Everyone’s path is for themselves; let them accomplish their own desires that they may thus be able to rise above them to the Eternal Goal.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
The sages have said, ‘Rise above the earthly motives. Accomplish all you wish to accomplish in life, whatever be the motive, and then that itself will lead you to a stage from which you can rise above them, and above the earthly desires of the body’. They have never said, ‘Stop, and go into the jungle, and see life from our point of view’. Everybody’s path is for themselves. Let everyone achieve the fulfillment of their own desires so as to be able to rise above them to the Eternal Goal.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume VII – In an Eastern Rose Garden: The Journey to the Goal )
All our experiences are nothing but preparation for something else. Nothing that belongs to this world, however precious, must hinder one’s path of progress. For every step in the direction to that spiritual gain must be the aim of every soul. … Every belief and every experience for the wise is a step of a staircase. They have taken this step, there is another step for them to take. The steps of the staircase are not made for one to stand there. They are just made for one to pass, to go further. Because life is progress. Where there is no progress there is no life.
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
Every soul on the journey toward manifestation selects certain qualities out of the Empyrean, so to speak, which form the nexus of their later desire. This is the seed of a person’s nature and it is through the development of personality — not its suppression — that the fulfillment of the involution and evolution is accomplished. As the very nature of desire was born out of unfulfilled love, it is not proper to crush this desire entirely — to transmute it is the right procedure.
From one point of view all desire is crushed, but from another point of view this is not so. What is necessary is to demonstrate through Life itself that satisfaction cannot arise out of any particular thing; rather that satisfaction only comes from the Pleroma, the Totality of thing-ness, not from the things themselves. And what is this Pleroma? It is nothing but an aspect of Allah, the aspect which satisfies every soul.