The perfect life is following one’s own ideal, not in checking those of others; leave all others to follow their own ideals.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
Religion in the East is not made into a thing apart from one’s Life, as in the West where business, profession, and other things on the one side of life, and going to church one day in the week on the other side, together constitute religion, with a prayer before going to rest. But, strictly speaking, Life is religion. When one has that Ideal before one with whatever occupation one is concerned, business, industry, domestic life, or whatever it is, one carries it out, trying to be worthy of it, that is Religion.
In the Hindu language, the same word, Dharma, means both duty and religion. Both are expressed by one word. ‘This is your Dharma’ means: ‘This is your faith.’ How beautiful the thought is! Whatever kind of duty it is, so long as you have an ideal before you and are performing that duty, you are walking in the path of religion.
We, with our narrowness of faith or belief, accuse others of belonging to another religion, another chapel or church. We say, ‘This temple is better, that faith is better.’ The whole world has kept on fighting and devastating itself just because it can not understand that each form of religion is peculiar to itself. Therefore, the ideal Life is in following one’s own ideal. It is not in checking other people’s ideals [ ie ‘checking’ in the sense of ‘blocking’ or ‘hindering’ — Muiz ]. If a certain thing is one’s ideal, that does not mean that others will agree that it is best to offer prayers ten times a day. They may be doing better by following their religion in their shop than by going to a mosque and offering up a prayer twenty times a day. Perhaps somebody with that ideal cannot see that the other person’s way is an ideal also. Leave all others to follow their own ideal. …
We see now that it is all a matter of their ideal whether people differ from their neighbors, whether they are heavenly or earthly, as high as the Devas, the heavenly beings, or as low as the demons. Their ideal makes them as high as the one, or as low as the other. The greatness of humanity lies in the greatness of our ideal.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume VII – In an Eastern Rose Garden: The Ideal Life )
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
You cannot digest another’s food, so why try to digest their thought? There is no vicarious atonement. God has created each form and each object in order that God might come to realization through that form and that object. When another is checked, God is checked; when another is hindered, God is hindered. This is very different from Guidance; Guidance helps toward some goal, it does not hinder. In other words it promotes activity, and if that activity does not appear to be in the right direction to the one to whom it is offered, it is because that one does not really know the right direction or has not the power and insight to transmute their direction into right direction. Every direction is right if it leads sooner or later to the Divine Ideal.