In this series of texts, Hazrat Inayat Khan uses the powerful image of the human being as the seed of the Divine to give an all-encompassing picture of the soul’s journey thought the cosmos, and also to put to rest the concept of reincarnation.
Man may most justly be called the seed of God. God the Infinite, most conscious within Himself, embraces His nature full of variety; in this way He is one and He is all. The whole of manifestation is just like a tree sprung from the divine root. Nature is like its stem and all the aspects of nature are like the branches, the leaves, the fruit, and the flower; and from this tree again the same seed is produced, the human soul, which was the first cause of the tree. The seed is the spirit of man, and as God comprehends the whole universe within Himself, being one, so man contains within himself the whole universe as His miniature. It is said in the Quran, ‘In our own image we have created man.’ Therefore neither can God be anything else than what He is, for the very reason that He is one and at the same time He is all, nor can man; neither can man be reincarnated nor can God.
The men of science of today have admitted the fact that the whole skin of man is changed in so many years and they have also been able to discover that each atom of man’s constitution changes so many times in life, renewing his body each time. If the body is subject to change, so is the mind, and it is only by these that man’s person is identified. Again, in our food and drink we live upon so many small lives and so many small lives live upon us, dwelling in our blood, veins, tubes, and in the skin, all of which constitute our individuality. And in the mind our every thought and feeling is as alive as we, even such beings as the elementals, demons, and angels, which are created within us, from us, and of us, and yet may as fitly be called individuals as we. So in the end of the examination it is hard for a man to find out whether he exists as one or many.
In our dreams all the inhabitants of our mind resurrect, forming a world within ourselves. We see in the dream things and beings, a friend, a foe, an animal, a bird, and they come from nowhere, but are created out of our own selves. This shows that the mind of an individual constitutes a world in itself, which is created and destroyed by the conscious or unconscious action of the will, which has two aspects: intention and accident. We have experience of this world of mind even while awake, but the contrast between the world within and without makes the world without concrete and the world within abstract.
Someone may ask, ‘If all that we see in the dream is we ourselves, then why do we, even in the dream, see ourselves as an entity separate from all the other things before us in the dream?’ The answer is, because the soul is deluded by our external form, and this picture it recognizes as I, and all other images and forms manifesting before it in the dream stand in contrast to this I; therefore the soul recognizes them as other than I.
However, if it is one individual that reincarnates, should we hold our changeable body to be an individual or our mind, both of which appear to be one and at the same time many? One might ask Jack, ‘Which part of yourself is Jack – the eye, the nose the ear, or the hand or foot, for each of them has a particular name? Or are your thoughts and feelings Jack? They are numerous, changeable and diverse; you name them as such an imagination, such a feeling.’ This shows that Jack stands aloof as the owner of all finer and grosser properties that have grouped and formed an illusion before him, which, reflected upon his soul, makes him say, ‘I, Jack.’ He is the owner of all that he realizes around and about him, and yet each atom and vibration which has composed his illusionary self is liable to change, and to a separate and individual birth and death.
To be continued…