Dear Reshad,
To say Goodbye is to say God Be With You – He always is; but this is a reminder that one should be aware of His being with you and so harmonise all your actions with His Wish. In other words, it is a reminder to fide oneself to His Will, so that all personal direction, desire and action is in complete accordance with His plan.
To found a Centre is a part of His plan and if you keep this always in mind, He will make your undertaking easier for you. You have been chosen to do His work for Him; surely this is a great Beneficence bestowed on you. Your part of Gratitude in this case is to see to it that your personal interest is only second to His, that your personal choice is consequent to His, and that our personal impulses are in complete harmony with His – and then easy success and victory is yours. Like all perfect victories should be, it will then be beneficial to Him, to you, and to Vancouver.
Tell the people of Vancouver and Canada, that man, who is the complete image of God, is eternally linked to Him whose image they are in consciousness of this fact, and they were not invented to be a lot of foot-loose and fancy-free robots, unguided, irresponsible, and left to their guise to be tossed about by waves of a fate brought about as a consequence to their own actions, a consequence the control of which has slipped their hands. Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “Woe unto him who suffers himself to be betrayed by fate!” But mankind accepts this fate with its ebb and tide as an opportunity for self-satisfaction as a birth right, without any obligation in return. They forget that all right incorporates an obligation. To bring out this inherent obligation in being Man is your job – a difficult job which can only be resolved by a certain Knowledge which inevitably leads to Love. This is the knowledge of oneself. To know oneself is surely to know Him in whose image one is. For the image and the subject of that image to unite is fulfilment; and complete fulfilment is only possible in Love.
Tell them that if they come to you with reservations, with prejudices, with self-centred and self-protective pettiness and bigotry, it is better for them not to come to you, but to find a suitable confined form and dogma which will placate their self-righteousness. Because, our way is just the opposite of this, whereby we give up the self we have nurtured up to then, for a Universal Truth which is the Matrix of our true self. For those of us who have come on this way with you, we have discovered that ourselves will never again be satisfied, fulfilled, except through that reunion with the Universal Truth. If they want to give themselves up to this joy of realisation, then lead them to come to Him – and this is why “God Speed” to you and “Good-bye!” Know that a part of all of us goes with you wherever you go, together with all our prayers for success in your undertaking, and Love which is mutually His and ours. May He in His all enfolding Compassion lend you Grace and ease your task for you and protect you. God be with you.
Bulent Rauf
29 September, 1973