In April of 1926, during his last, long trip to America, Hazrat Inayat Khan spoke for the first time in Denver on the subject of the awakening of the soul. In the opening part of his talk, he enumerates a surprising number of ways in which our efforts to awaken go astray. As the lecture is extensive, it will be presented in instalments.
Beloved Ones of God,
It is my great pleasure and privilege to address for the first time the citizens of Denver. I will speak this evening on the subject of the awakening of the soul.
There is a custom in the East that a person who is fast asleep may not be wakened. They call it a sin. It is symbolical. Spiritually it may be understood that a person who has not yet the inclination to waken, he must not waken. And the mystics and sages and the wise waken a person when he is changing from one side to the other, when he is showing an inclination to waken. Then they give him a hand to get up.
Very often people who are spiritually inclined feel that their husband or wife or friend, those whom they care for most, they want them to waken. And very often they make a great mistake in doing so. For the person who has not had his sleep, when he is wakened, that person feels irritated, ill-disposed, out of balance in every way.
There is a story told in the East that one day a wife arranged a great feast. And when the husband came home he asked, “My good wife, what was it made for? Is some friend coming?” She said, “It is more than that, for I am really pleased.” He said, “What is it?” She said, “I hitherto thought that you had no belief, my husband, and with all the good things you have in you I was thinking there was much missing in you. Now I have found out that you believe in God.” He said, “How did you find out?” She said, “Once in your sleep you said the name of God.” “Did I?” said he, “Alas, the secret is broken.” He heaved a deep sigh and died. For him the name of God was too sacred to utter. For him an outer religious ceremony was against his disposition, and yet the love of God was deeply rooted in his heart. The wife had not even reached the stage to understand him. When he saw that the greatest secret he was always covering was disclosed, he no longer wanted to live, because that was the greatest secret in his life. Therefore, friends, we do not know who is wakened and who not. Very often we try to see that the other one is wakened before we realize if we ourselves are wakened or not.
Now coming to the question how this wakening may be explained. From babyhood, childhood is awakening, and from childhood, youth is awakening. A baby has no thought what youth is. It is a wakening to a certain consciousness of the self and of life. The soul’s awakening, therefore, is wakening to a certain consciousness. Very often people misunderstand the word spiritual. Sometimes they say to be spiritual means to be good. But there are many people who are very good, but they do not know yet the true meaning of goodness. Therefore, goodness does not mean spirituality.
Then one may say, “Is spirituality orthodoxy?” Not at all! There are many in churches and temples who are perhaps praying all day long. Do you think they are spiritual? I do not mean they are not spiritual, I mean, are they always spiritual? Does orthodoxy or ceremony make a person spiritual? It has nothing to do with it. Or is it to do with much talking about spirituality? Many talk on metaphysics, they use esoteric words in their language. They are far from spiritual. It is intellectuality. Spirituality means spirit-conscious. The man whose soul has awakened to his own self, that man is spiritual.
Besides, there are times in one’s life when owing to an illness or a great disappointment in life, after having received a hard blow, a heartbreak, a certain wakening comes. And what changes in a person? His outlook on life. He walks on the same earth, he lives under the same sun, but the world becomes different to him, the value of things changes in his life, he begins to look from a different point of view. Things he had given great importance to then become of less importance. And at the same time, things he did not take notice of become more valuable; things he did not think about begin to seem precious to him. Therefore values change.
The first stage of spiritual awakening is a hunger to know something different from what one knows by learning. The one who learns is called learned, but to be learned is not to be spiritual. There comes a time when a person has learned enough. And then the desire for another knowledge comes which is quite different from the knowledge that is learned. It is therefore that book-learning has never made a man spiritual. No doubt, this is a book age. Since there are so many printing presses, there are so many books printed. And in this book age very often people remain backwards from progressing because they read too much. Just now in the United States people say that there is yearning for truth, there is a great longing for spirituality. I have no doubt about it. I admit the fact. There is. But I say that it cannot be otherwise. There has been so much materialism and on top of it commercialism that the natural instinct to realize the truth is revolting against it. And every soul in one form or the other is waiting to find some spiritual truth. But the only difficulty is, as Bernard Shaw says, that in America there is an untrained consciousness of spiritual understanding. There are different tendencies to be seen. There is one tendency to learn from books, and one reads an occult book, and another esoteric book, and higher thought and all sorts of thoughts, old thought and advanced thought. And after they have read fifty books or a hundred books, they do not know where they are. One book perhaps differs from the other. They do not know which is right and which is wrong. That is the greatest difficulty. The East has not that difficulty to face; therefore, it is more easy, for the reason that there is not that love of variety of thoughts. A person takes one line and he goes straight to it until he derives benefit from it. But here a person goes to one society and then to another society and then to a third society until he becomes very much dissatisfied. And in the end after having been in fifty societies he goes back to his work and says, “It is just as well to work in a material way and leave all societies.” And a third man, he thinks, “I should like to communicate with the spirits in order to find if there is something.” Or he wants some phenomena in order to see if in that direction there is something. And then again there is a fourth kind of person who calls himself intellectual; he is concerned with theories. If anything does not fit in with his ideas, he does not believe it. This seeking makes a person scattered in different directions and he does not find the way to reach perfection.
In reality all the great masters such as Jesus Christ, Krishna, Buddha, Moses, Muhammad, all they have taught to humanity, it all leads to a greater evolution. If only one understands the deeper meaning of spirituality, then all these different religions reveal their truth to him. But because he does not touch the depth of spirituality, he remains bound by one creed or the other and becomes bigoted or unbelieving. If he does not believe in his own faith, he is still further away.
To be continued…