The Power of Positive Thinking

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:

Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words. Keep your words positive because your words become your behaviors. Keep your behaviors positive because your behaviors become your habits. Keep your habits positive because your habits become your values. Keep your values positive because your values become your destiny. 
                                          – Mahatma Gandhi

Our success or failure depends upon the harmony or disharmony of our individual will with the divine will.
— Hazrat Inayat Khan

Ya Haqq!

The Mystic’s Prayer

GIVE ME OH GOD
DEEP THOUGHTS
HIGH DREAMS
FEW WORDS
MUCH SILENCE
THE NARROW PATH
THE WIDE OUTLOOK
THE END IN PEACE.

AMEN.

– Hazrat Inayat Khan, from his book The Inner Life. (with thanks to Brother Michael for calling it to my attention).

Sufi Wisdom and a Poem for Spring

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:

Alhamdulillah! The wild geese have come back again. I can see them in the pond now, preening their feathers and honking their song. Spring is in the air! And so, Sufi wisdom and a poem as the days lengthen and the heart rejoices :)

NATURE SPEAKS LOUDER THAN THE CALL FROM THE MINARET.

-Hazrat Inayat Khan

WILD GEESE

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

– Mary Oliver

 

– From the Sufi Family Yahoo Group

Ya Haqq!

Heaven and Hell

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:

It is more important to find out the truth about one’s self than to find out the truth of Heaven and Hell. – Hazrat Inayat Khan

What are Heaven and Hell? They are the results of action, speech and thought — they are *results* and not self-dependent. Every Hell and Heaven may be different, and the same condition can be Hell to one and Heaven to another. Therefore we cannot understand them until we understand the self — and not just the nafs, but the innermost being.

Sufis willingly surrender Heaven and Hell to God, considering it a joy when Allah is present even in the midst of Hell, and a loss when Allah is absent even in the bosom of Paradise.

– Commentary by Hazrat Samuel L. Lewis (Sufi Ahmed Murad Chisti). From the Sufi Family Yahoo Newsgroup.

Note: This idea is part of the Sufi tale, The Judgment of God, which you can read by clicking the Sufi Novel tab at top, from Master of the Jinn: A Sufi Novel.

Ya Haqq!