Thursday, August 27, 2015

Soul and Spirit

I meditated today on soul and spirit.  Ten minutes worth.  Wrestled with the meanings, and relaxed to let reason come.   No result.  I “forgot” about it.

Later I went on the web and googled “spirit”, then went on Wikipedia, mentally grimacing as I noticed the comment “you’ve visited this site many times.”  I glanced through the first paragraph, then on to Etymology which I hastened through but then a word caught my eye:  “nafs”.  I wondered why I hadn’t noticed that before, but then blasted onward.  And then, backtracking to another word, listed as being the part where the item was reading “The distinction between soul and spirit also developed in the Abrahamic religions, Arabic nafs opposite ruh”  I thought I knew what a “naf” was but was not sure about a “ruh”. So I looked up “ruh” on the teaching database of Hazrat Inayat Khan.

That led me to a remarkable discovery wherein both he and Pir Vilayat both explain that the soul is like the seed of the rose while the spirit is like its perfume.