Book Description

People are everywhere to do found, but where is none to find a human being? Individuality is a given, says Hazrat Inayat Khan, but personality must be discovered and created. In a realized personality, the soul expresses its divine inheritance through its thoughts, words, and actions. Hazrat explains, "Personality is the development of individuality, and in personality, which is formed by character-building, is born that spirit which is the rebirth of the soul." Character building is described as the very substance of Sufism. The first two books in this volume, "Character Building" and "The Art of Personality," together delineate a series of capacities of mind and heart that, when carefully contemplated and conscientiously enacted, ripen and refine an individual's nature. The next book, "Moral Culture," contains three sections-on reciprocity, beneficence, and renunciation-that correspond to stages traditionally designated as the law (shari'at), the path (tariqat), and the truth (haqiqat). By extension, these sections correspond to the contemplative stages that Hazrat names concentration, contemplation, and meditation. The last three books consist of previously uncollected lectures on various subjects related to personality, art, and aesthetics. "Consciousness and Personality" includes talks on beauty, influence, innocence, dreams, the shadow, and human destiny. "Art and the Artist" presents Hazrat's teachings on art and nature, copying and improving, observation and illusion, symbolism, art and religion. The find book is "The Art of Music," which contains sections on Indian music, composition, dance, harmony, and music as a divine art. For Hazrat, art in all of its forms is the creative manifestation of the unfurling of the human personality: art completes nature. A powerful piece of art our help us see the natural world around us through new eyes. But the most compelling art of all is not found on brightly painted canvases or in the pages of melodious musical scores. It is discovered, instead, in the personality of a person who has attained the momentous epiphany of self-knowledge. Book jacket.