Description
Toward the One
by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
Toward the One was a unique book produced in the 1970s by a group of artists and murids working as a team. The original book is an inspiring and wide-ranging work with hundreds of images, and text drawn from Pir Vilayat’s lectures as well as original material dictated by him for this book.
The subjects include everything from physics to mysticism, with chapters on, among other topics, meditation, breath, light, zikr, the New Age, gurus, psychedelics, resurrection, love and relationships, initiation, the Sufi silsila, and counseling. Also included are prayers and core practices. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its original publication, Sulūk Press is pleased to bring out an updated reissue of this seminal book.
Read excerpts from Toward the One
From the Prologos:
“Where does one go from here? What are our sailing orders? By what azimuth do we set course? What are the landmarks? The perils? The methods? The clues? Fortunate the wayfarer who is briefed by those rare pioneers who chart the uncharted, who brave the depths and spaces of being and offer future generations the topology of internal states and further spheres. One must pass through the portal of detachment into new horizons, leaving something of the old self behind. Seen from this perspective life looks like a never-ending pilgrimage toward the ever-receding horizons of awakening.”
From the Foreword by Pir Zia Inayat Khan:
“The endeavor to explore, realize, and communicate the profoundest depths of the human experience was my father’s lifelong quest. His father, Hazrat Inayat Khan, had said, “It is the insight into life that is the real religion.” My father accordingly regarded the religions of the world as so many windows looking out on the unfolding panorama confronting the gaze of the awakening human soul.
In this book, sutras of the Buddha, sermons of the Christ, and hadiths of the Prophet stand side by side. In fact, they do more: they mutually converse. The glosses of Magian, Neoplatonic, Vedantic, Kabbalistic, and Sufi sages amplify the discussion
in multiple illuminating directions.”
On meditation:
“Extend consciousness beyond the here and now to envision the flower in its genesis from its bud to its fading in one sweep — and so all creatures in the entire procession of their growth — instead of circumscribing our vision to their present appearance. One gathers together the past and the future of the flower in one all-embracing vision, including transformation in the unreeling of time.
Life is seen as a kaleidoscope continually changing formations and disintegrations; a current in which, as Buddha said, the only continuity is that of yearning, a chain in which there is no such thing as an entity or individuality. There are moments when one lifts consciousness above its everyday setting. It seems as though consciousness were poised above or beyond the body. One is aware of the gravity of body-ness, yet a flick of consciousness resisting identification with the solid state will make one aware of the buoyancy of the subtler strata of one’s being, and a mere switch of one’s emotional tonus, from egoistic interest in the neighborhood into sublime indifference to sense data, will displace the center of consciousness from the body to a setting where consciousness operates from one’s nonspatial components. It seems as though one had awakened form a dream. One sees the course of one’s life as a part of the great moving scene of the universe, marching inexorably toward some monumental apotheosis at the end of time, bemisted beyond the horizon of one’s understanding.
All things seem to be infused with radiant life force. What used to seem like objects now appear like the crystallization of that radiance which one might have thought emanated from them.”
