This Lent I’m reading Inayat Khan’s book The Awakening of the Human Spirit.
Perhaps for some it might seem a strange text to be reading during the Christian liturgical season of Lent. After all, isn’t Sufism the “mystical branch” of Islam?
While it’s true that Sufism has undoubtedly achieved a beautiful, unique, and profound flowering within Islam, its foundational truths have been embodied by women and men from the earliest days of humanity, and it exists today both within and beyond Islam. As expressed in the cultural milieu of Islam, Sufism is known as “classical Sufism,” while outside this milieu the term “universal Sufism” is often used.
I’ve come to recognize and understand Sufism as but one name for that great underground river of mystic thought and experience that wells up in and through all of humanity’s religious and spiritual traditions. This perspective mirrors that of poet and Rumi interpreter Coleman Barks, who notes that the Sufi Way is not religious but instead the “origin and longing inside religiousness.” (1)
Accordingly, Sufism is not a doctrine or a belief system but rather a tradition of enlightenment, a way of life that emphasizes love as the path to an ever-expanding realization of ourselves and our relationship with the Divine Presence, the Beloved One. This transforming and liberating realization takes place within and through our individual and communal journeys and leads us to recognize and celebrate God within all aspects of creation. The mystic, after all, is open to the sacred in all things, and Sufism, as Doris Lessing once wrote, “is always, has ever been, evolutionary in spirit and action.” (2)
The person who makes God his Beloved, what more does he want? His heart becomes awakened to all the beauty there is within and without. . . . When a person arrives at this realization, then he, so to speak, lives in the presence of God; then to him the different forms and beliefs, faiths and communities do not count. To him God is all-in-all; to him God is everywhere. If he goes to the Christian church or to the synagogue, to the Buddhist temple, to the Hindu shrine, or to the mosque of the Muslim, there is God. In the wilderness, in the forest, in the crowd, everywhere he sees God. (3)
Indeed, it is because of the deep universality of Khan’s life and work that I’ve come to understand myself as a Sufi. That being said, I generally prefer to define my path rather than myself in spiritual terms. Accordingly, I describe my spiritual path as “mystico/prophetic.”
I first encountered this path when reading theologian Albert Nolan’s book, Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom.
Reading the signs of the times, Nolan says, is prophetic work, and such work was integral to Jesus’ spirituality. We know this because Jesus recognized and spoke out against the oppressive assumptions, practices, and structures of the social and religious establishment of his time. He “turned their world upside down,” Nolan reminds us, and “the conflict that this created became so intense that in the end they killed him to keep him quiet.” (4)
Jesus was not only a prophet, however; he was also a mystic, a person who longs to experience oneness with God. Because he was both mystic and prophet, Jesus, says Nolan, was rooted in a “mystico-prophetic spiritual tradition,” one embodied by the Jewish prophets who came before him and which lives on to this day in those whose perspectives and actions provide a powerful example of “prophesy and mysticism forming an inseparable whole.” (5)
Vilayat Inayat Khan, son of Inayat Khan, reminds us that Sufism, like all mystical traditions, seeks first and foremost to awaken us to our oneness with God (6); or, in the words of Marianne Williamson, to align us with the “living light.” (7) Meditation, which involves cultivating stillness, plays an important role in this type of awakening and aligning.
At its deepest level of meaning, Lent is all about rediscovering what is essential and thus renewing our commitment to awaken to and align with the Christic consciousness, the divine light longing to be manifested to the world in and through our lives. This Christic consciousness is, in the words of Sufi writer Kabir Helminski, “the current of love that runs throughout all life, the unity behind all forms.” (8)
With all this in mind and heart, I hope you will agree wth me that a book about the mystical path of Sufism is indeed appropriate for Lent. The section of Khan’s The Awakening of the Human Spirit that I’ll be highlighing in this year’s Wild Reed Lenten series focuses on “the alchemy of happiness” and "the dance of the soul.”
The soul is called in Sanskrit, in the terms of the Vedanta, atman, which means happiness or bliss itself. This does not mean that happiness belongs to the soul; it means that the soul itself is happiness. Today we often confuse happiness with pleasure, but pleasure is only an illusion, a shadow of happiness; and in this delusion a person may pass their whole life, seeking after pleasure and never finding satisfaction. There is a Hindu saying that humans look for pleasure and find pain. Every pleasure seems happiness in outward appearance; it promises happiness, for it is the shadow of happiness. Just as the shadow of a person is not the person, although it represents their form, so pleasure represents happiness, but is not happiness in reality.
According to this idea, one rarely finds souls in this world who know what happiness is; people are constantly disappointed in one thing after another. That is the nature of life in the world. It is so deluding that if a person were disappointed a thousand times, he would still take the same path, for they know no other. The more we study life, the more we realize how rarely there is a soul who can honestly say, “I am happy.” Almost every soul, whatever their position in life, will say they are unhappy in some way or another, and if you ask them why, they will probably say that it is because they cannot attain to the position, power, property, possessions, or rank for which they have worked for years. Perhaps they crave money and do not realize that possessions give no satisfaction; perhaps they say they have enemies, or that those whom they love do not love them. There are a thousand excuses for unhappiness that the reasoning mind will make.
But is even one of these excuses ever entirely correct? Do you think that if these people gained their desires they would be happy? If they possess all, would that suffice? No, they would still find some excuse for unhappiness; and all the excuses are only like covers over a person’s eyes, for deep within is the yearning for the true happiness that none of these things can give. They who are really happy are happy everywhere, in a palace or in a cottage, in riches or in poverty, for they have discovered the fountain of happiness that is situated in their own heart. As long as a person has not found that fountain, nothing will give them real happiness.
– Inayat Khan
Excerpted from The Awakening of the Human Spirit
Omega Press, 1982
pp. 1-2
NEXT:
The Alchemy of Happiness
NOTES
1. Barks, C. Rumi: The Book of Love – Poems of Ecstasy and Longing. Harper San Francisco, 2003.
2. Lessing, Doris. From the preface of Seeker After Truth: A Handbook by Indris Shah. ISF Publishing, 2018.
3. Khan, Inayat. “The Object of the Journey” in The Inner Life. Shambhala, 1997, pp. 10-11.
4-5. Nolan, Albert. Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom. Orbis, 2006, p. 73.
6. Khan, Vilayat Inayat. Awakening: A Sufi Experience. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000, p. 5.
7. Williamson, Marianne. Illuminata: Thoughts, Prayers, Rites of Passage. Random House, 1994, p. 60.
8. Helminski, Kabir Edmund. Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness and the Essential Self. Tarcher Putnam Books, 1992, p. 174.
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The Sufi Way
• Sufism: Way of Love, Tradition of Enlightenment, and Antidote to Fanaticism
• Doris Lessing on the Sufi Way
• Sufism: A Living Twenty-First Century Tradition
• “Joined at the Heart”: Robert Thompson on Christianity and Sufism
• Sufism: A Call to Awaken
• Don’t Go Back to Sleep
• Clarity, Hope, and Courage
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Doris Lessing
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Kabir Helminski
• 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
• Jesus and the Art of Letting Go
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
• The Source Is Within You
• Jesus: Mystic and Prophet
• The Mystic Jesus: “A Name for the Unalterable Love That All of Us Share”
• Called to the Field of Compassion to Be Both Prophet and Mystic
• Mysticism and Revolution
• 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
• Bismillah
• Cultivating Stillness
• A New Beginning
• Thoughts on Transformation | II | III
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything Is Possible
Recommended Off-site Link:
Inayat Khan and Universal Sufism – Filip Holm (Let’s Talk Religion, December 8, 2024).
Opening image: Source.
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