When Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan came to the West, his own spiritual realisation continued to ripen, and he began to pour his soul into giving the divine Message. In doing so, he attracted a growing number of students, but people in Europe and America mostly approached the Sufi path without the attitudes that would be learned from birth in the East. They had perhaps already joined esoteric institutions or philosophical societies, and looked on Sufism as something similar, another sort of exotic club, without understanding the meaning of initiation on a spiritual path. It was a view that hindered their personal journey, and did not help to spread the Message – which can only convince people insofar as the followers really live the teaching. Therefore, during the Summer Schools in Suresnes, in the 1920’s, Hazrat Inayat tried to help them by giving an instructive lecture on how to be a mureed.

Not surprisingly, the important points he outlined were five in number. The first of these was simply to do one’s personal practices without fail, since it seems to be difficult for us to enshrine our spiritual prescription as a constant, immutable part of our day. Everyone’s life can provide abundant excuses for this, but the determining factor surely is how significant we think the exercises are; if we don’t give the exercises enough importance, we don’t do them. One reason for this might be a lack of understanding of what long commitment to them might offer as a consequence. To counter this, more than once Hazrat Inayat recalled the experience of a relative who did a certain practice for forty years, until, he said, a miracle occurred.

This is certainly related to the reduced regard for the sacred in the West. When we are thoroughly embedded in the material realm, we see spiritual exercises as little more than a dry recipe, a kind of measurable training, like so many laps around the track or so many repetitions on the weight machine. Naturally, if we approach them from this direction, the results will never be inspiring, but when one starts to awaken to the beauty and life inherent in our practices, the picture changes completely. Then we might begin to glimpse the possibility of remaining faithful to a practice for decades, for where there is life that is also love.

As that feeling for our exercises grows within us, it becomes possible to observe the second point Hazrat Inayat offers, which is to think about the practices through the day. Most people live very full lives, and it must be a very common experience to fall into bed at night without once having recalled the few moments spent in prayers and breathing in the morning. But if we have felt something moving inside us during, for example, a purification exercise, the idea of purity may come to us again from time to time, or we might actively seek to purify ourselves in moments of stress. From this moment, we could say that the practice is no longer a function of us, but that we become a function of the practice, and we begin to encounter support everywhere.

It is not possible to stress too strongly the importance of reflecting on our practices, returning to them in thought and feeling throughout the day, for it is this which gradually penetrates our false concepts and structures, enabling the inner alchemy, the transformation through many intermediate steps to gold. And as we find in Gayan Chalas : Gold is that which proves to be real to the end of the test.

To be continued…