The conversation amongst a few friends started from a saying found in the Bowl of Saki (14th of June) : Our thoughts have prepared for us the happiness or unhappiness we experience.  There were, of course, many interesting reflections on the thought, but also a general feeling of frustration that we are never as good at mastering our thoughts as we wish ourselves to be.  

As noted in a recent post, in addition to those thoughts which we intentionally cultivate, we are all carrying a weight of unexamined thoughts, which Hazrat Inayat Khan called our ‘automatic’ concentration – meaning concentration that goes on without our directing it.  Such thoughts are sometimes positive, and sometimes the opposite, but whatever their character, we must try to become aware of them if we hope to succeed in preparing the happiness we wish to experience.

Several voices in our conversation commented on what we might call the impermanence of our good intentions.  To put it simply, we try to fill our mind with good thoughts and that condition lasts for a certain time, and we feel uplifted as a result, but then before we know it we find ourselves again going over thoughts that are unhelpful, or even negative.  Somehow, without noticing, we have fallen from the angels back to earth  This can leave us with the depressing belief that our will power is feeble, a belief that, because of the creative power of thought, will probably be confirmed by subsequent experience.

There is no doubt that we can always benefit from any effort to strengthen our will power and focus our concentration.  Hazrat Inayat Khan gave the humble example of persisting in the effort to untie a knot in a piece of string; once we have begun, it would be a loss to reach for a knife.  But perhaps our biggest enemy in this battle to reach upward is an automatic concentration that is universal – the belief that this material world is real.

There is a distinction in Sufi thought between the factual and the real.  It is a fact that I have a body, but that body changes every day, and some day will scatter its elements, letting the earth fall to the earth, the water run to the water and so forth.  The Sufi looks for the real in that which is eternal, not in that which changes, and that is what may be discovered in the inner world.  There reality dawns ‘like the sun at the dawn of creation.’ If we believe that the constant turmoil of the material is real, though, then the upliftment given by a practice will seem to be only a temporary holiday, pleasant but not a place where we can reside.

There are many steps along the path to perfection, each one worthy of celebration, but perhaps the real victory comes when we succeed in erasing this automatic concentration, and awaken from the dream of the material to the infinite reality that surrounds us and pervades us. From there we come and it is to there that we are destined to return.