Translating Spirituality Into Real Life

Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan died on June 17th at the age of 87 (see our online memorial). Lawrence Pintak interviewed Pir Vilayat and wrote this article in 2000.

"The whole quest of Sufism is the search for the hidden secret, the desire to know," says Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan. "But the secret can only be known to us through signs."

Pir Vilayat has been reading those signs for the past eight decades. The eldest son of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, the spiritual master who brought the ancient mystical tradition of Sufism to the West, Pir Vilayat heads the Sufi Order, the Sufi lineage most widely known outside the Middle East and South Asia.

With his snow-white hair and beard and white tunic, he looks every inch the Eastern master come down from the mountaintop.

Yet woven through his esoteric talk of the "Divine Presence," the levels of consciousness, and the interchangeability of the terms "God" and the "Universe," are modern analogies that belie both his appearance and his 82 years.

"The universe as a being is trying to reveal its software through its hardware, and we're not listening," the Paris-based teacher explains.

Interviewing Pir (a religious title which means Master) Vilayat is both enervating and exhausting; his insights pouring forth in an almost non-stop stream of consciousness peppered with illustrations drawn from the works of the great composers, other religions and even physicist David Bohm.

"What we're doing in our practice for one thing is learning to extend our self-image into the cosmic vastness so we are not a discreet entity but somehow we incorporate the totality," Pir Vilayat explains.

"The Hindus, the Buddhists all know that things are not the way they look. So what? Any physicist will tell us that."

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