Curriculum of the Sufi Order, Lesson 8 -- Fashioning the Self

Title

Curriculum of the Sufi Order, Lesson 8 -- Fashioning the Self

Date

December 2000

Decade

2000s

Sequence

8

Description

Our objective in this course of studies illuminated by Hazrat Pir o Murshid’s insight and practical instructions is to crown our person with the cosmic and transcendent investiture with which we are bequeathed by discovering it and unfurling it.

As one’s awareness increases, one encounters an imperative need to find fulfillment and meaningfulness in one’s life.

Topic(s)

Awakening

Consciousness

Meaning of Life

Meditation Practice

Sufi Path

Wazifa/Wazaif

Subtopic(s)

Divine Inheritance, Antipodal, Middle-Range, Training the Mind

Type of Publication

Curriculum of the Sufi Order

Media

Writing

Pages

7

Identifier

CSO8

File Format

PDF

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 EIGHT

FASHIONING THE SELF

Note: For the sake of the coherence in the sequence of steps in this lesson it will be helpful if, occasionally, a few texts of Hazrat Inayat Khan are repeated in a new context.

Our objective in this course of studies illuminated by Hazrat Pir o Murshid’s insight and practical instructions is to crown our person with the cosmic and transcendent investiture with which we are bequeathed by discovering it and unfurling it.

As one’s awareness increases, one encounters an imperative need to find fulfillment and meaningfulness in one’s life.

By the study of human nature, one realizes the nature of life in general. (Unity of Religious Ideals.)

PRACTICE:

1) Ponder upon your life and ask yourself what you would like to achieve and why.

Wazaif: Ya Khabir (insight) – Ya Alim (wisdom)

2) Now consider your person (which we are used to calling our ‘self’) as an ephemeral, evanescent, ever-changing, ever-renewed, many-tiered construct – a continuity in change – a formation within the totality of the cosmos like a vortex, or whirlpool without boundary, powered by the self-same force that moves the stars and the galaxies (spurring your will), and piloted by your intelligence which overarches the transcendent levels of that construct (which you are) that enlists the code of the universe customized as your intention.

Wazifa: Ya Musawwir (the fashioner)

Like a musical composition, you can make it what you will, depending upon your sense of values, your insight or wisdom, and your attunement. Albeit, you are not only the composition, but the composer and even the instruments that play it (your body, your heart, your personality).



PRACTICE:

Ask yourself what are the values that you appraise and would like to pursue in your life. Make a priority list; you could redefine it as you progress.

Wazifa: Ya Badi (the incomparable)

As we have seen in the preceding lesson, Lesson 7, Hazrat Inayat Khan orients spirituality into concrete, practical activities: translating our ineffable musings about the purpose of life or belief in God into the fashioning of our self by working with the person.

There is no way of getting proof of God’s existence except by becoming acquainted with oneself. (Mind World p. 265.) If you dive deep within yourself, you will discover a universe in yourself. (The Vision of Man in God.) …that perfection lies in realizing the universe in man, he can touch the depths where he is united with the whole of life. (Gatheka)

PRACTICE:

Acquiesce to the fact that if you treasure these values, it is because they are latent in your true nature and are beckoning upon you to pursue them in order to discover and actuate your potentials.

Wazifa: Ya Wahhab (the bestower)

Discovering yourself (or rather how you could be) is creative unlike regurgitating your problems. Avoid this. It is counterproductive. The reason is that our assessment is biased by the fact that our consciousness is a limited focalization of the consciousness of the whole universe.

The pure consciousness has so to speak gradually limited itself more and more by entering into the external vehicles, such as the mind and the body, in order to be conscious of something. (Akibat)

Wazifa: Ya Qabid (the constrictor)

The caution spelled by the Hindu theory of maya only points out that things are not what they seem:

There comes a time when all that he had accepted in his mind, all that he believed, appears to be quite the contrary to what it was before.

PRACTICE:

Keep in mind that your objective is to ‘awaken’ – that means to downplay a perspective and highlight another which you had not heretofore considered and now dawns upon you with greater pertinence.

Wazifa: Ya Hakam (the judge)
However the Sufis draw attention to the complementary view: that they serve as clues as to what is enacted behind the facts.

Jami:
The world is an illusion but eternally reality manifests through it. (1982, 125).

This is based upon a surat in the Qur’an:

God reveals Himself through signs (ayat) in the physical world and also in your nature (psyche).

Paradoxically, to grasp these tenuous revelations, one needs to reverse the overt orientation of one’s consciousness and turn within. Therefore I suggest following the lead of your previous assessment, but not taking it to be ultimate, just as if you follow the pug-marks of a bear in the snow, you might find the bear. The Sufis call this tawil.

There are some realities of which I am vaguely aware; compared with them all I have studied and done seems to be of no account.

Wazifa: Ya Wajid (the finder)

Consequently, rather than reckoning upon your assessment of your problems, turn within to detect how they are related to qualities or defects or incongruities in your own being.

Wazifa: Ya Muhsi (the reckoner)

You are yourself the object of your realization.


INCLUDE ALL THE LEVELS OF THE RANGE OF YOUR BEING

As we have seen, consciousness operating in the human being is limited, and therefore deceptive, yet a transpersonal consciousness adumbrates it. We need to marshal all the levels of our being (as far as we can encompass these) by stretching our minds beyond its middle-range.

We occupy as much horizon as we are conscious of.
It is the situation we are in that makes us believe we are this or that.…When man lives this limitation, he does not know that another part of him exists which is much higher, more wonderful, more living, and more exalted.
The outlook becomes wide, as wide as the divine eye. (The Soul Whence and Whither)

Wazaif: Ya Basit (the expanding) – Ya Wasi (the all-encompassing)

Consequently we need to complement the personal vantage point by the antipodal pole of our consciousness. This beckons upon us to call upon the notion of God as the transpersonal pole of our being.

Wazifa: Ya Muta’ aly (the lofty One)
It is not self knowledge that leads to God knowledge, it is God knowledge that leads to self knowledge.

PRACTICE:

Rather than imagining God as “other” and “up there,” could you try to represent to yourself that your being extends between two poles: (i) your individual self which is, as we have seen, an evanescent construct in which the totality of the universe is converged, and (ii) the higher dimension of your being, coextensive with all beings, which is, as Hazrat Inayat Khan says, a “condition” of what you mean by God.

Wazifa: Ya Kamil (the perfect One) – Ya Qabid (the constrictor; limitation)


Now in assessing your problems and scanning yourself, you will be overarching your personal vantage point with a paramount vantage point, observing yourself as though the universe were discovering itself as you. What a difference it makes!

Wazifa: Ya Kabir (the great One)

Ibn ‘Arabi says:
God created perception in you only that therein He might become the object of His perception. (Corbin, 1970, 174)

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
The experience of every soul becomes the experience of the Divine Mind. Not knowing that God experiences this life through us, one is seeking for Him somewhere else. (Unity of Religious Ideals)

Our mind becomes saturated with impressions from the physical and psychological environment that can aver themselves obsessive.

The more the mind is allowed to go on without a purpose, the more likely it is to become a vehicle or machine which all manner of influences around it of other beings will employ instead of its owner. (Eastern Rose Garden)

Through meditation, one can take control of one’s thought by training the mind.

Concentration is activity of the mind in the direction desired. Train your mind. Control your thoughts and then use them for your benefit. Create a thought, hold it. Learn to expel it. Check every thought, every word, every act that you do not wish to occur. Ask yourself what was I thinking? Why was I thinking it? Why think of things that do not matter?

How do we achieve this? Hazrat Inayat Khan gives a clue:

We can go out of our thoughts, ideas, feelings just as a cobra sheds its skin. (Mental Purification)




PRACTICE:

Try to pull yourself out of your thoughts. This requires one to not be attached to their emotional charge.

Wazifa: Ya Salam (the peaceful One)

This requires something else than mastery, a non-emotion: detachment. It is a great secret – immunity. It is a matter of freeing oneself from the emotional charge behind a compulsive thought. This ability can be discovered. Somehow we are pulled between our need for the sense of fulfillment that results from the enrichment gained through our involvement with people, with life, by accomplishment; and on the other hand we have a nostalgia for freedom from the constraint that ensues and generally from conditioning. Hazrat Inayat Khan illustrates our ability to free ourselves emotionally by the mirror.

If you find freedom in yourself, you will find that your soul is just like a mirror which shows that object reflected in it instead of its own existence. (Supplementary Papers/Philosophy/Illusion and Reality.) If you turn the mirror the reflections are gone. All life’s joy and sorrow, ups and downs, are reflected for the time being upon the curtain of the soul, and after the mirror has turned, the picture has disappeared. (Spiritual Liberty, Aqibat, Life after Death/ The Philosophy of the Soul)

The attunement of the ascetic in the middle of life will alleviate a lot of suffering. However, Hazrat Inayat Khan suggests that rather than lamenting, we harness impressions as catalysts for our personal creativity. Impressions seep deep in the unconscious where they can be processed and find a resolution in our personal creativity. Turning the mirror illustrates the ability to free yourself from the emotional impact from outside.

PRACTICE:

Envision your consciousness as a mirror which, when turned towards the environment is receptive to impressions and reflects them in the environment (i.e., your actions reflect your impressions). Now imagine that you turn the mirror inside.

As the Sufi closes the door through which the soul is accustomed to look out, it turns its back to the external world and sees within. (Esoteric Papers)

Wazifa: Ya Batin (the veiled One)

Now Hazrat Inayat Khan presents the next paradigms: the photographic plate, and a yet further one, the seed.

One needs to choose between those impressions from which one wishes to free oneself and those that enrich one’s being and make these indelible.

Our mind is a receptacle to all to which it is exposed. It is like a photographic plate. Its first impression is on the surface and as the impression is retained in the mind, so it reaches the depth of the heart.

Now the further paradigm:

But the photographic plate is not creative… A soul not only takes an impression like a photographic plate, but it becomes nurtured by it. (The Soul, Whence and Whither? Towards Manifestation.) A reflection on a photographic plate remains, but does not live; the reflection upon the mind lives, and therefore it is creative. (Healing and the Mind World, The Mind World)

Wazifa: Ya Muhyi (the regenerator)


THE SECRET OF CREATIVITY

But self-observation, jhana darshana in Sanskrit, while being the first step is not sufficient. One needs to work with the self creatively.

PRACTICE:

Instead of observing who you are, project how you could be. That is: enlist the pull of the future instead of the push of the past. Turning within, try to espy and capture the fountainhead of the new qualities that are knocking at the door as they spark renewed inspiration upon emerging through the threshold between the unconscious and the conscious.

Wazifa: Ya Zahir (the revealer)

Acquiesce that you carry within yourself the same creative power that configures the cosmos:

In man is awakened that spirit by which the whole universe was created. (Religious Gatheka)

Wazifa: Ya Khaliq (the creator)

Hazrat Inayat Khan sees this creative power as bequeathed.

The soul has in it a potentiality – a creative power as its heritage. (Alchemy of Happiness)

Wazifa: Ya Warith (the inheritor)

This power is delegated.

In the person who participates actively in his own creativity, God can attain a greater perfection. (Religious Gatheka, p 43.) As the whole of nature is made by God, so the nature of each individual is made by himself. (Social Gatheka, p 4)





PRACTICE:

Instead of the old-fashioned view that you are created by God without your intervention or contribution, consider yourself as the artist of your self; you can place into that work of art that is your person whatever you wish.

Wazifa: Ya Mubdi (the originator)

Hazrat Inayat Khan considers our personality as the finishing touch in the creativity of the self.

In the making of our personality, it is God who completes His divine art. (The Art of Personality)

PRACTICE:

The way to understand this is to imagine that you are studying composition and given the task of improvising variations on a theme given to you. You have a lot of leeway to bring out potentials latent in the theme, and therefore must not forget the theme.

Think that the theme of which your personality is a variation is the personality which one endeavors to imagine to be the personality of God.

Hazrat Inayat Khan underscores that dimension of God that is His/Her personality.

People ask: “if all is God, then God is not a person.” 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. (Unity of Religious Ideals, The God Ideal)

He illustrates it thus:

Though the seed does not show the flower in it, yet the flower already existed in the seed. (Ibid.)

In the perfecting of our personality, the personality of God is actuated.

Man, in the flowering of his personality expresses the personality of God.
It is in the God-conscious that God becomes a reality so that He is no more an imagination; it brings to the world a living God. (Unity of Religious Ideals, The Personality of God.) It is in man that God is awakened. God is hidden in His creation; awaken the God within.

To perfect our fashioning of our self, we need to bring into account our ability to endeavor to imagine God as the perfecting of one’s self.

Wazifa: Ya Dhul Jalali wa’l Ikram (the Lord of splendor and power) or
Ya Khanum Jamil wa’l Ikram (the Queen of beauty and splendor)

On one hand, man is limited and imperfect; on the other side he represents the unlimited and perfect. (Alchemy of Happiness)