The Teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan

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We see that emotional people are apt to idealize quickly, but are also apt to cast down the object of their idealization quickly. To keep up an ideal which is living on earth and which is before one's eyes is the hardest thing there is, unless one has such balance that one will never waver and such compassion that one is able at one's own expense to add to the ideal all that it lacks. This is the only way in which one can hold on to a living ideal, otherwise what happens is that one says during the waxing of the ideal, "You are so good, you are so kind, you are so great", and during the waning of the ideal one says, "But you are unjust, you are thoughtless, you are inconsiderate; I am disillusioned. You are not what I expected you to be." It is so natural, and at the same time it is not the ideal which has fallen; the one who has fallen is the one who climbed the ladder of the ideal and went too high, and then he has to come down again till he stands on the same level as before.


 
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