“The culmination of the soul's journey of
awakening is not just returning to its original state. Instead,
it is how the soul has evolved through its passage on earth . .
. and the unique way each soul's unfoldment has contributed to
the evolution of the Universe itself.”
Over the course of his eighty-eight years of life, the great
Sufi mystic and teacher Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan wove the
timeless essence of Sufism into the unfolding expressions of
contemporary culture and consciousness. A senior statesman of
the world spiritual community, Pir Vilayat stood out as one who
saw spiritual awakening as not separate from intellectual
learning and creativity, or from full engagement with the latest
developments in philosophy, psychology, science, culture, and
the arts. He spoke five languages, studied philosophy at Oxford,
and was an accomplished cellist. As Pir Zia, his son and
spiritual heir, reflected: “Spurning the temptation to
succumb to the inertia of routinization, impelled by a string of
discoveries—spiritual openings alternating with deep
readings of science and scripture—Pir Vilayat blazed a
trail toward the spirituality of the future.”
Pir Vilayat was born in London in 1916 and became the
spiritual successor to his own father, the revered Hazrat Inayat
Khan, who had brought Sufism to the West. It was Pir Hazrat who
not only established Sufi practice beyond its indigenous
territory of the Middle East and India, but laid the ground for
an expression of his tradition that would meet the contemporary
context of his time, a spiritual perspective embraced by his son
Pir Vilayat. “As a tradition-sanctioned lineage
bearer,” explained Pir Zia, “Pir Hazrat was not an
apologist for a particular ideology, but a mystic responding to
the unprecedented challenges and prospects of a rapidly changing
world with a message of interreligious reconciliation and
spiritual renewal. It was in these footsteps that my father, Pir
Vilayat, followed.”
Pir Vilayat began teaching in the 1950s through the Sufi
Order in the West (now called Sufi Order International), which
had been established by his father and gave rise to more than
one hundred local centers for the study of Sufism in America,
Europe, and other countries around the world. Beginning in 1965,
he assembled a Congress of Religions in France every spring,
where representatives of various traditions met to discuss and
understand each other's viewpoints. This year he was
posthumously awarded the Hollister Prize for creating interfaith
understanding. In 1975 he founded the Abode of the Message, the
main spiritual center for the Sufi Order International, and in
1977, with his longtime student Elizabeth Lesser, he cofounded
the Omega Institute, which has since become the largest U.S.
holistic learning center. Lesser recalled that, in founding
Omega, Pir Vilayat “wanted to resurrect the ancient
libraries and schools of Alexandria. He felt that's where the
concept of holism was born, the idea that all thought is
related. He wanted to create a place in modern culture where all
religions and disciplines could be taught as related to each
other. The name Omega comes from the French Jesuit priest and
paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, one of Pir Vilayat's heroes,
and refers to that point where all thought converges.”
Pir Vilayat put forward an evolutionary spirituality, based
on a recognition that our role as humans is to participate fully
in the process by which the intelligence of the universe is
awakening over time through us. In his view, the
knowledge and insight generated from the expansion of
consciousness have the potential to influence the course of
evolution itself. And Pir Vilayat believed that while we are
already the expression of an evolved and complex civilization,
through our dynamic creativity and engagement humanity can
ultimately rise to new and higher orders of existence.
“The further you advance,” he said, “the
further the horizon recedes, so the secret treasure keeps on
moving further and further away. It's a very curious thing, but
we're creating the secret. It's not there. It's like
the future—we create it.”
As a revered spiritual master, Pir Vilayat was adept at
leading his students through the constructs of their own minds
toward Self-awareness. Pir Zia described how “he would
guide seekers in meditation through the multiple fields of
perception and identity, culminating in 'stereoscopic
consciousness,' the art of toggling between the temporal and the
eternal, between the immediate interactions of everyday life and
the most exalted intimation of God's being. His concern was not
to promote a system of thought but, through the transformative
power of prayer and meditation, to induce an amnesia and
dismantle the cognitive glitches that obstruct the soul's
natural self-realization.” Pir Zia then recollected a
particularly powerful moment with his father: “It was two
years ago at a meditation camp in the Swiss Alps. My father had
guided seekers through the advanced stages of meditation and he
emerged from the tent, radiating ecstasy. He called me to walk
with him. Midway along the path he stopped, and with tears
glistening in his eyes, he said, 'I want you to know, you do not
have to do things as I've done them.' Then he paused and smiled
and said, 'In fact, you must not do things as I've done
them!' It was a moment that epitomized his freedom of
spirit and faith in the future—a moment I will never
forget.”
–Jessica Roemischer