I am overwhelmed and graced by the powerful, loyal support and love reaching me here at Fazal Manzil from all parts of the world. I bid you all a heartfelt thank you. I attach judicious credence to the power of positive thought and prayer.

I am in the best and most expert of medical hands. Curiously enough, I have not felt quite so buoyant, energetic and positive, even humorous, for a long, long time. I already feel better which means that the treatment is working. Hopefully we caught it in the nick of time, at the eleventh hour, and we are dealing with it energetically. Officially the treatment has an 80% success rate. My doctor Dr. Haddad at the Hartman Institute told Dr. QwanYin Linda Wexler, my US doctor, today that, "It is impossible for Mr. Inayat to die on account of his present health condition," so that sounds reassuring! I have been working regularly at my office computer, from 6 am, on my book and curriculum, enthused by the rush of ideas. For age 85 plus, my health is not bad! In fact it is amazing.

I already feel a great relief as though that naughty "crab" (fictitious) has been bullied to let go its grip. It is now clear that this condition has been incubating for several years, defying detection (while I must own to neglect on my part, which I tried to justify by being so busy!!!)

Present day technology has improved by leaps and bounds. It has pushed its way into the area of the organic - endocrinology - beyond the inorganic drug. This accounts for one half of my treatment. The other half is radio-therapy [radiation] which is (if you permit my amateurish interpretations in the language of metaphor) healing with light, albeit with rather fierce light rays (the lance of Perceval). This is to incinerate the claws of the crab attacking my heart chakra, Anahata, from behind (5th dorsal), as did the lance grabbed by the Queen of the Night (Kali) in a smart ploy to attack King Amfortras. Furthermore it involves the thymus (6th cervical - immune system) and my left (4th) rib, 'the Sufi heart on the left,' drawing attention to my concern about dealing with the world instead of retiring in 'splendid, beatific isolation.' Do you believe it???

I have been complementing the medical treatment with my own meditation: visualizing my aura and the impact upon my aura of the cosmic rays descending as a lance of light (the lance of the Grail) into my aura, represented as a chalice of light. Incidentally, during and after the radio-therapy, while incandescent light is aggressing the pathological cells laterally, I meditate on the galactic cosmic rays directing high frequency light (ultra-violet) through the fontanel downwards along the spine (not upwards as in Kundalini) to regenerate the healthy body cells which proliferate in the process of mitosis by being quickened by that high frequency energy called the holy spirit. Our pineal gland is sensitive to the light of the center of the Milky Way, in addition to the influence of the sun, and therefore links us with influences of enormous outreach crowning the survival of the higher dimensions of one's being over the dismantling and distilling of the existential dimensions.

One can, indeed, in one's meditations, scan the wide spaces of light transpiring through the galaxies explored by astro-physicists, while the wreck of one's 'palace in a ruin' (the battered body) still registers the impact of the celestial experience on humans on Planet Earth, so as to communicate it to one's friends and, beyond that, heavenly light. So here is a further reason to reconcile meditation and science at this critical transit in the evolutionary advance of humanity.

In one's spiritual practices one awakens dormant faculties in one's body that reciprocate functions in the higher spheres, which one does not generally use.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
You can also become aware of your higher bodies - develop insight into the ethereal spheres. You can be instrumental to making this all-pervading light manifest as radiant light. It is in this process that man becomes like a radiant star. (Esoteric Papers)

Hazrat Inayat Khan gives many clues. Importantly:
If you make your soul more subtle in order to turn away from this world, you can find within yourself the different worlds by tuning to the different planes of consciousness…you gain a conviction that frees you from earthly conditions. (The Smiling Forehead/ Sufi Teachings). By making this body in a different condition you may become conscious of annihilation. If you produce the condition of death at will, in the reaction the opposite will occur. (Esoteric Papers/ Sangatha III). The great Yogis and Sufis have always progressed by the help of their practices toward the highest state of perfection by etherealizing through the knowledge of vibrations. (Vol. 2, The Mysticism of Sound and Music/ Esoteric Music)

Indeed, by one's meditation practices one is reinforcing the medical therapy with spiritual self-healing in parallel. Here we can confirm experientially the impact of the mind over the body. Let us further bear in mind that the imaginary representation of the light of one's aura can only be truly actuated physically if one cleans one's emotions, by entertaining generous, up-front emotions and crystal clear, luminous thoughts thereby clearing one's thought from guile lurking in the dark unconscious.

Of course one needs to die some time; it is current before my age. Whatever the result, (green or red - I don't like the ambiguous orange in between!) is OK. I am not afraid of death. There is nothing wrong with dying! But I would like to wait a little bit longer before the great jump because I have so much to do and explore.

Our programming provides for an irrevocable slow down of the regenerative process hopefully affecting the body rather than the mind, first targeting the reproductive system, then the immune, nervous and circulatory systems. It is quite current that senior citizens of a certain age are vulnerable to an incidence of cancer, albeit it advances slowly at that age and may evade detection even through a biopsy. So the (Vishnu) destructive macrophages need to fulfill their mission so that Shiva can resurrect.

What happens after life on earth is a question mark for most people. Rather than relying on belief or dogma, I am trying to espy clues in physics, biology and psychology as to the transformations and transmutations that occur in the fabric of the body cells and the mental processes after transiting - a further reason to pursue my study on meditation and science to which the present situation is drawing my attention. The 'flying Dutchman' who cannot die is not enviable; fettered to the Planet, he misses out on the glee of galactic travel. But the great jump could wait a bit. It could be delayed because I am straining on the lead to write the book ordered by my publishers on Meditation and Science. Having their hand on the pulse of the merging trend in the advance of human thought -

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
The whole universe has contributed to the way humanity thinks today. (Spiritual Liberty). The collective working of many minds as one single idea and the activity of the whole world are governed by the intelligence of the planet. It is the Message of spiritual liberty.

- they have a hunch that the alert minds in the leading edge of human thought see in this the opening of unexplored perspectives for the spirituality of the future.

D'Espagnat:
One needs to surpass familiar concepts because one cannot account for the world or for our rapport with the old by relying upon them. (La physique Quantique, Cf. L'homme Face a la Science)

Although several physicists are encroaching (surprisingly naively for otherwise brilliant minds) upon the realm of spirituality, and a few gurus have been and are trying to validate their antiquated belief systems on faulty interpretations of modern physics, the encounter between spirituality and science on the table is mostly explored by Buddhists. But the contribution of the insight of Sufis and particularly Hazrat Inayat Khan has not been explored and I deem that it is my job in this autumn of my life if I am given a few years respite. I am dialoguing with physicists and some physicists appreciate to find in me a teacher of meditation who has a background in science (which is not often the case, as far as I know with the exception of Mahesh Yogi, certainly of Sufi methods.)

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
The more deeply we study matter, the more proofs shall we find of intelligence working through the whole process of continual unfoldment. There is a gradual awakening of matter to become conscious. Through the awakening of matter to increased consciousness, matter becomes fully intelligent in man. In matter life unfolds, discovers and realizes the consciousness that has been, so to speak, buried in it for thousands of years. (The Smiling Forehead)

The opportunity offered by the 'transit' furnishes us with a 'leg-up' by hoisting us into extremely valuable, generally unknown unexplored areas - transpersonal dimensions of our being carrying the promise of opening up new perspectives.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
The ultimate aim of the eternal Consciousness in undertaking a journey to the plane of mortality is to realize its eternal being. (Spiritual Liberty). The soul's unfoldment comes from its power which ends in its loosening the ties of the lower planes...closing your eyes to your limited self… and realizing your immortal self. (Spiritual Liberty)

The false ego is what does not belong to the real ego, and what that ego has wrongly conceived to be its own being. (The Mysticism of Sound and Music). If you dived deep enough in yourself, you would discover your real ego. (Cosmic Language). Our soul begins to realize a much greater expansion of its own being. The ego itself is never destroyed. In the knowledge of the ego there is the secret of immortality.

Unfortunately the dying process can be painful. One may wish oneself a painless death, but one would be missing out on the value of pain. In some cases pain acts as a catharsis sublimating the human materialism by distilling it into spirit.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
The cry of agony which comes from the depth of the heart may be a sound of the greatest beauty.…There are moments of intense feeling when pain and joy meet, and one cannot distinguish where one ends and the other begins; they have their meeting place in the heart of man. Pain is like the herb in the hands of the great Transmuter, the divine Alchemist; falling on the melted silver of the heart it turns it into the purest gold, and renders the heart of man more fitting to be the altar of God. (Spiritual Healing)

Pain can help one overcome one's gross ego and make one beautiful. If one wallows in self-pity, it will make one bitter and cantankerous.

I certainly do not relish any condolences or that horrible word: 'pity,' or "rest in peace after all your work!" Amongst some who have given me a hard time (which has proven helpful in the long-run) some (hopefully in rare cases, but I am not sure) might consciously or unconsciously think 'good-riddance' (as has actually happened before), albeit most of these are polite enough not to say it too loudly. I would rather that they come forth frankly and say it. (Excuse me for a bout of temerity - I am working with laugh therapy.) I am not sorry for myself and when I feel pain, it pales into near nothingness when I think of the ordeal that my sister Noor and many through the history of the world suffered and are suffering today at the hands of brutes.

I do not welcome either well-intended patronizing back-stage, armchair, amateur psychologists or even professional psycho-therapists telling me: "Why don't you…?" My concerns, motivations, estimation of pros and cons, scruples about how my actions affect people and theirs affect me are personal to me, to my particular psychological and spiritual idiosyncratic configuration and values. That of a psychologist is his or hers, does not apply to me, and I am not prepared to deliver the secret of my soul and heart to anybody in the world. I do not wish it to be surmised or interpreted or misinterpreted by well-wishers who are not privy to my perspective.

DEALING WITH THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES

I have often pointed out the link between psychological issues with regard to the interface with the social environment and the bodily concomitant: cancer. Surprising cases of remission of cancer by laugh therapy and visualizing the T-cells, macrophages, combating and vamping the parasitic cells that are conspiring to take over by confusing the body's sense of identity (so that our genetic enzymes make mistakes in the replication of our genetic code from DNA to RNA) have been recorded. Therefore, at the psychological level, our sense of identity is at stake. This is precisely what we are working with in meditation.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
What is meant by concentration is the change of identification of the soul so that it may lose the false sense of identification and identify itself with the true self instead of the false self. (The Alchemy of Happiness\ The Inner Life and Self Realization)

The cosmic issue looming here is that in my involvement in the human drama enacted in my 'storms in my cup of tea,' my attention is being drawn to the fact that I am invited to sort this out myself in my own life (in the hope that it may prove useful for others) rather than quoting theoretically physiologists and psychologists. Maybe this is true for all of us.

Those who have made one's life hard help one to try one's best to overcome resentment, which by the same token is precisely what I am prescribing. However, the cosmic challenge that I need to sort out in myself to throw light into the psychological processes that triggered off consequences in my body (however currently recognized in medicine as a standard process) has resulted in my beginning to appreciate that one must not even condemn resentment in others, albeit it triggers off aggressivity, ruthless insensitivity, and ignorance with all its trail of brutality, cruelty, suffering. Maybe it has a psychological purpose in life in the divine strategy because that is a conditioned programming of the human defense system -

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
…everything has its purpose.

- to protect one from being abused, oppressed, victimized and violated in one's self esteem if one does not know a better way of dealing with the issue.

FREEDOM VERSUS INVOLVEMENT - DETACHMENT VERSUS LOVE!!!

Here we are bumping into precisely the crucial issue: processing in one's own life the reconciliation between two antithetical cosmic principles (and thereby helping others to do so) embodied in (i) the way of the saint - compassion with the danger of slipping into its flaw (that need not be) of co-dependence, facilitating rather than dealing with tyranny -

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
Man seeks freedom and pursues captivity. (In an Eastern Rose Garden) All that produces longing in the heart deprives one of one's freedom. One sees a constant striving in the life of the adepts to make themselves independent of outside things as much as possible. (The Art of Personality)

- and (ii) the way of the master - with the danger of slipping into its flaw (that need not be) of an ego trip, dominating others, hampering people's freedom and taking responsibility from them.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
He who fights his nature for his ideal is a saint; he who subjects his ideal to his realization of truth is the master. (Gayan)

It is challenging for one who has tasted of the freedom of the sanyasin, but recognizes that it is an escape from responsibility, to conform to the constraint of worldly circumstances in which one incurs the temptation of slipping into acquisitiveness, facetiousness, opulence, pretentiousness, impertinence, and the aggressivity of the ego for one's psychological protection. On the contrary, in the spiritual quest one is scrambling to transmute (rather than annihilate) the false ego.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
Things that people take to heart will seem of little importance, and he finds that all his life he has given his thoughts to something which does not last, which does not even exist…. When one's soul is awakened, one becomes in one moment a different person…. Something has touched it and made it uneasy, restless. This makes it yearn for release.

Let us remember:

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
Illumination is obtained by rising above one's earthly condition at the command of one's will and realizing one's immortal self which is God within…. Awaken God within.

The soul cannot rise from the lower regions until it has left behind all earthly longings and attachments. (Spiritual Liberty/ Aqibat)

My assignment has, therefore, been and is to insert freedom within constraint; that is to operate according to one's standards and values within the constraint of circumstances valiantly without self-pity. The Sufi call this condition zhud which means maintain a sense of satisfaction even in a battered body and overstressed psyche, undaunted, whatever the hardship of the circumstances, without complaining. (The secret of toughening up psychologically.)

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
Those who have accomplished something really worthwhile in the world have had to sacrifice comfort, convenience, pleasure and merriment. The higher the attainment, the higher the sacrifice it asks.

This is what it takes to explore the way that awakening in life in our tough new world leads to dedicated action. This is indeed the door to the spirituality of the future.

Incidentally (iii) the way of prophet-hood that overarches sainthood and mastery at the soul level, thus reconciling the apparent irreconciliables, needs to be implemented in our lives where this dichotomy challenges us to find a practical solution.

By some enigmatic paradox: while motivated by the quest for independence characteristic of the saint, his or her compassion squeezes him or her increasingly into the bind of limiting and frustrating circumstances. Like so for the master whose constraint is continually endeavoring to overcome the obstacles to his or her power rather than finding freedom from his own addiction to dominance.

Our body is drawing our attention to the fact that this is the crucial issue to deal with and tells us to work harder on sorting it out, urges us to deal with the need of working with it.

I have been pining for years, imagining, trying to relive the ordeal that Noor went through, ignoring all the logic that it was the birth pangs of a very strong magnificent being who has overcome the horror a long time ago, whereas it was affecting my health unnecessarily, since I cannot help by my commiseration for healed wounds that are no more there.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
One finds a kind of universe in oneself. If man dived deep enough within himself he would reach a point of his ego where it lives an unlimited life. One's own self is the object of one's realization. One finds a kind of universe in oneself and by the study of the self one comes to that spiritual knowledge for which one's soul hungers. (Vol. 6, p. 2). A person asks himself how all he sees affects him and what is his reaction to it all. First how does his spirit react to the objects or the conditions he encounters, to the sounds he hears, to the words people speak to him. Secondly see what affect he himself has on others' conditions and individuals when he comes in contact with them. (Vol. 11, Philosophy, Psychology and Mysticism). By the study of human nature one realizes the nature of life in general. (Unity of Religious Ideals)

Here is the therapy. The vital issues at the macrocosmic scale latent in the principles that overarch the existential state need to be worked out at the microcosmic scale in us.

The very same cataclysms erupting in the collisions of humongous galaxies that spark the birth of stars is replicated further in us at the microcosmic scale in 'our storms in our teacups' as the catastrophes in our lives can spark in us a new birth.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
Divinity resides in humanity; it is also the outcome of humanity….The planet has culminated into human beings. (Philosophy, Psychology, Mysticism/ Philosophy/ Intelligence). The divine mind becomes completed after manifestation. The creator's mind is made of His own creation. The experience of every soul becomes the experience of the Divine Mind. (Unity of Religious Ideals)

We are assigned to explore, under the aegis of the divine strategy customized by us, the premises for the spiritual ethics of the spirituality of the future in our personal lives by dint of our insight into people's motivations and attunements, and being aware of the way that our attitude, insight, attunement and behavior affects them and theirs us.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
It is like coming into the same room in the daytime that the soul has once visited in the darkness of the night….(Githa III). Everyone else seems to be with open eye and yet not see…. (Social Gathekas). It is like when a child is born and begins to see everything new. (Vol. 10, Path of Initiation). Wherever the light of pure intelligence is thrown things become clear. This light becomes a torch for the seer. It is his own soul that becomes a torch in his hand; it is his own light that illuminates his path. It is just like throwing a searchlight upon dark corners which one did not see before, and the corners become clear and illuminated again. It is like throwing light upon problems that one did not understand first; it is like seeing with x-rays persons who were a riddle before. (Social Gathekas)

What value our contribution?

It is precisely the same as the way that a variation on a theme enriches the theme. That is our assignment in our lives.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
As the whole of nature is made by God, so the nature of each individual is made by himself. (Social Gathekas). Think that the same power that moves the stars and the sap in the trees is in you. By man's limitations he, so to speak, buries the divine creative power in his mind. (The Way of Illumination). The soul is God, but man has a body and mind of his own.

Here is the challenge, the wager.

Remember:

Hazrat Inayat Khan:
Illumination is obtained by rising above one's earthly condition at the command of one's will and realizing one's immortal self which is God within… Awaken God within.

The soul manifests in the world in order that it may experience the different phases of manifestation, yet not lose its way, but regain its original freedom in addition to the experience and knowledge it has gained in the world. True exaltation of the spirit resides in the fact that it has come to Earth and has realized there its spiritual being. (The Alchemy of Happiness)

The purpose of life is fulfilled in rising to the greatest heights and in diving to the deepest depths of life, in widening one's horizons, in penetrating life in all its spheres, in losing oneself, and in finding oneself in the end. (Volume 1, The Way of Illumination, The Inner Life)

So I have a very tangible reason to try to live a few more years and I am not the type to give up! But to achieve this, I will need to spend more time meditating, particularly on light, and explore how it parallels with the circumspect views of scientists. I also wish to explore the interface between the celestial spheres (also shaken by cataclysms at humungous scales in 'seculo seculorum'), and the human drama in our violent, decadent yet creatively free-wheeling brave new world.

I will need to revise my scheduling, yet I will continue traveling some. (I am the unrestrainable salik, the pilgrim on Planet Earth - I have wings on my heels.) Moreover, I wish to encourage mureeds to visit Suresnes - build up Suresnes, the energy and outreach of the Universel - and place more and more responsibility on the shoulders of my wonderful son Pir Zia.

Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan