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Hazrat Inayat Khan – The Art of Being and Becoming

For every soul there are four stages to pass through in order to come to the culmination of the ego, which means to reach the stage of the rose.

• In the first stage a person is rough, thoughtless and inconsiderate.  He is interested in what he wants and in what he likes; as such he is naturally blind to the needs and wants of others.

•  In the second stage a person is decent and good as long as his interests are concerned.  As long as he can get his wish fulfilled he is pleasant and kind and good and harmonious, but if he cannot have his way, then he becomes rough and crude and changes completely. 

• There is a third stage, when someone is more concerned with another person’s wish and desire and less with himself, when his whole heart is seeking for what he can do for another.  In his thought the other person comes first and he come afterwards.  That is the beginning of turning into a rose.  It is only a rosebud, but then in the fourth stage this rosebud blooms in the person who entirely forgets himself in doing kind deeds for others.

In Sufi terms the crushing of the ego is called nafs kushi  How do we grind it?  We grind it by sometimes taking ourselves to task.

 When the self says ‘Oh no.  I must not be treated like this’, then we say ‘What does it matter?’

 When the self says ‘He ought to have done this; she ought to have said that’ we say ‘What does it matter, either this way or that way? Every person is what he is; you cannot change him, but you can change yourself’.

That is the grinding