| Hazrat
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
2. There is One Master
the Guiding Spirit of all souls,
Who constantly leads Humanity toward the Light.
The Sufi understands that although God is the source of all knowledge,
inspiration, and guidance, yet man is the medium through which God
chooses to impart His knowledge to the world. He imparts it through
one who is a man, in the eyes of the world, but God, in his consciousness.
It is the mature soul that draws blessings from the heavens, and
God speaks through that soul. Although the tongue of God is busy
speaking through all things, yet in order to speak to the deaf ears
of many among us, it is necessary for Him to speak through the lips
of man. He has done this all through the history of man, every great
teacher of the past having been this Guiding Spirit living the life
of God in human guise. In other words, their human guise consists
of various coats worn by the same person, who appeared to be different
in each. Shiva, Buddha, Rama, Krishna on the one side,
Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad on the other; and
many more, known or unknown to history--always one and the same
person.
Those who saw the person and knew Him, recognized Him in whatever
form or guise; those who could only see the coat went astray. To
the Sufi therefore, there is only one Teacher, however differently
He may be named at different periods of history, and He comes constantly
to awaken humanity from the slumber of this life of illusion, and
to guide man onwards towards divine perfection. As the Sufi progresses
in this view, he recognizes his Master, not only in the holy ones,
but in the wise, in the foolish, in the saint and in the sinner,
and has never allowed the Master, who is One alone, and the only
One, who can be, and who ever will be, to disappear from his sight.
The Persian word for Master is Murshid. The Sufi
recognizes the Murshid in all beings of the world, and is ready
to learn from young and old, educated and uneducated, rich and poor,
without questioning from whom he learns. Then he begins to see the
light of Risalat, the torch of truth which shines
before him in every being and thing in the universe. Thus he sees
Rasul, his Divine Message Bearer, a living identity
before him. Thus the Sufi sees the vision of God, the worshipped
deity, in His immanence, manifest in nature, and life now becomes
for him a perfect revelation both within and without.
It is often for no other reason than clinging to the personality
of their particular teacher, claiming for him superiority over other
teachers, and degrading a teacher held in the same esteem by others,
that people have separated themselves from one another, and caused
most of the wars and factions and contentions which history records
among the children of God.
What the Spirit of Guidance is, can be further explained as follows:
as in man there is a faculty for art, music, poetry and science,
so in him is the faculty or spirit of guidance; it is better to
call it spirit because it is the supreme faculty from which all
the others originate. As we see that in every person there is some
artistic faculty, but not everyone is an artist, as everyone can
hum a tune but only one in a thousand is a musician, so every person
possesses this faculty in some form and to a limited degree; but
the [fully awakened? -- editor] spirit of guidance is found
among few indeed of the human race.
A Sanskrit poet says, "Jewels are stones, but cannot be
found everywhere; the sandal tree is a tree, but does not grow in
every forest; as there are many elephants, but only one king elephant,
so there are human beings all over the world, but the real human
being is rarely to be found!"
When we arise above faculty and consider the spirit of guidance,
we shall find that it is consummated in the Bodhisatva,
the spiritual teacher or divine messenger. There is a saying that
the reformer is the child of civilization, but the prophet is its
father. This spirit has always existed, and must always exist; and
in this way from time to time the message of God has been given.
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. |