Curriculum of the Sufi Order, Lesson 2 -- Modes of Thinking
- Title
- Curriculum of the Sufi Order, Lesson 2 -- Modes of Thinking
- Date
- January 2000
- Decade
- 2000s
- Sequence
- 2
- Description
- Of course the obstacle standing in the way of our finding fulfillment in our lives lies in the inadequacy of our self-image. But how do we deal with it? Awkwardly one may try to annihilate oneself. The riddle is that one cannot obliterate the personal dimension of one's self by dint of the personal dimension of one's will. Of course the answer is God-consciousness; that is, discovering the bounty of the universe lying in wait potentially in our own being and longing to awaken.
- Topic(s)
- Consciousness
- Sufi Path
- Subtopic(s)
- Self-image, False Ego
- Type of Publication
- Curriculum of the Sufi Order
- Media
- Writing
- Pages
- 5
- Identifier
- CSO2
- File Format
- Language
- English
- Author(s)
- Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
- Courtesy Of
- Amida Cary
- Full Text
-
CURRICULUM OF THE SUFI ORDER
Teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan,
Parallels with earlier Sufis,
Comparative religion,
Comments,
Practices.
LESSON TWO.
MODES OF THINKING:
LIMITATION / COSMIC
CONSTRAINT/ FREEDOM
DETERMINISM / CREATIVITY
We are as great as our spirit, we are as wide as our spirit, we are as low as our spirit, we are as small as our spirit.
The world of one individual is as small as a grain of lentil, and that of another as large as the whole world.
We occupy as much horizon as is within our consciousness or as much as we are conscious of. (Healing)
The outlook becomes wide; as wide as the divine eye.
Mysticism means developing from limitation to perfection. (Healing)
The soul, conscious only of it limitation, of its possessions with which it identifies itself, forgets its own being and becomes captive of its limitation. (Alchemy)
The mystic knows, if anyone knows, what limitation means, for it is in perfection that his joy and his happiness are to be found. (Philosophy)
Pir Vilayat' s comments:
Of course the obstacle standing in the way of our finding fulfillment in our lives lies in the inadequacy of our self-image. But how do we deal with it? Awkwardly one may try to annihilate oneself. The riddle is that one cannot obliterate the personal dimension of one's self by dint of the personal dimension of one's will. Of course the answer is God-consciousness; that is, discovering the bounty of the universe lying in wait potentially in our own being and longing to awaken.
PRACTICE:
To start with, check your self-image. This is less easy than one might at first suppose, because one identifies with it. This is where the Buddhist techniques of Satipatana will prove helpful.
As long as one's little personality stands before one, as long as one cannot get rid of it, as long as one’s personality and all that is connected with it interests one, one will always find limitation. (Volume 1, Chapter IV; Gk 27)
The false self is the greatest limitation.
Pir o Murshid coins our self-image as the false ego:
The false ego is what has been wrongly conceived as one's real being. (Cosmic Language) It is not his true nature which is limited; what is limited is what he holds to be himself. (Alchemy) ... The false self is the greatest limitation. (Volume 2, Chapter X; Gg 27) So the ego has its two sides: the first is the one we know, and the next the one we must discover. The side we know is the false ego which makes us say "I." What is it in us that we call "I?" We say, "This is my body, my mind, these are my thoughts, my feelings, my impressions, this is my position in life." We identify our self with all that concerns us, and the sum-total of all these we call "I." In the light of truth this conception is false, it is a false identity...It is the imperfect division of the perfect ego. (Volume 9, Prophets) ... The real self can rise to perfection; the false self ends in limitation. (In man there is a real ego; this ego is divine. It is not that the false ego is our ego and the true ego is the ego of God, but that the true ego which is the ego of God has become a false ego in us. (Volume 11, Philosophy) ... But this divine ego is covered by the false ego. (Initiation) ... The ego itself is never destroyed; it is the one thing that lives. In the knowledge of the ego is the secret of immortality. (Volume 12, Cosmic) … If one realized that spiritual development depends upon the awakening of the false ego to the true ego, its very foundation, how simple the way to spiritual perfection would become!
How do we proceed?
A person has to analyze himself and see: 'Where does "I" stand? Does it stand as a remote, exclusive being? (Cosmic Language)
PRACTICE:
Observe your self-image. You can only observe it by disidentifying with it. Then only can one explore (admittedly at first vaguely) the many-splendored bounty of one's real being latent behind the idiosyncrasies of one's personality. Here again, the key is in rating one's commonplace thinking as not sufficiently comprehensive and therefore incomplete.
Can you reconnoiter your false ego? The key lies in checking whether you identify with what is perishable (your body) or transient (your thoughts).
Then we identify our soul with that which is mortal. This is the false ego. (Health)
Imagine that your real being is covered by many veils.
To become selfless is to realize the self by unveiling it from its numberless covers which make the false ego. (The Soul, Whence and Whither)
One of those veils is our role-playing.
It is the situation we are in that makes us believe we are this or that.
Whatever the soul experiences, that it believes itself to be. If the soul sees the external self as a baby, it believes I am a baby. If it sees the external self as old, it believes I am old. If it sees the external situation in a palace, it believes I am rich. If it sees itself in a hut, it believes I am poor. But in reality it is only I am. When man lives this limitation, he does not realize that another part of himself exists which is much higher, more wonderful more living and more exalted. This is His unlimited Being.... (Gk 27) Either we live in our limitation or let God reign there in His unlimited being.
Man's failures in life, together with his impression of limitation, keep him ignorant of that great power which is hidden in the mind. Man's life is the phenomenon of his mind; man's happiness and success, his sorrows and failures, are mostly brought about by his own mind, of which he knows so little.
Now let us try to reconnoiter our real being:
How can one be in tune with the infinite? The nature of being in tune with the infinite can be seen by comparing one's soul to the string of an instrument. It is tied at both sides: one is the infinite and the other is the finite. When a person is conscious all the time of the finite then he or she is tuned with the finite, and the one who is conscious of the infinite is tuned with the infinite. Being in tune with one makes us limited, weak, hopeless, and powerless; by being in tune with the other we obtain the power and strength to pull through life under all adverse conditions. (Gk 31)
If man dived deep enough within himself he would reach a point of his ego where it lives an unlimited life. It is that realization which brings man to the real understanding of life, and as long as he has not realized his unlimited self he lives a life of limitation, a life of illusion. (Gth 1)
Checking your self-image again, ascertain how limited it is and then discover how you suffocate in restriction, in constriction, (Wzf: Ya Qabid) and long for the vastness (Wzf: Ya Basit). You can find vastness in yourself. Ponder again upon these words:
The world of one individual is as small as a grain of lentil, and that of another as large as the whole world.
We are as great as our spirit, we are as wide as our spirit, we are a low as our spirit, we are as small as our spirit.
We occupy as much of the horizon as is within our consciousness or as much as we are conscious of. (Healing)
The outlook becomes wide; as wide as the divine eye.
PRACTICE:
In the tranquility inside, ponderous thoughts regarding the nature of your being surface with unexpected clarity. You can observe that, indeed, your self-image is based upon the more overt features of your psyche, even your body. But if you dive deeper, you will discover that in one's ordinary experience, one tends to identify with one's role playing, also with the features of one's face, also with those thoughts which while formulated in one's mind, get constrained by trying to articulate them within the constraint of language. In contrast: try to grasp your real person behind the pretence of role-playing; try to envision your real countenance behind the face you see in the mirror, which now appears as a mask. You will now be able to ascertain that your sense of meaningfulness is often distorted in your commonplace thoughts and that your personality only manifests a sliver of the bounty of that seed of your personality considered as a plant.
Now ponder upon the fact that, in the course of experiencing the existential world, you have involved yourself with people, with situations, with the fabric of the Planet. Caught in the narrow perspective that determines seeing things in detail, you have lost the overview and consequently forgotten who you are.
Pir Vilayat’s comments:
Our consciousness is ordinarily squeezed into a microscopically small range while we are oblivious of the way it relates to an infinite totality. What you are experiencing in this room on the screen of your mind is not only a sliver of what is happening on the Planet, let alone in the galaxies, but an infinitesimal cross-section of an n-dimensional world of beings living their lives in worlds of which we are not familiar (that escape our grasp), including our world in the past, which is still there, although it has changed. These far reaches include those whom we have known in our life-time or whose lives have been recorded in the annals of history, and those whom, in our inadequate thinking, we tend to believe are no more.
Consider this screen of your mind as a doorway giving you access beyond its limitation. Envision that the shadows on the screen are not simply what you perceive, but clues which if followed would open vaster and vaster horizons. This could be illustrated by a radio which functions as a transducer of an infinite web of radio-waves that we could not make sense of unless this complex network of waves - this wave-interference pattern (in physics) - were reduced to fit into the range of our perception.
Can you now see that what we perceive as objects are simply abstractions of a deeper dynamic reality which could be described as the interrelationship between events. What we perceive as events are simply cross-sections of intercepting interrelationships that criss-cross. Everything resonates with everything else.
Our consciousness functions like the radio that reduces that stupendous network that our intelligence would not be able to extrapolate and therefore make sense of.
PRACTICE:
Now try to expand your consciousness (Wzf: Ya Basit). See the difference between reading the letters on the pages of a book and scanning a vast horizon.
Of course it is an ideal situation if you meditate at night under the stars and think how extraordinary it is that your retinæ are sensitive to light reaching you from distances measured in umpteened light years! Furthermore, imagine that the molecules, atoms and electrons of the cells of your body originated in the "Big bang" as they coalesced though the æons of time to provide a support system for the intelligence of the universe focalized as your consciousness.
In a further step, see if you can feel a force field around your arms, in front of your chest, in your back, around your head just like the magnetic field of a magnet. Identify with it, considering it as the template in which your body cells are configured.
And further, if you can, sense a light field surrounding your body, also interfused in your body cells. Now identify with it.
Now we can do the reverse: having expanded consciousness, see if you can have a sense of encompassing a wide horizon with your consciousness (Wzf: Ya Wasi). Then hold people in your heart. Harbor them in safe asylum (Wzf: Ya Muhaimin) that they may be nurtured (Wzf: Ya Muqit), also that they may feel supported by you, so that you would intercede in their favor (Ya Vakil). [In general, Wzf: Ya Rahim (compassion), but particularly Ya Rahman (magnanimity).]
Now, says Pir o Murshid, since your outreach has expanded: take stock of the areas, that Murshid calls your kingdom, for which you assume responsibility and of those people for whom you assume responsibility, Ya Qazi al-Hazad, to be better able to manage one's affairs.
Part of Curriculum of the Sufi Order, Lesson 2 -- Modes of Thinking