We are always searching for God afar off, when all the while He is
nearer to us than our own soul.
Bowl of Saki, by Hazrat Inayat Khan
Commentary by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan:
Spirituality has become far removed from material life, and so God is
far removed from humanity. Therefore, one cannot any more conceive of
God speaking through a man, through someone like oneself. Even a
religious man who reads the Bible every day will have great
difficulty in understanding the verse, 'Be ye perfect, even as your
Father in heaven is perfect.' The Sufi message and its mission are to
bring this truth to the consciousness of the world: that man can dive
so deep within himself that he can touch the depths, where he is
united with the whole of life, with all souls, and that he can derive
from that source harmony, beauty, peace and power.
When a person turns for guidance to God, to the inner Being, then all
light and all knowledge are his for his guidance. "But," people
say, "how can we attach ourselves with the inner Being, so as to have
that guidance?" When the mind is fixed upon anything, then the person
becomes linked to that, a current is established between him and it.
It may be called the guidance of God or the guidance of the Self. If
we look within, God is nearer to us than our mind and our body,
because He is that life in which as is said in the Bible, we live and
move and have our being.
'The one whom I have called God, whose personality I have recognized,
and whose pleasure or displeasure I have sought, has been seeing His
life through my eyes, has been hearing through my ears. It was His
breath that came through my breathing, His impulse which I felt, and
therefore I know that this body which I had thought to be my own is
really the true temple of God. I did not realize that this body was
the shrine of God.' Not knowing that God experiences this life
through man, one is seeking for Him somewhere else, in some person
aloof and apart from the world, whereas all the time He is in oneself.
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