In his continuing explanation of the steps toward realisation, Hazrat Inayat Khan shows that they correspond with advancing stages of belief. The previous post is here.

Then there is a second step towards belief and that is belief in an authority, as with people at the time of a dictatorship – they believe in a leader. They say, ‘I will not believe in the ordinary man, in my neighbor, in my colleague. I believe in that man, whom I trust.’ This belief is one step higher, because it is a belief in somebody in whom one has trust. When a person says, ‘I am a Christian,’ it means a belief in Jesus Christ and his teaching. It is a belief in someone, not in an abstraction. One might think that people do not believe in authority today, but this is not so. For instance everyone accepts a discovery made by a scientist before having made investigations about it. Investigations come afterwards. When somebody comes forward and says he has discovered something, everyone accepts it. Perhaps another scientist will produce something else one may believe, but the one who says a thing with authority is believed by the multitude.

Then there is a third stage of belief, a further stage, and this belief makes man still greater. It is the belief of reason, and it means that one does not believe in any authority, nor in what everybody else believes, but that one has reasoned it out. That one sees reason in it. This belief is stronger still; for of the beliefs I have explained before one cannot give proof, but in this case one can stand up and say, ‘Yes, I have reasoned it out.’

This, however, also has its limitation. Since reason is the slave of the mind, reason is as changeable as the weather; reason obeys our impressions. If we have an impulse to insult a person, or to fight with him, we can produce many reasons for it. It may be that afterwards there will be contrary reasons. But at the time, while we have this impulse, right or wrong, there is always a reason which supports it. Have the criminals put in jail committed crimes without a reason? No, they have a reason too. It does not fit in with the law perhaps, it does not satisfy society, but if we ask them, they have a reason. The reason we have today we may perhaps change next week, but nevertheless this third belief makes us stand on our own feet – for that moment, if not always; and it gives us a greater power to defend our belief.

And then again there is a fourth belief. That belief is a belief of conviction which stands above reason. There is a sense of conviction in man which is not discovered for some time in life. But there comes a time when it is discovered; and that is a blessed day. Then there arises an idea, an idea which no reason can break, a feeling which is not a passing feeling but is a conviction. However high the idea may be, one seems to be an eyewitness of that idea. One is as strong, as confident, as a person who has seen with his own eyes. One can be convinced of ideas so subtle that they cannot even be expressed in words, and one is more convinced of them than if one had seen them with one’s own eyes. It is this belief which is called by the Sufis and Persian mystics Iman, which means conviction.

I remember the blessing my spiritual teacher, my murshid, used to give me every time I parted from him. And that blessing was, ‘May your Iman be strengthened.’ At that time I had not thought about the word Iman. On the contrary I thought as a young man: is my faith so weak that my teacher requires it to be stronger? I would have preferred it if he had said, may you become illuminated, or may your powers be great, or may your influence spread, or may you rise higher and higher, or become perfect. But this simple thing, may your faith be strengthened, what did it mean? I did not criticize, but I pondered and pondered upon the subject. And in the end I came to realize that no blessing is more valuable and important than this. For every blessing is attached to a conviction. Where there is no conviction there is nothing. The secret of healing, the mystery of evolving, the power of all attainments, and the way to spiritual realization, all come from the strengthening of that belief which is a conviction, so that nothing can ever change it.

To be continued…