Observations placeholder

Hazrat Inayat Khan – The Art of Being and Becoming

The person who is considered pure minded but who has no experience of the world and who does not know good or evil has no credit.  He is a simpleton, no better than a rock.  A rock does not know what is evil.  The greatness of a man is that he goes through all that which takes away that purity of mind with which man is born and rises through it, not being pushed under but holding to the mind’s original purity, rising above all that pulls him down and keeps him down on the earth.  It is a kind of fight throughout life.  He who has no cause to fight does not know life.  He is perhaps an angelic person, perhaps a pious person, and that we can call him out of respect; but plainly speaking, he is a simpleton.............

Among the many wrong meanings people attach to self denial the one that is most common is that it means denying oneself the pleasures and the happiness that the world can offer.  If practising renunciation as a principle were a good thing, then there would seem to be no purpose behind the whole of creation.  The creation might well never have been manifested if renunciation had been the principle