THE INNER LIFE:
Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan

Hazrat Inayat Khan emphasizes that the spiritual journey aims not just for belief but for the realization of God as a tangible presence, more vivid than imagination. Through love, the Divine—whether seen as Judge, Forgiver, Friend, or Beloved—awakes within the heart. The Sufi path promotes inner transformation, allowing the seeker to live in the presence of the Divine and recognize God in all forms, faiths, and beings. The pursuit of an "inner life"—a direct, personal connection with the Divine—reflects a universal human desire. Mystics across traditions have sought to go beyond external dogma and rituals, striving for a lived experience of divine reality. Hazrat Inayat Khan taught that the goal is to make God a reality, not just a concept. This writing suggests that the most direct way to achieve this is through the Divine Feminine, a principle often overlooked by patriarchal religious structures. From ancient reverence for the Great Mother to the esoteric feminine essence in Sufism and the modern awakening of Kundalini energy, the Divine Feminine embodies the source of creation, the foundation of consciousness, and the catalyst for spiritual rebirth. The modern phenomenon of being "born again of Spirit" or experiencing Kundalini awakening signifies the return of the Divine Feminine, transforming human consciousness and heralding a new era of universal spirituality.

The Object of the Journey

The first and principal thing in the inner life is to establish a relationship with God, making God the object with which we relate ourselves, such as the Creator, Sustainer, Forgiver, Judge, Friend, Father, Mother and Beloved. In every relationship we must place God before us, and become conscious of that relationship so that it will no more remain an imagination; because the first thing a believer does is to imagine. He imagines that God is the Creator, and tries to believe that God is the Sustainer, and he makes an effort to think that God is a Friend, and an attempt to feel that he loves God. But if this imagination is to become a reality, then exactly as one feels for one's earthly beloved sympathy, love and attachment, so one must feel the same for God. However greatly a person may be pious, good or righteous, yet without this his piety or his goodness is not a reality to him.

 The work of the inner life is to make God a reality, so that He is no more an imagination; that this relationship that man has with God may seem to him more real than any other relationship in this world; and when this happens, then all relationships, however near and dear, become less binding. But at the same time, a person does not thus become cold; he becomes more loving. It is the godless man who is cold, impressed by the selfishness and lovelessness of this world, because he partakes of those conditions in which he lives. But the one who is in love with God, the one who has established his relationship with God, his love becomes living; he is no more cold; he fulfills his duties to those related to him in this world much more than does the godless man.

 Now, as to the way in which man establishes this relationship, which is the most desirable to establish with God, what should he imagine? God as Father, as Creator, as Judge, as Forgiver, as Friend, or as Beloved? The answer is, that in every capacity of life we must give God the place that is demanded by the moment.

 When, crushed by the injustice, the coldness of the world, man looks at God, the perfection of Justice, he is no more agitated, his heart is no more disturbed, he consoles himself with the justice of God. He places the just God before him, and by this he learns justice; the sense of justice awakens in his heart, and he sees things in quite a different light.

 When man finds himself in this world motherless or fatherless, then he thinks that there is the mother and father in God; and that, even if he were in the presence of his mother and father, these are only related on the earth. The Motherhood and Fatherhood of God is the only real relationship. The mother and father of the earth only reflect a spark of that motherly and fatherly love which God has in fullness and perfection. Then man finds that God can forgive, as the parents can forgive the child if he was in error; then man feels the goodness, kindness, protection, support, sympathy coming from every side; he learns to feel that it comes from God, the Father-Mother, through all.

 When man pictures God as Forgiver, he finds that there is not only in this world a strict justice, but there is love developed also, there is mercy and compassion, there is that sense of forgiveness; that God is not the servant of law, as is the judge in this world. He is Master of law. He judges when He judges; when He forgives He forgives. He has both powers, He has the power to judge and He has the power to forgive. He is Judge because He does not close His eyes to anything man does; He knows, He weighs, and measures, and He returns what is due to man. And He is Forgiver, because beyond and above His power of justice there is His great power of love and compassion, which is His very being, which is His own nature, and therefore it is more, and in greater proportion, and working with a greater activity than His power of justice. We, the human beings in this world, if there is a spark of goodness or kindness in our hearts, avoid judging people. We prefer forgiving to judging. Forgiving gives us naturally a greater happiness than taking revenge, unless a man is on quite a different path.

 The man who realizes God as a friend is never lonely in the world, neither in this world nor in the hereafter. There is always a friend, a friend in the crowd, a friend in the solitude; or while he is asleep, unconscious of this outer world, and when he is awake and conscious of it. In both cases the friend is there in his thought, in his imagination, in his heart, in his soul.

 And the man who makes God his Beloved, what more does he want? His heart becomes awakened to all the beauty there is within and without. To him all things appeal, everything unfolds itself, and it is beauty to his eyes, because God is all-pervading, in all names and all forms; therefore his Beloved is never absent. How happy therefore is the one whose Beloved is never absent, because the whole tragedy of life is the absence of the beloved; and to one whose Beloved is always there, when he has closed his eyes the Beloved is within, when he has opened his eyes the Beloved is without. His every sense perceives the Beloved; his eyes see Him, his ears hear His voice. When a person arrives at this realization he, so to speak, lives in the presence of God; then to him the different forms and beliefs, faiths and communities do not count. To him God is all-in-all; to him God is everywhere. If he goes to the Christian church, or to the synagogue, to the Buddhist temple, to the Hindu shrine, or to the mosque of the Muslim, there is God. In the wilderness, in the forest, in the crowd, everywhere he sees God.

 This shows that the inner life does not consist in closing the eyes and looking inward. The inner life is to look outwardly and inwardly, and to find one's Beloved everywhere. But God cannot be made a Beloved unless the love element is awakened sufficiently. The one who hates his enemy and loves his friend cannot call God his Beloved, for he does not know God. When love comes to its fullness, then one looks at the friend with affection, on the enemy with forgiveness, on the stranger with sympathy. There is love in all its aspects expressed when love rises to its fullness; and it is the fullness of love which is worth offering to God. It is then that man recognizes in God his Beloved, his Ideal; and by that, although he rises above the narrow affection of this world, he is the one who really knows how to love even his friend. It is the lover of God who knows love when he rises to that stage of the fullness of love.

 The whole imagery of the Sufi literature in the Persian language, written by great poets, such as Rumi, Hafiz, and Jami, is the relationship between man as the lover and God as the Beloved; and when one reads understanding that, and develops in that affection, then one sees what pictures the mystics have made and to what note their heart has been tuned. It is not easy to develop in the heart the love of God, because when one does not see or realize the object of love one cannot love. God must become tangible in order that one may love Him, but once a person has attained to that love he has really entered the journey of the spiritual path.

The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan

The Inner Life and the Divine Feminine: From Sufi Mysticism to the New Millennium's Great Awakening

Introduction

The quest for an "inner life"—a direct, personal relationship with the divine—is the perennial impulse of the human spirit. Mystics of all traditions have sought to move beyond exoteric dogma and ritual to a lived, tangible experience of reality. As the Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan articulated, the goal is to "make God a reality, so that He is no more an imagination"^[1]. This paper contends that the most profound and direct path to this reality is through the Divine Feminine. For millennia, patriarchal religious structures have obscured or marginalized the feminine aspect of divinity, yet she remains the esoteric heart of spiritual experience. From the ancient worship of the Great Mother to the hidden feminine principle in Sufism, and culminating in the modern, global awakening of the Kundalini energy, the Divine Feminine emerges as the source of all creation, the matrix of consciousness, and the very essence of spiritual rebirth. This paper will demonstrate that the contemporary spiritual phenomenon, often described as being "born again of Spirit" or "Kundalini awakening," is the manifest return of the Divine Feminine, who has incarnated to reconfigure human consciousness and usher in a new age of universal spirituality.

The Great Mother: Primordial Consciousness and the Source of Being

Before the rise of patriarchal pantheons, humanity's earliest spiritual impulse was directed towards the Great Mother. From approximately 25,000 B.C., and likely far earlier, humanity worshipped the Divine Feminine as the fertile womb of all creation^[2]. These ancient peoples understood that their own consciousness had "developed infinitely slowly out of nature," and they revered the cosmic intelligence from which they had emerged. The Great Mother was not merely a fertility goddess; she was the totality of existence—sky, earth, and underworld. She was the great pulse of life, the cosmic rhythm manifest in the cycles of the moon, the sun, the seasons, and life itself. As one source notes, "She was the invisible patterning or formations of energy whose intricate and interdependent system of relationships were respected even though they were not understood"^[2].

This primordial understanding of the Divine Feminine as the source of all being is not a relic of the past; it is a foundational truth of human consciousness. The Devi Sukta of the Rigveda declares, in the voice of the Goddess, "I have created all worlds at my will without being urged by any higher Being, and dwell within them"^[3]. The Bahvricha Upanishad echoes this sentiment, stating, "She alone is Atman. Other than Her is untruth, non-self. She is Brahman-Consciousness"^[4]. This identity of the Divine Feminine with ultimate reality, with consciousness itself, is the key to understanding the inner life. To know the inner life is to return to the womb of the Great Mother, the source from which our own consciousness arose.

The Centrality of the Divine Feminine in Sufism

While Islam is often perceived as a patriarchal religion, its esoteric heart, Sufism, reveals a profound reverence for the Divine Feminine. The Sufi poet Rumi famously wrote, "Woman is the radiance of God; she is not your beloved. She is the Creator—you could say that she is not created"^[5]. This is not mere poetic flourish; it is a statement of deep metaphysical truth. Sufism understands that the soul itself is feminine, and that woman is the locus of the continuous theophany of the Divine in the world. As the scholar Laurence Galian notes, for many Sufis, Allah is ultimately understood as "the feminine form of the ultimate reality"^[5].

This hidden feminine principle is encoded in the most sacred symbols of Islam. The Ka'ba in Makkah, the focal point of Muslim prayer, houses the Black Stone, whose setting is in the form of a yoni, the feminine principle of generation^[5]. The stone was once served by the Beni Shaybah, the "Sons of the Old Woman," and the word Ka'ba itself is etymologically close to the word for a woman's breast^[5]. The mihrab, the niche in a mosque that indicates the direction of Makkah, is understood by Sufis as a symbol of the "transcendent vagina of the female aspect of divinity"^[5]. For the Sufi, the journey to God is a journey into the heart of the Beloved, a journey into the feminine essence of the Divine. As Hazrat Inayat Khan explains, the ultimate stage of the inner life is to make God the Beloved, to see the Beloved within and without, in all things^[1]. This is the path of the Divine Feminine.

Spiritual Rebirth: Kundalini Awakening and Being "Born Again of Spirit"

The Christian concept of being "born again of Spirit" and the Eastern concept of Kundalini awakening are two expressions of the same fundamental reality: spiritual rebirth is a process of birth from the Divine Mother. Jesus told Nicodemus, "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God" (John 3:3). This is not a metaphor for a change of belief; it is a description of a tangible, transformative event. It is the awakening of a new consciousness, a birth "from above." This birth requires a mother, and that Mother is the Holy Spirit, the Divine Feminine aspect of the Godhead. As the New Millennium Religion article states, this is the incarnation of the Divine Feminine, known across traditions as the Holy Spirit, Ruh, or Adi Shakti^[6].

This spiritual birth is accompanied by a verifiable, physical experience: the rising of the Kundalini energy, which culminates in the feeling of a "Cool Breeze" on top of the head and on the hands. This is the tangible proof of one's connection to the Divine. This is the baptism by the Holy Spirit, the direct experience of the Divine Feminine. As Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, the modern incarnation of the Divine Feminine, has stated, her mission is to grant humanity "the Kingdom of Heaven, the joy, the bliss, that your Father wants to bestow upon you"^[2]. This is not a promise of a future reward; it is the offer of a present reality, a direct, experiential transformation of consciousness.

The New Millennium Religion: The Return of the Divine Feminine

The convergence of ancient prophecy, mystical experience, and contemporary global trends points to a profound shift in the spiritual landscape of humanity. As the futurist Gerald Celente predicted, a new global religion is emerging, one that will "rival Christianity or Islam in its scale and historical impact"^[6]. This new religion is not another "ism" or a new set of dogmas. It is the universal religion of the Spirit, the direct, personal experience of the Divine Feminine. The incarnation of Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi as the Paraclete, the Comforter promised by Jesus, is the fulfillment of eschatological prophecies from all major world religions^[6].

This new religion is based on a five-fold framework of evidence: scriptural consistency, experiential verification, prophetic fulfillment, phenomenological manifestations, and global social impact^[6]. It is a religion of direct experience, not blind faith. It is a religion of unity, not division. It is a religion of transformation, not stagnation. The old, patriarchal structures are dying, and a new era of collective enlightenment is dawning. The Divine Feminine has returned to reconfigure our minds, to awaken our spirits, and to lead us into the "Age to Come" of Awakening.

Conclusion

The inner life is not a matter of intellectual assent or emotional piety; it is a radical transformation of consciousness, a rebirth into a new dimension of being. This paper has argued that the most direct and authentic path to this transformation is through the Divine Feminine. From the primordial worship of the Great Mother to the esoteric heart of Sufism, and culminating in the modern, global awakening of the Kundalini, the Divine Feminine has been the constant, though often hidden, source of spiritual life. The new millennium has brought with it a new revelation, a new dispensation: the universal awakening of the Divine Feminine within each human being. This is the new religion, the religion of the inner life, the religion of the Spirit. It is the fulfillment of all that has come before, and the dawn of a new age for humanity.

References

[1] Khan, Hazrat Inayat. "The Inner Life." The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan. Provided in user prompt.
[2] "The Great Mother." Adishakti. Accessed October 16, 2025.
[3] Devi Sukta, Rigveda 10.125.8. Quoted in "The Great Mother." Adishakti. Accessed October 16, 2025.
[4] Bahvricha Upanishad 1.5. Quoted in "The Great Mother." Adishakti. Accessed October 16, 2025.
[5] Galian, Laurence. "The Centrality of the Divine Feminine in Sufism." Adishakti. Accessed October 16, 2025.
[6] "New Millennium Religion Ushered by the Divine Feminine." Adishakti. Accessed October 16, 2025.