They are living whose sympathy is awake, and they are dead whose hearts are asleep.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
Life’s light is love; and when the heart is empty of love, one is living and yet not living; from a spiritual point of view one is dead. When the heart is asleep, one is as though dead in this life, for one can only love through the heart. But love does not mean give and take. That is only a trade; it is selfishness. To give sixpence [ six pennies ] and receive a shilling [ twelve pennies ], is not love. Love is when one loves for the sake of love, when one cannot help but love, cannot do anything but love.
Most people will say, ‘The other does not understand me.’ But why must there be this lack of understanding? What causes it? It is lack of sympathy. No words can ever make a person understand. It is the heart alone which can convey its full meaning to the other heart, for there are subtle waves of sympathy, there are delicate perceptions of feelings such as gratefulness, admiration, kindness, which cannot be put into words. Words are too inadequate to explain the finer feelings. It is the heart quality which can express itself fully, and again it is the heart quality which can understand fully. Would it therefore be an exaggeration to say that as long as the heart is not awakened we are as though dead? It is after the awakening of the heart that we begin to live.
Sympathy is an awakening of the love element, which comes on seeing another in the same situation in which one has been at some time in one’s life. A person who has never experienced pain cannot sympathize with those suffering pain… Sympathy is something more than love and affection, for it is the knowledge of a certain suffering which moves the living heart to sympathy.
[ MUIZ COMMENTARY: Often in today’s US English (and perhaps in the English of other countries too), the word ‘sympathy’ is limited to feeling sad or sorry, or even pity, for someone else’s condition or circumstance. It is more than just the emotion or feeling of sadness or pain that arises from in context of injury or loss. The words ’empathy’ or ‘compassion’ may help convey more of the this fuller meaning.
In musical terms, and from the perspective of the Mysticism of Sound, this awakening of the love element that Pir-o-Murshid is calling ‘sympathy’ is the principle of ‘sympathetic vibrations’. A corresponding sound or feeling is produced or elicited in another instrument or in another person, if the string of the instrument, or the heart ‘string’ of the person, is plucked or vibrated, because the two ‘strings’ are tuned to the same pitch. For example, if one sings a note near a guitar, or a piano with the dampeners raised, or near a tuning fork, the guitar string or piano string, or tuning fork which is tuned to the same pitch as that being sung, will begin to vibrate and produce that pitch too, because the sound vibrations traveling through the air are transferred to the string or tuning fork, making it vibrate. ]
In the same way, when the heart is awakened, sympathetic connections are made with other hearts, which means that a feeling in one heart is transferred to the other heart through that sympathetic connection. This becomes a two-way or a back and forth transfer of vibrations if both hearts have awakened this sympathy. And so one ‘gets’ it, one understands at the heart level, what the other is experiencing … all of the emotions, not just sadness or pain from injury or loss. Sympathetic vibration is the principle behind remote or energy healing, telepathy, psychometry, and darshan (ie tawajjeh in Sufi terminology), and so on. And in the Buddhist teachings this is Mudita, sympathetic joy and delight in the good fortune of others. ]
That person is living whose heart is living, and that heart is living which has wakened to sympathy. The heart void of sympathy is worse than a rock, for the rock is useful, but the heart void of sympathy produces antipathy. … There are many attributes found in the human heart which are called Divine, but among them there is no greater and better attribute than sympathy, by which we show in human form God manifested.
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
The real life is not limited by thought or action. The real life is not qualified by mind or matter. The real life is not restricted because personality is subject to certain laws. And how does the real life express itself? The essence of life is in the heart and nowhere in the human being if not in the heart. Yet when once discovered in the heart it can be found in every particle of one’s nature and makeup.
Without heart, the human is merely animal or less than animal; with heart one becomes as a god. The energy of heart is life itself and the heart awakened brings the life to the surface.