We are always searching for God afar off, when all the while God is nearer to us than our own soul.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
Spirituality has become far removed from material life, and so God is far removed from humanity. Therefore, one cannot any more conceive of God speaking through a person, through someone like oneself. Even a religious person who reads the Bible every day will have great difficulty in understanding the verse, ‘Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.’ The Sufi message and its mission are to bring this truth to the consciousness of the world: that one can dive so deep within oneself that one can touch the depths, where one is united with the whole of life, with all souls, and that one can derive harmony, beauty, peace and power from that source.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume X – Sufi Mysticism: Sufi Poetry, The Poet and the Prophet )
When we turn for guidance to God, to the inner Being, then all light and all knowledge are ours for our guidance. “But,” people say, “how can we attach ourselves with the inner Being, so as to have that guidance?” When the mind is fixed upon anything, then the person becomes linked to that, a current is established between one and it. It may be called the guidance of God or the guidance of the Self. If we look within, God is nearer to us than our mind and our body, because God is that life in which, as is said in the Bible, we live and move and have our being.
( from “Supplementary papers, Mureeds VII” [ unpublished ]
“The one whom I have called God, whose personality I have recognized, and whose pleasure or displeasure I have sought, has been seeing through my eyes, has been hearing through my ears. It was God’s breath that came through my breathing, God’s impulse which I felt, and therefore I know that this body which I had thought to be my own is really the true temple of God. I did not realize that this body was the shrine of God.” Not knowing that God experiences this life through each person, one is seeking for God somewhere else, in some person aloof and apart from the world, whereas all the time God is in oneself.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume VII – In an Eastern Rose Garden: The Personality of God )
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
Differences in planes are not differences in time and space but differences of rates of vibrations. One plane is formed from another in the same region, called akasha or accommodation, by change of rate of vibration. Consequently all planes may be regarded as all spaces. God, being the source of formation and the essence of energy, is therefore in all times and all spaces and places and can be found by a change in pitch, by a tuning of the soul.
So long as soul is regarded as something different than material, something different from mental existence, one finds differences not soul. Since God is to be found in the mental and material, God is therefore the nearest thing. Really it is God Who is searching for God, and we are the very thing we are looking for, only in our ignorance we do not know this.