In December of 1925, Hazrat Inayat Khan was on board the SS Volendam, en route to New York, accompanied by his secretary Kismet Stam. During the journey he had been preparing short articles for the press in anticipation of his tour of the United States, and when he was asked to give a lecture to the passengers, he selected the theme of one of them for his talk, amplifying it and using the image of their own voyage as an illustration. As his lecture is rather lengthy, it will be presented here in instalments.
Friends,
I have the unexpected pleasure to comply with the request to speak before you some words on the deeper side of life.
When we consider life deeply, we can very well divide it into two parts and call them the lighter side of life and the deeper side of life. The importance of each of these sides may seem at moments equally great. When a person is thinking of the lighter side of life, at that moment that side is more important; the other side, of which the person is not conscious, seems to have no great importance. But then there are other moments which come in life, perhaps after a suffering or after a loss or after some experience, that a person suddenly wakens to a different realization of life. And when one is wakened to that, at that time the deeper side of life seems to have more importance. No one, neither clergyman nor mystic, no authority can say which side is more important. It depends upon how we look at it. There is nothing in this world with its value fixed to it. If there is such a thing, it does not stay in the same position always. If such a thing as money is changing, then what is there in this world which does not change its importance! And when we picture these two parts, the lighter and the deeper side of life, we see that we picture them according to our present experience.
Where do fear, doubt, passion and confusion come from?
They come from our ignorance of the deeper side of life.
We are travelling together, some from one country, others from another country, coming from different directions of the world, yet we are gathered together. By what? By a destiny, by a common destination where we all wish to go; we are for a few days together in this ship. And now our happy disposition, our favourable attitude to one another, our desire to be kind, friendly, sociable, serviceable, it is this alone which makes us understand one another, which will help us to make one another happy, and it brings us far closer than destiny has brought us. The same is a small picture of the whole life. When we consider the life of a community, a nation, a race, of the whole world, what is it? Is it not a large ship on which all are travelling, knowingly or unknowingly, all moving, all changing?
There are two kinds of traveller. There are travellers who do not know where they are coming from and where they are going. Only, when they open their eyes, they are in this ship. They come from somewhere; they realize that they are in a ship which is moving, going. And in this way many people are living in this world today. They are so absorbed in their everyday activities that they are ignorant of where they are coming from and where they are going. Imagine the difference between these two travellers; the one who knows from where he has come, he must also know or will know one day why he has come, why he is travelling; and the one who knows where he is going will also prepare for the place where he is going. The one who does not know from where he comes, he only knows where he is, he is only occupied with things in his immediate surroundings. The one who does not know where he will go to is not prepared to make arrangements, to face his destination; he does not know what is in store for him. Therefore, he is not prepared for it.
Buddha, whose name many have heard and who was a great master of the East, was asked one day by his disciples, what did he mean by ignorance? And he answered with this image. He said that a person was clinging in distress to the branch of a tree in the utter darkness of night, not knowing if beneath his feet there was earth or a ditch or water. All night long he trembled and wept and was clinging fast to that branch. And with the break of dawn he found that he was not one foot distant from the earth beneath his feet.
If I were to say how ignorance can be defined, I would say: as fear, doubt, passion, confusion. Where do all these come from? They come from our ignorance of the one side of life, the deeper side of life. A person may be clever in making the most of what we call the lighter side of life, but that is not all. We know not, with all our efforts from morning till evening, where we arrive, what we gain by it. If we consider wealth, position, fame, name, or anything else, it only gives confusion, since life is moving; it is all moving. We cannot hold it. A person may have riches one day and the other day may be subject to poverty; he may be successful one day and it is possible that sooner or later he will meet with failure.
Such powerful nations as Russia and Germany, who could have thought for one moment that they would drop down in a moment’s time, nations for which it took hundreds of years to become strong, to build themselves? But when their time came, it did not take one day to turn from East to West. If such great powers are subject to fall in a moment, when they can fall in a day and the whole construction can be broken, if that is the nature and character of life, no thoughtful person will deny that there must be some mystery behind it, some secret of which he would like to find the key. At least, he would want to know what life is, what is behind it.
Those who have studied life and thought long enough over this subject, they have arrived at the same point as the thinkers who lived perhaps eight thousand years before, like Buddha who said and realized the same thing which a really wise man would realize today. And that shows us that wisdom is the same in all ages. We may be evolving or going backwards; wisdom never changes and will always be the same. The same realization will come to those who will think deep and try to realize what is life.
I do not say by this that in order to realize life it is necessary that a person has to follow a certain religion. I do not mean to say that a person has to be so great or so good, so pious or so spiritual. I mean to say that the first and most necessary thing is that we must become observant. We should look at life more keenly than we do, instead of living still more superficially. It costs us nothing. It only takes us away from our everyday occupation for a few minutes. Life always gives an opportunity of thinking; however busy we are, we have always some time, if we care to know life’s secret. It is not necessary that we leave our occupation, our work in life, and go in the forest and sit silent and meditate upon life. We can meditate upon life in the midst of life, if only we want to. What happens is that man begins his life by action and as more and more he becomes active, then less and less he thinks. Besides, his action becomes his thought. But if one would think of what exists besides the action and thoughts that are connected with everyday life, if one also gave a thought to the deeper side of life, one would be more benefited.
To be continued…