Love is unlimited, but it needs scope to expand and rise; without that scope, life is unhappy.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
People who live in happy surroundings with luxuries and sources of pleasure and comfort, may be envied and imagined to be very happy and lucky. In reality, however, they may be very unhappy. The external world has given them all they wished for, but the inner world, the inner being, is unhappy. There is something absent, and they want it to be present. There is something missing inwardly. This shows that the inner presence is required. The external presence is not the only comfort.
But we may ask, the inner presence of what? Many will say, ‘We know we are unhappy sometimes in spite of wealth, comfort, happiness, friends, or beloved’. But, perhaps they will not believe that it is another lack, the lack of a divine ideal that makes them unhappy. Others consider that life requires scope for progress, and that it is the lack of scope that causes the greatest unhappiness. Such persons think that they cannot prosper in the work that they are doing, that they cannot be any better off than the others. Such a thought is worse than death. Life is unlimited, and it wants scope to expand and rise. Without that scope life is unhappy.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume VII – In an Eastern Rose Garden: Chapter 31 – The Presence of God )
Every kind of power lies in this one thing which we call by the simple name: love. Charity, generosity, kindness, affection, endurance, tolerance, and patience — all these words are different aspects of one; they are different names of only one thing: love. Whether it is said, ‘God is love,’ or whatever name is given to it, all the names are the names of God; and yet every form of love, every name for love, has its own peculiar scope, has a peculiarity of its own. Love as kindness is one thing, love as tolerance is another, love as generosity is another, love as patience another; and yet from beginning to end it is just love. … True love must have free flow; and to learn that free flow the teachers have taught us first to love from the limited, and thence to advance in love till we attain to the love of God, the Unlimited.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume VII – In an Eastern Rose Garden: Chapter 9 – Love, Human and Divine )
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
Involution is really involution of love or Ishk. An accommodation was made which produced mind. Through mind, soul could see the physical plane. But mind also created thoughts, which proved confusing. Love does not think, yet understands thought. Love hampered by thought cannot rise and expand. Love, free from the bondage of self, can expand or contract without hindrance and without confusion. These stages of the heart are experienced by the mystics and form the spiritual life.