At the conclusion of his lecture on the maturity of the soul, posted here, Hazrat Inayat Khan makes this statement: And at the end of the journey he always finds that he has traveled because it was his destiny to travel, and he discovers that his starting-point is the same as his final goal. This seems a surprising way to end the lecture, for ‘destiny ‘ has not been mentioned here, nor has the mystery of arriving where we began.  How can we understand this?

It is common to speak of life itself as a journey, and also to apply the term to spiritual development.  This is not just because travel in earlier times was physically laborious, and involved every kind of hazard, from storms at sea to illness, wild beasts and robbers, but also because moving from place to place provides a changing view: the outlook from the top of a hill is quite different from the valley.  Similarly, our insight into the world changes as we grow and unfold.  Conversely,travel has also been used a spiritual method.  Dervishes, for example, shed attachments by not staying in one place for long, and thousands of people have walked the camino of Santiago, refining their spirit through pilgrimage.  But journeys in the physical world usually start in one place and end somewhere else.  If we thought that the trip would only bring us back to our starting point, we might hesitate to travel at all.  So, what does Hazrat Inayat want to tell us?

The spiritual journey is a search for unity.  We begin to grope around int he dark because, in one way or another, we feel incomplete, as if ‘something’ is missing, and all our efforts – through prayer and meditation and various forms of discipline – are endeavours to find that which will fill the void.  But unity is not in just one place or another; if it were found at the top of a mountain and not at the foot of it, then it could not be unity.  The One must be everywhere.  This means that what we have sought, sometimes for a whole lifetime, was not absent from where we began the search, although we did not recognise it when we first set out upon our travels.

And this same truth also explains the Master’s statement about destiny.  We and all the myriad forms of manifestation have burst forth from the same sacred Fountain of Abundance, and as no form can endure forever, all will one day dissolve again into the single Ocean of Being.  Setting aside for the moment the question of micro-destiny (“Am I meant to win the lottery?  Am I destined to marry this person? Why did destiny give me curly hair?”) it is undeniably our destiny to journey toward the One, and when, some day, we realise that One-ness, we will know that we were never separate from what we sought.

And if some say, “Then, why bother with our spiritual exercises, if we are destined to arrive at Unity in any case?” the answer is this: that the one who recognises Unity has the privilege to travel with eyes open whereas the other travels with eyes closed, and loses the precious opportunity of appreciation.