Nour Ali Elahi—widely known as Ostad Elahi (1895-1974)—was a modern thinker and mystic, a distinguished musician, and heir to an age-old tradition of spirituality. Parallel to his judicial career, he founded a new approach to spirituality that focused more on its essence than its form, and in so doing adopted an experimental method whose outcome he called “the quintessence of all divine religions.”

Ostad Elahi presents a system for the development of the soul on “the path of perfection” in which awareness and experience are acquired through interaction with the material world, enabling the soul to internally establish the preparatory stages for its process of perfection here in this world. This process continues after physical death and requires that the soul return to this world many times over to reach its ultimate destination (i.e., perfection). From Ostad Elahi’s standpoint, perfection is the realization of an individual’s human potentialities one after the other, an objective that is impossible to achieve without self-knowledge.

The soul’s process of perfection entails the acquisition of virtues that, in practice, are dependent on the soul’s assimilation of the truth of divine ethics; that is, the recognition and observance of its own rights and that of others, as well as the performance of their corresponding duties. The two principal tasks of such an undertaking—fighting against the imperious self and helping others—are aptly summarized in the longstanding divine precept: do not want for others that which you do not want for yourself.

Such an approach to perfection cannot materialize, however, unless a “student of the path of perfection” is observant of the other world, remains attentive to the Source, and is intent on attracting divine satisfaction and connecting to the Source in everything that he or she does.

According to Ostad Elahi, then, spirituality is conduct that is not only compatible with reason and science, but is also based on trial and error and the internal interactions within human beings that facilitate the soul’s maturation or perfection.