| Hazrat
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
1. There is One God
the Eternal, the Only Being, None exists save God.
The God of the Sufi is the God of every creed, and the God of all.
Names make no difference to him. Allah, God,
Gott, Dieu, Khuda, Brahma,
or Bhagwan, all these names and more are the names
of his God; and yet to him, God is beyond the limitation of name.
He sees his God in the sun, in the fire, in the idol which diverse
sects worship; and he recognizes Him in all the forms of the universe,
yet knowing Him to be beyond all form: God in all, and all in God,
He being the Seen and the Unseen, the Only Being. God to the Sufi
is not only a religious belief, but also the highest ideal the human
mind can conceive.
The Sufi, forgetting the self and aiming at the attainment of the
divine ideal, walks constantly all through life in the path of love
and light. In God the Sufi sees the perfection of all that is in
the reach of man's perception and yet he knows Him to be above human
reach. He looks to Him as the lover to his beloved, and takes all
things in life as coming from Him, with perfect resignation. The
sacred name of God is to him as medicine to the patient. The divine
thought is the compass by which he steers the ship to the shores
of immortality. The God-ideal is to a Sufi as a lift by which he
raises himself to the eternal goal, the attainment of which is the
only purpose of his life.
In a few instances, Hazrat Inayat
Khan's original gender-specific wording of the 10 Thoughts and 3
Objects has been slightly altered, by Pir Moineddin Jablonski, Murshid
Wali Ali Meyer, and Pir Shabda Kahn, as a reflection of ongoing guidance. The commentary associated
with each Thought has been extracted directly from the Sufi Message
of Hazrat Inayat Khan, Volume I, Part 1: The Way of Illumination (© 1979,
International Sufi Movement, All rights reserved.), and as a quoted passage,
Hazrat Inayat Khan's use of gender specific language has not been updated. |