The Pursuit of God
If you are a sincere seeker of truth, you realize that something within you is constantly pushing you from the nest. You know the answers you seek do exist somewhere in the world. This inner force that pushes you to find the answers is an urge you have no control over.
It is the call of Soul.
Prayer. Meditation. Contemplation. What’s at the heart of these spiritual practices? Each is a response to the call of Soul. Each represents an individual’s desire to contact the source of all truth. Different paths to reach the same goal.
You are Soul, a divine spark of God on a journey homeward. Soul wants to experience more of the Voice of God, which can be heard as Sound or seen as Light. This Voice often remains an unconscious inner experience of which the outer, or human, side of the individual is not aware.
Outwardly, all you know is this gnawing feeling that there is more to life than you have yet discovered. So you begin your search through different philosophies, looking for the missing link.You have heard the call of Soul and set off in pursuit of God.
A search for happiness is the pursuit of God. Yet the reason so many people fail to find happiness is because they look for it in the wrong place—at the market instead of in their hearts.
It takes discipline to pursue God.
There is no mystery to finding God: just follow the Sound of the divine Voice back home. Could anything be easier? Not so for most people, for whom the pursuit of God is as unlikely as the phenomenon of a flying rabbit. And why? It’s simply not in their consciousness yet to know that the destiny of each Soul is to become a Co-worker with God, who expects more of us than an eternity of eating and play.
For many, life is much like a trip to a casino. They place all their talents and dreams on the gaming table then bet the outcome of this life upon a turn of the wheel of fortune. That is the sum of their spiritual life in pursuit of God.
Happiness, to them, is blind luck.
People want happiness, but they go about it backward. They keep looking for happiness. And then they spend their money on things: new computer toys, new cars, new clothes, and the like. Trying to find happiness. If they’d only look for freedom first—maybe meditate like the Buddhists or contemplate as we do in Eckankar, which is a lighter form of meditation.
Yet some individuals do have a true desire for God and use some form of prayer or worship to better understand the Creator. Mostly, however, their prayer is like traffic on a one-way street: They do all the talking. It never occurs to them to stop for a moment and listen. God may want to speak.
Often, God doesn't’t get a word in at all.
How, then, does God communicate with us? God speaks to all life with the voice of divine Light and Sound. The Christian name for these dual aspects of God is the Holy Spirit, or the Holy Ghost, which in Eckankar we refer to by the age-old name ECK.
The range of vibration in the universe spans from infinity to infinity. And while the primal cause of vibration is the Light and Sound of God, the human voice is a mere speck on the full scale of vibration. Why would God only speak in a whisper? Yet people who believe that God speaks chiefly in the frequency range of the human voice forget that the human voice, in comparison to the universe of sound, is but a tiny whisper.
So the idea that God only speaks to life within the narrow field of human sound is an attempt to reduce the might of God.
The Light and Sound of God are the food and drink of saints. Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus was struck to the earth by the Light of God. Martin Luther, the great reformer, was also fortunate to see It. Then there was Genghis Khan, the Mongol conqueror of the thirteenth century, who every so often would fall into a swoon for days, able only to chant HU, an ancient name for God. In those trance states, he saw and heard the majestic Light and Sound of God. The Divine One spoke through the Holy Spirit.
So the highest form of speech from God to the more spiritually advanced of the human race is the Light and Sound.
Who, then, does God talk to?
In fact, everyone who has made a contribution to the human race has heard or seen the True Voice. The ways of God are many. God often speaks in a less direct manner to dreamers, poets, visionaries, and prophets—in part, through visions or dreams, daydreams, prayer (the listening kind), or intuition.
History tells of many such people. Brother Lawrence was a Carmelite monk in Paris around 1666. He was the monk whose duty it was to wash the pots and pans.
Brother Lawrence found a way to practice the presence of God while washing the pots and pans, doing even the very lowly jobs. The people around him couldn't’t really understand how he could be so happy while doing the dirty work. It was because he saw God in everything he did.
A list of other famous people who have been a mouthpiece for the Voice of God includes the likes of Socrates, Plato, Elijah, King David, Mozart, Beethoven, Jung, Einstein, Shelley, Edison, Michelangelo, and thousands more. Each does his best to render the divine will into human terms, using a natural genius as the tool of communication. The Sound and Light carry out God’s scheme of creation. So the highest anyone can aspire to is a life of high creativity, but always guided by the force of divine love.
That is how to be most like God.
From the book, The Call of Soul © 2012 Eckankar – Sri Harold Klemp
Islamic soul philosophy
All Muslim philosophers concerned themselves with the subject of the soul. The most detailed and most important works on this subject are those of al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd. Muslim philosophers recognized that the first issue, that confronts the human mind with regard to the soul is its existence. That is why, at the very beginning of his inquiry about the soul in al-Shifa’ (Healing), Ibn Sina asserts that we infer the existence of the soul from the fact that we observe bodies that perform certain acts with some degree of will. These acts are exemplified in taking nourishment, growing, reproducing, moving and perceiving. Since these acts do not belong to the nature of bodies, for this nature is devoid of will, they must belong to a principle they have other than bodies. This principle is what is called ‘soul’.
AL-FARABI asserts that even though the soul is of different parts, it is a unity with all its parts working for one final end, happiness.
Did you know:
"Allah Hu" means "He is" …. it is His essence that only "HE" can exist as "is" … and all else is just a manifestation of his will/power.
Listen for the sound and you see the light.
YES!
I did know that meaning in Arabic amongst Sufis, but did you know that that meaning and usage is a much later usage, despite its connections to the Hebrew, the history of the term HU goes back etymologically to the Sanskrit HU where it means "to invoke" and that is further taken to mean "that which is invoked" as the etymological sorce for the English term God, however, the etymolologists argue and cannot decisively say where it appeared first, so the proto-Germanic "ghu" is also given, with much the same meaning, that of "to invoke" or "that which is invoked" but also with the meaning "to pour"…this they decided was meant to indicate the earth that was poured over a body at it's burial, but it is interesting to note that some of the old Hebrew traditions state that God poured the Spirit, to create the worlds and life, and this meaning is also found and used in ancient Egyptian languages, usually to indicate the Breath of God, which does indeed indicate the Voice of God…the Egyptians were said by some, to have named the sphinx HU. Some say that HU is purely of origin in Islam amongst the Sufis, but this is patently incorrect according to the data historically available, but that however by no means diminished the meaning in Urdu….if one goes back far enough, it is suggested that there literally was, one language amongst all of mankind around the world, and terms such as HU seem to identify the very same thing….i large number of ancient religions around the world also use those 2 letters, in that order, and thus the same specific Sound, within the name of their Creator God, and this can be found feom the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda, to the Mayan Hunab Ku, amongst the Egyptians as i said, and also in ancient Ireland where HU was the name of the primal Sky and Creator God! The following links give much etymological information as well as taking it a bit further, enjoy!
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=God&searchmode=none
http://wahiduddin.net/words/name_god.htm
http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/II/II_8.htm
A Note About the WAY of Genghis (Chinggus) Khan