"That person is living whose heart is living, and that heart is living which has wakened to sympathy." Sufi Message Volume 13
A living heart is responsive to all aspects of life, it is reacting, it feels the vibrations of colors, it is touched by music and all things of beauty. Man in his innermost being is seeking for happiness, for beauty, for harmony. By not responding to the beauty and harmony before him, he wastes his life, which is an opportunity for him to experience and to enjoy. The only way of wakening to the life within, which is most beautiful, is first to respond to the beauty outside. If we ignore all this then why have we come and what have we accomplished here on earth?
But if we want the light colors and not the dark colors, we experience only the surface of life. When we accept both the light and the dark colors, we will experience the depth of life. The living heart feels the pain and suffering of other living beings and will try to help all other creatures in need. That is what we hope to do in our spiritual healing circles and of course not only during the ceremony, but every moment of our lives we are able to do so.
But we are not doing anything, we are only instruments. We open ourselves to the Divine Healer and pray to be of service to God and to all of humanity as instruments of the divine Love and Light. The words of Hazrat Inayat Khan on this subject are offered in the text below from the Gathas: Metaphysics 3.2.
Sympathy
“Sympathy is an awakening of the love element which comes on seeing another in the same situation in which one has been at some time in one’s life. A person who has never experienced pain cannot sympathize with those suffering pain. In the same way a person sympathizes with someone whose honor or reputation has been harmed. The one who has no honor or reputation himself would not mind for he does not know what it is and what it is to lose it. A rich person who has lost his money may be laughed at by someone who has never had it. He can sympathize with him who has wealth and lost it. Very often the young imagine they love their mother and think they sympathize with their parents, but they cannot come to the full realization of their love until they reach that situation. Very often people think it cruel and unkind of their friends when they do not receive sympathy from them, but they do not know that to have sympathy does not mean having a warm heart only, but it means having that experience which reminds them of it, making them sympathetic. Sympathy is something more than love and affection, for it is the knowledge of a certain suffering which moves the living heart to sympathy.
That person is living whose heart is living, and that heart is living which has wakened to sympathy. The heart void of sympathy is worse than a rock, for the rock is useful, but the heart void of sympathy produces antipathy. Man is most active physically and mentally, and when his heart is not tuned to sympathy his mental and physical activity takes quite a contrary direction, which leads to inharmony and destruction. No doubt love, affection, or sympathy without wisdom may seem profitless, as for instance, if a person was crying with pain and his sympathetic friend, on hearing his cry, began to weep with him, doubling his pain. Sympathy can only be useful when man does not make the condition of the person with whom he sympathizes worse, but makes things better. The feeling of sympathy must be within, it need not manifest purely as sympathy but as an action to better the condition of the one with whom one has sympathy. There are many attributes found in the human heart which are called divine, but among them there is no greater and better attribute than sympathy, by which man shows in human form God manifested."
Loving greetings from Sattva and Shamsher
