Through this series of posts, Hazrat Inayat Khan has endeavoured to give a picture of the journey of the soul from its Divine origin through different planes of manifestation. The series concludes here,, but in the subsequent series he will give us insight into the return journey. The previous post in this series is here.

The soul’s happiness is in itself; nothing can make the soul fully happy but self-realization. Phenomena which the intelligence creates by its creative power becomes the source of its own delusion; as the spider is caught in its own web, so the soul is imprisoned in all it has created.

This picture we see in the lives of individuals and of the multitude. Motive gives power, and at the same time it is motive which limits power; for the power of the soul is greater than any motive. But it is the consciousness of the motive which stimulates the power, and yet robs it of its power. The Hindus have called the whole phenomenon of life by the name Maya, which means illusion, and once the true nature and character of this puzzle is realized the meaning of every word of language becomes untrue, except one: Truth, which words cannot explain. Therefore the soul may be considered to be a condition of God, a condition which makes the only Being limited for a time. And the experience gained in this time, with its ever-changing joy and pain, is interesting, and the fuller the experience the wider becomes the vision of life. What one has to experience in life is its true being.

The life which everyone knows is this momentary period of the soul’s captivity. Beyond this man knows nothing; therefore, every seeming change that takes place he calls death or decay. Once the soul has risen above this illusive phase of life by surmounting all that exists apart from itself, it experiences in the end that happiness for which this whole creation took place. The uncovering of the soul is the discovering of God.

The word intelligence as it is known by us, and spoken in everyday language, does not give a full idea; especially the word intelligence as used by modern science will only convey to us something which is the outcome of matter or energy. But according to the mystic, intelligence is the primal element, or the cause as well as the effect. While science acknowledges it as the effect, the mystic sees in it the cause. One may ask, ‘How can intelligence create this dense earth which is matter? There must be energy behind it.’ But this question comes because we separate intelligence from energy or matter. In point of fact it is spirit which is matter, and matter which is spirit; the denseness of spirit is matter, and the fineness of matter is spirit. Intelligence becomes intelligible by turning into denseness; that denseness being manifest to its own view, creates two objects: Zat, the self, and Sifat, what is known by the self. And then comes of necessity a third object, the medium by which the self knows what it knows: Nazar, the sight or the mind. The Sufi poets have pictured these three in their verse as Bagh, Bahar, and Bulbul, the garden, the spring, and the nightingale. And it is these three aspects of life which are at the root of the idea of Trinity. The moment these three are realized as one, life’s purpose is fulfilled.

As matter evolves so it shows intelligence, and when one studies the growing evolution of the material world one will find that at each step of evolution the natural world has shown itself to be more intelligent, reaching its height in the human race. But this is only the predisposition of what we call matter which is manifested in the end; and everything in nature, even in the vegetable world, if we could see it, is the seed of which the root is the evidence, and thus the intelligence, which is the effect, is also the cause.