SOUK - 21sep09 - study on the soul

Message Class - 21st September 2009

We are continuing our study on the soul. Pir-o-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan said the soul is intelligence contained for a certain time by the body and the mind. That intelligence is God. What a strange word to use, ‘intelligence’. It seems to mean cleverness in English. What does it really mean? It means the same in Latin where it comes from. In Arabic, there are several words for intelligence. Most frequently used is aql, it is a noun that is derived from the verb aqala. Aqala means to hobble a camel. This is really strange, what has hobbling a camel to do with intelligence? Related to aqala is iqal. Iqal is the cord which is used for hobbling the camel. It is also the cord that Arab men put around their headgear so it does not blow off. What does the cord that keeps the head cloth in place or the cord that hobbles the camels so they do not run away to do with intelligence? The word means to bind, that is what hobbling the camel really does, to bind the camel, to bind the head cloth to your head. To bind with what? What is intelligence binding us with? One answer that comes to mind is our source, our origin. Intelligence is what binds us with our source. What is it about not running away? You cannot access that intelligence if all those thoughts that are running away are present. You need to bind the thoughts, the thinking process that is part of the intellect to be able to go beyond this and access the intelligence that we call as part of God that has created the soul. Arabic seems to suggest that intelligence is not so much the ability to do things, as knowing enough to restrain oneself, to do the right things at the right time. There is a beautiful depth in this. The aql is to keep the thought process, the mind, in control so it does not run wild. That is why you hobble the camel, so it does not run off, so you do not loose it. But to hobble the mind, they seem to imply with the word aql to restrain. It seems to say that intelligence has to do with restraining, having the caution and the prudence to restrain the impulses. Another word in Arabic for the English word intelligence is quf which means to halt. How can intelligence have anything to do with halting, stopping or standing still. The only explanation is restraining the fiery and uncontrollable aspect of our mind.

Pir-o-Murshid talks about motive.

“Motive gives power and at the same time it is motive which limits power. For the power of the soul is greater than any motive. But it is the consciousness of the motive which stimulates the power and yet robs it of its power.”

On the Sufi path we work a lot with paradox. One of the most famous paradoxes on the Sufi path has to do with teachers on the Sufi path. The Sufis say, those that want to teach can’t, and those that do not want to teach don’t. In other words, if you want to teach your motive is likely to be selfish and ego centred. But if you don’t want to teach you won’t, nobody can make you do it. It is a paradox that also has to do with the motive. Say you have an idea; a lot of times after the dancing you are asked to look into your heart and describe the quality that is alive that moment. Whatever is in your heart can probably never be described by one quality or a couple of words. Why are we limiting the greatness and richness that is in your heart at that moment, by asking to express it? By expressing it you are giving it power, but you are also limiting it - you have to restrict the vastness that is in your heart and put it into a couple of words that probably cannot describe it, either in depth or in width. Why? Because unless you actually manifest that which is vague and vast it remains a potential. The potential is always greater than its manifestation, but we need manifestation in this realm, on this plane. We need to manifest that which is potential, even if we are limiting it. Otherwise it is in the dream world, out there, it is beautiful and powerful but something of it needs to come through into this reality. That is what Murshid says; the power of the motive is great but ultimately limits the power of the soul. It is the consciousness of the motive that stimulates the power of the soul. If there is no motive nothing comes through, nothing manifests.

Someone asked Murshid “Does motive limit the intensity of power?”

And the answer is

“Certainly. Motive is a shadow upon the intelligence. It might seem that it increases the power, but no doubt at the end one finds out that it robs the power, although the higher the motive, the higher is the soul. The greater is the motive, the greater the person. When the motive is beneath one's ideal, then it is the fall of man, and when the motive is his ideal, it is his rise. According to the width of motive man's vision is wide and according to the power of the motive man's strength is great.”

What is he saying? A lot of time our motives are not obvious, least of all to us. The first step is to become constantly aware of our motives in every action, no matter how seemingly insignificant it is, we have to become aware of our motives. Why is the motive important? Because it will give shape to whatever we accomplish. If you want to attain something you have to aim higher than what you think you can attain. Gravity will pull you down. So you need to aim higher. We all instinctively know that. Esoterically what Murshid is saying, the higher our motive is - as long as it is genuine and we do not fake it - the nearer our soul it is. There are many people who have accomplished absolutely unimaginable tasks. Why? Because their motive was high and their mind did not intrude with the rational how possible or not it might be. The motive gives a depth of the horizon in your vision. It has to do with your ideal, and if your motive falls short of your ideal, then Murshid says this is our fall. Why? Because we do not even strive to reach our ideal. The only way that we can rise spiritually is for our motive to be our ideal. Of course that pre-supposes that we are aware what our ideal is. But this is not as difficult as it sounds. When you are alone with yourself and you are meditating and you feel centred ask yourself what is your highest aspiration. That is your ideal, that is your compass in life. It points you towards fulfilling your purpose. Always - once you are aware of that ideal - and it is not only one, there are several, but there is one at every phase of your life that dominates, whenever you are questioning your motive, always check it against your ideal. Is my motive in line with my ideal. it is not saying that we do not have to compromise in life, and this hurts us, we have to do it consciously. If we don’t we find someone else to blame either a personal situation or God or whatever. Yes, you have to compromise a lot of times. You have to compromise your ideal. Do it consciously.

We talked last Monday about the body dying and the atoms not disappearing, so we hopefully can become aware that the atoms that are forming our cells, our material body are not really ours, we borrow them. We have to give them back when the body ceases to exist. For a mystic there is no difference between matter and spirit. The mystic sees spirit as the evolution of matter and matter as the solidification of spirit. It is the same, it depends on which end of the prism you are looking at. There is ultimately no duality. On a very superficial level we say there is some sort of antagonism between the spirit and matter - this is a dualistic view. Ultimately there is no difference, and this “intelligence“ that we keep on talking about needs to be material - that is why we need to consciously manifest our motives on this earth. Whilst we are on this plane of existence these are the tools we have, this is the game we play. In the next realm the matter has gone, it has been transformed into spirit, therefore our motives cannot be material, there would not be a need for manifestation such as here. So he says the denseness of the spirit is matter, and the fineness of matter is spirit. This is very beautiful:

“Intelligence becomes intelligible by turning into denseness. That denseness being manifest to its own view, creates two objects, the self and what is known by the self; and there comes of necessity a third object, the medium with which the person knows what he knows such as the sight or the mind. And it is these three aspects of life which is at the root of the idea of Trinity. The moment these three are realized as one, the life's purpose is fulfilled.”

You cannot be aware of the spirit, intelligence, the soul, because we are made of matter. It has to speak in our own language. So it becomes manifest by manifesting in the material world. And what happens when it manifests, it creates two objects, the self and what is known by the self. In other words our ego and what the ego can perceive. But it is not enough to have the self and that which is known by the self. We need the medium through which that knowledge will become known. What is the medium? The mind, the senses. That is the medium through which we know. He says this is the root of the idea of the trinity, because we always have the self, that which is known by the self, in other words the subject, the object, and most of us stop there, we are not aware that we need a third, a medium, it is the medium through which we are capable of knowing. Murshid says the moment we go beyond the idea of our ego and the idea of what is known by our ego and the idea of our mind which allows our ego to know what it knows, the moment we realise that all these things are one life’s purpose is fulfilled.

“As matter evolves, so it shows intelligence”

Most of us in our culture are still stuck in a Victorian idea of seeing matter like a machine, mechanistically. And as you must have heard, scientists now n quantum physics are discovering weird unexplainable connections in matter. Matter communicates with itself without any means of communication. Matter that is far away from the rest of it knows what happened to the other bit and does the same thing. Strange for our rational mind that can only be explained and in a lot of scientists book with this idea that matter evolves intelligently. Perhaps it has always been there and we were not evolved enough to spot it, to realise it. But the mystics have always said that. When Murshid was writing this in 1923 there was no quantum physics. The mystics have always known that, and now, to the glory of God, the scientists are knowing it as well. So perhaps after 40 years or so it will permeate to common knowledge.

Ponder on this. It is a very important issue in our life. Spend some time trying to come to terms with it, see what you understand personally by it.

(All quotes: Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan - Lecture “Metaphysics - The Soul” given at the Suresnes Summer School on 1st August 1923 from the Complete Works of Pir-o-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan - Original Texts: Lectures on Sufism, 1923 II: July-December)