After beginning with the theme of the Spirit of Guidance, Hazrat Inayat Khan now describes that Spirit as the Heart of God.
Divinity is that aspect of God which emanates from God and forms itself into the Spirit of Guidance. The Spirit of Guidance may thus be called the heart of God, a heart which is the accumulator of all feelings, impressions, thoughts, memories, and of all knowledge and experience. It is like putting a man at the head of a factory who has been in that factory from the beginning. He has had experiences of all kinds, of the pioneer work and of how things have changed, of the new methods and of the right or wrong results, which have come out of them. All such impressions have thus been collected in that one person.
In this mechanism of the world, all that happens, all that is experienced in the way of thought and feeling, is accumulated. Where? In the heart of God. Divinity is that heart which contains all wisdom and to which all wisdom belongs. The heart of God is the intelligence and the current of guidance in the heart of every man, and therefore it is not disconnected from the heart of man. Indeed, the heart of man is one of the atoms, which form the heart of God.
If people have called Christ divine that is right too. The heart of the Master that fully reflected the divine heart naturally, showed the sign of divinity. Not understanding this, people made this idea exclusive and incomprehensible, and by this they have taken away the ground from under the feet of the Master. And by this, too, further harm has been done, taking away the worthiness of man who was made to be the representative of God. The Hebrew scriptures say that man was made in the image of God, and the Muslim scripture says that man was made the Khalif of God, which means His representative.
When one says that man was born in sin, that man is on earth and that God is in heaven, one separates man from God; and this takes away the possibility of human perfection of which Christ has said, ‘Be ye therefore perfect, as your father which is in heaven is perfect.’ That possibility of human perfection is taken away by making the idea of divinity exclusive and remote, and thus depriving man of the bliss of God which was meant for him. That is why disputes have arisen among the followers of different religions, each of them thinking their teacher to be the only teacher. For that reason wars have taken place in all ages, and people have disagreed with one another. People from one community have called the others heathen, depriving themselves of the bliss which constantly is, which was, and which always will be.
To be continued…