Hazrat Inayat Khan now begins to teach about the nature of the ego. The previous post is here.

When we think of that sense, that feeling, or that inclination that makes us affirm the word ‘I’ we realize that it is difficult to point out what this ‘I’ is, what its character is, for it is something that is beyond human comprehension. That is why a person who wishes to explain, even to himself, what it is, points to what is nearest to him, declaring, ‘This is the one whom I have called, ‘I’.’ Therefore, every soul who has, so to speak, identified itself with anything has identified itself with the body, its own body, because that is the thing that one feels and realizes to be immediately next to one and that is intelligible as one’s being.

So, what a person knows of himself, as the first thing, is his body. He calls himself his body, he identifies himself with his body. For instance, if one asks a child, ‘Where is the boy?’ he will point to his body. That is what he can see or can imagine of himself.

This forms a conception in the soul. The soul conceives this deeply, so that after this conception, all other objects, persons or beings, color or line, are called by different names. The soul does not conceive of them as itself, for it already has a conception of itself – this body, which it has first known or imagined to be itself. All else that it sees, it sees through its vehicle that is the body and calls it something next to it, something separate and different.

In this way, duality in nature is produced. From this comes ‘I’ and ‘You.’ But as ‘I’ is the first conception of the soul, it is fully concerned with this ‘I’ and with all else it is only partly concerned. All other things that exist, besides this body which it has recognized as its own being, are considered according to their relation with this body. This relation is established by calling them, ‘mine,’ which is between ‘I’ and ‘you’ – as, you are ‘my’ brother, or ‘my’ sister, or ‘my’ friend. This makes a relationship and according to this relationship, the other object or person stands nearer to or farther from the soul.

All other experiences that the soul has in the physical world and in the mental spheres become a sort of world around it. The soul lives in the midst of it, yet the soul never for one moment feels with anything that it is, ‘I’. This ‘I’ it has reserved and made captive in one thing, only – the body. Of everything else, the soul thinks that it is something else, something different, as, ‘It is near to me, it is dear to me, it is close to me, because it is related. It is mine, but it is not me.’ ‘I’ stands as a separate entity, holding, attracting, collecting all that one has and which makes one’s own world.

To be continued…