See what appears to be non-existent — the soul. Open your inner eye and the mystery of life will unfold. Just as the owl is blind to the light of the day, we are blind to the spiritual world and are unable to see phenomena that really do exist.

Everything cannot be seen through our eyes, smelled with our nose, heard with our ears, or felt with our skin. We cannot see everything, but it doesn’t mean that these things don’t exist. Can you see the air that you breathe? Can you see the fragrance of a flower? Can you see the wind that makes the trees sway? Say to the embryo in the womb that there is a beautiful world outside; it will not believe you.

When we are alert and connected with the events in our lives, we open the inner eye, which sees things that are not otherwise apparent.

Things we cannot see are often hard to believe. The Sufis go a step further by saying we have difficulty believing things that are right there in front of us. The fish is born in the ocean, lives in the ocean, dies in the ocean, and yet asks, “Where is the ocean?” If we were to take the fish out of the ocean and allow it to watch the ocean from the outside, it would realize it had been in the ocean all the time.

Similarly, we are born in spirit, live in spirit, and die in spirit, yet we persist in asking, “Where is the spirit?” If we could take the soul out of the body, we would realize that we always had the spirit.

We begin to notice and to feel spiritual matters more clearly when we open the inner eye. Then we see the fragrance, not just smell it! Just as a magnifying glass allows us to see things difficult to perceive with the naked eye, so too will our connection to the soul allow much more of ourselves and the universe to be evident.

If we open our inner eye, we will not leave empty-handed when the lotus opens.

(Excerpt from the book, The One Minute Sufi by Azim Jamal.)