The soul of Christ is the Light of the Universe.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
Truth is the soul of religion. When Jesus came to earth he did not say, ‘I have brought you a new religion never heard of by you or your ancestors.’ He said he had not come to give a new law but to fulfill the law; in other words, ‘I have come to continue giving you that which you have received before and have not understood.’
There are scriptures that humankind regards as religious scriptures, but imagine how little of that message a book can contain, and how much more must have been given that was never written in a book! If books were sufficient, then the book of Abraham or the earlier books that were kept as scriptures could be sufficient, but it was not the book. The Messengers, whenever they came, came to give the Life, the Living Spirit, the Divine Light that can shine like the sun during the day, so that no soul with the slightest spark of sincerity could ever doubt the Truth and Unity of the Message.
The Divine Message has always been sent through those fitly endowed. For instance when wealth was esteemed the Message was delivered by King Solomon; when beauty was worshipped, Joseph, the most handsome, gave the Message; when music was regarded as celestial David gave his Message in song. When there was curiosity about miracles Moses brought his Message. When sacrifice was highly esteemed Abraham gave the Message. When heredity was recognized, Christ gave his Message as the Son of God. When democracy was necessary, Muhammad gave his Message as the Servant of God, one like all and among all. …
All Masters from the time of Adam till the time of Muhammad have been the one embodiment of the Master-ideal. When Jesus Christ is represented as saying, ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end,’ it is not meant that either the name or the visible person of Jesus Christ is the Alpha and Omega, but the Master-spirit within. It was this Spirit which proclaimed this, moved by its realization of past, present, and future life, confident of its eternity. It is the same Spirit which spoke through Krishna, saying, ‘We appear on earth when Dharma is corrupted,’ which was long before the coming of Christ. During his Divine absorption Muhammad said, ‘I existed even before this creation and shall remain after its assimilation.’ In the holy traditions it is said, ‘We have created thee of Our light and from thy light We have created the universe.’ This is not said of the external person of Muhammad as known by this name. It refers to the Spirit which spoke through all the blessed tongues and yet remained formless, nameless, birthless and deathless.
[ MUIZ COMMENTARY: See also, Pir-o-Murshid’s commentary on his 10 Sufi Thoughts, Thought #2: “There is One Master, the Guiding Spirit of all Souls, Who constantly leads all followers towards the Light.” where he expands on this activity of the One Spirit of Guidance who spoke through the lips of embodied human beings beings throughout human history. He says, “… every great teacher of the past having been this Guiding Spirit living the Life of God in human guise. In other words, their human guises consist of various coats worn by the same Person, who appeared to be different in each. … Those who saw the Person, knew and recognized the Person in whatever form or guise; those who could only see the coat went astray.” ]
But the blind world, absorbed in its phenomena and impressed by a certain name and form, has clung to the name, forgetting the True Being. It is this ignorance which has divided the children of humanity into so many divisions and separated one from the other by their own delusions: whereas in Reality there exists one Religion and one single Master, the Only God. … There has been One Teacher only, and That One alone will be. All the names which the world has fought over are God’s names, and all the physical forms that have won the adoration of the truth-seeking world are God’s forms.
[ MUIZ COMMENTARY: In fact if we really understand the Zikr phrase that we repeat so often (La Ilaha Ell’ Allahu), we have to realize, sooner or later, that ALL names are God’s names, that ALL forms are God’s forms, that ALL names and forms themselves are merely the different ‘coats’ that the Only Being puts on for a time, for a shorter or longer while, and then takes off again.
One difference between the names and forms (ie the ‘coats’, guises, or vehicles) that ‘have won the adoration of the truth-seeking world’ and ‘which the world has fought over’ and all the rest of the names and forms which don’t have such widespread recognition, is that in wearing some particular coats or guises That One Person may be more recognizable than It is when wearing other coats or guises.
ALL people are really God/Goddess/Source presenting to our human consciousness in different drag. And not just people, ALL forms, all situations, all circumstances are the veils, the vehicles, the guises, the coats, that The One Person, The Only Being wears in order to interact, to learn, to grow, to wake up, in this manifested world.
Albert Einstein discovered this fundamental Truth about Reality from his Physics and Mathematical perspective with his famous equation E = mc2 which means that mass, ordinary matter, is really just a ‘frozen’ form of an unimaginable amount of energy … that matter and energy aren’t different things fundamentally, they’re just different presentations of the same ‘stuff’. His science-physics-mathematics realization echoes and confirms the millennia old spiritual-metaphysical teachings that, despite the religious misunderstandings and misconceptions of the time, Spirit and Matter are NOT completely separate, NOT completely different things.
Spirit and Matter (Purusha and Prakriti in Sanskrit) are in Reality One and the Same … just different manifestations, different presentations, different States of the One and Only Being. Matter (ie form and name) is frozen, condensed, crystallized, coagulated Spirit-Awareness-Consciousness. In coming into manifestation Spirit condenses, compacts, and crystalizes certain aspects of Itself, which become the matter, the atoms and molecules of the various planes, and It then fashions that matter into vehicles (coats) which It then wears in order to interact and experience on that level.
When our Soul which is a Ray and an Activity of The One and Only Being comes into human embodiment, it forgets Who and What It Really Is and ends up identifying with the coats, the vehicles it is using, because of the density and opaqueness of the coats of the ego structure (the mind-mesh) and the body. Part of the work of the Soul in embodiment is to refine and clarify the opaqueness and transmute the density of the atoms that make up the coats, the vehicles, the body and the ego structure (the mind-mesh), so that the Indwelling Light-Love-Life-Consciousness (Sat-Chit-Ananda), the Soul Nature, is no longer occluded and is able to shine through vehicles, awakening the consciousness to what it Really Is.
To paraphrase the well-known Hadith: ‘I was a hidden treasure, yearning to be known, so I became humanity so that I might be known’. The original word was ‘created’, yet we humans tend to perceive a difference between creator and created, or between Creator and Creation.
This misapprehension is an artifact, a limitation of our embodied ego, our nafs. Once complete our mundane creations may no longer be connected to our hands or bodies, so we believe in a certain way that they are separate from us, even though in a certain other way we still may experience a feeling of ownership. But in describing the Creation of the Manifested Universe and of human beings, the Creator becomes the Manifested Universe, becomes the Created, becomes the human beings.
The Torah says that the Holy One fashioned a form out of clay and breathed the Breath of Life into it, and it lived. What is this Breath of Life but Spirit, Life-Love-Light-Consciousness, the Creator Itself, breathing Itself into Form to ensoul it? And not with Its entirety, but just a Ray of Itself.
Krishna says: Having permeated the entire Universe with a fragment of Myself, I remain.
And Gautama Buddha says: I realize that Buddha Nature is always present in all times and in all beings, but they don’t realize it because it is obscured from worldly perception by the screening effect of tenacious, negative mental and emotional afflictions within each being (in other words, all of those things within the mind-mesh that we grasp or want to cling to, all of those things that we deny, push away or seek to avoid, including our beliefs, our various identities, and our sense of our limited self). Once those are released and cleared away, we are no longer trapped within the mind-mesh, and Buddha Nature shines through our vehicles, unimpeded, undistorted, undimmed.
This is the Mystery of the Trinity, which we humans have such a difficult time understanding. The see-er, the seen, and the sight; the know-er, the known, and the knowledge, the Creator, the Created, and the Creation. Love, Lover, and Beloved. The Verb, the activity, links the other two aspects together, the apparent Subject and the apparent Object. The teachings maintain that these 3 are NOT separate. They are One, Inseparable, except in the mistaken perception of our limited nafs, from the perspective we have from within the mind-mesh.
An everyday example of this 3-in-one that can be a useful metaphor for understanding Trinity is the compound we call water (H2O). It has 3 well known states or phases — solid, liquid, and gaseous. The solid and gaseous aspects have their own names (ice, snow or frost, and steam or vapor) and we call the liquid phase ‘water’, but we know that even with all of the different names, they all are really the same compound, even though they look and behave differently in each phase.
And there are the many different translations or paraphrasings of Mevalana Jelaluddin Rumi’s poems: ‘The Beloved is All in All, the lover just a veil. But when living itself becomes the Friend, lovers disappear’. Or ‘become melting snow, wash yourself of yourself’. Or ‘like pieces of cloud dissolve in sunlight’. And there’s also the story that I heard when I was at university, of a supposed chemistry or physics course final exam, somewhere, that consisted of only one question: ‘Where does the white go when the snow melts?’
Until we Wake Up, we mistakenly believe that our coats are us, that we are the coats of our bodies, our feelings and thoughts, our personalities, our egos, our identities, and our limitations, our wounds, our failures, and our successes, hopes and dreams. And we also believe that all the other coats that we see and interact with in everyday life, are the reality of those other supposedly separate people. Once we begin to recognize our own True Nature, inside ourselves, inside our coats, our vehicles, our bodies which It is wearing, then we can begin to recognize the same True Nature inside the coats It is wearing in others. To paraphrase Pir-o-Murshid from above “Once we see That Person, we know and recognize That Person in whatever form or guise; as long as we’re only seeing the coats That Person is wearing, we go astray.” ]
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad) Samuel L. Lewis
The single expression Nuri Mohammed characterizes both the soul of Christ and the Light of the Universe. This Light permeates the Cosmos, and it is through it that humanity finds all love, all wisdom, and all joy.
[ MUIZ COMMENTARY: Murshid SAM gives a definition of Nuri Mohammed in his Commentary on the Bowl of Saki for 21 June: “Soul is the Nuri Mohammed, the Universal Love-Light-Life, which becomes individualized in the heart.” And from a book called “When Oceans Merge: the Contemporary Sufi and Hasidic Teachings of Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan and Rabbi Zalman Shachter Shalomi”, by Gregory Blann:
“In mystical Islam, the historical Muhammad is considered an expression of the Nuri Muhammad, the first light of Eternity, which is another way of describing the Logos or Cosmic Christ. Sufis also speak of the Insani-Kamil, and Jewish Kabbalists of Adam Kadmon, both of which represent the idealized archetype of human perfection, the primordial Divine template of humanity in its glorious original state. [Adam Kadmon being Unified Awareness before It separated into the binary Archetypes of Male Adam and Female Eve.]
]