A Living Light

The Wild Reed’s 2025 Lenten series continues with a fourth 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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It is very difficult to judge an awakened soul, as they say in the East, for there is nothing outwardly to prove its condition. The best way of seeing an awakened soul is to wake up oneself, but no one in the world can pretend to be awake when they are still asleep. . . . All other pretences one can make, but not the one of being an awakened soul, for it is a living light. Truth is born in the awakening of the soul, and truth is not taught, truth is discovered. The knowledge of truth cannot be compared with the knowledge of forms or ideas; truth is beyond forms and ideas. What is it? It is itself and it is our Self.

Very often people make an effort, though in vain, to awaken a friend or a near relation whom they love. But in the first place, we do not know if that person is more awakened than we ourselves; we may be trying for nothing. And the other point is that it is possible that a person who is asleep needs that sleep. Waking them in that case would be a sin instead of a virtue. We are only allowed to give our hand to the one who is turning over in their sleep, who desires to wake up; only then a hand is given. It is in this giving of the hand that is called initiation. No doubt a teacher who is acquainted with this path may give a hand outwardly to the one who wishes to journey, but inwardly there is the Teacher who has always given and always gives a hand to awakening souls, the same hand that has received the sages and masters of all time in a higher initiation. Verily, the seeker will find sooner or later, if only they keep steadily on the path until they arrive at their destination.

– Inayat Khan
Excerpted from The Awakening of the Human Spirit
Omega Press, 1982
pp. 122-123

NEXT:
A Perpetual Fire Within


NOTE: Each post in this series is accompanied by Sufi music. Today it is an instrumental piece called “As You Start to Walk on the Way, the Way Appears” 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:

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
• Aligning With the Living Light
• “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).

Iimage: Artist unknown.