The realization that the whole Life must be “give and take” is the realization of the spiritual truth and the fact of true Democracy; not until this spirit is formed in the individual can the whole world be elevated to the higher grade.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
A child should know the moral of give and take; it must know that it should give to others what it wishes to receive from them. The great fault of humanity today is that everyone seeks to get the better of others, by which one is often caught in one’s own net.
The mystics learn … that Life is give and take. It is not only that one receives what one gives, but also one gives what one receives. In this way the mystics begin to see the balance of Life. They realize that Life is a balance, and if the gain or loss, the joy or pain of one outweighs that of another, it is for the moment, but in time it all sums up in a balance, and without balance there is no existence possible.
Real spiritual Democracy we see in Jesus Christ. According to their law, some of the theologians and Pharisees wished to accuse the people who had sinned, but he told them to let those who had never sinned throw the first stone. That was the outlook of Democracy. In that, Christ suggested that human nature was everywhere. … However humble and low people may be in occupation and evolution, we are none the less interdependent and require their help and service as they need ours. However much wealth or power or rank we possess, we still depend upon the humblest and poorest people in the world. The realization that the whole of life must be give and take, is the realization of the spiritual truth and the fact of true Democracy. Not until this spirit is formed in the individual can the whole world be raised to a higher grade of evolution.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume VII – In an Eastern Rose Garden: Democracy )
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
This is a realization; and how can this realization be obtained? It is the spiritual practices which free one from the sway of nufs. It is the nufs which takes. Christ has said, “Freely give, freely receive.” This is the spiritual condition, and it is the attainment of this condition which spiritualizes the self and the collective humanity. Not the philosophy, not the moral, not the thought, not the belief, but the realization alone will elevate the human and the universe.