A recent post of a text by Hazrat Inayat Khan on discipleship brought up the theme of the development of consideration, and in response to some questions, we looked more deeply at what consideration means in this post.  But in his text Hazrat Inayat says that the birth of consideration is the birth of the soul, which can seem rather puzzling.  If the soul is the spark of divinity that gives us life, and if the divine is infinite and eternal, then how can we say the soul is born when we become considerate? Birth is associated with creation; is the soul created? Can it, then, be destroyed? And what is our condition before the development of consideration? Are we ‘soul-less’ until we begin to think of others?

Hazrat Inayat often described the soul as a ray of light shooting forth from the Sun, as for example in this post. The ray progresses through various realms on the journey toward manifestation, putting on successively more dense covers, the last and most dense being the physical body.  The experience of the soul is to be conscious of these covers, and consequently to be unaware of its true nature.  A person thinks, “I am my body.  ‘I’ am the sum of my physical experiences and sensations.”  This condition has been described as being asleep, or even as being buried alive, since the life of the soul is held captive by the earth of the body.

Nevertheless, no captivity can be eternal, because prisons are made of created forms which must ultimately be destroyed. Every soul is destined to return to the Infinite Intelligence from which it has emerged, and some will begin this homeward journey while still walking upon the earth.  This awakening, gradual or sudden, means an ever-widening horizon, and the recognition that ‘I’ cannot live separately from ‘you,’ that your happiness and mine are the same.  Here is the birth of consideration, and the beginnng of the emergence of the soul from its captivity.

Therefore, when Hazrat Inayat speaks of the birth of the soul, it does not mean the soul’s creation, but rather the dawning realisation of our own true nature and that of those around us.