People create their own disharmony.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
Feelings such as pride, conceit, selfishness, jealousy, envy and contempt are all feelings which hurt others and which destroy one’s own life, making it full of the misery which springs from that selfish personal feeling, from that ego of humanity. The more egoistic, the more conceited one is, the more miserable a life one has in the world, the more one makes the lives of others miserable. … it is in the world that, growing up, we create all this and this creation is called nafs or ego. Yet at the same time in the depth of the heart there is that goodness which is the Divine Goodness, that righteousness which we have inherited from the Divine Parent in heaven. …
Each of us creates our own disharmony in our soul and then treats others in the same way; therefore we are not satisfied with our own lives, nor are we satisfied with others because we feel that we have a complaint against them, although mostly it is caused by us. What we give we receive back, but we never see that. We always think: what the depth of our being yearns for — love, goodness, righteousness, harmony and peace — everybody must give to us. But for us when it comes to giving, we do not give because we live in the other life we have created. …
But when a revolution comes in our lives as humans, as soon as we begin to see deeply into life, to acquire goodness — not only to get but to give — as soon as we begin to enjoy not only the sympathy of others but giving sympathy to others, then comes a period when we begin to see this Satan-spirit as apart from our real original being, standing before us constantly in conflict with our natural force, freedom and inclination. … The mystery of perfection lies in annihilation — not in annihilation of the Real Self, but of the false self, of the false conception which we have cherished in our hearts and always have allowed to torture our lives. …
God speaks to everyone, not only to the messengers and teachers. God speaks to the ears of every heart, but it is not every heart which hears it. God’s voice is louder than the thunder, and God’s light is clearer than the sun — if one could only see it, if one could only hear it. In order to see it and in order to hear it, we should remove this wall, this barrier which we have made of the self. Then we become the flute upon which the Divine Player may play the music of Orpheus which can charm even the hearts of stone; then we rise from the cross into the life everlasting.
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
This by their thought of self, the nufs. Undifferentiated Sound exists above the mind-mesh, and in the mental plane it exists as all different sounds. These need not clash but when they are attuned to particular ears, and then focused by particular thoughts — especially by that nufs, or thought of self — their real rhythm and vibration is affected and they are perceived as disharmonies. This disharmony is not real, it is not objective, it is subjective — the result of relating Reality to the false self.