Commentary on
The Iron Rules

by Pir Zia Inayat Khan

Iron Rule 6

The next of the Iron Rules is: My conscientious self, do not reproach others, making them firm in their faults. There’s a very beautiful and enlightening passage from Murshid on this subject in the Volume called “Sufi Teachings” under the chapter heading “Overlooking,” which is given here with its Persian cognate, except that the original word is mistransliterated. It should be dar-guzar.

“There is a tendency which manifests itself and grows in a person who is advancing spiritually, and that tendency is overlooking. At times this tendency might appear as negligence, but in reality negligence is not necessarily overlooking, negligence most often is not looking. Overlooking may be called in other words rising beyond things: one has to rise in order to overlook; the one who stands beneath life could not overlook, even if she wanted to. Overlooking is a manner of graciousness; it is looking, and at the same time not looking; it is seeing and not taking notice of what is seen; it is being hurt or harmed or disturbed by something and yet not minding it. It is an attribute of nobleness of nature; it is a sign of souls who are attuned to a higher key.

One may ask ‘is it practical?’ I may not be able to say that it is always practical, but I mean it all the same, for in the end the one who overlooks will also realize the practicality of it. Maybe he will realize it in the long run after he has met with a great many disadvantages of it. Nevertheless, all is well which ends well.

Very often, overlooking costs less than taking notice of something that could well be overlooked. In life there are things which matter and there are things which do not matter. As one advances through life one finds there are many things that do not matter, and one could just as well overlook them. The one who, on a journey which takes all his life to accomplish, will take notice of everything that comes his way will waste his time. While climbing the mountain of life, the purpose of which is to reach the top, if a person troubles about everything that comes along, she will perhaps never be able to reach the top; she will always be troubling about things at the bottom. No soul, realizing that life on this earth is only four days long, would trouble about little things. She will trouble about things which really matter. In his strife with little things a person loses the opportunity of accomplishing great things in life. When one troubles about small things, one is small; the soul who thinks of great things, is great.

Overlooking is the first lesson of forgiveness. This tendency springs from love and sympathy; for of whom one hates, one notices every little fault; but of whom one loves one naturally overlooks the faults, and very often one tries to turn the faults into merits. Life has endless things which suggest beauty, and numberless things which suggest ugliness. There is no end to the merits and no end to the faults, and according to one’s evolution is one’s outlook on life.

The higher one has risen, the wider the horizon before one’s sight. It is the tendency to sympathize which brings the desire to overlook, and it is the analytical tendency which weighs and measures and takes good notice of everything. ‘Judge ye not,’ said Christ, ‘lest ye be judged.’ The more one thinks of this lesson, the deeper it goes into one’s heart and what one learns from it is to try and overlook all that does not fit in with one’s own ideas as to how things ought to be in life, until one comes to a stage of realization where the whole of life becomes one sublime vision of the immanence of God.”

There’s an amusing story that’s told in Turkey about a gathering of Sufis. Each Order is represented by its shaykh, and the shaykhs are asked questions. One person asks “What do you do when you see a vice in someone, a bad habit?” The first shaykh answers, “I point it out to the person and admonish them, correct them.” Then the next shaykh answers, “I try to cover it up so that no one will see it.” And the third shaykh answers, “Vice? What vice?”

There’s another story Murshid tells which is the story of a lion cub that became lost on the savannah and separated from its pride of lions. It became separated from its pride in another way as well, which was that as it became lost, it gradually forgot where it had come from and fell in with a herd of sheep. It was adopted by the herd of sheep and spent its life there growing up with the sheep. It began to bleat like a sheep and eat grass and so on. And it became very skittish so if other animals came around, with the rest of the sheep it would run away, even though it had now grown into the form of a very powerful and impressive lion, but it behaved just like a sheep. Then one day it was confronted by a pride of lions and tried to run away with the other sheep but it was surrounded by the lions. It was shaking with fear. The lions didn’t attack it but rather they were amused and disconcerted by its strange behavior and they said “What are you doing? You’re a lion. Why are you acting like this?” “Me? I could not be a lion. I’m not a lion, I’m a lamb.” As much as they tried to point out its lion-like features, it just couldn’t see itself as a lion. So finally they got tired of trying to convince it and they just chased it to the shore of a little pond. There the lion looked in the reflection and saw that it was a lion, and it had an awakening, and all of its behaviors, its self-image, point of view, everything changed immediately.

So that is a story about the human condition: that we are all born as lions, but somehow we fall in with sheep. What does it mean to fall in with sheep? We become impressed with limitation, negative judgments, feelings of incapability, deficiency, inferiority. We are looked upon as sheep and sooner or later we come to accept the validity of that critical glance. We just take it for granted; we internalize the exterior judgment of ourselves. It’s not that any particular person intended to deceive us or confuse us, but rather those who have contributed to this impression in us have themselves been infected by the impression from others. It’s like an infectious disease that is transmitted over and over again, down the generations, through families, through societies. The impression of inferiority, incapacity, harsh negative self-judgment that enfeebles one, that makes one feel ashamed and guilty and unable to possibly manifest the qualities of one’s soul. It’s just the gloom that circulates in the world endlessly, and all of us are receptive to it, all of us have in some ways been tainted by it.

But that is not the only force in the world. If that were the only force, the world would crumble under the weight of its own darkness. But there is another force, the force of illumination, the force of beauty, seen and felt and heard. It’s not that one person represents one and the other person represents the other. To some extent, each one of us is a battleground in which those two forces are in contention. And to the extent that we become overwhelmed by the force of gloom, the acceptance of the illusory judgments that have been forced upon us, to such an extent we are incapable of seeing the good, seeing the beautiful and therefore incapable of seeing it in others. If we cannot see it in ourselves we cannot see it in another. Then we become complicit in the perpetuation of this dark gaze of misjudgment. It’s a vicious cycle that has to be broken decisively, and that’s what this Sufi thought, this chivalrous principle, the Iron Rule is calling us to do. Do not reproach others, making them firm in their faults.

We can see in life that we have become firm in our fault by the repetition of the impression. The more that we hold ourselves to blame for a certain thought, speech or action, the more adamant that vice becomes in ourselves. It is reaffirmed with every guilty feeling, and so we are paralyzed. So, first of all, this principle applies to ourselves. When it says do not reproach others, making them firm in their faults, when one looks upon oneself unsympathetically, not in the truth of the lion that you are but as the lamb that you think you have become, then yourself is an other. In that moment you are not united with yourself, you’re in opposition to yourself, alienated and looking condescendingly, judgmentally from afar. Literally speaking, when we say do not reproach others, it applies equally to the self experienced as other, the self image that is this thing that one takes oneself to be. So do not reproach yourself, blaming yourself for some aspect of yourself that you think is wrong, making that aspect, insofar as it does exist, into an illusionary mode of being, all the more intransigent. The first thing is not to reproach yourself making yourself firm in your faults.

And likewise, in interactions with other people, there’s constantly the tendency to overlook all of the beauty, all of the wonderment, the divine mystery which is pervasive in existence which the one who sees clearly is ecstatically enamored of. But our tendency is to become so convoluted in our thinking that we overlook this glory and see the little minutia of disconcerting, disturbing impressions that are—from the vantage point of the journeyer who’s striving to seek the peak of the mountain—inconsequential in the attainment of life’s purpose. Yet we become so distracted in these nagging problems that we have with people. And of course we have a tendency in our relationships when there are difficult situations to become embittered and resentful and to focus in on that one wrong thing that is presented by that person. But if one looked more and more, one would find that one has a tendency to see the same defects again and again in different people, and one might then realize that the defect is a matter of one’s perception and that it is something in one’s inability to accept oneself. It is a reproach against oneself that is being projected outwardly as a reproach against another, something in which one is not able to come to peace with in oneself.

So if one has a desire, for example, to act aggressively, and if one represses that desire, then one feels resentful of someone who has not similarly controlled that desire. But if you yourself have not repressed it, but clarified it, discovered its divine impulse and released that impulse in a dynamic and constructive manner, then you will never resent someone who is unable to do so, but conversely you will strive in every case to support other people in liberating the impulses which you have been able to liberate in yourself. We know, I think, from our own life experience that when we have felt weighed down by life and incapable and depressed, we have been influenced by the general atmosphere that is critical and skeptical and cynical and unsupportive. And conversely, when we have really thrived in life, when we have grown and blossomed and seen the world with new eyes and developed new capabilities, it has always been in an environment in which someone saw in you something that you could not see in yourself.

Can you remember moments in your life when someone had faith in you, someone had confidence in you? Just recall the tremendous blessing of that experience in your life, that someone’s simple act of faith in you, when you could not even have faith in yourself, enabled you to see yourself in a new light and to do something that you could not otherwise do. So think of how in your own life that infectious negativity was conquered by the positivity, the divine glance of one who trusted you. And even when in the outer world it may have appeared that your life was a shambles, they saw something deeper. Can you do the same for others? Can you look beyond the exterior which may project the image of a life in disarray, where everything is falling apart? Can you look beyond the veils and discover that something is collapsing and has to collapse but there is an essence within that will grow out from the ruin, and can you see that essence clearly, even when that person cannot see it?

It’s a strange feeling to find oneself confronted with someone who is profoundly endowed with the most incredible divine qualities in a unique configuration that is special to that person, and in the presence of that person one sees it so clearly, and one is so touched by it and inspired, and so the one who views the beauty is not merely a philanthropist in that act of recognition, but the one who sees the beauty is himself or herself dynamized by the contact with the beauty in people. It’s inspiring and affirming. Yet paradoxically, ironically, very strangely, that person cannot yet see it themselves. So one finds oneself in this really odd situation, where you see the incredible perfection in a person and that person is just so confused that they’re unable to see it. Then you have to have patience because, of course, there are no words to describe it, you can’t exactly put it across in the clearest terms. But you can just make known, in every possible way, your confidence. You can choose, always, not to get caught up in the details of the negative self image that that person will continuously reproduce, but continue to accept all of the viewpoints and perceptions that that person shares while at the same time overlooking, looking more deeply, looking right into the essence and seeing beyond there the beauty of what is struggling to be born.

As Murshid says, it’s just like the light of the sun, which does not only reveal the surface of an object but reveals its depth; not only reveals its depth but galvanizes what lies within the depth. In other words, one could imagine the beam of light of the sun falling upon a seed, and the first thing the light does is just to reveal the contours of the seed. But then it can penetrate and reveal the inner essence of the seed. Not only does it reveal it to the view of the sun, but it energizes, it bestows its warmth, its magnetism, right into the essence of the seed and the seed thereby begins to sprout and grow and unfold. That is the potential of the glance of intelligent compassion that overlooks the facts of limitation and sees the truth of perception.

One realizes more and more that one took for granted that the whole world is simply composed of information that is representative of a particular mode of being. Instead one sees that it is one’s consciousness of the world that constitutes the world rather than that the world constitutes one’s consciousness. So the consciousness that is illuminated by the love of beauty, the glance of intelligent compassion, remakes the world, not merely by an illusion of projection but by participation in molding the fabric of reality, remaking the world closer to the heart’s desire. There are different forces at play. There’s the force of the regressive tendency which limits things, brings out the differences and the small confines, and there’s the glance which invites growth and renewal and evolution. These two forces have their outlet in our consciousness and it is up to us to make the decision in how we judge ourselves and how we judge others, what force we will represent, what the effect of our life will be in the life of the world.