The heart is not living until it has experienced pain.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
Those who have avoided love in life from fear of its pain have lost more than the lovers, who by losing themselves gain all. The loveless first lose all, until at last their self is also snatched away from their hands. The warmth of the lovers’ atmospheres, the piercing effect of their voices, the appeal of their words, all come from the pain of their hearts. The heart is not living until it has experienced pain. We have not lived if we have lived and worked with our body and mind without heart. The soul is all light, but all darkness is caused by the death of the heart. Pain makes it alive. The same heart that was once full of bitterness, when purified by love becomes the source of all goodness. All deeds of kindness spring from it.
A person who has never experienced pain cannot sympathize with those suffering pain. … Sympathy is something more than love and affection, for it is the knowledge of a certain suffering which moves the living heart to sympathy.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume XIII – The Gathas, Series III, Tasawwuf: Metaphysics )
Suffering is always a blessing. If it is for higher ideas, for God, for an ideal, it takes a person at once to the highest heaven. If it is for lower ideas, for the ego, for pride, for possessions, it takes a person to the lowest depth of hell. But there, after much suffering, after a long, long time, one loses these ideas and is purified. That is why the Christian religion shows the symbol of the cross, of suffering. How high our ideal may be, how low our ideal may be, in the end each pain has its prize.
If there were no pain, one would not have the experience of joy. It is pain which helps one to experience joy. Everything is distinguished by its opposite and the one who feels pain deeply is more capable of expressing joy. If there were no pain, life would be most uninteresting; for it is by pain that penetration takes place, and the sensation after pain is a deeper joy. Without pain the great musicians, athletes, discoverers, and thinkers would not have reached the stage they have arrived at in the world. If they had always experienced joy, they would not have touched the depths of life.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume VI – The Alchemy of Happiness: Our Life’s Experience )
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume )
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
The angel lives in the heart-sphere but does not know pain. There is not strength in the love, it is something like the natural love of the infant. It is only when love is tested that love can show its strength. If it turns to hate or any emotion, that shows there was no life there.
Sufis are able to experience pain in the heart without being drowned by it. The various spiritual practices are exercises to the heart-muscles and to the heart faculties. This endows the heart with life; that is to say, it enables the heart to partake of experiences and to shed the Divine Light upon them, showing the proper way through all intricacies of external existence.