It is being dead to self that is the recognition of God.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
There is a poem by the great Persian poet Iraqi in which he tells, ‘When I went to the gate of the divine Beloved and knocked at the door, a voice came and said — Who art thou?’ When he had told, ‘I am so and so’, the answer came, ‘There is no place for anyone else in this abode. Go back to whence thou hast come’. He turned back and then, after a long time, after having gone through the process of the cross and of crucifixion, he again went there — with the spirit of selflessness. He knocked at the door; the word came, ‘Who art thou? ‘, and he said, ‘Thyself alone, for no one else exists save Thee’. And God said, ‘Enter into this abode for now it belongs to thee’. It is such selflessness, to the extent that the thought of self is not there, it is being dead to the self, which is the recognition of God.
One finds this spirit to a small extent in the ordinary lover and beloved, when a person loves another from the depth of the heart. The one who says, ‘I love you but only so much, I love you and give you sixpence but I keep sixpence for myself, I love you but I stand at a distance and never come closer, we are separate beings’ — that person’s love is with the self. As long as that exists, love has not done its full work. Love accomplishes its work when it spreads its wings and veils our self from our own eyes. That is the time when love is fulfilled, and so it is in the life of the Holy Ones who have not only loved God by professing or showing it, but who have loved God to the extent that they forgot themselves.
This is the time when another epoch begins in our lives, and from this time on there is a constant conflict between our Self and that spirit which is our ego. It is a conflict, it is a kind of hindrance to our natural attitudes, our natural inclinations to do good and right; and we constantly meet with that spirit because it was created in our own hearts and has become part of our being. It is a very solid and substantial being, as real as we feel ourselves to be and often more real, and something within us in the depths of our beings is covered up by it. And this constant conflict between our real, original Self and this self which hinders our spiritual progress, is pictured in the form of a cross.
This cross we carry during our progress. It is the ugly passions, the love of comforts, and the satisfaction in anger and bitterness that we have to fight first; and when we have conquered these the next trouble we have to meet is that still more subtle enemy of ourselves in our minds: the sensitiveness to what others say, to the opinion of others about us. We are anxious to know everybody’s opinion about us or what anybody says against us or if our dignity or position is hurt in any way. Here again the same enemy, the nafs [ the small self, the ego ], takes another stand, and the crucifixion is when that nafs is fought with — until there comes an understanding that there exists no self before the vision of God.
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It is this which is the real crucifixion; but with it there comes still another which always follows and which every soul has to experience, for the perfection and liberation of every soul depend on it. This is the crucifixion of that part of our being which we have created in ourselves, and which is not our real Self, although on the way it always appears that we have crucified our own selves.
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There have always been two tendencies: one of sincerity, and the other of insincerity and falsehood. They constantly work together. The false and the true have always existed side by side in life and nature. Where there is real gold there is false; where there is a real diamond there is an imitation diamond, where there are sincere people there are insincere ones; and in every aspect of life – in a life of spirituality, in the acquisition of learning, in art or science – we can see both sincerity and insincerity. And the only way to recognize real spiritual development is by understanding the extent of selflessness; because however much people pretend to spirituality and wish to be godly or pious or good, nothing can hide their true natures. For there is the constant tendency of that ego to leap out; it will leap out from our control, and if we are insincere we cannot hide it. Just as the imitation diamond, however bright, is dull compared with the real one, and when tested and examined will prove to be an imitation, so real spiritual progress must be proved in the personality of a soul. It is the personality that proves whether we have touched that larger realm where self does not exist.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume VIIIa – Sufi Teachings: The Symbol of the Cross )
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
This is so simple that its very simplicity has astounded those who have found God. We are always looking for complexities, but these come out of the self-thought. Light is simple, although from it very complex mixtures of colors have been made. Yet the essence of all these colors is light which is much more simple. To find light in the colors, one has to move from the complex to the simple.
This is not a mental process when one is considering human spiritual evolution. It is the living process which comes when one ceases to think in terms of “I”. This does not extinguish thought, it purifies thought. Instead of the “I” trying to think thought, it is pure thought which thinks. And how does thought think?
On the physical plane there are natural movements of matter, which have led some to believe there is no cause, and that the natural forces control everything. There is an element of truth in this belief as every activity of matter may cause some other matter to move, as in the phenomenon of weather. There is an analogous condition in the mental world that every thought of anyone may affect many other thoughts and produce mental phenomena. At the same time, just as the physical sun, which embodies physical light, is the most important factor in the physical world, so the sun of intelligence, embodying pure thought, affects the mental world more than anything else.
There are all kinds of clouds in the mental world, but these are produced by the self in opposition to the Sun of Intelligence. So one cannot enter the higher heavens in bliss until these clouds are removed; yet this removal, this extinguishing of self, automatically brings one into the presence of God, regardless of time, space, plane, or condition.