The word initiation is interpreted by different people in different ways. By some it is considered a kind of membership in a certain secret order, but what I mean by initiation is taking a step forward on the path unknown to oneself. I classify three different kinds of initiation.
The first initiation is that which comes from within yourself. This initiation is a person’s intention to proceed on a path that is not generally taken by their fellow creatures. If this does not come from within yourself, you will always be afraid to take a step further on the path that the others around you do not take. It is also true that the general conception of people is not the idea of an individual. For the nature of the generality is like that of sheep; wherever the sheep are taken, there all the sheep will go. We must know that this nature of walking with the flock of the sheep is not out of human nature. People will deny it and will disapprove of it, and then they will do that very thing without knowing that they are doing it. If you want to see this, you just have to stand in the street and, with surprise, look up and look here and look there, and be absorbed in it, and you will see twenty persons standing by your side; both foolish and wise people.
Therefore, the person who is initiated, the person who walks on the path of initiation, is someone who has risen above the collective, and who goes on their individual way forward, different from the others who are around them. When a person begins to feel that there is something behind the veil, when they begin to feel that there is something attainable, something which they can attain by effort, then they begin to take a step on the path which they know not.
Do not be surprised if you saw that initiation in a child of five years, and at the same time do not be surprised if you did not see that initiation in a person of sixty years who has no tendency towards it. All their life they will live, and yet they will not think about it. The person who has received this initiation will go on. Even in childhood they will show that tendency to take a step forward on that path that others do not take. You will find this initiation in all different aspects. For example, a child may take a slate and pen and draw a picture. The child is not an artist, yet has a tendency to draw something. It is an idea that is perhaps not a child’s idea, but it is a wonderful idea. You may find a child humming or singing or thinking of a piece of music that a composer will be surprised to hear. The child is doing what is not ordinary, something that comes spontaneously from their soul and shows their initiation on that path. You may also hear a child speak with you on a subject, and the idea is quite different from what you think a child should bring to you. Perhaps the idea is beyond comprehension to most people, yet the child speaks about it. It is their initiation.
I have heard a child ask me, “Why must we kneel down, why must we prostrate when they say that God is above. Why must we prostrate our self below and kneel down?” I have heard a child say, “Why must there be one side to which a person must look in order to worship, why should not all sides be equally good for a person to worship?” You will find a grown-up person fixed in their ideas, that on this particular side they must worship and not on the other side, and never once in their life questioning why. You will find a grown-up person who has perhaps all their life worshipped while kneeling down to the earth, and never having asked themself, “Why should I kneel down to the earth when I should worship God in the heavens?” Therefore, to believe, to worship, to be pious, to be good is quite different from the idea of being initiated. Initiation is coming out of the ordinary. Initiation is rising above the conditions which are common. This shows the maturity of the soul.
And what is the second state? The second state is the materialization of this initiation. The materialization is possible through the hand of someone living on the earth. For the condition of being initiated completely is to become initiated on this earth plane, on this physical plane where you are living and you are moving, and on this physical plane through which you are experiencing life.
People make a great many mysteries out of the name initiation. I wish to make it simple. The simple explanation of initiation is trust on the part of the pupil and confidence on the part of the initiator. As I have heard from my Murshid, from my initiator, words that I shall never forget, “This friendship, this relationship that is brought about by initiation between two persons, is something that cannot be broken. It is something that cannot be separated. It is something that cannot be compared with anything else in the world. It is of eternity.” When this initiation takes place then it becomes the responsibility of the initiator to think of the welfare and well-being of their pupil; and there is a responsibility of the initiated to become faithful and true and to become steady and unshaken through all the tests and through all the trials.
There is one person who will go to one teacher and be initiated, and then afterwards to another teacher and be initiated, then to a third person and be initiated. They might go to a hundred persons, but they become a hundred times less instead of a hundred times more blessed. For the object of friendship is not in making friends, the object of friendship is to keep friendship steady, unchanged, unbreaking. Of all friendship, the friendship that is established by initiation is of a sacred kind, a friendship that must be considered to be beyond all other relationships in the world.
There is a story of a peasant in India, a young peasant, who used to take a great interest in spiritual things. Someone of a great name happened to come to his town, about whom it was said, as it was always said among simple peasants, “The person is so great, that by going into their presence one would be sure to enter the heavens.” The whole town went to see this great person and to get from them that guarantee of entering the heavens, except that one peasant who had once been initiated. This great person, having heard about this young peasant, came to the house themself and asked the peasant, “How is it that you, who take such interest in this subject did not come, and all the others came to see me?” The young person said, “Oh, there was no antagonism on my part; there was only one simple reason. My teacher who has initiated me has passed from this earth, and since he was a person with limitations, I do not know whether he has gone to heaven or to the other place. If by the blessing of your presence, I was sent to heaven, I should be most unhappy there. Heaven would become another place for me if my Teacher were not there.” It is this oneness, this connection, it is this relationship between the initiator and the initiated, that gives them that strength, that power, that wisdom to journey on this path. For it is the devotion of the initiated that gives all that is lacking in the initiator, and it is the trust of the initiator that gives all that is lacking in the initiated.
There are different degrees, but they are not to be discussed on this path because, after all, different stages are the conceptions, the speculations of different wise people. Just like the seven notes of music: there are seven notes of music, because the musician knows them as seven notes of music. They can be made into more notes or into less notes, if the musician wishes to make it so. We conceive of stages of things; in reality it is impossible to make a stage. It is a spontaneous development on the spiritual path that may be called treading the path of initiation.
Now you may ask me, “How do I explain spiritual progress? What is it? What is it like?” Spiritual progress is the difference of the point of view. There is only one way to recognize this progress, and that way is to see the progress in our own outlook on life, to ask our own self a question: “How do I look at life?” This we can do by not judging others, by not criticizing others, by not weighing and measuring others, but only asking, “What is my own outlook?” As long as a person is concerned with the faults of others, as long as they criticize others, they are not ready to make their outlook clear in order to see if their outlook on life is right.
Now you might ask what the different initiations are. “Is one better than the other, or one higher than the other? In what way are they to be distinguished? By knowing some more mysteries, or by knowing some secrets, or by studying something very wonderful, or by communicating with something unseen?” Nothing of this whatever. Not one of these things can assure you of your higher initiation, of your greater progress in spiritual life. In the first place you need not strive for mysteries, for life itself is a mystery. As soon as the outlook on life is changed all that seemed to a person to be simple, all that offered no mystery, becomes mysterious. The secret is to be found in simplicity; it is the simple life which is full of secrets.
Study—a person may study the whole library, may write fifty books, may read a hundred books, and that leads them nowhere. If there is any study that is required, for that study you need not go anywhere to study it. Your life itself is a study if you will study it. For the person who studies, life offers every opportunity for study, morning to evening, every moment of the day, in the home, outside, in work, in leisure. In all things there is something to study.
No book can give that joy and that pleasure that human nature itself can give. The wise, the foolish, the good, the wicked whom you see every day, their tendencies, their attitude, all this, is the greatest study. Besides success and failure, besides sorrows and pleasures and all things in life, things that go unfavorably in life, things that come favorably in life, in all these things there is so much to study. All that we do rightly, all that we have done wrongly, everything is a lesson, everything is a study if we take it as such. The thing is this, that the person who is life’s student, the person who is really initiated, studies themself first before studying others.
Does an initiator in life teach Truth? No, no person has the power to teach another Truth. Each must discover for themself. What the initiator can do from the side, is to say, “This is the path, do not go astray.” The initiator will put their initiated one on that path where the further they will go, the more they will receive at every step a hand raising them upwards. However, the first step is the most difficult, and that step is taken by the help of an initiator on the earth.
Now you might ask me, “What is it that the initiator teaches the initiated?” The initiator tells the initiated the truth of their own being. The initiator does not tell them something new or something different. The initiator tells them something that their soul knows already, but their mind has forgotten.
There is a story, a fable that gives a picture of this. A lion, walking through the desert, found a little lion cub playing with the sheep. It had happened that the little lion was reared with the sheep, and so it never had a chance or an occasion to realize for himself what he was. The lion was greatly surprised to see a little lion cub running about with the same fear of a lion as the sheep. The lion jumped in among the flock of sheep and said, “Halt, halt!” But the sheep ran and the little lion ran also. The lion only pursued the lion cub, not the sheep, and said, ” Wait, I wish to speak to you.” The cub said, “I tremble, I am afraid of you, I cannot stand before you.” The lion said, “Why are you running about with the sheep? You are a little lion yourself.” “No,” said the little one, “I am a sheep, I tremble, I am afraid of you. Let me go, let me go with the sheep.” “Come along,” said the lion, “Come with me, I will take you, and I will show you what you are before I let you go.” Trembling and yet helpless, the little lion followed the lion to a pool of water. At the pool of water, the lion said, “Look at me and look at yourself. Are we not closer, are we not near? You are not like the sheep; you are like me.”
This lion is symbolic of the souls who have become God-conscious, the souls who have realized the Truth. When they see the same Divine Spirit in another soul, their first thought is to take the hand of that soul and to show them, “In you also there is the same divine spark that I possess.” Therefore, outwardly it is an aristocratic picture, but inwardly it is leading to democracy. The command of the lion to that little lion is apparently aristocratic, but what is the intention of the lion? It is democracy. It wants to make the little lion conscious of the same grandeur that the lion has. That is the path of spirituality. Its outward appearance may seem different, but its inner intention and what it culminates in, is democratic. In spiritual initiation therefore, the secret of both things is to be learned. It is by being a soldier that one becomes a commander. The one who has never been a soldier can never be a perfect commander.
The initiations beyond are still greater. There are some, if not all, that will tell you their experience, that at different times in their life a sudden change of outlook has come to them. It is not our usual experience to think that suddenly one day we wake up from sleep and our point of view has changed. However, do not consider it an exaggeration when I say that it takes but one moment to change one’s outlook on life altogether. It is this that is an initiation, an initiation that is above the initiations of the earth as we know them. One thing leads to another, and so we go on in the life of initiation from one thing to another, as a ladder that seems to be before us, on which we climb. Each step of that ladder becomes an initiation. Each step on that ladder changes our point of view altogether, if only we keep to that ladder and do not drop down. For there is always a possibility of going forward or backward. Nevertheless, the person who is anxious to go forward will never go backward. If the whole world pulled that person back with a chain on their feet, still they will go forward, because their desire to go forward is more powerful than all the people of the world.
The Sufi Order in the Western world offers to those who wish to take the benefit of the path of initiation, an occasion, an opportunity. It is an occasion to study, an occasion to meditate, and an opportunity to come into personal touch with those who will help them on the path. When explaining the object of the initiation, the object of progressing on the spiritual path, I should explain only one, one and the simplest one. That object is to be best suited to serve humanity.
December 20, 1924
CW 1924 Vol. II, pp. 787-797.
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