Hazrat Inayat Khan now concludes the questions in this section. The previous post is here.

Question: What is indifference?

Answer: This is a word that I always find difficult to explain, and I have made many people angry by talking about indifference. They say, ‘Where is the love that you have come to preach to us? Indifference is quite contrary to love, to the message and the teaching.’ When people read in Buddhism and Yogism about renunciation, nirvana, vairagya – which in Sufi terms of the Persian poets is fana – they begin to ask, ‘Have they all taught to become indifferent, have they taught such cruelty?’ In reality, it is quite a different thing. Indifference is not lovelessness nor is it lack of sympathy. Indifference is most useful at the time when a soul has arrived at that sensitiveness when every little thing hurts. Then it is only indifference which keeps it alive.

You might say that it is not good to be sensitive. Yes, but without being sensitive, you cannot evolve. Sensitiveness is a sign of evolution. If you are not sensitive, then you cannot feel in sympathy with your fellow men. If you do not feel the feelings of your fellow men, then you are not yet awakened to life. Therefore, in order to become a normal human being, one has to develop sensitiveness, or at least to arrive at sensitiveness. When you are sensitive, then life becomes difficult to live. The more sensitive you are, the more thorns you will find on your way. Every move you make, at every turn, at every step, there is something to hurt you. It is only one spirit that you can develop, and that is the spirit of indifference; yet, not taking away the love and sympathy you have for another – that is the right indifference. To say to a person, ‘I do not care for you because you have been thoughtless,’ that is not the right kind of indifference, that is not the indifference that mystics relate as being vairagya. The mystical indifference is that a soul retains sympathy and love, even at the thoughtlessness of a person, and expresses it as forgiveness. In the Bible, we read the words of Christ, ‘Turn the other side of your face if a person has struck you on one side.’ What else is this than the lesson of indifference? How can a sensitive person, a person of feeling, a spiritual, tenderhearted person, live in this world if he is not indifferent? He cannot live here one moment! There is only this one thing that protects him from the continual jarring influences that come from all sides.

Question: Why not call it detachment?

Answer: Detachment is not really the right word. We cannot be detached, we are never detached. Life is one and nothing can separate it. Detachment is only an illusionary aspect of life. There is no such thing as detachment in truth. How can there be detachment when life is one!

Often, in order to make it clearer, I have said that indifference and independence are two meanings of that one word, vairagya. Indifference, alone, explains it only halfway.
 

To be continued…