Volume
The Healing Papers
| Heading
2,2: the Spirit In the Flesh
|
Sub-Heading
22: The Journey to the Goal (continued)
|
The Healing Papers
2,2: the Spirit In the Flesh
22: The Journey to the Goal (continued)
Though one sees different desires in different people, yet when one studies them keenly one finds they are all different paths leading to one common goal. When one realizes this one's accusations, complaints, and grudges cease at once. However, there is also a natural tendency in man to find the easiest and quickest path to reach the desired goal, and there is also the tendency to share his pleasure, happiness, or comfort with others, and it is this that prompted the prophets and reformers to help mankind on its journey to the goal. Those that follow in their footsteps, forgetting that moral, drag people by the neck to make them follow them, and this has brought about the degeneration of religions.
Christ said, "In my Father's house are many mansions." The Prophet has said, "Every soul has its peculiar religion." And there is a Sanskrit saying, which perhaps deludes those who do not understand it, but which yet means the same thing: "As many souls as there are, so many gods are there."
The Sufi therefore never troubles which path anybody takes, Islam or Kafir; nor does he worry which way anyone journeys, the way of evil or of righteousness. For every way to him seems leading to the goal, one sooner and one later, one with difficulty, one with ease. But those who walk with him willingly, trusting in his comradeship, are his murids and call him Murshid, and he guides them, not necessarily through the same path he has chosen for himself, but through the path best suited to them.
In reality the goal is already there where the journey begins. It is a journey in name; it is a goal in the beginning and in the end. It is absurd to say, "How wicked I am", or "How undeveloped I am for reaching the destination!" or to think, "How many lives will it take, before I shall be ready to arrive at the goal?" The Sufi says, "If you have courage and if you have sense, come forward. If now you are on earth, your next step will be heaven." The Sufi thinks, "From mortality to immortality I will turn as quickly and as easily as I change sides in sleep."
|