In the tale recently posted in the Inner Call, at a critical moment in the search for Lord Rama’s kidnapped wife Sita, Hanuman, the Hindu model of total devotion, is awakened to his real nature by the reminder of Jambavan, the wise king of the bears. Hanuman had been cursed to forget his great powers and abilities until he should be reminded of them, and for years therefore he had thought himself to be nothing special, merely an ordinary monkey. At the words of Jambavan, though, he remembered himself, his strength returned, and in the service of Rama he was able to fly across the ocean to the island of Lanka.

It is a picture of the transformation we may undergo when we awaken to our true selves, discovering the ‘light and power latent in the human soul,’ as Hazrat Inayat Khan has said. For many, though, the transformation comes much more slowly, and at the cost of considerable effort.

Insofar as we are imprisoned in the illusion of a separate, limited being, the way to self knowledge requires work on two fronts. One is the cultivation of an ideal that beguiles us, that uplifts us and guides us onward. For example, in the words of the Invocation we say ‘the perfection of love,’ but mostly we understand this imperfectly: we need to ask what could perfect love mean? What would our experience of it be? How could we express it? How could life change if we knew it? And without doubt the more we ponder this, the more will our ideal become real and living to us, exerting an ever-increasing pull on our thoughts and feelings. This is what could be called awakening the greater self, and it is indispensable.

The other front of self-knowledge is less appealing, but just as essential, and that is to study carefully that which we believe to be our self, our limited domain in other words, and endeavour to remove whatever flaws conceal the ideal. If we have been considering the ideal of the perfection of love, for example, we will surely discover that we are far less loving than we would wish to believe. And with that recognition begins the difficult task of grinding away our selfishness in order to let the ideal appear. This could be called the labour of the small self, and it is equally necessary.

In his play Una, Hazrat Inayat Khan gives us the image of a sculptor who is constantly seeking to perfect her work of art, and in this way he illustrates the creation of the ideal – but we should remember that if one is making a sculpture – from marble, let us say – then the hard physical labour of the artist is to remove all that does not belong to the desired form. The revelation of the beauty of Michelangelo’s David resulted from the painstaking removal of all the stone that concealed it. If our ideal is love, then we must strive to remove all that is not love. And if we love our ideal, the result will be beauty’s as we find in this saying from Vadan Boulas : Love creates beauty by her own hands, to worship.

Therefore the path of self-knowledge means loving the ideal and being willing to throw away the faults and flaws that do not belong to the true self. That is expressed in this saying from Gayan Boulas : The way to overcome error is, first, to admit one’s fault; and next, to refrain from repeating it.