We can never sufficiently humble our limited self before Limitless Perfection.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
I have seen with my own eyes souls who have attained saintliness and who have reached to great perfection; and yet such souls will stand before an idol of stone with others, with fellow human beings, and worship, not letting those others know that they are in any way more advanced than other people, keeping themselves in humble guise, not making any pretense that they have gone further in their spiritual evolution. The further such souls go, the more humble they become; the greater the mystery they have realized, the less they speak about it.
The first aspect of prayer is giving thanks to God for all the numberless blessings that are bestowed upon us at every moment of the day and night, and of which we are mostly unconscious. The second aspect of prayer is laying our shortcomings before the Unlimited Perfection of the Divine Being, and asking for forgiveness. This makes us conscious of our smallness, of our limitation, and therefore makes us humble before our God. And, by humbling ourselves before God we do not lose any virtue. God alone has the right to demand complete humility.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume IX – The Unity of Religious Ideals, Part I: Prayer, Chapter VII )
There is a beautiful story told of the King Akbar that when he was grieving with an almost ungovernable grief over the death of his mother, his ministers and friends tried to comfort him by influence and power. Akbar replied, “Yes, that is true, and that only makes my grief greater; for while I have everyone to bow before me, to give way to me, to salute me and obey me, my mother was the one person before whom I could humble myself; and I cannot tell you how great a joy that was to me.”
Think, then, of the far greater joy of humbling one’s self before the Mother-Father God on Whose Love one can always depend. A spark only of love expresses itself in the human mother and father; the Whole of Love in God. In whatever manner a person humbles self, it can never be enough to express the humility of the limited self before Limitless Perfection.
( from
Unpublished Papers from the Nekbakht Foundation Archives: Prayer – May 1921 and 15 May 1921 )
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
So long as there is humility, effacement is not yet reached. Through humility we make very little of our limited self; through effacement we make it as nothing. The small fraction has a value, it may be a very little value, but it still has some value; so humility keeps the ego from expanding itself but does not efface it.
Now in mathematics all numbers are as nothing before the Infinite, and in Reality all things or thoughts are as nothing before God. This corresponds to humility. But in mathematics the zero is as nothing before anything which has any value, without taking measure of the thing. This is the effacement of ego, where all things appear as Infinite because in everything one sees God’s Face.