“Man is closer to God than the fishes are to the ocean.”

“Many think that spiritual attainment can only be achieved by great labor. It is not so; labor is necessary for material attainment, but for spiritual attainment what one needs is a seeking soul like that of Moses. Moses falling upon the ground may be interpreted as the cross, which means, ‘I am not; Thou art.’ In order to be, one must pass through a stage of being nothing. In Sufi terms this is called Fana, when one thinks, ‘I am not what I had always thought myself to be.’ This is the true self-denial, which the Hindus called Layam, and … Continue reading

“We start our lives trying to be teachers; it is very hard to learn to be a pupil.”

“We often start our lives as teachers, and then it is hard to become a pupil. From childhood on we start to teach our parents. There are seldom souls who have more inclination for pupilship than for teaching, and there are many whose only difficulty in life is that they are teachers already.” ~Hazrat Inayat Khan (via Wahiduddin) “It should be remembered that all the great teachers of humanity, such as Jesus Christ, Buddha, Muhammad and Zarathushtra, have been great pupils; they have learned from the innocent child, they have learned from everyone, from every person that came near them. … Continue reading

The first sign of the realization of truth is tolerance.

“A soul shows the proof of its evolution in the degree of the tolerance it shows. The life in the lower creation shows the lack of tolerance. The tendency of fighting with one another, which one sees among beasts and birds, shows the reason at the back of it, that intolerance is born in their nature. … But when a soul has evolved still more, tolerance becomes the natural thing for him. Because the highly evolved soul then begins to realize ‘Another person is not separate from me, but the other person is myself. The separation is on the surface … Continue reading