Spirituality - The Core of All Religions

All religions have some portion of spirituality in them, because without spirituality, you cannot be connected to God. Therefore, it's important for all religions to at least have the basic principles of spirituality. However, spirituality is not a religion itself; a religion is a set of beliefs and there are things that you can do and there are things that you cannot do. Things that you cannot do may not be bad, but you are not allowed to do them. According to some religions, some things are permissible to be practised and the same stuff, according to other religions, is prohibited. A religion is more about dos and don'ts, but a religion works better when spirituality is practised - and only the basic principles of spirituality are practised in all religions. The difference between His Divine Eminence Gohar Shahi's teachings and all other religions is very huge. HDE Gohar Shahi does not propagate any religion and HDE Gohar Shahi has introduced to this world the fullest total spirituality.

There are many things that you are able to do when your souls are spiritualised. When you discover that there are seven souls in you, you are supposed to initiate them, awaken them and enlighten them all - and once they are enlightened, you have access to a lot of celestial facilities. Number one, you feel closer to nature. Number two, you have deeper understanding of the creation of the universe. Then, you will begin to have the knowhow of the future and you will understand the purpose of your presence on Earth. Then, you will begin to know who are you and what are you. Are you a body or are you a soul? And do you have any power? What is it that you can do and what is it that you cannot do? For example, in any martial art, like judo, karate, taekwondo or kickboxing, when you have gotten a black belt or expertise in any field, you have some confidence in you. You become a little brave because you know what you are capable of. There are many things you begin to do because you have confidence in you. In normal circumstances you couldn't do what you can do now because you couldn't do what you are capable of now - in a similar way, when your souls are enlightened and you are in contact with God, you speak with God and God replies to you. You are able to see God and see angels and you are not just locked in your body; you are a free bird, you are flying everywhere. You are not just roaming about here and there seeking cosmic energy; you become a cosmic traveller, you travel all around the cosmos. Just one soul in your body, Nafs (Self), can take you all around this cosmos - to the moon, to Mars, to the sun, everywhere.

Without spirituality, you are just locked in your body like a dead person in the grave; like a pseudo-claimant of spirituality locked in his church, like a fascist Muslim cleric locked in his robe and sitting on his pulpit, giving a lecture or a sermon without even knowing the real meaning of what he is saying. But when you have become a spiritual person, you can dive in the ocean of divinity, because you yourself are a drop from that ocean. Spirituality is to discover that separated drop - which is you - from the ocean, which is God. Towards the culmination of your spiritual height and peak, you begin to realise, 'I myself am a part of the ocean; I myself am a drop of the ocean.' The name of that ocean is God, divine. The moment you realise who you are, you want to return to your base, you want to return to your origin. That little tiny drop of divinity in you, which after the formulation of creation has become a soul - without spirituality, that one divine drop which has been separated from the main ocean has been covered with a lot of dust: dust of the instinct of a man, dust of the cosmos, dust of the universe, dust of being here around animals, and moreover, dust of the separation from your main ocean. 

When you are separated from the ocean, a tiny drop has no value but when that tiny drop returns to its origin, the ocean, it turns into a mighty wave.  When you have become a spiritual person, you are no more a tiny drop, you turn into a divine wave and wherever you go, you invite all other separated drops to come and mingle in that wave, to have a bigger tide.

Spirituality is not just reality, but very, very glamorous and fascinating. When people begin to admire you, that is glamour, isn't it? Don't think glamour is part of show business only, glamour is originally part of divinity; everybody praises God without knowing the truth. It's all glamour. When you have the power in your hands, it's sunny and you say, 'Rain,' and it rains. When there is a hurricane in the ocean and you say, 'Stop,' and it stops, then you should understand that your drop has now turned into a wave and is part of the ocean; you do not claim you have become God, but you have merged into your basic reality and this is spirituality. In order to embark upon a spiritual journey, it's not the body that will adopt spirituality; it is the souls inside the body. What wakes up and what sleeps is the body. God said in Quran that he doesn't yawn and he doesn't sleep. What about the souls? Even the souls do not yawn; even the souls do not sleep. It is the body that goes to sleep, not the soul. Now, the problem is, you don't differentiate between these two things because you do not know spirituality, you do not know about your souls. When you know yourself, you will come to know that your soul doesn't sleep or yawn. When you eat less, you automatically sleep less. It is the formation of cells in your body. When your muscles get tired, a lot of digestion and synthesis of cells takes place in your body and your body needs rest. But there is no such thing in the soul. The soul is just God's Light and all souls have all attributes of God.  

There are certain characteristics of God that are in your soul, discoverable for you; and there are some other characteristic in your soul which are not discoverable for you - because the key of the name of God will discover many of the attributes of your soul, however it will not discover everything. But the name of Lord Ra Riaz Gohar Shahi will lit up the entire soul and even the most obscure areas in your soul which were not visible under the lantern of God's Name (Ism-e-Dhaat Allah). With the name, 'Ra Riaz,' it will be so lit up that nothing will remain hidden! 

One beautiful thing about spirituality is, you don't have to do anything; you are a sleeping partner. In the West, people think the Seeker of the Path, the follower, the disciple, has to work hard and do this and do that. No! This is not the case. The Spiritual Guide takes the active part; he has to nurture your souls and he does it spiritually. You just do what he asks you to do and he does the rest.  

Now, when your soul travels, it is possible that your mind may not remember it, but even then your mind may have a little bit of understanding and awareness that your soul was going somewhere. It may not have complete knowledge as to where exactly your soul was going or what exactly your soul was doing, but you will definitely feel something has gone out of your body. But then, as the time goes by and you constantly improve in spirituality and the progression of spirituality is really good, there is a point where you begin to know everything. You are sitting idle in your seat or lying idle in your bed and your soul is travelling somewhere and you can see you are going here and there.

In spirituality, the souls are trained. What kind of training does spirituality provide? When you go to a college or university, there are books, you read them with your eyes and your mind endeavors to grasp whatever information is contained by those books and words. So, the impact of that knowledge and learning is only on your brain, only on your mind, nowhere else on the body. But in spirituality, the learning doesn't come by reading books. How do you learn? The divine light enters into your souls and with the divine light, those attributes of God enter into your souls.

The moment these attributes of God become part of your soul, this is how your soul learns. Gradually you are saying, 'Goodbye,' to yourself and, 'Welcome,' to God. A day will come in your life when you will say to yourself. 'I am no more. God has taken place and my souls have adopted the divine nature. My own nature diminished.' When your soul has absorbed all the divine characteristics, all the divine attributes, then you become an embodiment of God on Earth.

Some people are so blind by their inner eye that they cannot see Jesus as God. But with the teachings of Lord Ra Riaz Gohar Shahi, a common man, upon realisation of the truth, will abruptly say, 'I exist no more.' Who is it then? It's God and he doesn't have to make this announcement that he has become God; people will see he doesn't behave the way he used to behave. 'Why is he so kind, why is he so nice to everybody?'

When you are a man, you are kind to certain people; you are generous to certain people. Everybody is generous here, but as a human being you are nice and kind to certain people and you make sacrifices for certain people. Day and night you make sacrifices; wives make sacrifices for their husbands and husbands make sacrifices for their wives. Little or big, a sacrifice is a sacrifice. For example, the husband is really tired and the wife is really tired but the wife loves the husband and gives him a massage for half an hour; so she is sacrificing 30 minutes of sleep, isn't she? The husband is sitting on his armchair and she is making dinner. If she is doing it, she is making a sacrifice and if the husband is doing it, the husband is making a sacrifice. So this life is full of compromises and sacrifices; however, one must understand the truth that when you are generous to certain people you are a human being. When you are genuinely nice and kind to everybody, that's crazy! Then it should ring bells. It is not possible for a human being to be nice and kind to all. You can try hard, but when you fail you can say, 'I know why, [it's] because I am a human being.' But when you adopt spirituality, one day, you will be nice and kind to everybody; you will be nice to cows, buffalos and dogs. It is easy to be nice to human beings, but it is not easy to be nice to dogs. When you love everybody, when you are kind to everybody, you are not a human being because a human being has both qualities: love and hatred. 

Human beings love those only who are nice to them, human beings love only those people who love them. Human beings cannot love a person who hates them - but God loves all! He is nice to all, kind to all, he is generous to all. When you have the same qualities as God does, then what should we call you - a human being? By definition, no. 

If he has divine characteristics in him, by definition, you can call him God because he has the abilities, capabilities and characteristics of God. And this is the purpose of life: to live like God, to feel like God. That is what spirituality can do to you. This will become part of your character when your souls are enlightened. As a human being, you can love and hate; but God cannot hate. When you see that somebody manifests these attributes of God, then that man looks like a man but he is not a man!  

The Seventh Soul 

It is because of this seventh soul that you are inclined to do bad things; it is because of this soul that you are inclined to hate people. Whoever becomes obedient to this soul becomes a complete devil. Why the world is torn apart? There are no moral values exercised or practised anymore in this world. It's because people have forgotten that they are supposed to tame and purify the seventh soul in their body. They are trying to diminish the negative characteristics in them, however they do not know where is the centre of negativity, what possibly could be the solution and how to take care of this negativity. It is the seventh soul in the body which is responsible for staining the character of a man.  

There is one great Sufi in the subcontinent of India, Bulleh Shah. He said, 'It is the seventh soul because of which my entire Self has become impure, otherwise in the Primordial Time, when I was not in the company of this soul, I was pure. It is because of the presence of this soul in the body that I have become impure.'

Now with the help of spirituality, you can remove this impurity from your seventh soul. You can tame it and you can only tame it when you know how to change its diet.  Most of the diseases that people have today are because of an imbalanced diet. You are what you eat. If you eat a lot of fatty acids, a lot of monosaturated and saturated fats, you develop cholesterol in your body. If you eat a lot of carbohydrate and your spleen is not working properly, it will start malfunctioning and you will become diabetic one day. So what you are consuming will depend on your health. It's the diet. In a similar way, there is something wrong with the diet of the seventh soul. That seventh soul is living on negative attributes, negative fire. There is a counter energy that exists in this world: Divine Energy and Evil Energy. That seventh soul, by itself - you do not even know - lives on Evil Energy and the more wrong you do, the stronger your seventh soul becomes.  Now, in order to change, in order to tame it, in order to purify it, you need to change its diet. You need to stop giving the seventh soul Evil Energy and replace it with Divine Energy. But, you can't do it. How do you do it? When you adopt spirituality, the Spiritual Guide with his authority, power and discerning, will make a circle around the seventh soul. This circle is like a lock, nothing will enter in that circle without the permission of the Spiritual Guide. The purpose of making this circle around your seventh soul is to keep away all the Evil Energy and when the Evil Energy is kept off, the Spiritual Guide will start giving this seventh soul Divine Energy. Divine Energy will incur in this seventh soul the divine attributes. When the seventh soul has stopped taking any amount of Evil Energy and now it has been replaced with Divine Energy, in no time the process of purification will start. The more Divine Energy enters into it, the more divine attributes will manifest through your character. One day, when all the Evil Energy is taken out from this seventh soul and it is filled with Divine Energy, you will no longer hate anybody, you will no longer think badly of anybody. The seventh soul will adopt Divine Energy and a divine character.  

When the baby is born, the angels insert six souls into the baby and these souls are transported from the Celestial Realm. At the same time, the devil inserts a soul in the body, the seventh one: his representative inside every human being's body. The trouble started when God decided to upgrade humanity. God had already created human beings and these human beings that he created didn't know love and they were not generous. They promoted hatred and they were involved in butchery, massacre; they were irrational, illogical and all sorts of negative vices were there in them. Then God decided to upgrade humanity, therefore, he decided to create a noble human being. He decided to upgrade him and he decided to give him more power, more hunger for adopting divinity and an appetite for goodness. He wanted to give this human being more practical knowledge. But above all, he wanted to give this human being something really special and that specialty was confined to this human being so that he may become able to communicate with God and also be able to see God. Like you see me, and I see you. I can see this table and chair, in a similar way, this human being can see God.

Now, before this, angels were superior to human beings; however, all of a sudden, God decided to upgrade human beings. He said to all the angels, 'Look, I am creating another human being but this time this human being is going to be greater than you are and you must bow your heads before this human being.' All these angels got really surprised and they said, 'How come this human being can be greater than us?' And they said to God, 'O God, haven't you seen these human beings, what they did in the past? They promoted hatred, they carried out bloodshed and you didn't like it, and yet again you're creating a human being. On top of that, you are saying that this human being is going to be greater than us!' The angels were really surprised and taken aback, however, God is God. He said, 'No, you do not know what I am going to teach this human being. If you think you are greater than this human being, tell me, what is the knowledge of my names?' These angels said, 'O God, come on, how would we know what you did not teach us?' God was really persistent, he didn't forget - he said, 'No, you must accept his superiority and you must bow down in respect to this man.' Therefore, he asked all the angels collectively to bow before this man, Adam. They all bowed before this man for except one, and his name was Iblis. He didn't bow and God said to him, 'Why didn't you bow before him?' He said to God, 'You made him with clay and you made me with fire. I am better than him. I am not going to bow before him.' God said, 'I reject you, I reject you, I reject you,' and this is how he was rejected by God. From that day, Iblis had a grudge against man. He didn't like Adam, the new improved version of man, the new Adam. God said, 'When I send Adam on earth, I will manifest through him. He will be in contact with me; he will spread love and peace.' Iblis said, 'Okay, let's see.' This is when all the strife began and subsequent to this, when a man is born into this world, as soon as the angels come down with six souls, Iblis is also there and he inserts into the body of the baby a soul from him, to represent Iblis in him. Obviously, Iblis was made of fire, so this soul is also made of fire. When this soul is inserted in the body of the baby, the baby cries. Its diet is fire, heat and negativity. This is why you will see, the babies do not do any sins, the babies do not know anything bad, but even then you see small babies have jealousy. They have arrogance and they are also stubborn, why? The babies do not know anything, then why do the babies have jealousy? Why are some of the babies stubborn and arrogant? Even brothers and sisters cannot stand the sight of each other. When the parents give more importance to another baby, their brother or sister cry and feel jealous, they have problems. It is because of that negative soul, the presence of the seventh soul in them. So this enmity against humanity, against human beings, started on the first day when God decided to upgrade man to a degree where no angels could reach.

  

Now, the agenda of God that he wants to upgrade you and he gives you knowledge which he didn't impart with to any other progeny of Adam, where is that knowledge? Where is the upgraded version of character in you? If you are still doing the same thing that previous progenies of Adam did, then there is no difference. What was upgraded in you? Why are you better than angels? Because when you are born into this world, you are supposed to seek company of a Spiritual Master/Guide and that Spiritual Master will enlighten your heart. He will give the knowledge of divinity to your heart and revive divinity in you. 

He will take care of the seventh soul. With the help of spirituality, the Spiritual Master will purify the seventh soul and when this soul is purified, it changes forms. This seventh soul initially looks like a dog, but when it goes through the system of purification, this dog transforms into a horse or a bull. When more purification is done, this horse or bull transforms into a goat and in the final stage when the utter purification is achieved, it transforms into a man. Then you become a man. When the seventh soul is purified, it comes out of your body. It looks like you and it takes your shape. You are sleeping in your bed and this soul is out of your body roaming around here and there - and people think it's you. Similarly, all other souls will take your shape after spiritualisation.

You see, the prime object of our presence into this world is to awaken our souls. If I say to you, 'Go to Paris and come back and tell me what Paris is like,' and at the same time I give you local anesthesia and you are unconscious, this would be similar to what God does. He sent you here but at the same time, your souls are dormant. He wants to know how much you miss him and how much you love him, but missing and loving will only come into practice once the souls are awakened. So, if I send you to Paris to tell me what Paris is like and at the same time I give you chloroform or general anesthesia - you are knocked out, you have been taken to Paris and all that time you were sleeping, [when] you came back and I ask you, 'Did you see Paris?' You would say, 'I don't know.' 'What was the highway like?' 'I don't know.' This is what will happen to common people. The questions will be put to the soul, 'Who is your Lord?' The soul was dormant, the soul doesn't know anything. Although people have been going to mosques, churches, synagogues and everything, but that was their body; when they were in the mosques, their souls were sleeping. The soul didn't know what they were doing in the mosque, church, synagogue or temple or any other worship place. When your soul is awakened and the moment it is awakened, it comes to know of reality straight away. Even if the soul was awakened for a minute, this is enough.

But the problem is, people adopt religions but they do not know they are supposed to send these teachings to the soul - because when they leave this world, their bodies will either be cremated or buried in the grave. Whatever you have done in this world, you have done it with your body. But the questions will be put to your soul when you travel to the other world - obviously, not to your body. 

However, when the soul is enlightened and the angels come to collect the souls, when they see an enlightened soul, they develop respect; they don't ask you any questions. If you're driving a Land Cruiser, you have a lot of good clothes and you have a lot of gadgets and everything, people will not think you are a poor man. In a similar way, when your soul is enlightened, the angels will not ask you whether you are a good man or a bad man. When the soul is enlightened and shiny, it is exempted from accountability and questions.

When the soul is enlightened, then you will see many people that you thought were good are not good. When your soul is enlightened, you will only feel good when you are around enlightened people and those who are not enlightened, they will not feel comfortable with you. You see, I don't hide things. I have to say the truth. I am not going to tell you that when you are enlightened, this place will become paradise because it's the total opposite. When you are enlightened, the ugliness of the world will be more exposed to you. You will feel closer to God, you will feel closer to yourself. If you know who you are, that's it, you have gained everything. People do not know who they are. If you don't know who you are, then what is the point of learning? Becoming PHD, becoming Masters in Science and all these things are a total waste. You're a surgeon, you're a doctor, you're an engineer, but you don't know who you are - what a shame!

God said, 'If you know who you are then you know who I am. And only those will find me who know who I am.' This is what he said to Moses. Moses asked him, 'What's your name?' He said, 'I am what I am.' Sometimes I cry when I repeat these words. The progeny of Abraham are the original Jews, (the nation of Moses are not real Jews) the real Jews, and God loves them. When those Jews asked Abraham to ask God what is his name, God said, 'Messiah will come and he will tell you my name. I love you, this is why I do not want to tell you my name; because if I told you my name and you said my name in vain, then it would not be good.' This is part of the Ten Commandments: do not say God's name in vain. For this fear, God did not disclose his name to the primary, fundamental Jews and said, 'Wait until the Messiah comes.' What did God mean when he said, 'I do not want you to take my name in vain'? 'The Messiah will come and he will tell you my name.' When the Messiah comes and tells them God's name, the fear still exists. Even at the time of Messiah, people can say God's name in vain. But that's not the case. What God was trying to tell them was that, 'If you say my name with your tongue and the heart is not with it - your heart doesn't have its source, its light - then taking my name is wasted. But the Messiah will come and he will implant my name in your hearts. Then you say it with your tongue or your heart, it will not be wasted.'

We are in the times of Messiah and we are initiating the hearts of people. Only if they knew what they have gotten today, they would be more grateful than oblivion they are because taking God's name directly into the soul without going through the desert of your mouth, without going through the dirty perimeters of phraseology of your tongue, entering directly into your heart; it's fully secured. There is not even a minute chance that you would say God's name in vain because you are not saying it. You will never say it because when God's name is inserted into the heart, then the heart will vibrate with God's name. The name itself is vibrating. For example if Jesus is inserted the heart will pound with the name of Jesus. God was really merciful upon them, so he decided to give Jews his name only when the Messiah is here and Messiah puts the name of God directly into their hearts, without the fear of taking it in vain. Here you go now, when God's name is in your heart you're just sitting at your laptop, you're not going to any mosque or temple or church. Your soul is getting polished and your heart is getting cleansed. This is beautiful, divine spirituality. You're not doing anything, you are just sitting comfortably. When the tongue says God's name, what do they get out of it? Nothing is being produced, so it's in vain. But when God's name is said in the heart it produces Divine Light.