Hazrat Inayat Khan here concludes his brief teaching on the ideal and the search for purity. At the end of the first instalment, he observes that the practical man may find some use for the sense of ‘I’, “But after all, how long does this practical sense last, and to what end does it lead? The end of the one who was practical and the end of the unpractical one are the same.”
There is the story of a Sufi who met a young man while traveling and said to him, ‘Come and see me if you pass the village where I live; you might call on me.’ This young man asked, ‘May I know the name of the place where you live?’ The Sufi said, ‘The place of liars, it is near the temple.’ This young man was very confused; he thought the Sufi was speaking all the time the truth, and yet saying he lived in the place of liars!
When he arrived at the village he tried to find the Sufi, but no one knew where the place of liars was. He only found it in the end when he came near the temple and saw the Sufi there. He said, ‘The first question that arises in my mind is, why do you call this place the place of liars?’ The Sufi said to the young man, ‘Come along with me, we shall go for a little walk in the graveyard, which is close by.’ Then he said, ‘They say that here the Prime Minister was buried, and here the king was buried, and here the chief judge was buried, and here a very great general. Were they not liars? Here they are proved to be liars. They are nothing but the same in the same ground; they are buried with everybody else. They had the same end as all others. If that is the end, then think of the beginning. In the beginning there was no such thing as distinction either. No infant is born into this world saying, ‘I am so and so, my name is so and so, my position is such and such.’ All this the soul has learned after coming here. The soul has learned the first lie in saying ‘I,’ as a separate identity; and after the first lie a man tells numerous lies.’
Thus the teaching and the occupation of the Sufi is to erase that error from the surface of his heart, and therefore the first and last lesson the Sufi learns is: I am not, Thou art. And when the false claim no longer exists in his consciousness, then the claim can be made which is expressed in the Bible, that first was the Word, and the Word was God. And by listening to that divine Word, by giving himself to that Word, the Sufi experiences the heavenly joy which is incomparable, the joy which is ecstasy.
There is only one thing in the world that cannot be defined, and that is the idea of God. If it could be defined it would not be God, because God is greater than His name and higher than our comprehension of Him. We call Him God; if we did not call Him God, then what would we call Him? But by giving a name to the nameless, by making a concept of someone who is beyond conception, we only make Him limited; at the same time, if we did not do so, then we would not be doing what we ought to do. My meaning is this, that in order to respect a great man we should have some conception of what greatness is; but our conception is not of that great man as he really is, it is the idea that we have made of him. Twenty admirers of a great personality would each have his own conception of that personality. And I might also say that each of the twenty has his special great person, and that thus there are twenty great persons instead of one; only, the one name causes these twenty persons to unite under it. The Hindus have said: ‘As many men, so many gods,’ and it was not an exaggeration; it only meant that every man has his own conception of God. It is necessary first to have a conception of God in order to reach the stage at which one realizes Him. If a man did not believe a personality to be great, he would not be able to see the greatness of that personality. He must first have the conception that there is something great in it. Thus we first make our God before we come to the realization of Him.
Belief in God leads to that perfection which is the quest of the soul. But it is not only belief, for there are numberless souls in this world that believe in God; but do you think that they are very far advanced? Often you find that those who claim to believe in God may be much more backward than those who make no such claim.
Belief in God should serve the purpose of purification, the purity which is the ideal attainment for man; and which is attained by meditation. In this purity is fulfilled the purpose of life.