The wave is the sea itself yet, when it rises in the form of a wave, it is the wave and when you look at the whole of it, it is the sea.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
There is an Arabic saying, ‘If you wish to know God, you must know yourself.’ How little people know while they are in the intoxication of individualism! … We are connected with one another. Our lives are tied together, and there is a link in which we can see one current running through all. There are many globes and lamps, and yet one current is running through all.
The mystics seek to realize this constantly and to impress it on their minds in whatever they may see. What, for them, are the waves of the sea? Are they not the sea itself? … Therein lies the whole of religion. The mystics’ prayer is to that beauty, and their work is to forget the self, to lose self like a bubble in the water. The wave realizes, ‘I am the sea’, and by falling into the sea prostrates itself before its God.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume VII – In an Eastern Rose Garden: Chapter 6 – Mind, Human and Divine )
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
Soul, forming a center in the Universal Light, produces heart. In heart soul sees directly, thus producing Universal Intelligence. But as God has produced matter outside the realm of absolute intelligence, yet impregnated with Universal Intelligence, the soul — to experience it — must produce a vehicle capable of apprehending it. So the Light-Intelligence is agitated and the waves on its surface produce mind.
Mind being made up of coarser vibrations than heart can look directly upon matter and see it as matter. Heart may perceive matter but would not distinguish matter from spirit because heart does not distinguish. So mind sees all these differences, but when one wishes to look beyond the differences one must see with the heart. When one further wishes to become that which one sees, one enters upon the soul-life. Then sight, seer, and seen are all one.