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Petama Counsellor September 'The Desire for Knowledge- 2' from Hazrat Inayat Khan: 'The Purpose of Life' |
The knowledge with its ‘because’ attached, is contradicted a thousand times over. One scientist, one inventor, one learned person has one argument; another comes and he says, ‘This is not what I think; I have found out the truth about it, which the one who looked before did not perceive rightly.’ It has always been and will always be so with outer knowledge. With that knowing which is the central knowledge there has never been a difference and there will never be. Saints, sages, seers, people of the Inner Life, prophets of all ages, in whatever part of the world they were born, when they have touched this realm of knowing, have all agreed on this same one thing. It is therefore that they called it Truth. It was not because this was the conception of one person, or the expression of another person, or the doctrine of a certain people, or the teaching of a certain religion. No, it was the knowledge of every knowing soul. And every soul, whether in the past, present, or future, whenever it arrives at the stage when it knows, will realize the same thing. Therefore it is in that knowledge that there is to be found the fulfillment of the purpose of our coming on the earth. And now we may ask, ‘What is that knowledge? How can we attain to it?’ The first condition is to separate this outer knowledge from the inner knowing. False and true, the two things cannot go together. It is in separating the real from the unreal. The knowledge gained from the outer world is the knowledge of the cover of all things, not of the spirit of all things. Therefore that knowledge cannot be essential knowledge. It is not the knowledge of the spirit of all things; it is the knowledge of the cover of all things which we study and call learning, and to it we give the greatest importance. We may say, ‘What are we to do when the call of the intellectual reason for knowledge and learning is such that it threatens our faith in the possibility of knowledge by the self?’ The answer is to go on, in that case, with the intellectual knowledge till we feel satisfied with it or tired of it. For we must not seek after food if we are not hungry. The food which is sought in absence of hunger will prove to be poison. Great as it is, the knowledge of self, if there is not that natural desire raging like fire, does not manifest. We might ask, ‘Then why should we not try to get to the bottom of all outside things; shall we not by this way reach the same knowledge?’ That is not possible. The easiest way and the possible way is to attain to the knowledge of the self. It is the after-effect of this attainment that will give us keen sight into outside things, into the spirit of outward things. The question is about ourselves, the knowledge of self, what that knowledge is. Do we know ourselves? None of us, for one moment, will think that we do not know ourselves. That is the difficulty. Everyone says, ‘I know myself better than I know anybody else. What is there to be learned in myself? Is it the anatomy of the body?’ Yes, the first thing is to understand the construction of the body; that is the first lesson.
(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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