All earthly knowledge is as a cloud covering the sun.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
Truth is the very self of humanity. Truth is the Divine Eelement in humanity. Truth is every soul’s seeking. Therefore as soon as the clouds of illusion are scattered, that which one now begins to see is nothing but the Truth, which has been there all the time. One finds that the Truth was never absent; it was only covered by clouds of illusion.
( from Supplementary Papers: Philosophy, Part V – The Knowledge of Truth [ unpublished ] )
People bring unhappiness upon themselves by holding in their hands the clouds of bad impressions, which fall as a shadow upon their souls. Once they are able to clear from their minds, by whatever process, the undesirable impressions, a new power begins to spring from their hearts. This opens a way before them to accomplish all they wish, attracting to them all they requires, clearing their path of all obstacles, and making their atmospheres clear, for them to live and move and to accomplish all they wish to accomplish.
As there are times when the sun becomes covered by clouds, so there are times when the God-ideal becomes covered by materialism. But if for a moment the cloud covers the sun, that does not mean that the sun is lost; and so the God-ideal may seemed to have disappeared in the reign of materialism, yet God is there just the same. … We find that during the past few years all over the world we have come to a phase when the God-ideal has seemed entirely forgotten. It does not mean that the churches have disappeared, it does not mean that God does not exist, but that a light that was once there has been covered and has ceased to illuminate us.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume IX – The Unity of Religious Ideals, Part II: The God Ideal )
Now the time has come that humanity, after its contemplation on material gain, must contemplate on another gain. Material gains are taken away in a moment’s time and leave us in our graves, alone without any of them. … This does not mean that the knowledge of the world is useless, but the knowledge of the world does not suffice the whole purpose of Life. There is only one thing from which true satisfaction can come, and that is the knowledge of the deeper side of Life, the knowledge of the source and goal of all things.
It is the receptivity of our heart and the passivity of our mind, it is the eagerness, the thirst and hunger after Truth, it is the direction of our whole life to that Ideal from which all Light and Truth come, that alone can bring us Truth and the knowledge of God. All knowledge of the earth is as clouds covering the sun. It is the breaking of these clouds and clearness of the sky, or in other words the purity of Heart, which give the capacity for the knowledge of God.
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
This is so because these forms arise from thought-shadows. It is the hardening of thought-forms which enables humankind to produce material objects out of the stuff of the physical sphere. The mental and physical cannot be dissociated in this, but the process that enables the mind to work is super-mental. Real knowledge comes when mind is tuned to heart and heart to that Universality which we call God or Allah or Amitabha or Brahma.