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Identify with what you are not -

The third field of mental purification is to identify oneself with what one is not. By this one purifies one's mind from impressions of one's own false identity.

I will give as an example the story of a sage in India. The story begins by saying that a young man in his youth asked his mother, who was a peasant-woman living in a village, "What is the best occupation, mother?" And the mother said, "I do not know son, except that those who searched after the highest in life went in search of God." "Then where must I go, mother?" he asked. She answered, "I do not know whether it is practical or not, but they say in the solitude, in the forest." So he went there for a long time and lived a life of patience and solitude. And once or twice in between he came to see his mother. Sometimes his patience was exhausted, his heart broken.

Sometimes he was disappointed in not funding God. And each time the mother sent him back with stronger advice. At the third visit he said, "Now I have been there a long time." "Yes," said his mother, "now I think you are ready to go to a teacher."

So he went to see a teacher. And there were many pupils learning under that teacher. Every pupil had a little room to himself for meditation, and this pupil also was told to go into a certain room to meditate. The teacher asked, "Is there anything you love in the world?" This young man having been away from home since childhood, having not seen anything of the world, could think of no one he knew, except of the little cow that was in his house. He said, "I love the cow in our house." The teacher said, "Then think of the cow in your meditation."

All the other pupils came and went, and sat in their room for fifteen minutes for a little meditation; then they got tired and went away; but this young man remained sitting there from the time the teacher had told him. After some time the teacher asked, "Where is he?" The other pupils answered, "We don't know. He must be in his room." They went to look for him; the door was closed and there was no answer.

The teacher went himself and opened the door and there he saw the pupil sitting in meditation, fully absorbed in it. And when the teacher called him by name, he answered in the sound of the cow. The teacher said, "Come out." He answered, "My horns are too large to pass through the door." Then the teacher said to his pupils, "Look, this is the living example of meditation. You are meditating on God and you do not know where God is, but he is meditating on the cow and he has become the cow; he has lost his identity. He has identified himself with the object on which he meditates."

All the difficulty in our life is that we cannot come out of a false conception.

I will give another example. Once I was trying to help a person who was ill, who had had rheumatism for twenty years. This woman was in bed; she could not move her joints. I came to her and told her, "Now you will do this and I will come again in two weeks' time." And when after two weeks I came, she had already begun to move her joints. And I said, "In six weeks I will come back." And in six weeks she got up from bed and had still greater hope of being cured. Nevertheless her patience was not so great as it ought to have been.

One day she was lying in bed and thought, "Can I ever be cured?" The moment she had that thought she went back to the same condition; because her soul had identified itself with a sick person. For her to see her own well-being was impossible, she could not imagine that she would ever be quite well; she could not believe her eyes that her joints were moving; she could not believe it.

People can be well in their bodies but not in their minds. Very often they hold on to an illness which they could get rid of. And the same thing happens with misery. People who are conscious of misery attract miseries. They are their own misery. It is not that misfortune is interested in them, but that they are interested in misfortune. Misfortune does not choose people; people choose misfortune. They hold that thought and that thought becomes their own. When a person is convinced that he is going downward, he goes downward; his thought is helping him to sink.

Therefore the third aspect of mental purification is to be able to identify oneself with something else. The Sufis have their own way of teaching it. Very often one holds the idea of one's spiritual teacher; and with that idea one gains the knowledge and inspiration and power that the spiritual teacher has. It is just like a heritage.

The man who cannot concentrate so much as to forget himself and go deep into the subject on which he concentrates, will not succeed in mastering concentration.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

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