Gayan Commentary

As long as I act upon my own intuition, I succeed, but whenever I follow the advice of others I go astray.

An eel would not do well to ask directions to the Sargasso Sea from a pike or a trout. Deep down in its viscera, it already knows the way. Its best course is to trust its instincts. The same is true of human beings.

A philosophizer asked a dervish what truth was. She pointed to his eyes. He asked what was falsehood. She tweaked his ear. Her point being: seeing is believing, and be wary of what you are told.

Whatever the question, the answer is already present. Only, it’s buried under a mass of fears and fancies. One needs to clear one’s mind to know what one knows.

Is counsel worthless then? Not necessarily. The Prophet Muhammad said, “The believer is a mirror of the believer.” A word or glance that confirms what one knows in one’s innermost core is a kind of light upon light.

For this reason, Guides in the Esoteric School do not give advice. They work instead to empower the murid’s intuition.

“Every soul stands before me as a world, and the light of my spirit falling upon it brings clearly to my view all it contains.”

Would there be a world if there were no witnesses? It is the perceiving of the world that makes it a world. And as there are many perceivers, there are, accordingly, many worlds.

Imagine a hermit’s dark cell. Light flashes in through two chinks in the roof. One beam has illumined a curl of smoke. The other transfixes a moth in flight.

Spirit is light. The soul is a portion of divided light. The mind is what is revealed in the beam of that portion.

Two minds may know one another, in some measure, by comparing their perceptions through conversation. But a soul knows another soul silently—by rising up to spirit and then, descending, alighting on it.

When the light of one soul irradiates another, it witnesses what the other’s mind contains. When love unites two souls in spirit, their lights converge in a double flame and two worlds become one.

I have learned more by my faults than by my merits. If I acted always aright, I could not be human.

We might have been created as flawless beings in a flawless world. But we were not, and for a reason. In a placidly perfect world, there would be no discovery. There is a unique perfection to be found in the unveiling of the Perfect within the imperfect.

Life is a school for the education of the heart. Every day there is a new lesson. Lessons not learned are repeated until understanding comes. Successes teach something, but missteps often teach more.

Of course, it is not faults themselves that are instructive. Awareness is what guides. When vigilance illuminates a dark passage through life, the path comes into view.

Coming to terms with one’s shortcomings brings humility and compassion. Observing that one does not always perceive situations in their entirety, one learns to think twice before making brash pronouncements. Recognizing one’s own capacity for error, one is moved to forbear with others in their fumblings.

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.