Description
The Awakening of the Human Spirit
by Hazrat Inayat Khan
A thorough and understandable description of the sequence of inner stages which a person goes through in the process of spiritual development. The teaching advocates not a withdrawal from the world, but making spiritual ideals a reality in one’s daily life.
“As a spiritual teacher, Hazrat Inayat Khan was very definitely a spokesman for the present outlook, the new ways of looking at spirituality. Rather than enjoining upon his disciples to leave the world for an inexpressible bliss—at the cost of shirking responsibilities—he showed the way to find a far greater fulfillment: by making our spiritual ideals a reality in our lives, transforming ourselves in our relationship with people and situations.” – From the introduction by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
Note: Awakening of the Human Spirit includes material previously published as part of The Inner Life in the Sufi Message Volume series, as well as additional material from various other volumes of the sames series.
Read an excerpt from Awakening of the Human Spirit:
“Do you think if the generals, the politicians, the statesmen and business people of today were awakened souls, we would have had wars? By this time we should be past those days of stupidity when people killed one another; we are in a different stage of evolution, and today there should be no need for war. Humanity is grown up; it is no longer an infant. But even after a war there is no security of peace. We do not know what will happen tomorrow, and that shows that there is something missing. And what is missing is the realization of the dream: people think they are awakened, that they have common sense, and yet they are still asleep. We must be wakened from this dream we are in; the soul must come to the realization of what it is. Then a better day will come for us.
The first sign one notices after the awakening of the soul is that one begins to see from two points of view. One begins to see the right of the wrong and the wrong of the right. One begins to see the good of the bad and the bad of the good. One begins to see that everything is reflected in its opposite. In this way one rises above intellectuality, which then begins to appear as a primitive or elementary knowledge. One sees the dark in the bright and the light in the dark, death in birth and birth in death. It is a kind of double view, of things. And when one has reached this, then reason has made way for higher reasoning.”
