In the previous post, Hazrat Inayat Khan began to describe his experience watching a group of dervishes. He continues his observations and then begins to reflect upon what he has seen.

The dervishes first sat lost in contemplation, reciting charms one after the other, and then they began their music. I forgot all my science and technique while listening to their simple melodies, as they sang to the accompaniment of sitar and dholok the deathless words of the Sufi Masters such as Rumi, Jami, Hafiz, and Shams-i Tabriz.

The rhapsody, which their ecstasies conjured up, seemed to me so strong and vital that the very leaves of the trees seemed to hang spellbound and motionless. Although their emotions manifested themselves in varying forms, they were regarded with silent reverence by all that strange company. Each one of them revealed a peculiar mood of ecstasy; some expressed it in tears and others in sighs, some in dances and yet others in the calm of meditation. Although I did not enjoy the music as much as they, still it impressed me so deeply that I felt as if I were lost in a trance of harmony and happiness. 

But the most amazing part of the proceedings came when the assembly was about to disperse. For one of the dervishes arose and, while announcing Bhandara or dinner, addressed them in the following terms, ‘O Kings of Kings! O Emperors of Emperors!’ This amused me greatly at the time, while I regarded their outward appearance. My first thought made them merely kings of imagination, without throne or crown, treasury, courtiers, or dominions – those natural possessions and temporal powers of kingship.

But the more I brooded upon the matter, the more I questioned whether environment or imagination made a king. The answer came at last: the king is never conscious of his kingship and all its attributes of luxury and might, unless his imagination is reflected in them and thus proves his true sovereignty. For instance, if a baby were crowned and seated upon a throne he would never comprehend his high position until his mind evolved sufficiently to realize his surroundings. This shows how real our surroundings seem to us, and yet how dead they are in the absence of imagination. And it also reveals how fleeting time and the changes of matter make all the kings of the earth but transitory kings, ruling over transitory kingdoms; this is because of their dependence upon their environment instead of their imagination. But the kingship of the dervish, independent of all external influences, based purely on his mental perception and strengthened by the forces of his will, is much truer and at once unlimited and everlasting. Yet in the materialistic view his kingdom would appear as nothing, while in the spiritual conception it is an immortal and exquisite realm of joy. 

Verily, they are the possessors of the kingdom of God and all His seen and unseen treasure is in their own possession, since they have lost themselves in Allah and are purified from all illusive deceptions. ‘It is by them that you obtain rain; it is by them that you receive your subsistence,’ says the Quran. And Omar Khayyam said,

Think in this battered caravanserai,
Whose doorways are alternate night and day,

How Sultan after Sultan with his pomp,
Abode his hour or so, and went his way.

They say the lion and the lizard keep
The courts where Jamshed gloried and drank deep;

And Bahram that great hunter, the wild ass
Stamped o’er his head and he lies fast asleep.

Thus I compared our deluded life with the real, and our artificial with their natural being, as one might compare the false dawn with the true. I realized our folly in attaching undue weight to matters wholly unimportant and how apt we were to laugh at the dreamer building his lovely castles in the air. I saw how our fleeting affairs are blown about as chaff is blown in the wind, while the imagination is difficult to alter. It is possible for the land to turn into water and for water into land, but the impression of an imagination can never change.

I felt that we were losing the most precious moments and opportunities of life for transitory dross and tinsel, at the sacrifice of all that is enduring and eternal.

To be continued…