| from The
Religious Gathekas
Hazrat
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
If anybody asks you, "What is Sufism? What religion is
it?", you may answer, "Sufism is the religion of the heart,
the religion in which the most important thing is to seek God in
the heart of mankind."
There are three ways of seeking God in the human heart. The
first way is to recognize God the divine in every person, and to
care for every person with whom we come in contact, in our thought,
speech, and action. Human personality is very delicate. The more
living the heart the more sensitive it is; that which causes sensitivity
is the love element in the heart, and love is God. The person whose
heart is not sensitive is without feeling; his heart is not living,
but dead. In that case the divine spirit is buried in his heart.
A person who is always concerned with his own feelings is
so absorbed in himself that he has no time to think of another.
His whole attention is taken up with his own feelings: he pities
himself, worries about his own pain, and is never open to sympathize
with others. He who takes notice of the feeling of another person
with whom he comes in contact practices the first essential moral
of Sufism.
The next way of practicing this religion is to think of the
feeling of the person who is not at the moment before us. One feels
for a person who is present, but one often neglects to feel for
someone who is out of sight. One speaks well of someone to his face,
but if one speaks well of someone when he is absent, that is greater.
One sympathizes with the trouble of someone who is before one at
the moment, but it is greater to sympathize with one who is far
away.
The third way of realizing the Sufi principle is to recognize
in one's own feeling the feeling of God, and to realize every impulse
that rises in one's heart as a direction from God. Realizing that
love is a divine spark in one's heart, one blows that spark until
a flame may rise to illuminate the path of one's life.
The symbol of the Sufi Order, which is a heart with wings,
is symbolic of its ideal. The heart is both earthly and heavenly.
The heart is a receptacle on earth of the divine spirit, and when
it holds the divine spirit it soars heavenward; the wings picture
its rising. The crescent in the heart symbolizes responsiveness;
it is the heart that responds to the spirit of God that rises. The
crescent is a symbol of responsiveness because it grows fuller by
responding more and more to the sun as it progresses. The light
one sees in the crescent is the light of the sun. It gets more light
with increasing response, so it becomes fuller of the light of the
sun. The star in the heart of the crescent represents the divine
spark reflected in the human heart as love, which helps the crescent
toward its fullness.
The Sufi Message is the message of the day. It does not bring
theories or doctrines to add to those already existing, which puzzle
the human mind. What the world needs today is the message of love,
harmony, and beauty, the absence of which is the only tragedy of
life. The Sufi Message does not give a new law. It wakens in humanity
the spirit of brotherhood, with tolerance on the part of each for
the religion of the other, and with forgiveness from each for the
fault of the other. It teaches thoughtfulness and consideration,
so as to create and maintain harmony in life; it teaches service
and usefulness, which alone can make life in the world fruitful
and in which lies the satisfaction of every soul.
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