THE PURPOSE OF LIFE
The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan
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I came from the East with the idea, which every Eastern person has, that the people in the West are all Christians. But after coming, the more I saw the Western world and the more I knew about the general attitude of the people in the West towards religion, the more I found that this idea of the Eastern people was unfounded.
I saw in the West people of three categories:
Those who believe in God and hereafter,
Those who do not believe the same, and
Those who believe in the Christian Church.
Among intellectual and lettered people and among the people of scientific trend of mind I found most very materialistic, who are truthful in confessing their disbelief, who consider it falsehood to profess a belief in something one does not know. They found their faith upon things that are within the grasp of their reason. Many of them consider belief in God or the soul or in hereafter as a religious fad. There are others among them who think, there may be something perhaps which we do not know and it is best not to trouble about it. Most of them believe in the phenomenon of science which is the only source on which they depend. Some of them sometimes in their life begin to wonder at life, and show to know something of its source and goal and of its latent power, which remains so far unexplored by science. They take no other method than that of scientific research to explore the phenomena hidden behind life, and as a natural consequence they arrive at no definite result.
We love our body and identify ourselves with it to such an extent that we are very unhappy to think that this body, which is so dear to us, will some day be in the grave. No one likes to think that it will die and be destroyed. But the soul is our true self. It existed before our birth and will exist after our death. That which holds the conception of ‘I’, a living entity, is not the body but the soul deluded by the body. The soul thinks that it is the body; it thinks that it walks, sits, lies down when the body does, but it does not really do any of these things. A little indisposition of the body makes it think, ‘I am ill’. A slight offence makes it dejected. A little praise makes it think itself in heaven. In reality it is not in heaven nor on earth; it is where it is. The soul’s dwelling in the material body deludes it so much that it thinks, ‘I can live only on material food, can stand only on earth, can enjoy only material surroundings. Without these I am nowhere, I am nothing.’
Sufism originated from the ancient school of Egyptian mysteries, a school which existed even before Abraham, the father of three great religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Those who know Sufism from superficial writings, and, sometimes, from translations of the Arabic or Persian literature, are apt to think that Sufism is the mystical side of Islam. In reality, it is not true. Sufism existed before Mohammed, before Jesus Christ, before Abraham.
It is true that the mystics in the world of Islam are called Sufis, but that does not mean that “Sufi” means the mystics of Islam. For instance, the green color is the national color of the Irish, but that does not mean that everybody who dresses in green is from Ireland. The green color existed even before people inhabited Ireland.
Background on Sufism
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