Students of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan are probably familiar with the book called “The Bowl of Saki,” a collection of 366 sayings – thus, one for each day of the year, including leap years. The sayings were selected by mureeds from the lectures and the personal notebooks of Hazrat Inayat Khan, and first published in 1922. The word ‘Saki’ means the one who serves wine in the tavern, and in Sufi poetry symbolizes the Divine who pours intoxicating beauty into our empty cup so that, with heads reeling, we may forget ourselves entirely.

So far as we know, no human plan was used to assign the sayings to different dates, but each day offers a new discovery, and sometimes provokes deep reflection. This very interesting phrase is found on the day of July 15th : “The world is evolving from imperfection toward perfection; it needs all love and sympathy; great tenderness and watchfulness is required from each one of us.”

We are certainly aware that the world is changing. Of all the people on the planet, probably the majority do not live as their grandparents did, and it seems likely that the next generation will also live in a way that their parents shall find incomprehensible. But are we convinced that we are evolving? That depends on what we understand by ‘perfection.’ At the moment we seem to be witnessing much destruction and chaos, but on the other hand it is sometimes necessary to tear down the old in order to build the new. Some creatures grow by casting off their old skin, for example, and the seed that appears to die when it falls into the earth and is buried, is on its way to being reborn. The caterpillar, which happily chewed through many sun-warmed leaves, dissolves almost completely in the cocoon before it emerges as a trembling butterfly capable of flight. Therefore we could look at the suffering of the world, which is great and undeniable and should not be ignored, with hope that the future will be better.

To perfect is to remove all faults and defects, and to make suitable for some purpose. What, then, is the purpose of the world? Each individual will have their own particular response; the bird that sings in the forest is fulfilling its purpose, as is the tree in which the bird sits and the fish that swims in the nearby stream. Many humans also discover a personal purpose and find joy in its fulfilment. But the purpose of the whole world? What is that? Surely the world has been made with intention, but the answer to the purpose can only come from God Himself, the One who created the world, and who is Meaning itself. It is striking, though, that in this saying Hazrat Inayat Khan gives every one of us responsibility to help in this evolution. The birds and the fishes aren’t called upon; the human being has a unique place in creation.

And what is required of us? Beginning from where we are right now, to help the world evolve we are called to work with the qualities the saying mentions – love, sympathy, great tenderness and watchfulness, qualities that only the human form of nature is privileged to manifest in their fulness. If we offer them to the world, we can hope that perhaps we help it forward, but the real transformation will be in ourselves. We cannot expect to perfect others, but we can strive to perfect ourselves, for that is the domain in our care. And in so far as we succeed, we may offer the fruits of that perfection to those around us. To dream of perfecting ourselves may seem impossible, but in Nirtan Chalas we find these encouraging words: “Nothing is impossible; all is possible. Impossibility is only a boundary of limitation which stands around the human mind.”