Sacred Readings Archive back to index from the Rose Garden Web site Invocation
Bhagavad Gita. Seventh discourse.
v 28.
The Dharmapada. Righteousness
Ch11, v151
Gospel of Zarathustra; ch 63:
v 2.
Tanakh: Psalms 86 v 11-13 A Prayer
for David
The New Testament, John Ch1 v
1-5
The Holy Qur'an Sura xxix 62
Readings from the Gayan
Excerpt from Sufi Teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan; Life in God (Vol 3. P254) "In Him we live and move and have
our being." This teaching of the Bible describes the nature of God:that
God is the ocean, the waves of which are all its activities, small or great.
The Qu'ran says in support of this that not a single atom moves, groups
or scatters without the command of God. Rumi
One who wants anything becomes smaller than the thing they wants. One who gives away anything is greater than the thing they give. Therefore to a mystic each act of renunciation becomes a step toward perfection. Forced renunciation, whether forced by morality, religion, law, convention, or formality, is not necessarily renunciation. The real spirit of renunciation is willingness; and willing renunciation comes when one has risen above the thing one renounces. The value of each thing in life, wealth, power, position, possession, is according to our evolution. There is a time in life when toys are ones treasures, and there is a time when one puts them aside; there is a time when copper coins are everything, and there is another time when one can give away gold coins. There is a time in life when one values a cottage, and a time when one gives up a palace. Things have no value; their value is as one makes it; and at every step in one's evolution, one changes their value. Certainly there is no gain in leaving home, friends, and all affairs of life, and going to the forest and living the life of an ascetic; and yet who has the right to blame those who do so? How can the worldly person judge the one who renounces? Perhaps that which seems of greatest value to the worldly person is nothing to the one who has renounced. The Sufis make no restrictions and has no principles of renunciation, nor do they teach renunciation. The Sufis believe that to sacrifice anything in life which one does not wish to sacrifice is of no use, but that renunciation is a natural thing, and grows in one with one's evolution. A child which cries for its toy at one stage of its childhood, comes to an age where it is quite willing to give away the toy it once cried for. There are three stages of morals. The first stage is the moral of reciprocity. This moral is natural to those who see the difference between themselves and others, who recognise each person as "such and such". The second stage is the law of beneficence, where one, recognising themselves as an entity separate from others and recognising others as distinct entities from themselves, nevertheless, see a cord of connection running through themselves and all, and find themselves as a dome, in which rises an echo of good and evil; and in order to have a good echo, they give good for good and they give good for evil. But the third stage is the moral
of renunciation, where the difference of "mine" and "thine" and the distinction
of "I" and "you" fade away in the realisation of the one Life that is within
and without, beneath and beyond; and that is the meaning of the verse in
the Bible, "In Him we live and move and have our being."
Benediction "May the blessing of
God rest upon you, May His peace abide with you, may His presence
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