After expanding on the first two stages of the journey, idealising and recognising God, Hazrat Inayat Khan now speaks of the final three steps. As s evident, though, the further one progresses, the less that can be said. The previous post in this series is here.
Communicating with God:
When an ordinary or an illiterate person meets a poet, he sees the man-part and not the poet-part. But if he is told that this person is a poet he may see the poet-part when he meets him. He now sees that he is a poet in his actions and in his words; in everything about him he sees the poet, whereas otherwise he would not have been able to see this. Thus a great poet may go among a crowd and the people will only see the man in him; they do not see the poet, and they do not know how profound his thoughts are. So once a person begins to recognize God in man he does not see the man any more but God. The man is the surface, while God is deep within him. Such recognition brings a person into touch with everyone’s innermost being, and then he knows more about people than they know themselves. He will know their sorrow, their joy, and their secrets. Such a person is called a seer.
The seer sees God with his own eyes and also recognizes his divine Beloved in every form, in every name. He reaches Him and touches the God-part in every being, however limited this individual appears to be on the surface. From now on a softness develops in his nature, a magnetism, a winning quality, a beauty rarely to be found. Those who have attained to this stage are able to meet people with awakened minds, and when a person meets them he wants to stay with them forever. A very well known seer, the great Shams-i Tabriz, went to see Jalaluddin Rumi when the latter was teaching at the university of Konya. He was a dervish, and he approached Rumi appearing like a savage. The first thing he did was to seize Rumi’s manuscripts and throw them into a nearby tank. Rumi looked at him, wondering at his action in throwing away all that knowledge, and he asked him the reason for it. The seeming vagrant said, ‘Because you have been reading all your life and you should now do something more. You should understand what you are and where you are. Everything in front of you is spelt out in letters, if only you could read them; then you could read life, which is greater than any scripture, better than any tradition that you can be told. It would disclose the secret of all being.’ Rumi, studying him and his expression and hearing all he said, was so won by him that he wrote down in his diary, ‘The God whom I have been worshipping all my life has today appeared before me in the form of a man.’
It is said, ‘By the vision of God, their self will become God.’ This happens when we come to see God in everybody. We develop goodness in our actions; our words become God’s words because we are impressed with all that reflects only goodness and is mirrored around us. Then we become a museum or a picture of goodness. We reflect it from morning till evening, we reflect forgiveness, we reflect tolerance, and we reflect all these lovely qualities. As it is said, ‘If my Beloved is in every kind of man, how considerate I ought to be towards all!’ The lover is always very careful when he is with his beloved; he becomes thoughtful and tender.
Realization:
It is after feeling the presence of God and after being in communication with Him that we come to realize Him. When we can touch God in everyone then God tells us about Himself, because He sees that we have no hate, no prejudice. We have seen our Beloved, and our Beloved tells us all. Still, realization is difficult, for it involves discerning the difference between you and me. What is this difference? It is a great question, a great problem. Our ‘I’ and ‘you’ are just like a pair of compasses with which we draw circles on paper. The one point of the compass is the ‘I’, the other point is the ‘you’, and where they join there is no ‘I-you.’ The ‘I’ and ‘you’ only remain as long as we see ourselves; but when we rise above them or beyond them, the thought brings us nearer and nearer to God in that consciousness in which we all unite.
Self-realization is not self-expression; it is not work; it is not an art; it is not realization of a mental or artistic self. It is realizing God, it is union with God. It is not a matter of creating something to live forever as Shakespeare or Beethoven did. It is an attainment.
Self-realization is where the word is silent. The object of the Sufi is to enter into the silence, to learn to leave the form and the external world with all its attributes, to cease striving for anything but the goal. God is not in time; therefore He is in the silence. Sound is part of the world of time. The sage cannot say more than this, for the subject is so vast; when we come to this conception we find that it is altogether too subtle, too vast, to express.
Perfection:
Divine perfection is perfection in all powers and mysteries. All these are manifested without specially striving for them. Perfection and annihilation is that stage where there is no longer ‘I’ and no longer ‘you’, where there is what there is.