Hazrat Inayat Khan often equates the effort to awaken love in the heart to the labour of digging a well; one example appears in this post.  As the world is now more urban than rural, it is likely that most readers have had no experience of digging in search of water, but if we have only turned over a few shovelfuls of soil in the garden, we can imagine that it would be a lot of work.  What is more, the one searching for water has no clear idea how far down it will be necessary to dig.  Even a task as large and serious as a grave has a determined depth, but water is where we find it; to make a physical well, we might have to dig down five or even ten meters before we see signs of hope.

This same uncertainty applies to spiritual excavation; the seeker on the path has no idea how much labour will be required, and with no way to measure our progress, discouragement is not uncommon.  But Hazrat Inayat speaks specifically of mud.  He says we encounter mud and give up — what does he mean by that? What is that mud, and how does it manifest to us on the spiritual path?

Mud is a mixture of earth and water. We can see it as earth softened by water, or as water too burdened by earth to show its clarity and purity, unable to flow freely.  In the spiritual realm, the water represents love, and the earth represents the accumulation of limitations, self-centered attachments and negative impressions that lie upon the heart. The ‘digging’ refers to all the methods a seeker may adopts to clear these layers away: prayer, self-observation, and various disciplines including meditation.

The paradox, though, is that the more we dig in search of spiritual beauty, the more unappealing is the view.  Although it is difficult to admit, we discover that we have been harbouring coldness, selfishness, unkindness, pettiness, lack of generosity, resentment and many other negative characteristics.  What is more, the further we dig, the more we realise that our shortcomings  arise from the subversion by the ego, by the little ‘me’, of the sacred current of love.  The deeper we delve, the less clean we feel – just as a labourer digging a well must become covered from head to toe with mud.

Obviously, as Hazrat Inayat makes clear, the solution is to keep digging, to dig until we hit pure water — but why, we might ask, do some give up and others persevere? There are differences of character, of course: some people are just more stubborn than others, and we might expect to see them keep digging until they emerge on the other side of the planet.  But the real motive is thirst, thirst for the pure water that will answer the longing of the soul, and will complete the task of clearing away the mud. It is precisely that thirst that allows us to go on in spite of all our apparent faults, and it is only the water of life that can help us.  That is why, in Gayan, Boulas, it says: