Humans are closer to God than the fishes are to the ocean.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
One day Inayat was praying on the roof of the house, offering his prayers and he thought to himself that there had not been an answer yet to all the prayers he had offered to God and he did not know where God was to hear his prayers and he could not reconcile himself to going on praying to the God whom he knew not. He went fearlessly to his father and said: “I do not think I will continue my prayers any longer, for it does not fit in with my reason. I do not know how I can go on praying to a God I do not know.” His father, taken aback, did not become cross lest he might turn Inayat’s beliefs sour by forcing them upon him without satisfying his reason and he was glad on the other hand to see that, although it was irreverent on the child’s part, yet it was frank, and he knew that the lad really hungered after Truth and was ready to learn now, what many could not learn in their whole life.
He said to him: “God is in you and you are in God. As the bubble is in the ocean and the bubble is a part of the ocean and yet not separate from the ocean. For a moment it has appeared as a bubble, then it will return to that from which it has risen. So is the relation between humans and God. The Prophet has said that God is closer to you than the jugular vein, which in reality means that your own body is farther from you than God is. If this be rightly interpreted, it will mean that God is the very depth of your own being.” This moment to Inayat was his very great initiation, as if a switch had turned in him, and from that moment onward his whole life Inayat busied himself, and his whole being became engaged in witnessing in life what he knew and believed, by this one great Truth.
( from Biography, Autobiography, Journal and Anecdotes, Part I: Biography – Boyhood )
The innermost being of humans is the real being of God; we are always linked with God. If we could only realize it, it is by finding harmony in our own souls that we find communion with God. All meditation and contemplation are taught with this purpose: to harmonize one’s innermost being with God, so that God is seeing, hearing, thinking through us, and our being is a ray of God’s Light. In that way we are even closer to God than the fishes are to the ocean in which they have their being.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume IX – The Unity of Religious Ideals, Part I: Unity and Uniformity )
Many think that spiritual attainment can only be achieved by great labor. It is not so; labor is necessary for material attainment, but for spiritual attainment what one needs is a seeking soul like that of Moses. Moses falling upon the ground may be interpreted as the cross, which means, ‘I am not; Thou art.’ In order to be, one must pass through a stage of being nothing. In Sufi terms this is called Fana, when one thinks, ‘I am not what I had always thought myself to be.’ This is the true self-denial, which the Hindus called Layam, and the Buddhists annihilation. It is the annihilation of the false self which gives rise to the True Self; once this is done, from that moment we approach closer and closer to God, until we stand face to face with God’s Divine Ideal, with which we can communicate at every moment of our lives.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume X – The Unity of Religious Ideals, Part IV: Moses )
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
Now the fishes are in the ocean but the ocean is not in the fish except in a certain sense. The fish have bones, muscles, etc., which are of more solid materials than the ocean. But all things are of God, the material of which the human being is formed, the akasha which provides the substance and food for the intellect, the stream of light which is the essence of heart, and the soul which is God.