Curriculum of the Sufi Order, Lesson 4 -- Prayer: The Key to Personal Creativity
- Title
- Curriculum of the Sufi Order, Lesson 4 -- Prayer: The Key to Personal Creativity
- Date
- February 2000
- Decade
- 2000s
- Sequence
- 4
- Description
-
The most precious moments in our life erupt when we are moved by our spontaneous urge to pray. Sometimes it is triggered off by desperation. This is recognizing a greater power than one’s own.
- Topic(s)
- Prayer
- Sufi Path
- Subtopic(s)
- Glorification, Creative Imagination, Ibn' Arabi, Self-Image
- Type of Publication
- Curriculum of the Sufi Order
- Media
- Writing
- Pages
- 9
- Identifier
- CSO4
- File Format
- Language
- English
- Author(s)
- Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
- Courtesy Of
- Amida Cary
- Full Text
-
CURRICULUM OF THE SUFI ORDER
The teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan
Presented and paraphrased by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
Including parallels with the ancient Sufis.
LESSON FOUR
PRAYER:
THE KEY TO PERSONAL CREATIVITY.
Allah al Makhluk fi’l itikadat Make God a reality so that
Through your prayers, he is no more imagination.
God creates Himself through you.
(Hadith) (Hazrat Inayat Khan)
Note: Before proceeding to the next stage of turning within, we are inserting this lesson on prayer. It is essential to consider at this time and will help us to move to the next phase of turning within. Despite some overlap with a prior lesson (KiT 122, September, 1999, Curriculum of the Sufi Order, Number 2), this version is more fully developed and contains elements absolutely essential for prayer.
The most precious moments in our life erupt when we are moved by our spontaneous urge to pray. Sometimes it is triggered off by desperation. This is recognizing a greater power than one’s own.
Glorification starts with admiration for the beauty of a form – the beauty of a crystal, a cathedral, a flower, a beautiful face, watching the stars at night. It extends further in a dynamic scene: when one is delighted by the changing landscape as it vies with the vicissitudes of the weather, of the wind, of the light of the sun, the seasons. A whole new perspective opens up if one sees the live human cell in an electron microscope or looks at the photos of matter observed under ultraviolet or infrared light, or if one could hear the rumble of the voices of animals, birds, of elephants communicating in infrasonic tones, or whales in supersonic tones.
The harmony of the movement of the planets and stars (and galaxies) strikes a deep chord somewhere in our psyche because it evokes a deep sense of harmony resonating in our emotions. A symphony is a dynamic form enfolded in the dimension of the arrow of time. Here the form reveals its dynamic potentials instead of being seen as a static gestalt, like one’s impression of the crystal (unless one is aware of the jiggling of the atoms and electrons within it). Admiration deepens when one grasps the expression of the countenance behind a face – that of a person whose face does not fit into our concept of aesthetic beauty, but has a beautiful personality that transpires through the countenance to the inner eyes of those “who have eyes to see.” However, beauty cannot be confined to form, even that which transpires from behind that which appears, unless one considers (as the Sufi do) the idiosyncrasies of our human personalities as “subtle form.” This could be illustrated by a beautiful gesture - compassion. One grasps splendor behind beauty. We have reached the mystical dimension.
Physicists peering into the depth of matter unsounded by our bare senses never cease to be amazed by what they call the “elegance” of the programming of life.
Glorification may be sparked by facing the meaningfulness of our life and the significance of life in the universe, confronting the vastness and splendor of the reality beyond our grasp. Then one is suffused with an attunement to the sacred.
One may repartée: “Yes, but the forms of the world are not always beautiful. How about the ugliness, horror, evil, decadence, pollution physical and psychological, the cruelty we are surrounded with and we he hear about in the media? Moreover how can we account for the cataclysms of nature, in the galaxies at a humungous scale?” In the human drama, suffering reveals the evil motivation causing it. The crucifixion of Christ stands historically as the epitome of suffering caused by evil. Untold countless cases of such agonizing ordeals have happened in the past and are occurring right around us right now.
By virtue of its creative imagination, our human mind is endowed with the ability of restoring the distortion. This is the meaning of the wazifa Ya Mu’id.
For the image to lead to the divine model it needs to be transmuted, and moreover it is transfigured thereby. Ibn’Arabi
We are tested in our prayer in our ability to espy beauty when distorted, disrupted, or defiled.
PRACTICE:
While looking at or imagining a faded flower try to reconstitute in your mind that flower in its pristine glory prior to its being faded – or rather how it has been conceived in the divine blueprint before it got pummeled by existential circumstances. Likewise, can you intuit the Divine intention in your life that either we have flouted because we followed our own intention alienated from the Divine intention, or we had acted to the best of our understanding in our ignorance of that intention. The glory of the intention cannot be blemished by its defilement. That is the power of faith in prayer.
Is it not amazing that a thought is configured into a form? That is what is gained by life. What is more, the very concretization of thought in a form unfolds the thought further in the breathtaking advance of evolution. Moreover, in Sufism, vision is not confined to the input of the senses of that which accrues to one from “outside,” but is our faculty (based upon the divine faculty) of translating a thought, or realization, or emotion into a form. Imagination is the faculty of doing just this. Here lies the key to creativity. What is more: thought avers itself to be sparked by emotion.
One is filled with amazement as one’s mind is able to peer into the programming one may espy while pondering upon the events in one’s life – reading into “the mind of God.” That cosmic intention sparking our being, transcending all form, should manifest and materialize as us (and of course as all living reality) pummels our soul (beyond our mind) with awe. This is the secret of prayer. Prayer culminates when we are awed by discovering in our very selves the potentialities of that Being whom we had hitherto worshiped as “other.”
O Thou who art absent there, we have found Thee here. Jili
At this point we are faced with the enigma that always besets us when facing our concept of God. It is only by by-passing these concepts that we can reconcile the irreconcilables.
When thou knowest thyself, thou understandeth that thou art He (1976, p. 16)... Understand whereby you are He and whereby you are other than He. Ibn ‘Arabi, (Corbin 1975 I, 103, cf 1969, p.192)
When we are face to face, Beloved, I do not know whether to call Thee me, or me Thee! I see myself when Thou art not before me; when I see Thee my self is lost to view. I consider it good fortune when Thou art alone with me, but when I am not there at all, I think it the greatest blessing. Hazrat Inayat Khan
The difficulty lies in reconciling our normally limited self-image with the transpersonal dimension of our being.
God can only be known by the synthesis of antinomic affirmations.
(Abu Sa'id al Kharraz; cf Ibn'Arabi, 1975, p. 36)
Thy spirit is mingled in my spirit even as wine is mingled with pure water.
When anything touches Thee, it touches me.
Lo, in every case, Thou art I. Hallaj
This is the key to understanding Hazrat Inayat Khan and all Sufism: accounting for both dimensions of our being rather than considering God as “other.”
By contemplating Him, I am contemplating myself;
and by contemplating myself, I am contemplating Him. Ibn ‘Arabi
I searched for God and I found myself, and I searched for myself and I found God.
Abdullah Ansari
Hazrat Inayat Khan points out the difference.
We are a condition of God.
Divinity is human perfection and humanity is divine limitation. (Gayan, Boulas)
Man is divine limitation and God is human perfection.
One of the distinctive features of Hazrat Inayat Khan’s teaching is emphasis on human incentive.
All is God, but man has a mind of his own.
It should however be noted that this was already in incubation in the teaching of Ibn ‘Arabi.
When God sent Himself down to the Waystation of His servants, their properties exercised their influence over Him. Hence He only determines their properties through them...He does not determine our properties except through us. Or rather we determine our own properties through ourselves though within Him.
(cf Chittick, p. 299)
Prayer opens the door to giving credence to an unanticipated hunch that behind our limited understanding and emotion lies meaningfulness and splendor. Prayer frees us from our limited outlook and particularly from the inadequacy of our self-image – precisely that which has been hampering the unfoldment of our being and the fulfillment of our life’s purpose – and fosters our personal creativity and accomplishment in life.
Can a limited man be conscious of perfection? The answer is that the limited man has limited himself; he is limited because he is conscious of his limitation. It is not his true self which is limited; what is limited is what he holds, not himself (Alchemy, Attainment). When one is conscious of limitation, one is limited; when one is conscious of perfection, one is perfect. The thought of one's limitation covers what is true in one's being, one's true self (Religion, Purity). Even in its limitation the soul has the spark of perfection. The real self can rise to perfection; the false self ends in limitation (Alchemy, Struggle). The purpose of life is that we grow towards perfection; from the greatest limitation we grow towards perfection. (Alchemy).
To pray, we try to imagine God by projecting upon Him/Her qualities that we only know in their imperfect actualization in ourselves or others, by imagining them as they might be in their perfection. Our minds are equipped with the ability to represent a quality (or an outreach of space
or a span of time) always more infinite or excellent than those reached so far – in infinite regress. Of course we can never imagine them in their perfection.
Everything in the world that has a name is imaginable; the one and only Being the imagination cannot reach is God. And yet as God is manifested in all things and in all beings, so in all things and in all beings there is always a part which is unimaginable….Man can reach God only as far as his imagination can take him. (Social Gathekas)
Man is incapable of appropriating the divine knowledge which is applied to those archetypes in their state of non-existence…however the essence only reveals itself in the form of the disposition of the individual who receives this revelation. Ibn ‘Arabi
We are cautioned that when we say God, we are projecting our own anthropomorphical representation of what we imagine God to be or would like God to be.
Ibn ‘Arabi says:
To Him we attribute no quality without ourselves having that quality. (1975, p. 16)
However it is in the world and ourselves that we can find clues to that which lies beyond our imagination.
He shows you His signs at the horizons and in yourselves. Qur’an
Since the ephemeral manifests the eternal, it is by the ephemeral that God reveals to us the eternal. Know that there is no form in the lower world without a likeness (mithal) in the higher world. Between the two worlds there are tenuities which extend from each to its likeness (Ibn ‘Arabi, Fut. lll 260, 6, Chittick, 1989, p. 406). God brings them out of the treasuries, that is from an existence we do not perceive, to an existence that we do perceive. Hence the treasuries contain only the possibilities of the things (Fut. III 199, 3). When meanings are embodied and become manifest in shapes and measures they assume forms, since witnessing takes place through sight (Chittick 1989, p. 354). Ibn ‘Arabi
However, to overcome the limitation of our projections, we need to see things from two antipodal points of view: How then can one grasp the eternal model of our personality? Reverse your sense of identity to the antipodal pole of your being which one usually ascribes to God as “other.” This is the key to Sufism.
God discovers His perfection in the imperfection of the creature…Imagine grasping the bounty in a seed while contemplating a flower. Hazrat Inayat Khan
However, the ephemeral is not conceivable as such that is its ephemeral and relative nature, except in relation to a principle from which it derives its possibility, so that it has no being in itself, but derives it from another to whom it is tied by its dependence. Ibn ‘Arabi (1975, p. 15)
Our representation of God as remote, actually as “other” hinders our ability to recognize His/Her nature that is trying to manifest and actuate itself in our personality. The consequence is that our idiosyncrasies are constrained within our personal self-image, which cannot but limit the bounty lying in wait in the seed-bed of our being.
People ask: "If all is God, then God is not a person." The answer: though the seed does not show the flower in it, yet the seed culminates in the flower; and therefore the flower already existed in the seed. Moreover, as the seed comes last after the life of the trunk, branch, flower and fruit, and is sufficient in itself of producing another plant, so in man, the product of all the planes, spiritual and material, shines forth that which caused the whole: the seed of existence, primal intelligence.
No doubt it would be a great mistake to call God a personality, but it is a still greater mistake when man denies the personality of God.
Man in the flowering of his personality expresses the personality of God.
The man who has no imagination to make a God, and is not open to a conception of God (even his own) finds no stepping stone to reach that knowledge which his soul longs for but his doubts deny.
It is not wrong to make God in one's imagination the God of all beauty, free from ugliness and evil, for by that imagination, he is drawn nearer and nearer every moment of his life to that Divine Ideal which is the seeking of his soul. And, once he has touched divine Perfection, in it he will find the fulfillment of his life.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
In our prayer, our faculty of creative imagination leads us from stretching our minds beyond their commonplace reach to actually being transformed ourselves.
Since imagination can produce beauty outwardly in the form of poetry, music, art, or literature, it can produce beauty of much higher and greater value when it is directed inward (Initiation)… If you have no God, make one. By making God great, we ourselves arrive at a certain greatness. Imagination becomes a ladder on the path of the mystic. The mystic begins his work with the ladder of imagination, and actual experience follows (Philosophy, Psychology, Mysticism)
Our active imagination is a moment, an instant, of the Divine Imagination that is the universe. Ibn’ Arabi (Corbin, 1970, p. 214)
To spark creativity, we need to match the idiosyncrasies in our personality with their archetype that represents the higher dimension of our being which is co-extensive with all beings and which we call God, while both poles of our being are incommensurable. This is not easy.
It is not an easy thing to make a God of imagination and make out of Him a reality. For every person it is like making an idol, a statue, and trying to make the statue live. But if ever anyone has reached God, he has not reached by finding God in the abstract, something where nothing is to be found. But he had to make God, and then through that God, which was once made, that God of the abstract became knowable. Hazrat Inayat Khan
Thus prayer avers itself to be the secret of personal creativity, whereas trying to perfect ourselves while limiting ourselves in our personal self-image would be like trying to lift oneself by one’s boot-straps.
He realizes that all that is lacking in it and all that remains to be done, or all the faults that it may seem to have, are his own faults, while his ideal is perfect. This is a stepping-stone for the mystic to come closer to God's shrine; by this he attains more quickly to a higher degree of perfection.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
In order to imagine God in our prayer, we are not only arousing the qualities we project upon the concept that we make of Him/Her, that are lying in wait in our personality, but also configuring our subtle bodies to manifest the miracle whereby the Divine intention is configured as an evanescent, evolving, self-organizing form.
PRACTICE:
The representative prescribes a wazifa and the mureed projects the quality upon his/her representation of what he/she imagines God to be as epitomizing this quality in a more and more perfect way, in infinite regress. Then, reconnoitering this quality in oneself in a reduced form, one tries to enhance that attribute in one’s personality so that it may conform to the Divine model.
By so doing, we arouse qualities dormant within ourselves.
Avicenna says:
It is prayer which causes the human soul to resemble the heavenly abodes eternally worshipping absolute truth - for worship is knowledge. The real nature of prayer is therefore to know God in His uniqueness Whose essence is infinitely exalted and Whose qualities are infinitely holy.
By imagining God as the paramount reality of our own being, our ideal becomes homonized (a word of Teilhard de Chardin) in the features of our personality. Through our prayers God becomes a personality.
One sees one’s personality as an exemplar of the Divine nature:
The Islamic prayer is a dialogue between the two poles of one’s being: between the supplicant in his/her personal identity and the supplicant trying to see him/herself as seen from the antipodal vantage point (considered to be the Divine view) as he/she imagines God seeing Him/Herself in him/herself.
The knowledge you may glean by grasping in yourself the divine archetype of which you are an exemplar is only the first degree of a Sufi, the second is knowing oneself through the knowledge that God has of himself through you. Ibn ‘Arabi
The purpose of the whole creation is the realization that God Himself gains by discovering His own perfection through His manifestation. The experience of every soul becomes the experience of the Divine Mind (Unity of Religious Ideals). Not knowing that God experiences this life through us, one is seeking for Him somewhere else…Man realizes his perfection in God and God realizes His perfection in man. God discovers His perfection in our imperfection. Hazrat Inayat Khan
Actually, the hidden treasure is love. One can discover the traces of the Divine mind in the deeper processes of one’s own thinking. But when one discovers God as a person embedded in one’s own personality, one realizes that this is Whom one loves and Who loves one in an intimacy of the soul that surpasses the love for “another” person. This is because one loves what one admires most, albeit that one realizes that in this relationship, the love for the person is sparked by this Divine love.
He is the One every lover loves in every beloved. Ibn’ Arabi
If it is love rather than understanding that motivates one, then rather than sufficing oneself with the clues “on the horizons and in one’s own psyche,” then…
At an advanced stage, one learns to grasp God as He is Himself, rather than the knowledge gleaned of Him. Ibn'Arabi
In the absence of the Names, the "Named" would appear.
Ibn'Arabi (Hikmat un Nuriya, cf Etudes, 151, 27)
If these veils were lifted, unity would erase the existence of the entities of the possible things, and they would cease being described by existence, since they only become qualified by existence through these names.
Ibn ‘Arabi (cf 1998, p. 95)
The bridegroom does not have to suffice himself with the veil of the bride.
Bastami
The God who is intelligible to man is made by man himself, but what is beyond his intelligence is the reality. Hazrat Inayat Khan
A Hadith of Prophet Mohammed often quoted declares (God speaking):
I was a hidden treasure and loved to be known and therefore I created the world in order to know myself.
It is out of love for the possibility of us that God is seeking to become a reality as us.
A further Hadith says:
But for thee, I would not have created the heavens.
In consequence God becomes real:
But if this imagination is to become a reality, then exactly as one feels for one’s earthly beloved sympathy, love and attachment, so one must feel the same for God. (Social Gathekas)
One communicates with God, so that God becomes to the initiate a living entity; God is then no longer an ideal or an imagination, no longer one whom he has made; the One whom he once made has now become alive - a living God. Before this there was belief in God, there was worship of Him; perhaps He was made in the imagination; but in this stage God becomes living. And what a phenomenon this is! This stage is a miracle in itself. The God-realized person need not speak of or discuss the name of God; his presence will inspire the sense of God in every being, and charge the atmosphere with it. Everyone that meets him, whether he is spiritual or moral or religious or without religion, will feel God in some form or other. (The Path of Initiation)
I am He Whom I love, and He Whom I love is I. We are two spirits dwelling in one body. If thou seest me, thou seest Him. And if thou seest Him, thou seest us both. There is not one tear between my eyelids or drop of blood in the cockles of my heart that does not proclaim Thy presence. Hallaj (cf Nicholson, 1963, p.151)
Since what is gained by existence is that formless reality is configured and therefore manifests and is actuated as form, one projects what one admires most into “the most perfect of forms.” Hence the Muslim prayer is not just a dialogue where one is communicating with God as a being in which the Divine intention in life is being revealed, but in the ecstasy of the love relationship one reflects
the very Divine action whereby God discovers a dynamic feature of Him/Herself that adds itself to the knowledge that God has of Him/Herself in the principle of His/Her being, in the human form in which God discovers Him/Herself by disclosing Him/Herself to the supplicant .
Then comes another unveiling in which your forms in Him will be manifest to you. Among us are those who know that his knowledge takes place in God.
Ibn ‘Arabi (Chittick, 1989, p. 298)
A Hadith says:
Adore God as though thou seest Him. And if thou dost not see Him, He sees thee.
Another Hadith (God speaking):
I witness the invocation of he who invokes Me. And if he is endowed with vision, he finds himself in the presence of He whom he invokes. But he who does not have vision cannot contemplate Him.
Thus prayer transmutes one’s self image - the false ego – into one’s true self and thus avers itself to be the ultimate personal creativity.
The best way of losing the self is by the repetition of a certain sacred word which gradually makes one lose the conception of the false self, expressing at the same time the idea of the real self.
When they stand before God, their ego, their self, their life, is no more before them. They do not think of themselves in that moment with any desire to be fulfilled, with any motive to be accomplished, with any expression of their own; but as empty cups, that God may fill their being, that they may lose the false self.
When man - the most egoistic being in creation, who keeps himself veiled from God, the Perfect Self within, by the veil of his imperfect self, which has formed his presumed ego by the extreme humility when he stands before God and bows and bends and prostrates himself before His Almighty Being, makes the highest point of his presumed being, the head, touch the earth where his feet are, he in time washes off the black stains of his false ego, and the light of perfection gradually manifests. He stands then first face to face with his God, the idealized Deity, and when the ego is absolutely crushed, then God remains within and without, in both planes, and none exists save He.
In that state, called Fana-fi-Allah, when the soul is absorbed in God, one loses the false sense of being and finds the true reality. Then one finally experiences what is termed Baqa-i-Fana, where the false ego is annihilated and merged into the true personality, which is really God expressing Himself in some wondrous ways. When one has risen above the limitations of life on all the planes of existence, the soul will break all boundaries, and will experience that freedom which is the longing of every soul.
This is the real exaltation, when one has risen above one's limitation and has become conscious of the Perfection whom we call God.
The soul reaches a stage of realization where the whole of life becomes to him one sublime vision of the immanence of God. Hazrat Inayat Khan
PRACTICE:
Kneeling.
As you exhale, prostrate. Earmark the idiosyncrasies of your personal ego. Reconnoiter its strategies by eschewing a tendency to resort to justifications and acknowledge that it is in some way related to an inadequate notion of your total self in its wholistic, multilevel dimension. (Fikr: “Illa”)
As you inhale, sit upright on knees. Enjoy a sense of freedom from the constraint of your personal ego. Exult in glorification and merge in that reality sought “beyond the beyond,” and which one ordinarily calls God. (Fikr: “’llah”)
Now hold your breath, realizing that that reality sought yonder is the seed-bed out of which your being has unfurled in a unique way carrying the totality called God. (Fikr: “Hu”)
P.S.
In the teachings of the more advanced Sufis, the Message of unity of spiritual ideals of Hazrat Pir o Murshid Inayat Khan has its forerunners.
Avoid relying upon that upon which your faith is founded: intellectual speculation. God is too vast to be conditioned by an intelligence based upon belief or a belief based upon intelligence. However the light of intelligence can carry a certain receptivity irrespective of rational thinking. Ibn ‘Arabi
Avicenna says:
The outward part of the prayer is prescribed by the religious law….This outward or disciplinary part is connected with the body because it is composed of certain postures such as recitation, genuflexion and prostration….They act as controlling the body to bring it into tune with the harmony of the universe.
The law-giver prescribed prayer for the body as an outward symbol for that other prayer. As for the second or inward part or truth of prayer, this is to contemplate God with a pure heart and a spirit abstracted and purified of all desires. This part does not follow the path of bodily numbers or physical actions, but rather the art of pure thoughts and eternal spirits.
The Prophet said: "The man at prayer is in secret converse with his Lord.” This is only to be predicated of that inward knowledge that belongs solely to the pure souls that are abstracted and free from events in time and directions in space... They behold Him with spiritual, not corporeal vision.
It is an imploring of Absolute Being to perfect the soul through contemplation of Him and to complete the worshipper’s felicity through the inner knowledge and apprehension of Him. The divine injunction and holy emanation descends from the heavenly void into the confines of the rational soul.
A Hadith of Prophet Mohammed:
I manifest myself to my worshiper only in the form of his belief.
And Ibn ‘Arabi:
The divinity which conforms to the belief is created by the one who concentrates on it. He who concentrates on a certain belief is necessarily ignorant of the intrinsic truths of other beliefs. If he understood the meaning of the word of Junaid: “the color of the water is that of the receptacle,” he would admit the validity of all beliefs and he would recognize God in every form and every object of faith.
Since the form in which He discloses Himself in a faith is the form of that faith, the theophany takes the dimension of the receptacle that receives it, the receptacle in which He discloses Himself. That is why there are many different faiths. To each believer, the Divine Being is He who is disclosed to him in the form of his faith. If God manifests Himself in a different form, the believer rejects Him, and that is why the dogmatic faiths combat one another. (cf Corbin, 1969, p. 197)
Part of Curriculum of the Sufi Order, Lesson 4 -- Prayer: The Key to Personal Creativity