All gains, whether material, spiritual, moral or mystical, are in answer to one’s own character.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
It is easy to help children, but it is most difficult to help the grown-up. One may change snow into water and water into ice, but to try to change a character is the most difficult thing one can ever imagine. Therefore, it is usually vain to try. But what one can do is to build one’s own character; that is in one’s own hands. Only, what people are most occupied with is the character of someone else; they are always thinking of the other but they never want to change themselves.
The seer, therefore, teaches that all the things that we desire and think beautiful, we ought to produce within ourselves instead of expecting them from others. What a task that is! What great self-sufficiency there would be if every country always itself produced that which it seeks from others; what an independent life it would be to produce within ourselves what we expect to obtain from others! Instead of depending on them for something we ourselves can give them, we should experience the joy of giving, the joy of being kind to others. What joy and freedom we should ourselves find in being kind to another. However natural it may be to have someone love and admire us, are we not dependent? A spouse is dependent on the partner’s love; the friend is dependent on the friend’s love. But in the other case we would be free and independent; for our joy would lie in the Love itself, and not in the person.
We should enjoy life by doing kindness to others. Receiving kindness from others only makes the recipients expect more. The recipients keep saying, ‘They are doing this for their own benefit; they are not considering me; they are blaming me; they did not help me; they did not deal fairly with me.’ Their lives become full of grudges because they expect from everybody all the good that they want, and they do not know that they ought to have it all in themselves; that they should become independent. Therein lies the secret of character. …
If people think that God is All, but the whole world is vile, they do not worship God, for God is All and God is Beautiful. ‘God is Beautiful and loves Beauty,’ the Prophet said. And as God’s being is in us, we are supposed to love Beauty also. What is Beauty? Not only the external beauty, but the beauty of personality, the beauty of character, that is the real Beauty. If we did not worship it, we could not admire it in other people. We cannot appreciate anything without beauty of character.
All gains, whether material, spiritual, moral, or mystical, are the outcome of one’s own character; and if we have gained nothing, it is only by reason of our own character.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume VII – In an Eastern Rose Garden: Character and Fate )
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
For either they come through the operation of karmic law wherein one attracts or repels because of one’s nature, or else they come because of the Grace of God which, although ever-present, is not accepted until the self is laid aside. This is the perfuming of character.