By the late fifties, looking for spiritual salvation while feeling abnormally allergic to the antics of the old biblical God, I found myself dabbling in some sort of private mythology which, in the end, brought me no real spiritual satisfaction. I felt that no matter how high my mind made me believe I was flying, I couldn't escape the pentagonal confines of my senses and the inexorable logic of those very senses told me that what I was really after lay outside the sky-high walls of that finite pentagon. There were of course those flickering moments when I could have sworn that some occult receiver somewhere was catching some very faint vibrations coming from outside the prison walls. If those latest musings of mine were at all relevant to reality - which in time I found they were - then I would have to look for a spiritual expert capable of boring holes in the walls or, better still, someone with first-hand knowledge of what went on outside the walls.

It was in the year 1963 when, finally, a trustworthy friend told me about a sage - Nour Ali Elahi - here, inside, who had 'first-hand knowledge of what went on outside the walls.' His accounts were compatible with what I had heard from some others who also happened to have frequent encounters with Ostad Elahi.

Greatly intrigued, I wondered if that was the opening I had been looking for all those years. My assumption had always been that the sage that would put me on the path of salvation would be free from the need for rooting his wisdom in the old omnipotent God; but the message coming through my friends was loud and clear: it was indeed the old omnipotent God Himself who was at the root of his wisdom, with all the Biblical and Qoranic prophets besides, and Buddha and Zoroaster to boot, as well as all the saints we knew , and many super-saints we knew not of. There seemed, at the same time, to be no partiality on his part towards any creed; and welcoming Buddha and Zoroaster to the ancient fold of monotheist prophets denoted a fresh interpretation of the old concept of God, since neither of the two had ever been designated as a "monotheist prophet." That was more than a good sign: it was a revolutionary approach. Ostad Elahi was saying that the attainment of genuine spiritual awareness depended on ceasing to see any real difference between the different religions and truly succeeding in discerning the justness of all prophets and saints. He emphasized that God had only one religion which He dispensed in different guises at different times and the ultimate purpose of that one religion was to answer the four existential questions: where have I come from? Why am I here? What are my duties? And where will I go? That one religion he called "The Path of Truth," insisting all the time that on the Path of Truth there was no difference between genders, races and religions.

It was intriguing indeed to have the chance to be introduced to a spiritual master with such an all-embracing vision, a sage who had, atypically, abandoned a life of ascetic seclusion and opted for an active judicial career in order to test his fresh insights against the turmoil of social living. But it was all alarming at the same time. Filled with my chronic and complicated misgivings, I wasn't sure I could lend myself to such a radically simple vision of the Truth, one with the old omnipotent Creator - albeit a far more magnanimous one - still in charge of everything? Yet I knew I had to go…

A scholar friend took me to a gathering where I could directly ask the Master if he could help me break the expanding cycle of my perplexities - the private constructs, once the source of great joy and satisfaction, no longer giving light for me to find my way.

Ostad Elahi's presence was strangely serene and electric at the same time, his demeanor singularly simple but subtly imposing; his eyes at once gentle and piercing, his smile soothing and yet admonishing; and his music, masterful but not exactly of this world. My trustee friend once called it "spiritual dynamite", and Yehudi Menuhin, who had had the chance to meet Ostad and listen to his music for some half an hour in the late sixties referred to it as "that unforgettable half an hour…"

Yes, Ostad Elahi was also a great musician of an unusual spiritual kind, whose mastery of the sacred tanbour, an ancient Persian lute, was unparalleled by all accounts. And on that particular night he spoke little, but went on playing the tanbour for a long time. Sitting there, mesmerized, I found out that I could not remember the questions I had carefully crafted for the occasion. They had faded away, evaporated. And there I was, light and happy, feeling that I was onto something, sitting before a man who held the key to the mysteries beyond the walls of senses…

When the time came for us to depart, Ostad Elahi had a reassuringly kind word for everyone. "About those two matters you had on your mind" he said, with an ambiguous smile, "forget the first one, and you'll see that the second will soon be cleared". Was he referring to my forgotten questions? I was so tongue-tied that I couldn't put to him even that simple query.

A second, a third and a fourth meeting, and I found that I had no quarrel with God, even the One Who wrestled with Jacob, or the One Who was the real object of worship of the idolater who was bound to know that his wooden idol was made with his own hands; let alone the One who is "our Father in heaven" or the philosopher's faceless 'spirit of the world' or 'life force', or even the truly pure intelligence behind the Big Bang in a primal dimension, an inconceivably supreme consciousness, capable of commanding light to come into being, or simply saying "Be" and seeing to it that it "Is." It suddenly seemed that even a lot of non-believing but prominent scientists were inadvertently invoking that mysterious Cause of all causes when they continually kept referring to evolution as something that wanted to do this or that, seemingly forgetting that if something has the capacity of wanting or deciding it must necessarily be endowed with a degree of intelligence or consciousness, without which nothing could be wanted, no program could be devised, no order could be brought about and no laws could be given. And this whole universe is nothing if not an infinite bundle of laws that have been actualized, but not just by themselves. To actualize your blueprint you have to have a degree of power. Without power, that primordial, pure Intelligence, even after willing, could not execute its program. So it would not be unfair or illogical to say that a willing and powerful Intelligence is behind it all: the Cause of all causes.

It was not long before the gentle prodding of Ostad Elahi made me clearly see how illogical the mule-headed negation of God was. He made me realize that much of the misunderstanding about the concept of God rests on the fact that, throughout millennia, the vagaries of religious institutions have passed for true religion and, to put it mildly, humanity has suffered much harm as a result. My bundle of old allergies, exposed to the radiance of his presence, simply melted away, like a snow ball in the hands of a child. It was his very presence, in conjunction with his music that did the ground work before you knew it; and by the time he began to articulate the matter at hand in characteristically simple words, you were likely to feel that you had gained a new insight into some highly complex reality. And if you indulged your zest for over-probing a problem whose full objective solution lay beyond the orbit of your present understanding, he would simply tell you to wait and work until you were mature enough to thrust your way up into a higher orbit. Regarding the question of all questions - what is the exact meaning of God? - Ostad Elahi would make you understand that the exact meaning of the word God is potentially available to every soul, but to really understand it the soul must fulfill its potential destiny of reaching perfection, the state of God-like omniscience, where the divine particle in the soul reaches its full bloom, attaining total equilibrium and unadulterated freedom.

In Ostad Elahi's vocabulary the long and arduous course that leads the soul to freedom is called the "Path of Perfection" and one essential tool recommended by Ostad Elahi for the attainment of perfection is an increasingly concentrated attention on the divine presence. In concentrating your attention on God, you would be offering to him your concrete prayers, whether you would also be uttering certain words or not. Such attention would feed one's faith, which is another essential tool on the path, and such faith would, in turn, broaden the scope of one's attention. Faith and attention, the twin gifts of the soul, when awakened, mutually enhance each other. But Ostad Elahi also maintains that it is willpower that is the key that gives access to all levels of spirituality.