Hazrat Inayat: Sympathy

In May of 1926, near the end of a long visit to America, Hazrat Inayat Khan was in Detroit, where he had renewed a young Sufi center and become good friends with the businessman Henry Ford. Before going on to New York, from where he would sail back to Europe and his family, he gave a series of lectures in Detroit’s Twentieth Century Club, and on several occasions touched on the theme of sympathy. Hazrat Inayat used this word in the widest sense, not only to mean to feel pity and sorrow for the suffering of another, but also to share understanding, to have common feeling with another. In the first excerpt below, he mentions the stage of bewilderment, which comes when one awakens to the recognition that nothing in life is as it appears, that all is ‘upside down.’

And the next stage to this bewilderment is the stage of sympathy. We begin to appreciate things more and sympathize more because so far we had walked on thorns and we did not feel them. And in this stage we begin to feel them and we see that others are walking on the same thorns. And we forget our pain and begin to sympathize with others. Therefore, evolved ones get sympathy, a natural tendency of outgoing. Troubles, sufferings and limitation, everyone has to go through all, everyone has to face the same difficulty. And not only the good; the wicked one has a greater difficulty still. He lives in the same world with his wickedness. He has a great load to carry. Naturally, one becomes forgiving, sympathetic. * * *

Our great poet of Persia, Rumi, says that the heart of man can be likened to a mirror. The mirror is made clear by sympathy. Every soul that stands before it is reflected in it and it sees that soul clearly. One need not practise arts such as clairvoyance and clairaudience. Once the heart faculty is developed, the natural culture helps one to be inside in every soul one meets. Every soul becomes as an open letter; he can see through the soul clearly. Spiritual attainment is not necessarily a certain knowledge. It is the changing of the outlook, of the attitude, the spring of consciousness, the deepening of inside experience, of that peace, and it is enjoying that happiness which is the natural heritage of every soul. God bless you.

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