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Counsellor September 'What the World Needs Today' - 2 from: Hazrat Inayat Khan: 'Religious Gathekas' |
Today the world is more starved for religion than ever before. What is the reason? The reason is that while some simple souls held to the faith of their ancestors with esteem, considering religion necessary in life, many souls, with intelligence and reason and understanding of life, rebelled against religion just as the child when grown up throws away his rattle because he is no longer interested in it. So today religion remains in the hands of those who have kept it in its outer form out of devotion and loyalty to their ancestors' faith; those who are, so to speak, grown up in minds and spirit and want something better can find nothing. Their souls hunger for music, and when they ask for music they are given a rattle, and they throw away the rattle and say they do not care for music. Yet there is the inner yearning for music, the soul's music, and without it their life becomes empty. How few recognize this fact, and fewer still admit it. The psychological condition of humanity has become such that a person with intelligence refuses music; he does not want music, he wants something, but he calls it by another name. I will tell you my own experience in the western world. Traveling for ten years I have come in contact with people of intelligence, thinkers, and people of science, and in them I have seen the greatest yearning for the religious spirit. They are longing every moment of their life for it, for they find that with all their education and science there is some space empty in themselves, and they want it filled. At the same time if you speak of religion, they say, ‘No, no speak of something else, we do not want religion.’ This means they know only the rattle part of religion and not the violin part. They do not think anything different from a rattle exists, and yet there is a perplexity in them, an inner craving that is not answered even by all their learned and scientific pursuits. Now therefore, what is needed today in this world is a reconciliation between the religious human being and the one who runs away from religion. But what can we do when we see even in the Christian religion so many sects opposing one another. Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, and many others, each consider their own religion and think the others are not worth thinking about. Now to me these different religions are like different organs of the body cut apart and thrown asunder. Therefore to me personally it seems as if one arm of the same person were cut off and rising to right the other; both are arms of the same person. When this person is complete and all these parts are brought together, then there is religion.
(Maheboob Khan, Hazrat Inayat Khan‘s brother, has composed music to a row of aphorisms of Hazrat Inayat Khan in the middle of last century, as this ‚How Shall I Thank Thee‘. Mohammed Ali Khan, Hazrat Inayat Khan’s cousin, has sung this song around the year 1956 in a concert in Zürich – here you can listen to it) (these E-book are free of all charge - use their treasures well!) |
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