

...the power acquired by a consciousness to turn in upon itself, to take possession of itself as of an object endowed with its own consistence and value: no longer merely to know, but to know oneself....

Hazrat Inayat Khan:

In man this consciousness of being reaches its culmination. (Manifestation)

Now in the same sentence without a transit, Teilhard's mind itself makes a quantum leap anticipating the next step:

...no longer to know, but to know that one knows.

Compare Jami:

...to be aware that one is aware.

This corresponds precisely to the 4thSatipathana of Buddhism; Buddha expresses it thus: Having dismissed the "illusory 'I'," (p 175), the meditator reaches "the point where consciousness can no more be the consciousness of an 'I'. (Cf. Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening, Luzac, 1951, p 189) 

It is not an I.... He looks at himself again and again before performing an action, saying a word, harboring a thought....(ibid p. 171)

Baghavad Githa:

He "sees the self in the self." (VI 20 - 23)

This takes place by freeing the mind from sensations, vitarka, and representations, vikara.

This does not simply announce the advent of homo sapiens, but clearly marks the leap towards realization - the ultimate step in the evolutionary advance.

Here we distinguish two steps in meditation: (i) to reconnoiter dormant physical faculties and arouse them, (ii) to watch your consciousness reconnoitering body functions and awakening them.

Addendum

Some observations about the relation between meditation and science by a physicist Dr. Michael-David Clarkson who is practicing our meditations:

Since some of the points of view arrived at by meditators fall within the purview of the research of physicists and biologists, an in-depth study of the domains where there is an overlap is warranted. We have reached a point where networking the know-how obtained in various fields of human endeavor has proven mutually enriching; perhaps what the scientist and the mystic have most in common is the importance they attach to experience. In fact, scientists and contemplatives share a common set of values in the sense that the ultimate test in both cases is that of experience; the difference is that the physicist manipulates matter and matches it with his experience of events outside himself, whereas the mystic works by triggering off physiological processes in his or her body, which require of the mind to explore unfamiliar territory.

A meditator in our day and age, conversant with some of the publications about the update in physics, biology and psychology, is bound to be enthused by reading in these parallels with his/her own views attained in the meditative state. Indeed we are interested in knowing whether what we are experiencing in our bodies, or about our bodies, is corroborated by or corroborates the findings of scientists. However the contemplative experience stands on its own ground and need not be validated by science, just as scientists would not seek validation for their findings in the utterances of mystics. Science provides invaluable models that may be called upon to make some sense of the unusual, sometimes paradoxical experiences of contemplatives practicing their meditations.

As meditators, we are interested in understanding the phenomena that we encounter when modulating our consciousness in our contemplative practices. On the other hand, valuable information as to the nature of our thinking, culled from exploring the impact of experience upon our consciousness as we modulate the field and level of our consciousness, may open some clues to physicists, biologists and psychotherapists in their efforts to account for phenomena. By the same token, by providing us with a topography of the uncharted reaches of the psyche, these findings facilitate and encourage our meditative practices.

While scientists are manipulating matter to answer specific questions, contemplatives are modifying their perspective of the environment and their self-image by modulating consciousness and altering some physiological functions.

There is a parallel between the mystic and the physicist in that progress is made by uncovering modes of thinking that are not yet known. Both are challenged into exploring the nature of our thinking, and extend it beyond the commonplace middle range in order to make sense of the observations thus acquired beyond what was considered acceptable in the past. The role of such fundamental qualities of our universe such as locality, causality and reality are currently being very carefully scrutinized (D'Espagnat), and perhaps we might even ask if contemplatives might have a contribution to make to this kind of thinking as we all try to create an "imago mundi." Perhaps this is not so surprising: these are precisely what we encounter in meditation, i.e. non-locality or ubiquity, the acausal, synchronicity, vacuity, the non-determined, negentropy.

Professor Motoyama measured the energy emanating from the chakras of a meditator as compared with a person who does not practice meditation.

The data (measurement of the electric potential and frequency) recorded in the case of electrodes placed in proximity to a fully awakened chakra easily emitting energy through the subject's will were remarkably different from those obtained when the electrodes were placed near a chakra not readily emitting energy through the will of the subject. There was also a marked contrast in the data when the subject was in a quiescent state. (Cf. Future Science, Anchor Books, Double Day, 1977, p 445)
