Hazrat Inayat Khan is the man who first brought Sufism into the West in 1912, over a hundred years ago now. His story is very interesting because he came from a musical spiritual family in India. He naturally awoke through his training because he was living in a culture of awakeness.
He was from a musical family and music is what they used for spiritual teachings. Music itself requires tremendous concentration in a person. To really play an instrument, especially to the quality of a musical family like his, took tremendous concentration. Concentration like that, done in an atmosphere of awakening, leads to illuminated beings.
The Sufism that Hazrat Inayat Khan brought to the West brought this concentration into it. Not only does his teachings require a lot of concentration, they require understanding how harmony and notes and rhythm intersect and blend with each other.
He grew up in this powerful society, a culture that used music as a way to disappear into reality. A musician, when they’re really playing isn’t an ego playing; it’s the years of developing your muscles and your breath so that you can lay within the melody that you’re playing that makes the music happen.
He came from a very refined culture, and his job was to bring Sufism to the West. I think it was the Theosophical Society who brought them in and sent them around everywhere. As he worked with westerners he realized that the cultural differences were so huge he couldn’t even begin to use music to teach; he would have to speak.
Keep that in mind when studying Hazrat Inayat Khan. His books are his attempt to translate his knowledge, not only from his native language into Western languages, but from music itself into a reality that is not so obviously harmonized.
His writings reflect the culture that he came from.
This is interesting when we compare it to what is coming to us these days from native traditions, who are talking about the same thing. From all these places we hear the story of what it’s like to be raised in a spiritually alive tribe where everyone is full of self knowledge.
From the very beginning of life, they are taught how to be alive and how to be connected.
But, we also know that the societies that Sufism comes from are divided and conquered societies to start out with. This is obvious if you look at the histories of Muhammad, and the Muslim world, and the Sufi world. There was tremendous strife through all this. When Mohammed lived there was a confusing belief in gods that people were having troubles reconciling themselves with.
Much of the religions that come from this time and place are trying to reconcile a deep misunderstanding about life. Hazrat Inayat Khan was raised in a particular family that had reconciled the difference through music. It’s important to understand this because there is a lot in Sufi teachings that are not necessarily going to be useful to us.
One of our best examples is the story of how Hazrat Inayat Khan came to the west with this idea of how he was going to teach spirituality through music. It didn’t work. He had to stop and come up with another idea of how to do it.
The important thing to understand is that it took a completely awake person to be able to do this. Not only was he able to adjust, but he was able to adjust to something that would work in his new world.
One of the things that we have to understand is that ego can only teach ego; awakeness is the only thing that can teach awakeness. So, if you have spiritual teachers who are not completely awake, all of their teachings are going to be full of ego. Ego is going to be driving it.
No matter how much we quote awakened people, no matter how much we read it, it’s always our ego that’s interpreting it. If a spiritual teacher is still coming from ego, no matter how refined and beautiful they try to make it, it’s going to still enhance and perpetuate ego.
That’s the thing about illusion; it is self-perpetuating. If you have a lie, then there has to be a thread of it running through things. Otherwise the lie falls apart.
If we have a very subtle refined lie about how life is, we’re going to send that thread through everything you do. This is one of the reasons why Eastern traditions require a spiritual teacher to be awake, and to be recognized by their predecessors as awake, before they’re allowed to teach.
In Sufism, I’ve heard a person does not become a Murshid until they have awakened two people. It’s a very powerful process to be awake yourself, and it’s an even more powerful process to be involved in the awakening of somebody else. Because, in order to awaken somebody else, you have to deal with them as they are. You can’t just spout out old sayings and contribute to the awakening of somebody else.
We can learn all of these things by studying Hazrat Inayat Khan. We’re working on the thread of “die before you die.” Hazrat Inayat Khan had allowed his ego and his self to completely dissolve before he came to the west and tried to teach. That’s why he was able to change and adjust to the society that he was in.
Imagine that he had managed to stay alive another hundred years, and he was still alive today. He would have had to change and change and change and change as our needs change.
This is why we really need to listen to the awakened people that are around today, and they’re all Sufis. Anyone who is on a path of awakening really is a Sufi because Sufism encompasses everything, any striving towards awakening. We have so much available to us now, and we can blend this in with the Sufi teachings of before. Hazrat Inayat Khan is a fabulous example to us of how this can be done.