Recognizing greatness has been our practice since our winter retreat. We've found this is a practice that helps people move from analysis to synthesis. As important as it is to analyze one's being in order to become aware of one's lacks and shortcomings, it is even more important to work through the concept of greatness to create completion and fulfillment -- becoming the superlative of what has already begun to manifest.
Analysis is the process of dividing a whole thing into pieces, concentrating on each piece to find its part in the whole and its relation to other pieces. Synthesis is the process of bringing pieces together to make a whole.
Analysis applied to sociology finds the differences between people; synthesis finds their commonness. Analysis applied to psychology uses boundaries to distinguish between "their" problems and "my" problems; synthesis reveals that the problems of every person are my own as well. Analysis sees the greatness in specific words or actions; synthesis shows the greatness of a whole being. In general, analysis is about duality while synthesis is about unity. Analysis is done by the mind, synthesis is done by the heart.
A specific use of synthesis is forgiveness. When you have been hurt by another, the other holds a part of you that is then not available to you anymore; it is entangled in the other. When you forgive that person, you get to reclaim that part of yourself that they held and you become even greater than you were before.
When it is difficult to see the greatness in another and especially in oneself, it is a sign that the heart needs to be energized. When the heart is strong, it only sees greatness in everyone and everything, everywhere.
The One Being finds Its fullest manifestation in the human being. In other words, the macrocosm is being expressed in the microcosm of the human being. Seeing life this way, we create the responsibility of growing our being to our fullest potential.
Our experience in the Winter Retreat and our seminars since then is that people become euphoric and glorious in the expresson of the greateness that is already latent in themselves. By becoming aware, naming it, and using the vanity of one's self-conception, the concept of greatness brings forth surprises in oneself that couldn't happen in any other way.
The skill in this practice is to be able to not only name the qualities in oneself that have manifested in a positive form, but to also see the qualities that have manifested in the negative form and be able to apply their positive form. For example, if I have the destructive tendency of criticizing others, I could see my criticism as insight into a detailed perception of others, and I could use this insight in a creative way. Insight and criticism come from the same ability but are applied differently.
What are the practices of synthesis? Seeing greatness in oneself and others; practices of forgiveness, overlooking and forgetting; invoking the divine qualities of the heart; and those practicces that produce unity consciousness.
Quotations from Hazrat Inayat Khan:
"There is a saying of the Sufis that "God slept in the rock, God dreamed in the tree, God became self-conscious in the animal, but God sought Himself and recognized Himself in man."
"That denotes clearly man's main purpose: that whatever be his occupation, whatever may please him, whatever he may admire, there is only one motive, the one motive which is working towards his unfoldment, and that is to feel, "What I have made, how great it is, and how wonderful. How beautiful it is to recognize it, to see it."
"It is that inclination which is working through every soul. Whether a person wants to become spiritual or not, yet unconsciously every soul is striving towards the unfoldment of the soul."
Life is a puzzle of duality. The idea of opposites keeps us in an illusion. Seeing this to be the nature and character of life, the Sufi says that it is not very important to distinguish between two opposites (analysis); what is most important is to recognize that One which is hidden behind it all (synthesis). Naturally when he comes to this realization, the Sufi climbs upward on that ladder which leads him to unity, to the idea of unity which comes through the synthesis of life, by seeing the One in all things and in all beings.
The tendency of the academic study of religion is to find where the differences are. They would be most interested in knowing where Christianity differs from Buddhism and where the Jewish religion differs from Islam. Their interest is in the difference instead of in the synthesis, where we meet.
If we made a synthesis of all the things in the world which we have separated by analysis and called by various names, we could safely and rightly say that all things and beings are made of light, or that all things and beings are the manifestation of the light of intelligence.
Mysticism is a process of learning which is quite contrary to the process by which science is learned. For science is learned by analysis and mysticism by synthesis. If a person who wants to obtain esoteric knowledge breaks things up into bits, he is analyzing them; and as long as he does this he will never come to understand mysticism.
In psychology two things are needed: analysis and synthesis; and when through a better understanding of psychology one has accustomed oneself to synthesize as well as to analyze, then one prepares oneself to synthesize only, which leads to a fuller understanding of esotericism. Therefore the acquisition of mystical knowledge is quite different from the study of science.