Our pride and satisfaction in what we know limits the scope of our vision.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
People wish to be admired for their clothes, their jewels, their possessions, their greatness and position, and naturally when this desire increases it makes them blind and they lose sight of right and justice. It is natural that the desire for things that gratify vanity should have no end; it increases continually. The tendency to look at others with hatred and prejudice, to consider them inferior to oneself, and all such tendencies come from this ego. There are even cases when people spend money in order to be able to insult another. To make someone bow before them, to make someone give way, to put a person in a position of inferiority, to make that one appear contemptible, sometimes a person will spend money. The desire for the satisfaction of vanity reaches such a point, that some people would give their life for the satisfaction of their vanity. Often someone shows generosity, not for the sake of kindness, but to satisfy their vanity. The more vanity a person has the less sympathy they have for others, for all their attention is given to their own satisfaction, and they are as blind toward others. This ego, so to speak, restricts life, because it limits a person.
All the knowledge that we possess we have acquired by belief. When we strengthen our belief by knowledge then comes disbelief in things that our knowledge cannot cope with, and in things that our reason cannot justify. We then disbelieve things that we once believed in. Unbelievers are those who have changed their belief to disbelief; disbelief often darkens the soul, but sometimes it illuminates it. There is a Persian saying, ‘Until belief has changed to disbelief, and, again, the disbelief into a belief, a person does not become a real Muslim.’ But when disbelief becomes a wall and stands against the further penetration of Mind into Life, then it darkens the soul, for there is no chance of further progress, and our pride and satisfaction in what we know limit the scope of our vision.
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
For this pride and satisfaction keep the attention on what one has, or has done, and not on what one might see, or do, or know. Without this egocentric condition there would be no limitation upon our faculties — human or super-human — if such a word can properly be applied to them.