It is God who, by the hand of humanity, designs and carries out God’s intended plans in nature.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
First we must understand what the word divine means. Divine means: in a state of perfection. This state is experienced by God through humanity. In other words, when people have risen to the stage of development where they can be the perfect instrument of God, when nothing of their own being stands in the way of the direct impulse that comes from within — that spirit may be called perfect. That which is most precious, that which is the purpose of our life is to arrive at that state of perfection when we can be the perfect instrument of God.
It is in this stage that we begin to realize the truth of the whole being and we will think: ‘The one whom I have called God, whose personality I have recognized, and whose pleasure or displeasure I have sought, has been seeing Its life through my eyes, has been hearing through my ears. It was God’s breath that came through my breathing, God’s impulse which I felt, and therefore I know that this body which I had thought to be my own is really the true temple of God. I did not realize that this body was the shrine of God.’ Not knowing that God experiences this life through humanity, one is seeking for God somewhere else, in some person aloof and apart from the world, whereas all the time God is in oneself.
Why is God called the Creator? Because the creation itself is the evidence of some wisdom working. No mechanical creation could result in such perfection as that of nature. All the machines of the scientists are built on the model of nature’s mechanism, and every inspiration that comes to the artist is received from nature. Nature is so perfect in itself that it needs no scientific or artistic improvement upon it; but to satisfy the limited human fancies humanity develops science and art. And yet it is still the creation of God which is expressed in art and science through humanity, as in human beings God is not absent. In some ways we are more able to finish God’s creation, which God completes through us.
Art is much more important than the average person realizes it to be — despite the saying that ‘art is what humans make, and nature is what God makes.’ I would prefer to say that nature is what God makes as God, and art is what God makes as humanity. Artists who have arrived at some perfection in their art, whatever their art may be, will come to realize that it is not they who ever achieved anything; it is someone else who came forward every time. And when artists produce a perfect thing, they find it difficult to imagine that it has been produced by them. They can do nothing but bow their head in humility before that Unseen Power and Wisdom which takes their bodies, their hearts, their brains, and their eyes as Its instrument. Whenever beauty is produced in art, be it music, or poetry, or painting, or writing, or anything else, one must never think that humans produced it. It is through humans that God completes Creation.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume )
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
There are the three aspects in life: first, that spiritual life which is God in Divine Fullness, uncontaminated by darkness of any sort; second, the Nature which was born from the movement of contraction, which appears as a world of relative darkness and which is the nexus of material life. To draw matter back into spirit, humanity was created who becomes the play between these other two forces or aspects. Actually these two are not in opposition, but they appear so to humanity who is attracted by one or the other.
Out of humanity comes the third aspect, manasic or mental life, which is between the two others, and consists of an apparent mixture of light and darkness in which the former always predominates but does not entirely dissipate the darkness until the flood of the spiritual intelligence makes that possible. By such means the Divine enters into the created worlds and restores to Itself that which It voluntarily deprived Itself of, in love and self-sacrifice.
Actually this is not so. It is all a dream, but it is the only explanation intelligible to humanity.