This post completes the very instructive lecture by Hazrat Inayat Khan on the need for names, forms and certain ways of working in the service of the Message. In the previous post in the sequence, which may be found here, Hazrat Inayat enumerates a number of ways in which interested people would offer him only limited or conditional support for his work.
All these things are like different threads, and the person who does not want to be tied thinks, “I can loosen it”, but after having loosened it he still finds himself bound. It is human nature. A man wants to be free, but in order to be free he is too careful. It is that people have a wrong idea of freedom. The other day in New York there came to see me some representatives of a society, the Humanity League which was founded by Lady Montague. All the time they talked to me about their ideas. They said, “We want you to be a member of our society, what do you say?” I said, “Most willingly. I appreciate your ideas and principles. I am your member!” And do you know the result of this willingness? They have chosen me to be the leader of their society for seven years from now. There was an archbishop there but they have put me in that place. I thought, “All right, put me wherever you like. It will not take me away from the Message I have to give to the world.”
People become extra sensitive about this. By joining anything one is not really bound. The real meaning of freedom is quite different. A person may be in the midst of the crowd and be free of all, and another may be in the forest and yet be a captive. Captivity belongs to our thought, not to conditions.
There is a story of a very great Madzub. A Madzub is a kind of sage who always tries to act as someone who is not all there [i.e. mentally unstable : ed.]. And therefore some recognize him, about which he does not care, and others think that he is out of his mind. Something like this exists in Ireland, where such people are called ‘God’s fool’! In the East it is a well-known thing; there are many great souls found to be in this guise. I myself have known this Madzub of whom I am speaking. Once he was walking in the street during the night and a police-officer saw him. The law of the city was that after ten o’clock no one should be in the street. So the officer asked first, “Why are you walking about at this time of the night?” This sage did not know what time it was. He was walking in complete peace and rest of mind, and he did not answer. The officer said, “Why do you not answer? Are you a thief?” He smiled and said, “Yes,” so the policeman took him to the police station, as he had no discrimination. This Madzub sat there in prison all night long. He was quite happy, as if he was a king sitting in a palace. In the morning the chief of police came, and this police-officer was quite proud of having arrested a thief. But when his chief saw this sage sitting there he was cross with the police-officer. He said, “What did he do? Why did you arrest him?” “He said he was a thief,” replied the officer. Then the chief begged the sage’s pardon and let him go.
The meaning of this is that for a great sage, whose consciousness is the All-Consciousness, there is nothing that he is not. His consciousness is raised to such heights that he is all that exists. There is nothing that he is not. Call him a thief, he is a thief; call him a king, he is a king; saint, he is a saint; devil, he is a devil – any name. He will answer that he is all. For such examples of real freedom, captivity is no captivity, no prison; make them captive here, and at the same time they are in heaven. This is the freedom they seek. It is sought by deeper knowledge, by greater insight in life, by the knowledge of truth, by the raising of the consciousness. To go towards this aim they do not occupy themselves with what they were in their last incarnation, nor with what they will be afterwards; this is all a question of “I”.
People all the time want to inquire about the very thing they should forget. In San Francisco I went to visit a friend whom I had seen twice before. And every time I saw her she asked me the same question, a question about reincarnation. Each time I gave her the same answer, but she never heard it, and she would not have heard it if I had answered her a hundred times. What she heard was the question in her mind, which was talking louder than the answer; that is why she knew nothing but her question. As it is said in the Vadan, “’Why?’ Is an animal with a thousand tails. At every bite you give it, it drops one of its curved tails and raises another. Its hunger is never satisfied so long as its mouth is open.”* The ‘why?’ is continually there, as long as it is not satisfied. There may be a thousand answers, but people like this have no faith; the answers do not reach them. There is a continual ‘why?’
*Vadan, Chalas