The Teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan

Create a Bookmark

You may reach a point when you experience yourself as being a soul, or as being the Soul even, because there is not really such a thing as a soul. There is just Soulness, at every level the merging of beings is more intense. At the top it is just One Being, and at the bottom, let's say, there is a relative autonomy of the individuals, in multiplicity. But the Spirit is beyond. There are several ways to use the word Spirit. I'm not talking about spirits in the sense of spirit phantoms or anything like that, or spiritism, but Spirit, in the real sense, like the Spiritus in the Latin sense of the word and, of course, Quddus in the Ruh-al Quddus in the Arabic. That is the essence. That is the perfume of the rose. The Soul is the seed of the plant. That is the difference. The word is used in Arabic as Ayn. This is the meaning of resurrection. What is it? You are drawing the essence of the essence of the essence of the essence. The attar of roses, for example, that's the Spirit. When one says "the Holy Spirit," that is what it means. The Holy Spirit is not an angel, because an Angel is a soul, where Spirit is not a soul; it is beyond a soul. So if you can experience the life of your life, you experience it as being something that is flowing through you, like the energy behind energy. We talk about prana. Well, prana is cosmic energy at a certain level, but Spirit is the energy of that energy. That is what we mean by Spirit. It is always something beyond, always the essence of something, the life of your life.


 
Topic
Sub-Topic