The Journey Home

– Artwork: Niki Bowers

The Wild Reed’s 2024 Advent series concludes with a third excerpt from Sufism: Transformation of the Heart by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. (To start at the beginning of this series and to learn why I chose this book, click here.)

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Sufism is the ancient wisdom of the heart. Like a stream which goes underground and then reappears, this wisdom is always present in the world, sometimes visible and sometimes hidden. Some great Sufis have been public figures; many have worked in the disguise of ordinary men and women. They belong to God and respond to the need of the time. At the present time in the West there is a need for this path of the heart to be made known, for this ancient tradition to be made accessible.

In our Western world there is a hunger for the wisdom and nourishment that come from the inner world. In dreams, visions, and the silence of longing, the inner journey awakens within us and we are called back “to the root of the root of our own self.” Yet our culture has forgotten the way of the mystic, which is so at variance with the rational and material values that surround us. There appear to be few signposts to guide the traveller, who is so often left stranded, confusing longing with depression, or believing that the desire for God is just an inability to adjust to the “real” world.

In [the twentieth-century], psychology and the many different forms of therapy [arose and] helped us to understand the dynamics of the unconscious. We are beginning to learn about the healing and transformation that can come from within. Psychology is a valuable contemporary science, but the mystic has different intentions from those who seek psychological healing or the resolution of problems. The heart’s desire for union with God activates a process of psychological ego-destruction that is both terrifying and intoxicating, The mystic does not seek ego-fulfillment, but to be lost in the abyss of nothingness. At the same time we need to live a balanced life and not allow the contents of the unconscious to overwhelm us. The Sufi path has explored and documented the psychological and spiritual unfolding that belongs to the journey Home. This wisdom is valuable not only to those who follow the Sufi path, but to others who need to understand the processes of transformation that belong to the mystical journey.

The wayfarer follows love’s call, like the moth drawn to the flame of annihilation. At the same time the Sufi lives an everyday life in the world. We have to learn to live in two worlds, to have both feet firmly on the ground and yet with our head to support the sky. Living in two worlds is an integral part of the Sufi tradition. The subtle balance of inner and outer states, the integration of the spiritual and everyday life, belongs to the wisdom of this path.

. . . Living in both realms – working in the world, having a family, while at the same time realizing the Truth – is a cornerstone of the Sufi path. The inner and outer world, the heart’s secrets and the most ordinary things, combine to create the necessary conditions for the path. The friction between the two worlds wears away the ego, which is unable to contain the seeming contradiction of the endless inner expansion and the limitations of everyday life. The prison of our temporal home contains the key of the heart's freedom. Here lies the secret alchemy of the Sufi path.

The combination of the inner and outer worlds produces a powerful dynamic that helps the wayfarer to realize her true nature. Remembering God in our daily life, we bring the imprint of the soul into the world of time and space. Only within the heart can we contain the most primal pair of opposites, that we are at the same time divine, immortal spirits and temporal creatures. The tension between our divine and human natures produces the longing that burns [and transforms us] us and takes us Home.

Inwardly looking towards God, we learn to live our devotion not as some idealized state, but as a center of stillness and love within the limitations and difficulties of the world. We do not reject God’s creation but rather come to know its deeper purpose, as a reflection of God’s Oneness. When we love God in the midst of the world, amidst our mundane, everyday life, we realize this hidden secret of creation – “in everything there is a sign, a clue to 'God is One.’”*

The way of the Sufi is to contain duality within the oneness of love. We are both separate and united with the Beloved whom we love.

– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Excerpted from Sufism: The Transformation of the Heart
The Golden Sufi Center, 1995
pp. 144-145

* Fakhruddīn Irāqī, Divine Flashes, translated by William Chittick and Peter Lamborn Wilson, p. 126.

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Something special now to mark the conclusion of this series: a 40-minute talk by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee that serves as a very accessible and eloquent introduction to Sufism, the “path of love” that reveals the “secrets of mystical Oneness.” This talk was recorded on October 18, 2009 in Tiburon, California.





See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Held in the Presence of God
• The Act of Surrrender
• The Sufi Way
• Sufism: Way of Love, Tradition of Enlightenment, and Antidote to Fanaticism
• Doris Lessing on the Sufi Way
• Sufism: A Living Twenty-First Century Tradition
• “Joined at the Heart”: Robert Thompson on Christianity and Sufism
• Sufism: A Call to Awaken
• Don’t Go Back to Sleep
• Clarity, Hope, and Courage
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Doris Lessing
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Kabir Helminski
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Inayat Khan
• Inayat Khan and the Heart of Sufism
• Inayat Khan: “There Must Be Balance”
• Inayat Khan on the Art of Selflessness
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
• Prayer of the Week – October 28, 2013
• Neil Douglas-Klotz: Quote of the Day – December 29, 2011
• Birthday Musings
• The Onward Call
• A Sacred Journey, a Pilgrim Path
• In the Footsteps of Spring: Introduction | Part I | II | III | IV | V
• New Horizons
• Advent: Renewing Our Connection to the Sacred
• Advent Questions for These Times of Challenge and Change
• Advent Thoughts
• A Threshold Season
• A New Beginning
• Advent: The Season of Blessed Paradox
• An Advent Prayer
• Advent: A “ChristoPagan” Perspective
• Guidelines for the Advent of a Universal Mysticism: An Introduction | Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
• Active Waiting: A Radical Attitude Toward Life
• Bismillah
• Cultivating Stillness
• Thoughts on Transformation | II | III
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything Is Possible

Opening image: “Serpentine Starlings” by Niki Bowers.

The Act of Surrender

– Artwork: Niki Bowers

The Wild Reed’s 2024 Advent series continues with a second excerpt from Sufism: Transformation of the Heart by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. (For the first installment of this series and an explanation for why I chose this book, click here.)

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We have to make every effort [to renouce the ego], but without [the Beloved’s] grace all our efforts would be useless because we would still be caught in the ego. There comes the time when we have to give up even the desire to progress, even the desire to get closer to Him whom we love. We have to surrender every effort in order to be taken by God to God. In the words of Abu al-Hassan al-Kharaqāni: “He who says he has attained God, has not; while he who says he has been taken to God has indeed attained union with God.”

What we most want we cannot find, but we have to seek with every effort until we surrender. Then in the act of surrender we create an inner space for the Beloved to reveal Himself. We die to our own desire, even the desire for Truth, and then Truth reveals Itself. The eye of the heart opens and we see that there is nothing other than God.

The process of dying is a slow and gradual work. Slowly the ego dies as attachments and conditioning fall away. With each little death a veil falls away and the horizon of the Self expands. After these moments of expansion there is usually a period of contraction as we integrate our new-found awareness, learn to live with a wider perspective. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the focus of our awareness shifts from the ego to the Self. As this happens the rate of expansion, the speed of the journey, intensifies. Faster and faster we flow with the currents of love which carry us Home.

The dissolution of the ego unites us with the Self. What was always present but hidden comes to the surface. The all-knowing and all-seeing Substance within the heart permeates consciousness with its presence. We continue to live our ordinary, everyday life, but we begin to feel that it is included within something greater, something which does not belong to the mind or the personality. When He wills we can have access to this other dimension within us. The ego cannot reach the Self, but once we learn to surrender, the Self can reach us. The ego and the mind instinctively step aside and we are in the presence of what is eternal.

. . . To be surrendered to God is to give oneself into unknowingness, into a space beyond thought or form. His presence then comes into our life in many forms – as a companion, as inner guidance, as a sweetness suddenly felt. And underneath all His manifestations is a deepening communion with what can never be manifest, with an emptiness, a nothingness, “the dark silence in which all lovers lose themselves.”* This silence is the real Home of the mystic, where we inwardly abide with God.

In this inner silence, love reveals its secret potency, an unending expansion of the heart.

– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Excerpted from Sufism: The Transformation of the Heart
The Golden Sufi Center, 1995
pp. 144-145

NEXT:
The Journey Home

* The Blessed John Ruysbroeck, quoted by F. C. Happold in Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology, p. 293.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Held in the Presence of God
• I Surrender to You
• The Sufi Way
• Sufism: Way of Love, Tradition of Enlightenment, and Antidote to Fanaticism
• Doris Lessing on the Sufi Way
• Sufism: A Living Twenty-First Century Tradition
• “Joined at the Heart”: Robert Thompson on Christianity and Sufism
• Sufism: A Call to Awaken
• Don’t Go Back to Sleep
• Clarity, Hope, and Courage
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Doris Lessing
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Kabir Helminski
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Inayat Khan
• Inayat Khan and the Heart of Sufism
• Inayat Khan: “There Must Be Balance”
• Inayat Khan on the Art of Selflessness
• Jesus and the Art of Letting Go
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
• The Soul’s Beloved
• The Gorgeous One
• Resting in the Presence of the Beloved
• A Sacred Journey, a Pilgrim Path
• Finding Balance in the Presence of the Beloved
• Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence
• You Are My Goal, Beloved One
• Be In My Mind, Beloved One
• Your Peace Is With Me, Beloved One
• Beloved and Antlered
• Meeting (and Embodying) the Lover God
• Prayer of the Week – October 28, 2013
• Neil Douglas-Klotz: Quote of the Day – December 29, 2011
• Advent: Renewing Our Connection to the Sacred
• Advent Questions for These Times of Challenge and Change
• Advent Thoughts
• A Threshold Season
• A New Beginning
• Advent: The Season of Blessed Paradox
• An Advent Prayer
• Advent: A “ChristoPagan” Perspective
• Guidelines for the Advent of a Universal Mysticism: An Introduction | Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
• Active Waiting: A Radical Attitude Toward Life
• Bismillah
• Cultivating Stillness
• Thoughts on Transformation | II | III
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything Is Possible

Opening image: “Short Days, Long Shadows” by Niki Bowers.

Held in the Presence of God

– Artwork: Niki Bowers

This Advent I’m reading Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee’s book Sufism: The Transformation of the Heart. Perhaps for some it might seem a strange text to be reading during the Christian liturgical season of Advent. After all, isn’t Sufism the “mystical branch of Islam”?

While it’s true that Sufism has undoubtedly achieved a beautiful, unique, and profound flowering within Islam, its foundational truths have been embodied by women and men from the earliest days of humanity, and it exists today both within and beyond Islam. As expressed in the cultural milieu of Islam, Sufism is known as “classical Sufism,” while outside this milieu the term “universal Sufism” is often used.

I’ve come to recognize and understand Sufism as but one name for that great underground river of mystic thought and experience that wells up in and through all of humanity’s religious and spiritual traditions. This perspective mirrors that of poet and Rumi interpreter Coleman Barks, who notes that the Sufi Way is not religious but instead the “origin and longing inside religiousness.” (1)

Accordingly, Sufism is not a doctrine or a belief system but rather a tradition of enlightenment, a way of life that emphasizes love as the path to an ever-expanding realization of ourselves and our relationship with the Divine Presence, the Beloved One. This transforming and liberating realization takes place within and through our individual and communal journeys and leads us to recognize and celebrate God within all aspects of creation. The mystic, after all, is open to the sacred in all things, and Sufism, as Doris Lessing once wrote, “is always, has ever been, evolutionary in spirit and action.” (2)

For quite some time now I’ve been drawn to the teachings on universal Sufism promulgated by Inayat Khan (1882-1927). In particular, I appreciate Khan's emphasis on God as "the Beloved." He writes, for instance that:

The person who makes God his Beloved, what more does he want? His heart becomes awakened to all the beauty there is within and without. . . . When a person arrives at this realization, then he, so to speak, lives in the presence of God; then to him the different forms and beliefs, faiths and communities do not count. To him God is all-in-all; to him God is everywhere. If he goes to the Christian church or to the synagogue, to the Buddhist temple, to the Hindu shrine, or to the mosque of the Muslim, there is God. In the wilderness, in the forest, in the crowd, everywhere he sees God. (3)

Indeed, it is because of the deep universality of Khan’s life and work that I’ve come to understand myself as a Sufi. That being said, I generally prefer to define my path rather than myself in spiritual terms. Accordingly, I describe my spiritual path as “mystico/prophetic.”

I first encountered this path when reading theologian Albert Nolan’s book, Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom.

Reading the signs of the times, Nolan says, is prophetic work, and such work was integral to Jesus’ spirituality. We know this because Jesus recognized and spoke out against the oppressive assumptions, practices, and structures of the social and religious establishment of his time. He “turned their world upside down,” Nolan reminds us, and “the conflict that this created became so intense that in the end they killed him to keep him quiet.” (4)

Jesus was not only a prophet, however; he was also a mystic, a person who longs to experience oneness with God. Because he was both mystic and prophet, Jesus, says Nolan, was rooted in a “mystico-prophetic spiritual tradition,” one embodied by the Jewish prophets who came before him and which lives on to this day in those whose perspectives and actions provide a powerful example of “prophesy and mysticism forming an inseparable whole.” (5)

Vilayat Inayat Khan, son of Inayat Khan, reminds us that Sufism, like all mystical traditions, seeks first and foremost to awaken us to our oneness with God (6); or, in the words of Marianne Williamson, to align us with the “living light.” (7) Meditation, which involves cultivating stillness, plays an important role in this type of awakening and aligning.

At its deepest level of meaning, Advent is about actively waiting and preparing for one’s awakening to and alignment with the Christic consciousness longing to be birthed in and through our lives. This Christic consciousness is, in the words of Sufi writer Kabir Helminski, “the current of love that runs throughout all life, the unity behind all forms.” (8)

With all this in mind and heart, I hope you will agree wth me that a book about the mystical path of Sufism is indeed appropriate for Advent. The section of Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee’s Sufism: The Transformation of the Heart that I’ll be highlighing in this year’s Wild Reed Advent series focuses on abiding in God, on being “held in the presence of God.”

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Love is the greatest power in the universe. The Sufi path uses the energy of love to cleanse the heart of impurities and turn it back to God. When the heart spins with love it can carry the human being beyond the horizons of the ego to where the mind cannot follow. To quote the Sufi master Bhai Sahib: “We are simple people. But we can turn the heart of a human being so that the human being will go on and on, where nobody can even imagine it.”

Sufism is a science of love, for it understands how to ese this energy to transform the wayfarer and send her Home. The Home we seek is not a place but a state of being in which the heart is aligned with God. The remembrance of the heart is this state of being when the inner awareness of the heart is a part of our conscious life. Reconnected to the source of our own Self, we hear the heart’s continued affirmation that He is Lord. We are held in the presence of God.

We begin the quest with a longing for something we cannot name or place. The pain of the heart’s awakening is the pain of awakening to our own forgetfulness. We begin to remember that we are exiles who have forgotten from whence we came. The heart holds the secrets of our origin, and yet the door of the heart is obscured by the ego and its desires. What we long for is so close and yet unobtainable, as Ibn ’Arabi expresses:

God deposited within man knowledge of all things, then prevented him from perceiving what He had deposited within him. . . . This is one of the divine mysteries which reason denies and considers totally impossible. . . . “We are nearer to him than his jugular vein” (Qur’an 50:16). In spite of this nearness, the person does not perceive and does not know. . . . No one knows what is within himself until it is unveiled instant by instant.

The work of purification, confronting the shadow and the attachments of the ego, prepares us for this “unveiling.” Inner work takes us deep within to the root of the root of our being. Then we can stand on the rock of the Self, without which we would become unbalanced by the slightest glimpse of what is hidden behind the veils of separation.

What stands between the wayfarer and her divine nature is the ego, the “I.” Bayezid Bistami saw his Lord in a dream and asked, “How am I to find you?” He replied, “Leave yourself and come!” The wayfarer’s own self, her personal identity, is the illusion that separates her from her goal. We are the barrier between lover and Beloved. This simple but paradoxical reality is the basis of fana, the annililation of the lover that leads to union with the Beloved: “Listen, riffraff: Do you want it ALL? Then go, go and become NOTHING.”

To become nothing, to “die before you die,” is the only solution to the pain of separation. What we think we are has to be burnt in the pain of longing, destroyed [I would say transformed] in the fire of love. . . . The Sufi path is a journey of self [i.e., ego]-destruction. . . . As long as the ego rules the human being, there can be no lasting experience of the Self. Two cannot live in one heart, either the ego or the Self must go.

The ego has to get out of the way in order for the seeker to realize the truth of love’s union. But it does not want to surrender its position and power, and will fight with all its strength, trickery, and powers of illusion. We need tp persevere and keep the heart’s desire burning, and still it is not enough. Alone we cannot renounce our own self. This is why we need a teacher and a spiritual tradition to hold us while we make this transition. The grace of God that flows through a spiritual tradition breaks the pattern of attachment while holding us Somewhere. We are held in the heart of God as He[/She/They] takes us Home.

– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Excerpted from Sufism: The Transformation of the Heart
The Golden Sufi Center, 1995
pp. 141-143

NEXT:
The Act of Surrender

NOTES
1. Barks, C. Rumi: The Book of Love – Poems of Ecstasy and Longing. Harper San Francisco, 2003.
2. Lessing, Doris. From the preface of Seeker After Truth: A Handbook by Indris Shah. ISF Publishing, 2018.
3. Khan, Inayat. “The Object of the Journey” in The Inner Life. Shambhala, 1997, pp. 10-11.
4-5. Nolan, Albert. Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom. Orbis, 2006, p. 73.
6. Khan, Vilayat Inayat. Awakening: A Sufi Experience. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000, p. 5.
7. Williamson, Marianne. Illuminata: Thoughts, Prayers, Rites of Passage. Random House, 1994, p. 60.
8. Helminski, Kabir Edmund. Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness and the Essential Self. Tarcher Putnam Books, 1992, p. 174.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The Sufi Way
• Sufism: Way of Love, Tradition of Enlightenment, and Antidote to Fanaticism
• Doris Lessing on the Sufi Way
• Sufism: A Living Twenty-First Century Tradition
• “Joined at the Heart”: Robert Thompson on Christianity and Sufism
• Sufism: A Call to Awaken
• Don’t Go Back to Sleep
• Clarity, Hope, and Courage
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Doris Lessing
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Kabir Helminski
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Inayat Khan
• Inayat Khan and the Heart of Sufism
• Inayat Khan: “There Must Be Balance”
• Inayat Khan on the Art of Selflessness
• Jesus and the Art of Letting Go
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
• The Source Is Within You
• Jesus: Mystic and Prophet
• The Mystic Jesus: “A Name for the Unalterable Love That All of Us Share”
• Called to the Field of Compassion to Be Both Prophet and Mystic
• Mysticism and Revolution
• Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence
• Prayer and the Experience of God in an Ever-Unfolding Universe
• Prayer of the Week – October 28, 2013
• Neil Douglas-Klotz: Quote of the Day – December 29, 2011
• Advent: Renewing Our Connection to the Sacred
• Advent Thoughts
• A Threshold Season
• Advent: The Season of Blessed Paradox
• An Advent Prayer
• Advent: A “ChristoPagan” Perspective
• Guidelines for the Advent of a Universal Mysticism: An Introduction | Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
• Active Waiting: A Radical Attitude Toward Life
• Bismillah
• Cultivating Stillness
• A New Beginning
• Thoughts on Transformation | II | III
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything Is Possible

Recommended Off-site Link:
Inayat Khan and Universal Sufism – Filip Holm (Let’s Talk Religion, December 8, 2024).

Opening image: Niki Bowers.

Quote of the Day

As we silently work upon ourselves, the energy of our devotion becomes a point of light within the world. At the present time a map is being unfolded made of the lights of the lovers of God. The purpose of this map is to change the inner energy structure of the planet. In previous ages this energy structure was held by sacred places, stone circles, temples, and cathedrals. In the next stage of our collective evolution it is the hearts of individuals who will hold the cosmic note of the planet. This note can be recognized as a song of joy being born within the hearts of seekers. It is a quality of joy that is being infused into the world. It is the heartbeat of the world and needs to be heard in our cities and towns.

– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Excerpted from The Bond with the Beloved

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Threshold Musings
Quote of the Day – December 29, 2011
The Light Within
The Sufi Way
A Living Twenty-Fist Century Tradition
Clarity, Hope and Courage
Sufism: A Call to Awaken
Keeping the Spark Alive: Conversing with "Modern Mystic" Chuck Lofy
As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything is Possible
In the Garden of Spirituality – Hazrat Inayat
In the Garden of Spirituality – Doris Lessing
The Winged Heart
A Dance of Divine Light
Bismillah
Quote of the Day – November 16, 2011

Recommended Off-site Links:
The Golden Sufi Center
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee's Blog at The Huffington Post

Image: "Theologue" (detail) by Alex Grey.