Today I not only share an essential writing by the great Sufi musician and teacher Inayat Khan (1882-1927) but I also declare that, based on Khan’s deeply universal understanding of Sufism, I am a Sufi.
To be honest, I think I’ve known this for years, but the following words of Khan have brought this truth home to me in a very definitive way, and one that very much mirrors my work as an interfaith chaplain in the field of palliative care. I often share with patients who are on the threshold of the “sweet beyond” and experiencing some trepidation or fear, my deep trust that “we all come from God and we all return to God.” Imagine, then, both my surprise and sense of deep and calm resonance when I read this same sentiment, almost to the word, in the following description of Sufism by Inayat Khan.
Sufism is the ancient school of wisdom, of quietism, and it has been the origin of many schools of mystical and philosophical nature. Its roots can be traced to the school which existed in Egypt and from which source all the different esoteric schools have come. Sufism has always represented that school and has worked out its destiny in the realm of quietism.
In the different schools the ideal remained the same, although the methods varied. The main ideal of every Sufi school has been to attain that perfection which Jesus Christ has taught in the Bible, “Be ye perfect [i.e., whole], even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” The method of the Sufis has always been that of self-effacement. But which self? Not the real, but the false self upon which man depends, and upon which he prides himself as being something special; and by effacing this false self he allows that real Self to manifest in the world of appearance. Thus the Sufi method works towards the unfoldment of the soul, that Self which is eternal and to which all power and beauty belong.
The Sufi sees the one truth in all forms. If anyone asks a Sufi to come and offer prayer in the Christian church, he is ready to do so. If someone would like to take him to the synagogue and ask him to pray as the Jews do, he would be quite willing; and among Muslims he will offer nimaz as they do. In the Hindu temple he sees the same God, the living God, in the place of the idol; and the temple of Buddha inspires him instead of blinding him with idolatry. Yet his true mosque will be his heart in which the Beloved lives, who is worshipped by both Muslim and kafir alike.
. . . Sufism is a religion if one wants to learn religion from it; it is a philosophy if one wants to learn wisdom from it; it is mysticism if one wishes to be guided by it in the unfoldment of the soul. And yet it is beyond all these things. It is the light, it is the life which is the sustenance of every soul, and which raises a mortal being to immortality. It is the message of love, harmony, and beauty. It is a divine message. It is the message of the time; and the message of the time is an answer to the call of every soul. The message, however, is not in its words, but in the divine light and life which heals the soul, bringing to them the calm and peace of God.
Sufism is neither deism nor atheism, for deism means a belief in a God far away in the heavens, and atheism means being without belief in God. The Sufi believes in God. In which God? In the God within him and outside him; as it is said in the Bible, we live and move and have our being in God. That teaching is the teaching of the Sufis.
The Sufi believes in God as the idealized Self within the true life, as the collective Consciousness, and also as the Lord of both worlds, the Master of the day of judgment, the Inspirer of the right path, and the One from whom all has come and to whom all will return.
In reality there cannot be many religions; there is only one. There cannot be two truths; there cannot be two masters. As there is only one God and one religion, so there is only one master and only one truth. The weakness of man has always been that he only considers as truth that to which he is accustomed, and anything he has not been accustomed to hear or to think frightens him. Like a person in a strange land, away from home, the soul is a stranger to the nature of things it is not accustomed to. But the journey towards healing and wholeness means rising above limitations; rising so high that not the horizons of one country or of one continent only is seen, but that the of the whole world. The higher we rise, the wider becomes the horizons of our view.
– Inayat Khan
From The Heart of Sufism:
Essential Writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan
Edited by H.J. Witteveen
Shambhala, 1999
pp. 3-6
From The Heart of Sufism:
Essential Writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan
Edited by H.J. Witteveen
Shambhala, 1999
pp. 3-6
In the following video David C. Lane reads from Inayat Khan’s 1923 book, The Mysticism of Sound. About this classic in spiritual literature, W. A. Mathieu writes:
Inayat Khan says that music is the “picture of our Beloved” and then draws the picture stroke by stroke from every angle and plane until we see it. He is the only holy man I know who delivers an authentic and inclusive spiritual message from a musical sensibility. He does this rigorously, poetically and spontaneously, until we perceive our own actions as music. Open to any line on any page: you will be opened.
Lane’s reading of Inayat Khan’s words is accompanied by the music of the Sufi Music Ensemble.
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Inayat Khan
• Inayat Khan on the Art of Selflessness
• Inayat Khan: “There Must Be Balance”
• The Sufi Way
• Sufism: Way of Love, Tradition of Enlightenment, and Antidote to Fanaticism
• Sufism: A Call to Awaken
• Sufism: A Living Twenty-First Century Tradition
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Kabir Helminski
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything is Possible
• Clarity, Hope, and Courage
• “Joined at the Heart”: Robert Thompson on Christianity and Sufism
• The Mystic Jesus: “A Name for the Unalterable Love That All of Us Share”
• Doris Lessing on the Sufi Way
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Doris Lessing
• The Soul’s Beloved
• Resting in the Presence of the Beloved
• You Are My Goal, Beloved One
• Be In My Mind, Beloved One
• Finding Balance in the Presence of the Beloved
• Your Peace Is With Me, Beloved One
• I Need Do Nothing . . . I Am Open to the Living Light
• New Horizons
• Adnan and the Winged Heart
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