To fall beneath one’s ideal is to lose one’s share of Life.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
If anyone asked me what is the life of Life, and what is the light of Life, what gives one interest in Life, I should answer them in one word, and that is: the Ideal. The one with wealth, with qualifications, with learning, with comfort, but without Ideal to me is a corpse; but the one without learning, without qualifications, without wealth or rank, but with an Ideal is a living being. If people do not live for an Ideal what else do they live for? They live for themselves, which is nothing. Those who live and do not know an Ideal are powerless and without light. The greater the Ideal, the greater the person. The wider the Ideal the broader the person. The deeper the ideal the deeper the person, the higher the Ideal the higher the person. Without an Ideal, whatever we may be in life, life for us is worthless.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume VI – The Alchemy of Happiness: Chapter 35 – Ideal )
The Sufi Message gives to the world the religion of the day; and that is to make one’s life a religion, to turn one’s occupation or profession into a religion, to make one’s Ideal a religious Ideal. The object of Sufism is the uniting of life and religion, which so far seem to have been kept apart. When people go to church once a week, and devote all the other days of the week to their business, how can they benefit from religion? Therefore the teaching of Sufism is to transform everyday life into a religion, so that every action may bear some spiritual fruit.
We, with our narrowness of faith or belief, accuse others of belonging to another religion, another chapel or church. We say, ‘This temple is better, that faith is better.’ The whole world has kept on fighting and devastating itself just because it can not understand that each form of religion is peculiar to itself. Therefore, the ideal life is in following one’s own ideal. It is not in checking other people’s ideals.
[ MUIZ COMMENTARY: Actually what is most often meant, no matter the wording, is my temple, my faith, my God, my way, is the only valid-right-true-real God-temple-faith-way. And by ‘checking’ other people’s ideals, Pir-o-Murshid means blocking, opposing, judging, or attempting to change them. ]
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume VII – In an Eastern Rose Garden: Chapter 29 – The Ideal Life )
Those who have never had an Ideal may hope to find one. They are in a better state than those who allow the circumstances of Life to break their Ideal. To fall beneath one’s Ideal is to lose one’s track in Life. Then confusion rises in the mind, and that Light which one should hold high becomes covered and obscured, so that it cannot shine out to light one’s path.
An ideal is something to hope for and to hold on to, and in the absence of an ideal, hope has nothing to look forward to. It is the lack of idealism which accounts for the present degeneration of humanity in spite of all the progress it has made in other directions. There are many kinds of ideals: principles, virtues, objects of devotion; but the greatest and highest of all ideals is the God-Ideal. And when this God-Ideal upon which all other ideals are based is lost, then the very notion of ideal is ignored. Humanity needs many things in life, but our greatest need is an Ideal.
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad) Samuel L. Lewis
That is to say, since the ideal is the highest of concepts, the whole of the vital force for which one has capacity cannot be expressed or felt unless act, speech, and thought are in harmony with it. The practice of Tasawwuri Murshid, practicing oneness with your teacher, as well as the practice of Darood by Sufis make it possible to retain some relationship, even identity, with the Ideal at all times. Average people, not knowing these principles, often have no means by which they can maintain their state, so they rise and fall and are subject to both joy and sorrow.
Actually life is expressed through the Ideal, the Ideal in this event being higher than the idea. Idea is a thought which is connected with nufs; Ideal, while not always free from nufs, is in the direction of independence from nufs. To attain to any Ideal, no matter what its characteristics, one must remove the nufs from one’s path. Therefore, selfishness is a bar even to passion, crime, and aggrandizement. Fortunately the wicked people do not generally know this so they are caught by their own misdeeds.