It’s finally happened…. Just when I was starting to feel kind of superior because I was the only person I know who hadn’t been hacked….I was. Am. If you are getting weird email “from” me, please ignore it…..

Save me, my Lord, from the earthly passions and the attachments which blind mankind. Save me, my Lord, from the temptations of power, fame, and wealth, which keep man away from Thy Glorious Vision. Save me, my Lord, from the souls who are constantly

occupied in hurting and harming their fellow-man, and

who take pleasure in the pain of another. Save me, my Lord, from the evil eye of envy and jealousy,

which falleth upon Thy bountiful Gifts.

Save me, my Lord, from falling into the hands of the playful children of earth, lest they might use me in their games; they might play with me and then break me in the end, as children destroy their toys.

Save me, my Lord, from all manner of injury that cometh from the bitterness of my adversaries and from the ignorance of my loving friends.

 Amen.  –Hazrat Inayat Khan

Spring.

The wind blows, sweeping across the grass that is greening up, producing multitudinous dandelions at an alarming rate .

The tulips and paper-whites sway in the breeze, standing up to reason.

Big, fat, velvet bumblebees buzz up and down and around, chasing each other up and down the length of the porch, seeming to play some unknown game that makes the dogs snap at them and try to catch them until, for their own safety and this one’s sanity, they are escorted inside, where they stand at the screen, wistful, panting.

The row of Ent-friend Cypresses on the edge of the yard stands shoulder to shoulder, holding hands, swaying in the breeze.

They know where they stand, and are thus a fine example of unconditional friendship.

This silver-haired crone sits in the white-painted rocking chair that has held her for several years now, containing her practice, embracing arthritic bones…

iPod earbud cords trailing.

“The Zen Master’s Diary” is the music of the day that is apparent, but the breeze and the bees and the dogs and the creaking of the shed door are accompaniment,

and thus complete the symphony of the apparent, leading into the concert of the music beyond music.

Suddenly, this one opens her eyes for no good reason:  Look!  The first hummingbird, slugging down the carefully concocted nectar made ready, content in its entitlement.  What a metabolism!  These friends seem drawn to meditation, flying close for a look into the face of this one, lost in absorption.

It is all You, my love.

Oh, my love.

It is all love.

That’s all.

That is enough.

Do visit Sacred Music Radio to hear the highest of the high music……

http://www.sacredmusicradio.org

I used to pray all the time:

Give me this.

Do that.

Why?

How dare You?

Yadda yadda yadda

Blah blah blah…

Eventually, when my back was really to the wall,

I learned to narrow it down a bit:

Thy will be done.

That one pushed me down the road a ways,

Into the Whiteness

The Pure Land

The Fire

Up

Out

Down

In

Yet as I fell harder and harder in love,

That one became too much.

Eventually:

Oh, my love…

Just that.

What else?

Like a weary, devout Chassid breathing “Oy…” into his clasped hands.

Oh, my love.

But who says “Oh?”

And who loves back…

And forth…

Who says “I love you?”

Who prays?

There is no one home.

There is no one to pray.

But there is being in love.

That’s all.

Ich lebe grad, da das Jahrhundert geht

I’m living just as the century ends.

A great leaf, that God and you and I have covered with writing

turns now, overhead, in strange hands.

We feel the sweep of it like a wind.

We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.

Unmoved by us, the fates take its measure

and look at one another, saying nothing.

–Rilke

Yesterday–New Year’s Eve for us in this culture–I got up from my practice and intended to write this very piece, and found that I, who had plenty of words while trying to let go of the words, had none.  But I love this poem, and a century is always ending, and I love this picture, so I’d better just put them both up and promise to add a few more of the words that want to come through this person when…they come.

Oh, and one other thing:  the title to this one:  I don’t have the slightest idea what it means in this context, but I’m going to leave it up there any way.

Peace, peace, peace………….

Electronic circuitry has so wired the planet that within twenty years–a few hundred months–just about everything that the human race is doing or has ever thought about will be available at its fingertips.  The human spirit is now coming in waves at us through computer, TV, CD player and joystick.  The electronic revolution is returning us to a tribal world of instantaneous information and dialogue.

–Jean Houston, A Mythic Life

I have several times reminded my children that in the course of my lifetime, I have progressed from the manual typewriter and a sheaf of carbon paper to the electric typewriter, the electric typewriter that is self-correcting, to the “mag card” I remember during my days as a legal secretary, and eventually to the computer, one that interfaces with the entire world through the Internet.  What a life!  How much more intelligent we humans must be becoming, with an increasing body of knowledge at our fingertips that eventually will include all the knowledge there is, as if the Akashic Records have become manifest.  But that isn’t the most important part of the electronic revolution, I think:  what is most important is, as Houston points out, that we are fast becoming a world village through Facebook and its ilk.  I have made so many wonderful friends online, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have made them otherwise, if only because I have never been inclined toward snailmail, possibly through sheer laziness (or lack of postage).  Most of us these days–if we wish to–have friends all over the world and  information about places we’ve never been and may never go is right at our fingertips.  I tend to bemoan not having been able to travel more in my life, even though I’ve traveled a fair amount…but now, all I have to do is Google anything I want to see, any place I want to know more about.  What does this mean for us as a collective being?  Surely any answer to that becomes an obsolete one almost the moment it is spoken.

One of the friends I have met online is a man who lives in in Utah, a man who grew up a Mormon and a farmer who is becoming increasingly self-actualized through his own intuitive process.  He is a fascinating combination of wisdom and pragmatism, and strikes me as one of the people I have met on this planet who genuinely enjoys being here.  He mentioned this when we were talking recently, commenting that it seems that so many people become involved in what we used to call–in my hippie days–the “spiritual trip,” are people who have lived lives of misery and limitation of one kind and another, people who began to search for a higher meaning in life because they did not find sufficient meaning in their current experience to be content with the world as it is.  He is, he says, not one of these:  he finds life endlessly fascinating and meaningful, and his interest in expanded consciousness is an outgrowth of that, rather than a reaction to misery and limitation.

Well, I suppose he’s right.  When he said this, the only thing I could reply was “Yeah, you’re right, I hate this life and I want to die.”  He didn’t seem to have much to say to that, and I don’t blame him.  It occurred to me later that I must have sounded like a profoundly depressed and hopeless person, but that isn’t it at all.  Recently, toward the end of one of my meditations, I found myself saying over and over again to the God of my understanding, “Let me die, let me die, let me die…”

Now, there is no doubt that I am one of the people in the group this man mentioned:  I have not particularly enjoyed the earthly experience, although I have a great love of nature, the joy of relationship  and many of the sublime aspects of life on this planet.  But that isn’t the source of my misery or of my search for a higher existence:  it is nostalgia.  Inayat Khan and the other teachers who have formed the foundation of my spiritual tutelage teach of the path of the soul as one that takes Being through world after world, level after level of the unfoldment of God in God’s creatures, and the soul picks up and carries impressions from each place it passes through in its descent and ascent away from and back to its Totality.  And it is my understanding that depending on the route taken by each ray of that Sun, each soul takes on and carries impressions from the different realms it passes through.  Over and over, the soul is born to parents in each plane, passes through worlds of that realm, lives and dies and passes on to the next. And the next.  One soul may carry a primordial impression of the celestial planes, where angels of fire or light carry out the work that they are drawn to.  Another soul may carry the impression of the astral planes, or the mind-world of djinns.  Still another may be most deeply impressed by the earth plane, where the soul passes through the realms of animal, vegetable, mineral influences.  And for some souls, their abiding attunement is in their memory of the Absolute, the silence and solitude of God beyond becoming.  Thus, a feeling of strangeness and even alienation with one’s current experience may be motivated by the soul’s longing, its nostalgia for its true home, not a dislike of this one.

If I wish to become self-actualized, I will at some point be drawn to and recover my memory of all the worlds I have passed through on the way into and out of God, and it seems that, based on my current experience, I may carry the memory of one more than others.  In my case, I have a strong angelic attunement:  I am drawn to the pure, pristine world beyond earthly emotions and inclinations, and have needed to guard myself, as all souls do, in an earthly guise that might seem to preclude such an impression.  It is natural that I would find myself often unable to tolerate the present moment and locale I find myself in:  I remember too well those worlds beyond physical limitation and ugly emotions.  The planet earth, of course, contains many reminders of where I come from:  a fresh snowfall, a great painting, a Tallis Mass, a beautiful emotion that seems beyond what I consider to be ordinary emotion….all of these remind me of where I come from, and on my journey I meet souls who embody the reality of the realms they have descended from.  Do we speak here of parallel universes, quantum reality….or of the Divine Sun unfurling its rays and drawing them back in?  One’s interpretation of what one perceives seems to depend on the knowledge of other realities that it carries.

What does this existence, then, mean?  Well, speaking of Facebook and our growing global village, I saw  the following this morning, from a page called  Where Angels and Lightworkers Meet:

A bit simplistic, perhaps, but…it’s all true, I’m pretty sure.  This is what it’s all about, and my path of love shows me this in some way nearly every day.

So I do want to die.  I want to go home.

I also want to follow the path of True Love.  The Prophet, peace be upon Him, said in some Hadith I’ve forgotten the source of, that to be human is to be higher than the angels, because traditionally, the angel is caught in the contemplation of God, while the human experience allows for the full realization of God.   In other words, I love to look at God, but I have a feeling that my highest happiness is in becoming the Divine Glance.  So I suppose I’ll just have to continue to put up with this mess, Republicans and all.

The supreme goal of the teachings is the

emptiness whose nature is compassion.

~ Atisha ~

Lately I have been feeling very blue, very backwards….as if this quest of mine was nothing, a failure, none of what I thought had happened had happened.  I knew that this feeling was nothing unusual and that I was in good company in what I was going through, but still I grumbled about it to God:  “Isn’t it time for another peak experience?  It’s been so long!”  But there was nowhere to go, nothing to be done….after all, I had gone too far to go back now.  What else could I do but continue to free-fall backwards into Those arms?

Then last night I sat on my porch listening, listening to the steady thrum of the crickets and the soft sound of my rocking, and . . .  nothing. No-thing, as the Buddhists say.   And after awhile,  I gradually, peacefully, slowly realized that there was no me.  I did not/do not exist.  No being.  No God, either.  It didn’t even particularly concern me that there was no one there to have these thoughts.

Only…love.  No peak experience.  Nothing dramatic.  Just…  “Ah.  This is how it is.”  Home now.  The veil lifted, and I knew that now things would be different.  Perfectly natural.  “Oh.  I got it.”  It was also interesting that this ego here didn’t engage in its usual clamoring,  just accepted its own nonexistence, relaxed, turned over and went to sleep.   Love was alone.  And in that aloneness is perfect happiness.  It occurs to me to look back over the years when I was hoping for illumination that I panicked at the very idea of this kind of thing.  Until…I didn’t.  Until…it was time.

And yet…there is no time.  There is no space.  There is only emptiness, and that emptiness is made from love, from which all these things  spring.  We are thoughts in the mind of God.

And so the journey continues….  Your heart takes you to places that do not exist, where the snow falls gently and the wind comes from behind the clouds.  And here, in this land, you can forget everything, even your own existence.  There is no mirror to reflect you, no open door to walk through,  just an endless landscape of love that knows no boundaries.  And the wind is real and the snow continues to fall and the love continues, and will always continue.  So you can leave behind those old worn clothes that you called your existence, those ways you used to walk when you thought you were alive.  Because here in this place that is like no other there is the freedom you always knew, a freedom that belongs to love.

Do not be discouraged, do not ever be discouraged, even when you feel so lost and misunderstood, when the wheels of existence carry you always along roads you would rather not travel.  There is this other land, this landscape that belongs to love.  This is the place where the two seas meet, where existence reveals its secrets, where time uncovers what always was, even if you have never seen it before.

So why do we wait, feeling stranded, expecting something, when we are already at the place where the two seas meet, where the journey we call our self has already ended?

Do not worry.  There is nothing to find or lose—the moon will always rise, the wind will blow apart the clouds and time will take you where you need to go.  You are the place where the two seas meet, where love is uncovered, where silence is mirrored into sound.  And yet we are conditioned to worry, to dream in a language that causes misunderstandings, to seek meanings where there is only the moon reflected in the water.  We mistake our self again and again, looking for what cannot be answered.  And yet there is always this other place, this vastness that calls to us, that draws us out of our existence.  Remember it is always here.  It cannot be anywhere else, just as love can never be somewhere else, because that would deny the very nature of love.  –Llewellyn Vauhan-Lee, Fragments of a Love Story:  Reflections on the Life of a Mystic

This morning, toward the end of my sleep, I dreamed that my family was looking for a beach house to buy, and we were taken through this wonderful, sprawling dream of a beach house built on undulating golden dunes overlooking the ocean.  I seem to remember a deck built on the dune, with stairs to a lower deck on a lower dune, leading down to the beach and the roaring ocean.  We sat with the owners in  a room that was all windows overlooking the sea, with a sectional couch built around the walls the windows were in.  Outside, toward the road, there was a double garage.  The owners, or at least the ones we met, a woman and a young man (her son, I assumed), very much wanted us to buy the house.  I didn’t feel quite worthy of it, and such a house didn’t seem possible to me.  I told her that we’d like to lease the house for the winter (we had done this in beach communities when we were younger), and at first she said “no.”  We talked some more and I evidently said something that pleased her, and then the answer was “yes.”  I could tell from the start I had a connection with this woman, but I was surprised and humbled by that.  Then she said “You’re going to make a wonderful daughter.”

I suddenly seem to have taken my blog in the direction of dream analysis, although there are a few here already, ones that seem important.  But “analysis” isn’t quite the right word, because if I analyze my dreams, I’m limiting them.  It seems better to just write them down as the imagery comes to me, and ask that to tell its tale.

Last night, or rather this morning (Jung says that the last dream of the night is the most important, the one that WANTS to be remembered), I dreamed that I was preparing to leave the house my parents owned, the one that, in the dream, I thought of particularly as “my mother’s house.”  I had taken quite some time to come to this decision, and everything contained in the house was gone.  The house was empty.  I assume that I had sold or auctioned off the contents.  I remember that I was scared about leaving, and was not at all sure where I was going . . . but I was also kind of excited about it, too.

Pema Chodron often uses a Buddhist term that translates as groundlessness, in particular, “positive groundlessness.”  We don’t have a leg to stand on:  not a single one of us really knows what is going to happen in life.  We don’t know whether we’re safe, we dont’ know whether our needs will be provided for, we don’t know what may happen at any given moment.  We are, it appears, powerless.  Her recommendation is to learn to relax into this state, to enjoy the free-fall that is life.  If we can go from “negative” groundlessness (i.e., a chronic state of fear and anxiety) to “positive” groundlessness, she says, we find ourselves opening up to life, opening our hearts and minds and awakening to a state of all-possibility.  Life is suffering, as Lord Buddha said.  But Pema points out that it is not what actually happens that causes the suffering, but our attitudes toward it, the stories we tell ourselves about what takes place, the decisions we make about what happens.

This dream of mine seems to indicate my perception of a new chapter.  I wonder if I can write that chapter without actually attaching a story to it.

Among lonely people there is not a single one who can be sure that in his suffering he might not yet console someone else and that the gestures of his most personal helplessness, like so many cues and signals, might not serve as signs guiding the way in the realm of the unfathomable.  — Rilke, Letters on Life

There is a memorable hadith where a Bedouin says to the Prophet, “What if I do this really bad thing?  And the answer is, “Allah forgives.”  But what if I do it again and again and again?”  “Allah continues to forgive.”  Then the Bedouin says, “Doesn’t Allah ever get tired of forgiving?”  And the Prophet Muhammad says, “No, but you might get tired of doing that same thing over and over again.”

 Physicians of the Heart (see below), p. 127.

As I was reading this book, I kept thinking about similar books of its kind, particularly THE CHOSEN, by Chaim Potok.  Another coming-of-age story about a young man living in a culture that would be unfamiliar to many of us of the “Leave it to Beaver” generation, and even the ones that come after, but the comparison ends there.  THE CHOSEN (and its successors) was a rich, dense, intelligent and extremely moving book that illustrated exquisitely the profundity of pain and joy in growing up in a very specific culture….and AMERICAN DERVISH…wasn’t.  A pretty good first book.  And an important book for mainstream post-911 Americans.  But not good enough to truly do service to its topic.

I happen to be that rarity, an American Sufi.  I am well aware that the very concept is ridiculous to most of the more traditional, Eastern Sufis and/or Muslims, but I claim my heritage nonetheless, after some forty years of study with an authentic Sufi teacher.  I read through a number of the reviews on Amazon, and it is interesting to me that very few of the readers zero in on this very important aspect of the writer’s illustration of Islam, Sufism:  generally thought to be an outgrowth of Islam, typically understood as something like Islamic mysticism.  In my experience, it is much more than that, but my purpose here is not to argue these issues, it is to point out that the author tried very hard to wade through his conditioning as a Muslim–or not–at the hands of his family and community, his heritage and his life as an American boy….and in some way, found in his aunt’s understanding of Sufism, a deep answer to his pain, an answer he still didn’t entirely understand, even at the end of his story; or at least, the character didn’t.  Given the few referrals to the Sufis in the book, it is certainly easy to miss this nuance, but for me, it is the only thing that eventually causes the book to make as much sense as it does.  Unfortunately, the author’s seeming lack of understanding–or his failure to subtly lead the reader to his possibly real understanding–fails.  Most of the book is so gritty and so tragic and so painful and fraught with such melodrama that the culmination of the story left me, at least, thinking that the author himself didn’t “get it.”

But who are these people the author writes about?  With the possible exception of Mina, and perhaps the boy’s mother and father, the other characters seem rather one-dimensional.  I found myself adding to them with my own imagination, trying to flesh-out the incomplete illustrations of them.  The most frustrating one was Nathan, and it occurs to me that perhaps the reader doesn’t really come to understand someone like Nathan–a Jewish American, the child of Holocaust survivors–simply because such people were truly foreign to his world.  He could only see what was in front of him, it would seem.

Ultimately, though, the frustrating thing about this book was the unanswered questions, the biggest of which was supposedly answered by Mina before her death, explained by some “Sufi-speak” that might make sense to someone like me, and that in this context was supposed to explain her understanding of why she remained in a simply dreadful, violent relationship that nearly killed her and probably damaged her children irreparably because of her refusal to take action, a refusal that made no sense for a woman of her intelligence, a woman who had already been through so much trauma, a woman who was as strong as she was said to be.  It seemed to me that the author was attempting a sort of Zen-like “figure it out for yourself” culmination, the answer to a life’s koan. . . but in my opinion, it was a cop-out at best, and at worst shows the author’s misunderstanding of the philosophy his story hinges on.

In his epilogue, the author announces that out of the whole experience, “I finally discovered myself not only as a man, but as an American.”  The final scene, which takes place after this pronouncement, offers no explanation of either, as it takes place at the Cafe Algiers in Harvard Square, about as un-American a setting as there could possibly be within these borders.  Yet another unanswered question.  One isn’t allowed to see much evidence of either his growth as a man OR an American.

Perhaps what I am struggling to say, here, is that this writer doesn’t yet understand his own subject. I do appreciate his willingness to let me see what it is like to grow up in a very different culture from my own, although having come from the “Bible Belt” of the American South, I find fewer differences than I do similarities.  And having studied Sufism for so many years, experientially and academically both, it is tempting to say that I have a better understanding of both than he does.  But after all, I’m possibly twice his age, and if I were to attempt to describe Christianity and/or Pentacostalism to you, I would probably be just about as inept, because what he’s describing, here, and what I would be describing, is not a religion, but the painful and horrific impressions that are forced on children in the name of that religion through the so-called “scriptures” that evolve to reinforce those misinterpretations.

All in all,  I hope Akhtar keeps writing:  perhaps he will grow into his perceptions, so that he can articulate them fully.

Heal my soul by the all-sufficient power that comes from the glance of Thy Messiah. –Inayat Khan

Wali Ali Meyer and friends have written a book for the ages:  Physicians of the Heart:  a Sufi View of the Ninety-Nine Names of Allah.  Awhile back I wrote a post here on the psychological effects of the Divine Names (https://eklutna.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/the-beautiful-names/), but this wonderful and HUGE book blows that out of the water, and also shows that I am not alone in my perception that the ultimate healing is, as my beloved Pir Vilayat would say, when “God creates and recreates God’s own self in and through us, in the measure that we reverse our vantage point and grasp the divine operation in us.”  A tall order to those of us who have emerged from the “quick fix” generation, still needing to be fixed and still feeling the pain of that.  I myself certainly have been and still am an example of that way of doing things, but I have learned, and so can anyone who is ready to acquiesce to the reality, as Al Hallaj says, that  “I have been invited to the divine banquet and the divine host has offered me to drink of the wine, the poison, that is His beverage. How can I refuse?  It is the beverage that gives eternal life.”  Not quite the same as sitting in the office of some sympathetic person who just keeps saying “you’re okay.”  How okay do we want to be? This is why Inayat Khan said that “the message is a call to awakening for those who are meant to awaken, and a lullabye for those who are still meant to sleep.”  In my case, I found that I could not transcend my personal suffering without that ultimate Cure, and in the end nothing else was worthwhile.

Many of us American Sufis, I think, grasped the essence of Sufism, but took a longer time to understand the framework and the context of that framework.  This is only partly to be found in traditional Islam, although the teachers I have had have stressed this more and less, depending on what they saw as the need of their time.  Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, for instance, was directed to take the Message of spiritual unity from his native India to the West in 1910 by his teacher, and he came to a world that didn’t understand his music and its deeper meaning at all, and he had to learn the words that would convey the essence of his teaching to a world that was only just beginning to get ready for it; and therefore he placed his message within the context of his own spiritual upbringing, but he focused on conveying the Message of spiritual liberty to his audiences, and while he taught the traditional practices to his students, he gave them in a fairly traditional, classic methodology, and in the simplest and most practical form.  His successor and my lifelong teacher, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, was a poet and a visionary. He inherited us, the hippie generation, the “tune in, turn on and drop out” generation, and we were ready for his visionary grasp of that essence, which he framed in the poetry engendered by his visions.  Others of his close followers stressed different aspects of the Message:  “Sufi Sam,” the one who was designated by God, he said, to be “teacher to the hippies,” to some extent superceded the intellectual framework by teaching his followers a direct musical transmission of the essence of the message, in the form of  Sacred Dance.  It was in that context that I first met Wali Ali, at a time when we were all united in our spiritual work, and it was Sam’s “kids” who brought me up in my early years as a Sufi, even though my teacher was Pir Vilayat.  But it didn’t matter, and it doesn’t matter:  it is all the same teaching, and as Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad) said, “Sufism can’t be taught; it has to be caught.”  And so we have done our best to field those ecstatic flies that have come at us through the years.  And we have grown, and the teaching has grown, as has the “unity without uniformity” that Murshid taught.

S.A.M. once said “my secret is controlled schizophrenia.”  As for me, my life is an endless digression.  I return to Physicians of the Heart, wherein is a most marvelous explication of the Divine Names, both in terms of their origins, pronunciations, and a deeply lyrical interweaving of the spiritual and the psychological, and the psychology of the spirit.  Wali Ali takes the reader far beyond the surface understandings of the divine qualities:  when I first began to learn them, I learned that al Jamil, for instance, was about Beauty, and al Majid  as about majesty, and al Haqq meant truth, and on and on. . .  yet one finds, if one gives oneself deeply to recitation of these names, that each is in itself a dhikr, an open door to an aspect of the Divine Being that precludes one’s personal wishes and projections, and aids in remembrance of one’s divine heritage, in that the practitioner must symbolically die to the quality that is being invoked in order that one might come to individual understanding through the Divine understanding as compared to one’s personal constructs.  Each is different, the 99 and then some, and each invokes the proliferation of the flowering of God’s unfoldment in the person, in an alchemical process of awakening. . . but it is not the person who awakes, it is God, whatever God is.  In his book Wali Ali invokes this precious, fragrant flowering of divinity in humanity through the divine qualities.  He explicates the deeper meanings of the Names, he tells stories and weaves webs of possibilities and potentials.  He takes the student into the deepest heart of each, yet conversely demonstrates their efficacy in daily life.  Through the many years of work he and his colleagues have done with students, he shows how the Names heal and awaken both psyche and spirit.

In my own inner work, I have been astounded, again and again, with how each name becomes a sort of homeopathic remedy, in that if the right one at the right time is prescribed, and to the extent to which I am able to surrender to its reality, the places where I am wounded are healed, in the areas where I am stuck become unstuck, and even more:  I am afforded the opportunity to become the instrument of the Divine Voice, if I am dedicated enough to put aside my ideas and surrender to the true reality of the Name I invoke.  And it all goes back to the casual suggestion of the Prophet, peace be upon Him, that the disciple ought to recite the Names in order to know God’s qualities.  A simple instruction which became a Divine Science.

When you feel full of worth and value, because you have identified your self with the eternal reality of the soul, strength arises spontaneously from within.  It is something to be cherished and it gives you the courage to be, the strength and dignity to protect the divine quality within, and to honor it throughout your life.  When you let down your ego defenses, you are able to see that you don’t personally have the power to do what needs to be done in order to heal the wound of being disconnected from God.  The dawning of this light of self-value comes when you truly surrender the healing into God’s hands.  (Wali Ali Meyer, et al., p. 15)

 I am of the nature to grow old.

There is no way to escape growing old.

I am of the nature to have ill-health.
There is no way to escape having ill-health

I am of the nature to die.
There is no way to escape death.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love
are of the nature to change.
There is no way to escape being separated from them.

My actions are my only true belongings.
I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.
My actions are the ground upon which I stand.  — Lord Buddha

There are those with whom we resonate quite naturally by the gift of affinity, or those dear to us whom we admire even if we do not see eye to eye with them.  But we are challenged in our capacity to love by those whom we find difficult to love, or who make themselves difficult to love, whose personality we criticize, or whose actions we condemn, those who have treated us unjustly or even abused our confidence.  In fact this is precisely where dislike or simply incompatibility escalates to the point of culminating in resentment.  It is resentment that constitutes the veil separating us from our celestrial counterpart and will block access to our celestial home in the hereafter.  — Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, Life is a Pilgrimage

The best Christmas present I got. . .

Someone said “No matter where I go, some poet has been there before me.”  I concur.  Or some artist, or some musician…  And sometimes, it’s the poem that writes the poet . . .

O my Lord,
the stars glitter
and the eyes of men are closed.
Kings have locked their doors
and each lover is alone with his love.
Here, I am alone with you.

from Doorkeeper of the Heart:  Poems of Rabia.   Translated by Charles Upton

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.  –Oscar Wilde

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about the state of the world and have been in one of those “there must be another planet somewhere” moods…..  My problem with God has been his/her/its seeming willingness to “allow” the most outrageous suffering and desecration of people, places and things, and seemingly turn a blind eye.  For me, it’s been one of those “can’t live with him (her/it), and can’t live without him” situations.  Nothing unusual, of course.  Somehow, this past winter, I think I finally got it that if I can’t live  without her (him/it), I’d better take a stand one way or the other, and that must have been enough for God, because it (her/him) pulled me into an alchemical retreat right in the comfort of my own home, and I sat, sat, sat some more….and God has blessed me endlessly.  The Sufis Order’s Universal Worship has a beautiful liturgy that includes a number of truly wonderful, noble, inspired prayers….  And I was driving down the road today and, as I often will, I prayed one of them and realized it wasn’t nearly as meaningful to me as it once was, simply because my relationship with God has shifted.  There is an intimacy there, an ongoing dialogue between lovers that makes these form prayers kind of…well, not as necessary as they once were, although I assume I will always love them.

As to my frustration with the seeming cruelty of this creation, I’m now beginning to assume that if one wants to be happy and fulfilled, this probably isn’t the best place to come.  It seems we come here to learn, and real wisdom seems to arise from enduring what can’t be cured, which means that which is so completely unacceptible that it ought not to be allowed…and is.  I think they call that “free will,” and supposedly God grants that to God’s creatures.  I’m not so sure it’s a matter of “granting,” though, but more a necessity to growth, horrifying as its manifestations can be.  The worst part of that–for me–is not watching what God seems to do–which I think is an extreme oversimplification of the situation–but accepting what I myself am capable of, have been capable of, and probably will be capable of.  I don’t like being wrong, and I don’t like having to accept my own shortcomings.  I find it unbearable to know that I have caused pain and suffering, but I can assure you, I have, and there isn’t a thing I can do about it.

Well, there’s one thing:  I can wake up.  I can learn what I came here to learn, and become what I came here to become.  I don’t think that fixes anything, but it does mean that a purpose has been served, and the universe has grown a bit.  Good conquers bad, so to speak.

And there is this thing called grace. But I have been the recipient of a great grace just recently, and I am involved in bringing it into fruition, so time is limited.  Grace will have to wait, and it usually does.

My house is buried in the deepest recess of the forest
Every year, ivy vines grow longer than the year before.
Undisturbed by the affairs of the world I live at ease,
Woodmen’s singing rarely reaching me through the trees.
While the sun stays in the sky, I mend my torn clothes
And facing the moon, I read holy texts aloud to myself.
Let me drop a word of advice for believers of my faith.
To enjoy life’s immensity, you do not need many things.  – Ryokan

Sitting and sitting, this person becomes more and more aware of the inherent dissociation between nafs (ego) and soul.  I go back and forth between various strategies for taming my “monkey mind,” a Buddhist term for the endless chattering of the brain while the soul seeks to find itself in God.  Recently, someone said to me, “I don’t think I’m cut out for meditation.  I just can’t stop thinking.”  Well, you poor thing, I thought to myself.  Not coming from the Baba Ram Das New Age milieu I cut my teeth in, he didn’t realize that his Monkey Mind is all part of the Dance, a necessary ballast to keep him on the planet, rather than where he properly belongs and longs to be.

My teacher Shamcher once wrote to me, “Don’t even think about the ego, it is a phantom dreamed up in a nightmare.”  A phantom, yes, but one that is highly schooled in keeping the Self in a death-grip while the soul attempts to spread its wings and take off.  Recently, I read the book  Eat.  Pray.  Love. by Elizabeth Gilbert.  I had mixed feelings about the book, although I realized that I was at an entirely different phase of life than the author, and could be expected to.  But I did enjoy her description of sitting in the Ashram in India where she was fortunate enough to be able to spend several months (one reviewer referred to it as “Enlightenment for the Affluent”):  attempting to quiet her mind and meditate, it was indeed like a monkey swinging through the trees, chattering, quarreling, clinging…..  The Monkey Mind is frightened when we try to separate from it:  it wants to be preeminent as it has always been, and when we unmask the hoax and begin to open up to the possibility of another identity, its life seems threatened.  I have it on good authority from my own teacher, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, that the ego is always going to be there, as it should be, at least in the here and now, and that wherever we go, we will come back.

I have been “called” into an impromptu alchemical retreat in these past few months, and life has cooperated to allow me to acquiesce.  I note, in the several hours daily I sit, that my friend the Monkey Mind is not just beginning to calm down, but to–dare I say it?–actually transform a bit.  Instead of sitting on my shoulder, picking bugs from its fur, picking fights, quarreling, worrying, doing its level best to distract me from my spiritual endeavors, it is beginning to calm down a bit.  It goes into the corner and wraps its tail around its body and broods, sneaking an occasional glance at me to make sure I’m still there.  I notice that both of us are becoming more aware of who we are and who we are NOT.  Sometimes…  Oh, sometimes. . . . . . .

I am camping out on God’s doorstep.  Sometimes I get invited in, however briefly, and sometimes. . . I even get to have some say-so as to when I come and when I go.

I am becoming rather fond of my little nafs in the form of my Monkey Mind. A well-known Zen koan is:  What was my face before my parents were born?  As I polish that particular mirror and the clouds are rubbed away, the nafs does indeed reveal itself as but a phantom, a dream, useful fantasy that has gotten out of hand.  The surprising thing is that it is so easy to tame, once one is finally ready to unmask the hoax, as I mentioned.  When I am lucky–and increasingly–Vayu the Wind blows it out of range for awhile.  I see the difference between that eternal face and the phantom.  We are thoughts in the mind of God.  Even that goofy monkey swinging from limb to limb, yammering, picking its nose, raising hell endlessly.

When once the Nafs is crushed you will never find it necessary to be angry any more, though you can act the part of one who is angry and pretend to be angry. So if it is necessary to show anger this does not mean the fire of hell for you as it would be for others, for you are only using an instrument, and that instrument is not your master. In the same way you are justified in whatever course you find before you in life, as long as you really have freed your self from control by the Nafs.  –Inayat Khan

This morning…

Perfect.

Autumn.

The leaves wave hello.

The cars go by on the highway.

The trees keep standing for what they know to be true (I am so grateful to them). . .

Sitting

Rising

Shining

Two crows outside my windows speaking to each other in Crow…

Leading me upwards

Showing me perfection.

One changes location

Rising over my head

Rising

Rising

Then:  off  into the Blue!

I am here.

I am There.

I am nowhere.

I am everywhere.

Trite…

but True.