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Petama Forum August 'Our God Part and Our Human Part - 1' from Hazrat Inayat Khan: 'Healing Papers' |
Not only in this age but also in past ages, the first thing realized by human beings has been their own limited existence formed of matter, which they called 'I'. This is not their fault; it is because religions have been interpreted with the intention of dominating the people, of holding them in the grasp of those who understood their meaning. Priests have only allowed people to understand very little, and all the rest they have kept for themselves. They said, 'You are ordinary beings. God is much too high for you to understand. We are the ones who can communicate with Him, we can understand Him, but you must stay where you are'. All his life Buddha fought hard against this. When someone spoke to him of a spirit, of God, or made a show of a holy, an Inner Life, he said, 'I do not believe in it.' But this was very extreme, for it led people into another error: it led them to say that there was no God, no spirit. Another reason for this separation was that it has always been the tendency of those who had the same way of thought, the same belief or faith, to come together in one group, in one society, in order to have the encouragement of each other's thought. By this they separated themselves from the rest of humanity. The human being of the Inner Life has never believed with a blind belief. In fact he does not believe, he experiences. He experiences that he is himself the unlimited Being. There is a verse of a Hindustani poet which says: Behind the human face God was hiding, and I did not know. I veiled my eyes and was separated from Truth, and I did not know. It is a very beautiful verse, and it has a deep meaning. All of us have our God part and our human part. A human being is made of two things, spirit and substance. The spirit is the finer part and the substance is the grosser part; the finer part, the spirit, has turned into the grosser part. One part is the external, limited self that we see, and the other is the unlimited being. Our external human self is composed of the five elements, but in reality humans are much larger and extend much further than we generally believe. For instance, when someone stands before an audience he appears to be of a certain size; but when he speaks he is as large as the area to which his voice carries. Although a friend or a beloved may be thousands of miles away he will feel our attachment, our affection. The feeling originates here, but manifests over there. This shows that in our feelings we are larger still. There are many ideas which intoxicate human beings; many feelings act upon the soul as wine, but there is no stronger wine than selflessness.
Gayan - Chalas (these E-book are free of all charge - use their treasures well!) |
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