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Petama Counsellor October 'Purifying our Memory' from Hazrat Inayat Khan: 'Healing Papers' |
The nature of the memory is to hold an impression, agreeable or disagreeable, and therefore a person holds a thought in the mind, whether it is beneficial to him or not, without knowing the result which will come from it. This is like a child who holds a rattle in his hand and hits his head with the rattle and cries with the pain, and yet does not throw the rattle away. There are many who keep in their mind a thought of illness or a thought of unkindness done to them by someone and suffer from it, yet not recognizing that it makes them suffer, nor understanding the reason of their suffering. They go on suffering and yet hold on in memory the very source of their suffering. Memory must be our obedient servant; when it is commanding then life becomes difficult. A person who cannot throw away from his memory what he does not desire to keep in mind, is like a person who has a safe but the key to that safe he has lost. He can put in money but he cannot take it out. All faculties in a human being become invaluable when a person is able to use them at will, but when these faculties use the person, then he is no longer the master of himself. Concentration is taught by the human beings of the Inner Life in order to exercise the will, making it capable of using all the faculties. A person with will power can remember what he wishes to remember and can forget what he wishes to forget. All things which deprive us of our freedom in life are undesirable. The mind must be free from all bad impressions of life, which take away our rest and peace. By concentration we are able to hold a certain thought we desire and to keep away all other thoughts, and when we are able to keep away all the thoughts we do not want to think about, it becomes easier to throw away the impressions of years, if we wish to forget them. Bad impressions, however old and intimate, are like rubbish accumulated, which should be removed in order to make the house clean. The human heart is the home of the soul, and upon this home the comfort and peace of the soul depend.
(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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