TERMS STARTING WITH
Sufi, Sufi, Sufiism [from Arab suf wool; sufi he who wears woolen garments] A school of thought that emphasizes the superiority of the soul as opposed to the body. A Sufi wears harsh, raw woolen garments constantly irritating his skin to remind him that the body is the part which prevents the soul from attaining higher goals. The first public pronouncement of mysticism in Moslem lands is attributed to Rabi‘a, who lived in the 1st century of the Hejira (622 AD) and expounded the theory of divine love: God is love, and everything on earth must be sacrificed in order eventually to attain union with God. However even before the time of Mohammed there were two principal schools of Arabic thought: the Meshaiuns (the walkers), who later became the metaphysicians after the appearance of the Koran, and the Ishrachiuns (the contemplators) who became affiliated with the Sufis. The Sufis, in fact, put an esoteric interpretation on the Koran, as well as the collected saying of Mohammed, the Sufi movement representing an infiltration into the rigidity of Islamic doctrine of the pre-Islamic mystical or quasi-occult stream of thought, especially from Persia. Blavatsky states that the Sufis acquired their “proficient knowledge in astrology, medicine, and the esoteric doctrine of the ages” from the descendants of the Magi” (IU 2:306).
Sufi. In the traditional sense a ‘Sufi’ is a person who has attained the state of purity (safa), comparable to the westen notion of ‘saint’. Nowadays the term is also used to denote a member of a sufi organisation or a mureed. In that sense it would be more correct to use the word ‘mutasawwif’ (aspirant sufi) he who is seeking to reach the state of purity.
Sufi ::: lit., wearer of wool or person of the bench; member of a tariqa
Sufi Order was founded (c 900 AD) in the city of Chisht (a small town near Herat, Afghanistan) by Abu Ishaq Shami whose teacher sent him from Syria to spread the Sufi message. The Chishti Order is one of the oldest Sufi orders currently existing, and often makes great use of sound and music in its practices.
Sufism: A classical development of mysticism and a reaction from the legalism and rigidity of orthodox Islam. Being a sect seeking to attain a nearer fellowship with God by scrupulous observation of the religious law, it represents an infiltration into Islam of the Christian-gnostic type of piety with its charismatic and ascetic features. Gained many of its converts from the heterodox Moslems in Persia. -- H.H.
Sufism: A system of Mohammedan mysticism, arising chiefly in Persia. It offers steps toward union with God, as repentance, abstinence, renunciation, poverty, patience, trust. Love is the keynote to the Sufi ethics.
Sufism ::: process of attaining closeness to the Creator through love, which is attained by purification of the nafs; tasawwuf
sufim. Cf. the Zoroastrian Zervan Akarana; the
TERMS ANYWHERE
(1680-1758 AD) Sufi poet and Qawwali, born near Bahawalpur, Pakistan. His message was one of truth, love and compassion. His guide was Hazrat Shah Inayat, a well-known Qadiri Sufi and gardener by profession. Bullah asked his guide, "I
5 chief partsufim who “dwell in the world of
(777-874 AD) Sufi saint and mystic from Bastam in eastern Persia (Iran). A prayer from Bayazid:
Abdul Qādir Jīlāni (1077-1166), the great Islamic scholar and mystic, born in Jīlān (Iran). The Qadiriyya Sufi order was founded upon his teachings.
AD. A student of Sufi master Shahābuddīn Suhrawardī, Sa'dī produced many great works including Bustān and Gulistān.
Ahl al Suffa, Ahle Suffa ::: Sufis during the time of Muhammad (pbuh)
Ahl al Tariqa, Ahle Tariqa ::: People of the path; Sufis
Alam: Arabic for world. In Sufi terminology, the seven cosmic planes called alam are: 1) the lowest one, alam i sugrah, the world of human experience; 2) alam i nasut, the material world of forms and bodies; 3) alam i mithal, the astral world; 4) alam i malakut, the spiritual world; 5) alam i kabrut, the radiant plane of divine splendor; 6) alam i lahut, the exalted divine plane of the first emanation; 7) the highest, alam i hahut, plane of absolute inactual being.
(also see Sufism above)
Amal Sufi practice where the bodily awareness is being erased step by step. This is one of the more advanced practices where the sufi tries to remove the awareness of the ego in order to sink into a condition of higher or universal awareness
angel encountered by the sufi Abu Yazid in the
Asma (Allahi) al Husna (A) The holy names (of Allah). Traditionally there are 99 (beautiful) names of Allah in the Koran. These Asma al Husna are being used within Sufism for recitation as a wazifa (mantram).
Bay’at (A) Initiation (to mureed), in the traditional sufi orders the only initiation, see Khilafat
bayat, biat ::: pledge; promise; initiation into a Sufi order
Begum (bi, by) Dame, lady. In particular Amina Begum (Ora Ray Baker) the wife of Hazrat Inayat Khan is referred to as ‘Begum’ amongst sufis
Sufi, Sufi, Sufiism [from Arab suf wool; sufi he who wears woolen garments] A school of thought that emphasizes the superiority of the soul as opposed to the body. A Sufi wears harsh, raw woolen garments constantly irritating his skin to remind him that the body is the part which prevents the soul from attaining higher goals. The first public pronouncement of mysticism in Moslem lands is attributed to Rabi‘a, who lived in the 1st century of the Hejira (622 AD) and expounded the theory of divine love: God is love, and everything on earth must be sacrificed in order eventually to attain union with God. However even before the time of Mohammed there were two principal schools of Arabic thought: the Meshaiuns (the walkers), who later became the metaphysicians after the appearance of the Koran, and the Ishrachiuns (the contemplators) who became affiliated with the Sufis. The Sufis, in fact, put an esoteric interpretation on the Koran, as well as the collected saying of Mohammed, the Sufi movement representing an infiltration into the rigidity of Islamic doctrine of the pre-Islamic mystical or quasi-occult stream of thought, especially from Persia. Blavatsky states that the Sufis acquired their “proficient knowledge in astrology, medicine, and the esoteric doctrine of the ages” from the descendants of the Magi” (IU 2:306).
Sufi. In the traditional sense a ‘Sufi’ is a person who has attained the state of purity (safa), comparable to the westen notion of ‘saint’. Nowadays the term is also used to denote a member of a sufi organisation or a mureed. In that sense it would be more correct to use the word ‘mutasawwif’ (aspirant sufi) he who is seeking to reach the state of purity.
Sufi ::: lit., wearer of wool or person of the bench; member of a tariqa
Sufi Order was founded (c 900 AD) in the city of Chisht (a small town near Herat, Afghanistan) by Abu Ishaq Shami whose teacher sent him from Syria to spread the Sufi message. The Chishti Order is one of the oldest Sufi orders currently existing, and often makes great use of sound and music in its practices.
Sufism: A classical development of mysticism and a reaction from the legalism and rigidity of orthodox Islam. Being a sect seeking to attain a nearer fellowship with God by scrupulous observation of the religious law, it represents an infiltration into Islam of the Christian-gnostic type of piety with its charismatic and ascetic features. Gained many of its converts from the heterodox Moslems in Persia. -- H.H.
Sufism: A system of Mohammedan mysticism, arising chiefly in Persia. It offers steps toward union with God, as repentance, abstinence, renunciation, poverty, patience, trust. Love is the keynote to the Sufi ethics.
Sufism ::: process of attaining closeness to the Creator through love, which is attained by purification of the nafs; tasawwuf
By the year 200 of the Hejira a definite sect of mystics had arisen, and following the instructions of a prominent member, Abu Said, his disciples forsook the world and entered the mystic life with a view of pursuing contemplation and meditation. These disciples wore a garment of wool, and from this received their name. Sufiism spread rapidly in Persia, and all Moslem philosophers were attracted to this sect, as great latitude in the beliefs of its followers was at first permitted, until in the reign of Moktadir, a Persian Sufi named Hallaj was tortured and put to death for teaching publicly that every man is God. After this the Sufis veiled their teachings, and especially in their poetry used amorous language and sang of the delights of the wine cup. In spite of the amorous trend of poetry followed by the Sufis, to the observing eye there appears a beauty and a spirituality of thought which has found many devotees. Ideas of pantheism abound, for God is held to be immanent in all things, expresses itself through all things, and is the transcendent essence of every human soul. For a person to know God is to see that God is immanent in himself.
Cherag(a) (P) Literally: light, lamp. Officiant in the Universal Worship of the Sufi Movement.
chirāgh, charāgh ::: lamp, light; guide, director. The term cherag is also used to refer to one who is ordained in the work of the Universal Worship of the Sufi Movement. (also see
Chistiyya order One of the four great sufi orders in India (see: Qadiriyya, Nakhshibandiyya, Suhrawardiyya). The order was founded in the 10th century by Khwaja Abu Ishaq Shami Chisti. He was named after the city Chist in present-day Afghanistan. The founder of the Chistiyya order in India was Khwaja Muinuddin Chisti who lived in the 12th century in Ajmeer. (see Appendix E.)
countenances ::: Countenances See Partsufim.
dergah ::: Sufi center
dīn ::: creed, belief, religion. It is said that there is only one dīn; that which is the natural, intended, proper manner of life, acting in harmony with the will of the Creator and thereby in harmony with all of creation. The classical Arabic root d-y-n signifies that which is obedient, abased, submissive; doing service for; acting well towards; and also signifies receiving a loan, being indebted, repaying a debt. Thus dīn signifies repaying our debt to our Creator through humble submission and loving service. To do so, it is a common Sufi practice to strive to be like a perfect mirror, reflecting all of the magnificence and glory back to the Beloved and into this world, illuminating any darkness. Hazrat 'Ali said 'The love of the wise is a religion (dīn) with which Allah is served.'
Druses: A religious sect in Asia Minor, whose faith combines teachings of the Mosaic law, the Christian Gospels, the Koran and the Sufi allegories; they believe in one God, transmigration of the soul, constant spiritual evolution and final perfection.
elder; title of honor, title of religious dignitaries; master; saint; master of a Sufi order. (also transliterated as shaykh or sheikh)
encountered by the sufi Abu Yazid in the 4th
Fana (A) To go beyond. Fana is the proces of transcending the limited self (ego) so that it can merge into the greater Self, the divine presence. Within Sufism three stages: Fana fi Shaikh (the merging into the master or teacher), Fana fi Rasul (the merging into the messenger, prophet) and Fana fi Allah (the merging into God). The first two stages are preparations for the last stage. See page 33
Fana: In Sufism, the “self-attenuation,” or “self-effacement,” the final stage on the way to mystic union with God (tariqat), the cleansing of the mirror of one’s impersonal heart and the unfettering from the attachment to material limitations which prevent the soul from apprehending the splendor of the “Real” which is behind and within all appearances. Four degrees of fana are described by the Sufi mystics: the fana fi seheikh, the complete suppression of one’s personality in obedience to one’s superior; the fana fir Rasul, self-attenuation or effacement of one’s personality in the gratitude for the Prophet, the vehicle of the grace of God; fana Fillah, self-effacement or self-attenuation in God; and fana al fana, the attenuation of the attenuation, the stage beyond consciousness and unconsciousness.
Fikar (A) Spiritual Sufi practice in which a holy word is being repeated in silence on the breath.
from The Sufi Message, Volume II, Vibrations
from The Sufi Message, Volume V, Sufism
from The Sufi Message, Volume V, Spiritual Liberty
from The Sufi Message, Volume XI, Ideal
from The Sufi Message, Volume XIV, Divine Impulse
from The Sufi Message, Volume II, Voices
from The Sufi Message, Volume IX, Krishna
from The Sufi Message, Volume IX, Rama
from The Sufi Message, Volume V, Blessed are the Poor
from The Sufi Message, Volume VII, Democracy
from The Sufi Message, Volume V, Qaza and Qadr
from The Sufi Message, Volume V, Spiritual Liberty
from The Sufi Message, Volume V, Spiritual Liberty
from The Sufi Message, Volume XIII, Symbology
from The Sufi Message, Volume XII, The Word
from The Sufi Message, Volume XI, Threefold...Aspects of Nature
from The Sufi Message, Volume X, The Different Steps
Gathas Series of spiritual teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan based on a number of his lectures. Gathas were meant as part of a school that prepared followers for a (next) circle of learning. The selection of the lectures and the compiling of the different volumes of teachings were done by Murshida Sharifa Goodenough, a pupil of Hazrat Inayat Khan, in her capacity as Madar-ul-Maham, the secretary-general of the Sufi Order, the primary esoteric activity of the Sufi Movement. This system of consecutive teachings is grouped respectively: Gathekas (for interested individuals), Gathas, Githas, Sangathas and Sangithas.
Gayatri Originally a prayer from the vedas meaning: ‘The Redeemer of the Singer’. In the Hindu tradition a sung prayer, a song, a hymn. Within the Sufi Movement it is a title of a section of the Gayan and Vadan of Hazrat Inayat Khan. Also: Namaz. See: Wird
Gharb i mutlaq: Arabic for the absolute void; in Sufism, the plane of absolute inactual being.
halka ::: lit., circle; a group which gathers to practice or study Sufism, usually a shaykh and murids.
hearing, receiving. Often used to refer to the musical portion of a Sufi gathering. From the Arabic root s-m-'meaning to hear; learn, be told, listen, pay attention to. (in some texts as suma; also written as sema)
Heaven during the sufi’s mir’aj (ascent) to all 7
https://sufipedia.org/en/begrippenlijst/
Hunting through all fourteen volumes of the Sufi Message to find a particular concept or a certain word has been virtually impossible in the past, but now, using computer search technology, it's easy to search for any word or phrase.
from Social Gatheka 1, Sufism not Passivism, by Hazrat Inayat Khan (unpublished)
from Social Gatheka 7, Sufism, by Hazrat Inayat Khan (unpublished)
from The Sufi Message, Volume II, Abstract Sound
from The Sufi Message, Volume II, Music
from The Sufi Message, Volume II, Power of the Word
from The Sufi Message, Volume IV, Health
from The Sufi Message, Volume IX, Muhammad
from The Sufi Message, Volume VI, Development of Personality
from The Sufi Message, Volume VII, Self-Realization
from The Sufi Message, Volume VII, Silent Life
from The Sufi Message, Volume V, Manifestation
from The Sufi Message, Volume V, Spiritual Liberty
from The Sufi Message, Volume XIII, Modesty
from The Sufi Message, Volume XII, My Initiation in Sufism
from The Sufi Message, Volume XI, Love
from The Sufi Message, Volume XIV, Heart Quality
ijaza ::: permission; license to teach tasawwuf (Sufism)
Ilahi (A) Turkish religious sufi music (instrumental and vocal) often used prior to a Zikar gathering
in the 4th), Baryd’il offers the sufi “a kingdom
In this way, by recognizing the sāqī, the wine-giver, in all forms, the Sufi worships God. He recognizes God in friend and foe as the wine-giver.
Kasab, Kasb Breath practice used in Indian sufi orders derived from the pranayama practices of the yoga tradition
Khankah (Khaniqah) (P) A residence, dwellingplace, convent or monastery for sufis, comparable with a Turkish Tekke
Khilafat Appointment in traditional sufi orders, where one is becoming an authorized representative of that order, a Khalif.
Khusrau (1253-1325 AD), also known as Amir Khusrau, a Sufi mystic and a spiritual disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya of Delhi,. Amir Khusrau was not only one of India's greatest poets, he is also credited with being the founder of both Hindustani classical music and Qawwali. (also written as Khusro or Khusraw)
Laqab Honorific name, title or nickname. As Sufi name offered to an initiate of the Sufi order from whom not mere discipleship, but sustainable participation is expected. In the early days of the Movement used as an honorific title, nowadays mainly given when requested by the pupil, but not encouraged because of the possible romantic-exotic connotations. The conferring of a Laqab was early on reserved for Murshid Inayat Khan and his three brothers.
::: marriage, wedding, wedding-feast; union, coupling, joining. Used metaphorically to refer to a death anniversary, especially of a Sufi saint. From a root which points toward cleaving, being kept together.
Mi'raj ::: Night Journey of the Prophet (pbuh); the type of "ascension" that may be experienced by advanced Sufis
Mu'īnuddīn Hasan Chishtī, the Sufi mystic who established the Chishti Order in Ajmer (India) around 1190 AD.
Murad Hassil (A) (literally: wish fulfilled ) The name given by Hazrat Inayat Khan in 1922 to an area in the dunes of Katwijk aan Zee, Holland, where in 1970 the Universel (temple) of the Sufi Movement was built.
murid ::: lit., directed one; a person who has accepted a spiritual teacher; Sufi student
murshid ::: teacher of the Sufi path, a title usually reserved for the head of an order
Mutasawwif (A) Mystic, aspirant-Sufi, he who strives to be a Sufi (i.e. pure).
Mystical night: The practice of the Sufis consisting in “disconnecting” all physical senses of perception, shutting out all external impressions and all emotions in order to induce a state of mystic contemplation and receptivity to inner enlightenment.
mysticism ::: Mysticism The belief that one can rise above reason to achieve direct union with God or the Divine through meditation and intuition. In mystical practices, one attempts to merge with God or the Divine through a disciplined quest to achieve enlightenment. Some forms of mysticism include the Kabbalah, Sufism (Islam), Yoga, and Buddhism.
Nafs (A) The ego or self. The limited awareness of one’s own identity. The aim of the sufi is to forget the nafs so one can merge into a divine awareness
Nafs-i Ammara ::: Dominant Nafs; the first of seven main levels of nafs attained in the process of Sufi purification
Nafs-i Lawwama ::: Blaming Nafs; the second of seven main levels of nafs attained in the process of Sufi purification
Nafs-i Mardziyya ::: Satisfying Nafs; the sixth of seven main levels of nafs attained in the process of Sufi purification
Nafs-i Mulhama ::: Inspired Nafs; the third of seven main levels of nafs attained in the process of Sufi purification
Nafs-i Mutmaina ::: Tranquil Nafs; the fourth of seven main levels of nafs attained in the process of Sufi purification
Nafs-i Radziyya ::: Satisfied Nafs; the fifth of seven main levels of nafs attained in the process of Sufi purification
Nafs-i Safiyya ::: Purified Nafs; the seventh of seven main levels of nafs attained in the process of Sufi purification
Nakhshbandiyya One of the four major Sufi orders of India (see: Qadiriyya, Chistiyya, Suhrawardiyya) (see also Appendix E.)
naqsh-bandiyyā ::: one of the four earliest Sufi orders; followers of the Sufi path of Bahauddin Naqshband Bukhari.
of angels.” The sufi Abu Yazid in his mir’aj
of the imagination, existing in the imagination, pictured in the mind; idealized. Often used to describe a Sufi practice of focusing the attention upon a certain ideal (such as a spiritual teacher), visualizing the nature of that ideal, embodying that essence, and allowing the essence of that ideal to flow freely through one's own life. From the Arabic root s-w-r meaning to shape, fashion, create; represent, portray, depict.
one who breaks bread into broth; surname of an ancestor of Muhammad, on account of his breaking bread for the benefit of the poor at the time of a great famine. Sayyed Muhammad Hashimi, a Sufi mystic, was Inayat Khan's friend and academic teacher in Sufi literature.
partsufim ::: Partsufim Also known as the countenances, this is a theory foreign to the Sefer Yetzirah, but fairly well developed in 'The Greater Assembly' of the Sefer Zohar. Much of the theory of the countenances, as it is now, was worked out by Isaac Luria who began with the material to be found in the Zohar. The Partsufim are the Macroprosopus (Kether), the Father (Chokmah), the Mother (Binah), the Microprosopus (the six Sephiroth from Chesed to Yesod, inclusive) and the Shekhinah.
partsuf ::: Partsuf Singular of Partsufim.
Partsuf (pi. partsufim or parzupheim, “the
from The Sufi Message, Volume I, The Angel-Man
Pir-o-Murshid (P) Leader of the Murshids, head of a sufi order
pir ::: spiritual ancestor; founder of a Sufi tariqa; living principal of a Sufi tariqa
postaki, post ::: sheepskin used as the seat of the shaykh in the traditional Sufi zikr ceremony
Pranayama (S) System of breathing practices within the yoga practice. Breath is considered in yoga and by Sufis as far more than the supply of oxygen to the body. The breath is at the same time a vehicle for life’s energy, called prana. See also: Kasab.
preserver, caretaker. The great Sufi poet, Shamsuddin Muhammad Hāfiz, born in the early 1300's in Shiraz (Iran).
prosperity, being auspicious, a fortunate aspect of the stars. The Persian Sufi poet Muslihuddīn Mushrif ibn Abdullāh, often called Sa'dī, was born in Shīrāz (Iran) around 1175
[The Sufi's] aim in life is to release the captive soul from the bondage of limitations, which he accomplishes by the repetition of the sacred names of God, and by constant thought of his divine ideal, and an ever-increasing love for the divine Beloved until the beloved God with His perfection becomes manifest to his vision, and his imperfect self vanishes from his sight.
This he calls Fanā, the merging in the ideal. In order to attain the final goal he gradually raises his ideal, first to Fanā-fī-Shaikh, the ideal seen in a mortal walking on the earth, and he drills himself as a soldier before battle in devotion to his ideal.
Then comes Fanā-fī-Rasūl, when he sees his ideal in spirit, and pictures Him in all sublimity, and fashions Him with beautiful qualities, which he wishes to obtain himself. And after this he raises it to Fanā-fī-Allāh, the love and devotion for that ideal which is beyond qualities and in which is the perfection of all qualities.
Qadiriyya order One of the four major sufi orders in India (see: Chistiyya, Nakhshibandiyya, Suhrawardiyya), named after the founder: Abdu’l Qadir Jilani.
quote :::Abstract sound is called Saut-i Sarmad by the Sufis; all space is filled with it. The vibrations of this sound are too fine to be either audible or visible to the material ears or eyes, since it is even difficult for the eyes to see the form and color of he ethereal vibrations on the external plane. It was the Saut-i Sarmad, the sound of the abstract plane, which Muhammad heard in the cave of Ghar-i Hira when he became lost in his divine ideal.
quote :::After receiving instruction in the five different grades of Sufism, the physical, intellectual, mental, moral, and spiritual, I went through a course of training in the four schools:
quote :::Among the Sufis there was a great saint, Muinuddin Chishti of Ajmer. At his grave music is played, the Hindus and Muslims go their on pilgrimage. This shows that the religion of the knowers of truth is the religion of God.
quote :::As in the physical being of an individual many small germs are born and nourished which are also living beings, so in his mental plane there are many beings, termed Muwakkals, or elementals. These are still finer entities born of man's own thoughts, and as the germs live in his physical body so the elementals dwell in his mental sphere. Man often imagines that thoughts are without life; he does not see that they are more alive than the physical germs and that they have a birth, childhood, youth, age and death. They work for man's advantage or disadvantage according to their nature. The Sufi creates, fashions and controls them.
quote :::Avicenna, the great physician of ancient times, on whose discoveries medieval science was based, was a Sufi who used to sit in meditation, and by intuition he used to write prescriptions.
quote :::
Vairagya means satisfaction, the feeling that no desire is to be satisfied any more, that nothing on earth is desired.
from The Sufi Message, Volume VIII,
quote :::Sufism has as its object the uniting of life and religion, which so far seem to have been kept apart... Therefore the teaching of Sufis is to make everyday life into a religion, that every action in life may have some spiritual fruit.
quote :::Sufism, therefore, is the process of making life natural... By this process of Sufism one realizes one's own nature, one's true nature... Sufism means to know one's true being, to know the purpose of one's life and to know how to accomplish that purpose.
quote :::Devotion requires an ideal, and the ideal of the Sufis is the God-ideal. They attain to this ideal by a gradual process. They first take bayat, initiation, from the hand of one whose presence gives them confidence that he will be a worthy counselor in life and a guide on the path as yet untrodden...
quote ::: from The Sufi Message, Sangatha I, Tasawwuf (unpublished)
quote ::: from The Sufi Message, Volume II, Abstract Sound
quote ::: from The Sufi Message, Volume IX, Universal Worship
quote ::: from The Sufi Message, Volume X, Sufi Poetry
quote ::: from The Sufi Message, Volume XII, The Life of a Sage
quote ::: from The Sufi Message, Volume XII, The Life of a Sage
quote :::In the imagery of the Sufi poets, this tavern is the world, and the sāqī is God. In whatever form the wine-giver comes and gives a wine, it is God who comes.
quote :::I will say that there is one principle mission of Sufism, that is, to dig the ground under which the light of the soul becomes buried. The same is the teaching of Christ, who has said, that no one shall cover his light under a bushel, also. 'Raise your light on high.'...
quote :::Maulana Hashimi was his great friend and ustad, who taught him the Persian and Arabic literature of the ancient Sufis and being a great mystic, recognized in Inayat what other friends of his (Ramyar and Hafiz Khan) though his great friends and admirers, were at a loss to understand. But Hashimi knew that something was being prepared in Inayat for the years that were in store for him, which was beyond words or imagination.
quote :::Music is called Ghiza-i-ruh, the food of the soul, by Sufis. Music being the most divine art elevates the soul to the higher spirit; music itself being unseen soon reaches the unseen; just as only the diamond can break the diamond, so musical vibrations are used to make the physical and mental vibrations inactive, in order that the Sufi may be elevated to the spiritual spheres.
quote :::The Sufi in the East says to himself, 'Ishq Allah, Ma'bud Allah, which means 'God is Love, God is the Beloved', in other words it is God who is Love, Lover, and Beloved.
quote :::The Sufi's base the whole of their teaching on the crushing of the ego which they term Nafs-kushi, for therein lies all magnetism and power.
quote :::... the Sufis have learned the lesson of love, of devotion, of sympathy, and have called it the cultivation of the heart. It is known by the word suluk, which means the loving manner.
quote :::... the essence of morals and of religion and of education is one, and that one essence is the manner of friendship. Sufis of all ages have named it Suluk, which means divine manner, beneficence.
quote :::The ideal perfection, called Baqa by Sufis, is termed 'Najat'in Islam, 'Nirvana'
quote :::The method of attainment is to endeavor always to make others happy and by experiencing happiness in the happiness of others. In the terms of the Sufi it is "Suluk".
quote :::The religious activity of the Sufi Movement is called the Universal Worship, or the Church of All. Why is it so named? Because it contains all different ways of worship and all Churches...
quote :::This Universal Worship which has been organized in the Sufi Movement was the hope of all prophets.
Rind (P) Pupil. The free aspect of sufism where the adept tries to live in the here-and-now, without concerning him/herself with regrets over the past and worries about the future. The emphasis on this path is detachment (compare: salik)
rogue, libertine. In esoteric terms, there are two general types of Sufis, the Rind and the Salik; the Rind follow a path of disregarding worldly matters, while the Salik are engaged in worldly matters.
Rohanee (Arabic) Rūhānī. Used by the modern Sufis, in some senses equivalent to the Sanskrit gupta-vidya (secret knowledge); “the Magic of modern Egypt, supposed to proceed from Angels and Spirits, that is Genii, and by the use of the mystery names of Allah; they distinguish two forms — Ilwee, that is the Higher or White Magic; and Suflee and Sheytanee, the Lower or Black Demoniac Magic. There is also Es-Seemuja, which is deception or conjuring. Opinions differ as to the importance of a branch of Magic called Darb el Mendel, or as Barker calls it in English, the Mendal: by this is meant a form of artificial clairvoyance, exhibited by a young boy before puberty, or a virgin, who, as the result of self-fascination by gazing on a pool of ink in the hand, with coincident use of incense and incantation, sees certain scenes of real life passing over its surface” (TG 280).
Ruh i Basit: The Sufi term for the Universal Soul, the efficient aspect of God, which animates the whole universe and is present in every soul.
Sajjada Nashin (P) Spiritual successor in a sufi-order; heir that takes his place on the prayer rug of his predecessor.
Salik (A) Pupil, follower. Aspect of sufism where the adept places emphasis on righteousness and morality
Salik: The Sufi term for a seeker of the mystic union with God.
Samadhi (S) Deep and abstract meditation, highest condition of being that brings peace and balance. Comparable to the Buddhist term Nirwana and the sufi term Hahut
Sam’a Silence by listening. Musical spiritual gathering, religious concert amongst sufis. The experience of the beauty of music is considered to have a deepening spiritual effect.
Saut-i-sarmad (also Saut-e-Surmadi) (A) (P) Sufi term for the sound of the cosmos, the divine primal vibration, abstract sound that can be considered as the keynote of all existing sound. Saut-i-sarmad is reflected mostly by the sound ‘Hu’ (Arabic for ‘He’ or ‘Him’) Comparable to Aum or Om from the Buddhist tradition.
Self-attenuation: The fana (q.v.) of Sufis.
Shagal, Shagl Work, occupation. Sufi practice that consists of the successive closure of the four outwardly directed senses (sight, smell, taste and hearing) in order to direct these senses to the inner world and to unite them to one single underlying sense.
Shahada (A) Formula that expresses the creed of the Muslim and is used in the Zikar practice amongst sufis. It confirms nothing but God and denies all other than God. In Arabic: La Ilaha illa ‘llahu, meaning: Nothing exists, save God.
shaykh ::: lit., elder; appointed master in a Sufi order or tariqa
Silsilah List of succession of Murshids or Shaikhs. Most sufi orders trace their silsilah back to Mohammed.
silsila ::: lit., chain; the lineage of a Sufi tariqa descending from Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), through Ali Ibn Abu Talib or Abu Bakr (may Allah be pleased with them). The chain of transmission includes all murshids of the order up to the present.
Sirr: In Sufi terminology, conscience, regarded as a pure possibility of consciousness, void of contents.
sofi ::: n. --> Same as Sufi.
sofism ::: n. --> Same as Sufism.
Some say that sāf may have been the root from which the word Sūfī has arisen. (see Suf and Sufism)
soofeeism ::: --> Same as Sufi, Sufism.
sophi ::: n. --> See Sufi.
sufim. Cf. the Zoroastrian Zervan Akarana; the
Suhrawardiyya One of the four major sufi orders of India (see: Qadiriyya, Nakhshibandiyya, Chistiyya) (see Appendix E.)
Talib (A) Pupil. Term generally used by Hazrat Inayat Khan to refer to an adept or disciple of Sufism. Comparable to mureed.
talib ::: candidate or aspirant to formal membership in a Sufi order
tariqa ::: lit., way to; path; order of Sufism founded by a recognized member of a silsila
Tasawwuf (A) Islamic mysticism, Sufism
tasawwuf ::: system of spiritual cleansing known in the West as Sufism
tasawwuf ::: Sufism; the Sufi way of life; mysticism.
tasawwuf ::: (تصوف taṣawwuf) mysticism; the Sufi way of life.
Tawajjoh (A) Sufi concentration practice in which the mureed opens up for the inspiration of the chain (silsilah) of Murshids or one of them.
Tekke (T) Sufi-house. Place where sufis or dervish gather, also: Khankah, Khaniqah (P) of Ribat (A).
The dervishes are the practical expounders of Islam. As with the fakirs and sufis, the origin of the dervish fraternities is assigned to either Ali or Abu Bekr. They are divided into two great classes, the ba-Shara (with the law), who govern their conduct according to the principles of Islam; and the be-Shara (without the law), who do not rule their lives according to the formal principles of any religious creed, although they call themselves Moslems. The sufis belong principally to the latter class. There are reckoned 32 different fraternities of dervishes, with innumerable suborders, but the two principal ones known in the West are the Mevlevits (whirling or dancing dervishes), an order founded by Jelal ud-Din ar-Rumi, author of the great Persian mystical poem the Mathnawi; and the Rifa’ites (howling dervishes), who in ecstasy cut themselves with knives, eat live coals and glass, handle red-hot iron, and devour serpents.
The prayer and the desire of all great souls was that the light given in all the different forms such as the Buddhist scriptures, the Qur'an, the Bible or the teachings of Krishna or Zarathushtra, should be known by everyone. The work of the Sufi message is to spread the unity of religion. It is not a mission to promote a particular creed or any Church or religion. It is a work to unite the followers of different religions and faiths in wisdom, so that without having to give up their own religion they may strengthen their own faith and focus the true light upon it.
There are three synonymous words in modern Persian often interchangeably used — Sufi, Aref, and Darvish — each with its own nuance. Sufi represents the most institutionalized Islamic mysticism, while Aref and Erfan (school of thought-cognition) conveys cognitive aspects of mystic teachings and are more philosophic; Dervish and Darvishi (state of being Dervish) conveys freedom from attachments to worldly possessions. Hafi (the most loved and best known of the mystic poets) often refers to Sufis as those who rigidly adhere more to religious teachings than cognitive aspects of truth. These differences occurred when the mystics, due to religious persecution, had to veil their ancient beliefs with religious teachings. This made their teachings appear ambiguous, as a result of which, some confused esoteric mysticism with esoteric religion.
There is and has been a great deal of confusion, not only at present but throughout the ages, about these matters, and several mystical schools have even chosen the language of the tavern and drinking house as the cloak for conveying occult or semi-occult teaching. A noted example is the Sufi school with its poems lauding the flowing bowl and the joys of the tavern and the bosom friends therein, and the beloved’s breast. Here the tavern was the universe, the flowing cup or wine was the wine of the spirit bringing inner ecstasy, the bosom of the beloved was the raising oneself into inner communion with the god within, of which the Jewish bosom of Abraham is a feeble correspondence. The friends of the tavern are those perfect human relations brought about by a community of spiritual and intellectual interests, and the associations of the tavern are the mysteries of the world around us with their marvels and arcana. Nevertheless in various countries as the fourth root-race ran toward its evil culmination, the mystic became translated into the material, the spiritual degenerated into the teaching of matter, so that indeed in later Atlantean times the drugging of initiates was common, and the results always disastrous, this being one of the sorceries for which the Atlanteans in occult history have remained infamous. Yet even in the fifth root-race, due to the heavy Atlantean karma still weighing on us, many nations as late as historic times employed more or less harmless potations to bring about a temporary dulling or stupefying of the brain and nervous system — a procedure always vigorously opposed by the theosophic occult school which has never at any time allowed it.
traveling; traveler, devotee; open not obstructed. From the Arabic root s-l-k meaning to travel, to follow (a path), to enter upon a course or road; to behave; to proceed, to set foot (on); to clarify, disentangle. In esoteric terms, there are two general types of Sufis, the Rind and the Salik; the Rind follow a path of disregarding worldly matters, while the Salik are engaged in worldly matters.
Universel Name introduced for a sufi temple by Hazrat Inayat Khan. The name denotes that Sufism holds the idea of the unity of religious ideals and strives for universal brother- and sisterhood of mankind.
urs ::: anniversary of the death of a Sufi saint, which is celebrated as their day of union with Allah
Viladat day 5th July, birthday of Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882), founder of the Sufi Movement. This day is celebrated in sufi circles.
Visalat day 5th February, death day of Hazrat Inayat Khan (1927), founder of the Sufi Movement. This day is commemorated in sufi circles.
wali ::: protecting friend of Allah; guardian; saint; also wali ul Allah; Sufi of a high spiritual level
Wazifa (pl. Wazaif) Sufi word for mantra(m), a holy word that is recited several times as a contemplation. One of the 99 holy names of Allah (asma al husna) are mainly used for wazifa. See 2.3.
Wird (A) Prayer of a specific sufi order (plural: awrad). Mostly a series of prayers, installed by the founder of the order. Hazrat Inayat Khan called the awrad: Gayatri.
With reference to the approach to the central reality of religion, God, and man's relation to it, types of the Philosophy of Religion may be distinguished, leaving out of account negative (atheism), skeptical and cynical (Xenophanes, Socrates, Voltaire), and agnostic views, although insertions by them are not to be separated from the history of religious consciousness. Fundamentalism, mainly a theological and often a Church phenomenon of a revivalist nature, philosophizes on the basis of unquestioning faith, seeking to buttress it by logical argument, usually taking the form of proofs of the existence of God (see God). Here belong all historic religions, Christianity in its two principal forms, Catholicism with its Scholastic philosophy and Protestantism with its greatly diversified philosophies, the numerous religions of Hinduism, such as Brahmanism, Shivaism and Vishnuism, the religion of Judaism, and Mohammedanism. Mysticism, tolerated by Church and philosophy, is less concerned with proof than with description and personal experience, revealing much of the psychological factors involved in belief and speculation. Indian philosophy is saturated with mysticism since its inception, Sufism is the outstanding form of Arab mysticism, while the greatest mystics in the West are Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Ruysbroek, Thomas a Kempis, and Jacob Bohme. Metaphysics incorporates religious concepts as thought necessities. Few philosophers have been able to avoid the concept of God in their ontology, or any reference to the relation of God to man in their ethics. So, e.g., Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schelling, and especially Hegel who made the investigation of the process of the Absolute the essence of the Philosophy of Religion.
Zakir (P) Practitioner of the Zikar, a sufi practice
Zikar (Zikr, Dhikr, Dzikr) (A) Sufi practice. Zikar is Arabic for ‘reference’, ‘remembrance’. During the practice the soul tries to remember its true origin and identity; the true Self. During the practice the phrase: La ilaha illa ‘llahu, is recited, literally meaning: no deity, except God. As instatic (as opposed to extatic) meditation this practice is performed sitting down, combined with certain rotating movements of the torso.
zikr ::: lit., remembrance; reminder; the Sufi practice of repeating the Names of Allah
KEYS (10k)
35 Jalaluddin Rumi
8 Hafiz
2 Sufi saying
1 Yunus Emre
1 Sufism
1 Sufi Proverb
1 Shams of Tabriz
1 Saadi
1 Imam al- Ghazali
1 Ibn El-Jalali. Source: Idries Shah
1 Hazrat Khwaja Ibn-El-Jalali
1 Fakhruddin Iraqi
1 Binavi Badakhshani 13th century(?) Sufi poet.
1 Binavi Badakhshan
1 Attar of Nishapur
1 And so forth. See Sufi Symbolism:
1 And so forth. See "Sufi Symbolism":
1 Ahlulbayt
1
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
132 Idries Shah
12 Anonymous
7 Gonjasufi
3 Seyyed Hossein Nasr
3 Colleen Hoover
3 Carlos Ruiz Zaf n
2 Walter Isaacson
2 Terry Pratchett
2 Tabitha Suzuma
2 Sufi Proverb
2 Stephen Chbosky
2 Reza Aslan
2 Osho
2 Nicole Williams
2 Mohsin Hamid
2 Julio Cort zar
2 J K Rowling
2 Jalaluddin Rumi
2 Isabel Allende
2 Isaac Asimov
1:A donkey with a load of holy books is still a donkey." ~ Sufi saying, #KEYS
2:the Most Beautiful Names." ~ ~ Binavi Badakhshan, (13th cent.) Sufi poet, #KEYS
3:Intoxication means religious ecstasy." ~ And so forth. See Sufi Symbolism:, #KEYS
4:Intoxication means religious ecstasy." ~ And so forth. See "Sufi Symbolism":, #KEYS
5:forgetfulness woke up and found myself asleep." ~ Binavi Badakhshani 13th century(?) Sufi poet., #KEYS
6:Within your own house dwells the treasury of joy; so why do you go begging door to door." ~ Sufi saying, #KEYS
7:There wouldn't be such a thing as counterfeit gold if there were no real gold somewhere.
~ Sufi Proverb,#KEYS
8:Sufism is truth without form." ~ Ibn El-Jalali. Source: Idries Shah, "The Way of the Sufi,", (reprint 1990)., #KEYS
9:Even as if love's time unvanishing were." ~ Sumnun al Muhibb, (d. 905 AD). Sufi poet. Known as "Sumnun the Lover.", #KEYS
10:Everyone who has studied the Psalms, Every Jewish Rabbi, Every Christian priest. Who is she? - the Truth." ~ Sufi saying, #KEYS
11:Allah deals with you based upon your certainty of Him." ~ Sufi Proverb, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
12:The treasure of joy is closer to you than you are to yourself-so why should you go searching from door to door?
~ Sufi Proverb,#KEYS
13:Madmen know only the easiest part of love." ~ Shaykh Abu Bakr Shibli, (861-946) important Sufi poet of Persian descent, Wikipedia., #KEYS
14:if not in the give and take of Love. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, (1207 - 1273), Persian poet and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
15:'My dear one, thou thyself art love, art lover, and thyself art the beloved whom thou hast adored.'" ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, (1882 - 1927) Sufi., #KEYS
16:What expression, when you read it, will make you sad when you are happy and happy when you are sad? Answer: 'THIS TOO, WILL PASS'." ~ Sufi Saying, #KEYS
17:I searched for myself and found only God I searched for God and found only myself." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, (1207 - 1278) Sufi poet, Wikipedia., #KEYS
18:and our story, an old forgotten dream." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, ( 1207 - 1273), Persian poet, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
19:Tie two birds together. They will not be able to fly, even though they now have four wings." ~ Rumi( 1207 - 1273), Persian poet, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia, #KEYS
20:Beauty and Mirror and the Eyes which see." ~ Abū Saʿīd Abū'l-Khayr, (967 - 1049), famous Persian Sufi and poet who contributed extensively to the evolution of Sufi tradition, Wikipedia., #KEYS
21:The Sufi knows the real truth speaks in a way that is based upon the understanding, prejudices and limitation of his audience. ~ ibnArabi, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
22:The body is completely dark, and its lamp is the inner consciousness. If one has no inner consciousness, one is forever in darkness. ~ Sufi saying, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
23:Come out of the circle of time and enter the circle of love." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, (1207 -1273), Persian poet, faqih, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
24:For thirty years I went in Search of God, and when I opened my eyes at the end of this time, I discovered that it was really He who sought me…" ~ Bayazid Bistami, (804-874), a Persian Sufi, Wikipedia., #KEYS
25:There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.
~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, Thinking Like The Universe: The Sufi Path Of Awakening,#KEYS
26:Keep company with those who remind you of God, and seek approval of those who counsel not with the tongue of words but the tongue of deeds." ~ Ibn Khafif, (died 981/982) a Persian mystic and sufi from Iran, Wikipedia., #KEYS
27:At the end of the valley of sin; do not be surprised if you find virtue standing." ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, (1882 - 1927) founder of the Sufi Order in the West in 1914, (London) and teacher of Universal Sufism, Wikipedia., #KEYS
28:Oh thou! who art free of notion, imagination, and duality, We are all bellows in the ocean of eternity." ~ Binavali, a sufi of the 17th century. From "The Religion of the Sufis : From The Dabistan of Mohsin Fani,", (1979), #KEYS
29:I am afraid of what happened yesterday." ~ Khwaja Abdullah Ansari, (1006-1088) Persian Sufi saint of Arab origin. polemicist, and spiritual master, known for his oratory and poetic talents in Arabic and Persian, Wikipedia., #KEYS
30:So I pray to increase my madness And to increase your sanity. My 'madness' is from the power of Love' Your sanity is from the strength of unawareness." ~ Shaykh Abu Bakr Shibli, (861-946) important Persian Sufi, Wikipedia., #KEYS
31:The sufi opens his hands to the universe and gives away each instant, free. Unlike someone who begs on the street for money to survive, a dervish begs to give you his life." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #KEYS
32:Ordinary people are friendly with those who are outwardly similar to them. The wise are friendly with those who are inwardly similar to them." ~ Sufi saying, from "Sacred Laughter of the Sufis,", (2014), ed. Imam Jamal Rahman, #KEYS
33:Do not seek any rules or method of worship. Say whatever your pained heart chooses." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, (1207 - 1273), Persian poet, faqih, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
34:The Sufi is one that does what others do — when it is necessary. He is also one who does what others cannot do — when it is indicated." ~ Abu al-Hassan al-Kharaqani, (963 - 1033) one of the master Sufis of Islam, Wikipedia, #KEYS
35:The further one goes on the spiritual path the more will one have to learn to play a part." ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, (1882 - 1927) founder of the Sufi Order in the West in 1914, (London) and teacher of Universal Sufism, Wikipedia., #KEYS
36:Strange is my case, in strangeness I am all alone Uniqe amongst mankind, peer I have none. My time in Thee eternized, is Eternity, and from myself Thou hast extinguished me." ~ Abu Bakr Shibli, (861-946) Persian Sufi, Wikipedia., #KEYS
37:Love all, trust none; forgive all, forget none, respect all, worship none. That is the manner of the wise." ~ Inayat Khan, (1882 - 1927) founder of the Sufi Order in the West in 1914, (London) and teacher of Universal Sufism, Wikipedia., #KEYS
38:And the sword of firm conviction buckled on, With the knapsack of sincerity And the shield of earnestness, I advance on the path of love." ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, (1882 - 1927) founder of the Sufi Order in the West in 1914, (London), Wikipedia., #KEYS
39:Like a hand that possesses five fingers is destiny: when it wants anyone to be obeying its decree … it places two of the fingers on the ears and two on the eyes and one on the lips, saying 'Silent be!'" ~ Kasim Anwar, (1336-1433) Sufi poet., #KEYS
40:In my belief, the beloved and the lover are one: the desire, the desired and the desirer, are one I am told, 'Seek His Essence,' but …how can I seek when the sought and the seeker are one!" ~ Shah Ni'Matli'llah, (1330-1431) Sufi Master and poet., #KEYS
41:Holding in my hand the rein of courage, Clad in the armor of patience, And the helmet of endurance on my head, I started on my journey to the land of love." ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, (1882 - 1927) founder of the Sufi Order in the West in 1914, Wikipedia., #KEYS
42:If you become addicted to looking back, half your life will be spent in distraction and the other half in regret." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, ( 1207 - 1273), Persian poet, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
43:All things existing have their opposites, except God. It is for this reason that God can not be made intelligible." ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, (1882 - 1927) founder of the Sufi Order in the West in 1914, (London) and teacher of Universal Sufism, Wikipedia., #KEYS
44:A person need not be unworldly in order to become spiritual. We may live in the world and yet not be of the world." ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, (1882 - 1927) founder of the Sufi Order in the West in 1914, (London) and teacher of Universal Sufism, Wikipedia., #KEYS
45:To be a Sufi is to detach from fixed ideas and from presuppositions; and not to try to avoid what is your lot." ~ Abu Sa'id Abu'l-Khayr, (967 - 1049), famous Persian Sufi and poet who contributed extensively to the evolution of Sufi tradition, Wikipedia, #KEYS
46:'What seems to you to be many is one; What seems to you simple is not; What seems to you complex is easy; The answer to you all is: The Sufis.'" ~ Naqshband Buxoriy, (Persian:, (1318-1389) founder of the largest Sufi Muslim orders, the Naqshbandi, Wikipedia, #KEYS
47:Put your thoughts to sleep let them not cast a shadow over the moon of your heart. Drown them in the sea of love." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, (1207 - 1273), 13th-century Persian poet; Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
48:A tender-hearted sinner is better than a saint hardened by piety." ~ Inayat Khan, (1882 - 1927) founder of the Sufi Order in the West in 1914, (London) & teacher of Universal Sufism, Wikipedia. From "The Complete Sayings of Hazrat Inayat Khan,", (1978, 2005, 2010), #KEYS
49:If one is chained, a chain breaker one has to be: If the way is lost then a way-finder one has to be. One has to live a thousand years in one moment: instantly, a multitudinous traveler, one has to be." ~ Attar of Nishapur, ((c. 1145 - c. 1221), Persian Sufi poet., #KEYS
50:The heart which is not struck by the sweet smiles of an infant is still asleep." ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, (1882 - 1927) founder of the Sufi Order in the West in 1914, (London) and teacher of Universal Sufism, Wikipedia. Quote from the "Complete Sayings of Hazrat…,", (1990)., #KEYS
51:Love that ends, is the shadow of love; true love is without beginning or end." ~ Inayat Khan, (1882 - 1927) founder of the Sufi Order in the West in 1914, (London) & teacher of Universal Sufism, Wikipedia. From "The Complete Sayings of Hazrat Inayat Khan,", (1978, 2005, 2010), #KEYS
52:To love one another is… half of wisdom. Grief… is half of old age." ~ Ali, (601 - 661), the cousin and son-in-law of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. He ruled as the fourth caliph from 656 to 661, Wikipedia. Quote from "The Sufi Bible,", (latest ed. 2016). Trans. Paul Smith., #KEYS
53:There is nothing in this world which does not speak. Every thing & every being is continually calling out its nature, its character, & its secret; & the more the inner sense is open, the more capable it becomes of hearing the voice of all things." ~ Inayat Khan, (1882-1927) Sufi, #KEYS
54:Man has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead." ~ Idries Shah, (1924-1996) author and teacher in the Sufi tradition, Wikipedia., #KEYS
55:He was asked "What is evil and what is the worst evil?" The Master replied, "Evil is 'thou': and the worst evil is ' thou', when thou knowest it not." ~ Abū-Sa'īd Abul-Khayr, (967 - 1049), Famous Persian Sufi and poet who contributed extensively to the Sufi tradition, Wikipedia., #KEYS
56:You goal is not to seek love, but merely to seek, find and remove all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it" ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, (1207 - 1273), 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
57:Open your door, Beloved, You are the wine, I am the cup You are eternal, I am a prisoner of time. 'Silence fool, who would open his door to a madman.'" ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, ( 1207 - 1273), Persian poet, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
58:Drunk and notorious all year round may the lover be; in a frenzy, spellbound, crazy, let him be, constantly. When sober we are suffering, because of everything… but when we are intoxicated … everything we set free." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, (1207 - 1273), Persian poet, Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
59:Whatever you have in your mind—forget it; whatever you have in your hand—give it; whatever is to be your fate—face it." ~ Abū Saʿīd Abū'l-Khayr, (967 -1049), famous Sufi poet who contributed extensively to the evolution of Sufi tradition, Wikipedia. "One day man will realize that his own I AM-ness is the God he has been seeking throughout the ages, and that his own sense of awareness - his consciousness of being - is the one and only reality." ~ Neville Goddard, "The Complete Reader,", (2013), #KEYS
60:reading :::
50 Spiritual Classics: List of Books Covered:
Muhammad Asad - The Road To Mecca (1954)
St Augustine - Confessions (400)
Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)
Black Elk Black - Elk Speaks (1932)
Richard Maurice Bucke - Cosmic Consciousness (1901)
Fritjof Capra - The Tao of Physics (1976)
Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan (1972)
GK Chesterton - St Francis of Assisi (1922)
Pema Chodron - The Places That Scare You (2001)
Chuang Tzu - The Book of Chuang Tzu (4th century BCE)
Ram Dass - Be Here Now (1971)
Epictetus - Enchiridion (1st century)
Mohandas Gandhi - An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (1927)
Al-Ghazzali - The Alchemy of Happiness (1097)
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet (1923)
GI Gurdjieff - Meetings With Remarkable Men (1960)
Dag Hammarskjold - Markings (1963)
Abraham Joshua Heschel - The Sabbath (1951)
Hermann Hesse - Siddartha (1922)
Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception (1954)
William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Carl Gustav Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1955)
Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe (1436)
J Krishnamurti - Think On These Things (1964)
CS Lewis - The Screwtape Letters (1942)
Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964)
Daniel C Matt - The Essential Kabbalah (1994)
Dan Millman - The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (1989)
W Somerset Maugham - The Razor's Edge (1944)
Thich Nhat Hanh - The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975)
Michael Newton - Journey of Souls (1994)
John O'Donohue - Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (1998)
Robert M Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
James Redfield - The Celestine Prophecy (1994)
Miguel Ruiz - The Four Agreements (1997)
Helen Schucman & William Thetford - A Course in Miracles (1976)
Idries Shah - The Way of the Sufi (1968)
Starhawk - The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979)
Shunryu Suzuki - Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970)
Emanuel Swedenborg - Heaven and Hell (1758)
Teresa of Avila - Interior Castle (1570)
Mother Teresa - A Simple Path (1994)
Eckhart Tolle - The Power of Now (1998)
Chogyam Trungpa - Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973)
Neale Donald Walsch - Conversations With God (1998)
Rick Warren - The Purpose-Driven Life (2002)
Simone Weil - Waiting For God (1979)
Ken Wilber - A Theory of Everything (2000)
Paramahansa Yogananda - Autobiography of a Yogi (1974)
Gary Zukav - The Seat of the Soul (1990)
~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Spirital Classics (2017 Edition),#KEYS
61:
What is the exact way of feeling that we belong to the Divine and that the Divine is acting in us?
You must not feel with your head (because you may think so, but that's something vague); you must feel with your sense-feeling. Naturally one begins by wanting it with the mind, because that is the first thing that understands. And then one has an aspiration here (pointing to the heart), with a flame which pushes you to realise it. But if you want it to be truly the thing, well, you must feel it.
You are doing something, suppose, for example, you are doing exercises, weight-lifting. Now suddenly without your knowing how it happened, suddenly you have the feeling that there is a force infinitely greater than you, greater, more powerful, a force that does the lifting for you. Your body becomes something almost non-existent and there is this Something that lifts. And then you will see; when that happens to you, you will no longer ask how it should be done, you will know. That does happen.
It depends upon people, depends upon what dominates in their being. Those who think have suddenly the feeling that it is no longer they who think, that there is something which knows much better, sees much more clearly, which is infinitely more luminous, more conscious in them, which organises the thoughts and words; and then they write. But if the experience is complete, it is even no longer they who write, it is that same Thing that takes hold of their hand and makes it write. Well, one knows at that moment that the little physical person is just a tiny insignificant tool trying to remain as quiet as possible in order not to disturb the experience.
Yes, at no cost must the experience be disturbed. If suddenly you say: "Oh, look, how strange it is!"...
How can we reach that state?
Aspire for it, want it. Try to be less and less selfish, but not in the sense of becoming nice to other people or forgetting yourself, not that: have less and less the feeling that you are a person, a separate entity, something existing in itself, isolated from the rest.
And then, above all, above all, it is that inner flame, that aspiration, that need for the light. It is a kind of - how to put it? - luminous enthusiasm that seizes you. It is an irresistible need to melt away, to give oneself, to exist only in the Divine.
At that moment you have the experience of your aspiration.
But that moment should be absolutely sincere and as integral as possible; and all this must occur not only in the head, not only here, but must take place everywhere, in all the cells of the body. The consciousness integrally must have this irresistible need.... The thing lasts for some time, then diminishes, gets extinguished. You cannot keep these things for very long. But then it so happens that a moment later or the next day or some time later, suddenly you have the opposite experience. Instead of feeling this ascent, and all that, this is no longer there and you have the feeling of the Descent, the Answer. And nothing but the Answer exists. Nothing but the divine thought, the divine will, the divine energy, the divine action exists any longer. And you too, you are no longer there.
That is to say, it is the answer to our aspiration. It may happen immediately afterwards - that is very rare but may happen. If you have both simultaneously, then the state is perfect; usually they alternate; they alternate more and more closely until the moment there is a total fusion. Then there is no more distinction. I heard a Sufi mystic, who was besides a great musician, an Indian, saying that for the Sufis there was a state higher than that of adoration and surrender to the Divine, than that of devotion, that this was not the last stage; the last stage of the progress is when there is no longer any distinction; you have no longer this kind of adoration or surrender or consecration; it is a very simple state in which one makes no distinction between the Divine and oneself. They know this. It is even written in their books. It is a commonly known condition in which everything becomes quite simple. There is no longer any difference. There is no longer that kind of ecstatic surrender to "Something" which is beyond you in every way, which you do not understand, which is merely the result of your aspiration, your devotion. There is no difference any longer. When the union is perfect, there is no longer any difference.
Is this the end of self-progress?
There is never any end to progress - never any end, you can never put a full stop there. ~ The Mother,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:There is a Sufi story about a man who is so good that the angels ask God to give him the gift of miracles. God wisely tells them to ask him if that is what he would wish. ~ rachel-naomi-remen, @wisdomtrove 2:One of my favorite Sufi poems... says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 3:The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 4:I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 5:The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing? ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Sufi secrets are perceived, not understood by words. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
2:Un Sufi es alguien que no está atado a nada ni ata a nadie. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
3:To say "yes" to the Sufi way is to say "no" to imagined escapes. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
4:Los milagros, para el Sufi, no son evidentes; son instrumentales. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
5:Miracles, to the Sufi, are not evidential, they are instrumental. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
6:A Sufi is one who is not bound by anything nor does he bind anything ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
7:For the Sufi, reality is neither emptiness nor illusion; reality is God. ~ Reza Aslan, #NFDB
8:El dicho Sufi es: “Dios, para una abeja, es algo que tiene DOS aguijones. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
9:The Sufi teacher’s mission is to be in the service of those who can learn. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
10:The Sufi saying has it: "God, to the bee, is something which has TWO stings! ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
11:El Sufismo – según el Sufi – es una aventura viviente, una aventura necesaria. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
12:The Sufi way is through knowledge and practice, not through intellect and talk. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
13:La misión del maestro Sufi es estar al servicio de aquellos que pueden aprender. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
14:Sufism," according to the Sufi, "is an adventure in living, necessary adventure. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
15:Therefore the Sufi attends to his own journey, and does not judge others. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, #NFDB
16:My friend, the sufi is the friend of the present moment. To say tomorrow is not our way. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
17:Sufi service has to be the right kind of service; neither servitude nor hypocrisy. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
18:Aprender a aprender: Decir "sí" a la vía sufi es decir "no" a las fugas imaginadas. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
19:…la actitud Sufi es: “Que la auténtica verdad, cualquiera que fuere, me sea revelada ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
20:… the Sufi attitude is: ‘Let the real truth, whatever it may be, be revealed to me’. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
21:One of the basic Sufi needs is to enable people to see themselves as they really are. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
22:Sufi Teachers are not, as you might hope, people who make you feel peace and harmony. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
23:La elección y seguimiento de un guía espiritual es el deber más importante de un Sufi. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
24:Nada puede contaminar al Sufi, y de hecho él todo lo purifica.” Abu-Turab al-Nakhsabi. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
25:The selection and following of a spiritual guide is the most important duty of a Sufi. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
26:A Sufi has a right to be served, but he has no right to demand. Maruf Karkhi of Khorasan ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
27:Nothing can defile the Sufi, and he in fact purifies everything.” Abu-Turab al-Nakhsabi. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
28:There wouldn't be such a thing as counterfeit gold if there were no real gold somewhere.
~ Sufi Proverb,#NFDB
29:El Sufi está vivo al valor del tiempo, y es dado, a cada momento, lo que ese momento demanda. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
30:Active and Passive Perfection are the Taoist equivalent of the sufi terms Majesty and Beauty. ~ Martin Lings, #NFDB
31:A Sufi is alive to the value of time, and is given, every moment, to what that moment demands. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
32:But the world itself, as well as special attitudes, properly understood, constitute the Sufi school. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
33:La información sobre las actividades de un organismo Sufi puede ser dañino para el potencial de otro. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
34:Un Sufi tiene derecho a ser servido, pero no tiene derecho a exigir.
Maruf Karkhi de Khorasan ~ Idries Shah,#NFDB
35:el Sufi es “alguien que no se preocupa cuando le quitan algo, pero que no cesa de buscar lo que no tiene. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
36:He who is fortunately enlightened [the Sufi]
Knows that sophistry is from the devil and love from Adam. ~ Idries Shah,#NFDB
37:El Sufi debe ser capaz de alternar su pensamiento entre lo relativo y lo Absoluto, lo aproximado y lo Real. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
38:To be a Sufi is to detach from fixed ideas and from preconceptions; and not to try to avoid what is your lot. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
39:Most of the supposedly Sufi organizations, exercises and “orders” are in fact only of archaeological interest. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
40:Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality. ~ Mohsin Hamid, #NFDB
41:Aquel que es afortunadamente iluminado (el Sufi)
Sabe que la sofistería procede del diablo, y el amor de Adán. ~ Idries Shah,#NFDB
42:Pero el mundo mismo, así como cualquier actitud especial, apropiadamente comprendida, constituye la escuela Sufi. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
43:Sufis aim to refine human consciousness. This is Sufi mysticism: not mystification or magic, but a specific Path. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
44:I want this music and this dawn and the warmth of your cheek against mine. —RUMI, SUFI POET, from LIKE THIS You ~ Charlotte Kasl, #NFDB
45:The object of Sufi preparatory study, however, being to illustrate, expose and out-manoeuvre superficial ambition. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
46:El objetivo del estudio Sufi preparatorio, sin embargo, es ilustrar, mostrar y neutralizar la ambición superficial. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
47:The Sufi must be able to alternate his thought between the relative and the Absolute, the approximate and the Real. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
48:The treasure of joy is closer to you than you are to yourself-so why should you go searching from door to door?
~ Sufi Proverb,#NFDB
49:Lo que el autoimaginado místico busca sólo en su meditación, es visible para el Sufi en cada esquina y cada callejuela. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
50:The Sufi is One who does not care when something is taken from him, but who does not cease to seek for what he has not. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
51:The Sufi is 'One who does not care when something is taken from him, but who does not cease to seek for what he has not. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
52:The would-be Sufi needs guidance precisely because books, texts, while telling you what is needed, do not tell you when. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
53:It is axiomatic that the attempt to become a Sufi through a desire for personal power as normally understood will not succeed. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
54:Let yourself be silently drawn by
the stronger pull of what you really love.
— Rumi (C. 1207 C.E.-1273 C.E.), Sufi poet ~ Gregg Braden,#NFDB
55:What the self-imagined mystic seeks only in his meditation is visible to the Sufi on every street corner and in every alleyway ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
56:There can be no spirituality, according to the Sufi masters, without psychology, psychological insight and sociological balance. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
57:Los Sufis apuntan a refinar la consciencia humana. Esto es el misticismo Sufi: no mistificación o magia, pero una vía específica. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
58:Many a “learned” man is destroyed by ignorance and by the learning which is of no use to him’ (Hadrat Ahmed ibn Mahsud, the Sufi). ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
59:Ser un Sufi es desligarse de ideas fijas y preconcebidas, y no intentar eludir el propio destino.
Abu-Said, hijo de Abi-Khair ~ Idries Shah,#NFDB
60:The Sufi is one who does what others do – when it is necessary. He is also one who does what others cannot do – when it is indicated. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
61:Una escuela sufi nace para florecer y desaparecer, no para dejar vestigios de un ritual mecánico o interesantes restos antropológicos. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
62:Abu-Yaqub al-Susi declara que el Sufi es “alguien que no se preocupa cuando le quitan algo, pero que no cesa de buscar lo que no tiene. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
63:El Sufi es uno que obra como los demás, cuando es necesario. Es también uno que hace lo que los otros no pueden, cuando es lo indicado. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
64:Es axiomático que el intento de hacerse sufi para lograr ventajas personales, o lo que suele entenderse por las mismas, no tendrá éxito. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
65:He that is purified by love is pure; and he that is absorbed in the Beloved and hath abandoned all else is a Sufi.Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
66:El aspirante a Sufi necesita un guía precisamente porque los libros y textos, a pesar de decirte lo que es necesario, no te dicen cuándo. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
67:Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi or zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not of the East, nor of the West.... ~ Rumi, #NFDB
68:Abu-Yaqub al-Susi: the Sufi is 'One who does not care when something is taken from him, but who does not cease to seek for what he has not. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
69:A Sufi school comes into being in order to flourish and disappear, not to leave traces in mechanical ritual, or anthropologically survivals. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
70:The totality of life cannot be understood, so runs Sufi teaching, if it is studied only through the methods which we use in everyday living. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
71:Según la enseñanza Sufi, no es posible entender la vida en su totalidad si se la analiza según los métodos utilizados en nuestra cotidianidad. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
72:Sufi der ki baĢkaları hakkında hüküm verip yargıda bulunacağıma, ben kendi içime bakayım. Sofu der ki baĢkaları- nın her kusurunu bulup çıkarayım ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
73:He that is purified by love is pure; and he that is absorbed in the Beloved and hath abandoned all else is a Sufi.
Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah. ~ Idries Shah,#NFDB
74:Quien es purificado por el amor, es puro; y quien es absorbido en el Amado y ha abandonado todo lo demás, es un Sufi.
Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah ~ Idries Shah,#NFDB
75:There are two parts to the equation: feel good + take action. The ancient Sufi proverb says; “Trust in Allah, but first tie your camel to a post. ~ Andrew Matthews, #NFDB
76:Irving Karchmar, a Sufi convert and friend, and the author of the novel Master of the Jinn, said it best: at some point, the devoted pass from belief into certainty. ~ G Willow Wilson, #NFDB
77:Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a Love like that! It lights the whole sky.” Hafez (1315-1390)
SUFI POET ~ Rhonda Byrne,#NFDB
78:Master
'Whoever accepts me as a master,
Ali is his master too.'
{Rest of the lines are Tarana bols, which are meaningless and are chants of the
sufi saints}
~ Amir Khusro,#NFDB
79:“Tie two birds together.They will not be able to fly, even though they now have four wings.” ~ Jalaluddin Rumi( 1207 – 1273), Persian poet, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia, #NFDB
80:In comfort and abundance the Friend raised me. With vein and skin He tailored this ragged body. It’s just a robe worn by a Sufi, the heart. The whole universe is a khaneqah1 and He is my Shaikh. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
81:A true Sufi, Shaykh Haeri writes, “does not separate the inner from the outer,” for when you “start by purifying your inner self, you end up being concerned with the outer and with society. ~ Reza Aslan, #NFDB
82:Sandals. The Sufi teacher Ghulam-Shah was asked what pattern he used in formulating his courses for disciples. He said: 'Barefoot until you can get sandals, sandals until you can manage boots. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
83:This ancient Sufi story was told to teach a simple lesson but one that we often ignore: The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made. ~ Donella H Meadows, #NFDB
84:The thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi is said to have written, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. ~ Robert Wright, #NFDB
85:balance is captured in the words of the ancient Sufi teaching: “You think because you understand one you must understand two, because one and one makes two. But you must also understand and. ~ Stephen R Covey, #NFDB
86:You think that because you understand "one" that you must therefore understand "two" because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand "and."
-Sufi teaching story ~ Donella H Meadows,#NFDB
87:From the Sufi: Mullah Nasrudin once entered a store and asked the proprietor, “Have you ever seen me before?” “No,” was the prompt answer. “Then,” cried Nasrudin, “how do you know it is me? ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
88:There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.
~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, Thinking Like The Universe: The Sufi Path Of Awakening,#NFDB
89:don't waste time pining for the past
don't hold regrets for things that happened long ago
if you let the past go, you'll be a Sufi
you'll be the child of the present moment
the young and old of now ~ Rumi,#NFDB
90:“If you become addicted to looking back, half your life will be spent in distraction and the other half in regret.” ~ Jalaluddin Rumi ( 1207 – 1273), Persian poet, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia, #NFDB
91:The new Sufi tariqahs founded at this time stressed the unlimited potential of human life. Sufis could experience on the
spiritual plane what the Mongols had so nearly achieved in terrestrial politics ~ Karen Armstrong,#NFDB
92:He who tastes, knows,” goes the old Sufi saying. France’s most famous epicure, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, believed that food is the mirror to our souls: “Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are. ~ Eric Weiner, #NFDB
93:If it is bread that you seek, you will have bread,
If it is the soul you seek, you will find the soul.
If you understand this secret, you know you are that which you seek.” – Rumi (12th century Sufi poet) ~ Brian Tracy,#NFDB
94:Sandalias. Al maestro sufi Ghulam-Shah se le preguntó qué patrón utilizaba al formular sus cursos para discípulos. Dijo: “Descalzo hasta que puedas obtener sandalias, sandalias hasta que puedas valerte de botas”. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
95:“Put your thoughts to sleeplet them not cast a shadowover the moon of your heart.Drown them in the sea of love.” ~ Jalaluddin Rumi (1207 – 1273), 13th-century Persian poet; Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia, #NFDB
96:A Sufi manual, the Kashf-al-Mahjub, says that, towards the end of his journey, the dervish becomes the Way not the wayfarer, i.e. a place over which something is passing, not a traveller following his own free will. ~ Bruce Chatwin, #NFDB
97:You are my protection O Lord, my salvation: grant to Farid the blessing of Your adoration. [2667.jpg] -- from Anthology of Great Sufi & Mystical Poets of Pakistan, by Paul Smith
~ Baba Sheikh Farid, You are my protection O Lord
,#NFDB
98:The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
99:I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
100:Sufi sebenar berpakaian biasa bangsanya, mengikut Nabi
Pada zaman ini akan berseluar kemeja, sederhana sekali
Namun dada berisi hikmah ladunni bukan hasil hafali
Menjadi muaddib zamannya penuh istiqamah, berani. ~ Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud,#NFDB
101:the God that the Sufi poet Hafiz writes about: Not the God of names, Nor the God of don’ts, Nor the God who ever does Anything weird, But the God who only knows four words And keeps repeating them, saying: “Come dance with Me. ~ Elizabeth Lesser, #NFDB
102:The religion of the Sufi is the religion of the heart. The principal moral of the Sufi is to consider the heart of others, so that in the pleasure and displeasure of his fellow-man he sees the pleasure and displeasure of God. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, #NFDB
103:“Open your door, Beloved,You are the wine, I am the cupYou are eternal, I am a prisoner of time. ‘Silence fool, who would open his door to a madman.’” ~ Jalaluddin Rumi ( 1207 – 1273), Persian poet, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia, #NFDB
104:For evil give good, hold no revenge in the heart, Farid; your body will be free of sickness, your life be blessed. [2667.jpg] -- from Anthology of Great Sufi & Mystical Poets of Pakistan, by Paul Smith
~ Baba Sheikh Farid, For evil give good
,#NFDB
105:Turn cheek of yours before that one who hits on your right: do not strike back, remember its the soul's play, its delight. [2667.jpg] -- from Anthology of Great Sufi & Mystical Poets of Pakistan, by Paul Smith
~ Baba Sheikh Farid, Turn cheek
,#NFDB
106:…the work of the (Muslim Sufi) dervish community
was to open the heart,
explore the mystery of union,
to fiercely search for and try to say the truth,
and to celebrate the glory and difficulty
in being in human incarnation. ~ Coleman Barks,#NFDB
107:To be a Sufi is to give up all worries and there is no worse worry than yourself. When you are occupied with self you are separated from God. The way to God is but one step: the step out of yourself.
(Abu Sa'id Ibn Abi-l-khayr) ~ Llewellyn Vaughan Lee,#NFDB
108:Seek the Perfect Master who is like a deep sea where pearl you will find no point seeking that One in the shallow water too! [2667.jpg] -- from Anthology of Great Sufi & Mystical Poets of Pakistan, by Paul Smith
~ Baba Sheikh Farid, Like a deep sea
,#NFDB
109:As the political sky darkened, the court was lost in a last idyll of pleasure gardens, courtesans and mushairas, or poetic symposia, Sufi devotions and visits to pirs, as literary and religious ambition replaced the political variety. ~ William Dalrymple, #NFDB
110:The years after 2000 will be a monumental change in the way life is lived here. It will be harder and harder to relate to our children. I don't know what it's going to be. I don't plan to be around in the year 2000. I'll be taken away by the Sufi God. ~ Hunter S Thompson, #NFDB
111:There is a wonderful ancient Sufi saying which I'm going to paraphrase slightly. It says, 'When the heart weeps for what it has lost,' in this case 'heart' means 'ego,' 'when the heart weeps for what it has lost, the spirit rejoices for what it has found.' ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
112:But I was always coming here. I though about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
113:Even the Quran, which Sufis respect as the direct speech of God, lacks the capacity to shed light upon God’s essence. As one Sufi master has argued, why spend time reading a love letter (by which he means the Quran) in the presence of the Beloved who wrote it? ~ Reza Aslan, #NFDB
114:Farid says: Creator is in the creation and creation in the Creator! Why should we then be blaming others when that One is everywhere? [2667.jpg] -- from Anthology of Great Sufi & Mystical Poets of Pakistan, by Paul Smith
~ Baba Sheikh Farid, Fathom the ocean
,#NFDB
115:Sufi teaching story: After many year's study of philosophical subjects, Malik Dinar felt that the time had come to travel in search of knowledge. "I will go," he said to himself, "seeking the Hidden Teacher, who is also said to be within my uttermost self. ~ Jules Cashford, #NFDB
116:But I was always coming here. I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
117:O sufi Muhammad ibn Khafif disse: “Fé é acreditar, com o coração, no conhecimento que vem do Invisível.” Ele não disse que é acreditar em algo que foi dito, ou incutido, ou admitido em momentos de entusiasmo e que, por conseguinte, tornou-se parte de uma obsessão. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
118:It's quite common for a Sufi mystic to cry in ecstasy that he's neither a Jew, a Christian, nor a Muslim. He is at home equally in a synagogue, a mosque, a temple, or a church because when one's glimpsed the divine, one's left these man-made distinctions behind. ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
119:/Farsi O Lord, give me a heart I can pour out in thanksgiving. Give me life So I can spend it Working for the salvation of the world. [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut
~ Khwaja Abdullah Ansari, Give Me
,#NFDB
120:The Sufi, realizing this, takes the path of annihilation, and, by the guidance of a teacher on the path, finds at the end of this journey that the destination was he. As Iqbal says: I wandered in the pursuit of my own self; I was the traveler, and I am the destination. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, #NFDB
121:All life is struggle, says the Sufi, but the struggle must be a coherent one. The average man is struggling against too many things all at once. If a confused and incomplete person makes money, or becomes a professional success, he still remains a confused and incomplete person. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
122:/Farsi & Turkish Watching my hand; He is moving it. Hearing my voice; He is speaking... Walking from room to room -- No one here but Him. [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut
~ Jalaluddin Rumi, No One Here but Him
,#NFDB
123:I read, read enormously on all different fields of Islamic thought, from philosophy to Islamic literature, poetry, exegeses, knowledge of the Hadith, the teachings of the prophet. That's how I trained myself. And then I was appointed imam by a Sufi master from Istanbul, Turkey. ~ Feisal Abdul Rauf, #NFDB
124:Kunley belongs to a spiritual school of thought known as crazy wisdom. Every religion has its branch of crazy wisdom. The Christians have their Fools for Christ. The Muslims have their Sufi Mast-Qalanders. The Jews have Woody Allen. Yet none is as crazy, or as wise, as Drukpa Kunley. ~ Eric Weiner, #NFDB
125:His grace may fall upon us at anytime, it has no rules, you see? Some don't get it after rituals, vigils: others asleep, it hits suddenly! [2667.jpg] -- from Anthology of Great Sufi & Mystical Poets of Pakistan, by Paul Smith
~ Baba Sheikh Farid, His grace may fall upon us at anytime
,#NFDB
126:The Sufi relates to God not as a judge, nor as a father figure, nor as the creator, but as our own Beloved, who is so close, so near, so tender.
In the states of nearness the lover experiences an intimacy with the Beloved which carries the softness and ecstasy of love. ~ Llewellyn Vaughan Lee,#NFDB
127:From the Muslims I learned from the extraordinary pluralism of the Koran, the fact that the Koran endorses every single one of the major world faiths, but I was particularly enthralled by the Sufi tradition, the mystical tradition of Islam, which is so open to other religious faiths. ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
128:The Sufi saint Rabi'a Al-Adawiyya was seen carrying a firebrand and a jug of water - the firebrand to burn Paradise, the jug of water to drown Hell...
So that both veils disappear, and God's followers worship, not out of hope for reward, nor fear of punishment, but out of love. ~ Craig Thompson,#NFDB
129:A fish wants to dive from dry land
into the ocean
when it hears the roaring waves.
A falcon wants to return from the forest
to the King’s wrist
when it hears the drum beating “Return.”
A Sufi, shimmering with light,
wants to dance like a sunbeam
when darkness surrounds him. ~ Rumi,#NFDB
130:To those who say "Sufism is apolitical" or "no politics," I respond: "No politics is politics." Look at the very old African Sufi tradition, the Asian Sufi tradition, or the North African Sufi tradition. Then you get it and understand what Sufism is all about wisdom, courage and resistance. ~ Tariq Ramadan, #NFDB
131:A fish wants to dive from dry land
into the ocean
when it hears the roaring waves.
A falcon wants to return from the forest
to the King’s wrist
when it hears the drum beating “Return.”
A Sufi, shimmering with light,
wants to dance like a sunbeam
when darkness surrounds him. ~ Rumi,#NFDB
132:It is no accident that Sufis find that they can connect most constructively with people who are well integrated into the world, as well as having higher aims, and that those who adopt a sensible attitude towards society and life as generally known can usually absorb Sufi teachings very well indeed ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
133:A modern story of Mullah Nasrudin, the Sufi teacher and holy fool, tells of him entering a bank and trying to cash a check. The teller asks him to please identify himself. Nasrudin reaches in his pocket and pulls out a small mirror. Looking into it, he says, “Yep, that’s me all right.” Meditation ~ Jack Kornfield, #NFDB
134:What would I do if you never came here?' But I was ALWAYS coming here. I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
135:Everyone in Iran is perceived to be a child with a paternal authority vested in the Guardian Council and the Sufi elders. They're supposed to be grateful. They can never for a moment not be afforded this wonderful protection. The father who will never go away. The father who will never quit caring for them. ~ Christopher Hitchens, #NFDB
136:The Sufi way of thinking is particularly appropriate in a world of mass communication, when every effort is directed towards making people believe that they want or need certain things; that they should believe certain things; that they should as a consequence do certain things that their manipulators want them to do. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
137:I went looking for Him And lost myself; The drop merged with the Sea -- Who can find it now? Looking and looking for Him I lost myself; The Sea merged with the drop -- Who can find it now? [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut
~ Kabir, The Drop and the Sea
,#NFDB
138:We view Sufism not as an ideology that molds people to the right way of belief or action, but as an art or science that can exert a beneficial influence on individuals and societies, in accordance with the needs of those individuals and societies ... Sufi study and development gives one capacities one did not have before. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
139:The Sufi way is through knowledge and practice, not through intellect and talk. As Prince Dara Shikoh says, in a Persian poem: Do you wish to be included with the Lords of Sight? From speech (then) pass on to experience. By saying 'Unity', you do not become a monotheist; The mouth does not become sweet from the word 'Sugar ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
140:The Sufi recognizes the knowledge of self as the essence of all religions; he traces it in every religion, he sees the same truth in each, and therefore he regards all as one. Hence he can realize the saying of Jesus; 'I and my Father are one.' The difference between creature and Creator remains on his lips, not in his soul. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, #NFDB
141:People have fought in vain about the names and lives of their saviors, and have named their religions after the name of their savior, instead of uniting with each other in the truth that is taught. ~ Inayat Khan, in The Spiritual Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan Vol. I, The Way of Illumination Section I - The Way of Illumination, Part III : The Sufi, #NFDB
142:/Farsi & Turkish Love is here; it is the blood in my veins, my skin. I am destroyed; He has filled me with Passion. His fire has flooded the nerves of my body. Who am I? Just my name; the rest is Him. [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut
~ Jalaluddin Rumi, Love is Here
,#NFDB
143:/Farsi The one You kill, Lord, Does not smell of blood, And the one You burn Does not reek of smoke. He You burn laughs as he burns And the one You kill, As You kill him, Cries out in ecstasy. [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut
~ Khwaja Abdullah Ansari, The one You kill
,#NFDB
144:/Farsi The universe is a kaleidoscope: now hopelessness, now hope now spring, now fall. Forget its ups and downs: do not vex yourself: The remedy for pain is the pain. [1501.jpg] -- from The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry, Translated by Peter Lamborn Wilson / Translated by Nasrollah Pourjavady
~ Sarmad, The universe
,#NFDB
145:Like the bat, the Sufi is asleep to 'things of the day' - the familiar struggle for existence which the ordinary man finds all-important - and vigilant while others are asleep. In other words, he keeps awake the spiritual attention dormant in others. That 'mankind sleeps in a nightmare of unfulfillment' is a commonplace of Sufi literature ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
146:Definición de un Sufi
Para aprender, la gente debe abandonar mucho, y esto incluye el ritual como algo de lo cual imaginan que pueden aprender. Es para recalcar esto que Abu-Yaqub al-Susi, citado en Taarruf, de Kalabadhi, declara que el Sufi es “alguien que no se preocupa cuando le quitan algo, pero que no cesa de buscar lo que no tiene. ~ Idries Shah,#NFDB
147:There is a Sufi trend, a madhabi Sufi trend, and I don't have any problem with this. What is not acceptable is that, first, some scholars are trying to show to the audience that they are open to other trends. However, when it comes to the retreat or the panels, they don't want to be with some of us because they are scared of being exposed. ~ Tariq Ramadan, #NFDB
148:The saint Shibli one day went to see the Sufi Thaury; he found him sitting so still in contemplation that not a hair of his body moved. He; asked him, "From whom didst thou learn to practice such fixity of contemplation?" Thaury answered, "From a cat which I saw waiting at a mouse-hole in an attitude of even greater fixity than this. ~ Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, #NFDB
149:The very essence of the Sufi spiritual tradition requires you to purify your heart, to liberate yourself from your ego and to be courageous in facing any corrupt power, injustice and oppression. Unfortunately, colonial powers pushed an agenda by using Sufism against resistance, and some ulama played that game in the past and in the present. ~ Tariq Ramadan, #NFDB
150:/Farsi Where have you taken your sweet song? Come back and play me a tune. I never really cared for the things of this world. It was the glow of your presence that filled it with beauty. [2200.jpg] -- from Love's Alchemy: Poems from the Sufi Tradition, Translated by David Fideler / Translated by Sabrineh Fideler
~ Hafiz, The Glow of Your Presence
,#NFDB
151:Whatever happens in your life, no matter how troubling things might seem, do not enter the neighbourhood of despair. Even when all doors remained closed, God will open up a new path only for you. Be thankful! It is easy to be thankful when all is well. A Sufi is thankful not only for what he has been given but also for all that he has been denied. ~ Shams Tabrizi, #NFDB
152:When [Allen] Ginsberg and I founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics - that was 1974 - we referred to it by a term used by Sufi thinker Hakim Bey, as "temporary autonomous zones." That for me sums up some of Whitman's sense of a community of likeminded people with a certain kind of adhesiveness and connection and sharing of this ethos. ~ Anne Waldman, #NFDB
153:El camino Sufi es a través del conocimiento y la práctica, no a través del intelecto y el habla. Como dice el príncipe Dara Shikoh en el poema persa: ¿Deseas ser incluido con los Señores de la Visión? Pasa (entonces) del discurso a la experiencia. Al decir “Unidad”, no te transformas en un monoteísta; La boca no se vuelve dulce por la palabra “Azúcar”. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
154:/Farsi Your heartrending fire made me bloom like a rose. I died at your feet and returned fast to life. My inborn freedom offered nothing in profit; but now I am free, since becoming your slave. [2200.jpg] -- from Love's Alchemy: Poems from the Sufi Tradition, Translated by David Fideler / Translated by Sabrineh Fideler
~ Hakim Sanai, Bloom Like a Rose
,#NFDB
155:When the Day came -- The Day I had lived and died for -- The Day that is not in any calendar -- Clouds heavy with love Showered me with wild abundance. Inside me, my soul was drenched. Around me, even the desert grew green. [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut
~ Kabir, When the Day Came
,#NFDB
156:Being human, we struggle constantly to stay with the miracle of what is and not to fall constantly into the black hole of what is not. This is an ancient challenge. As the Sufi poet Ghalib said centuries ago, “Every particle of creation sings its own song of what is and what is not. Hearing what is can make you wise; hearing what is not can drive you mad. ~ Mark Nepo, #NFDB
157:Definition of a Sufi
To learn, people must give up a great deal, and this includes ritual as something from which they imagine they might learn. It is to emphasise this that Abu-Yaqub al-Susi, quoted in Kalabadhi's Taaruf, states that the Sufi is 'One who does not care when something is taken from him, but who does not cease to seek for what he has not. ~ Idries Shah,#NFDB
158:it's about a love song to myself, and a love song to the universe, kind of like the way that Song of Solomon consists of love songs to God or like the way Sufi poems are erotic love songs to God, I kind of wanted something like that. Because I was getting to know myself more deeply at this point. I've always been on this track where I wanted to be enlightened. ~ Larkin Grimm, #NFDB
159:Whatever happens in your life, no matter how troubling things may seem, do not enter the neighbourhood of despair. Even when all doors remain closed, God will open up a new path only for you. Be thankful ! It is easy to be thankful when all is well. A Sufi/Lightworker is thankful not only for what she/he has been given, but also for what she/he has been denied. (8) ~ Various, #NFDB
160:It is a Sufi contention that truth is not discovered or maintained by the mere repetition of teachings. It can only be kept understood by the perpetual experience of it. And it is in the experience of truth that the Sufis have always reposed their trust. Sufism is therefore not 'Do as I say and not as I do', or even 'Do as I do', but 'Experience it and you will know'. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
161:Where establishment Islam was becoming less tolerant, seeing the Quran as the only valid scripture and Muhammad’s religion as the one true faith, Sufis went back to the spirit of the Quran in their appreciation of other religious traditions. Some, for example, were especially devoted to Jesus, whom they saw as the ideal Sufi since he had preached a gospel of love. ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
162:One famous female Sufi mystic and religious teacher was Rabi-’ah al-’ Ada-wiyyah (712‒801), who after a girlhood in slavery fled to the desert, where she rejected all offers of marriage and devoted herself to prayer and scholarship. Although the most distinguished of women Sufis, Rabi-’ah was not unique, since Sufism gave all women the chance to attain a holy dignity ~ Rosalind Miles, #NFDB
163:Scholars of the East and West have heroically consecrated their whole working lives to making available, by means of their own disciplines, Sufi literary and philosophical material to the world at large. In many cases they have faithfully recorded the Sufis' own reiteration that the Way of the Sufis cannot be understood by means of the intellect or by ordinary book learning. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
164:/Farsi Lord, send me staggering with the wine Of Your love! Ring my feet With the chains of Your slavery! Empty me of everything but Your love And in it destroy and resurrect me! Any hunger You awaken Can only end in Feast! [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut
~ Khwaja Abdullah Ansari, Empty Me of Everything But Your Love
,#NFDB
165:/Farsi Love came flowed like blood beneath skin, through veins emptied me of my self filled me with the Beloved till every limb every organ was seized and occupied till only my name remains. the rest is It. [1501.jpg] -- from The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry, Translated by Peter Lamborn Wilson / Translated by Nasrollah Pourjavady
~ Abu-Said Abil-Kheir, Love came
,#NFDB
166:Existe la afirmación Sufi de que la verdad no se descubre o mantiene por la mera repetición de enseñanzas. Su comprensión sólo puede mantenerse mediante la continua experiencia de ella. Y es en la experiencia de la verdad donde los Sufis siempre han depositado su confianza. Por tanto el sufismo no es “Haz como digo y no como hago”, o incluso “Haz como hago”, sino “Experiméntalo y conocerás”. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
167:Christian scholars often say that Sufi theories are close to those of Christianity. Many Moslems maintain that they are essentially derived from Islam. The resemblance of many Sufi ideas to those of several religious and esoteric systems are sometimes taken as evidence of derivation. The Islamic interpretation is that religion is of one origin, differences being due to local or historical causes. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
168:The main problem is that most commentators are accustomed to thinking of spiritual schools as 'systems', which are more or less alike, and which depend upon dogma and ritual: and especially upon repetition and the application of continual and standardised pressures upon their followers.The Sufi way, except in degenerate forms which are not to be classified as Sufic, is entirely different from this. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
169:A handful of men working within the Zen sect of Buddhism created gardens in fifteenth-century Japan which were, and still are, far more than merely an aesthetic expression. And what is left of the earlier Mogul gardens in India suggests that their makers were acquainted with what lay behind the flowering of the Sufi movement in High Asia and so sought to add further dimensions to their garden scenes. ~ Russell Page, #NFDB
170:The main problem is that most commentators are accustomed to thinking of spiritual schools as 'systems', which are more or less alike, and which depend upon dogma and ritual: and especially upon repetition and the application of continual and standardised pressures upon their followers.
The Sufi way, except in degenerate forms which are not to be classified as Sufic, is entirely different from this. ~ Idries Shah,#NFDB
171:The poor Sufi dressed in rags walked into a jewelry store owned by a rich merchant and asked him, "Do you know how you’re going to die." And the Sufi said, "I do.""How?" asked the merchant.
And the Sufi lay down, crossed his arms, said, "Like this," and died, whereupon the merchant promptly gave up his store to live a life of poverty in pursuit of the kind of spiritual wealth the dead Sufi had acquired. ~ John Green,#NFDB
172:Eruditos de Oriente y Occidente consagraron heroicamente sus existencias profesionales a poner a disposición del público el material literario y filosófico sufi, utilizando para ello sus propias disciplinas. En muchos casos hicieron referencia a la insistencia de los propios sufis en que el camino de los sufis no puede ser comprendido valiéndose del intelecto o mediante el común aprendizaje a través de libros. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
173:How did the Turks become Muslim? They became Muslim through the Sufis. The Arabs never conquered the Turks. There were people in early Islam who were speaking like Hallaj, who spoke about the Truth, about reaching the Truth, about being one with the Truth, and not only they were not killed, but they were great heroes of their own culture, and there is a university in Turkey named after one [Sufi Saint.] ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, #NFDB
174:Overcome any bitterness that may have come because you were not up to the magnitude of the pain that was entrusted to you. Like the mother of the world who carries the pain of the world in her heart, each of us is part of her heart and is, therefore, endowed with a certain measure of cosmic pain. You are sharing in the totality of that pain. You are called upon to meet it in joy instead of self-pity. -Sufi poetry ~ Tara Brach, #NFDB
175:A joyful task,’ he says and she realizes that he welcomes the idea of years of searching, tile by tile, inscription by inscription, cornice by cornice and niche by niche, that the painstaking search of Sinan’s greatest achievement, decades long, is the holy task; that the secret letter is cut in every stone and tile. By the time you find it, you have realized the supreme unimportance of finding it. A Sufi lesson. ~ Ian McDonald, #NFDB
176:An individual enters the final stages of the Way when the nafs begins to release its grip on the qalb, thus allowing the ruh—which is present in all humanity, but is cloaked in the veil of the self—to absorb the qalb as though it were a drop of dew plunged into a vast, endless sea. When this occurs, the individual achieves fana: ecstatic, intoxicating self-annihilation. This is the final station along the Sufi Way. ~ Reza Aslan, #NFDB
177:El principal problema es que la mayoría de los comentaristas están acostumbrados a considerar a las escuelas espirituales como “sistemas”, más o menos similares, y que dependen del dogma y el ritual: en especial de la repetición y la aplicación de presiones continuas y uniformes sobre sus seguidores.
El camino sufi, excepto en formas degeneradas que no deben clasificarse como súficas, difiere totalmente de eso. ~ Idries Shah,#NFDB
178:The Sufi saint Mazhar Jaan Jana of 18th century Delhi believed that the Quran condemns bowing before deities because in pre-Islamic idol worship stones were considered god. But Hindus pray to god through that idol, which is a reflection of god. In Vedas god is nirguna and nirankara, that is, he has no attributes and no shape, that is the real belief of Hindus. As Muslims visit graves, so Hindus worship idols. ~ Asghar Ali Engineer, #NFDB
179:/Farsi In Love there are no days or nights, For lovers it is all the same. The musicians have gone, yet the Sufis listen; In Love there is a beginning but no end. Each has a name for his Beloved, But for me my Beloved is nameless. Sa'di, if you destroy an idol, Then destroy the idol of the self. [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal
~ Saadi, In Love
,#NFDB
180:Every spiritual path leads the sincere seeker to the truth that can only be found within. The Sufi says that there are as many roads to God as there are human beings, “as many as the breaths of the children of men.” Because we are each individual and unique, the journey of discovering our real nature will be different for each of us. At the same time different spiritual paths are suited to different types of people. ~ Llewellyn Vaughan Lee, #NFDB
181:There are lots of ways to dance and to spin, sometimes it just starts my feet first then my entire body, I am spinning no one can see it but it is happening. I am so glad to be alive, I am so glad to be loving and loved. Even if I were close to the finish, even if I were at my final breath, I would be here to take a stand, bereft of such astonishments, but for them. If I were a Sufi for sure I would be one of the spinning kind. ~ Mary Oliver, #NFDB
182:A Sufi mystic who had always remained happy was asked.... For seventy years people had watched him, he had never been found sad. One day they asked him, 'What is the secret of your happiness?' He said, 'There is no secret. Every morning when I wake up, I meditate for five minutes and I say to myself, 'Listen, now there are two possibilities: you can be miserable, or you can be blissful. Choose.' And I always choose to be blissful.' ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
183:/Farsi On Unity's Way: no infidelity no faith. Take one step away from yourself and -- behold! -- the Path! You, soul of the world, must choose the road of Divine Submission then sit with anyone you like -- even a black snake -- but not your self! [1501.jpg] -- from The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry, Translated by Peter Lamborn Wilson / Translated by Nasrollah Pourjavady
~ Abu-Said Abil-Kheir, On Unitys Way
,#NFDB
184:When Peter renounced the world he grew up in and the people he grew up with, I believe it was exactly as heroic as that of a person who, finding himself prone to violent seasickness, renounces yachting. Hell, Pete was hardly ‘in the world’ in the first place. That was just the problem. He knew more about 13th century Sufi Orders and the Ptolemaic Universe than the rivers and hills and sewers and mills in southwestern Washington. ~ David James Duncan, #NFDB
185:Kill me, my faithful friends, For in my being killed is my life. Love is that you remain standing In front of your Beloved When you are stripped of all your attributes; Then His attributes become your qualities. Between me and You, there is only me. Take away the me, so only You remain. [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut
~ Mansur al-Hallaj, Kill me- my faithful friends
,#NFDB
186:Let's go be Sufi's. Roam the planet spinning like a child’s toy, spreading truth and wisdom, spreading love. Let us go be animals, acting on instinct, without thought, stalking prey and lying in the holy hot sun of the Serengeti. Let us go be ourselves, whoever we are, souls bumping into one another, atoms, science, and physics. Let's go be you, and let's go be me, and together let us hand people keys that unlock the dankest depths of their souls. ~ Susan Marie, #NFDB
187:You have learnt so much And read a thousand books. Have you ever read your Self? You have gone to mosque and temple. Have you ever visited your soul? You are busy fighting Satan. Have you ever fought your Ill intentions? You have reached into the skies, But you have failed to reach What's in your heart! [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal
~ Bulleh Shah, Look into Yourself
,#NFDB
188:The Now is also central to the teaching of Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam. Sufis have a saying: “The Sufi is the son of time present.” And Rumi, the great poet and teacher of Sufism, declares: “Past and future veil God from our sight; burn up both of them with fire.” Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century spiritual teacher, summed it all up beautifully: “Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
189:The Hole and the Thread A CERTAIN great Sufi was asked about the role and status of some of his predecessors. He said: ‘To erect a small building you may first have to excavate a large hole. ‘To make a large carpet you may have to start with a single thread. ‘When you can see the building or the carpet, your question is answered. ‘But when your question is about the hole in the ground and the thread in the hand, you can only be answered in this parable.’ * * * ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
190:You went away but remained in me And thus became my peace and happiness. In separation, separation left me And I witnessed the Unknown. You were the hidden secret of my longing, Hidden deep within my conscience deeper than a dream. You were my true friend in the day And in darkness my companion. [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal
~ Mansur al-Hallaj, You Went Away but Remained in Me
,#NFDB
191:While the stability of marriage exists as a structural element of society the meaning and evaluation of life can be experienced at a personal and existential level. Once divorce emerges as the norm, or marriage is replaced by the ‘relationship’, itself a fleeting and undefined condition, the result is the isolated individual, and as such, the isolated individual is helpless to create a societal model. Marriage and inheritance – joining and transfer – are thus the warp and woof of the community. The ~ Abdalqadir as Sufi, #NFDB
192:The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing? ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
193:But promoting philosophical skepticism is not quite the mission of this book. If awareness of the Black Swan problem can lead us into withdrawal and extreme skepticism, I take here the exact opposite direction. I am interested in deeds and true empiricism. So, this book was not written by a Sufi mystic, or even by a skeptic in the ancient or medieval sense, or even (we will see) in a philosophical sense, but by a practitioner whose principal aim is not to be a sucker in things that matter, period. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
194:The louder a person speaks in an assembly the more attention he attracts and all those present perforce give him a hearing. In the same way, if a Sufi sends forth the vibrations of his thought and feeling, they naturally strike with a great strength and power on any mind on which they happen to fall. As sweetness of voice has a winning power so it is with tenderness of thought and feeling. Thought-vibrations to which the spoken word is added are doubled in strength; and with a physical effort this strength is trebled. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, #NFDB
195:Where Ibn al-Arabi had written for the intellectual, Rumi was summoning all human beings to live beyond themselves, and to transcend the routines of daily life. The Mathnawi celebrated the Sufi lifestyle which can make everyone an indomitable hero of a battle waged perpetually in the cosmos and within the soul. The Mongol invasions had led to a mystical movement, which helped people come to terms with the catastrophe they had experienced at the deeper levels of the psyche, and Rumi was its greatest luminary and exemplar. ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
196:His constant fight is with the Nafs (self-interest), the root of all disharmony and the only enemy of man. By crushing this enemy man gains mastery over himself; this wins for him mastery over the whole universe, because the wall standing between the self and the Almighty has been broken down. Gentleness, mildness, respect, humility, modesty, self-denial, conscientiousness, tolerance and forgiveness are considered by the Sufi as the attributes which produce harmony within one's own soul as well as within that of another. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, #NFDB
197:In Sufi terms the crushing of the ego is called Nafs Kushi. And how do we crush it? We crush it by sometimes taking ourselves to task. When the self says, 'O no, I must not be treated like this,' then we say, 'What does it matter?' When the self says, 'He ought to have done this, she ought to have said that,' we say, 'What does it matter, either this way or that way? Every person is what he is; you cannot change him, but you can change yourself.' That is the crushing. ... It is only in this way that we can crush our ego. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, #NFDB
198:I witnessed my Maker with my heart's eye. I asked, 'Who are You?' He answered, 'You!' For You one cannot ask, Where? Because where is Where for You? You do not pass through the imagination Or else we'll know where You are. You are He who is everywhere Yet You are nowhere. Where are You? In my annihilation is my annihilation's annihilation And You are found in my annihilation. [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal
~ Mansur al-Hallaj, I Witnessed My Maker
,#NFDB
199:The Jesus Trajectory Love is recklessness, not reason. Reason seeks a profit. Loves comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed. Yet in the midst of suffering, Love proceeds like a millstone, hard-surfaced and straight forward. Having died to self-interest, she risks everything and asks for nothing. Love gambles away every gift God bestows. The words above were written by the great Sufi mystic Jalalludin Rumi.6 But better than almost anything in Christian scripture, they closely describe the trajectory that Jesus himself followed in life. ~ Cynthia Bourgeault, #NFDB
200:Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or the next, did not descend from Adam or Eve or any origin story. My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul. I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one and that one call to and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human being. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
201:He who is stricken by Love Sings and dances out of tune. He who wears the garb of Love Gets blessings from above. Soon as he drinks from this cup No questions and no answers remain. He who is stricken by Love Sings and dances out of tune. He who has the Beloved in his heart, He is fulfilled with his Love. No need he has for formality, He just enjoys his ecstasy. He who is stricken by Love Sings and dances out of tune. [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal
~ Bulleh Shah, He Who is Stricken by Love
,#NFDB
202:/Farsi Don't speak of your suffering -- He is speaking. Don't look for Him everywhere -- He's looking for you. An ant's foot touches a leaf, He senses it; A pebble shifts in a streambed, He knows it. If there's a worm hidden deep in a rock, He'll know its body, tinier than an atom, The sound of its praise, its secret ecstasy -- All this He knows by divine knowing. He has given the tiniest worm its food; He has opened to you the Way of the Holy Ones. [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut
~ Hakim Sanai, The Way of the Holy Ones
,#NFDB
203:An individual enters the final stages of the Way when the nafs begins to release its grip on the qalb, thus allowing the ruh—which is present in all humanity, but is cloaked in the veil of the self—to absorb the qalb as though it were a drop of dew plunged into a vast, endless sea. When this occurs, the individual achieves fana: ecstatic, intoxicating self-annihilation. This is the final station along the Sufi Way. It is here, at the end of the journey, when the individual has been stripped of his ego, that he becomes one with the Universal Spirit and achieves unity with the Divine. Although ~ Reza Aslan, #NFDB
204:Stillness, then silence, then random speech, Then knowledge, intoxication, annihilation; Earth, then fire, then light. Coldness, then shade, then sunlight. Thorny road, then a path, then the wilderness. River, then ocean, then the shore; Contentment, desire, then Love. Closeness, union, intimacy; Closing, then opening, then obliteration, Separation, togetherness, then longing; Signs for those of real understanding Who find this world of little value. [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal
~ Mansur al-Hallaj, Stillness
,#NFDB
205:Why Aren't We Screaming Drunks?
by Hafiz (Daniel Ladinsky)
(1945? - ) Timeline
Original Language
English
Muslim / Sufi
Contemporary
The sun once glimpsed God's true nature
And has never been the same.
Thus that radiant sphere
Constantly pours its energy
Upon this earth
As does He from behind
The veil.
With a wonderful God like that
Why isn't everyone a screaming drunk?
Hafiz's guess is this:
Any thought that you are better or less
Than another man
Quickly
Breaks the wine
Glass. ~ Daniel Ladinsky,#NFDB
206:Untuk membuat hati kita lapang dan dalam, tidak cukup dengan membaca novel, membaca buku-buku, mendengar petuah, nasihat, atau ceramah. Para sufi dan orang-orang berbahagia di dunia harus bekerja keras, membangun benteng, menjauh dari dunia, melatih hati siang dan malam. Hidup sederhana, apa adanya, adalah jalan tercepat untuk melatih hati di tengah riuh rendah kehidupan hari ini. Percayalah, memiliki hati yang lapang dan dalam adalah konkret dan menyenangkan, ketika kita bisa berdiri dengan seluruh kebahagiaan hidup, menatap kesibukan sekitar, dan melewati kebahagiaan hidup, bersama keluarga tercinta. ~ Tere Liye, #NFDB
207:Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion
or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up
from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,
am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any
origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,
first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.
~ Jalaluddin Rumi, Only Breath
,#NFDB
208:To make sure none followed where you led
I used my hair to cover our tracks.
Sun set on the island of our bed
night rose
eating echoes
and we were beached there, in tangles of flicker,
candles whispering at our driftwood backs.
Your eyes above me
afraid of the promises I might keep
regretting the truth we did say
less than the lie we didn't,
I went in deep, I went in deep,
to fight the past for you.
Now we both know
sorrows are the seeds of loving.
Now we both know I will live and
I will die for this love.
-Sadiq Khan, Sufi poet ~ Gregory David Roberts,#NFDB
209:Hammered into the Heart
In the Sufi tradition light and knowledge are reflected from heart to heart. The heart is the organ of the higher consciousness — the consciousness of the Self. Spiritual teachings can be reflected or impressed directly into the heart, bypassing the limitations of the mind. . . . A further part of the Sufi training is to bring the mind into the heart, the mind 'hammered into the heart' as the Sufis say, so that the teachings given to the heart can be assimilated into everyday consciousness. A mind that has been brought into the heart can understand the ways of oneness, which are often paradoxical, sometimes even nonsensical, to the rational self. ~ Llewellyn Vaughan Lee,#NFDB
210:Hammered into the Heart
In the Sufi tradition light and knowledge are reflected from heart to heart. The heart is the organ of the higher consciousness — the consciousness of the Self. Spiritual teachings can be reflected or impressed directly into the heart, bypassing the limitations of the mind. . . . A further part of the Sufi training is to bring the mind into the heart, the mind 'hammered into the heart' as the Sufis say, so that the teachings given to the heart can be assimilated into everyday consciousness. A mind that has been brought into the heart can understand the ways of oneness, which are often paradoxical, sometimes even nonsensical, to the rational self. ~ Llewellyn Vaughan Lee,#NFDB
211:Certainly If John moschos where to come back today it is likely that he would find much more than that was familiar and the practices of a modern Muslim Sufi then he would with those of, say, a contemporary American evangelical. Yet the simple truth has been lost by our tendency to think of Christianity as a western religion rather than the Oriental faith it actually is. Moreover the modern demonization of Islam in the west, and the recent growth of Muslim fundamentalism (itself in many ways a reaction to the West's repeated humiliation of the Muslim world), have led to an atmosphere where few are aware of, or indeed wish to be aware of, the profound kinship of Christianity and Islam. ~ William Dalrymple, #NFDB
212:Find the word, understand the word, Depend on the word; The word is heaven and space, the word the earth, The word the universe. The word is in our ears, the word is on our tongues, The word the idol. The word is the holy book, the word is harmony, The word is music. The word is magic, the word the Guru. The word is the body, the word is the spirit, the word is being, The word Not-being. The word is man, the word is woman, The Worshipped Great. The word is the seen and unseen, the word is the existent And the non-existent. Know the word, says Kabir, The word is All-powerful. [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal
~ Kabir, The Word
,#NFDB
213:/Farsi Beauty radiated in eternity With its light; Love was born And set the worlds alight. It revealed itself to angels Who knew not how to love; It turned shyly towards man And set fire to his heart. Reason ventured to light Its own flame and wear the crown, But Your radiance Turned the world Of reason upside down. Others got pleasure As was their fate. My heart was Towards sadness inclined; For me, sorrow was destined. Beauty yearned to see itself; It turned to man to sing its praise. Hafiz wrote this song Drunk with Love, From a heart Carrying a happy secret. [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal
~ Hafiz, Beauty Radiated in Eternity
,#NFDB
214:Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there's a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seem running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, 'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven of fear of hell, but because He is God. ~ John Green, #NFDB
215:The myth persists in Egypt to this day that Napoleon’s soldiers actually disfigured some of these ruins, and are even said to have used the Sphinx as target practice for their cannons, shooting off its nose. This last is a calumny: it is known that the Sphinx was defaced as early as the eighth century by the Sufi iconoclast Saim-ed-Dahr,28 and was further damaged in 1380 by fanatical Muslims prompted by the Koran’s strictures against images. During these early times the Sphinx was not regarded as a precious historical object, but instead inspired fear: through the centuries it became known to the Egyptians as Abul-Hol (Father of Terrors), and would only begin to be regarded more favorably when it became a tourist attraction in the later nineteenth century. ~ Paul Strathern, #NFDB
216:/Farsi We are busy with the luxury of things. Their number and multiple faces bring To us confusion we call knowledge. Say: God created the world, pinned night to day, Made mountains to weigh it down, seas To wash its face, living creatures with pleas (The ancestors of prayers) seeking a place In this mystery that floats in endless space. God set the earth on the back of a bull, The bull on a fish dancing on a spool Of silver light so fine it is like air; That in turn rests on nothing there But nothing that nothing can share. All things are but masks at God's beck and call, They are symbols that instruct us that God is all. [1490.jpg] -- from The Conference of the Birds: The Selected Sufi Poetry of Farid ud-Din Attar, Translated by Raficq Abdulla
~ Farid ud-Din Attar, Invocation
,#NFDB
217:The Lord is in me, and the Lord is in you, As life is hidden in every seed. So rubble your pride, my friend, And look for Him within you. When I sit in the heart of His world A million suns blaze with light, A burning blue sea spreads across the sky, Life's turmoil falls quiet, All the stains of suffering wash away. Listen to the unstruck bells and drums! Love is here; plunge into its rapture! Rains pour down without water; Rivers are streams of light. How could I ever express How blessed I feel To revel in such vast ecstasy In my own body? This is the music Of soul and soul meeting. Of the forgetting of all grief. This is the music That transcends all coming and going. [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut
~ Kabir, The Lord is in Me
,#NFDB
218:Love springs eternal! When I learnt the lesson of Love I dreaded going to the mosque. Hesitantly, I found a temple Where they beat a thousand drums. Love springs eternal! Come! I am tired of reading holy books, Fed up with prostrations good. God is not in Mathura or Mecca. He who finds Him is enlightened! Love springs eternal! Come! Burn the prayer mat, break the beaker! Quit the rosary, chuck the staff! Lovers shout at the top of their voices: Break all rules that tie you down! Love springs eternal! Come! Heer and Ranjha are united: While she searches for him in orchards, He is in her warm embrace! She has her love, she is fulfilled! Love springs eternal! Come! [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal
~ Bulleh Shah, Love Springs Eternal
,#NFDB
219:In one marijuana experience, my informant became aware of the presence and, in a strange way, the in-appropriateness of this silent "watcher," who responds with interest and occasional critical comment to the kaleidoscopic dream imagery of the marijuana experience but is not part of it. "Who are you?" my informant silently asked it. "Who wants to know?" it replied, making the experience very like a Sufi or Zen parable. But my informant's question is a deep one. I would suggest the observer is a small part of the critical faculties of the left hemisphere, functioning much more in psychedelic than in dream experiences, but present to a degree in both. However, the ancient query, "Who is it who asks the question?" is still unanswered; perhaps it is another component of the left cerebral hemisphere. An asymmetry in the temporal lobes ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
220:/Farsi 'Why was Adam driven from the garden?' The pupil asked his master. 'His heart was hardened With images, a hundred bonds that clutter the earth Chained Adam to the cycle of death following birth. He was blind to this equation, living for something other Than God and so out of paradise he was driven With his mortal body's cover his soul was shriven. Noblest of God's creatures, Adam fell with blame, Like a moth shriveled by the candle's flame, Into history which taught mankind shame. Since Adam had not given up his heart To God's attachment, there was no part For Adam in paradise where the only friend Is God; His will is not for Adam to imagine and bend.' [1490.jpg] -- from The Conference of the Birds: The Selected Sufi Poetry of Farid ud-Din Attar, Translated by Raficq Abdulla
~ Farid ud-Din Attar, The Pupil asks- the Master answers
,#NFDB
221:/Farsi One day God spoke to Moses and said: 'Visit Satan, question him, use your head.' So Moses descended to Hell's burning halls; Satan saw him coming, a smile did he install On his fiery face. Moses proudly asked him For advice, waiting for Satan's crafty whim; Satan spoke through his coal-black teeth: 'Remember this rule which sense bequeaths Never say "I" so that you become like me.' So long as you live for yourself you'll be A drum booming pride a cymbal of infidelity. Vanity, resentment, envy and anger shall be cemented Into your inner state; you shall be like a demented Dog with lolling tongue, infected with indolence of sin. You shall become your own tracked prisoner within. [1490.jpg] -- from The Conference of the Birds: The Selected Sufi Poetry of Farid ud-Din Attar, Translated by Raficq Abdulla
~ Farid ud-Din Attar, God Speaks to Moses
,#NFDB
222:I remembered the malangs of Shah Jamal, the dirty, shirtless renouncers with ratty beards and dreads and bare chests covered in necklaces of prayer beads, throwing around their arms in Charlie Manson dances and whipping out their old ID cards to say look, I used to be someone and now I'm no one, I'm so lost in Allah that I've thrown away the whole world. Would that qualify them as Sufis? I didin't know how to measure it. Whether the malangs were Sufi saints or just drugged-out bums didn't really matter. The lesson I took from them was that you're never disqualified from loving Allah, never. And I could see again that what I went through was nothing new, not even anything special in the history of Islam, not a clashing of East and West; it was always there. And that made me feel more Muslim than ever, because fuck it all, CNN, this is Islam too. ~ Michael Muhammad Knight, #NFDB
223:Karl Marx famously called religion 'the opiate of the masses'. Buddhism, particularly as it is popularly practiced, promises improvement through karma. Islam and Christianity promise eternal life to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there's a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, 'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God. ~ John Green, #NFDB
224:/Farsi & Turkish Since Love has made ruins of my heart The sun must come and illumine them. Such generosity has broken me with shame: The King prayed for me, and granted me His prayer: How many times, just to calm me, did He show His face? I said, "I saw His Face," but it was only a veil. He charred a universe through the flaming-out of this veil. O my God! How could such a King ever be unveiled? Love reared in front of me, and I followed Him. He turned and seized me like an eagle -- What a blessing it was to be His prey! I plunged into a sea of ecstasy, and fled all pain. If anguish is not delicious meat for you, It is because you have never tasted this wine. The Prophets accept all agony and trust it For the water has never feared the fire. [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut
~ Jalaluddin Rumi, The Sun Must Come
,#NFDB
225:/Farsi My dear! You haven't the feet for this path -- why struggle? You've no idea where the idol's to be found -- what's all this mystic chat? What can be done with quarrelsome fellow travelers, boastful marketplace morons? If you were really a lover you'd see that faith and infidelity are one... Oh, what's the use? nit-picking about such things is a hobby for numb brains. You are pure spirit but imagine yourself a corpse! pure water which thinks it's the pot! Everything you want must be searched for -- except the Friend. If you don't find Him you'll never be able to start to even look. Yes, you can be sure: You are not Him -- unless you can remove yourself from between yourself and Him -- in which case you are Him. [1501.jpg] -- from The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry, Translated by Peter Lamborn Wilson / Translated by Nasrollah Pourjavady
~ Hakim Sanai, Mystic Chat
,#NFDB
226:In Islam, and especially among the Sufi Orders, siyahat or 'errance' - the action or rhythm of walking - was used as a technique for dissolving the attachments of the world and allowing men to lose themselves in God. The aim of a dervish was to become a 'dead man walking': one whose body stays alive on the earth yet whose soul is already in Heaven. A Sufi manual, the Kashf-al-Mahjub, says that, toward the end of his tourney, the dervish becomes the Way not the wayfarer, i.e. a place over which something is passing, not a traveller following his own free will...it was quite similar to an Aboriginal concept, 'Many men afterwards become country, in that place, Ancestors.' By spending his whole life walking and singing his Ancestor's Songline, a man eventually became the track, the Ancestor and the song. The Wayless Way, where the Sons of God lose themselves and, at the same time, find themselves. ~ Meister Eckhart, #NFDB
227:THE DANCE OF ANGELS
Suzy Kassem
He spins and spins and spins
To remove all three layers of him
And with devout discipline
He spirals to ignite the light within.
He becomes a part
Of the solar system
And spirals to its cosmic hymn.
His soul transcends through
The mouth of God
To join the source
Of everything.
He turns and turns and turns
To open up windows to the universe
And with each circle of love he twirls
The love in his heart
Radiates and bursts.
His thirst for a meeting with the divine
Has been his only quest since birth,
And while rotating like the hand of time
He sings the 'AH' of an angel's verse.
As he turns and turns and turns
A million emotions and vibrations submerge
A luminous spectacle worth a million candles,
The Sufi dancer is poetry without
Words.
THE DANCE OF ANGELS by Suzy Kassem ~ Suzy Kassem,#NFDB
228:/Farsi Lost in myself I reappeared I know not where a drop that rose from the sea and fell and dissolved again; a shadow that stretched itself out at dawn, when the sun reached noon I disappeared. I have no news of my coming or passing away-- the whole thing happened quicker than a breath; ask no questions of the moth. In the candle flame of his face I have forgotten all the answers. In the way of love there must be knowledge and ignorance so I have become both a dullard and a sage; one must be an eye and yet not see so I am blind and yet I still perceive, Dust be on my head if I can say where I in bewilderment have wandered: Attar watched his heart transcend both worlds and under its shadow now is gone mad with love. [1501.jpg] -- from The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry, Translated by Peter Lamborn Wilson / Translated by Nasrollah Pourjavady
~ Farid ud-Din Attar, The Dullard Sage
,#NFDB
229:One point contains all; Learn about the One, forget the rest. Forget hell and the terrible grave; Leave the ways of sin and purify Your heart. That's how the argument is spun: It's all contained in One! Why rub your head against the earth? What point in your vain prostration? Your Kalimah read, makes others laugh. You do not grasp the Lord's word! Somewhere the truth is written down: It's all contained in One! Some go to the jungle in vain And starve and cause themselves some pain; They waste their time with all this And come home tired, nothing gained! Find your master and become God's slave. In this way you'll be free of care; Free of desire, free of worry, And your heart truthful, pure. Bulleh has discovered this truth alone: It's all contained in One! [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal
~ Bulleh Shah, One Point Contains All
,#NFDB
230:Bridge Ghazal
My love and I reside upon the belly of a bridge
with heartbeats of the sky?--the drums upon the bridge.
I've heard of songs that rise at night from pitch black oceans.
I've heard the strums of lyrics made by four hands on a bridge.
My love and I do landscapes for the gardens of the sea.
At night we sleep as seedlings at the center of its bridge.
Once I saw a Sufi breathe in seabirds, and send them out again.
I've seen people bearing blindfolds near the entrance of a bridge.
My love's old love, he says, had tried to douse him in a moat.
He grew gills to save himself and hid beneath a drawbridge.
The masters speak of magic at the middle of the rings
where Yes and No chase each other round the props of any bridge.
My love's new love, some say, makes far too much of things
as fundamental, elemental, as the structure of a bridge.
Anonymous submission.
~ C.J. Sage,#NFDB
231:Water splashes and runs in a film across the glass floor suspended above the mosaics. The Hacı Kadın hamam is a typical post-Union fusion of architectures; Ottoman domes and niches built over some forgotten Byzantine palace, years and decades of trash blinding, gagging, burying the angel-eyed Greek faces in the mosaic floor; century upon century. That haunted face was only exposed to the light again when the builders tore down the cheap apartment blocks and discovered a wonder. But Istanbul is wonder upon wonder, sedimented wonder, metamorphic cross-bedded wonder. You can’t plant a row of beans without turning up some saint or Sufi. At some point every country realizes it must eat its history. Romans ate Greeks, Byzantines ate Romans, Ottomans ate Byzantines, Turks ate Ottomans. The EU eats everything. Again, the splash and run as Ferid Bey scoops warm water in a bronze bowl from the marble basin and pours it over his head. ~ Ian McDonald, #NFDB
232:/Farsi David was an open vessel, the light Poured into him. God's words took flight In him and through him God said: 'To all humankind, who are wed To hubris and sin, I say: "If heaven and hell Did not exist to catch you and break you, Would you, though a speck of dust, tell Truth from falsehood, would your eye find true Centre in my words? If there was nothing but dark Would you think of me, still less mark Your place with the leaf of prayer? Yet You are bound to my will, your soul is set In the direction of my breath, with hope And fear which cracks the dawn of your heart, So you will worship me with all your mind Words and inclination. Make a start: Burn to ashes all that is not I, bind The ashes to the fidelity of the wind, Extract the ore of your being, Then you shall start seeing."' [1490.jpg] -- from The Conference of the Birds: The Selected Sufi Poetry of Farid ud-Din Attar, Translated by Raficq Abdulla
~ Farid ud-Din Attar, God Speaks to David
,#NFDB
233:It is not true that Islam makes it impossible for Muslims to create a modern secular society, as Westerners sometimes imagine. But it is true that secularization has been very different in the Muslim world. In the West, it has usually been experienced as benign. In the early days, it was conceived by such philosophers as John Locke (1632–1704) as a new and better way of being religious, since it freed religion from coercive state control and enabled it to be more true to its spiritual ideals. But in the Muslim world, secularism has often consisted of a brutal attack upon religion and the religious.
Atatürk, for example, closed down all the madrasahs, suppressed the Sufi orders and forced men and women to wear modern Western dress. Such coercion is always counterproductive. Islam in Turkey did not disappear, it simply went underground. Muhammad Ali had also despoiled the Egyptian ulama, appropriated their endowments and deprived them of influence. ~ Karen Armstrong,#NFDB
234:/Farsi & Turkish You have fallen in love my dear heart Congratulations! You have freed yourself from all attachments Congratulations! You have given up both worlds to be on your own the whole creation praises your solitude Congratulations! Your disbelief has turned into belief your bitterness, into sweetness Congratulations! You have now entered into Love's fire, my pure heart Congratulations! Inside the Sufi's heart there is always a feast dear heart, you are celebrating Congratulations! My heart, I have seen how your tears turned into a sea now every wave keeps saying Congratulations! O silent lover, seeker of the higher planes, may the Beloved always be with you Congratulations! You have struggled hard, may you grow wings and fly Congratulations! Keep silent my dear heart, you have done so well Congratulations! [2296.jpg] -- from Rumi: Hidden Music, Translated by Azima Melita Kolin / Translated by Maryam Mafi
~ Jalaluddin Rumi, You have fallen in love my dear heart
,#NFDB
235:Osho was very generous with his genius. When I went to Poona in 1988, he answered a question of mine. “Rumi says, ‘I want burning, burning.’ What does this burning have to do with my own possible enlightenment?” “You have asked a very dangerous question, Coleman. Burning has nothing to do with your enlightenment. This work you have done with Rumi is beautiful. It has to be, because it is coming out of Rumi’s love. But for you these poems can become ecstatic self-hypnosis.” He pretty much nailed me to the floor with that one. Sufism is good, but end up with Zen. It was a fine hit he gave me. I am still drawn to the Sufi longing and love-madness, but clarity is coming up strong on the inside. I have not assimilated his wisdom yet, but I mean to. I am very grateful to him. But it is not wisdom for everyone. Osho crafted his words to suit the individual. Ecstatic self-hypnosis might be just the thing for someone else. He was showing me a daylight beyond any beloved darkness, an ecstatic sobriety beyond any drunkenness. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
236:The bulbul's care is naught but the rose is his mate dear
The rose's care is naught but to bring grace to her cheer
Not all lure is what brings the lover's heart to its fall
Master is he who bears compassion to his thrall.
Now comes the time when blood gushes into the ruby's heart
For the shard hath shattered its value and worth in the mart.
The bulbul's power of speech came from the rose's boon
Or his beak would be devoid of all this song and tune
O thou who in the street of our Love tread
Be careful; or his wall may shatter thy head
The traveler is accompanied by a hundredfold soul
Wherever he is, health and well-being be his dole
O heart! Though the dice of health to thee was cast
Sweet is the lot of Love. Cling to it hard and fast
Intoxicated, the Sufi wore his hat askew
Two more goglets, aslant his turban flew
To the sight of thee the heart of Hafiz had been inclined
It is now cherished with union. Put this torment behind.
(Translated by Ismail Salami)
~ Hafiz, Rubys Heart
,#NFDB
237:In a battle ‘Alī confronted a powerful enemy and after a fierce fight was able to throw the enemy to the ground and sit on his chest with his sword drawn. At this moment the enemy warrior spat in ‘Alī’s face, whereupon ‘Alī immediately disengaged himself and abstained from delivering a blow with his sword. The enemy warrior, who was an idol worshipper, had never seen such an event. He became agitated and asked ‘Alī why he had not killed him. The response of ‘Alī, which in the verses of the Mathnawī constitutes one of the masterpieces of Sufi poetry, was that ‘Alī was fighting at first for the preservation of the Truth, but once the enemy warrior spat in his face ‘Alī became angry, and he would never react on the basis of anger and certainly not get into a battle or slay someone for personal or selfish reasons. In Rūmī’s words, ‘Alī responded: Said he, “I wield the sword for the sake of the Truth, I am the servant of the Truth not the functionary of the body. I am the lion of the Truth, not the lion of passions, My action does witness bear to my religion. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, #NFDB
238:Sufis have no set belief or disbelief. Divine light is the only sustenance of their soul, and through this light they see their path clear, and what they see in this light they believe, and what they do not see they do not blindly believe. Yet they do not interfere with another person's belief or disbelief, thinking that perhaps a greater portion of light has kindled his heart, and so he sees and believes that the Sufi cannot see or believe. Or, perhaps a lesser portion of light has kept his sight dim and he cannot see and believe as the Sufi believes. Therefore Sufis leave belief and disbelief to the grade of evolution of every individual soul. The Murshid's work is to kindle the fire of the heart, and to light the torch of the soul of his mureed, and to let the mureed believe and disbelieve as he chooses, while journeying through the path of evolution. But in the end all culminates in one belief, Huma man am, that is, 'I am all that exists'; and all other beliefs are preparatory for this final conviction, which is called Haqq al-Iman in the Sufi terminology. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, #NFDB
239:An old story is told about Rabia of Basra, an eighth-century Sufi mystic who was seen running through the streets of her city one day carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she said she wanted to burn down the rewards of paradise with the torch and put out the fires of hell with the water, because both blocked the way to God, 'O, Allah,' Rabia prayed, 'if I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise. But if I worship You for Your Own sake, grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.'
In Christian tradition this comes under the heading of unconditional love, though it is usually understood as the kind of love God exercises toward humans instead of the other way around. Now, thanks to a Muslim mystic from Iraq, I have a new way of understanding what it means to love God unconditionally. Whenever I am tempted to act from fear of divine punishment or hope of divine reward, Rabia leans over from here religion into mine and empties a bucket of water on my head. ~ Barbara Brown Taylor,#NFDB
240:What earth is this so in want of you they rise up on high to seek you in heaven? Look at them staring at you right before their eyes, unseeing, unseeing, blind. . . . I was patient, but can the heart be patient of its heart? My spirit and yours blend together whether we are near one another or far away. I am you, you, my being, end of my desire, The most intimate of secret thoughts enveloped and fixed along the horizon in folds of light. How? The "how" is known along the outside, while the interior of beyond to and for the heart of being. Creatures perish in the darkened blind of quest, knowing intimations. Guessing and dreaming they pursue the real, faces turned toward the sky whispering secrets to the heavens. While the lord remains among them in every turn of time abiding in their every condition every instant. Never without him, they, not for the blink of an eye -- if only they knew! nor he for a moment without them. [1520.jpg] -- from Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Quran, Miraj, Poetic and Theological Writings (Classics of Western Spirituality), by Michael A. Sells
~ Mansur al-Hallaj, If They Only Knew
,#NFDB
241:/Farsi Collect your mind's fragments that you may fill yourself bit by bit with Meaning: the slave who meditates on the mysteries of Creation for sixty minutes gains more merit than from sixty years of fasting and prayer. Meditation: high-soaring hawk of Intellect's wrist resting at last on the flowering branch of the Heart: this world and the next are hidden beneath its folded wing. Now perched before the mud hut which is Earth now clasping with its talons a branch of the Tree of Paradise soaring here striking there -- each moment fresh prey gobbling a mouthful of moonlight wheeling away beyond the sun darting between the Great Wheel's star-set spokes, it rips to shreds the Footstool and the Throne a Pigeon's feather in its beak -- or a comet -- till finally free of everything it alights, silent on a topmost bough. Hunting is king's sport, not just anyone's pastime but you? you've hooded the falcon -- what can I say? -- clipped its pinions broken its wings... alas. [1501.jpg] -- from The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry, Translated by Peter Lamborn Wilson / Translated by Nasrollah Pourjavady
~ Hakim Sanai, Meditation
,#NFDB
242:Here’s to the security guards who maybe had a degree in another land. Here’s to the manicurist who had to leave her family to come here, painting the nails, scrubbing the feet of strangers. Here’s to the janitors who don’t understand English yet work hard despite it all. Here’s to the fast food workers who work hard to see their family smile. Here’s to the laundry man at the Marriott who told me with the sparkle in his eyes how he was an engineer in Peru. Here’s to the bus driver, the Turkish Sufi who almost danced when I quoted Rumi. Here’s to the harvesters who live in fear of being deported for coming here to open the road for their future generation. Here’s to the taxi drivers from Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt and India who gossip amongst themselves. Here is to them waking up at 4am, calling home to hear the voices of their loved ones. Here is to their children, to the children who despite it all become artists, writers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, activists and rebels. Here’s to international money transfer. For never forgetting home. Here’s to their children who carry the heartbeats of their motherland and even in sleep, speak with pride about their fathers. Keep on. ~ Ijeoma Umebinyuo, #NFDB
243:The Sufi is free from beliefs and disbeliefs, and yet gives every liberty to people to have their own opinion. There is no doubt that if an individual or a multitude believe that a teacher or a reformer will come, he will surely come to them. Similarly, in the case of those who do not believe that any teacher or reformer will come, to them he will not come. To those who expect the Teacher to be a man, a man will bring the message; to those who expect the Teacher to be a woman, a woman must deliver it. To those who call on God, God comes. To those who knock at the door of Satan, Satan answers. There is an answer to every call. To a Sufi the Teacher is never absent, whether he comes in one form or in a thousand forms he is always one to him, and the same One he recognizes to be in all, and all Teachers he sees in his one Teacher alone. For a Sufi, the self within, the self without, the kingdom of the earth, the kingdom of heaven, the whole being is his teacher, and his every moment is engaged in acquiring knowledge. For some, the Teacher has already come and gone, for others the Teacher may still come, but for a Sufi the Teacher has always been and will remain with him forever. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, #NFDB
244:The Atheist
Nor thou, Habib, nor I are glad,
when rosy limbs and sweat entwine;
But rapture drowns the sense and self,
the wine the drawer of the wine,
And Him that planted first the grapeo podex, in thy vault there dwells
A charm to make the member mad,
And shake the marrow of the spine.
O member, in thy stubborn strenght
a power avails on podex-sense
To boil the blood in breast and brain;
shudder the nreves incarnadine!
From me thou drawest pearly drink and in its pourings both are drunk.
The Iman drives forth the drunken man
from out the marble prayer-shrine.
Blue Mushtari strove with red Mirrikh
which should be master of the nightBut where is Mushtari, where Mirrikh
when in the sky the sun doth shine?
Now El Qahar to Hazif gives
the worship unto poets due : But songs are nought and Music all;
what poet music may define?
Allah's the atheist! he owns
no Allah. Sneer, thou dullard churl!
The Sufi worships not, but drinks,
being himself the all-divine.
Come, my Habib, the roses blush,
the waters gleam, the bulbul sings To pierce thy podex El Quahar's
urgent and and imminent design!
58
~ Aleister Crowley,#NFDB
245:I passed away into nothingness -- I vanished; and lo! I was all living.' All who have realized the secret of life understand that life is one, but that it exists in two aspects. First as immortal, all-pervading and silent; and secondly as mortal, active, and manifest in variety. The soul being of the first aspect becomes deluded, helpless, and captive by experiencing life in contact with the mind and body, which is of the next aspect. The gratification of the desires of the body and fancies of the mind do not suffice for the purpose of the soul, which is undoubtedly to experience its own phenomena in the seen and the unseen, though its inclination is to be itself and not anything else. When delusion makes it feel that it is helpless, mortal and captive, it finds itself out of place. This is the tragedy of life, which keeps the strong and the weak, the rich and poor, all dissatisfied, constantly looking for something they do not know. The Sufi, realizing this, takes the path of annihilation, and, by the guidance of a teacher on the path, finds at the end of this journey that the destination was he. As Iqbal says:
'I wandered in the pursuit of my own self; I was the traveler, and I am the destination ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan,#NFDB
246:Nor thou, Habib, nor I are glad,
when rosy limbs and sweat entwine;
But rapture drowns the sense and self,
the wine the drawer of the wine,
And Him that planted first the grape-
o podex, in thy vault there dwells
A charm to make the member mad,
And shake the marrow of the spine.
O member, in thy stubborn strength
a power avails on podex-sense
To boil the blood in breast and brain;
shudder the nerves incarnadine!
From me thou drawest pearly drink -
and in its pourings both are drunk.
The Iman drives forth the drunken man
from out the marble prayer-shrine.
Blue Mushtari strove with red Mirrikh
which should be master of the night-
But where is Mushtari, where Mirrikh
when in the sky the sun doth shine?
Now El Qahar to Hazif gives
the worship unto poets due : -
But songs are nought and Music all;
what poet music may define?
Allah's the atheist! he owns
no Allah. Sneer, thou dullard churl!
The Sufi worships not, but drinks,
being himself the all-divine.
Come, my Habib, the roses blush,
the waters gleam, the bulbul sings -
To pierce thy podex El Quahar's
urgent and and imminent design!
~ Aleister Crowley, The Atheist
,#NFDB
247:The importance of Saudi Arabia in the rise and return of al-Qaeda is often misunderstood and understated. Saudi Arabia is influential because its oil and vast wealth make it powerful in the Middle East and beyond. But it is not financial resources alone that make it such an important player. Another factor is its propagating of Wahhabism, the fundamentalist, eighteenth-century version of Islam that imposes sharia law, relegates women to the status of second-class citizens, and regards Shia and Sufi Muslims as non-Muslims to be persecuted along with Christians and Jews. This religious intolerance and political authoritarianism, which in its readiness to use violence has many similarities with European fascism in the 1930s, is getting worse rather than better. For example, in recent years, a Saudi who set up a liberal website on which clerics could be criticized was sentenced to a thousand lashes and seven years in prison. The ideology of al-Qaeda and ISIS draws a great deal from Wahhabism. Critics of this new trend in Islam from elsewhere in the Muslim world do not survive long; they are forced to flee or are murdered. Denouncing jihadi leaders in Kabul in 2003, an Afghan editor described them as “holy fascists” who were misusing Islam as “an instrument to take over power.” Unsurprisingly, he was accused of insulting Islam and had to leave the country. ~ Patrick Cockburn, #NFDB
248:A young lad was sent to school. He began his lessons with the other children, and the first lesson the teacher set him was the straight line, the figure “one.” But whereas the others went on progressing, this child continued writing the same figure. After two or three days the teacher came up to him and said, “Have you finished your lesson?” He said, “No, I’m still writing ‘one.’ ” He went on doing the same thing, and when at the end of the week the teacher asked him again he said, “I have not yet finished it.” The teacher thought he was an idiot and should be sent away, as he could not or did not want to learn. At home the child continued with the same exercise and the parents also became tired and disgusted. He simply said, “I have not yet learned it, I am learning it. When I have finished I shall take the other lessons.” The parents said, “The other children are going on further, school has given you up, and you do not show any progress; we are tired of you.” And the lad thought with sad heart that as he had displeased his parents too he had better leave home. So he went into the wilderness and lived on fruits and nuts. After a long time he returned to his old school. And when he saw the teacher he said to him, “I think I have learned it. See if I have. Shall I write on this wall?” And when he made his sign the wall split in two. —Hazrat Inayat Khan The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan ~ Ram Dass, #NFDB
249:JANUARY 24 Miracle Thinking There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. —ALBERT EINSTEIN There is no end to worry, because there is no end to what exists out of view, beyond our very small eyes. So worry is a way to gamble with what might or might not happen. It reminds me of a friend who had a flat tire on a country road. After finding he had no jack, he began walking, hoping to find a nearby farmer who would help him. It was getting dark and the crickets were getting louder. As he walked the overgrown road, he began to throw the dice of worry in his mind: What if the farmer's not home? What if he is and won't let me use his jack? What if he won't let me use his phone? What if he's frightened of me? I never did anything to him! Why won't he just let me use his phone?! By the time he knocked on the farmer's door, my friend was so preoccupied with what could go wrong that when the friendly old man answered, my friend bellowed, “Well, you can keep your Goddam jack!” Being human, we struggle constantly to stay with the miracle of what is and not to fall constantly into the black hole of what is not. This is an ancient challenge. As the Sufi poet Ghalib said centuries ago, “Every particle of creation sings its own song of what is and what is not. Hearing what is can make you wise; hearing what is not can drive you mad. ~ Mark Nepo, #NFDB
250:Ten years ago a book appeared in France called D'Une foi l'autre, les conversions a l'Islam en Occident. The authors, both career journalists, carried out extensive interviews with new Muslims in Europe and America. Their conclusions are clear. Almost all educated converts to Islam come in through the door of Islamic spirituality. In the middle ages, the Sufi tariqas were the only effective engine of Islamisation in Muslim minority areas like Central Asia, India, black Africa and Java; and that pattern is maintained today.
Why should this be the case? Well, any new Muslim can tell you the answer. Westerners are in the first instance seeking not a moral path, or a political ideology, or a sense of special identity - these being the three commodities on offer among the established Islamic movements. They lack one thing, and they know it - the spiritual life. Thus, handing the average educated Westerner a book by Sayyid Qutb, for instance, or Mawdudi, is likely to have no effect, and may even provoke a revulsion. But hand him or her a collection of Islamic spiritual poetry, and the reaction will be immediately more positive. It is an extraordinary fact that the best-selling religious poet in modern America is our very own Jalal al-Din Rumi. Despite the immeasurably different time and place of his origin, he outsells every Christian religious poet.
Islam and the New Millennium ~ Abdal Hakim Murad,#NFDB
251:A Sufi's Remonstrance
I’m sick of You. Your magnificence
precipitates mental pain, ethical
cramps. That You continue to shine
blinds, asphyxiates, twists the sinews
of my words. How dare You bewitch
in an aeon like this? 14 year-old
Iraqi girl kidnapped, raped, burnt alive
by American servicemen; Palestinian
toddler’s head pulped by the shrapnel
of Israeli bombs; sleepy Israeli civilian
shattered by rubble while drinking tea; not
to forget the forgotten diseased, starved
billions expiring in the squalid ghettos
of ‘globalisation’. Could You possibly
justify the garish brilliance of your
intractable, effervescent spring
as rivers shrivel and soil turns saline
due to pitiless ‘progress’? Or the candle
of compassion in this starless night
of cyclic hatred? I honestly can’t help
my revulsion at Your volition to remain
prodigious, enchanting, Beloved. So what
if You discharge life, if my life is nothing
but a valley along the trajectory of return
to You? You flaunt the ecstasies of Union
and transcendence when reality demands
outrage and obduracy. Why won’t You
let me loathe my fellow creatures instead
of being mesmerised by Your allure? It turns
my stomach, aches my intellect, since I hope
and even occasionally smile, sleep and dream
in spite of the calamities, because of You.
~ Ali Alizadeh,#NFDB
252:I don’t think Kashmiriyat is dead, nor is Sufism. If we don’t support the idea of Kashmiriyat or the Sufi tradition, it will fade out eventually, because radicalism is increasing. Sheikh Saheb was said to be a pure Musalman but he kept the Jamaat-e-Islami at bay, telling them they were not going to meddle in political life. After him, Farooq was the same way and in fact more aggressive about it, saying that they should close down all the Jamaat schools and that if Delhi funded the state, it would set up its own schools. But he did not get that much support. This is getting compromised. If you don’t do anything about Kashmir, then more and more Wahhabism will come in, as petro-dollars, etc., with their mosques growing and the lectures from their mosques increasing. A couple of years ago I was leaving Srinagar on a Friday and I was startled. Every road I passed had a loudspeaker blaring for the jumme ka namaaz. This never happened earlier. To my surprise, one of the breeding grounds of the fast-spreading radicalism is the Srinagar jail. A Kashmiri who was detained twice under the Public Security Act told me that the atmosphere of radicalism was so suffocating that you felt that you were in a jail inside a jail. So long as the likes of Masarat Alam and Qasim Fakhtoo are given free rein radicalism will grow. While Pakistan remains a factor in Kashmir, the real danger is that radicalism will end up as the lasting political legacy of Kashmir. ~ A S Dulat, #NFDB
253:/Farsi The nightingale raises his head, drugged with passion, Pouring the oil of earthly love in such a fashion That the other birds shaded with his song, grow mute. The leaping mysteries of his melodies are acute. 'I know the secrets of Love, I am their piper,' He sings, 'I seek a David with broken heart to decipher Their plaintive barbs, I inspire the yearning flute, The daemon of the plucked conversation of the lute. The roses are dissolved into fragrance by my song, Hearts are torn with its sobbing tone, broken along The fault lines of longing filled with desire's wrong. My music is like the sky's black ocean, I steal The listener's reason, the world becomes the seal Of dreams for chosen lovers, where only the rose Is certain. I cannot go further, I am lame, and expose My anchored soul to the divine Way. My love for the rose is sufficient, I shall stay In the vicinity of its petalled image, I need No more, it blooms for me the rose, my seed. The hoopoe replies: 'You love the rose without thought. Nightingale, your foolish song is caught By the rose's thorns, it is a passing thing. Velvet petal, perfume's repose bring You pleasure, yes, but sorrow too For the rose's beauty is shallow: few Escape winter's frost. To seek the Way Release yourself from this love that lasts a day. The bud nurtures its own demise as day nurtures night. Groom yourself, pluck the deadly rose from your sight. [1490.jpg] -- from The Conference of the Birds: The Selected Sufi Poetry of Farid ud-Din Attar, Translated by Raficq Abdulla
~ Farid ud-Din Attar, The Nightingale
,#NFDB
254:HOW SHOULD THE SOUL
How should the soul not take wings
when from the Glory of God
It hears a sweet, kindly call:
"Why are you here, soul? Arise!"
How should a fish not leap fast
into the sea form dry land
When from the ocean so cool
the sound of the waves reaches its
How should the falcon not fly
back to his king from the hunt
When from the falconer's drum
it hears to call: "Oh, come back"?
Why should not every Sufi
begin to dance atom-like
Around the Sun of duration
that saves from impermanence?
What graciousness and what beauty?
What life-bestowing! What grace!
If anyone does without that, woe-
what err, what suffering!
Oh fly , of fly, O my soul-bird,
fly to your primordial home!
You have escaped from the cage now-
your wings are spread in the air.
Oh travel from brackish water
now to the fountain of life!
Return from the place of the sandals
now to the high seat of souls!
Go on! Go on! we are going,
and we are coming, O soul,
From this world of separation
to union, a world beyond worlds!
How long shall we here in the dust-world
like children fill our skirts
With earth and with stones without value,
with broken shards without worth?
Let's take our hand from the dust grove,
let's fly to the heavens' high,
Let's fly from our childish behaviour
and join the banquet of men!
Call out, O soul, to proclaim now
that you are rules and king!
You have the grace of the answer,
you know the question as well! ~ Rumi,#NFDB
255:HOW SHOULD THE SOUL not take wings
when from the Glory of God
It hears a sweet, kindly call:
"Why are you here, soul? Arise!"
How should a fish not leap fast
into the sea from dry land
When from the ocean so cool
the sound of the waves reaches its
How should the falcon not fly
back to his king from the hunt
When from the falconer's drum
it hears to call: "Oh, come back"?
Why should not every Sufi
begin to dance atom-like
Around the Sun of duration
that saves from impermanence?
What graciousness and what beauty?
What life-bestowing! What grace!
If anyone does without that, woe-
what err, what suffering!
Oh fly , of fly, O my soul-bird,
fly to your primordial home!
You have escaped from the cage now-
your wings are spread in the air.
Oh travel from brackish water
now to the fountain of life!
Return from the place of the sandals
now to the high seat of souls!
Go on! Go on! we are going,
and we are coming, O soul,
From this world of separation
to union, a world beyond worlds!
How long shall we here in the dust-world
like children fill our skirts
With earth and with stones without value,
with broken shards without worth?
Let's take our hand from the dust grove,
let's fly to the heavens' high,
Let's fly from our childish behaviour
and join the banquet of men!
Call out, O soul, to proclaim now
that you are rules and king!
You have the grace of the answer,
you know the question as well! ~ Rumi,#NFDB
256:/Farsi Ah, the Simurgh, who is this wondrous being Who, one fated night, when time stood still, Flew over China, not a single soul seeing? A feather fell from this King, his beauty and his will, And all hearts touched by it were in tumult thrown. Everyone who could, traced from it a liminal form; All who saw the still glowing lines were blown By longing like trees on a shore bent by storm. The feather is lodged in China's sacred places, Hence the Prophet's exhortation for knowledge to seek Even unto China where the feather's shadow graces All who shelter under it -- to know of this is not to speak. But unless the feather's image is felt and seen None knows the heart's obscure, shifting states That replace the fat of inaction with decision's lean. His grace enters the world and molds our fates Though without the limit of form or definite shape, For all definitions are frozen contradictions not fit For knowing; therefore, if you wish to travel on the Way, Set out on it now to find the Simurgh, don't prattle and sit On your haunches till into stiffening death you stray. All the birds who were by this agitation shook, Aspired to a meeting place to prepare for the Shah, To release in themselves the revelations of the Book; They yearned so deeply for Him who is both near and far, They were drawn to this sun and burned to an ember; But the road was long and perilous that was open to offer. Hooked by terror, though each was asked to remember The truth, each an excuse to stay behind was keen to proffer. [1490.jpg] -- from The Conference of the Birds: The Selected Sufi Poetry of Farid ud-Din Attar, Translated by Raficq Abdulla
~ Farid ud-Din Attar, The Simurgh
,#NFDB
257:/Farsi He was a soldier with a soldier's pride, This hawk, whose home was by a king's side. He was haughty as his master, all other birds Thought him a disaster, his beak was feared As much as his talons. With hooded eyes (His place on the royal roster was his prize) He stands sentinel on the king's arm, polite And trained meticulously to do what is right And proper with courtly grace. He has no need To see the Simurgh even in a dream, his deeds Are sufficient for him, and no journey could replace The royal command, royal morsel food no disgrace To his way of thinking, he easily satisfies the king. He flies with cutting grace on sinister wing Through valleys and upward into the sky, He has no other wish but so to live and then to die. The hoopoe says: 'You have no sense with your soldier's pride. Do you think that supping with kings, doing their will Is enough to keep you in favour, always at their side? An earthly king may be just but you must beware still For a king's justice is whim pretending to be good. Once there was a king who prized his slave for his beauty. His body's silver sheen fascinated the prince who would Dress him in fine clothes so his looks alone were his duty. The king amused himself by placing on his favourite's head An apple for a bullseye, the poor silver slave would grow Yellow with fear because he knew too well blood is red. His silver hue would be tarnished if the king's bow Was not true; an injured slave would his silver lose To be discarded because the king would not be amused.' [1490.jpg] -- from The Conference of the Birds: The Selected Sufi Poetry of Farid ud-Din Attar, Translated by Raficq Abdulla
~ Farid ud-Din Attar, The Hawk
,#NFDB
258:One Sufi mystic who had remained happy his whole life—no one had ever seen him unhappy—he was always laughing. He was laughter, his whole being was a perfume of celebration. In his old age, when he was dying—he was on his deathbed, and still enjoying death, laughing hilariously—a disciple asked, “You puzzle us. Now you are dying. Why are you laughing? What is there funny about it? We are feeling so sad. We wanted to ask you many times in your life why you are never sad. But now, confronting death, at least one should be sad. You are still laughing! How are you managing it?” And the old man said, “It is a simple clue. I had asked my master. I had gone to my master as a young man; I was only seventeen, and already miserable. And my master was old, seventy, and he was sitting under a tree, laughing for no reason at all. There was nobody else, nothing had happened, nobody had cracked a joke or anything. And he was simply laughing, holding his belly. And I asked him, ‘What is the matter with you? Are you mad or something?’ “He said, ‘One day I was also as sad as you are. Then it dawned on me that it is my choice, it is my life. Since that day, every morning when I get up, the first thing I decide is, before I open my eyes, I say to myself, “Abdullah”—that was his name—‘what do you want? Misery? Blissfulness? What are you going to choose today? And it happens that I always choose blissfulness.’” It is a choice. Try it. The first moment in the morning when you become aware that sleep has left, ask yourself, “Abdullah, another day! What is your idea? Do you choose misery or blissfulness?” And who would choose misery? And why? It is so unnatural—unless one feels blissful in misery, but then too you are choosing bliss, not misery. ~ Osho, #NFDB
259:Why are we as helpless, or more so, than our ancestors were in facing the chaos that interferes with happiness? There are at least two good explanations for this failure. In the first place, the kind of knowledge—or wisdom—one needs for emancipating consciousness is not cumulative. It cannot be condensed into a formula; it cannot be memorized and then routinely applied. Like other complex forms of expertise, such as a mature political judgment or a refined aesthetic sense, it must be earned through trial-and-error experience by each individual, generation after generation. Control over consciousness is not simply a cognitive skill. At least as much as intelligence, it requires the commitment of emotions and will. It is not enough to know how to do it; one must do it, consistently, in the same way as athletes or musicians who must keep practicing what they know in theory. And this is never easy. Progress is relatively fast in fields that apply knowledge to the material world, such as physics or genetics. But it is painfully slow when knowledge is to be applied to modify our own habits and desires. Second, the knowledge of how to control consciousness must be reformulated every time the cultural context changes. The wisdom of the mystics, of the Sufi, of the great yogis, or of the Zen masters might have been excellent in their own time—and might still be the best, if we lived in those times and in those cultures. But when transplanted to contemporary California those systems lose quite a bit of their original power. They contain elements that are specific to their original contexts, and when these accidental components are not distinguished from what is essential, the path to freedom gets overgrown by brambles of meaningless mumbo jumbo. Ritual form wins over substance, and ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
260:A Persian, a Turk, an Arab, and a Greek were traveling to a distant land when they began arguing over how to spend the single coin they possessed among themselves. All four craved food, but the Persian wanted to spend the coin on angur; the Turk, on uzum; the Arab, on inab; and the Greek, on stafil. The argument became heated as each man insisted on having what he desired. A linguist passing by overheard their quarrel. “Give the coin to me,” he said. “I undertake to satisfy the desires of all of you.” Taking the coin, the linguist went to a nearby shop and bought four small bunches of grapes. He then returned to the men and gave them each a bunch. “This is my angur!” cried the Persian. “But this is what I call uzum,” replied the Turk. “You have brought me my inab,” the Arab said. “No! This in my language is stafil,” said the Greek. All of a sudden, the men realized that what each of them had desired was in fact the same thing, only they did not know how to express themselves to each other. The four travelers represent humanity in its search for an inner spiritual need it cannot define and which it expresses in different ways. The linguist is the Sufi, who enlightens humanity to the fact that what it seeks (its religions), though called by different names, are in reality one identical thing. However—and this is the most important aspect of the parable—the linguist can offer the travelers only the grapes and nothing more. He cannot offer them wine, which is the essence of the fruit. In other words, human beings cannot be given the secret of ultimate reality, for such knowledge cannot be shared, but must be experienced through an arduous inner journey toward self-annihilation. As the transcendent Iranian poet, Saadi of Shiraz, wrote, I am a dreamer who is mute, And the people are deaf. I am unable to say, And they are unable to hear. ~ Reza Aslan, #NFDB
261:Paradox is any self-contradictory proposition that, when investigated, may prove to be well-founded or true. Once understood, it opens the gateway to higher wisdom. But how can contradictory principles both be true? As the Buddhist Riddle of Five Truths puts it: “It is right. It is wrong. It is both right and wrong. It is neither right nor wrong. All exist simultaneously.” Charles Dickens expressed the paradox of his era, equally true today, when he wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,” going on to describe that time as one of belief and incredulity, light and darkness, hope and despair. Two opposing statements can each be true depending on the observer: it’s true that spiders are merciless killers from the viewpoint of tiny insects caught in their webs—but for most humans, nearly all spiders are harmless creatures. A story of the Sufi sage Mullah Nasruddin expresses the nature of paradox when he’s asked to arbitrate between two men with opposing views. Hearing the first man, he remarks, “You’re right.” When he hears the second man, he also says, “You’re right.” When a bystander points out, “They can’t both be right,” the mullah scratches his head and says, “You’re right.” Let’s go deeper and consider four central sets of paradoxical truths: * Time is real. It moves from past to present to future. * There is no time, no past, no future—only the eternal present. * You possess free will and can thus take responsibility for your choices. * Free will is an illusion—your choices are influenced, even predetermined, by all that preceded them. * You are, or possess, a separate inner self existing within a body. * No separation exists—you are a part of the same Consciousness shining through billions of eyes. * Death is an inevitable reality you’ll meet at the end of life. * The death of the inner self is an illusion. Life is eternal. Must you choose one assertion and reject the other? Or is there a way to meaningfully resolve and even reconcile such apparent contradictions? ~ Dan Millman, #NFDB
262:The History Of The Veil
…sexuality is originally, historically bourgeois…
Michel Foucault
Once upon a time: Bedouin shepherd marries into earlyMedieval mercantile city-dwellers of Arabia. Freed
from the bondage of work, he lazes in caves, imagines
god. His urbane wife, connoisseur of comfortable life
hates deserts, caravans and camels; the first convert
to his way of imagining god. But how to exalt, distinguish
the new path from the old idols’? The middle class lady
knows best: something some pagan Persian princesses do
to mark affluence, exceptionality; shrouding their ‘beauty’
(face and hair) from the gaze of commoners and slaves. So
the Prophet’s wife, the first Muslim woman, fashions
the hejab. Yet the effect of the loose covering surpasses
class, overlaps ‘gender’. Why? The Crusaders, centuries later
camped in the Middle East to battle ‘the heresy of Islam’;
Norman brigands, Goth marauders and Nordic rapists
see Woman as the raison d’être of Man’s Fall from Heaven
hear erotic Sufi poetry, return to their castles to inaugurate
Chivalric Romance, etc: the interminable Western obsession
with what (Muslim) Woman wears/shouldn’t wear. ‘Woman’
herself reinvented, characterised by the appearance of body
being covered or not, modified or not, desirable or not. But
don’t confuse sexuality with ars erotica. Gallant knights riding
78
forth to fight for a Faire Lady didn’t pine for the pleasures
of sex. Phallic lances clashing over the chatelaine’s kerchief
a class struggle: between the up-and-coming page boy/squire
and the aging chevalier – burgeoning Gentry vs. expiring
Nobility. We call this Modernity: the ascendancy of the West.
Yes, Islam was finally subjugated by the steam-engined navies
of Enlightened bourgeois Christians; Egypt, Palestine,
Mesopotamia carved up by the Anglo-French armies. Now
the Islamic veil, the sign of a beaten civilisation, and then
a fixed attribute of an inferior species of colonised beasts.
~ Ali Alizadeh,#NFDB
263:You killed a Christian? Fine. But if the victim had been a Muslim. . . The rules for restitution for wrongful death are also illuminating for Infidels. The Koran (2:178) establishes a law of retaliation (qisas) for murder: equal recompense must be given for the life of the victim, which can take the form of blood money (diyah): a payment to compensate for the loss suffered. In Islamic law (Sharia), the amount of compensation varies depending on the identity of the victim. ‘Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveller), a Sharia manual that Cairo’s prestigious Al-Azhar University certifies as conforming to the “practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community,” says that the payment for killing a woman is half that to be paid for killing a man. Likewise, the penalty for killing a Jew or Christian is one-third that paid for killing a male Muslim.1 The Iranian Sufi Sheikh Sultanhussein Tabandeh, one of the architects of the legal codes of the Islamic Republic of Iran, explains that punishments in Iran for other crimes differ as well, depending on whether the perpetrator is a Muslim. If a Muslim “commits adultery,” Tabandeh explains, “his punishment is 100 lashes, the shaving of his head, and one year of banishment.” (He is referring, of course, to a Muslim male; a Muslim female would in all likelihood be sentenced to be stoned to death.) “But if the man is not a Muslim,” Tabandeh continues, “and commits adultery with a Muslim woman his penalty is execution.” Bible vs. Koran “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. And those with him are hard against the disbelievers and merciful among themselves.” —Koran 48:29 “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.” —Matthew 7:12 Furthermore, if a Muslim kills a Muslim, he is to be executed, but if he kills a non-Muslim, he incurs a lesser penalty: “If a Muslim deliberately murders another Muslim he falls under the law of retaliation and must by law be put to death by the next of kin. But if a non-Muslim who dies at the hand of a Muslim has by lifelong habit been a non-Muslim, the penalty of death is not valid. Instead the Muslim murderer must pay a fine and be punished with the lash. ~ Robert Spencer, #NFDB
264:What has just been said of the followers of different faiths is even more patent in their mystics. Despite the abrogation of their religions, we do not doubt the possibility of mystics of other faiths reaching a higher spiritual plane, for when the lower soul is negated and sublimated by spiritual disciplines, the powers of the higher soul seldom fail to appear, and it is not impossible that in such a condition it might behold Ultimate Reality, which is, after all, as real and objective as Detroit or anything else in the physical world.
But what a difference between the few hundred Jewish, Christian, or even American Indian mystics of the Western tradition who left any record of their experiences-men and women such as Catherine of Siena, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Francis of Assisi, Moses Cordovero, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, John Tauler, Henry Suso, Jakob Böhme, Handsome Lake, Isaac Luria, Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross-and the literally thousands of Sufi masters of the Islamic tradition who founded the great mystical orders, had immense influence for centuries at all levels of society, produced an unparalleled and monumental body of mystic literature in poetry and prose, and left countless adepts in the beatitude of the Divine Presence, a living tradition that continues to this day. What other religion has ever seen a Mathnawi like Rumi’s? There is a tremendous difference between a few outstanding spiritual personalities that appeared at times and places in the West, like occasional watering places scattered across a hinterland, and the throngs of mystics of the Islamic milieu, on a sea of the Divine whose tides flooded regularly.
Not only in the numbers of contemplatives, but in the abidingness of their personal experiences, there is a great difference between the mystics of Islam, who proceeded from the light of true monotheism to a state of perpetual illumination, men such as Sahl al-Tustari, al-Ghawth Abu Madyan, Shams al-Tabrizi, Ibn ‘Arabi, Abul Hasan al-Shadhili, and others whose testimony is unambiguous, and those of other faiths, who through self-mortification caught momentary glimpses of the Godhead in “experiences” they then translated to others in spiritual depositions. ~ Nuh Ha Mim Keller,#NFDB
265:While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging “center of narrative gravity” (to use Daniel Dennett’s phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time.
Our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also suggest, to varying degrees and with greater or lesser precision, that we live in the grip of a cognitive illusion. But the alternative to our captivity is almost always viewed through the lens of religious dogma. A Christian will recite the Lord’s Prayer continuously over a weekend, experience a profound sense of clarity and peace, and judge this mental state to be fully corroborative of the doctrine of Christianity; A Hindu will spend an evening singing devotional songs to Krishna, feel suddenly free of his conventional sense of self, and conclude that his chosen deity has showered him with grace; a Sufi will spend hours whirling in circles, pierce the veil of thought for a time, and believe that he has established a direct connection to Allah.
The universality of these phenomena refutes the sectarian claims of any one religion. And, given that contemplatives generally present their experiences of self-transcendence as inseparable from their associated theology, mythology, and metaphysics, it is no surprise that scientists and nonbelievers tend to view their reports as the product of disordered minds, or as exaggerated accounts of far more common mental states — like scientific awe, aesthetic enjoyment, artistic inspiration, etc.
Our religions are clearly false, even if certain classically religious experiences are worth having. If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science.
But we must first realize that we are lost in thought. ~ Sam Harris,#NFDB
266:reading :::
50 Spiritual Classics: List of Books Covered:
Muhammad Asad - The Road To Mecca (1954)
St Augustine - Confessions (400)
Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)
Black Elk Black - Elk Speaks (1932)
Richard Maurice Bucke - Cosmic Consciousness (1901)
Fritjof Capra - The Tao of Physics (1976)
Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan (1972)
GK Chesterton - St Francis of Assisi (1922)
Pema Chodron - The Places That Scare You (2001)
Chuang Tzu - The Book of Chuang Tzu (4th century BCE)
Ram Dass - Be Here Now (1971)
Epictetus - Enchiridion (1st century)
Mohandas Gandhi - An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (1927)
Al-Ghazzali - The Alchemy of Happiness (1097)
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet (1923)
GI Gurdjieff - Meetings With Remarkable Men (1960)
Dag Hammarskjold - Markings (1963)
Abraham Joshua Heschel - The Sabbath (1951)
Hermann Hesse - Siddartha (1922)
Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception (1954)
William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Carl Gustav Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1955)
Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe (1436)
J Krishnamurti - Think On These Things (1964)
CS Lewis - The Screwtape Letters (1942)
Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964)
Daniel C Matt - The Essential Kabbalah (1994)
Dan Millman - The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (1989)
W Somerset Maugham - The Razor's Edge (1944)
Thich Nhat Hanh - The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975)
Michael Newton - Journey of Souls (1994)
John O'Donohue - Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (1998)
Robert M Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
James Redfield - The Celestine Prophecy (1994)
Miguel Ruiz - The Four Agreements (1997)
Helen Schucman & William Thetford - A Course in Miracles (1976)
Idries Shah - The Way of the Sufi (1968)
Starhawk - The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979)
Shunryu Suzuki - Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970)
Emanuel Swedenborg - Heaven and Hell (1758)
Teresa of Avila - Interior Castle (1570)
Mother Teresa - A Simple Path (1994)
Eckhart Tolle - The Power of Now (1998)
Chogyam Trungpa - Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973)
Neale Donald Walsch - Conversations With God (1998)
Rick Warren - The Purpose-Driven Life (2002)
Simone Weil - Waiting For God (1979)
Ken Wilber - A Theory of Everything (2000)
Paramahansa Yogananda - Autobiography of a Yogi (1974)
Gary Zukav - The Seat of the Soul (1990)
~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Spirital Classics (2017 Edition),#NFDB
267:He was the leader of the Prophet David’s army,’ said the Sheikh. ‘David had him killed so that he could marry Nebi Uri’s beautiful wife. Two angels, Mikhail and Jibrael, appeared and asked David why he needed an extra wife when he already had ninety-nine others. You know this story?’ ‘Yes. I think we Christians know Nebi Uri as Uriah the Hittite.’ It was an unlikely tangle of tales: a medieval Muslim saint buried in a much older Byzantine tomb tower had somehow been confused with the Biblical and Koranic Uriah; perhaps the saint’s name was Uriah, and over the passage of time his identity had been merged with that of his scriptural namesake. More intriguing still was the fact that in this city, long famed for the shrines of its Christian saints, the Muslim Sufi tradition had directly carried on from where Theodoret’s Christian holy men had left off. Just as the Muslim form of prayer, with its bowings and prostrations, appears to derive from the older Syriac Christian tradition that I had seen performed at Mar Gabriel, and just as the architecture of the earliest minarets unmistakably derives from the square late-antique Syrian church towers, so the roots of Islamic mysticism and Sufism lie with the Byzantine holy men and desert fathers who preceded them across the Near East. Today the West often views Islam as a civilisation very different from and indeed innately hostile to Christianity. Only when you travel in Christianity’s Eastern homelands do you realise how closely the two religions are really linked. For the former grew directly out of the latter and still, to this day, embodies many aspects and practices of the early Christian world now lost in Christianity’s modern Western incarnation. When the early Byzantines were first confronted by the Prophet’s armies, they assumed that Islam was merely a heretical form of Christianity, and in many ways they were not so far wrong: Islam accepts much of the Old and New Testaments, and venerates both Jesus and the ancient Jewish prophets. Certainly if John Moschos were to come back today it is likely that he would find much more that was familiar in the practices of a modern Muslim Sufi than he would with those of, say, a contemporary American Evangelical. Yet this simple truth has been lost by our tendency to think of Christianity as a Western religion rather than the Oriental faith it actually is. Moreover the modern demonisation of Islam in the West, and the recent growth of Muslim fundamentalism (itself in many ways a reaction to the West’s repeated humiliation of the Muslim world), have led to an atmosphere where few are aware of, or indeed wish to be aware of, the profound kinship of Christianity and Islam. ~ William Dalrymple, #NFDB
268:Someone said: “I have neglected that true purpose.”
Rumi replied: When this thought enters a person’s mind and they criticize them self, saying,
“What am I about, and why do I do these things?” When this happens, it is a sure proof that God loves them and cares for them.
“Love continues
so long as reprimands continue,” said the
poet. We may reprimand our friends, but we
never reprimand a stranger.
Now there are levels of reprimand. When a
person is stung by it and sees the truth in it, that
is a sign that God loves them and cares for them.
But if the reprimand flies by that person without
causing any pain at all, then this is no sign of love.
When a carpet is beaten to get rid of the dust,
intelligent people do not call that a reprimand.
But if a woman beats her own darling child, then
that is called a reprimand and is a proof of her
love. Therefore, as long as you find pain and
regret within yourself, that is a proof of God’s
love and guidance.
If you find fault in your brother or sister, the
fault you see in them is within yourself. The true
Sufi is like a mirror where you see your own
image, for “The believer is a mirror of their fellow
believers.” Get rid of those faults in yourself,
because what bothers you in them bothers you in yourself.
An elephant was led to a well to drink. Seeing
itself in the water, it shied away. It thought it was
shying away from another elephant. It did not
realize it was shying away from its own self.
All evil qualities—oppression, hatred, envy,
greed, mercilessness, pride—when they are within
yourself, they bring no pain. When you see them
in another, then you shy away and feel the pain.
We feel no disgust at our own scab and abscess.
We will dip our infected hand into our food and
lick our fingers without turning in the least bit
squeamish. But if we see a tiny abscess or half a
scratch on another’s hand, we shy away from that
person’s food and have no stomach for it whatsoever.
Evil qualities are just like scabs and abscesses;
when they are within us they cause no pain,
but when we see them even to a small degree in
another, then we feel pain and disgust.
Just as you shy away from your brother or sister,
so you should excuse them for shying away
from you. The pain you feel comes from those
faults, and they see the same faults. The seeker of
truth is a mirror for their neighbors. But those
who cannot feel the sting of truth are not mirrors to anyone but themselves. ~ Rumi,#NFDB
269:As everyone knows, Islam set up a social order from the outset, in contrast, for example, to Christianity. Islamic social teachings are so basic to the religion that still today many people, including Muslims, are completely unaware of Islam's spiritual dimensions. Social order demands rules and regulations, fear of the king, respect for the police, acknowledgement of authority. It has to be set up on the basis of God's majesty and severity. It pays primary attention to the external realm, the realm of the body and the desires of the lower soul, the realm where God is distant from the world. In contrast, Islamic spiritual teachings allow for intimacy, love, boldness, ecstatic expressions, and intoxication in the Beloved. All these are qualities that pertain to nearness to God. (...) In short, on the social level, Islam affirms the primacy of God as King, Majestic, Lord, Ruler. It establishes a theological patriarchy even if Muslim theologians refuse to apply the word father (or mother) to God. God is yang, while the world, human beings, and society are yin. Thereby order is established and maintained. Awe and distance are the ruling qualities. On the spiritual level, the picture is different. In this domain many Muslim authorities affirm the primacy of God as Merciful, Beautiful, Gentle, Loving. Here they establish a spiritual matriarchy, though again such terms are not employed. God is yin and human beings are yang. Human spiritual aspiration is accepted and welcomed by God. Intimacy and nearness are the ruling qualities. This helps explain why one can easily find positive evaluations of women and the feminine dimension of things in Sufism.
(...) Again, this primacy of yin cannot function on the social level, since it undermines the authority of the law. If we take in isolation the Koranic statement, "Despair not of God's mercy surely God forgives all sins" (39:53), then we can throw the Sharia out the window. In the Islamic perspective, the revealed law prevents society from degenerating into chaos. One gains liberty not by overthrowing hierarchy and constraints, but by finding liberty in its true abode, the spiritual realm. Freedom, lack of limitation and constraint, bold expansivenessis achieved only by moving toward God, not by rebelling against Him and moving away.
Attar (d. 618/1221) makes the same point more explicitly in an anecdote he tells about the great Sufi shaykh, Abu'l- Hasan Kharraqani (d. 425/1033): It is related that one night the Shaykh was busy with prayer. He heard a voice saying, "Beware, Abu'l-Hasan! Do you want me to tell people what I know about you so that they will stone you to death?" The Shaykh replied, "O God the Creator! Do You want me to tell the people what I know about Your mercy and what I see of Your generosity? Then no one will prostrate himself to You." A voice came, "You keep quiet, and so will I."
Sufism is concerned with "maintaining the secret" (hifz al-sirr) for more reasons than one. The secret of God's mercy threatens the plain fact of His wrath. If "She" came out of the closet, "He" would be overthrown. But then She could not be found, for it is He who shows the way to Her door. ~ Sachiko Murata,#NFDB
270:Coup D'Etat
I’m comfortable with your confronting me
hurling, albeit politely, the epic query
haunting your ‘tolerance’ and a fever
to my soul. It’s frankly a relief
decoding the cryptic cause of my exile
in the context of considering your phobia. So
here, the facts: boys of my generation
marching in front of our tanks to eat into
the landmines. Women not unlike my mother
buried neck-deep for transgression
before having their heads smashed with rocks.
Your tongue has already tried obfuscations
avoiding the ‘sensitive’ appellation; I put
our minds at (some) ease by offering the term
‘Muslim’, and using direct monosyllables
to terminate the confluence of innuendo:
“What went wrong?” I briefly catalogue
the points of my suppressed pride: Persian
poets, those geniuses; Islamic civilisation
an absolute paragon of the Middle Ages. ‘We’
achieved so much: algebra, alchemy, Alhambra
Aviccena, Omar Khayam, Rumi and Andalusia
and now beheaded journalists, banished feminists
persecuted writers and pulverised regimes. What
did go wrong? You don’t require my noting
British divide-and-conquer, Russian missiles
15
US uranium-depleted and cluster bombs; and let’s
please avoid Israel. So I propose a date: 19 August
1953; and the place, Tehran. The event
the calculated abortion of the incipient democracy
of my native land. You know about
the coup that crushed our future, engineered
by the CIA with the mullahs’ collusion
and our king’s utter complicity? You’re right
dismissing my narration as apologia
for a nation’s impotence. Why didn’t my
grandparents oppose the US-backed generals
in the streets of Tehran on the day our chosen
Prime Minister Mosaddegh was toppled? Where
were our prodigious poets and philosophers
when Eisenhower’s operatives signalled
to venal clerics and commanded the junta? Here,
more facts: hurt by the grotesque perfidy
Iranians of my parents’ generation mounted
a Revolution against the coup’s beneficiary
the Shah; then the Islamic Republic; Sharia law; war
with the US protégé Saddam; and now
terrorism, terror against terrorism, and the terrors
of a nuclear war between Iran and, yes, Israel. You
find my discourse cogent yet, or predictably
tendentious? A history lecture in need of
an addendum of objectivity? You’ve finally
terminated the small talk, tightened
your grimace. I repeat my own morose
16
volition to locate an answer. Yes, we will
otherwise be prey to perennial fears and
contemporaneous wars. What went wrong
with noble hopes, ‘religion of peace’ and all
the bridge-building and culture-crossing?
The soulfulness of Sufi poets and the magic
of Scheherazade’s stories. I feel your
disappointment. A romantic quest narrative
crusading knights vs. ardent Saracens
instead of Cold War intrigue and Third World
servitude. I grant something went wrong
all those years ago, and continues to afflict.
Things will keep going wrong. But what would I
know. I’m only traumatised and feverish
by the event’s effects, forced into perpetual
exile. I’ve only survived. What do you think?
~ Ali Alizadeh,#NFDB
271:The last time I’d been unwell, suicidally depressed, whatever you want to call it, the reactions of my friends and family had fallen into several different camps:
The Let’s Laugh It Off merchants: Claire was the leading light. They hoped that joking about my state of mind would reduce it to a manageable size. Most likely to say, ‘Feeling any mad urges to fling yourself into the sea?’
The Depression Deniers: they were the ones who took the position that since there was no such thing as depression, nothing could be wrong with me. Once upon a time I’d have belonged in that category myself. A subset of the Deniers was The Tough Love people. Most likely to say, ‘What have you got to be depressed about?’
The It’s All About Me bunch: they were the ones who wailed that I couldn’t kill myself because they’d miss me so much. More often than not, I’d end up comforting them. My sister Anna and her boyfriend, Angelo, flew three thousand miles from New York just so I could dry their tears. Most likely to say, ‘Have you any idea how many people love you?’
The Runaways: lots and lots of people just stopped ringing me. Most of them I didn’t care about, but one or two were important to me. Their absence was down to fear; they were terrified that whatever I had, it was catching. Most likely to say, ‘I feel so helpless … God, is that the time?’ Bronagh – though it hurt me too much at the time to really acknowledge it – was the number one offender.
The Woo-Woo crew: i.e. those purveying alternative cures. And actually there were hundreds of them – urging me to do reiki, yoga, homeopathy, bible study, sufi dance, cold showers, meditation, EFT, hypnotherapy, hydrotherapy, silent retreats, sweat lodges, felting, fasting, angel channelling or eating only blue food. Everyone had a story about something that had cured their auntie/boss/boyfriend/next-door neighbour. But my sister Rachel was the worst – she had me plagued. Not a day passed that she didn’t send me a link to some swizzer. Followed by a phone call ten minutes later to make sure I’d made an appointment. (And I was so desperate that I even gave plenty of them a go.) Most likely to say, ‘This man’s a miracle worker.’ Followed by: ‘That’s why he’s so expensive. Miracles don’t come cheap.’
There was often cross-pollination between the different groupings. Sometimes the Let’s Laugh It Off merchants teamed up with the Tough Love people to tell me that recovering from depression is ‘simply mind over matter’. You just decide you’re better. (The way you would if you had emphysema.)
Or an All About Me would ring a member of the Woo-Woo crew and sob and sob about how selfish I was being and the Woo-Woo crew person would agree because I had refused to cough up two grand for a sweat lodge in Wicklow.
Or one of the Runaways would tiptoe back for a sneaky look at me, then commandeer a Denier into launching a two-pronged attack, telling me how well I seemed. And actually that was the worst thing anyone could have done to me, because you can only sound like a self-pitying malingerer if you protest, ‘But I don’t feel well. I feel wretched beyond description.’
Not one person who loved me understood how I’d felt. They hadn’t a clue and I didn’t blame them, because, until it had happened to me, I hadn’t a clue either. ~ Marian Keyes,#NFDB
272:The refusal to examine Islamic culture and traditions, the sordid dehumanization of Muslims, and the utter disregard for the intellectual traditions and culture of one of the world’s great civilizations are characteristic of those who disdain self-reflection and intellectual inquiry. Confronting this complexity requires work and study rather than a retreat into slogans and cliches. And enlightened, tolerant civilizations have flourished outside the orbit of the United Sates and Europe.
The ruins of the ancient Mughal capital, Fatehpur Sikri, lie about 100 miles south of Delhi. The capital was constructed by the emperor Akbar the Great at the end of the sixteenth century. The emperor’s court was filled with philosophers, mystics and religious scholars, including Sunni, Sufi, and Shiite Muslims, Hindu followers of Shiva and Vishnu, as well as atheists, Christians, Jains, Jews , Buddhists and Zoroastrians. They debated ethics and beliefs. He forbade any person to be discriminated against on the basis of belief and declared that everyone was free to follow any religion. This took place as the Inquisition was at its height in Spain and Portugal, and as Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Rome’s Campo de Fiori.
Tolerance, as well as religious and political plurality, is not exclusive to Western culture. The Judeo-Christian tradition was born and came to life in the Middle East. Its intellectual and religious beliefs were cultivated and formed in cities such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople. Many of the greatest tenets of Western civilization, as is true with Islam and Buddhism, are Eastern in origin. Our respect for the rule of law and freedom of expression, as well as printing, paper, the book, the translation and dissemination of the classical Greek philosophers, algebra, geometry and universities were given to us by the Islamic world. One of the first law codes was invented by the ancient Babylonian ruler Hammurabi, in what is now Iraq. One of the first known legal protections of basic freedoms and equality was promulgated in the third century B.C. by the Buddhist Indian emperor Ashoka. And, unlike, Aristotle, he insisted on equal rights for women and slaves.
The division set up by the new atheists between superior Western, rational values and the irrational beliefs of those outside our tradition is not only unhistorical but untrue. The East and the West do not have separate, competing value systems. We do not treat life with greater sanctity than those we belittle and dismiss. Eastern and Western traditions have within them varied ethical systems, some of which are repugnant and some of which are worth emulating. To hold up the highest ideals of our own culture and to deny that these great ideals exist in other cultures, especially Eastern cultures, is made possible only by a staggering historical and cultural illiteracy. The civilization we champion and promote as superior is, in fact, a product of the fusion of traditions and beliefs of the Orient and the Occident. We advance morally and intellectually only when we cross these cultural lines, when we use the lens of other cultures to examine our own. It is then that we see our limitations, that we uncover the folly of or own assumptions and our prejudices. It is then that we achieve empathy, we learn and make wisdom possible. ~ Chris Hedges,#NFDB
273:Vasana is determinism that feels like free will. I’m reminded of my friend Jean, whom I’ve known for almost twenty years. Jean considers himself very spiritual and went so far in the early nineties as to walk way from his job with a newspaper in Denver to live in an ashram in western Massachusetts. But he found the atmosphere choking. “They’re all crypto Hindus,” he complained. “They don’t do anything but pray and chant and meditate.” So Jean decided to move on with his life. He’s fallen in love with a couple of women but has never married. He doesn’t like the notion of settling down and tends to move to a new state every four years or so. (He once told me that he counted up and discovered that he’s lived in forty different houses since he was born.) One day Jean called me with a story. He was on a date with a woman who had taken a sudden interest in Sufism, and while they were driving home, she told Jean that according to her Sufi teacher, everyone has a prevailing characteristic. “You mean the thing that is most prominent about them, like being extroverted or introverted?” he asked. “No, not prominent,” she said. “Your prevailing characteristic is hidden. You act on it without seeing that you’re acting on it.” The minute he heard this, Jean became excited. “I looked out the car window, and it hit me,” he said. “I sit on the fence. I am only comfortable if I can have both sides of a situation without committing to either.” All at once a great many pieces fell into place. Jean could see why he went into an ashram but didn’t feel like he was one of the group. He saw why he fell in love with women but always saw their faults. Much more came to light. Jean complains about his family yet never misses a Christmas with them. He considers himself an expert on every subject he’s studied—there have been many—but he doesn’t earn his living pursuing any of them. He is indeed an inveterate fence-sitter. And as his date suggested, Jean had no idea that his Vasana, for that’s what we’re talking about, made him enter into one situation after another without ever falling off the fence. “Just think,” he said with obvious surprise, “the thing that’s the most me is the thing I never saw.” If unconscious tendencies kept working in the dark, they wouldn’t be a problem. The genetic software in a penguin or wildebeest guides it to act without any knowledge that it is behaving much like every other penguin or wildebeest. But human beings, unique among all living creatures, want to break down Vasana. It’s not good enough to be a pawn who thinks he’s a king. We crave the assurance of absolute freedom and its result—a totally open future. Is this reasonable? Is it even possible? In his classic text, the Yoga Sutras, the sage Patanjali informs us that there are three types of Vasana. The kind that drives pleasant behavior he calls white Vasana; the kind that drives unpleasant behavior he calls dark Vasana; the kind that mixes the two he calls mixed Vasana. I would say Jean had mixed Vasana—he liked fence-sitting but he missed the reward of lasting love for another person, a driving aspiration, or a shared vision that would bond him with a community. He displayed the positives and negatives of someone who must keep every option open. The goal of the spiritual aspirant is to wear down Vasana so that clarity can be achieved. In clarity you know that you are not a puppet—you have released yourself from the unconscious drives that once fooled you into thinking that you were acting spontaneously. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
274:Arts of energy management and of combat are, of course, not confined to the Chinese only. Peoples of different cultures have practised and spread these arts since ancient times. Those who follow the Chinese tradition call these arts chi kung and kungfu (or qigong and gongfu in Romanized Chinese), and those following other traditions call them by other names.
Muslims in various parts of the world have developed arts of energy management and of combat to very high levels. Many practices in Sufism, which is spiritual cultivation in Islamic tradition, are similar to chi kung practices. As in chi kung, Sufi practitioners pay much importance to the training of energy and spirit, called “qi” and “shen” in Chinese, but “nafas” and “roh” in Muslim terms.
When one can free himself from cultural and religious connotations, he will find that the philosophy of Sufism and of chi kung are similar. A Sufi practitioner believes that his own breath, or nafas, is a gift of God, and his ultimate goal in life is to be united with God. Hence, he practises appropriate breathing exercises so that the breath of God flows harmoniously through him, cleansing him of his weakness and sin, which are manifested as illness and pain.
And he practises meditation so that ultimately his personal spirit will return to the universal Spirit of God. In chi kung terms, this returning to God is expressed as “cultivating spirit to return to the Great Void”, which is “lian shen huan shi” in Chinese. Interestingly the breathing and meditation methods in Sufism and in chi kung are quite similar.
Some people, including some Muslims, may think that meditation is unIslamic, and therefore taboo. This is a serious mis-conception. Indeed, Prophet Mohammed himself clearly states that a day of meditation is better than sixty years of worship. As in any religion, there is often a huge conceptual gap between the highest teaching and the common followers. In Buddhism, for example, although the Buddha clearly states that meditation is the essential path to the highest spiritual attainment, most common Buddhists do not have any idea of meditation.
The martial arts of the Muslims were effective and sophisticated. At many points in world history, the Muslims, such as the Arabs, the Persians and the Turks, were formidable warriors. Modern Muslim martial arts are very advanced and are complete by themselves, i.e. they do not need to borrow from outside arts for their force training or combat application — for example, they do not need to borrow from chi kung for internal force training, Western aerobics for stretching, judo and kickboxing for throws and kicks.
[...]
It is reasonable if sceptics ask, “If they are really so advanced, why don't they take part in international full contact fighting competitions and win titles?” The answer is that they hold different values. They are not interested in fighting or titles. At their level, their main concern is spiritual cultivation. Not only they will not be bothered whether you believe in such abilities, generally they are reluctant to let others know of their abilities.
Muslims form a substantial portion of the population in China, and they have contributed an important part in the development of chi kung and kungfu. But because the Chinese generally do not relate one's achievements to one's religion, the contributions of these Chinese Muslim masters did not carry the label “Muslim” with them.
In fact, in China the Muslim places of worship are not called mosques, as in many other countries, but are called temples. Most people cannot tell the difference be ~ Wong Kiew Kit,#NFDB
275:
What is the exact way of feeling that we belong to the Divine and that the Divine is acting in us?
You must not feel with your head (because you may think so, but that's something vague); you must feel with your sense-feeling. Naturally one begins by wanting it with the mind, because that is the first thing that understands. And then one has an aspiration here (pointing to the heart), with a flame which pushes you to realise it. But if you want it to be truly the thing, well, you must feel it.
You are doing something, suppose, for example, you are doing exercises, weight-lifting. Now suddenly without your knowing how it happened, suddenly you have the feeling that there is a force infinitely greater than you, greater, more powerful, a force that does the lifting for you. Your body becomes something almost non-existent and there is this Something that lifts. And then you will see; when that happens to you, you will no longer ask how it should be done, you will know. That does happen.
It depends upon people, depends upon what dominates in their being. Those who think have suddenly the feeling that it is no longer they who think, that there is something which knows much better, sees much more clearly, which is infinitely more luminous, more conscious in them, which organises the thoughts and words; and then they write. But if the experience is complete, it is even no longer they who write, it is that same Thing that takes hold of their hand and makes it write. Well, one knows at that moment that the little physical person is just a tiny insignificant tool trying to remain as quiet as possible in order not to disturb the experience.
Yes, at no cost must the experience be disturbed. If suddenly you say: "Oh, look, how strange it is!"...
How can we reach that state?
Aspire for it, want it. Try to be less and less selfish, but not in the sense of becoming nice to other people or forgetting yourself, not that: have less and less the feeling that you are a person, a separate entity, something existing in itself, isolated from the rest.
And then, above all, above all, it is that inner flame, that aspiration, that need for the light. It is a kind of - how to put it? - luminous enthusiasm that seizes you. It is an irresistible need to melt away, to give oneself, to exist only in the Divine.
At that moment you have the experience of your aspiration.
But that moment should be absolutely sincere and as integral as possible; and all this must occur not only in the head, not only here, but must take place everywhere, in all the cells of the body. The consciousness integrally must have this irresistible need.... The thing lasts for some time, then diminishes, gets extinguished. You cannot keep these things for very long. But then it so happens that a moment later or the next day or some time later, suddenly you have the opposite experience. Instead of feeling this ascent, and all that, this is no longer there and you have the feeling of the Descent, the Answer. And nothing but the Answer exists. Nothing but the divine thought, the divine will, the divine energy, the divine action exists any longer. And you too, you are no longer there.
That is to say, it is the answer to our aspiration. It may happen immediately afterwards - that is very rare but may happen. If you have both simultaneously, then the state is perfect; usually they alternate; they alternate more and more closely until the moment there is a total fusion. Then there is no more distinction. I heard a Sufi mystic, who was besides a great musician, an Indian, saying that for the Sufis there was a state higher than that of adoration and surrender to the Divine, than that of devotion, that this was not the last stage; the last stage of the progress is when there is no longer any distinction; you have no longer this kind of adoration or surrender or consecration; it is a very simple state in which one makes no distinction between the Divine and oneself. They know this. It is even written in their books. It is a commonly known condition in which everything becomes quite simple. There is no longer any difference. There is no longer that kind of ecstatic surrender to "Something" which is beyond you in every way, which you do not understand, which is merely the result of your aspiration, your devotion. There is no difference any longer. When the union is perfect, there is no longer any difference.
Is this the end of self-progress?
There is never any end to progress - never any end, you can never put a full stop there. ~ The Mother,#NFDB
276:Look! What wonders the spring has wrought! The river bank is a paradise! Rose-embowered glades, Blossoming jasmine and hyacinth, And violets, the envy of the skies!. Rainbow colours transformed Into a chorus of rapturous sounds, And the harmony of flowers The hillside is carnation-red; In the languid haze, the air Seems drunk with the beauty of life! The brook, on the heights of the hill, Dances to its own music. The world is dizzy in a pageant of colour! My rosy-cheeked Cup-bearer! The voice of spring is the voice of life! But the spring lasts not for ever; So bring me the cup that tears all veils -- The wine that brightens life -- The wine that intoxicates the world -- The wine in which flows The music of everlasting life, The wine that reveals eternity's secret. Unveil the secrets, O Saqi. Look! The world has changed apace! New are the songs, and new is the music; The West's magic has dissolved; The West's magicians are bewildered; Old politics has lost its game; The world is tired of kings; Gone are the days of the rich; Gone is the jugglery of old; Awake is China's sleeping giant; The Himalayas' torrents are unleashed; Sinai is riven; Moses awaits the light divine. The Muslim says that God is One But his heart is Still a heathen: Culture, sufism, rites and rthetoric, All adore non- Arab idols; The truth was lost in trifles, And the nation was lost in conventions. The speaker's rhetoric is enchanting, But is devoid of passion; It is clothed in logic neat, But lost in a maze of words; The sufi, unique in the love of truth, Unique in the love of God, Was lost in un-Islamic thought; Was lost in the hierarchic quest; The fire of love is extinguished, And a Muslim is a heap of ashes, O Saqi! Give me the old wine again! Let the potent cup go round! Let me soar on the wings of love; Make my dust bright-pinioned; Make wisdom free; And make the young guide the old; Thou it is that nourishest. this nation; Thou it is that canst sustain it; Urge them to move, to stir; Give them Ali's heart; give them Siddiq's passion; Let the same old love pierce their hearts; Awaken in them a burning zeal; Let the stars throw down their spears, And let the earth's dwellers tremble Give the young a passion that consumes; Give them my vision, my love of God; Free my boat from the whirlpool's grip, And make it move forward-, Reveal to me the secrets of life, For thou knowest them all; The treasures of a fakir like me Are suffused, unsleeping eyes, And secret yearnings of the heart-, My anguished sighs at night, My solitude in the world of men, My hopes and my fears, My quest untiring, My nature an arena of thought A mirror of the world. My heart a battlefield of life, With armies of suspicion, And bastions of certitude; With these treasures I am More rich than the richest of all. Let the young join my throng, And let them find an anchor of hope. The sea of life has its ebb and flow-, In every atom's heart is the pulse of life; It manifests itself in the body, As a flame conceals a wave of smoke; Contact with the earth was harsh for it, But it liked the labour; It is in motion, and not in motion; Tired of the elements' shackles; A unity, imprisoned by plurality; But always unique, unequalled. It has made this dome of myriad glass; It has carved this pantheon. It does not repeat its craft For thou art not me, and I am not thou; It has created the world of men, And remains in solitude, Its brightness is seen in the stars, And in the lustre of pearls-, To it belong the wildernesses, The flowers and the thorns; Mountains sometimes are shaken by its might; It captures angels and nymphs; It makes the eagle pounce on a prey, And leave a blood-stained body. Every atom throbs with life; Rest is an illusion; Life's journey pauses not, For every moment is a new glory; Life, thou thinkest, is a mystery; Life is a delight in eternal flight; Life has seen many ups and downs; It loves a journey, not a goal. Movement is life's being; Movement is truth, pause is a mirage. Life's enjoyment is in perils, In facing ups and downs; In the world beyond Life stalked for death, But the impulse to procreate Peopled the world of man and beast. Flowers blossomed and dropped From this tree of life. Fools think life is ephemeral; Life renews itself for ever -- Moving fast as a flash, Moving to eternity in a breath; Time, a chain of days and nights, Is the ebb and flow of breath. This flow of breath is like a sword, Selfhood is its sharpness; Selfhood is the secret of life; It is the world's awakening, Selfhood is solitary, absorbed, An ocean enclosed in a drop; It shines in light and in darkness, Existent in, but away from, thee and me. The dawn of life behind it, eternity before, It has no frontiers before, no frontiers behind. Afloat on the river of time, Bearing the buffets of the waves, Changing the course of its quest, Shifting its glance from time to time; For it a hill is a grain of sand, Mountains are shattered by its blows; A journey is its beginning and end, And this is the secret of its being. It is the moon's beam, the spark in the flint, Colourless itself, though infused with colours, No concern has it with the calculus of space, With linear time's limits, with the finitude of life. It manifested itself in man's essence of dust, After an eternity of a strife to be born. It is in thy heart that Selfhood has an abode, As heaven has its abode in the cornea of thy eye. To one who guards his Selfhood, The living that demeans it, is poison; He accepts only a living, That keeps his self- esteem; Keep away from royal pomp, Keep thy Selfhood free; Thou shouldst bow in prayer, Not bow to a human being. This myriad-coloured world, Under the sentence of death, This world of sight and sound, I Where life means eating and drinking, Is Selfhood's initial stage; It is not thy abode, O traveller! This dust-bowl is not the source of thy fire; The world is for thee, not thou for the world. Demolish this illusion of' time and space; Selfhood is the Tiger of God, the world is its prey; The earth is its prey, the heavens are its prey; Other worlds there are, still awaiting birth, The earth-born are not the centre of all life; They all await thy assault, Thy cataclysmic thought and deed; Days and nights revolve, To reveal thy Selfhood to thee; Thou art the architect of the world. Words fail to convey the truth; Truth is the mirror, words its shade; Though the breath is a burning flame, The flame has limited bounds. 'If now I soar any farther, The vision will sear my wings.'
~ Allama Muhammad Iqbal, To the Saqi (from Baal-i-Jibreel)
,#NFDB
51 Poetry
11 Philosophy
10 Integral Yoga
6 Occultism
1 Psychology
11 Aldous Huxley
8 Farid ud-Din Attar
6 Baba Sheikh Farid
5 Sri Aurobindo
5 Mansur al-Hallaj
5 Jalaluddin Rumi
5 Hafiz
4 The Mother
4 Kabir
4 Hakim Sanai
4 Bulleh Shah
4 Aleister Crowley
3 Satprem
3 Nolini Kanta Gupta
3 Khwaja Abdullah Ansari
3 A B Purani
2 Allama Muhammad Iqbal
2 Abu-Said Abil-Kheir
11 The Perennial Philosophy
3 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
2 The Secret Doctrine
2 Magick Without Tears
2 Hafiz - Poems
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
2 Agenda Vol 04
0 1963-06-15, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Hes a man who could have practiced some Tantrism in the way Woodroffe did; I cant say. There are also many people of that kind who were converted to Sufism they are very easily converted to Sufism. But true spiritual life, there arent many.
He has written three volumes entitled Gnosis.
0 1963-08-28, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The author of this letter is a Westerner turned Sufi.
Sri Aurobindo or the Transformation of the World.
02.01 - Metaphysical Thought and the Supreme Truth, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This, you will see, answers your point about the Western thinkers, Bradley and others, who have arrived through intellectual thinking at the idea of an "Other beyond Thought" or have even, like Bradley, tried to express their conclusions about it in terms that recall some of the expressions in the Arya. The idea in itself is not new; it is as old as the Vedas. It was repeated in other forms in Buddhism, Christian Gnosticism, Sufism. Originally, it was not discovered by intellectual speculation, but by the mystics following an inner spiritual discipline. When, somewhere between the seventh and fifth centuries B.C., men began both in the East and West to intellectualise knowledge, this Truth survived in the East; in the West, where the intellect began to be accepted as the sole or highest instrument for the discovery of
Truth, it began to fade. But still it has there too tried constantly to return; the Neo-Platonists brought it back, and now, it appears, the Neo-Hegelians and others (e.g., the Russian Ouspensky and one or two German thinkers, I believe) seem to be reaching after it. But still there is a difference.
05.09 - Varieties of Religious Experience, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Sufi doctrine also occupies an intermediate position, like the Christian, between the Chaldean and the Vedantic. The absolute identity of the human lover and the Divine Beloved, a complete fusion of the two at a particular stage or moment of consciousness is one of the cardinal experiences in the Sufi discipline. But that is an innermost state, not normal or habitual in life and activity, where the difference, the separation between the adorer and the adored is maintained exactly for the delight of play. But the dualism in the Indian discipline is more than compensated by the doctrine of Incarnation which obliterates fundamentally all difference between the human and the Divine. According to it, God does not become man only once, as in the Christian view, but that it is one of his constant functions. Indeed, the Indian tradition is that He is always the leader of terrestrial evolution; at each crisis, at each moment of need for guidance, He comes down in flesh and blood, in the form of an earthly creature to show the way, how to live and move and act.
The special gift of the Chaldean line of discipline lay in another direction. It cultivated not so much the higher lines of spiritual realisation but was occupied with what may be called the mid regions, the occult world. This material universe is not moved by the physical, vital or mental forces that are apparent and demonstrable, but by other secret and subtle forces; in fact, these are the motive forces, the real agents that work out and initiate movements in Nature, while the apparent ones are only the external forms and even masks. This occultism was also practised very largely in ancient Egypt from where the Greeks took up a few threads. The MysteriesOrphic and Eleusiniancultivated the tradition within a restricted circle and in a very esoteric manner. The tradition continued into the Christian Church also and an inner group formed in its heart that practised and kept alive something of this ancient science. The external tenets and dogmas of the Church did not admit or tolerate this which was considered as black magic, the Devil's Science. The evident reason was that if one pursued this line of occultism and tasted of the power it gave, one might very likely deviate from the straight and narrow path leading to the Spirit and spiritual salvation. In India too the siddhis or occult powers were always shunned by the truly spiritual, although sought by the many who take to the spiritual lifeoften with disastrous results. In Christianity, side by side with the major saints, there was always a group or a line of practicants that followed the occult system, although outwardly observing the official creed. It is curious to note that often where the original text of the Bible speaks of gods, in the plural, referring to the deities or occult powers, the official version translates it as God, to give the necessary theistic value and atmosphere.
07.29 - How to Feel that we Belong to the Divine, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
To have such an experience, you must first have the will for it; you must will and aspire, try to be less and less an egoist, to have less and less the feeling of being a particular person. You must have then within you this flame, this ardent yearning, this need of union. It is a kind of luminous enthusiasm that possesses you, an irresistible necessity of your being to dissolve in the divine and not to be separate. True, it is a state that does not last longin the beginningyou have the contrary experience immediately after. But if you continue, persist in your will and aspiration, the other state will come again. The two alternate for a time till the complete fusion is achieved. Finally there is no longer the distinction of your personal being and the Divine Being, the two are one. There is no more the state of yearning towards an ecstatic sense of submission in which the two are still separate. The state of fusion and mingling, of complete identity is extremely simple and supremely spontaneous. I heard once from an Indian Sufi at Paris of this state of consciousness. They too know of it.
Is that then the final stage, no more progress after that?
1.00b - INTRODUCTION, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
for they shall see God. And the same idea has been expressed by the Sufi poet,
Jalal-uddin Rumi, in terms of a scientific metaphor: The astrolabe of the mysteries of
1.01 - THAT ARE THOU, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The lower gate is that preferred by strictly practical teachersmen who, like Gautama Buddha, have no use for speculation and whose primary concern is to put out in mens hearts the hideous fires of greed, resentment and infatuation. Through the upper gate go those whose vocation it is to think and speculate the born philosophers and theologians. The middle gate gives entrance to the exponents of what has been called spiritual religion the devout contemplatives of India, the Sufis of Islam, the Catholic mystics of the later Middle Ages, and, in the Protestant tradition, such men as Denk and Franck and Castellio, as Everard and John Smith and the first Quakers and William Law.
It is through this central door, and just because it is central, that we shall make our entry into the subject matter of this book. The psychology of the Perennial Philosophy has its source in metaphysics and issues logically in a characteristic way of life and system of ethics. Starting from this midpoint of doctrine, it is easy for the mind to move in either direction.
--
Among the Christians and the Sufis, to whose writings we now return, the concern is primarily with the human mind and its divine essence.
My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except my God Himself.
--
Two of the recorded anecdotes about this Sufi saint deserve to be quoted here. When Bayazid was asked how old he was, he replied, Four years. They said, How can that be? He answered, I have been veiled from God by the world for seventy years, but I have seen Him during the last four years. The period during which one is veiled does not belong to ones life. On another occasion someone knocked at the saints door and cried, Is Bayazid here? Bayazid answered, Is anybody here except God?
To gauge the soul we must gauge it with God, for the Ground of God and the Ground of the Soul are one and the same.
1.02 - In the Beginning, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
And this name, Allah, itself contains the symbol of that union between the two complementary poles of being out of which the Universe is generated. Formed of twin syllables of which the first has for its initial letter Alif, the characteristic sign of the Masculine, and the second for its final letter He, the constant symbol of the Feminine, it seems to be merely the inversion in combination of one and the same essential article and can be mystically translated, as indeed it is translated by some of the Sufis,by the two pronouns He and She.
***
1.02 - The Great Process, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
But the damage does not stop there. Nothing is stickier than falsehood. It sticks to the soles of our shoes even though we have turned away from the wrong path. Others had indeed seen the earthly relevance of the Great Process the Zen Buddhists, the Tantric initiates, the Sufis and others and, more and more, disconcerted minds are turning to it and to themselves: never have so many more or less esoteric schools flourished. But the old error is holding fast (to tell the truth, we don't know whether error is ever an appropriate term, for the so-called error always turns out to be a roundabout route of the same Truth leading to a wider view of itself). It took so much effort out of the Sages of those days, and out of the lesser sages of these days, so many indispensable conditions of peace, austerity, silence and purity for them to achieve their more or less illumined goal, that our subconscious mind was as if branded by a red-hot iron with the idea that, without special conditions and special masters and somewhat special or mystical or innate gifts, it was not really possible to set out on that path, or at best the results would be meager and proportionate to the effort expended. And it was still, of course, an individual undertaking, a lofty extension of book learning. But this new dichotomy threatens to be more serious than the other one, more potentially harmful, between an unredeemed mass and an enlightened elite juggling lights about which anything can be said since there is no microscope to check it. Drugs, too, are a cheap ticket to dizzying glimpses of dazzling lights.
But we still do not have the key, the simple key. Yet the Great Process is there, the simple process.
1.02 - THE NATURE OF THE GROUND, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Among the Sufis, Al Haqq, the Real, seems to be thought of as the abyss of Godhead underlying the personal Allah, while the Prophet is taken out of history and regarded as the incarnation of the Logos.
Some idea of the inexhaustible richness of the divine nature can be obtained by analysing, word by word, the invocation with which the Lords Prayer beginsOur Father who art in heaven. God is oursours in the same intimate sense that our consciousness and life are ours. But as well as immanently ours, God is also transcendently the personal Father, who loves his creatures and to whom love and allegiance are owed by them in return. Our Father who art: when we come to consider the verb in isolation, we perceive that the immanent-transcendent personal God is also the immanent-transcendent One, the essence and principle of all existence. And finally Gods being is in heaven; the divine nature is other than, and incommensurable with, the nature of the creatures in whom God is immanent. That is why we can attain to the unitive knowledge of God only when we become in some measure Godlike, only when we permit Gods kingdom to come by making our own creaturely kingdom go.
--
Like St. Augustine, Eckhart was to some extent the victim of his own literary talents. Le style cest Ihomme. No doubt. But the converse is also partly true. Lhomme cest le style. Because we have a gift for writing in a certain way, we find ourselves, in some sort, becoming our way of writing. We mould ourselves in the likeness of our particular brand of eloquence. Eckhart was one of the inventors of German prose, and he was tempted by his new-found mastery of forceful expression to commit himself to extreme positionsto be doctrinally the image of his powerful and over-emphatic sentences. A statement like the foregoing would lead one to believe that he despised what the Vedantists call the lower knowledge of Brahman, not as the Absolute Ground of all things, but as the personal God. In reality he, like the Vedantists, accepts the lower knowledge as genuine knowledge and regards devotion to the personal God as the best preparation for the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. Another point to remember is that the attri buteless Godhead of Vedanta, of Mahayana Buddhism, of Christian and Sufi mysticism is the Ground of all the qualities possessed by the personal God and the Incarnation. God is not good, I am good, says Eckhart in his violent and excessive way. What he really meant was, I am just humanly good; God is supereminently good; the Godhead is, and his isness (istigkeit, in Eckharts German) contains goodness, love, wisdom and all the rest in their essence and principle. In consequence, the Godhead is never, for the exponent of the Perennial Philosophy, the mere Absolute of academic metaphysics, but something more purely perfect, more reverently to be adored than even the personal God or his human incarnationa Being towards whom it is possible to feel the most intense devotion and in relation to whom it is necessary (if one is to come to that unitive knowledge which is mans final end) to practise a discipline more arduous and unremitting than any imposed by ecclesiastical authority.
There is a distinction and differentiation, according to our reason, between God and the Godhead, between action and rest. The fruitful nature of the Persons ever worketh in a living differentiation. But the simple Being of God, according to the nature thereof, is an eternal Rest of God and of all created things.
1.03 - PERSONALITY, SANCTITY, DIVINE INCARNATION, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The doctrine that God can be incarnated in human form is found in most of the principal historic expositions of the Perennial Philosophyin Hinduism, in Mahayana Buddhism, in Christianity and in the Mohammedanism of the Sufis, by whom the Prophet was equated with the eternal Logos.
When goodness grows weak,
--
In other words there must be imitation of Christ before there can be identification with the Father; and there must be essential identity or likeness between the human spirit and the God who is Spirit in order that the idea of imitating the earthly behaviour of the incarnate Godhead should ever cross anybodys mind. Christian theologians speak of the possibility of deification, but deny that there is identity of substance between spiritual Reality and the human spirit. In Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, as also among the Sufis, spirit and Spirit are held to be the same substance; Atman is Brahman; That art thou.
When not enlightened, Buddhas are no other than ordinary beings; when there is enlightenment, ordinary beings at once turn into Buddhas.
1.04 - GOD IN THE WORLD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
It is in the Indian and Far Eastern formulations of the Perennial Philosophy that this subject is most systematically treated. What is prescribed is a process of conscious discrimination between the personal self and the Self that is identical with Brahman, between the individual ego and the Buddha-womb or Universal Mind. The result of this discrimination is a more or less sudden and complete revulsion of consciousness, and the realization of a state of no-mind, which may be described as the freedom from perceptual and intellectual attachment to the ego-principle. This state of no-mind exists, as it were, on a knife-edge between the carelessness of the average sensual man and the strained over-eagerness of the zealot for salvation. To achieve it, one must walk delicately and, to maintain it, must learn to combine the most intense alertness with a tranquil and self-denying passivity, the most indomitable determination with a perfect submission to the leadings of the spirit. When no-mind is sought after by a mind, says Huang Po, that is making it a particular object of thought. There is only testimony of silence; it goes beyond thinking. In other words, we, as separate individuals, must not try to think it, but rather permit ourselves to be thought by it. Similarly, in the Diamond Sutra we read that if a Bodhisattva, in his attempt to realize Suchness, retains the thought of an ego, a person, a separate being, or a soul, he is no longer a Bodhisattva. Al Ghazzali, the philosopher of Sufism, also stresses the need for intellectual humbleness and docility. If the thought that he is effaced from self occurs to one who is in fana (a term roughly corresponding to Zens no-mind, or mushin), that is a defect. The highest state is to be effaced from effacement. There is an ecstatic effacement-from-effacement in the interior heights of the Atman-Brahman; and there is another, more comprehensive effacement-from-effacement, not only in the inner heights, but also in and through the world, in the waking, everyday knowledge of God in his fulness.
A man must become truly poor and as free from his own creaturely will as he was when he was born. And I tell you, by the eternal truth, that so long as you desire to fulfill the will of God and have any hankering after eternity and God, for just so long you are not truly poor. He alone has true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing.
1.06 - MORTIFICATION, NON-ATTACHMENT, RIGHT LIVELIHOOD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Rabia, the Sufi woman-saint, speaks, thinks and feels in terms of devotional theism; the Buddhist theologian, in terms of impersonal moral Law; the Chinese philosopher, with characteristic humour, in terms of politics; but all three insist on the need for non-attachment to self-interestinsist on it as strongly as does Christ when he reproaches the Pharisees for their egocentric piety, as does the Krishna of the Bhagavad Gita, when he tells Arjuna to do his divinely ordained duty without personal craving for, or fear of, the fruits of his actions.
St. Ignatius Loyola was once asked what his feelings would be if the Pope were to suppress the Company of Jesus. A quarter of an hour of prayer, he answered, and I should think no more about it.
--
Anonymous Sufi Aphorism
It is by losing the egocentric life that we save the hitherto latent and undiscovered life which, in the spiritual part of our being, we share with the divine Ground. This new-found life is more abundant than the other, and of a different and higher kind. Its possession is liberation into the eternal, and liberation is beatitude. Necessarily so; for the Brahman, who is one with the Atman, is not only Being and Knowledge, but also Bliss, and, after Love and Peace, the final fruit of the Spirit is Joy. Mortification is painful, but that pain is one of the pre-conditions of blessedness. This fact of spiritual experience is sometimes obscured by the language in which it is described. Thus, when Christ says that the Kingdom of Heaven cannot be entered except by those who are as little children, we are apt to forget (so touching are the images evoked by the simple phrase) that a man cannot become childlike unless he chooses to undertake the most strenuous and searching course of self-denial. In practice the comm and to become as little children is identical with the comm and to lose ones life. As Traherne makes clear in the beautiful passage quoted in the section on God in the World, one cannot know created Nature in all its essentially sacred beauty, unless one first unlearns the dirty devices of adult humanity. Seen through the dung-coloured spectacles of self-interest, the universe looks singularly like a dung-heap; and as, through long wearing, the spectacles have grown on to the eyeballs, the process of cleansing the doors of perception is often, at any rate in the earlier stages of the spiritual life, painfully like a surgical operation. Later on, it is true, even self naughting may be suffused with the joy of the Spirit. On this point the following passage from the fourteenth-century Scale of Perfection is illuminating.
1.07 - The Three Schools of Magick 2, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Mysticism, both Catholic and Protestant, made a further attempt to free Christianity from the dark cloud of iniquity. They joined hands with the Sufis and the Vedantists. But this again led to the mere denial of the reality of evil. Thus drawing away, little by little, from clear appreciation of the facts of Nature, their doctrine became purely theoretical, and faded away, while the thundercloud of sin settled down more heavily than ever.
The most important of all the efforts of the White School, from an exoteric point of view, is Islam. In its doctrine there is some slight taint, but much less than in Christianity. It is a virile religion. It looks facts in the face, and admits their horror; but it proposes to overcome them by sheer dint of manhood. Unfortunately, the metaphysical conceptions of its quasi-profane Schools are grossly materialistic. It is only the Pantheism of the Sufis which eliminates the conception of propitiation; and, in practice, the Sufis are too closely allied to the Vedantists to retain hold of reality.
That will be all for the present.
1.07 - TRUTH, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
IN RELIGIOUS literature the word truth is used indiscriminately in at least three distinct and very different senses. Thus, it is sometimes treated as a synonym for fact, as when it is affirmed that God is Truthmeaning that He is the primordial Reality. But this is clearly not the meaning of the word in such a phrase as worshipping God in spirit and in truth. Here, it is obvious, truth signifies direct apprehension of spiritual Fact, as opposed to second-hand knowledge about Reality, formulated in sentences and accepted on authority or because an argument from previously granted postulates was logically convincing. And finally there is the more ordinary meaning of the word, as in such a sentence as, This statement is the truth, where we mean to assert that the verbal symbols of which the statement is composed correspond to the facts to which it refers. When Eckhart writes that whatever thou sayest of God is untrue, he is not affirming that all theological statements are false. Insofar as there can be any correspondence between human symbols and divine Fact, some theological statements are as true as it is possible for us to make them. Himself a theologian, Eckhart would certainly have admitted this. But besides being a theologian, Eckhart was a mystic. And being a mystic, he understood very vividly what the modern semanticist is so busily (and, also, so unsuccessfully) trying to drum into contemporary mindsnamely, that words are not the same as things and that a knowledge of words about facts is in no sense equivalent to a direct and immediate apprehension of the facts themselves. What Eckhart actually asserts is this: whatever one may say about God can never in any circumstances be the truth in the first two meanings of that much abused and ambiguous word. By implication St. Thomas Aquinas was saying exactly the same thing when, after his experience of infused contemplation, he refused to go on with his theological work, declaring that everything he had written up to that time was as mere straw compared with the immediate knowledge, which had been vouchsafed to him. Two hundred years earlier, in Bagdad, the great Mohammedan theologian, Al Ghazzali, had similarly turned from the consideration of truths about God to the contemplation and direct apprehension of Truth-the-Fact, from the purely intellectual discipline of the philosophers to the moral and spiritual discipline of the Sufis.
The moral of all this is obvious. Whenever we hear or read about truth, we should always pause long enough to ask ourselves in which of the three senses listed above the word is, at the moment, being used. By taking this simple precaution (and to take it is a genuinely virtuous act of intellectual honesty), we shall save ourselves a great deal of disturbing and quite unnecessary mental confusion.
1.1.01 - The Divine and Its Aspects, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The distinction between the Transcendental, the Cosmic, the Individual Divine is not my invention, nor is it native to India or to Asia - it is on the contrary a recognised European teaching current in the esoteric tradition of the Catholic Church where it is the authorised explanation of the Trinity, - Father, Son and Holy Ghost, - and it is very well-known to European mystic experience. In essence it exists in all spiritual disciplines that recognise the omnipresence of the Divine - in Indian Vedantic experience and in Mahomedan Yoga (not only the Sufi, but other schools also) - the Mahomedans even speak of not two or three but many levels of the Divine until one reaches the Supreme. As for the idea in itself, surely there is a difference between the individual, the cosmos in space and time, and something that exceeds this cosmic formula or any cosmic formula. There is a cosmic consciousness experienced by many which is quite different in its scope and action from the individual consciousness, and if there is a consciousness beyond the cosmic, infinite and essentially eternal, not merely extended in Time, that also must be different from these two. And if the Divine is or manifests Himself in these three, is it not conceivable that in aspect, in
His working, He may differentiate Himself so much that we are driven, if we are not to confound all truth of experience, if we are not to limit ourselves to a mere static experience of something indefinable, to speak of a triple aspect of the Divine?
1.12 - TIME AND ETERNITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The Sufi, says Jalal-uddin Rumi, is the son of time present. Spiritual progress is a spiral advance. We start as infants in the animal eternity of life in the moment, without anxiety for the future or regret for the past; we grow up into the specifically human condition of those who look before and after, who live to a great extent, not in the present but in memory and anticipation, not spontaneously but by rule and with prudence, in repentance and fear and hope; and we can continue, if we so desire, up and on in a returning sweep towards a point corresponding to our starting place in animality, but incommensurably above it. Once more life is lived in the moment the life now, not of a sub-human creature, but of a being in whom charity has cast out fear, vision has taken the place of hope, selflessness has put a stop to the positive egotism of complacent reminiscence and the negative egotism of remorse. The present moment is the only aperture through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which charity can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time. That is why the Sufi and, along with him, every other practising exponent of the Perennial Philosophy is, or tries to be, a son of time present
Past and future veil God from our sight;
1.13 - SALVATION, DELIVERANCE, ENLIGHTENMENT, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Much of the literature of Sufism is poetical. Sometimes this poetry is rather strained and extravagant, sometimes beautiful with a luminous simplicity, sometimes darkly and almost disquietingly enigmatic. To this last class belong the utterances of that Moslem saint of the tenth century, Niffari the Egyptian. This is what he wrote on the subject of salvation.
God made me behold the sea, and I saw the ships sinking and the planks floating; then the planks too were submerged. And God said to me, Those who voyage are not saved. And He said to me, Those who, instead of voyaging, cast themselves into the sea, take a risk. And He said to me, Those who voyage and take no risk shall perish. And He said to me, The surface of the sea is a gleam that cannot be reached. And the bottom is a darkness impenetrable. And between the two are great fishes, which are to be feared.
1.23 - THE MIRACULOUS, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The Sufis regard miracles as veils intervening between the soul and God. The masters of Hindu spirituality urge their disciples to pay no attention to the siddhis, or psychic powers, which may come to them unsought, as a by-product of one-pointed contemplation. The cultivation of these powers, they warn, distracts the soul from Reality and sets up insurmountable obstacles in the way of enlightenment and deliverance. A similar attitude is taken by the best Buddhist teachers, and in one of the Pali scriptures there is an ancedote recording the Buddhas own characteristically dry comment on a prodigious feat of levitation performed by one of his disciples. This, he said, will not conduce to the conversion of the unconverted, nor to the advantage of the converted. Then he went back to talking about deliverance.
Because they know nothing of spirituality and regard the material world and their hypotheses about it as supremely significant, rationalists are anxious to convince themselves and others that miracles do not and cannot happen. Because they have had experience of the spiritual life and its by-products, the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy are convinced that miracles do happen, but regard them as things of little importance, and that mainly negative and anti-spiritual.
1.25 - SPIRITUAL EXERCISES, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Six hundred years later, as we have seen, St. Franois de Sales was saying very much the same thing to young Camus and all the others who came to him in the ingenuous hope that he could reveal some easy and infallible trick for achieving the unitive knowledge of God. But to lose self in the Beloved there is no other secret. And yet the Sufis, like their Christian counterparts, made ample use of spiritual exercisesnot, of course, as ends in themselves, not even as proximate means, but as means to the proximate means of union with God, namely selfless and loving contemplation.
For twelve years I was the smith of my soul. I put it in the furnace of austerity and burned it in the fire of combat, I laid it on the anvil of reproach and smote it with the hammer of blame until I made of my soul a mirror. Five years I was the mirror of myself and was ever polishing that mirror with divers acts of worship and piety. Then for a year I gazed in contemplation. On my waist I saw a girdle of pride and vanity and self-conceit and reliance on devotion and approbation of my works. I laboured for five years more until that girdle became worn out and I professed Islam anew. I looked and saw that all created things were dead. I pronounced four akbirs over them and returned from the funeral of them all, and without intrusion of creatures, through Gods help alone, I attained unto God.
--
In India the repetition of the divine name or the mantram (a short devotional or doctrinal affirmation) is called japam and is a favourite spiritual exercise among all the sects of Hinduism and Buddhism. The shortest mantram is OMa spoken sym bol that concentrates within itself the whole Vedanta philosophy. To this and other mantrams Hindus attribute a kind of magical power. The repetition of them is a sacramental act, conferring grace ex opere operato. A similar efficacity was and indeed still is attri buted to sacred words and formulas by Buddhists, Moslems, Jews and Christians. And, of course, just as traditional religious rites seem to possess the power to evoke the real presence of existents projected into psychic objectivity by the faith and devotion of generations of worshippers, so too long-hallowed words and phrases may become channels for conveying powers other and greater than those belonging to the individual who happens at the moment to be pronouncing them. And meanwhile the constant repetition of this word GOD or this word LOVE may, in favourable circumstances, have a profound effect upon the subconscious mind, inducing that selfless one-pointedness of will and thought and feeling, without which the unitive knowledge of God is impossible. Furthermore, it may happen that, if the word is simply repeated all whole, and not broken up or undone by discursive analysis, the Fact for which the word stands will end by presenting itself to the soul in the form of an integral intuition. When this happens, the doors of the letters of this word are opened (to use the language of the Sufis) and the soul passes through into Reality. But though all this may happen, it need not necessarily happen. For there is no spiritual patent medicine, no pleasant and infallible panacea for souls suffering from separateness and the deprivation of God. No, there is no guaranteed cure; and, if used improperly, the medicine of spiritual exercises may start a new disease or aggravate the old. For example, a mere mechanical repetition of the divine name can result in a kind of numbed stupefaction that is as much below analytical thought as intellectual vision is above it. And because the sacred word constitutes a kind of prejudgment of the experience induced by its repetition, this stupefaction, or some other abnormal state, is taken to be the imme thate awareness of Reality and is idolatrously cultivated and hunted after, with a turning of the will towards what is supposed to be God before there has been a turning of it away from the self.
The dangers which beset the practicer of japam, who is insufficiently mortified and insufficiently recollected and aware, are encountered in the same or different forms by those who make use of more elaborate spiritual exercises. Intense concentration on an image or idea, such as is recommended by many teachers, both Eastern and Western, may be very helpful for certain persons in certain circumstances, very harmful in other cases. It is helpful when the concentration results in such mental stillness, such a silence of intellect, will and feeling, that the divine Word can be uttered within the soul. It is harmful when the image concentrated upon becomes so hallucinatingly real that it is taken for objective Reality and idolatrously worshipped; harmful, too, when the exercise of concentration produces unusual psycho-physical results, in which the person experiencing them takes a personal pride, as being special graces and divine communications. Of these unusual psycho-physical occurrences the most ordinary are visions and auditions, foreknowledge, telepathy and other psychic powers, and the curious bodily phenomenon of intense neat. Many persons who practise concentration exercises experience this heat occasionally. A number of Christian saints, of whom the best known are St. Philip Neri and St. Catherine of Siena, have experienced it continuously. In the East techniques have been developed whereby the accession of heat resulting from intense concentration can be regulated, controlled and put to do useful work, such as keeping the contemplative warm in freezing weather. In Europe, where the phenomenon is not well understood, many would-be contemplatives have experienced this heat, and have imagined it to be some special divine favour, or even the experience of union, and being insufficiently mortified and humble, have fallen into idolatry and a God-eclipsing spiritual pride.
1.35 - The Tao 2, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
I also studied all varieties of Asiatic philosophy, especially with regard to the practical question of spiritual development, the Sufi doctrines, the Upanishads, the Sankhra, Veda and Vedanta, the Bhagavad-Gita and Purana, the Dammapada, and many other classics, together with numerous writings on the Tantra and Yoga of such men as Patanjali, Vivekananda, etc., etc. Not a few of these teachings are as yet wholly unknown to scholars. I made the scope of my studies as comprehensive as possible, omitting no school of thought however unimportant or repugnant.
I made a critical examination of all these teachers in the light of my practical experience. The physiological and psychological uniformity of mankind guaranteed that the diversity of expression concealed a unity of significance. This discovery was confirmed, furthermore, by reference to Jewish, Greek, and Celtic traditions. One quintessential truth was common to all cults, from the Hebrides to the Yellow Sea; and even the main branches proved essentially identical. It was only the foliage that exhibited incompatibility.
--
As for ,[64] which superficially might seem the best translation of Tao as described in the text, it is the most misleading of the three. For To On possesses an extensive connotation implying a whole system of Platonic concepts, than which nothing can be more alien to the essential quality of the Tao. Tao is neither "being" nor "not being" in any sense which Europe could understand. It is neither existence, nor a condition or form of existence. Equally, TO MH ON gives no idea of Tao. Tao is altogether alien to all that class of thought. From its connection with "that principle which necessarily underlies the fact that events occur" one might suppose that the "Becoming" of Heraclitus might assist us to describe the Tao. But the Tao is not a principle at all of that kind. To understand it requires an altogether different state of mind to any with which European thinkers in general are familiar. It is necessary to pursue unflinchingly the path of spiritual development on the lines indicated by the Sufis, the Hindus and the Buddhists; and, having reached the trance called Nerodha-Sammapati, in which are destroyed all forms soever of consciousness, there appears in that abyss of annihilation the germ of an entirely new type of idea, whose principal characteristic is this: that the entire concatenation of One's previous experiences and conceptions could not have happened at all, save by virtue of this indescribable necessity.
I am only too painfully aware that the above exposition is faulty in every respect. In particular, it presupposes in the reader considerable familiarity with the subject, thus practically begging the question. It must also prove almost wholly unintelligible to the average reader, him in fact whom I especially aim to interest.
1929-07-28 - Art and Yoga - Art and life - Music, dance - World of Harmony, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Why not? The Mahabharata and Ramayana are certainly not inferior to anything created by Shakespeare or any other poet, and they are said to have been the work of men who were Rishis and had done Yogic tapasy. The Gita which, like the Upanishads, ranks at once among the greatest literary and the greatest spiritual works, was not written by one who had no experience of Yoga. And where is the inferiority to your Milton and Shelley in the famous poems written whether in India or Persia or elsewhere by men known to be saints, Sufis, devotees? And, then, do you know all the Yogis and their work? Among the poets and creators can you say who were or who were not in conscious touch with the Divine? There are some who are not officially Yogis, they are not gurus and have no disciples; the world does not know what they do; they are not anxious for fame and do not attract to themselves the attention of men; but they have the higher consciousness, are in touch with a Divine Power, and when they create they create from there. The best paintings in India and much of the best statuary and architecture were done by Buddhist monks who passed their lives in spiritual contemplation and practice; they did supreme artistic work, but did not care to leave their names to posterity. The chief reason why Yogis are not usually known by their art is that they do not consider their art-expression as the most important part of their life and do not put so much time and energy into it as a mere artist. And what they do does not always reach the public. How many there are who have done great things and not published them to the world!
Have Yogis done greater dramas than Shakespeare?
1953-05-20, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
That is to say, it is the answer to our aspiration. It may happen immediately afterwards that is very rare but may happen. If you have both simultaneously, then the state is perfect; usually they alternate; they alternate more and more closely until the moment there is a total fusion. Then there is no more distinction. I heard a Sufi mystic, who was besides a great musician, an Indian, saying that for the Sufis there was a state higher than that of adoration and surrender to the Divine, than that of devotion, that this was not the last stage; the last stage of the progress is when there is no longer any distinction; you have no longer this kind of adoration or surrender or consecration; it is a very simple state in which one makes no distinction between the Divine and oneself. They know this. It is even written in their books. It is a commonly known condition in which everything becomes quite simple. There is no longer any difference. There is no longer that kind of ecstatic surrender to Something which is beyond you in every way, which you do not understand, which is merely the result of your aspiration, your devotion. There is no difference any longer. When the union is perfect, there is no longer any difference.
Is this the end of self-progress?
1.ac - The Atheist, #Crowley - Poems, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
The Sufi worships not, but drinks,
being himself the all-divine.
1.ami - O Cup-bearer! Give me again that wine of love for Thee (from Baal-i-Jibreel), #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Naeem Siddiqui Original Language Urdu O Cup-bearer! Give me again that wine of love for Thee; Let me gain the place my soul desires. My lyrical vein was all but dried up, still The sheik decrees that, too, should be choked to death. No trail now blazes in new fields of thought, But blind slaves of Sufies and mullahs survive. Who snatched away the piercing sword of love? Knowledge is left with an empty sheath alone. With a luminous soul the power of song is life; With a darkened soul that power is eternal death. A full moon glistens in Thy brimful cup; Deprive me not of its silver beams at night. <
1.ami - To the Saqi (from Baal-i-Jibreel), #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Naeem Siddiqui Original Language Urdu Look! What wonders the spring has wrought! The river bank is a paradise! Rose-embowered glades, Blossoming jasmine and hyacinth, And violets, the envy of the skies!. Rainbow colours transformed Into a chorus of rapturous sounds, And the harmony of flowers The hillside is carnation-red; In the languid haze, the air Seems drunk with the beauty of life! The brook, on the heights of the hill, Dances to its own music. The world is dizzy in a pageant of colour! My rosy-cheeked Cup-bearer! The voice of spring is the voice of life! But the spring lasts not for ever; So bring me the cup that tears all veils -- The wine that brightens life -- The wine that intoxicates the world -- The wine in which flows The music of everlasting life, The wine that reveals eternity's secret. Unveil the secrets, O Saqi. Look! The world has changed apace! New are the songs, and new is the music; The West's magic has dissolved; The West's magicians are bewildered; Old politics has lost its game; The world is tired of kings; Gone are the days of the rich; Gone is the jugglery of old; Awake is China's sleeping giant; The Himalayas' torrents are unleashed; Sinai is riven; Moses awaits the light divine. The Muslim says that God is One But his heart is Still a heathen: Culture, Sufism, rites and rthetoric, All adore non- Arab idols; The truth was lost in trifles, And the nation was lost in conventions. The speaker's rhetoric is enchanting, But is devoid of passion; It is clothed in logic neat, But lost in a maze of words; The Sufi, unique in the love of truth, Unique in the love of God, Was lost in un-Islamic thought; Was lost in the hierarchic quest; The fire of love is extinguished, And a Muslim is a heap of ashes, O Saqi! Give me the old wine again! Let the potent cup go round! Let me soar on the wings of love; Make my dust bright-pinioned; Make wisdom free; And make the young guide the old; Thou it is that nourishest. this nation; Thou it is that canst sustain it; Urge them to move, to stir; Give them Ali's heart; give them Siddiq's passion; Let the same old love pierce their hearts; Awaken in them a burning zeal; Let the stars throw down their spears, And let the earth's dwellers tremble Give the young a passion that consumes; Give them my vision, my love of God; Free my boat from the whirlpool's grip, And make it move forward-, Reveal to me the secrets of life, For thou knowest them all; The treasures of a fakir like me Are suffused, unsleeping eyes, And secret yearnings of the heart-, My anguished sighs at night, My solitude in the world of men, My hopes and my fears, My quest untiring, My nature an arena of thought A mirror of the world. My heart a battlefield of life, With armies of suspicion, And bastions of certitude; With these treasures I am More rich than the richest of all. Let the young join my throng, And let them find an anchor of hope. The sea of life has its ebb and flow-, In every atom's heart is the pulse of life; It manifests itself in the body, As a flame conceals a wave of smoke; Contact with the earth was harsh for it, But it liked the labour; It is in motion, and not in motion; Tired of the elements' shackles; A unity, imprisoned by plurality; But always unique, unequalled. It has made this dome of myriad glass; It has carved this pantheon. It does not repeat its craft For thou art not me, and I am not thou; It has created the world of men, And remains in solitude, Its brightness is seen in the stars, And in the lustre of pearls-, To it belong the wildernesses, The flowers and the thorns; Mountains sometimes are shaken by its might; It captures angels and nymphs; It makes the eagle pounce on a prey, And leave a blood-stained body. Every atom throbs with life; Rest is an illusion; Life's journey pauses not, For every moment is a new glory; Life, thou thinkest, is a mystery; Life is a delight in eternal flight; Life has seen many ups and downs; It loves a journey, not a goal. Movement is life's being; Movement is truth, pause is a mirage. Life's enjoyment is in perils, In facing ups and downs; In the world beyond Life stalked for death, But the impulse to procreate Peopled the world of man and beast. Flowers blossomed and dropped From this tree of life. Fools think life is ephemeral; Life renews itself for ever -- Moving fast as a flash, Moving to eternity in a breath; Time, a chain of days and nights, Is the ebb and flow of breath. This flow of breath is like a sword, Selfhood is its sharpness; Selfhood is the secret of life; It is the world's awakening, Selfhood is solitary, absorbed, An ocean enclosed in a drop; It shines in light and in darkness, Existent in, but away from, thee and me. The dawn of life behind it, eternity before, It has no frontiers before, no frontiers behind. Afloat on the river of time, Bearing the buffets of the waves, Changing the course of its quest, Shifting its glance from time to time; For it a hill is a grain of sand, Mountains are shattered by its blows; A journey is its beginning and end, And this is the secret of its being. It is the moon's beam, the spark in the flint, Colourless itself, though infused with colours, No concern has it with the calculus of space, With linear time's limits, with the finitude of life. It manifested itself in man's essence of dust, After an eternity of a strife to be born. It is in thy heart that Selfhood has an abode, As heaven has its abode in the cornea of thy eye. To one who guards his Selfhood, The living that demeans it, is poison; He accepts only a living, That keeps his self- esteem; Keep away from royal pomp, Keep thy Selfhood free; Thou shouldst bow in prayer, Not bow to a human being. This myriad-coloured world, Under the sentence of death, This world of sight and sound, I Where life means eating and drinking, Is Selfhood's initial stage; It is not thy abode, O traveller! This dust-bowl is not the source of thy fire; The world is for thee, not thou for the world. Demolish this illusion of' time and space; Selfhood is the Tiger of God, the world is its prey; The earth is its prey, the heavens are its prey; Other worlds there are, still awaiting birth, The earth-born are not the centre of all life; They all await thy assault, Thy cataclysmic thought and deed; Days and nights revolve, To reveal thy Selfhood to thee; Thou art the architect of the world. Words fail to convey the truth; Truth is the mirror, words its shade; Though the breath is a burning flame, The flame has limited bounds. 'If now I soar any farther, The vision will sear my wings.' <
1.asak - Love came, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Peter Lamborn Wilson and Nasrollah Pourjavady Original Language Persian/Farsi Love came flowed like blood beneath skin, through veins emptied me of my self filled me with the Beloved till every limb every organ was seized and occupied till only my name remains. the rest is It. [1501.jpg] -- from The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry, Translated by Peter Lamborn Wilson / Translated by Nasrollah Pourjavady <
1.asak - On Unitys Way, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Peter Lamborn Wilson and Nasrollah Pourjavady Original Language Persian/Farsi On Unity's Way: no infidelity no faith. Take one step away from yourself and -- behold! -- the Path! You, soul of the world, must choose the road of Divine Submission then sit with anyone you like -- even a black snake -- but not your self! [1501.jpg] -- from The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry, Translated by Peter Lamborn Wilson / Translated by Nasrollah Pourjavady <
1.bsf - Fathom the ocean, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Paul Smith Original Language Punjabi Farid says: Creator is in the creation and creation in the Creator! Why should we then be blaming others when that One is everywhere? [2667.jpg] -- from Anthology of Great Sufi & Mystical Poets of Pakistan, by Paul Smith <
1.bsf - For evil give good, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Paul Smith Original Language Punjabi For evil give good, hold no revenge in the heart, Farid; your body will be free of sickness, your life be blessed. [2667.jpg] -- from Anthology of Great Sufi & Mystical Poets of Pakistan, by Paul Smith <
1.bsf - His grace may fall upon us at anytime, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Paul Smith Original Language Punjabi His grace may fall upon us at anytime, it has no rules, you see? Some don't get it after rituals, vigils: others asleep, it hits suddenly! [2667.jpg] -- from Anthology of Great Sufi & Mystical Poets of Pakistan, by Paul Smith <
1.bsf - Like a deep sea, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Paul Smith Original Language Punjabi Seek the Perfect Master who is like a deep sea where pearl you will find no point seeking that One in the shallow water too! [2667.jpg] -- from Anthology of Great Sufi & Mystical Poets of Pakistan, by Paul Smith <
1.bsf - Turn cheek, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Paul Smith Original Language Punjabi Turn cheek of yours before that one who hits on your right: do not strike back, remember its the soul's play, its delight. [2667.jpg] -- from Anthology of Great Sufi & Mystical Poets of Pakistan, by Paul Smith <
1.bsf - You are my protection O Lord, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Paul Smith Original Language Punjabi You are my protection O Lord, my salvation: grant to Farid the blessing of Your adoration. [2667.jpg] -- from Anthology of Great Sufi & Mystical Poets of Pakistan, by Paul Smith <
1.bs - He Who is Stricken by Love, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Mahmood Jamal Original Language Punjabi He who is stricken by Love Sings and dances out of tune. He who wears the garb of Love Gets blessings from above. Soon as he drinks from this cup No questions and no answers remain. He who is stricken by Love Sings and dances out of tune. He who has the Beloved in his heart, He is fulfilled with his Love. No need he has for formality, He just enjoys his ecstasy. He who is stricken by Love Sings and dances out of tune. [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal <
1.bs - Look into Yourself, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Mahmood Jamal Original Language Punjabi You have learnt so much And read a thousand books. Have you ever read your Self? You have gone to mosque and temple. Have you ever visited your soul? You are busy fighting Satan. Have you ever fought your Ill intentions? You have reached into the skies, But you have failed to reach What's in your heart! [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal <
1.bs - Love Springs Eternal, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Mahmood Jamal Original Language Punjabi Love springs eternal! When I learnt the lesson of Love I dreaded going to the mosque. Hesitantly, I found a temple Where they beat a thousand drums. Love springs eternal! Come! I am tired of reading holy books, Fed up with prostrations good. God is not in Mathura or Mecca. He who finds Him is enlightened! Love springs eternal! Come! Burn the prayer mat, break the beaker! Quit the rosary, chuck the staff! Lovers shout at the top of their voices: Break all rules that tie you down! Love springs eternal! Come! Heer and Ranjha are united: While she searches for him in orchards, He is in her warm embrace! She has her love, she is fulfilled! Love springs eternal! Come! [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal <
1.bs - One Point Contains All, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Mahmood Jamal Original Language Punjabi One point contains all; Learn about the One, forget the rest. Forget hell and the terrible grave; Leave the ways of sin and purify Your heart. That's how the argument is spun: It's all contained in One! Why rub your head against the earth? What point in your vain prostration? Your Kalimah read, makes others laugh. You do not grasp the Lord's word! Somewhere the truth is written down: It's all contained in One! Some go to the jungle in vain And starve and cause themselves some pain; They waste their time with all this And come home tired, nothing gained! Find your master and become God's slave. In this way you'll be free of care; Free of desire, free of worry, And your heart truthful, pure. Bulleh has discovered this truth alone: It's all contained in One! [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal <
1.fua - God Speaks to David, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Raficq Abdulla Original Language Persian/Farsi David was an open vessel, the light Poured into him. God's words took flight In him and through him God said: 'To all humankind, who are wed To hubris and sin, I say: "If heaven and hell Did not exist to catch you and break you, Would you, though a speck of dust, tell Truth from falsehood, would your eye find true Centre in my words? If there was nothing but dark Would you think of me, still less mark Your place with the leaf of prayer? Yet You are bound to my will, your soul is set In the direction of my breath, with hope And fear which cracks the dawn of your heart, So you will worship me with all your mind Words and inclination. Make a start: Burn to ashes all that is not I, bind The ashes to the fidelity of the wind, Extract the ore of your being, Then you shall start seeing."' [1490.jpg] -- from The Conference of the Birds: The Selected Sufi Poetry of Farid ud-Din Attar, Translated by Raficq Abdulla <
1.fua - God Speaks to Moses, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Raficq Abdulla Original Language Persian/Farsi One day God spoke to Moses and said: 'Visit Satan, question him, use your head.' So Moses descended to Hell's burning halls; Satan saw him coming, a smile did he install On his fiery face. Moses proudly asked him For advice, waiting for Satan's crafty whim; Satan spoke through his coal-black teeth: 'Remember this rule which sense bequeaths Never say "I" so that you become like me.' So long as you live for yourself you'll be A drum booming pride a cymbal of infidelity. Vanity, resentment, envy and anger shall be cemented Into your inner state; you shall be like a demented Dog with lolling tongue, infected with indolence of sin. You shall become your own tracked prisoner within. [1490.jpg] -- from The Conference of the Birds: The Selected Sufi Poetry of Farid ud-Din Attar, Translated by Raficq Abdulla <
1.fua - Invocation, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Raficq Abdulla Original Language Persian/Farsi We are busy with the luxury of things. Their number and multiple faces bring To us confusion we call knowledge. Say: God created the world, pinned night to day, Made mountains to weigh it down, seas To wash its face, living creatures with pleas (The ancestors of prayers) seeking a place In this mystery that floats in endless space. God set the earth on the back of a bull, The bull on a fish dancing on a spool Of silver light so fine it is like air; That in turn rests on nothing there But nothing that nothing can share. All things are but masks at God's beck and call, They are symbols that instruct us that God is all. [1490.jpg] -- from The Conference of the Birds: The Selected Sufi Poetry of Farid ud-Din Attar, Translated by Raficq Abdulla <
1.fua - The Dullard Sage, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Peter Lamborn Wilson and Nasrollah Pourjavady Original Language Persian/Farsi Lost in myself I reappeared I know not where a drop that rose from the sea and fell and dissolved again; a shadow that stretched itself out at dawn, when the sun reached noon I disappeared. I have no news of my coming or passing away-- the whole thing happened quicker than a breath; ask no questions of the moth. In the candle flame of his face I have forgotten all the answers. In the way of love there must be knowledge and ignorance so I have become both a dullard and a sage; one must be an eye and yet not see so I am blind and yet I still perceive, Dust be on my head if I can say where I in bewilderment have wandered: Attar watched his heart transcend both worlds and under its shadow now is gone mad with love. [1501.jpg] -- from The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry, Translated by Peter Lamborn Wilson / Translated by Nasrollah Pourjavady <
1.fua - The Hawk, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Raficq Abdulla Original Language Persian/Farsi He was a soldier with a soldier's pride, This hawk, whose home was by a king's side. He was haughty as his master, all other birds Thought him a disaster, his beak was feared As much as his talons. With hooded eyes (His place on the royal roster was his prize) He stands sentinel on the king's arm, polite And trained meticulously to do what is right And proper with courtly grace. He has no need To see the Simurgh even in a dream, his deeds Are sufficient for him, and no journey could replace The royal command, royal morsel food no disgrace To his way of thinking, he easily satisfies the king. He flies with cutting grace on sinister wing Through valleys and upward into the sky, He has no other wish but so to live and then to die. The hoopoe says: 'You have no sense with your soldier's pride. Do you think that supping with kings, doing their will Is enough to keep you in favour, always at their side? An earthly king may be just but you must beware still For a king's justice is whim pretending to be good. Once there was a king who prized his slave for his beauty. His body's silver sheen fascinated the prince who would Dress him in fine clothes so his looks alone were his duty. The king amused himself by placing on his favourite's head An apple for a bullseye, the poor silver slave would grow Yellow with fear because he knew too well blood is red. His silver hue would be tarnished if the king's bow Was not true; an injured slave would his silver lose To be discarded because the king would not be amused.' [1490.jpg] -- from The Conference of the Birds: The Selected Sufi Poetry of Farid ud-Din Attar, Translated by Raficq Abdulla <
1.fua - The Nightingale, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Raficq Abdulla Original Language Persian/Farsi The nightingale raises his head, drugged with passion, Pouring the oil of earthly love in such a fashion That the other birds shaded with his song, grow mute. The leaping mysteries of his melodies are acute. 'I know the secrets of Love, I am their piper,' He sings, 'I seek a David with broken heart to decipher Their plaintive barbs, I inspire the yearning flute, The daemon of the plucked conversation of the lute. The roses are dissolved into fragrance by my song, Hearts are torn with its sobbing tone, broken along The fault lines of longing filled with desire's wrong. My music is like the sky's black ocean, I steal The listener's reason, the world becomes the seal Of dreams for chosen lovers, where only the rose Is certain. I cannot go further, I am lame, and expose My anchored soul to the divine Way. My love for the rose is sufficient, I shall stay In the vicinity of its petalled image, I need No more, it blooms for me the rose, my seed. The hoopoe replies: 'You love the rose without thought. Nightingale, your foolish song is caught By the rose's thorns, it is a passing thing. Velvet petal, perfume's repose bring You pleasure, yes, but sorrow too For the rose's beauty is shallow: few Escape winter's frost. To seek the Way Release yourself from this love that lasts a day. The bud nurtures its own demise as day nurtures night. Groom yourself, pluck the deadly rose from your sight. [1490.jpg] -- from The Conference of the Birds: The Selected Sufi Poetry of Farid ud-Din Attar, Translated by Raficq Abdulla <
1.fua - The Pupil asks- the Master answers, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Raficq Abdulla Original Language Persian/Farsi 'Why was Adam driven from the garden?' The pupil asked his master. 'His heart was hardened With images, a hundred bonds that clutter the earth Chained Adam to the cycle of death following birth. He was blind to this equation, living for something other Than God and so out of paradise he was driven With his mortal body's cover his soul was shriven. Noblest of God's creatures, Adam fell with blame, Like a moth shriveled by the candle's flame, Into history which taught mankind shame. Since Adam had not given up his heart To God's attachment, there was no part For Adam in paradise where the only friend Is God; His will is not for Adam to imagine and bend.' [1490.jpg] -- from The Conference of the Birds: The Selected Sufi Poetry of Farid ud-Din Attar, Translated by Raficq Abdulla <
1.fua - The Simurgh, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Raficq Abdulla Original Language Persian/Farsi Ah, the Simurgh, who is this wondrous being Who, one fated night, when time stood still, Flew over China, not a single soul seeing? A feather fell from this King, his beauty and his will, And all hearts touched by it were in tumult thrown. Everyone who could, traced from it a liminal form; All who saw the still glowing lines were blown By longing like trees on a shore bent by storm. The feather is lodged in China's sacred places, Hence the Prophet's exhortation for knowledge to seek Even unto China where the feather's shadow graces All who shelter under it -- to know of this is not to speak. But unless the feather's image is felt and seen None knows the heart's obscure, shifting states That replace the fat of inaction with decision's lean. His grace enters the world and molds our fates Though without the limit of form or definite shape, For all definitions are frozen contradictions not fit For knowing; therefore, if you wish to travel on the Way, Set out on it now to find the Simurgh, don't prattle and sit On your haunches till into stiffening death you stray. All the birds who were by this agitation shook, Aspired to a meeting place to prepare for the Shah, To release in themselves the revelations of the Book; They yearned so deeply for Him who is both near and far, They were drawn to this sun and burned to an ember; But the road was long and perilous that was open to offer. Hooked by terror, though each was asked to remember The truth, each an excuse to stay behind was keen to proffer. [1490.jpg] -- from The Conference of the Birds: The Selected Sufi Poetry of Farid ud-Din Attar, Translated by Raficq Abdulla <
1.hs - Beauty Radiated in Eternity, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Mahmood Jamal Original Language Persian/Farsi Beauty radiated in eternity With its light; Love was born And set the worlds alight. It revealed itself to angels Who knew not how to love; It turned shyly towards man And set fire to his heart. Reason ventured to light Its own flame and wear the crown, But Your radiance Turned the world Of reason upside down. Others got pleasure As was their fate. My heart was Towards sadness inclined; For me, sorrow was destined. Beauty yearned to see itself; It turned to man to sing its praise. Hafiz wrote this song Drunk with Love, From a heart Carrying a happy secret. [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal <
1.hs - Bloom Like a Rose, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by David and Sabrineh Fideler Original Language Persian/Farsi Your heartrending fire made me bloom like a rose. I died at your feet and returned fast to life. My inborn freedom offered nothing in profit; but now I am free, since becoming your slave. [2200.jpg] -- from Love's Alchemy: Poems from the Sufi Tradition, Translated by David Fideler / Translated by Sabrineh Fideler <
1.hs - Meditation, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Peter Lamborn Wilson and Nasrollah Pourjavady Original Language Persian/Farsi Collect your mind's fragments that you may fill yourself bit by bit with Meaning: the slave who meditates on the mysteries of Creation for sixty minutes gains more merit than from sixty years of fasting and prayer. Meditation: high-soaring hawk of Intellect's wrist resting at last on the flowering branch of the Heart: this world and the next are hidden beneath its folded wing. Now perched before the mud hut which is Earth now clasping with its talons a branch of the Tree of Paradise soaring here striking there -- each moment fresh prey gobbling a mouthful of moonlight wheeling away beyond the sun darting between the Great Wheel's star-set spokes, it rips to shreds the Footstool and the Throne a Pigeon's feather in its beak -- or a comet -- till finally free of everything it alights, silent on a topmost bough. Hunting is king's sport, not just anyone's pastime but you? you've hooded the falcon -- what can I say? -- clipped its pinions broken its wings... alas. [1501.jpg] -- from The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry, Translated by Peter Lamborn Wilson / Translated by Nasrollah Pourjavady <
1.hs - Mystic Chat, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Peter Lamborn Wilson and Nasrollah Pourjavady Original Language Persian/Farsi My dear! You haven't the feet for this path -- why struggle? You've no idea where the idol's to be found -- what's all this mystic chat? What can be done with quarrelsome fellow travelers, boastful marketplace morons? If you were really a lover you'd see that faith and infidelity are one... Oh, what's the use? nit-picking about such things is a hobby for numb brains. You are pure spirit but imagine yourself a corpse! pure water which thinks it's the pot! Everything you want must be searched for -- except the Friend. If you don't find Him you'll never be able to start to even look. Yes, you can be sure: You are not Him -- unless you can remove yourself from between yourself and Him -- in which case you are Him. [1501.jpg] -- from The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry, Translated by Peter Lamborn Wilson / Translated by Nasrollah Pourjavady <
1.hs - Rubys Heart, #Hafiz - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Intoxicated, the Sufi wore his hat askew
Two more goglets, aslant his turban flew
1.hs - The Glow of Your Presence, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by David and Sabrineh Fideler Original Language Persian/Farsi Where have you taken your sweet song? Come back and play me a tune. I never really cared for the things of this world. It was the glow of your presence that filled it with beauty. [2200.jpg] -- from Love's Alchemy: Poems from the Sufi Tradition, Translated by David Fideler / Translated by Sabrineh Fideler <
1.hs - The Pearl on the Ocean Floor, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Rober Bly Original Language Persian/Farsi We have turned the face of our dawn studies toward the drunkard's road. The harvest of our prayers we've turned toward the granary of the ecstatic soul. The fire toward which we have turned our face is so intense It would set fire to the straw harvest of a hundred reasonable men. The Sultan of Pre-Eternity gave us the casket of love's grief as a gift; Therefore we have turned our sorrow toward this dilapidated traveller's cabin that we call "the world." From now on I will leave no doors in my heart open for love of beautiful creatures; I have turned and set the seal of divine lips on the door of this house. It's time to turn away from make-believe under our robes patched so many times. The foundation for our work is an intelligence that sees through all these games. We have turned our face to the pearl lying on the ocean floor. So why then should we worry if this wobbly old boat keeps going or not? We turn to the intellectuals and call them parasites of reason; Thank God they are like true lovers faithless and without heart. The Sufis have settled for a fantasy, and Hafez is no different. How far out of reach our goals, and how weak our wills are! [2402.jpg] -- from The Soul is Here for its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures, Edited by Robert Bly <
1.hs - The Rose Has Flushed Red, #Hafiz - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Hail, Sufis! lovers of wine, all hail!
For wine is proclaimed to a world athirst.
1.hs - The Way of the Holy Ones, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Andrew Harvey Original Language Persian/Farsi Don't speak of your suffering -- He is speaking. Don't look for Him everywhere -- He's looking for you. An ant's foot touches a leaf, He senses it; A pebble shifts in a streambed, He knows it. If there's a worm hidden deep in a rock, He'll know its body, tinier than an atom, The sound of its praise, its secret ecstasy -- All this He knows by divine knowing. He has given the tiniest worm its food; He has opened to you the Way of the Holy Ones. [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut <
1.jr - Love is Here, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Andrew Harvey Original Language Persian/Farsi & Turkish Love is here; it is the blood in my veins, my skin. I am destroyed; He has filled me with Passion. His fire has flooded the nerves of my body. Who am I? Just my name; the rest is Him. [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut <
1.jr - No One Here but Him, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Andrew Harvey Original Language Persian/Farsi & Turkish Watching my hand; He is moving it. Hearing my voice; He is speaking... Walking from room to room -- No one here but Him. [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut <
1.jr - Only Breath, #Rumi - Poems, #Jalaluddin Rumi, #Poetry
Buddhist, Sufi, or zen. Not any religion
or cultural system. I am not from the East
1.jr - The Sun Must Come, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Andrew Harvey Original Language Persian/Farsi & Turkish Since Love has made ruins of my heart The sun must come and illumine them. Such generosity has broken me with shame: The King prayed for me, and granted me His prayer: How many times, just to calm me, did He show His face? I said, "I saw His Face," but it was only a veil. He charred a universe through the flaming-out of this veil. O my God! How could such a King ever be unveiled? Love reared in front of me, and I followed Him. He turned and seized me like an eagle -- What a blessing it was to be His prey! I plunged into a sea of ecstasy, and fled all pain. If anguish is not delicious meat for you, It is because you have never tasted this wine. The Prophets accept all agony and trust it For the water has never feared the fire. [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut <
1.jr - You have fallen in love my dear heart, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Azima Melita Kolin and Maryam Mafi Original Language Persian/Farsi & Turkish You have fallen in love my dear heart Congratulations! You have freed yourself from all attachments Congratulations! You have given up both worlds to be on your own the whole creation praises your solitude Congratulations! Your disbelief has turned into belief your bitterness, into sweetness Congratulations! You have now entered into Love's fire, my pure heart Congratulations! Inside the Sufi's heart there is always a feast dear heart, you are celebrating Congratulations! My heart, I have seen how your tears turned into a sea now every wave keeps saying Congratulations! O silent lover, seeker of the higher planes, may the Beloved always be with you Congratulations! You have struggled hard, may you grow wings and fly Congratulations! Keep silent my dear heart, you have done so well Congratulations! [2296.jpg] -- from Rumi: Hidden Music, Translated by Azima Melita Kolin / Translated by Maryam Mafi <
1.kaa - Empty Me of Everything But Your Love, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Andrew Harvey Original Language Persian/Farsi Lord, send me staggering with the wine Of Your love! Ring my feet With the chains of Your slavery! Empty me of everything but Your love And in it destroy and resurrect me! Any hunger You awaken Can only end in Feast! [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut <
1.kaa - Give Me, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Andrew Harvey Original Language Persian/Farsi O Lord, give me a heart I can pour out in thanksgiving. Give me life So I can spend it Working for the salvation of the world. [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut <
1.kaa - The one You kill, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Andrew Harvey Original Language Persian/Farsi The one You kill, Lord, Does not smell of blood, And the one You burn Does not reek of smoke. He You burn laughs as he burns And the one You kill, As You kill him, Cries out in ecstasy. [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut <
1.kbr - The Drop and the Sea, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Andrew Harvey Original Language Hindi I went looking for Him And lost myself; The drop merged with the Sea -- Who can find it now? Looking and looking for Him I lost myself; The Sea merged with the drop -- Who can find it now? [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut <
1.kbr - The Lord is in Me, #Songs of Kabir, #Kabir, #Sufism
English version by Andrew Harvey Original Language Hindi The Lord is in me, and the Lord is in you, As life is hidden in every seed. So rubble your pride, my friend, And look for Him within you. When I sit in the heart of His world A million suns blaze with light, A burning blue sea spreads across the sky, Life's turmoil falls quiet, All the stains of suffering wash away. Listen to the unstruck bells and drums! Love is here; plunge into its rapture! Rains pour down without water; Rivers are streams of light. How could I ever express How blessed I feel To revel in such vast ecstasy In my own body? This is the music Of soul and soul meeting. Of the forgetting of all grief. This is the music That transcends all coming and going. [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut <
1.kbr - The Word, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Mahmood Jamal Original Language Hindi Find the word, understand the word, Depend on the word; The word is heaven and space, the word the earth, The word the universe. The word is in our ears, the word is on our tongues, The word the idol. The word is the holy book, the word is harmony, The word is music. The word is magic, the word the Guru. The word is the body, the word is the spirit, the word is being, The word Not-being. The word is man, the word is woman, The Worshipped Great. The word is the seen and unseen, the word is the existent And the non-existent. Know the word, says Kabir, The word is All-powerful. [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal <
1.kbr - When the Day Came, #Songs of Kabir, #Kabir, #Sufism
English version by Andrew Harvey Original Language Hindi When the Day came -- The Day I had lived and died for -- The Day that is not in any calendar -- Clouds heavy with love Showered me with wild abundance. Inside me, my soul was drenched. Around me, even the desert grew green. [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut <
1.mah - If They Only Knew, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Michael A. Sells Original Language Arabic What earth is this so in want of you they rise up on high to seek you in heaven? Look at them staring at you right before their eyes, unseeing, unseeing, blind. . . . I was patient, but can the heart be patient of its heart? My spirit and yours blend together whether we are near one another or far away. I am you, you, my being, end of my desire, The most intimate of secret thoughts enveloped and fixed along the horizon in folds of light. How? The "how" is known along the outside, while the interior of beyond to and for the heart of being. Creatures perish in the darkened blind of quest, knowing intimations. Guessing and dreaming they pursue the real, faces turned toward the sky whispering secrets to the heavens. While the lord remains among them in every turn of time abiding in their every condition every instant. Never without him, they, not for the blink of an eye -- if only they knew! nor he for a moment without them. [1520.jpg] -- from Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Quran, Miraj, Poetic and Theological Writings (Classics of Western Spirituality), by Michael A. Sells <
1.mah - I Witnessed My Maker, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Mahmood Jamal Original Language Arabic I witnessed my Maker with my heart's eye. I asked, 'Who are You?' He answered, 'You!' For You one cannot ask, Where? Because where is Where for You? You do not pass through the imagination Or else we'll know where You are. You are He who is everywhere Yet You are nowhere. Where are You? In my annihilation is my annihilation's annihilation And You are found in my annihilation. [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal <
1.mah - Kill me- my faithful friends, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Andrew Harvey Original Language Arabic Kill me, my faithful friends, For in my being killed is my life. Love is that you remain standing In front of your Beloved When you are stripped of all your attributes; Then His attributes become your qualities. Between me and You, there is only me. Take away the me, so only You remain. [1722.jpg] -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut <
1.mah - Stillness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Mahmood Jamal Original Language Arabic Stillness, then silence, then random speech, Then knowledge, intoxication, annihilation; Earth, then fire, then light. Coldness, then shade, then sunlight. Thorny road, then a path, then the wilderness. River, then ocean, then the shore; Contentment, desire, then Love. Closeness, union, intimacy; Closing, then opening, then obliteration, Separation, togetherness, then longing; Signs for those of real understanding Who find this world of little value. [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal <
1.mah - You Went Away but Remained in Me, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Mahmood Jamal Original Language Arabic You went away but remained in me And thus became my peace and happiness. In separation, separation left me And I witnessed the Unknown. You were the hidden secret of my longing, Hidden deep within my conscience deeper than a dream. You were my true friend in the day And in darkness my companion. [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal <
1.sdi - In Love, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Mahmood Jamal Original Language Persian/Farsi In Love there are no days or nights, For lovers it is all the same. The musicians have gone, yet the Sufis listen; In Love there is a beginning but no end. Each has a name for his Beloved, But for me my Beloved is nameless. Sa'di, if you destroy an idol, Then destroy the idol of the self. [2469.jpg] -- from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, Translated by Mahmood Jamal <
1.srmd - The universe, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Peter Lamborn Wilson and Nasrollah Pourjavady Original Language Persian/Farsi The universe is a kaleidoscope: now hopelessness, now hope now spring, now fall. Forget its ups and downs: do not vex yourself: The remedy for pain is the pain. [1501.jpg] -- from The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry, Translated by Peter Lamborn Wilson / Translated by Nasrollah Pourjavady <
2.01 - On Books, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: The Mahomedan or Islamic culture hardly gave anything to the world which may be said to be of fundamental importance and typically its own. Islamic culture was mainly borrowed from others. Their mathematics and astronomy and other subjects were derived from India and Greece. It is true they gave some of these things a new turn. But they have not created much. Their philosophy and their religion are very simple and what they call Sufism is largely the result of gnostics who lived in Persia, and they are the logical outcome of that school of thought largely touched by Vedanta.
I have, however, mentioned that Islamic culture contributed the Indo-Saracenic architecture to Indian culture. I do not think it has done anything more in India of cultural value. It gave some new forms to art and poetry. Its political institutions were always semi-barbaric.
--
I believe he has been influenced by Sufism. But his general thesis is quite tenable: that is to say, right up to the beginning of the modernist period the poets, at least most of them, seem to have some perception or experience of other subtler worlds. They admit the existence of those worlds in some way. They sometimes even assert that this world is an illusion.
Only, his estimate of Bridges is one-sided. Probably, he wrote it at a time when Bridges was the craze, or when the Testament of Beauty was enthusiastically welcomed. I never thought much of his poetry, even in those early days, from what I saw of quotations from him. He is never rhythmical except when he rhymes. In his blank verse he is intolerable. Even the quotations given in this book are prosaic. Hardy is very good at times, at others he slips into want of rhythm.
2.18 - January 1939, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: Some Sufis and Bhaktas take illness and other troubles as gifts from the Beloved, the Divine. So, can one say that everything comes from the Divine?
Sri Aurobindo: They are right in a way. They take everything as coming from the Divine and it is a very good attitude if one can truly take it. Whatever happens is with the sanction of the Supreme. If you neglect the chain of intermediate causes there is a Superior Cause to everything.
2.18 - The Evolutionary Process - Ascent and Integration, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Sachchidananda. In ourselves, behind our surface natural being, there is a soul, an inner mind, an inner life-part which can open to these heights as well as to the occult spirit within us, and this double opening is the secret of a new evolution; by that breaking of lids and walls and boundaries the consciousness rises to a greater ascent and a larger integration which, as the evolution of mind has mentalised, so will by this new evolution spiritualise all the powers of our nature. For the mental man has not been Nature's last effort or highest reach, - though he has been, in general, more fully evolved in his own nature than those who have achieved themselves below or aspired above him; she has pointed man to a yet higher and more difficult level, inspired him with the ideal of a spiritual living, begun the evolution in him of a spiritual being. The spiritual man is her supreme supernormal effort of human creation; for, having evolved the mental creator, thinker, sage, prophet of an ideal, the self-controlled, self-disciplined, harmonised mental being, she has tried to go higher and deeper within and call out into the front the soul and inner mind and heart, call down from above the forces of the spiritual mind and higher mind and overmind and create under their light and by their influence the spiritual sage, seer, prophet, God-lover, Yogin, gnostic, Sufi, mystic.
This is man's only way of true self-exceeding: for so long as we live in the surface being or found ourselves wholly on Matter, it is impossible to go higher and vain to expect that there can be any new transition of a radical character in our evolutionary being. The vital man, the mental man have had an immense effect upon the earth-life, they have carried humanity forward from the mere human animal to what it is now. But it is only within the bounds of the already established evolutionary formula of the human being that they can act; they can enlarge the human circle but not change or transform the principle of consciousness or its characteristic operation. Any attempt to heighten inordinately the mental or exaggerate inordinately the vital man, - a Nietzschean supermanhood, for example, - can only colossalise the human creature, it cannot transform or divinise him. A different possibility opens if we can live within in the inner being and make it the direct ruler of life or station ourselves on the spiritual and intuitive planes of being and from there and by their power transmute our nature.
2.25 - List of Topics in Each Talk, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
| 12-09-23 | Islamic civilisation and The Synthesis of Yoga, Sufism |
| 10-10-23 | Fitness for Yoga, The Yoga and Its Objects, Bhakti and Grace |
--
| 08-04-43 | Mehdi Imam's Poetry of the Invisible, Sufism, poetic criticism |
| 05-05-43 | Sisir Kumar Maitra's article on Kathopanishad: 'Value', attaining the Eternal |
3.02 - The Psychology of Rebirth, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
up in the Sufi faith. To him Khidr was in every way a living
person, and he assured me that I might at any time meet Khidr,
7 - Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Indian Sufi at Paris of this state of consciousness. They
too knew of it.
APPENDIX I - Curriculum of A. A., #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Sufi Poetry generally.
Scandinavian and Teutonic Sagas generally.
Blazing P3 - Explore the Stages of Postconventional Consciousness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
of Buddhism, the samadhi of yoga, the satori of Zen, the fana of Sufism, the shema of the
Kabbalah, and the Kingdom of Heaven of Christianity.
BOOK II. -- PART I. ANTHROPOGENESIS., #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
except in an Arabic work, the property of a Sufi, the writer has never met with a correct copy of these
marvellous records of the past, as also of the future, history of our globe. Yet the original records exist,
BOOK I. -- PART I. COSMIC EVOLUTION, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
is called by the Sufis, Rohanee! In Section the VIIth of this Book, in Sub-section 3,
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
--
which are translated into Arabic and preserved by some Sufi initiates. Therefore the "Definitions of
Asclepios," as lately compiled and glossed by Mrs. A. Kingsford, F.T.S., some of which sayings are in
LUX.04 - LIBERATION, #Liber Null, #Peter J Carroll, #Occultism
For this reason Sufi mystics were required to master a handful of secular trades in addition to their occult studies.
Chief among the techniques of liberation are those which weaken the hold of society, convention, and habit over the initiate, and those which lead to a more expansive outlook. They are sacrilege, heresy, iconoclasm, bioaes theticism, and anathemism.
Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (text), #Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
In 1866 (Born 18th February, 1836) he received initiation in Islamic spiritual practices from a Sufi ascetic
named Govinda, and discovered that that
Talks With Sri Aurobindo 1, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
DR. SATYENDRA: Some Sufis and Bhaktas take illness and other such things as
coming from the Divine.
--
SATYENDRA (to Dr. Manilal): Like the Sufis and the Bhaktas you should rejoice in the suffering and think that it is a message of the Beloved.
NIRODBARAN: God may have given you suffering in order to help the growth
Talks With Sri Aurobindo 2, #Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
PURANI: Sufis do admit rebirth, I think, in a way.
SRI AUROBINDO: Oh, do they? Rumi speaks of transmigration which is
--
SATYENDRA: Maybe a Sufi.
SRI AUROBINDO: Bhaskarananda of Poona spoke to me of the same ascending planes.
The Riddle of this World, #unknown, #Unknown, #unset
Indian Vedantic experience and in Mahomedan Yoga (not only the Sufi,
but other schools also) - the Mahomedans even speak of not two or
The Zahir, #Labyrinths, #Jorge Luis Borges, #Poetry
Dawn may surprise me on a bench in Garay Park, thinking (trying to think) of the passage in the Asrar Nama where it says that the Zahir is the shadow of the Rose and the Rending of the Veil. I associate that saying with this bit of information: In order to lose themselves in God, the Sufis recite their own names, or the ninety-nine divine names, until they become meaningless. I long to travel that path. Perhaps I shall conclude by wearing away the Zahir simply through thinking of it again and again. Perhaps behind the coin I shall find God.
To Wally Zenner
--- Overview of noun sufi
The noun sufi has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts)
1. Sufi ::: (a Muslim who represents the mystical dimension of Islam; a Muslim who seeks direct experience of Allah; mainly in Iran)
--- Overview of adj sufi
The adj sufi has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts)
1. Sufi ::: (of or relating to the Sufis or to Sufism)
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun sufi
1 sense of sufi
Sense 1
Sufi
=> Muslim, Moslem
=> religious person
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun sufi
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun sufi
1 sense of sufi
Sense 1
Sufi
=> Muslim, Moslem
--- Similarity of adj sufi
1 sense of sufi
Sense 1
Sufi
--- Antonyms of adj sufi
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun sufi
1 sense of sufi
Sense 1
Sufi
-> Muslim, Moslem
=> Islamist
=> Jihadist
=> Shiite, Shi'ite, Shiite Muslim, Shi'ite Muslim, Shia Muslim
=> Sunnite, Sunni, Sunni Muslim
=> Moor
=> assassin
=> begum
=> caliph, calif, kaliph, kalif, khalif, khalifah
=> fakir, fakeer, faqir, faquir
=> hakim, hakeem
=> hakim
=> imam, imaum
=> mujahid
=> mujtihad
=> Mullah, Mollah, Mulla
=> Muslimah
=> Saracen
=> Sufi
=> Wahhabi, Wahabi
HAS INSTANCE=> Fatima, Fatimah
--- Pertainyms of adj sufi
1 sense of sufi
Sense 1
Sufi
Pertains to noun Sufism (Sense 1)
=>Sufism
=> mysticism, religious mysticism
Pertains to noun Sufi (Sense 1)
=>Sufi
=> Muslim, Moslem
--- Derived Forms of adj sufi
--- Grep of noun sufi
sufi
sufism
Wikipedia - Abd Al-Rahman Al Sufi
Wikipedia - Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi
Wikipedia - Abd al-Rahman al-Tha'alibi -- Algerian Sufi saint
Wikipedia - Abdulbaki Golpinarli -- Turkish Sufi scholar and literary historian
Wikipedia - Abdul Kerim al-Qubrusi -- Representative of the Naqshbandi-Nazimiyya Sufi Order in the USA
Wikipedia - Abdul Quddus Gangohi -- Indian Sufi scholar
Wikipedia - Abdurrauf as-Singkili -- Sufi Muslim sheikh and spiritual leader of the Shattariyya tariqa
Wikipedia - Abu Bakr al-Shibli -- 10th-century Persian Sufi scholar
Wikipedia - Abul Hasan ash-Shadhili -- Founder of the Shadhili Sufi order
Wikipedia - Abu MuM-aM-8M-%ammad Chishti -- Sufi of Chishti Order
Wikipedia - Abu Saeed Mubarak Makhzoomi -- 11th-century Sufi Muslim saint
Wikipedia - Abu Sufian Shakil -- Bangladesh chess player
Wikipedia - Ahmad al-Badawi -- Muslim founder of the Badawiyyah Sufi order
Wikipedia - Ahmad al-Buni -- Arab mathematician, philosopher and Sufi
Wikipedia - Ahmad al-RifaM-JM-=i -- Founder of Rifa'i Sufi Order
Wikipedia - Ahmad al-Tijani -- Algerian Sufi (1735-1815)
Wikipedia - Ahmad Sirhindi -- Indian Sufi philosopher
Wikipedia - Ahmad Yasawi -- Turkic poet and Sufi
Wikipedia - Ahmed Ali Lahori -- Pakistani Sufi
Wikipedia - Ajmer Sharif Dargah -- Sufi shrine of Moinuddin Chishti at Ajmer, Rajasthan, India
Wikipedia - Akbariyya -- Branch of Sufi metaphysics based on the teachings of Ibn Arabi
Wikipedia - Al-Busiri -- Sufi poet
Wikipedia - Al-Firdaus Ensemble -- Sufi musical group
Wikipedia - Ali Hujwiri -- 11th-century Sufi mystic
Wikipedia - Ali Sufiyan Afaqi -- Pakistani film producer-director, writer
Wikipedia - Aljay al-Yusufi -- Military officer
Wikipedia - Al-Kindi Ensemble -- Sufi Musical group
Wikipedia - Al-Risala al-Qushayriyya -- Treatise on Sufism by al-Qushayri
Wikipedia - Amjad Sabri -- Pakistani qawwal, naat khawan and a proponent of the Sufi Muslim tradition
Wikipedia - Arcs of Descent and Ascent -- Ontological circle in Neoplatonism, Islam and Sufism
Wikipedia - As-Sunnah Foundation of America -- Sufi Islamic Organization of America
Wikipedia - Attar of Nishapur -- Persian Sufi poet
Wikipedia - Badawiyya -- Sufi order in Islam
Wikipedia - Bahauddin Zakariya -- Sufi saint
Wikipedia - Balaibalan -- Constructed language of certain Sufi sects
Wikipedia - Bande Nawaz -- 14th and 15th-century Indian Sufi saint
Wikipedia - Barmer Boys -- Indian Sufi music group
Wikipedia - Bayazid Bastami -- 9th century Persian Sufi mystic
Wikipedia - Bhagat Kanwar Ram -- Sindhi singer and Sufi poet
Wikipedia - Bulbul Shah -- 14th c. Sufi missionary to Kashmir
Wikipedia - Burhanuddin Gharib -- Indian Sufi
Wikipedia - Category:African Sufis
Wikipedia - Category:Albanian Sufi saints
Wikipedia - Category:Algerian Sufi saints
Wikipedia - Category:Algerian Sufis
Wikipedia - Category:American Sufis
Wikipedia - Category:Australian Sufis
Wikipedia - Category:British Sufis
Wikipedia - Category:Female Sufi mystics
Wikipedia - Category:Founders of Sufi orders
Wikipedia - Category:Indian Sufi religious leaders
Wikipedia - Category:Indian Sufi saints
Wikipedia - Category:Indian Sufis
Wikipedia - Category:Iranian Sufi religious leaders
Wikipedia - Category:Iranian Sufi saints
Wikipedia - Category:Iranian Sufis
Wikipedia - Category:Iraqi Sufi saints
Wikipedia - Category:Iraqi Sufis
Wikipedia - Category:Kashmiri Sufi saints
Wikipedia - Category:Mauritian Sufi religious leaders
Wikipedia - Category:Moorish Sufi saints
Wikipedia - Category:Moorish Sufis
Wikipedia - Category:Moroccan Sufi writers
Wikipedia - Category:Mughal Empire Sufis
Wikipedia - Category:Nigerian Sufis
Wikipedia - Category:Pakistani Sufi religious leaders
Wikipedia - Category:Pakistani Sufi saints
Wikipedia - Category:Pakistani Sufis
Wikipedia - Category:Performers of Sufi music
Wikipedia - Category:Punjabi Sufi saints
Wikipedia - Category:Punjabi Sufis
Wikipedia - Category:Scholars of Sufism
Wikipedia - Category:Sindhi Sufi saints
Wikipedia - Category:Sudanese Sufis
Wikipedia - Category:Sufi art
Wikipedia - Category:Sufi fiction
Wikipedia - Category:Sufi literature
Wikipedia - Category:Sufi music
Wikipedia - Category:Sufi mystics
Wikipedia - Category:Sufi orders
Wikipedia - Category:Sufi philosophy
Wikipedia - Category:Sufi poetry
Wikipedia - Category:Sufi poets
Wikipedia - Category:Sufi psychology
Wikipedia - Category:Sufi religious leaders
Wikipedia - Category:Sufi saints
Wikipedia - Category:Sufis by nationality
Wikipedia - Category:Sufis from Nishapur
Wikipedia - Category:Sufi shrines in India
Wikipedia - Category:Sufi shrines in Pakistan
Wikipedia - Category:Sufi shrines
Wikipedia - Category:Sufism in Afghanistan
Wikipedia - Category:Sufism in Africa
Wikipedia - Category:Sufism in Algeria
Wikipedia - Category:Sufism in Pakistan
Wikipedia - Category:Sufism in Sindh
Wikipedia - Category:Sufism stubs
Wikipedia - Category:Sufism
Wikipedia - Category:Sufis of Sindh
Wikipedia - Category:Sufis
Wikipedia - Category:Sufi teachers
Wikipedia - Category:Sufi writers
Wikipedia - Category:Sunni Sufis
Wikipedia - Category:Syrian Sufis
Wikipedia - Category talk:Sufi poetry
Wikipedia - Category talk:Sufi poets
Wikipedia - Category talk:Sufi writers
Wikipedia - Category:Turkic Sufi religious leaders
Wikipedia - Category:Turkic Sufi saints
Wikipedia - Category:Turkish Sufis
Wikipedia - Category:Western Sufism
Wikipedia - Charar-e-Sharief shrine -- Sufi muslim shrine in Budgam district
Wikipedia - Chishti Order -- Sufi order in Islam
Wikipedia - Dama Dam Mast Qalandar -- Sufi song dedicated to Lal Shahbaz Qalandar
Wikipedia - Dervish -- Someone treading a Sufi Muslim ascetic path
Wikipedia - DowletmM-CM-$mmet Azady -- Turkmen poet and sufi
Wikipedia - Draft:Ahad Ali Khan -- Pakistani sufi singer
Wikipedia - Draft:Alauddin Attar -- Sufi saint
Wikipedia - Draft:Nabi Musa Festival -- Sufi festival
Wikipedia - Draft:Qazi Qadan -- Sindhi sufi mystic and poet
Wikipedia - Draft:Sabit Ali Shah -- 18th-century Sufi writer
Wikipedia - Draft:Shah Akbar Danapuri -- Indian sufi scholar
Wikipedia - Elez Isufi -- Albanian nationalist figure and guerrilla fighter (1861-1924)
Wikipedia - Fana (Sufism) -- Annihilation of self in Sufism
Wikipedia - Faouzi Skali -- Moroccan anthropologist and Sufi scholar
Wikipedia - Gyarvi Sharif -- Sufi Festival
Wikipedia - HaM-aM-8M-^Mra -- Collective supererogatory ritual performed by Sufi orders
Wikipedia - Hasan al-Basri -- Sufi Saint
Wikipedia - Haydar Amuli -- Shi'ite mystic and Sufi (1319-1385)
Wikipedia - Hazrat Ishaan -- Sufi saint from Bokhara
Wikipedia - Hijab (Sufism)
Wikipedia - History of Sufism
Wikipedia - Holiest sites in Sufi Islam
Wikipedia - Hosam al-Din Ali Bitlisi -- Kurdish Sufi author
Wikipedia - Hu (Sufism)
Wikipedia - Ibn Arabi -- Arab Andalusian Sufi and philosopher
Wikipedia - Ibrahim Yukpasi -- Sufi religious leader
Wikipedia - Idrisiyya -- Sufi order
Wikipedia - Iftikhar Ahamd Hussain Gilani -- Pakistani Sufi mystic
Wikipedia - Inayati Order -- International organization dedicated to spreading the Sufi teachings of Inayat Khan
Wikipedia - Index of Sufism-related articles -- Wikipedia index
Wikipedia - International Sufi Festival India
Wikipedia - Ivan Agueli -- 19th and 20th-century Sufi master and painter
Wikipedia - Jahriyya -- Sufi order in China
Wikipedia - Jhulelal (Sufism)
Wikipedia - Kasra Nouri -- Iranian Jurist and SufiM-bM-^@M-^Ys rights activist
Wikipedia - Khalil Ahmad Saharanpuri -- Indian Islamic scholar and sufi saint of Hindustan
Wikipedia - Khalwati order -- Sufi order
Wikipedia - Khwaja Abdullah Chishti -- 16th Century Sufi
Wikipedia - Khwaja Fazal Mohammed -- Sufi PM-DM-+r
Wikipedia - Khwaja Ghulam Farid -- 19th-century Sufi poet and writer
Wikipedia - Khwaja Hasan Nizami -- Sufi Saint from Delhi
Wikipedia - Khwaja Hasan Sani Nizami -- Sufi Saint from Delhi
Wikipedia - Khwaja Yunus Ali -- 20th-century Sufi saint
Wikipedia - Laal Kothi Paak Darbaar Sharif -- Sufi Shrine in Bangladesh
Wikipedia - Langar (Sufism)
Wikipedia - Lataif-e-Sitta -- Special organs of perception in Sufi spiritual psychology
Wikipedia - List of contemporary Sufi scholars -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of famous Sufis
Wikipedia - List of modern Sufi scholars -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Sufi orders -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Sufi saints
Wikipedia - List of Sufi singers -- Wikipedia list of persons by occupation
Wikipedia - List of Sufis -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - Madurai Maqbara -- Three Sufi shrines in the Kazimar Big Mosque, Madurai, India
Wikipedia - Maghrebi Tabrizi -- Iranian poet and Sufi of the second half of the eighth century AH
Wikipedia - Magtymguly Pyragy -- 18th-century Turkmen spiritual leader, poet and sufi
Wikipedia - Makhdoom Bilawal -- 15th and 16th-century writer and Sufi saint
Wikipedia - Maqaam -- Spiritual state in Sufi development
Wikipedia - Mast (Sufism)
Wikipedia - Maudood Chishti -- 5th century Sufi saint
Wikipedia - Meetha Neem Dargah -- Sufi shrine in Maharashtra, India
Wikipedia - Mekaal Hasan Band -- Pakistani sufi rock band
Wikipedia - Mevlevi Order -- Sufi order in Islam
Wikipedia - Mian Mir -- 16th and 17th-century Sufi Muslim saint
Wikipedia - Mian Muhammad Bakhsh -- Sufi poet
Wikipedia - Mohammed Amin Kuftaro -- Sufi scholar
Wikipedia - Moinuddin Hadi Naqshband -- Sufi saint
Wikipedia - Monnujan Sufian -- Bangladeshi politician
Wikipedia - Muhammad Amin Shah Sani -- Sufi scholar from Pakistan belonging to the Nahbandi order
Wikipedia - Muhammad Mohsin Bekas -- 19th-century Sindhi Sufi poet and saint
Wikipedia - Muhibullah Allahabadi -- Sufi poet and scholar
Wikipedia - Mu'in al-Din Chishti -- Sufi mystic of the Chishtiyya order
Wikipedia - Mushahada -- Concept in Sufism
Wikipedia - Naqshbandi Haqqani Sufi Order -- Religious organization
Wikipedia - Nasreddin -- Philosopher, Sufi and wise man from Turkey, remembered for his funny stories and anecdotes
Wikipedia - Nizamuddin Dargah -- Dargah (mausoleum) of the Sufi saint Khwaja Nizamuddin Auliya
Wikipedia - Nund Rishi -- Kashmiri sufi saint and poet
Wikipedia - Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order
Wikipedia - Oruc Guvenc -- Turkish Sufi master and musician
Wikipedia - Panj peer -- Five saints mentioned in Sufi by Waris Shah.
Wikipedia - Persecution of Sufis
Wikipedia - Pirani (Sufism)
Wikipedia - Pir Haji Ali Shah Bukhari -- Sufi saint
Wikipedia - Pir (Sufism)
Wikipedia - Qadir Bux Bedil -- 19th-century Pakistani writer and Sufi saint
Wikipedia - Qawwali -- Sufi devotional music popular in South Asia
Wikipedia - Qudusiyah -- Sufi order in Islam
Wikipedia - Qutb Shah -- Persian Sufi, Muslim preacher and religious scholar (1028-1099)
Wikipedia - Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki -- Indian Sufi (1173-1235)
Wikipedia - Rabbani (Sufism)
Wikipedia - Rabia of Basra -- Iraqi sufi and poet
Wikipedia - Rahat Fateh Ali Khan -- Pakistani sufi singer
Wikipedia - Rahman Baba -- Pashtun Sufi Saint (1653-1711)
Wikipedia - Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi -- Pakistani Sufi spiritual leader
Wikipedia - Rohal Faqir -- 18th-century Indian Sufi saint and mystic
Wikipedia - Ruzbihan Baqli -- Persian poet, mystic, and Sufi
Wikipedia - Sachal Sarmast -- Sindhi sufi mystic and poet
Wikipedia - Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi -- Persian mystical or Sufi philosopher (1207-1274)
Wikipedia - Safaviya (sufi order)
Wikipedia - Sajjada nashin -- Successor in Sufism
Wikipedia - Salim Chishti -- Sufi saint of the Chishti Order during the Mughal Empire in India
Wikipedia - Salka (Sufism)
Wikipedia - Sama (Sufism)
Wikipedia - Sanam Marvi -- Pakistani Folk and sufi singer
Wikipedia - Sari al-Saqati -- Iraqi sufi
Wikipedia - Sayed Badiuddin -- Sufi saint who founded the Madari sect
Wikipedia - Sayyid Mahmud Agha -- Sufi saint
Wikipedia - Sayyid Mir Fazlullah Agha -- Sufi saint
Wikipedia - Sayyid Mir Jan -- Sufi saint
Wikipedia - Sefik Can -- Turkish Sufi master
Wikipedia - Shabda Kahn -- Pir of the Sufi Ruhaniat International
Wikipedia - Shadhili -- Sufi order in Islam
Wikipedia - Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai -- 18th-century Sufi writer
Wikipedia - Shah Farid-ud-Din Baghdadi -- Kashmiri sufi saint
Wikipedia - Shah Jalal Dakhini -- Sufi saint of Bangladesh
Wikipedia - Shah Nimatullah Wali -- Persian Sufi Master and poet from the 14th and 15th centuries
Wikipedia - Shah Sultan Rumi -- Sufi saint
Wikipedia - Shaykh of Sufism
Wikipedia - Shaykh Sufi
Wikipedia - Sheikh Madar -- 19th century Somali Sufi leader instrumental in the expansion of Hargeisa
Wikipedia - Sheikh (Sufism)
Wikipedia - Shems Friedlander -- American Islamic scholar and Sufi master
Wikipedia - Sufia Ahmed -- Bangladeshi academic
Wikipedia - Sufi Abdul Hamid -- African-American religious and labor leader, and early African-American convert to Islam
Wikipedia - Sufi Barkat Ali
Wikipedia - Sufi Budhal Faqeer -- 19th and 20th-century Sufi Islamic saint and poet
Wikipedia - Sufi cosmology
Wikipedia - Sufi Dalpat -- 18th-century Sindhi poet
Wikipedia - Sufi dance
Wikipedia - Sufi literature
Wikipedia - Sufi metaphysics
Wikipedia - Sufi Mohammed Mizanur Rahman -- Bangladeshi industrialist (born 1943)
Wikipedia - Sufi music
Wikipedia - Sufi Muslim
Wikipedia - Sufi Observing Competition -- Messier marathon
Wikipedia - Sufi Order International
Wikipedia - Sufi Orders
Wikipedia - Sufi order
Wikipedia - Sufi philosophy
Wikipedia - Sufi poetry -- Poetry within Islamic mysticism
Wikipedia - Sufi poet
Wikipedia - Sufi psychology
Wikipedia - Sufi rock -- Genre
Wikipedia - Sufi Ruhaniat International -- Stream of Universal Sufism
Wikipedia - Sufi Saints of South Asia
Wikipedia - Sufi saint
Wikipedia - Sufi Shah Inayat Shaheed
Wikipedia - Sufism in Afghanistan -- Sufism in Afghanistan
Wikipedia - Sufism in Algeria
Wikipedia - Sufism in India -- History of Islamic mysticism in India
Wikipedia - Sufism in Pakistan -- history of Islamic mysticism in Pakistan
Wikipedia - Sufism in Sindh
Wikipedia - Sufism
Wikipedia - Sufi studies
Wikipedia - Sufis
Wikipedia - Sufi Way
Wikipedia - Sufi whirling -- Physically active Sufi meditation, practiced by Dervish orders, involving spinning in circles to music
Wikipedia - Sufi
Wikipedia - Sufiyum Sujatayum -- 2020 film by Naranipuzha Shanavas
Wikipedia - Suhrawardiyya -- Sufi order in Islam
Wikipedia - Sultan Bahu -- Sufi saint
Wikipedia - Swarn Noora -- Indian Sufi singer
Wikipedia - Syed Babar Ashraf -- Indian Sufi leader
Wikipedia - Syed Ghulam Moinuddin Gilani -- Sufi Scholar from Pakistan
Wikipedia - Syed Nasiruddin -- Sufi saint and military leader associated with the spread of Islam in Bengal in the 14th century
Wikipedia - Syed Rashid Ahmed Jaunpuri -- 20th-century Sufi Muslim saint
Wikipedia - Tahir Allauddin Al-Qadri Al-Gillani -- Sufi saint
Wikipedia - Tariqa -- School or order of Sufism
Wikipedia - Template talk:Sindhi Sufi
Wikipedia - Template talk:Sufism-stub
Wikipedia - Template talk:Sufism
Wikipedia - Template talk:Western Sufism
Wikipedia - The Conference of the Birds -- Persian poem by Sufi poet Attar
Wikipedia - Tijaniyyah -- Sufi order in Islam
Wikipedia - Tomb of Shah Rukn-e-Alam -- Mausoleum of the Sufi saint Sheikh Rukn-ud-Din Abul Fateh
Wikipedia - Universal Sufi Prayers
Wikipedia - Universal Sufism
Wikipedia - Urs -- Death anniversary of a Sufi saint in South Asia
Wikipedia - Usman Harooni -- Sufi saint of India
Wikipedia - Uwaisi -- Sufi Order
Wikipedia - Wahab Khar -- Kashmiri sufi poet, saint
Wikipedia - Warid (Sufism)
Wikipedia - Wassil (Sufism)
Wikipedia - Western Sufism -- A new religious movement with its origins in traditional Sufism
Wikipedia - Wird (Sufism)
Wikipedia - World Sufi Festival
Wikipedia - Wujud -- Term in Islamic philosophy and Sufism
Wikipedia - Yaqub al-Charkhi -- Sufi master and Islamic scholar
Wikipedia - Zulfiqar Ahmad Naqshbandi -- Islamic scholar and Sufi Shaykh
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10200956-bienestar-insuficiente-democracia-incompleta-sobre-lo-que-no-se-habla
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11340822-the-pirates-of-sufiro
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171550.The_Biographical_Tradition_in_Sufism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12914152-sufi-narratives-of-intimacy
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13199357-the-book-of-ascension-to-the-essential-truths-of-sufism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13225898-prayer-of-the-heart-in-christian-and-sufi-mysticism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/142138.Merton_Sufism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/142847.Sufi_Essays
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/144931.What_is_Sufism_
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/157121.The_Sufi_Book_of_Life
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/157126.Sufi_Path_of_Love
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/157128.Sufi_Sage_of_Arabia
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/157129.The_Sufi_Path_Of_Knowledge
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15730879-techings-of-sufism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15865196-sufi-meditation-and-contemplation
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16094676-a-sufi-study-of-hadith
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16779807-sufism-for-non-sufis
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16883482-sufi-city
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1787607.Sufism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18223809-the-sufi-path-of-annihilation
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/183005.The_Sufi_Doctrine_of_Rumi
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19325969-women-of-sufism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1980313.The_Sufis_of_Bijapur_1300_1700
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21121753-sufism-and-surrealism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22150923-sufism-and-american-literary-masters
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23968812-sufism-and-american-literary-masters
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2478259.Sufi_Orders_Lineages_and_Saints
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24998778-the-shambhala-guide-to-sufism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/261031.Sufism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2616430-the-sufi-message-of-hazrat-inayat-khan-vol-6
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/266124.The_Man_of_Light_in_Iranian_Sufism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27693062-three-great-abbasid-sufi-poets
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28127051-sufism-and-islamic-society
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30809336-ibn-juzay-s-sufic-exegesis
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31205429-leta-and-the-sufi
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32077314-aqwal-e-yousufi-aur-deegar-mazameen
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3602192-sufism-and-theology
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36177977-two-master-sufi-poets-friends-of-delhi---amir-khusrau-hasan-dehlavi
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36755785-little-book-of-sufi-stories
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/401568.Chinese_Gleams_of_Sufi_Light
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40513765-ten-great-sufi-poets-of-delhi
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41439270-priya-sufi
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4489992-introduction-to-sufi-doctrine
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/450553.The_Sufis
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4722821-idea-of-personality-in-sufism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5069280-el-fin-de-la-autosuficiencia-alimentaria
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/520859.Sufism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/525868.Women_of_Sufism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/553352.Sufism_Good_Character
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/586578.Essential_Sufism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/587425.Sufi_Martyrs_of_Love
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6275836-tales-of-a-modern-sufi
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/660747.Sufism_and_Islam
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/726715.Sufism_and_Taoism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/73429.A_Sufi_Saint_of_the_Twentieth_Century
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7350852-angels-unveiled-a-sufi-perspective
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/762229.The_Heart_of_Sufism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7926583-cinta-sufi
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/803729.Sufism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/83203.Sufi_City
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8404406-sufi-flights
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8527553-the-sufi-book-of-life
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/914743.The_Way_of_the_Sufi
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9314540-realities-of-sufism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9950051-sastra-sufi
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14067081.Sufiyan
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14215758.Abdalqadir_as_Sufi
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1423353.Sufian_Abas
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4213494.Mushtaq_Ahmad_Yousufi
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5399032.E_Man_Sufi
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/567824.Sufiya_Ahmed
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6897874.Sufian_Chaudhary
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7160666.Ahmad_Sufiatur_Rahman
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7279760.Amir_Sufi
Goodreads author - Abdalqadir_as_Sufi
Goodreads author - Mushtaq_Ahmad_Yousufi
http://it.religion.wikia.com/wiki/Sufismo
https://historia.wikia.org/pl/wiki/Sufizm
https://religion.wikia.org/de/wiki/Sufismus
https://religion.wikia.org/es/wiki/Sufismo
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Al-Ghazli_as_Sufi
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Asceticism#Sufism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Category:Sufi_philosophy
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Category:Sufi_saints
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Category:Sufi_shrines
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Category:Sufism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Category_talk:Sufism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Religious_experience#Sufism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Simurgh#In_Sufi_poetry
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufi
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufi_Saints_of_Aurangabad
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Additional_reading
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Ali_ibn_Abi_Talib
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Basic_views
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Bayazid_Bastami
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Contemporary_Sufism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Contributions_to_other_domains_of_scholarship
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Dhikr
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Etymology
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#External_links
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Formalization_of_doctrine
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Growth_of_Sufi_influence_in_Islamic_cultures
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#History_of_Sufism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Ibn_Arabi
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#In_movies
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#In_music
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#In_popular_culture
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Islam_and_Sufism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Islamic_positions_on_non-Islamic_Sufi_groups
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Junayd_Baghdadi
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Mansur_al-Hallaj
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Muraqaba
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Nooruddeen_Abul_Hasan_Ali_Ash_Shadhili
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Origins
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Perception_outside_Islam
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Preeminent_Sufi_Sheikhs
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Reception
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#References
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#See_also
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Sufi_cosmology
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Sufi_practices
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Sufism_and_Islamic_law
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Sufi_Visitation
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#The_influence_of_Sufism_on_Judaism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Theoretical_perspectives_in_Sufism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Traditional_and_non-traditional_Sufi_groups
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Sufism#Traditional_Islamic_thought_and_Sufism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Talk:Sufism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Universal_Sufism
Kheper - Sufi -- 39
Kheper - Bektashiya -- 15
Kheper - Chistiyyah -- 4
Kheper - cosmology_and_psychology -- 19
Kheper - cosmology -- 32
Kheper - Sufism -- 39
Kheper - Ibn_Arabi -- 12
Kheper - introduction -- 5
Kheper - lataif -- 27
Kheper - latifa -- 20
Kheper - links -- 23
Kheper - Rumi -- 5
Kheper - Sufism -- 15
Kheper - Universal_Sufism -- 12
Kheper - Universal_Sufism -- 40
Kheper - Zevi_and_Sufism -- 31
auromere - sufi-anecdotes-and-stories
Integral World - The Science of Sufism, Zakariyya Ishaq
https://thoughtsandvisions-searle88.blogspot.com/2012/08/list-of-sufi-orders.html
https://thoughtsandvisions-searle88.blogspot.com/2012/08/list-of-sufis.html
https://thoughtsandvisions-searle88.blogspot.com/2012/10/al-akbariyya-sufi-school.html
https://thoughtsandvisions-searle88.blogspot.com/2012/10/sufi-meditationazeemia.html
https://thoughtsandvisions-searle88.blogspot.com/2012/10/sufi-philosophy.html
https://thoughtsandvisions-searle88.blogspot.com/2012/10/sufi-psychology.html
https://thoughtsandvisions-searle88.blogspot.com/2012/10/sufism_16.html
https://thoughtsandvisions-searle88.blogspot.com/2012/10/sufism.html
https://thoughtsandvisions-searle88.blogspot.com/2013/10/sufi-talismen.html
https://thoughtsandvisions-searle88.blogspot.com/2015/12/sufi-cosmology.html
dedroidify.blogspot - sufi
https://esotericotherworlds.blogspot.com/2012/11/sufi-cosmology.html
https://esotericotherworlds.blogspot.com/2014/04/neo-sufism-case-of-idries-shah.html
Dharmapedia - Sufism
Psychology Wiki - Fanaa_(Sufism)
Psychology Wiki - Sufis
Psychology Wiki - Sufism
Psychology Wiki - Sufism#Sufi_psychology
Occultopedia - sufism
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Sufi_poets
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Sufis
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sufism
https://peace.fandom.com/wiki/Sufism
https://psytrancereleases.fandom.com/wiki/Sufi_-_Timewave_Zero
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sufism
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sufi_orders
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sufis
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sufism
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:'Ali_Dede_al-Busnawi_-_Three_Hundred_Sixty_Sufi_Questions_-_Walters_W585_-_Closed_Top_View_A.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:"Son_of_Shah_Sufi_Abdul_Mannan,_Mawlana_M_A_Shahidullah_Jehadi_-_Date_-_02-02-2021.jpg".jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sufi_Poems_Inspirational_Verses_of_Twenty_Sufi_Poets.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sufi_Poems.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sufi_poems.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sufi_Poetry_English_Translation.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sufi_Poetry_Inspirational_Sufi_Poetry.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sufi_Poetry.jpg
Abdalqadir as-Sufi
Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi
Abu Sufian bin Qumu
Abu Sufian Shakil
Adam Olsufiev
Ali Khan (Sufi)
Alisha Sufit
Ali Sufiyan Afaqi
Aljay al-Yusufi
Dahleh Sufian
Dar Sufian
Deh Sufian
Ezaz Yusufi
Fana (Sufism)
Gollar Qarah Sufi
Gonjasufi
History of Sufism
Holiest sites in Sufi Islam
Index of Sufism-related articles
Jusufi
Kalab-e Sufian
Kalab-e Sufian-e Olya
Kalab-e Sufian-e Sofla
Kalateh-ye Zaman Sufi
Khayrinisso Yusufi
Kissufim
List of Sufi orders
List of Sufis
List of Sufi saints
List of Sufi singers
Mazraeh-ye Pileh Sufi
Mohammed Nabi Yusufi
Monnujan Sufian
Muhammad al-Sufi
Mushtaq Ahmad Yusufi
Naqshbandi Haqqani Sufi Order
Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order
Pllumb Jusufi
Persecution of Sufis
Pir (Sufism)
Reflections (Sufi literature)
Ruhaniyat The All India Sufi & Mystic Music Festival
Salka (Sufism)
Sama (Sufism)
Sascha Jusufi
Shaykh Sufi
Sheikh Chilli (Sufi saint)
Sheikh (Sufism)
Special Illumination: The Sufi Use of Humour
Sufiabad-e Sofla
Sufiabad, Kurdistan
Sufi Abu Taleb
Sufia Kamal
Sufia Kamal National Public Library (Dhaka)
Sufi Amba Prasad
Sufian
Sufian Abdullah
Sufian Abu Zaida
Sufian Allaw
Sufian (disambiguation)
Sufian Sar
Sufi Baleh
Sufi Budhal Faqeer
Sufi Center Rabbaniyya
Sufi cosmology
Sufi dynasty
Sufi, Iran
Sufi Kani
Sufi metaphysics
Sufi Muhammad
Sufi Observing Competition
Sufi Order Inyati Silsila
Sufi Paranja Katha
Sufi philosophy
Sufi poetry
Sufi psychology
Sufi rock
Sufi saints of Aurangabad
SufiSalafi relations
Sufi Sheykh
Sufi Sheykh Daz
Sufism
Sufism in Afghanistan
Sufism in Bangladesh
Sufism in India
Sufism in Pakistan
Sufism in Punjab
Sufi Trail
Sufivand, Harsin
Sufi Way
Sufi whirling
Sufiyah
Sufiyum Sujatayum
Tazehabad Sufi Baleh
Universal Sufi Prayers
Western Sufism
Wird (Sufism)
World Sufi Festival
Yusufi
Yusufiyah
Zakhar Dmitrievich Olsufiev
convenience portal:
recent: Section Maps - index table - favoritesSavitri --Savitri extended toc Savitri Section Map --1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
authors -- Crowley - Peterson - Borges - Wilber - Teresa -Aurobindo -Ramakrishna - Maharshi -Mother
places -- Garden - Inf. Art Gallery - Inf. Building - Inf. Library - Labyrinth - Library - School -Temple - Tower - Tower of MEM
powers -- Aspiration - Beauty - Concentration - Effort - Faith - Force - Grace - inspiration -Presence - Purity - Sincerity - surrender
difficulties -- cowardice - depres. - distract. - distress - dryness - evil - fear - forget - habits - impulse - incapacity - irritation - lost - mistakes - obscur. - problem - resist - sadness - self-deception - shame - sin - suffering
practices -- Lucid Dreaming - meditation - project - programming - Prayer - read Savitri - studysubjects -- CS - Cybernetics - Game Dev - Integral Theory - Integral Yoga - Kabbalah - Language - Philosophy - Poetry - Zen
6.01 books -- KC - ABA - Null -Savitri - SA O TAOC -SICP - The Gospel of SRK - TIC - The Library of Babel -TLD -TSOY - TTYODAS - TSZ - WOTM II
8 unsorted / add here -- Always - Everyday - Verbs