In talks with Sufi mystics in Pakistan, India and other countries, I had come to realise one curious fact about the way in which they were thinking.
In the first place, your average Sufi who was not a mere imitator of mystics, was deeply concerned about humanity as a whole. Those who were higher up than the average in the invisible hierarchy seemed to have another basic bent of thought. This was that it was necessary for the Sufis, and the Sufis alone could do it, to bridge the gap between the developing cultures of the East and West. Since I had joined their ranks, I, too, had a similar sensation. The reason seems clear enough: there was no other meeting-ground. All the cooperation in politics, in education and economics, between the Orient and Occident, was not bringing the two together at all. And deep down inside of us, most people knew this. We had accepted that there was no meeting-ground in religion: this had been established as early as the time of the Crusades. That there was no deep co-operation in material fields was clear to those who had seen the downfall of one attempt after another to bridge the gap.
Nationalism and independence in the East had not brought about widespread harmony between the firmer ruling countries and the formerly ruled. People had claimed that the granting of independence to the East would be a sort of panacea. All would be well and cordial relations would be bound to return when people were ruled by their own nationals. This had not happened. In some cases the reverse had taken place.
In orthodox philosophy the East and West had taken leave of one another centuries ago. There was no basic unity of ideas at all, partly because, deep down, there was disharmony between peoples of different cultures, different nations. We had diagnosed the problem as due to one disease. When the remedy for the diagnosed ailment was applied, the illness did not cease, was not even ameliorated. The people who thought that the cure lay in granting independence, economic help and so on, refused to look at the instances of the countries in which these measures had not worked. Why? They were too busy looking for other countries to grant independence to. They had no time to see whether they were curing what they though they were curing.
I was no opponent of independence for anyone. But I could see that independence was not enough. As with many other things, the reformation had to start with the individual, had to start from within. The materialists continued to reassure us and themselves that ‘things would shake down’, that as soon as the first wave of patriotic fervour had passed, the East and the West would respect one another, and all would be well. But my travels and talks with people at all levels showed me that people in the Asian countries which had been independent for generations were still not reconciled with the West. What did this mean?
It meant the world was still waiting for a development within humanity which would make humanity one, one body, one heart. Plenty of people said that they had the answer. Nobody, as far as I could see, was applying it.
I had traveled and lived among the Sufis in Asia and Europe, in Africa and India. Sharing their lives and talking to them, becoming a member of their fraternities, I had found a group of people who were as worried about the future of the human race as I was. The difference between this group and those who talked a great deal about it in mass-communications media was, that the Sufis were trying to live that kind of life.
Their trusting me, as a member of another type of community, was to them a practical expression of that actual living of human unity...
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