Awakening and Turning

The Wild Reed’s 2025 Lenten series concludes with a seventh excerpt from The Awakening of the Human Spirit by Inayat Khan. (For the first installment of this series and an explanation for why I chose this book, click here.)

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What does death mean? Turning. The soul is always awake and therefore it is always living, but it may turn from one side to the other side. If there is some beautiful voice coming from behind to which it wishes to listen, then it turns towards it; and in the same way, when it is attracted to a certain sphere to which it had been asleep before, that is called awakening.

We see that the time for nature to awaken is the spring. It is asleep all winter and it awakens in the spring. And there is a time for the sea to awaken; when the wind blows and brings good tidings as if to awaken it from sleep, then the waves rise. All this shows struggle, shows that something has touched the soul that makes it uneasy, restless, that makes it want liberation, release. Every atom, every object, every condition, and every living being has a time of awakening. Sometimes this is a gradual awakening and sometimes it is sudden. To some people it comes in a moment’s time by some blow or disappointment, or because their heart has broken through something that happened suddenly. It may have appeared cruel, but at the same time the result was a sudden awakening, and this awakening brought a blessing beyond words. The outlook changed, the insight deepened; joy, quiet, and freedom were felt, and compassion showed in the attitude. A person who would never forgive, who liked to take revenge, who was easily displeased, who would measure and weigh everything, when their soul is awakened, becomes in one moment a different person. As Mahmud Ghasnavi, the emperor poet of India, has said in most beautiful words, “I, the emperor, have thousands of slaves awaiting my command, but the moment love had sprung in my heart I considered myself the slave of my servants.”

The whole attitude changes. Only, the question is what one awakens to, in which sphere, in what plane, to which reality. Sometimes, after one has made a mistake, by the loss that mistake has caused the outlook becomes different. In business, in one’s profession, in worldly life, a certain experience, just like a blow, has broken something in someone; and with that breaking a light has come, a new life. But it is not right to awaken someone by mistake. No doubt very often awakening comes by a blow, by great pain; but at the same time it is not necessary to look for a blow. Life has enough blows in store for us; we need not look for them.

. . . [T]he more one happens to glance into the hereafter, the more one will realize that what the hereafter is – what is behind the veil of death – is the awakening to another sphere, a sphere as real as this one or even more real. For what is real? It is the soul, the consciousness itself, that is real. What is past is a dream; what will come is hope. What one experiences seems real, but it is only a suggestion. The soul is real, and its aim is to realize itself; its liberation, its freedom, its harmony, its peace all depend upon its own unfoldment. No outer experience can make soul realize the real.

. . . [A key] form of awakening is the awakening of the real self. Then one begins to see what one’s thoughts and feelings mean, what right and wrong mean. Then a person begins to weigh and measure all that springs up within them. The further one goes, the more one sees behind things, the more one becomes drawn to explore all the planes of existence, not only living on the surface of life. This is a new kind of awakening; then a person has only to be awakened to the other world; they need not go there. They need not experience what death is, for they can bring about a condition where they rise above life. Then they come to the conclusion that there are many worlds in one world; they close their eyes to the dimensions of the outer world and find within their own self, in their own heart, the center of all worlds. And the only thing that is necessary at this point is turning; not awakening, but turning.

– Inayat Khan
Excerpted from The Awakening of the Human Spirit
Omega Press, 1982
p. 136-139

NOTE: Each post in this series is accompanied by Sufi music. Today it is an instrumental piece entitled “Mystical Journey” from the YouTube channel Buddha’s Lounge’s RUMI Spiritual Music Live Stream. I find this music perfect for times of meditation and prayer. Perhaps you will too.





See also the previous Wild Reed posts:

SOUL
• Soul: The Connecting Force in Life
• From the Palliative/Spiritual Care Bookshelf: Parker Palmer
• From the Palliative/Spiritual Care Bookshelf: Jean Shinoda Bolen
• Where Soul Would Have Us Go
• Surrendering in Sacred Trust
• Trust and Surrender
• Thomas Moore on the “Ageless Soul”
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Andrew Harvey
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Caroline Jones
• The Soul Within the Soul
• Your True Source
• The Soul’s Beloved
• My Love, “Return to the Root of the Root of Your Own Soul”
• Soul Deep
• Awakening the Wild Soul

AWAKENING
• Sufism: A Call to Awaken
• Don’t Go Back to Sleep
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Peng Roden Her
• Awakening
• An Extraordinary, Precious Opportunity
• The Task at Hand
• The Beauty and Challenge of Being Present in the Moment
• Shining On . . . Into the New Year

THE SUFI PATH
• Sufism: Way of Love, Tradition of Enlightenment, and Antidote to Fanaticism
• The Sufi Way
• Doris Lessing on the Sufi Way
• Sufism: A Living Twenty-First Century Tradition
• “Joined at the Heart”: Robert Thompson on Christianity and Sufism
• Clarity, Hope, and Courage
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Doris Lessing
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Kabir Helminski
• Bismillah
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything Is Possible

INAYAT KHAN
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Inayat Khan
• Inayat Khan and the Heart of Sufism
• Inayat Khan: “There Must Be Balance”
• Inayat Khan on the Art of Selflessness

THE DIVINE PRESENCE
• “Everything Is Saturated With the Sacred”
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
• The Source Is Within You
• Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence
• Prayer and the Experience of God in an Ever-Unfolding Universe
• Prayer of the Week – October 28, 2013
• Neil Douglas-Klotz: Quote of the Day – December 29, 2011
• Cultivating Stillness
• Thoughts on Transformation | II | III

THE LENTEN JOURNEY
• Blessing the Dust
• “This Beloved Quickened Dust”
• Ash Wednesday Reflections
• The Ashes of Our Martyrs
• Lent: A Season Set Apart
• A Lenten Resolution
• Lent: A Time to Fast and Feast
• “Here I Am!” – The Lenten Response
• Let Today Be the Day
• Pope Francis on Lenten Fasting
• “The Turn”: A Lenten Meditation by Lionel Basney
• Lent: A Summons to Live Anew
• Now Is the Acceptable Time
• Lent With Henri
• Waking Dagobert
• “Radical Returnings” – Mayday 2016 (Part 1)
• “Radical Returnings” – Mayday 2016 (Part 2)
• Move Us, Loving God

Recommended Off-site Link:
Inayat Khan and Universal Sufism – Filip Holm (Let’s Talk Religion, December 8, 2024).

Opening image: Artist unknown. Image 2: A 1916 portrait of Inayat Khan. (Photographer unknown.)