Zikr

Dr Roza was asking about zikr . I was doing some reading last night. I like to spend nights in Ramadan reading and trying to understand more of what I do not understand.
Mind you I am just a poor and lowly student of sufism and I am not being modest when I say this . I realise there is so much I do not understand nor know enough to expound but what I have experiential knowledge of , I willingly share.

Zikr literally means rememberance. This I have quoted below from Hazrat Inayat Khan my murshid perhaps needs a littel elaboration to help our understanding.I am quite good at simplyfying things and I think the reason is because my limited brain is simple .like when I want to explain medical stuff to laymen I use layman language and nobody is aware that I have actually forgotten a lot of the medical jargon and in my mind what I understand is what I explain to laymen!

So in brief what Hazrat Inayat Khan said is that what we hear from others , or see in writing for that matter has an effect on us, we process it in our brain and then it causes a reaction in our emotions. The reverse is also true, what we feel , we then process in our mind and express as words or speech. Simple isn t it? You do realise of course that we react differently and have different emotions over the same words spoken to us?I rememer seeing a very moving ceremony being performed from teacher to pupils where the teachers walked past the pupils and lit candles held by the puplis. I cried because I was so touched. The man beside me laughed and I asked him why. And he replied, because I was pleased with the ceremony..

Ooops I ve gone off on a different tangent..Next , HIK says, that which comes from within as inspiration , ilham comes involuntarily , ie we can t will it, we can t force it out..these mysterious things that spout out of us from deep within our beings, which is the secret of highly evolved humans...But when we use a wazifah ie a zikr ,usually of the 99 names or some verses from the Quran or prayers taught by the Prophet, then we do it voluntarily and it has an effect on the mind which then has an effect on the heart ..the heart mind you is the portal to all that is Divine.
So when we recite the wazifa, not out of pride but out of our need to be in contact with the divine then what is within the heart , that which is in contact with the Divine will manifest and impinge on our mind and we become aware of it and can act upon it.

Every spoken word is a re-echo of thought, and every thought is the re-echo of an emotion. And, as the activity from within manifests on the surface, so the word spoken takes its reverse process: it is reproduced on the mind, and from the mind it is reproduced on the heart, the factor of feeling. That which comes from within comes involuntarily, and what enters within from without enters voluntarily. Therefore, Wazifa is taught by Sufis as a voluntary production of a certain thing on the mind and in the heart, mind being powerful to produce that which is impressed upon it from within and without, and the heart being a still more powerful factor to produce that with which it is impressed from within and without.
Hazrat Inayat Khan