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Petama Counsellor December Pulse of the Universe - Love your Enemies 2 from Hazrat Inayat Khan: 'The Smiling Forehead' |
Someone said to a Brahmin: 'Oh Brahmin, how absurd it is that you worship a god made of stone, an idol! The true God is formless, standing above all things in the world.' The Brahmin replied, 'Do you know the phenomenon of faith? If you believe in the stone god, you will receive your answer, but if you do not believe in your formless God, even he will not communicate with you'. Seen from this perspective, life shows us that there is no place and no object that is not sacred, that even in a stone we can see the origin and destination of all things in this particular form. Many who have experience with plants know how receptive plants are to the sympathy of a person who loves nature and cares for it. I was very interested in meeting a scientist in California (Luther Burbank) who has dedicated his life to researching plant life. How true it is that, no matter which path we take in pursuit of truth, we arrive at an experience that reveals the truth to us. I was particularly interested when he said, 'I regard plants as real living beings. I work with them and always feel that they are living beings, that they have their own mentality. They show tenacity, they sense your sympathy, and if you learn to understand them, you can derive great benefit from them. All my life I have talked to plants as I would talk to people'. Here, too, the blood of the universe circulates again, at a higher stage of development than in rock. Another scientist, Professor Chandra Bose from Bengal, has devoted much time and effort to proving that plants breathe. If plants breathe, then they surely also possess intelligence. Even a stone can respond to a person's state of mind, teaching us that there is much to discover in the mineral kingdom. This insight is not new, but was already known to the ancients. In the Persian poems of Jelâl-ud-Din Rumi, we read that God slept in minerals, dreamed in vegetables, became conscious in animals and realised himself in humans.
(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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