We blame others for our sorrows and misfortunes, not perceiving that we ourselves are the creators of our world.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
Externally we are a single being, but internally we are a world. As vast as is the world around us, so vast is the world within. Asif says, ‘The limitation of the sky and land cannot be compared with humanity’s heart. If humanity’s heart be wide, there is nothing wider than this.’ All can be accommodated in it; heaven earth, sun, moon, all are reflected in it. It becomes itself the whole. This world becomes as one chooses to make it. If we only knew that! But since we do not know that, the world is not heaven, but has become its opposite. We blame others for our sorrows and misfortunes, not perceiving that we ourselves are the creators of our world; that our world has an influence upon our life within as well as upon our life without.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume VII – In an Eastern Rose Garden: Mental Creation )
We learn to understand that there is a world in our self, that in our mind there is a source of happiness and unhappiness, the source of health and illness, the source of light and darkness, and that it can be awakened, either mechanically or at will, if only we knew how to do it. Then we do not blame our ill fortune nor complain of our fellow humans. We become more tolerant, more joyful, and more loving toward our neighbor, because we know the cause of every thought and action, and we see it all as the effect of a certain cause.
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
This blaming comes from habit, a habit we cannot readily blame in others, for it is the way of the world. At the same time, when one overcomes such a habit it is often to fall subject to blame at the hands of others even without ever blaming others. The Sufis call this the path of Malamat or blame. It is the limited outlook of nufs which causes all difficulties. Events of themselves are neither good nor evil. It is the light which makes day, and the darkness which causes night, and this is also true of the affairs of life — that when the mind is illumined there is no longer anything which can be called evil. What is usually termed evil is due to the ignorant sway of the nufs; for it is ignorance which is the source of selfishness, which in turn creates all disharmonies and evils in the world. The world does not create them; the false self molds them out of the world.