Commentary on
The Iron Rules

by Pir Zia Inayat Khan

Iron Rule 4


We are continuing our work with the path of chivalry and continuing to work with the Iron Rules, and we come now to the next rule: My conscientious self, do not boast of your good deeds. It’s important to continue to remind ourselves first of all that the best of guides on the path of moral culture is your own conscience. There is no other authority. All of the sources of authority that exist in the world, the revelations, the scriptures, the teachings of the prophets, saints and masters are just like mirrors held up before your conscience, which allow your conscience to perceive its own truest ideals more clearly. But insofar as any teaching contradicts your conscience, then to practice it is to put yourself in conflict with yourself. The reason we adhere to a particular scripture is because we can see in our heart of hearts that it resonates with the true guidance that comes from within. Otherwise how would we distinguish between true scriptures and false scriptures, between that which is divinely revealed and that which is a deception? There is only one source of guidance, and that is one’s inner compass. It’s not to say that we should be so self-willed that we make the ego the arbiter of every decision and close our ears to the good guidance of the illuminated beings who have spent lifetimes in the practice of polishing the ego. What it means is that, if we are given from the spiritual hierarchy a teaching that does not yet resonate with our inner guidance, then the task before us is not to obediently submit, all the while inwardly experiencing conflict and resentment and shame. In fact, the consequence of burdening oneself with a spiritual practice that is not ultimately a joy, is a sense of resentment that one finds in one who outwardly is very pious and observant of all kinds of prescriptions and rituals and formal demands but does so not joyously but out of a sense of obligation and therefore resents those who have not submitted to the same routine.

That is one of the drives behind the persuasive tendency in which the righteous one tries to persuade the other. So often that is motivated by the feeling “Poor me, I have sacrificed and I have made myself submit to this regimen which ultimately is against my nature, and so the least that you could do is to do the same.” That is what is at the root of the spiritual vanity of proselytization. But we are at peace with our moral choice, although it is perhaps not what is most comfortable and convenient, in fact certainly not what is most comfortable and convenient, and yet it is what, when we look inwardly, we cannot deny in all good conscience to be the best of our understanding of the highest code of comportment. When we are practicing in this way, then there is no longer a heaviness, a sense of sacrifice and obligation, but one feels that having clearly analyzed all of the various options before me, I have profoundly come to the conclusion that this is the best of all choices that I may make. When one follows a principle with that spirit, it is charged with tremendous power, and that is the force of will power that is behind it. It’s not a will that has been cowed and harassed into compliance, but a will that fully invests itself in a project and therefore succeeds with tremendous results. So each time that you take up a principle, you have to apply the litmus test of your conscience because no one is asking this of you but yourself.

You are here because you have brought yourself here and the teachings are given for you to hold up to the light of your conscience and to examine the reasons for and against fulfilling them in your life. It’s also important to remember that when one receives a prescription that is given in the negative, “do not, do not,” in the form of the ten commandments and in fact in the form of so many of these rules, do not do such and such, it is a countervailing challenge to some ingrained habits which are, generally speaking, destructive habits. However, it is very important to remember that every habit is rooted in an impulse and every impulse is rooted in a divine desire. So to simply pursue the negative implications of a habit without appreciating and respecting the divine desire that is its essence is unnecessarily negative. Even if one succeeds in managing that bad habit by repressing it, by subverting the impulse that sought expression, that impulse will seek another expression, perhaps more destructive. In each case one has to look at the shadow and the light. What is the distortion in this habit, what is the destructive element wherein the impulse itself is unfulfilled because of the channel that it has pursued? But at the same time, look at the impulse that is following the wrong channel and see how it is in need of affirmation and how it can more properly be achieved constructively.

Today the principle is Do not boast of your good deeds, and a key word is “boast”. Just pause and think what does boasting mean? To begin, I would like to bring our attention back to an important chapter from “Creating the Person” on vanity: “The whole manifestation is the expression of that spirit of the logos which is called, in Sufi terms, kibriyya. Through every being this spirit manifests in the form of vanity, pride or conceit. Had it not been for this spirit working in every being as the central theme of life, no good or bad would have existed in the world; nor would there have been great or small. All virtues and every evil, is the offspring of this spirit. The art of personality is to cut the rough edges of this spirit of vanity which hurt and disturb those one meets in life. The person who talks of ‘I’, as many times as he talks about it, so much more he disturbs the mind of his listeners. Vanity expressed in rigidity is called pride, and when it is expressed nicely it is termed vanity. Often people are trained in politeness and they are taught a polished language and manner. Yet if there be this spirit of vanity pronounced, in spite of all good manners and beautiful language, it creeps up and sounds itself in a person’s thought, speech or action, calling aloud ‘I am, I am.’ If a person be speechless, her vanity will leap out from her expression, from her glance. It is something which is the hardest thing to suppress and to control. The struggle in the life of adepts is not so great with passions or emotions, which sooner or later, by more or less effort, can be controlled. But with vanity, it is always growing. If one cuts down its stem, then one lives no more. For it is the very self. It is the I, the ego, the soul or God within. It cannot be denied its existence. But only struggling with it beautifies it more and more, and makes more tolerable, that which in its crude form is intolerable. Vanity may be likened to a magic plant. If one saw it in the garden growing as a thorny plant, and if one cut it off, it would grow in another place in the same garden as a tree of fruits. And when one cuts it away in another place in the same garden, it will spring up as a plant of fragrant roses. It exists just the same, but in a more beautiful form, and would give happiness to those who touch it. The art of personality, therefore, does not teach us to root out the seed of vanity, which cannot be rooted out as long as one lives. But its crude, outer garb may be destroyed, that after dying several deaths, it might manifest as the plant of desire.”

So how do we apply these teachings to the principle Do not boast of your good deeds? First of all, it is perhaps the common experience of all of us that we find some people in the world very difficult to deal with, and rather off-putting, and the presence of other people is much more comfortable and easy. If one looks into the difference, in many cases the difference will be found in the hard edges of the ego of those whom one feels a natural desire to recoil from. It is in the presence of those who seem intoxicated by themselves, constantly concerned only with their own interest, their own agenda, and speak incessantly of their own good qualities, always defending and justifying themselves and promoting their own point of view and their own interest. In the presence of such a person it’s hard to feel completely comfortable. One feels one’s own vanity is snubbed by this larger vanity, this more jagged vanity that is before one.

So one can apply the same principle to oneself, that if one observes that there are those whose vanity has a jarring effect upon oneself, then if one reverses one’s gaze, one can consider in what way one’s own vanity imposes upon others in various situations. And we might find that we all have a tendency, in the intoxication of the moment, to lose ourselves in our own interests to such an extent that we have little regard for the concerns and cares of those around us. We are caught up in the events of our life which another just cannot share because that person has not had the same experiences and therefore cannot be so riveted as one is by one’s own personal drama.

In another place in “Creating the Person” Murshid tells a story that’s told in India about a person who was speaking at length, telling all the glorious deeds of the ancestors, and finally, after his ears were completely worn down, the person who was listening said “Enough! I’m bored to hear of my own ancestors. Why should I care to hear of your ancestors?” So the first and simplest level of this principle is just to remember that our personal passions may not be shared by everyone. And the second is, remember the words of Jesus, that we shall be known by our fruits. Sometimes I think that we all have a feeling that we need to justify ourselves, to explain ourselves, to make our argument, to call attention to our good intentions and the self-sacrifices that we have made. We feel that others really should understand us better than they do. We don’t feel properly appreciated. But again the words of Christ call us back to remembering that it’s in our fruits that we will be known, not in our words.

In fact our words may detract from our fruits. The very good deeds that we are rightly proud of, by calling attention to them, by excessively speaking about them, those very good deeds wither and become less appreciable in the eyes of others than if we had just let our deeds speak for themselves. That is a wonderful teaching that is offered among the sages which is, let deeds speak for themselves. Even if it seems in the moment that one is not understood or appreciated, one knows, one trusts that in the universe all accounts are settled sooner or later. One need not struggle so hard to defend oneself and explain oneself and justify oneself.

Finally one may say about this, we might think that in speaking our own praise we are respecting ourselves, affirming ourselves. But however highly we might praise ourselves or our actions, the truth is that that praise utterly pales in comparison to the praise that is actually due to the truth of yourself. But in fixating upon the praise that you think that you are worthy of, you fall from the praised station that is your true position, because in praising yourself you are investing yourself in the image of yourself that you are projecting. The greatness of your being is much greater than you could ever invest in that image. And so the more that you try to invest in that image, the more true greatness you lose because your true greatness is ineffable, it can never be expressed in words. Words only limit it. That true greatness is beyond the image. That true greatness is unspeakably, amazingly powerful, beautiful, unutterably awesome, and every time that we boast of our ego, we rob from that infinitude to feed something very small.