A fall does not break or discourage me, it only raises me to a new life.

Saint Paul says, “what you sow does not come to life unless it dies” (1 Corinthians 15:36). A seed must break apart in the earth if it is to unfurl and send up a stalk. Destruction is intrinsic to the process of creation.

The journey toward the One comprises many stops and starts, and every ending is a new beginning. A fall, however bruising, may prove an advance. When one falls, one’s previous momentum comes to a halt, and a pause follows. What is born in that pause gives rise to new momentum.

The pause after a fall, therefore, is a crucial moment. In that moment, if the mind and heart draw courage from the soul, a new and higher mode of life will commence. The seedpod of the old self will crumble away, a trusting root will sink down into the earth, and a hopeful shoot will climb up toward the sun.

“I consider myself second to none since I have realized in myself the One Alone.”

Status is a worry that troubles many minds. Individuals and communities perpetually vie for dominance, scrambling to occupy higher echelons in the scheme of the world. Racism, classism, sexism, bigotry—these are all the byproducts of the common urge to be special. In the confused condition of the human mind in its worldly delirium, personal worth is imagined to depend on one’s rank in the pyramid of social perceptions. The rules of the game dictate that for one to be high, another must be low.

Thank goodness there is another way. Rather than looking up, enviously, toward “superiors,” or down, contemptuously, toward “inferiors,” Murshid advises: look within, to the indwelling completeness in the center of yourself. The same plenitude indwells in the center of every human being, uniting all lives in the one Perfect Being.