If we ask someone where they live, they may mention a certain village or town, or a certain street in a large city, or perhaps name another country or continent. But ‘where’ does not always mean a physical location, as we see from this Aphorism of Hazrat Inayat Khan : The one who lives in his mind is conscious of the mind; the one who lives in his soul is conscious of the soul.

Like so many of the Sufi sayings, this puts before us a way to examine ourselves, a way that we may have never considered before to gain insight into ourselves : Do we live in our mind? Or do we live in our soul? Is there any other possibility? And if we manage to determine where we live, what are the implications for us in our life and in our spiritual journey?

There are, of course, people who live in the body, or almost exclusively so. Their life is through their senses, their sensory experiences lead them or more correctly rule them, and their horizon is restricted to the physical plane. But if we have an interest in the Sufi path, it is likely that we have moved – or are moving – beyond this level, and are living some or most of the time in our mind. Hazrat Inayat Khan, along with other Sufis in the past, has referred to the mind world as the palace of mirrors, because one reflection leads to another and another and another, ad infinitum. When we are able to direct the mind, this quality can produce great beauty – as when a poet sees the Beloved’s cheek in the colour of the sky at sunset, and coins an elegant verse to describe the moment. But most people, although conscious of their mind, have only limited control of it, and their palace of mirrors seems to be more like a zoo inhabited by an unruly band of monkeys, always leaping and chattering.

This means, of course, that there is a lot of noise, in the sense of unwanted thoughts intruding, and the lack of control means the necessary work of clearing away our opinions and pre-conceptions is also difficult. Many people assume that their happiness or unhappiness depends upon the events in their lives, but in truth it is our own labels and assumptions that make us unhappy. When we are able to let them go, we discover that happiness was there all along, hidden by our cloudy habits of thinking. But this purification is only possible when we have sufficient power of concentration to get the monkeys under control. Then we may recognize how shaped and limited by our thoughts we are, and begin to free ourself from them.

The aphorism does not say whether ‘mind’ refers only to the surface, the thinking part, or if Pir-o-Murshid is using it in the larger sense, for it would then include the depth of consciousness, or the heart. The heart is also a mirror, but to reflect properly, it must first be cleaned of the ego-rust that usually accumulates there When the small self, meaning our concept of being separate, is scraped away, then the heart will respond with deep feeling to whatever is placed before it. If the heart is directed toward the beauty of a beloved, that person will fill our consciousness. And if, by prayer and meditation, we have formed a divine ideal, and direct the heart toward that, our consciousness will begin to glow with the light of God.

Then we might be said to be living in our soul. The soul, in the Sufi understanding, is light, divine light, in other words the light of God, and although it wears the physical and mental garments of individuality, it is inherently one with the infinite life and light that sent it forth on its journey. When we become conscious of it – when we begin to live in it – then our heart forgets all limitations and also expands to infinity. We find everything in us, and ourself in all. That is what is expressed in this saying from Gayan Chalas:
Man as a human being is capable of loving one,
but his soul as the light of God
is capable of loving not only the world, but even a thousand worlds;
for the heart of man is larger than the whole universe.