The venerable shrine singer Mi‘raj Ahmad Nizami wails melodiously through betel-stained teeth. The words are Amir Khusraw’s, the saint's dearest disciple, his “Turk of God.” Booming drumbeats and the blare of harmoniums drive the message home.

You are a lamp … Listen: Tonight is the tryst … Stay awake all night. 

Here is Khusraw’s tomb, there is Princess Jahanara’s. Overshadowing both is the dome where the saint rests in a bed of white marble, breathing incense, festooned with rose petals. Khwaja Nizam al-Din, God’s Beloved, Sultan among God’s Friends.

Today is color … The color green … My Khwaja’s house, green … My beloved’s house, green … In this courtyard, our rendezvous … In my courtyard, our rendezvous.

Nights are still chilly in early February, but spring is fast approaching, promising vernal shoots as green as the sainted Khwaja’s turban. Soon comes Basant, the Hindu and Sufi festival of spring, when marigolds are gaily tossed and kites spangle the sky.

I have found my Pir … Nizam al-Din Awliya’, Farid al-Din Awliya’, Qutb al-Din Awliya’, Mu‘in al-Din Awliya’!

From Khorasan the Chishtis descended to the Gangetic plain in the 12th century, bearing a message of patient kindness, heartache, and ecstasy. Delhi became sacred Sufi ground, “Hazrat Dihli.” Pilgrims from across the globe, we are gathered here to pay homage to the chain of living hearts that binds us to the throne of Love.

Wherever I look, there is your green color … I searched from land to land and finally found your color … Mu‘in al-Din, I found your color! … Such color as I never saw.

Sayyid Ahmad Shah has come from Chisht Sharif (hail o root of the Chishti tree!), Sayyid Rashid al-Hasan from Hyderabad. Both pirs weep quietly as the qawwals sing. They have dard, the exquisite pain and rapture of the heart’s innermost emotion, a draught of God’s own sea-dark wine. Baba Farid bequeathed it to Nizam al-Din when he uttered, “God grant you the pain of love.” 

Take my color into yours, Khwaja-ji! … Make my color the color of spring!

A golden sheet, emblazoned with heart-and-wings, is now unfurled and carried in procession down the Avenue of the Flower Sellers to another tomb, our long-sought destination, the resting place and bridal bed of Hazrat Inayat Khan. Murshid! In the shade of your repose our broken hearts are mended. Spare a glance for one whose only thought is of you!

Note: The Chishti tradition of service is put into methodical practice on an ongoing basis and sizable scale in the work of the Hope Project, India. To learn about the project and how you can help, please visit www.hopeprojectindia.org. 

Summer seems to have flown by. Some of the highlights for me were: the Seven Pillars Guiding Voices Retreat; Sufi retreats at Light on the Hill, the Abode, and the Zenith Camp in the Swiss Alps; the Sufi Order Summer Camp in Colorado; the 35th Abode Anniversary Reunion; a conference on the State of Contemplative Practice at the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo; the Lindisfarne Fellows Meeting at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe; meetings with indigenous grandmothers and young contemplative activists; and the penultimate session of the Gulab class of the Suluk Academy in Germany.

While many of the summer’s meetings and experiences have reinforced my hope for the future, I cannot help but brood pensively on the recent weather-related catastrophes in Pakistan, China, India and Russia. A fifth of Pakistan is underwater, more than 1500 people have died, millions are displaced, and the spread of infectious disease is a looming danger. Mudslides in Gansu, China, took more than 1400 lives and floods in Leh, India, took 193, with many more still unaccounted for. In Russia, drought has devastated the wheat fields, reducing great tracts of the country’s rich black loam to barren dust.

Are these events just flukes, or symptoms of a burgeoning pattern? It’s true that floods and droughts have occurred throughout human history. But it’s also true that over the last century and a half we’ve poured about 520 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the sky, and each of the past three decades has been warmer than the last, the 2000s being the hottest decade on record. The arctic glaciers are now melting at a rate no one seems to have expected, and the reduction in the Earth’s albedo due to that loss means that the heating process will intensify exponentially. As Bill McKibben makes clear in his powerful new book, Eaarth, we’re entering new territory where severe and erratic weather will increasingly become the norm.

Of course, pensive brooding will not do. We need prayer and action. We need to rethink how we live on Earth, adapting our lifestyles and our technologies to meet this moment of truth. We need, as Wendell Berry says, to stand for what we stand on.

I worry about my own carbon footprint. The itinerary sketched above required a fair bit of jet fuel and gasoline. Sometimes I think I should stop traveling and stay in one place. I’ve floated this idea, but people say: “if you don’t come to us, we’ll all have to come to you, and the energy cost will be much higher!” Webcasting is an alternative to travel. We’ve already used it to good effect in the Suluk Academy. It’s not the same as breathing the same air together. It may, however, be the way of the future.

I do feel that I’m on the right track when it comes to diet. By some estimates, half of all carbon emissions can be traced to the livestock industry. When I turned to a plant-based diet nearly thirty years ago, it was in acknowledgement of the rights of barnyard animals. Today a diet that refuses the products of factory farms is an acknowledgement of the whole planet’s right to live.

The Abode has a lovely little farm. Here in Paris we’ll miss the pleasure of partaking of the Abode’s autumn harvest of squash, beets, carrots, beans, peas, tomatoes and sundry other organic delicacies. Local agriculture is appealing not only ecologically, but also aesthetically and gastronomically. Thankfully there’s a weekly farmers’ market just up the street from Fazal Manzil.

So, my friends, wherever you may be, enjoy the harvest season, and let’s keep in touch.

My categories are fluid and informal and are provided here mostly to help organize the titles. Most of these books could easily slot into more than one category.

Originally I was just going to list the books, as Kelly did, but then that seemed spartan for this website era. Once I began composing descriptions, I realized that the nature of the books themselves as well as my present relationship to their content led me to have more—and different—things to say about them now than when I first read them. On a second pass I decided to add quotes from some (but not all) of the texts to give at least a taste of the author’s actual words.

A shorter description usually means that I have covered the book so thoroughly elsewhere in my writing that I don’t have the enthusiasm to repeat myself here. It sometimes means that I have forgotten too much of the detail in the book to do it full justice. In fact, I have forgotten some books almost completely, so I wasn’t able to describe them without looking back at them again to refresh my memory. In all cases, though, the books themselves had a huge impact—subtle or charismatic—that cannot be encapsulated. That is why I was able to forget the entire contents of some texts and still be influenced by them.

I have listed most translators, especially of contemporary books. Older works with multiple acceptable translations belong to the planet as is. They have entered the metaphorical noosphere and are already bouncing back out the Akashic Record (metaphorical or real).

1. The Form and Operation of the Part of the Universe That is Invisible to Us

In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky

The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin by P. D. Ouspensky

The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The Theory of Celestial Influence by Rodney Collin

The Theory of Conscious Harmony by Rodney Collin

The Seth Material by Jane Roberts

Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul by Jane Roberts

Level 1 Meditation Class by John Friedlander

The Seven Planes of Consciousness: An Exploration of the Energy Frequencies of Human Awareness by John Friedlander

2. The Esoteric Tradition in the West

The Tarot by Paul Foster Case.

The Zodiac: A Life Epitome by Walter H. Sampson

The Planetarization of Consciousness: From the Individual to the Whole by Dane Rudhyar

The Astrology of Personality by Dane Rudhyar

Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances A. Yates

The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age by Frances A. Yates

The Rosicrucian Enlightenment; and Theatre of the World by Frances A. Yates

Magick in Theory and Practice by Aleister Crowley

An Outline of Occult Science by Rudolf Steiner

Cosmic Memory: Atlantis and Lemuria by Rudolf Steiner

The Nature of Substance by Rudolf Hauschka, translated by Mary T. Richards and Marjorie Spock

“The Theatre of Terrestrial Astronomy” by Edward Kelley

Unancestral Voice by Owen Barfield

Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry by Owen Barfield

History in English Words by Owen Barfield.

3. The Nature of Our Body-Minds

The Primacy of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty translated by James Edie

Signs by Maurice Merleau-Ponty translated by Richard C. McCleary.

Man on His Nature by Sir Charles Sherrington

Process and Reality by Alfred North Whitehead

Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness by Donna Haraway

Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors That Shape Embryos by Donna Haraway

Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates by Slavoj Zizek

The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan

Migraine by Oliver Sacks

Metaphors of Vision by Stan Brakhage

Language, Thought, & Reality by Benjamin Lee Whorf

4. Psychology, Psychosomatic Healing, and Parapsychology

The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality by Sandor Ferenczi

The Alchemy of Healing: Psyche and Soma by Edward C. Whitmont

Living Your Dying by Stanley Keleman

Sexuality, Self & Survival by Stanley Keleman

The Fifty-Minute Hour by Robert Lindner

People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil by M. Scott Peck

Psychology and Alchemy by C. G. Jung

Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by C. G. Jung

Symbols of Transformation by C. G. Jung

Civilization in Transition by C. G. Jung

The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality, & The Origins of Culture by William Irwin Thompson

The Myth of Analysis by James Hillman

Revisioning Psychology by James Hillman

Working the Soul by Charles Poncé

The Archetype of the Unconscious and the Transfiguration of Therapy by Charles Poncé

Freud & Man’s Soul by Bruno Bettelheim

Ether, God, and Devil/Cosmic Superimposition by Wilhelm Reich

Character Analysis by Wilhelm Reich

The Function of the Orgasm by Wilhelm Reich

Paranormal Foreknowledge by Jule Eisenbud

5. The Search for the Divine and Modes of Love and Ascension

Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi by Henri Corbin

The Sufis by Idries Shah

The Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi by Andrew Harvey

The Holy Kabbalah by A. E. Waite

Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda

Stones of the New Consciousness: Healing, Awakening, & Co-Creating with Crystals, Minerals, & Gems by Robert Simmons

6. Culture, Language, and Symbol

The Savage Mind by Claude Lévi-Strauss

Totemism by Claude Lévi-Strauss

The Raw and the Cooked by Claude Lévi-Strauss

Structural Anthropology by Claude Lévi-Strauss

The White Goddess by Robert Graves

Les Mots et Les Choses by Michel Foucault

The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, translated by Maria Jolas

Navaho Religion: A Study in Symbolism by Gladys Reichard

7. Science as a Path to Meaning

On Growth and Form by D’arcy Thompson

The Seven Mysteries of Life: An Exploration in Science and Philosophy by Guy Murchie

Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan

Forerunners of Darwin: 1754-1859 edited by Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, and William Strauss, Jr.

The Great Chain of Being by Arthur O. Lovejoy

Ontogeny and Phylogeny by Stephen Jay Gould

Investigations by Stuart Kauffman

The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler

The Roots of Coincidence: An Excursion into Parapsychology by Arthur Koestler

The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers by Carl L. Becker

Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg

Physics and Beyond by Werner Heisenberg

Across the Frontiers by Werner Heisenberg

The Nature of Time, edited by Thomas Gold

8. Lost Civilizations, The Sources of Western Thought, and the Discovery of the Americas

The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans by G.J. Sawyer, Viktor Deak, Esteban Sarmiento, and Richard Milner

The Roots of Civilization by Alexander Marshack

Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay on Myth & The Fame of Time by Giorgi de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend

Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age by Charles Hapgood

The Presocratics edited by Philip Wheelwright

The Timaeus by Plato

The Enneads by Plotinus

Land to the West: St. Brendan’s Voyage to America by Geoffrey Ashe

The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations by Cyrus H. Gordon

The Beothuk Saga by Bernard Assiniwi, translated by Wayne Grady

Westviking: The Ancient Norse in Greenland and North America by Farley Mowat

Northern Mists by Carl Sauer

Land and Life by Carl Sauer

The Early Spanish Main by Carl Sauer

Sixteenth-Century North America by Carl Sauer

Seventeeth-Century North America by Carl Sauer

Plants, Man, and Life by Edgar Anderson

9. Non-Western World-Views and Critique of the West

The Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos by Knud Rasmussen

Mambu: A Study of Melanesian Cargo Movements and Their Social and Ideological Background by Kenelm Burridge

The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda

A Separate Reality; Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda

The Eagle’s Gift by Carlos Castaneda

Tales of Power by Carlos Castaneda

Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins

The World of Primitive Man by Paul Radin

The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology by Paul Radin

Primitive Man as Philosopher by Paul Radin

Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Ogalala Sioux by John G. Neihardt

Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian, edited by Leo W. Simmons

The Lost Universe: The Way of Life of the Pawnee by Gene Weltfish

The Toe Bone and the Tooth: An Ancient Mayan Story Relived in Modern Times (Stealing Benefacio’s Roses) by Martín Prechtel

Long Life, Honey in the Heart by Martín Prechtel

10. Practicing Mortality, Life, and Death

The Supreme Source: The Fundamental Tantra of the Dzogchen Semde Kunjed Gyalpo by Chogyal Namkhaf Norum and Adriano Clemente

Carefree Dignity: Discourses on Training in the Nature of Mind Drubwang Tsoknyi Rinpoche

Fearless Simplicity: The Dzogchen Way of Living Freely in a Complex World by Drubwang Tsoknyi Rinpoche

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki-roshi

Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chögyam Trungpa

The Myth of Freedom by Chögyam Trungpa

Transcending Madness by Chögyam Trungpa

The Lion’s Roar by Chögyam Trungpa

Crazy Wisdom by Chögyam Trungpa

Easy Death: Spiritual Wisdom on the Ultimate Transcending of Death and Everything Else by Da Free John

The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo: A new translation with commentary by Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam Trungpa

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, translated by W. Y. Evans-Wentz

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche

Encountering Alia was a source of revelation born out of true meeting. With her I learned a great deal about sharing relationship in the depths, void of pretense or defenses. Such a friendship can redeem a person's life, and further, can disclose the purpose and beauty of this world of duality. This was her gift, and I know that others experienced this with her as well.

Guiding souls was Alia's science and her art. She was guide and teacher to several hundred students—accompanying them with exquisite integrity, kindness and wisdom. She served her students, and they trusted her because they could sense that she was there for them, not for herself. I am confident that many of them, through the years, experienced Alia as the most important human relationship in their souls' journey, and I am touched by the beauty and preciousness of a life given to this purpose.

Spiritual conversation with Alia was an adventure and a delight. It was to engage in a duet of improvisational mystical jazz. She was so well read, so knowledgeable. Yet intellectual knowledge did not constrain her. She belonged to the mystery, with a love so large and pure that she readily left the shore of her own perspective. She was a child of the moment, exquisitely naked and transparent, completely personal and simultaneously impersonal. Her mind and her life were a remarkable flow of creativity—unique aliveness arising out of the Absolute into the most amazing forms of insight and expression. Alia gave herself to the mystery not only out of incurable curiosity, but even more out of deep devotion to Truth.

One of Alia's great contributions, along with her teacher A.H. Almaas (she worked closely as his editor on many books), was the exploration of modern psychology in relation to the methods and orientations of the spiritual traditions. Depending on how the terms "psychology" and "spirituality" are defined, these can be discriminated from each other, and Alia would do so with precision. More importantly, however, she understood how, in the realm of human consciousness, these domains are inseparable. I believe her teaching in this area has helped to advance the process of spiritual awakening. Her knowledge enabled her to work effectively with people through the stages of dissolution of the false/adaptive self, and to support a more stable identification with the true self. It allowed her to respond, with intelligence and compassion, to the most pressing questions and suffering in people's lives.

A few days before she died she sent this last note. It conveys both the most graceful letting go and simultaneously her unending participation in the One discovering Itself. 

Dear friends,

My body is not in pain but I am getting progressively weaker…. I am profoundly exhausted. My soul is in a very delicate process of clarification, which is going on every moment. It requires all my subtle attention. It's hard for me to write or speak with people, though I am always happy to hear from you. I am often resting blissfully.

My deepest satisfaction is knowing how the living revelation of the truth lives in us.

Alia

What is the deeper meaning of this disaster as the flow of oil meets the flow of water -- as our ecological system is destroyed by our need or greed for oil? Symbolic consciousness is not just a tool to listen to our dreams. The signs that speak to us are in the outer as well as the inner world. Symbols tell us the deeper meaning of the images and events that unfold around us. Do we dare at this moment to look beneath the surface to what life is telling us, or do we just regard this event as another glitch in our material culture. The government's response is to halt further deep sea drilling. And while BP tries to fix the leak and restore its image, it continues to invest heavily in the tar sands development in Alberta Canada, "the largest and most environmentally destructive endeavor of all time," which has already devastated an area the size of England and Wales. But this appears safer than the sea, maybe because the devastation can be more contained, or is hidden in the far north.

But there is another story being told if we dare to look and listen -- if we are awake to the symbolic meaning of life. One "resource," oil, is destroying another even more vital "resource," water.

Water is the source of life. Something in our culture has turned against itself, and the technology that has caused this cannot save us. The oil is still pouring. There is no quick and easy solution to the oil slicks washing up on the shore.

One of the ways to work with symbols is to hold these images in our consciousness and be present with them. In this way we allow life to speak to us in this ancient language, which has always been the language of life itself. This is the ancient wisdom of listening to life.

Traditional cultures knew this wisdom, just as they knew the wisdom of nature, plants and the seasons. They knew how to watch the weather and their sailors knew how to listen to the winds. They also knew how to read the book of life just as they knew how to listen to their dreams.

We have lost this essential wisdom, and now life is screaming at us, crying to us, imploring us. Will we wait for the well to be capped and talk about financial recompense while the lawyers bring their lawsuits? Will we once again "have the experience but miss the meaning?" Or before the clocks strikes 12 can we regain the wisdom of our ancestors and hold the real meaning of this experience and finally listen to life itself?

The difficulty is that there will be no easy answer, no quick fix. The images that are speaking to us are too potent and too powerful. They are about the primal values of life itself. But if we dare to hold these images in our consciousness maybe we can make a step toward recognizing that life is a living being that can speak to us. Maybe we can return to a relationship to life that honors it as a sacred whole whose voice can be heard. Maybe we will not have to wait until the next disaster or the next before waking up to our real responsibility to life and the planet.

Of course it is a big step between watching the disaster on the news and recognizing that it is happening to each of us, just as through this crisis life is speaking to each of us. But when we see what our technology, our lifestyles, our values, have caused does it not touch the heart and soul of each of us? We are all responsible. And we need to return to the core of our humanity, to the sacred connection to life that is within each of us. We need to be attentive and listen.

This quality of awareness belongs to the ancient wisdom of the earth that was always known to our ancestors. And when the earth is crying out to us with such a potent image as it is now, is it not our duty to listen? Only when we hear what it is saying, not just in our minds but also in our souls, will we know how to respond.

If we are to reclaim a real relationship to life and to our planet, we must listen to the real story that is being told. It is not just a story of a deep well disaster happening in the Gulf. It is about how our present civilization is causing the waters of life to be polluted and how at present we cannot stop it. And this disaster is taking place all around us and also in our own souls. Only if we listen to life will we know how to respond.

This blog post was originally published on huffingtonpost.com on June 8, 2010.

Call me dark, odd, or a bit of a mystic, but I've always been drawn to cemeteries. Far from feeling gloomy or morose, I find meandering among gravestones strangely calming. Stepping out of the mad rush of life and onto the hushed burial grounds of the dead is like crossing a threshold between worlds. Secluded within these sanctuaries of resting souls, the pressing problems of life become muted to stillness.

No doubt this ease among the dead comes from the private cemetery just up the road from the house where I grew up, and where I used to play. This plot of mostly old graves set among oaks and persimmon trees was, to my child's mind, a place of haunted magic. On a summer's afternoon, there was nothing I liked better than to run up the hill, nestle my back against a sun-warmed headstone, and lose myself in daydreams. I was rarely scared. Instead, I felt secure in my own enclave, entertaining the captive audience who lay beneath the ground with my adolescent poetry.

This habit carried forward into adulthood when, confronted with some insoluble dilemma, or simply seeking escape, I'd head to a cemetery. Recently, in between appointments, I found myself near a burial ground on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. It was mid-afternoon, and as I stepped through the arched gate, not a single living soul was about. Even the caretaker was out to lunch. Taking off my sandals, I walked barefoot on a grassy carpet of gentle slopes lush with flowering trees and bushes. Gravestones of every size and shape marked the landscape for acres in every direction. Off in the distance, I could hear the distant roar of traffic; within the confines of the cemetery, all was quiet, save for the birds and insects.

Oak Hill is one of Washington's oldest cemeteries, dating back to the mid-1800's. An example of the 19th-century romantic movement, when cemeteries served as rural parks for city dwellers, it's botanical gardens call to mind the Greek origin of the word "cemetery" as a sleeping place for the dead in their transition to the next world.

"And one of us tired and lay down to rest," read the inscription on one headstone topped by a whimsically sculptured tree-branch. The granite headstone of another spouse was inscribed with these words: "She died in the fiftieth year of her married life; ever loved and loving, her life was a constant beauty." Another grave was etched with these fading, poetic words: "Until the day breaks and the shadows flee away." Exploring the far corners of the cemetery, I came across the weathered mausoleum of John Peter Van Ness, one of Washington's early political figures, a congressman who lived in a mansion across from the White House, and who at one time commanded the city's militia. Other colorful characters from American history are buried at Oak Hill, such as Lt. Col. Uriah Forrest, who served on George Washington's staff during the American Revolution. As I left, I nearly missed the modest, flat stone set into the ground marking the grave of Katherine Graham, the once-powerful publisher of the "Washington Post."

That's the thing about cemeteries: rich or poor, powerful or powerless, known or unknown, all our lives come down in the end to a resting place in the earth. If we are at all sensitive, this kind of proximity to death has an instant centering effect. Like a good meditation practice, visiting a cemetery focuses our attention on what really matters; helping us to discriminate between what is true and lasting from what is transient, and of little importance. In many traditions, in fact, "death meditation" is a powerful practice. "Meditations on death," writes Phillip Kapleau, "are a means of purifying the mind in order to gain a crucial revelation of the meaning and significance of life." (The Zen of Living and Dying). It was a practice among ancient Sufis to gather at graveyards to meditate as a reminder of the eternal reality behind life.

As far as sacred places go, a cemetery may seem off the beaten path. But just like the serene field of energy created by a church, yoga center, meditation room or temple, cemeteries are hallowed areas set apart from the mundane world. The invisible presence of the departed creates a kind of vortex of deep tranquility, silencing the ten thousand things clamoring for our attention. For whether one believes in an afterlife or not, spending time at a burial ground inevitably stirs thoughts of our own mortality -- what life means, whether we are living the life we are meant to be living, and what comes next.

Indeed, sitting among the graves at Oak Hill Cemetery that bright day, my soul felt washed clean of petty complaints. Bills, house repairs, work stress, relationship issues, even the world's larger problems -- it all seemed part of the great, messy miracle of existence that I'd been blindly overlooking. As I listened to the boundless silence, it seemed to me that I could hear echoes of symphonies playing: the harmonic scores of those who'd passed on, leaving only the music of their lives behind. For a brief moment, I caught the faint chords of my own soul's melody. Leaving the cemetery, I thanked the dead for returning to me the gift of life.

If you have any favorite cemeteries you like to visit, or similar experiences, I'd love to hear about them.

Follow Pythia Peay on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/@pythiapeay

This blog post was originally published on huffingtonpost.com on June 3, 2010.

By Lauren Gelfond Feldinger, reprinted from The Jeruselem Post.

In a small and ancient family plot attached to his ancestral home in Jerusalem’s Old City, Sufi leader Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bukhari was laid to rest on Tuesday, June 1, at age 61, after a long struggle with heart disease. He was head of the mystical Naqshabandi Holy Land Sufi Order.

A longtime proponent of nonviolence and interfaith unity, Bukhari found his inspiration in Islamic law and tradition, as well as in the writings of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. “The stronger one is the one who can absorb the violence and anger from the other and change it to love and understanding. It is not easy; it is a lot of work. But this is the real jihad,” he once told the Globaloneness Project in an interview.

His teachings and practices put him in danger and under great stress that over the years harmed his health, said Sheikh Ghassan Manasra of Nazareth, whose father heads the regional Holy Land Qadari Sufi Order. “Sheikh Bukhari influenced lots of people, worked hard to bridge the religions and cultures; and his teaching is keeping part of the youth on the right path. We worked together for many years and succeeded many times and failed many times and decided to stay on the [path] of God to bring peace, tolerance, harmony and moderation,” he said.

“But on both sides, Jewish and Muslim, there are moderates but also extreme people, and our work was very dangerous, with a lot of pressure and stress until now, and I think this explains, in part, his heart problems.”

Bukhari later also got involved in the Interfaith Coordinating Council in Israel, the Interfaith Encounter Association, and the Sulha Peace Project, and in 2007 launched the “Jerusalem Hug” every June 21, where Israelis, Palestinians and foreigners of all faiths form a human chain of prayer around the Old City.

During Operation Cast Lead, Bukhari initiated a delegation of Arab youth and religious leaders to show solidarity with the students and teachers in Sderot and to share the pain of his own family's experience in Gaza.

"He was really special," Rabbi Tzion Cohen, a native of Sderot who is chief rabbi of the Shaar Hanegev region, said of their meeting. "Despite his own great pain for his family, and despite the fact that some of the group got heated up during the discussion, he and his wife remained gentle and patient and so very kind. I was truly impressed by their pleasantness."

For more on Sheikh Bukhari, including videos, please visit The Global Oneness Project.

Need is the beginning of prayer. We feel alone and in need. And only the divine can answer this need.
Calling out from the depths of our being, we make known our need to our self and to God. We pray according to our need, and according to the need of the moment. At different times our needs are different. We may pray for forgiveness, for understanding, for kindness. We may pray that our relationships not be clouded in mistrust or that our children not suffer. We pray for our self and for others. All of the myriad difficulties that we encounter in our daily life we can embrace in our prayer, the difficulties of our own self and the troubles of the world. We hope to bring God's attention to these problems, so that infinite love and grace can reach into the world and help with the pain of being human.

Prayer is infinitely powerful because it connects us with God's infinite power. In praying, we offer up the difficulties of living in a world in which the divine often appears to be absent, in the deepest knowledge that only the divine can really help us -- that is the source of all life and all love. We who are so small and alone look to God, and so turn our attention from the many back to the One. Sometimes people think, "Why should I bother God? How can my difficulties be of concern to this Great Being?" But this is in fact arrogance, because it places the individual before God. We are a part of God's world, and if we are in need we should turn toward God.

So many times it appears that our prayer is not heard, that we are forgotten, alone. And yet as the mystic says, "If the heart has heard the prayer, God has heard the prayer." And more important than any specific answer is the act of prayer, in which we turn toward God. In our busy lives it is so easy to forget the divine, to be immersed in our own problems and our own selves. The mystic knows that what really matters is the inner connection of the heart in which our heart opens and cries. It is something so simple and yet so easily overlooked. It is a way to be with God.

Learning to pray is also learning to listen. Within the heart we wait for an answer, for God's words, which may come even when we have not asked. Listening is a form of prayer, in which our whole being is receptive. Prayer is communion with God; we share with Him our needs, and we also learn to be attentive, as Rumi so beautifully writes:

Make everything in you an ear, each atom of your being, and you will hear at every moment what the Source is whispering to you, just to you and for you, without any need for my words or anyone else's. You are--we all are--the beloved of the Beloved, and in every moment, in every event of your life, the Beloved is whispering to you exactly what you need to hear and know. Who can ever explain this miracle? It simply is. Listen and you will discover it every passing moment. Listen, and your whole life will become a conversation in thought and act between you and Him, directly, wordlessly, now and always.

Listening within the heart is attuning our self to our Beloved. We develop the ear of the heart, the inner listening of the soul. Sometimes God communicates directly with words. We may hear these words as a still, small voice, or a thought suddenly appearing. In the silence of receptive prayer, the prayer of the quiet, we may hear words of help and guidance. Or our innermost may speak to us in dreams, when words carry an energy that we know does not belong to our psyche. Sometimes we open a book we know and the words that we read are a message from our Beloved. In so many ways, some known, some hidden, God speaks to us, answers our prayers.

We each have our own way of being with God, our own way of prayer. For some of us prayer takes place in the dark hours of the night, when we lie awake and our need is most pressing. Some find it easiest to pray as they walk, finding the presence of nature a way to access this inner communion. Others may pray while they are in their garden, feeling the presence of the divine among their flowers. Some pray when they see suffering, while others may find their heart opens when they experience beauty. In many cathedrals, temples and mosques there is the tangible presence of prayer, of so many souls looking towards God. Prayer is something essential to a human being and it belongs to the heart's relationship to the divine.

For more on prayer of the heart, see Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee's book, The Circle Of Love

This blog post was originally published on huffingtonpost.com on February 24, 2010.

Now, as spring blooms, I look out my window at the mound of fresh dirt where my charming dogwood friend once stood. I recall how, each year at this time, it appeared veiled in a cloud of petals. In particular, I loved the way it grew at a sharp angle, as if in defiance of its more upright neighbors. Eighteen years of living with such character and beauty: And it took losing it to appreciate it.

Losing such a familiar marker in my landscape made me think of other trees that have inhabited my life. On the Missouri farm where I grew up, a giant oak stood sentinel in my front yard, protectively brooding over my family. As a little girl, I'd dig in the dirt beneath its leafy shelter; growing older, I'd lean against its warm back, my dreams drifting upward. When times were troubled inside my house, that mighty tree was everything I wished my tempestuous, traveling, alcoholic father could be: a steady force who stood rooted in place, season after season.

Trees may be paragons of stability. But as the naturalist John Muir wrote, "The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness." And indeed, it was through an encounter with trees that I first glimpsed a larger reality. When I was about ten years old, my family took a vacation to San Francisco. On a visit to the colossal redwoods, I ran off playing. Suddenly, I came upon my mother. She was standing transfixed amid shafts of light as they poured down through the trees. "What are you doing?" I asked, puzzled. "I was just about to hear the voice of God, and then..." she replied, pausing. For several pregnant moments, I waited with her, until the silence was broken by a group of passing tourists.

My mother, though she didn't know it, was tapping into an old and magical bond between humans and trees. At the Sanctuary of Dodona in ancient Greece, the rustling leaves of the oaks "spoke" to the priestess-oracles. The Buddha attained enlightenment while sitting beneath the shelter of a Bodhi tree. A lonely Jesus, abandoned by his disciples on the eve of his crucifixion, bowed his head among the olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane. Among the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest, trees are considered sacred beings with souls and supernatural powers (The Power of Trees, by Michael Perlman).

In reflecting on why trees seem to speak to our innermost souls, I wonder if it stems from the great ages to which some species can live. My daughter-in-law Alison, a fire ecologist, has been studying core tree rings taken from Mountain Hemlocks at Crater Lake in Oregon. One sample, she tells me, dates back over five hundred years to 1462: just a youth, she says, compared to the oldest known tree, a Bristlecone Pine Tree nicknamed Methuselah in the White Mountains of California that dates back 4841 years. A tree that stood before Jesus, George Washington, the car, and the computer, I imagine, must be a veritable sage of wisdom.

My son Kabir, a microbial biologist, also tells me that the roots of trees are interlaced with fungal organisms in a mutually life-supporting system. His scientifically-based wonder at this subterranean civilization makes me think that if we are ever to find our way back to that golden age when nature and humankind co-existed in harmony, it might well be a tree that shows us the way. Gentle givers, they provide food and shelter to humans and creatures alike. Their roots bind the soil. Lungs of the earth, they breathe in toxic air and breathe out clean oxygen. Like nature's prophets, they stand as pillars of enduring wisdom and kindness in an ever-changing world. This noble alliance is one that we should strive to nurture.

A lifelong advocate of trees is Nobel Prize winner and environmental activist Wangari Maathai (Resurgence, Doubleday, September 2010, and Replenishing the Earth, Doubleday). Founder of the Green Belt Movement, which has planted over 30 million trees across Kenya, Maathai's passion for trees springs from her soul. Her idea of heaven, she told me in an interview, is "a beautiful forest, like the original Garden of Eden." Trees are wondrous beings to her because, she says, "even at night, when everyone else is asleep, they are awake. And as the branches dance in the wind, they are praising the Creator."

And so, this Earth Day, let us in turn praise those wise tribes of trees among whom we live. Long after we are gone---if we protect them---they will still be standing, memory-keepers of our time on the planet.

This blog post was originally published on huffingtonpost.com on April 22, 2010.

One is the biblical story of the Exodus from slavery under Pharaoh (rooted in the Spirit but noticeably political) ; the other, the Kabbalistic metaphor of God as the Tree of Life, unfolding  through successive emanations from the Infinite to the Incarnate so that its roots are in Heaven and its fruit is our world.  This wisdom is noticeably "spiritual" but has as its roots a political vision of sharing food among the whole community, and sharing God's abundance with all living beings.

Both these great myths, interestingly, are encoded in Festival Seders --– sacred meals that actually embody in earthy ways,  through what we eat and drink, the sublime meaning of each festival.

The Exodus story and its Passover Seder is the better-known (though Kabbalah began already in the Middle Ages to seep into Christian and Muslim mysticism). Both archetypal tales echo in the AVATAR film when all the life-forms of the planet-moon Pandora, including but not only the quasi-human blue-skinned people who call themselves the Na'vi (in Hebrew this word means "Prophet")  rise up  against the tyrannical power of a rapacious Earthian corporation backed by a hyper-mechanized invading mercenary army made up of ex-Marines.

In the Exodus story, it is locusts and frogs, rivers and hailstorms – what we call the Ten Plagues – that carry out the word of God and shatter Pharaoh when he refuses to free the shepherd-folk, the Hebrews, whom he has tried first to enslave and then to exterminate. The story climaxes when YHWH,  the God Whose name can only be "pronounced" by simply breathing "YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh," becomes the Holy Breath/ Wind that splits the Red Sea, drowning Pharaoh's army. In AVATAR, it is forests and stegosauruses and winged banshees who alongside the blue-skinned Na'vi vanquish the invaders.

In Exodus, it is Moses, an Egyptian prince with a physical flaw -- a stuttering tongue – who after stammering his doubts and unwillingness becomes a spokesperson for God, a leader of the rebellious slaves, and the invoker of the Plagues.

In AVATAR, it is Sully, a crippled Earthian white male ex-Marine, who becomes through 22d-century science an Avatar, a blue-skin who can lead the Na'vi and call upon the Earth-Goddess of Pandora to rouse her web of life to break the Earthian army and defend the Na'vi and all the life-forms of Her planet. (This Crusher army is Pharaoh's horse-chariot army turned hypermechanical.)  This Na'vian "Moses" does raise the problem  that the heroic leader may seem to some viewers to nullify the need for a transformational social movement. But a deeper seeing of the film makes clear that it is the Na'vi as a community and the whole Pandoran web of life that rise in revolt.

After rabbinic Judaism developed the tradition of telling the Exodus story through a sacred meal, the Seder, it assigned the Song of Songs to be chanted on the Shabbat of Pesach.  In this unique book of the Bible, God's Name is never mentioned and the reader is invited into a mystical sense that the very flow of the book itself in its spring-flowering erotic dance of woman and man, human and earth, is in its fullness and its mystery the all-embracing Name of God.  If this Divine Presence were to have  a name, it would be the mystics'  Shekhinah -- the Holy Female, the Indwelling Divine,  Present in all being.

In "AVATAR,"  Pandora in all its luscious colors, in the lyrical weave of unity between earth and human. and in the love affair of Sully's Avatar  and a Na'vi princess (consummated not in the theater version of the film but according to report, in the coming DVD) evokes the Song of Songs.

How does Avatar echo the Kabbalistic mythos? The festival through which the Kabbalists 500 years ago left a deep mark of their beliefs is Tu B'Shvat, which comes at the full moon of the midwinter lunar month of Shvat.

It was known in Jewish lore as the New Year of the Trees, dividing one tax year of tithing fruit from the next –-- therefore, a time to ensure that the poor and the landless get enough to eat. The kabbalists drew on the legend of the Tree of Life in Eden's garden of Delight -- and turned this moment into the New Year of "The Tree," God's Own Self, which in the time of cold, the time of invisible seed, begins to grow new life into the world. The Tree of Life, God's greatest plentiful abundance, had vanished from human ken when the humans tried to gobble up all the food they saw, and thereby banished themselves from Eden.

That banishment is what the Earthians of AVATAR have done to themselves. By  gobbling up the earth they live in, they have killed it and driven themselves to seek another in Pandora. But they have learned nothing.

In the winter of their discontent, despair, they glimpse the Tree of Life, the Garden of Delight.  They meet the Na'vi, who live their whole lives in the grown-ups' Garden of Eden for a grown-up human race -- the garden of the Song of Songs.  The Na’vi celebrate "Tu B'Shvat" all year long. Their worship especially focuses on great trees that are the most sacred centers of their lives. These great trees embody the Goddess  Eywa,– but S/He is more than even these trees, S/He is all life. Spirit incarnate. Notice that “Eywa” can be heard as “Yahweh” (sometimes misdescribed as the Hebrew Name of God) turned inside-out.

The film is a profound challenge to the official militarized foreign policy, Big-Business-dominated and oil-addicted economy,  and consumer-addled life-style of the United States, and even to the official religious life of American churches, synagogues, and mosques.

Perhaps the deepest American assumption that is challenged by the film is the one that superior technology always wins, by crushing the weak in their spiritual ineffectuality. And perhaps the film is winning the largest audience in movie history because in America and the rest of the world, there is an uncomfortable suspicion that perhaps the days of the Arrogant Techno-Empire are numbered and that colored Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans, Venezuelans, and Chinese –- and the many-colored earth itself –- are winning.

Yet the Na'vi rise also a level beyond the Native Americans of "Dances with Wolves" and the Pocohontas stories. They have a technology, but it is not mechanical. It is organic. The biological fringes they brush against each other --  living, pulsating versions of the tzitziot, the fringes on the corners of a sacred Jewish garment --  are the technology of organic intimacy. As even one of the Crusher Corporation's servants sees in a moment of deep vision, they make possible a "global network."

What some critics of "AVATAR" have seen as an internal muddle between anti-tech regression and pro-tech dream is not a muddle but a synthesis.

Like any film, AVATAR is meant for seeing. But unlike most films, it explicitly makes the act of seeing into a spiritual discipline. The watchword of the Na'vi is,  “I see you.” For Pandora’s people, these words express what in Hebrew is “yodea,” interactive “knowing” that is emotional, intellectual, physical/ sexual, and spiritual all at one.  And that is how an aware audience should "see" AVATAR: with serious discussion afterwards, open to all its meanings. And open to the delicious creatures and colors of its utterly see-able forest.

That synthesis beyond the muddle is true of the film itself. It is a high-tech film, higher-tech than practically all its contemporaries. It leaps far beyond the conventional technology of film in its ultra-special effects and its 3D coming-to-life. But the technology leaps beyond itself as well, to make a deeper vision possible.   The medium befits the message.

What’s to discuss?

1)  AVATAR teaches that the war against peoples and the war against the earth are the same war, being incited and fought by the same Crusher institutions. If we agree with this, how do we bring together the so-far separate struggles to end the two kinds of war? If we don’t agree, how do we see the relationship? Why does the Torah command that even in wartime, we must not destroy the enemy’s fruit trees? (The US Army did precisely this to the forests of Vietnam; the Israeli Army has done this to Palestinian olive trees; in AVATAR, the invading Earthians do precisely this to the sacred trees of the Na’vi. Why?)

2)  AVATAR teaches that in the struggle to  heal our world,  birds and animals and trees and grasses can become our active allies if we "see" them as part of ourselves, part of our Beloved Community. Is there a way to make this true for us? Can the Earth, God/dess Incarnate, defend Herself? What role do humans play?

3. AVATAR  describes how some Earthians turn their backs on the military-corporate attempt to shatter the Na'vi and instead join the Na'vi resistance. They become –- let's not mince words –-  traitors. Or rather, they transform themselves into the Avatars that actually become Na'vi, loyal not to  oppressive Crushers but to the web of life. What do we Americans, we Westerners  -- who have already done so much to crush the life from many parts of our planet and threaten to destroy the rest by choking its Breath, its Climate -- what do we make of that? What do we owe the indigenes of Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Nigeria, Burma? What do we owe our own lakes, forests? Our own lungs, choking in the air we have befouled?

4. In the climax of the film , it is not only the invading Marines in their Crusher machines who use extreme violence. The Na'vi and Eywa's life-forms use violence too, to defend themselves. There is barely a hint of any attempt to use nonviolent resistance in the mode of King or Gandhi to defend Pandora. Can we imagine an alternative? Why did the film not present one?

We can learn a great deal by talking together about these Four Questions, and others. Talking together may help us "see" each other;  eating together may help even more.  Every Tu B'Shvat, what's to eat? A sacred meal, a Seder with four courses of nuts and fruit and four cups of wine.  Foods that require the death of no living being, not even a carrot or a radish  that dies when its roots are plucked from the earth. For the Trees of Life give forth their nuts and fruit in such profusion that to eat them kills no being. The sacred meal of the Tree Reborn is itself a meal of life.

 And the four cups of wine are: all-white; white with a drop of red; red with a drop of white; and all-red: the union of white semen and red blood that the ancients thought were the start of procreation. And the progression from pale winter to the colorful fruitfulness of fall also betokens the growing-forth of life. The theme of Fours embodies the Four Worlds of Kabbalah: Action, Emotion, Intellect, Spirit.

So do the Four Questions and the Four Children of the Passover Seder.

 There is much more to learn about these moments that so richly intertwine the mystical, the ecological, and the political.  Let us explore especially the roles of the Plagues (seen as eco-disasters brought  on  by Pharaoh's arrogance);  the meaning of the delicious ceremonial dish, made of chopped nuts and apples, raisins and wine -- charoset; the Song of Songs (traditionally read on   Pesach);  and the Haftarah (prophetic reading)  for Shabbat HaGadol just before Pesach,   in what they have to say about Pharaoh, liberation, spring, and the  relationship between adam and adamah  --human earthlings and the  earthy humus.

The genius of the Passover and Tu B’Shvat Seders at their best — not often achieved — is that through discussion  and by embodying ideas they make possible a social movement  rooted in many places but ready to share ideas,  a spiritual orientation, and a bodily commitment to action.  Could “Avatar” become such a text for discussion  -- for instance, for an ”Earth Day” Seder? ? Could it be introduced into the festivals we already celebrate?  Let us compare our experience of AVATAR with our experience of Passover and Tu B'Shvat  as they have been and our vision of these festivals as they could be.

We live in a culture of religious diversity that is at present experiencing a reawakening of interest in spirituality. If we are to more fully understand what this reawakening might mean, it seems to me that we need to clarify the traditional difference between religion and spirituality, between the exoteric and the esoteric.

Exoteric refers to a religious doctrine or body of knowledge that is accessible to anyone. It does not rely upon one's inner experience of the divine or the sacred. Religious teachings have often emphasized that following religious doctrine is more important than one's individual spiritual experience, and some have discouraged inner experiences altogether.

In contrast, esoteric teachings and their practices are usually a way to help the individual have a direct inner experience of the sacred. Esoteric studies often involve specific spiritual practices that are quite distinct from religious observances. They are based upon the understanding that there is a world of the spirit that is very different from the purely physical world of the senses. These practices are a way to access the world of the spirit—leading one finally to awaken or be born into this reality that is invisible to our physical eyes.

Spiritual teachings of all cultures tell us that just as we have a physical body, so too do we have a spiritual body. This is the body of our spiritual self. In some Indian traditions it is described as having a series of energy centers, or chakras. In Sufism it is described as a series of chambers within the heart—that just as we have a physical heart we also have a spiritual heart which contains our divine consciousness. In Taoism it is sometimes imaged as a spirit body or light body. Our spiritual body has qualities such as peace, bliss and endless love that are rarely found in our outer lives. What is common to most esoteric traditions is that we can access this spiritual body through specific practices or techniques, like meditation, mantra and breathing practices.

Many religions have an esoteric core, for example the Jewish Kabbalah, or Sufism, which is known as the heart of Islam. Yet, at different times in history religions have banned or persecuted as heresy esoteric teachings and their practitioners. Early Christianity had a known esoteric dimension, for example in the teachings of the Gospel of Thomas that point to an inner spiritual mystery, as in the words of Jesus: "I disclose my mysteries to those who are worthy of my mysteries." Sadly the orthodoxy of the early Church banned the inner, esoteric aspect of Jesus' teachings, and the Gospel of Thomas became heresy and its copies destroyed, until one was rediscovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945.

The esoteric, spiritual teachings that can be found within many religions, and in shamanic and other traditions, form part of our spiritual heritage. They remind us that we are not just physical beings in a physical world, but that our lives and also our bodies have a spiritual dimension. We are beings of light as well as flesh and blood. There is a world within and around us to which we can have access that is very different from the physical world. Yet the spiritual and physical worlds are not separate, but interpenetrate and nourish each other.

At this present time there is a hunger for direct inner experience, a need to reclaim our spiritual heritage. While our materialistic culture tries to keep our attention firmly in the physical world of the senses, many of us sense a longing to know this hidden mystery of what it means to be human. And so we are able to turn to the teachings and traditions that have been given to us, whether in yoga, Buddhist meditation, Sufi dhikr or other spiritual practices. It is important to recognize the root of our longing, that we are no longer prepared to live in a purely physical world, but need the living presence of the spiritual. We need to know and be nourished by the invisible world that is within us and all around us. We need to reclaim the mystery and magic of being fully alive.

We also need to confront the specter of death. So many people, knowing only the physical world, remain frightened of death. Religious teachings create a clear division between this life and the afterlife, which may carry the promise of heaven or the threat of hell. Spiritual experience can lift the veils between the worlds, allowing us to glimpse a spiritual reality while we remain present in the physical world. Many people have had near death experiences in which they see a light at the end of a tunnel. Our spiritual heritage can give us access to this light while we are still in this world. This is the light found within the heart, the light of our divine self. It is beautifully imaged in the Gospel of St. Matthew, which speaks about the oneness of real inner perception: "If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light."

Spiritual life can take us beyond death. In Sufism this is called "to die before you die," to awaken to the world of light while still alive in this world. Then you know that there is no such thing as death, or in Jesus' words in the Gospel of Thomas, "Whoever discovers the interpretations of these sayings will not taste death."

Spiritual truth is at the heart of all religions, and yet it is also beyond the divisions that plague our world. It is about the oneness, the love and the light that is within us all, and to which as human beings we can have access. Spiritual teachings and their practices can give us each our own individual experience of this very human reality, and help us to live in the light of this oneness rather than stumbling in the darkness of so many divisions. I feel that our present spiritual reawakening is an expression of deep longing, of our need to step into this light.

For further reading on the spiritual world of light, see Vaughan-Lee, Alchemy of Light.

This blog post was originally published on huffingtonpost.com on March 9, 2010.

Few rhymes capture the enchantment of sleep like the lullaby "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod." Sailing off in a wooden shoe on a "river of crystal light, into a sea of dew," these "fishermen three" were sped by the wind beneath a moon that "laughed and sang a song." All night long, they cast nets of silver and gold "to the stars in the twinkling foam." "'Twas all so pretty a sail it seemed, as if it could not be," concludes the rhyme, "And some folks thought 'twas a dream they'd dreamed."

Ah, to sleep like a child, lulled to slumber by a parent's soothing voice. Indeed, perhaps our widespread problem around disrupted rest has to do with a lost connection to sleep as a mysterious world unto itself: a fantastical place of bewitchment, where strange things go on. After all, just to fall asleep requires a suspension of reality. Letting go of our bodies, our conscious minds become submerged in a nocturnal sea of images—a difficult feat in our 24/7, techno-driven world.

Perhaps it's because I'm a writer, but the older I get, the more central to my creativity, and my sanity, the nightly voyage to the "Land of Nod" becomes. Take away my eight hours of sleep, and I feel a little crazy and on edge. Sleep provides a welcome break, carrying me off to a place more like myth than real life. Ironically, this makes waking up just as interesting. Like the "fisherman three" returned from sea, I begin my workday by faithfully recording the night's haul of dreams.

As it turns out, a long tradition exists of writers and artists who have likewise drawn sustenance from the night world. In his book, Our Dreaming Minds, Robert Van de Castle describes film director Luis Bunuel's obsession with dreams: "Give me two hours a day of activity," Bunuel wrote, "and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams."

I'm not a filmmaker, but each night dream sequences play out in ways my waking mind could never have made up. Transcribing these dreams before I begin writing infuses a kind of multi-dimensionality into my creative process. It's as if I've tapped into a magnetic field of imagination that streams a steady flow of landscapes, wild animals, fairy tale creatures, unlikely scenarios, numinous objects, and colorful characters—the raw stuff of art and literature. "The experience of dreams operates in an altered state of consciousness 'below' the level of waking consciousness," write Jungian analysts Sylvia Perera and Edward Whitmont in Dreams: A Portal to the Source. Dreams speak in a language of sensory images, the authors write, "beyond our rational categories of time and space."

To understand the dream, counsel Perera and Whitmont, the dreamer must intuitively "enter the dream's own realm, its metaphoric, symbolic, and dramatic dimensions." This concentration aids the artist, who must set aside daily demands, and enter wholly into the imaginary creation taking shape, believing it to be is as real as ordinary life.

Dreams can be as melodramatic as Greek theater: the existential loneliness of the exile wandering in a barren landscape; the rage of confronting a difficult parent; the humiliating abandonment by a lover. Dreams can also be as banal as an image I once had of myself chewing gum while standing outside a Safeway grocery store. Working psychologically with the deeper meaning of these dreams—in therapy, a journal, or with a trusted friend—can add to our self-knowledge. But more than that, these "feeling" dreams can deepen our connection to the human condition. And without that connection, few writers or artists can produce anything lasting or meaningful. The reclusive author of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte, used dreams, writes Van de Castle, to help her describe sensations "she had no way of understanding in reality."

Dreams, in fact, often contribute directly to the creative process. While working on an article on the soul of Washington, D.C. some years ago, I dreamt that I was driving George Washington around the city. This dream-encounter enhanced my sense of the living history of the city. Robert Louis Stevenson, writes Van de Castle, attributed the plot of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to a vivid dream-scene. The Sixties beat writer Jack Kerouac provided a key for identifying characters that had appeared in his dreams with characters in his books.

One of the greatest mysteries surrounding dreams is their origin. Some creators have dropped provocative hints. The poet William Blake, for instance, painted a portrait of "The Man Who Taught Blake Painting in His Dreams." Stephenson, Van de Castle writes, spoke of the "Little People" who worked in "the nocturnal theater of his mind." One thing about dreams, however, is certain: we all have access to our dreaming minds. And whatever our profession may be, we have within us a creative voice that speaks in the language of the night, and that provides a richly imaginative commentary on our daytime lives—if only we would listen.

This blog post was originally published on huffingtonpost.com on January 15, 2010.

The sheer volume of spiritual literature and doctrine, the number of distinct gods worshiped (over 30 million, according to some sources), the breadth of distinct philosophies and practices that have emerged, and the total transformation over time of many of the core Indic teachings and beliefs, can be disconcerting to those raised in monotheistic cultures, as we are used to each faith bringing with it a defined set of beliefs that—with the exception of some denominational rifts over the centuries—stay pretty much consistent over time.

However, the key point of differentiation between Hinduism and these other faiths is not polytheism vs. monotheism. The key differentiation is that Hinduism is Open Source while most other faiths are Closed Source.

"Open source is an approach to the design, development, and distribution of software, offering practical accessibility to a software's source code."

If we consider god, the concept of god, the practices that lead one to god, and the ideas, thoughts and philosophies around the nature of the human mind to be the source code, then India has been the place where the doors have been thrown wide open and the coders have been given free reign to craft, invent, reinvent, refine, imagine, and re-imagine to the point that literally every variety of spiritual and cognitive experience has been explored, celebrated and documented.

Atheists and goddess worshipers, heretics who've sought god through booze, sex, and meat, ash-covered hermits, dualists and non-dualists, nihilists and hedonists, poets and singers, students and saints, children and outcasts ... all have contributed their lines of code to the Hindu string.

The results of India's God Project—as I like to refer to Hinduism—have been absolutely staggering. The body of knowledge—scientific, faith-based, and experience-based—that has been accrued on the nature of mind, consciousness, and human behavior, and the number of practical methods that have been specifically identified to work with one's own mind, are without compare. The Sanskrit language itself contains a massive lexicon of words—far more than any other historic or modern language—that deal specifically with states of mental cognition, perception, awareness and behavioral psychology.

At the heart of the Indic source code are the Vedas, which immediately establish the primacy of inquiry in Indic thought. In the Rig Veda, the oldest of all Hindu texts (and possibly the oldest of all spiritual texts on the planet), God, or Prajapati, is summarized as one big mysterious question, and we the people are basically invited to answer it.

"Who really knows?
Who will here proclaim it?
Whence was it produced?
Whence is this creation?
The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.
Who then knows whence it has arisen?"

While the god of the Old Testament was shouting command(ment)s, Prajapati was asking: "Who am I?"

Since opening the floodgates on the divine question, Indic thought has followed a glorious evolutionary arc from shamanism, nature worship and sacrifice to sublime and complex theories on mental cognition, the nature of consciousness, and quantum physics.

Through tracing the subcontinent's relationship with the deities of the Vedas, we can trace the course of Indic thought over the centuries. One of the first things we notice is that not only does the people's relationship to god change over the centuries, the gods themselves change. Shiva, for example, appears in the Vedas as Rudra, the howler, god of storms, still something of a lesser deity. Reappearing over the centuries as Bhairava—he who inspires fear—Pashupati, lord of beasts, the god of yogis, and the destroyer, Shiva finally, by the 9th century, achieves status in Kashmir as the fundamental energetic building block of the entire universe. Neat trick.

But as much as the gods change and the evolution of Indic thought leads us to increasingly modern and post-modern views of the nature of reality, the old Vedic codes still remain front and center. One of Hinduism's defining factors is that the historic view of god, the nature worship and shamanism never went away, so that god as currently worshiped exists simultaneously as symbol and archetype as well as literal embodiment. That Shiva, for instance, could simultaneously be the light of ultimate consciousness and an ash-smeared madman who frequents cremation grounds is a delight to us spiritual anarchists, while mind numbing to most western theologists.

Western and Middle Eastern monotheistic faiths have simply not allowed such liberal interpretation of their God. They continue to exist as closed source systems.

"Generally, [closed source] means only the binaries of a computer program are distributed and the license provides no access to the program's source code. The source code of such programs might be regarded as a trade secret of the company."

One of the defining facts of Christian history is that access to God has been viewed—as in most closed source systems—as a trade secret. The ability to reinterpret the Bible, or the teachings of Christ, or the Old Testament, or to challenge the basic fundamental authority of the church, has been nonexistent for most of the church's history. Those who dared to do so were quite often killed.

In Indic thought, there is no trade secret. The foundation of yoga is that the key to god, or the macrocosm, or the absolute ... lies within the individual and can be accessed through a certain set of practices. It's a beautifully simple but ultimately profound concept that has been allowed to flourish unchecked for millennia. The process of discovering and re-imagining the divine is in your hands. The God Project.

Follow Josh Schrei on Twitter: www.twitter.com/brooklynjosh

This blog post was originally published on huffingtonpost.com on March 4, 2010.

Seven Pillars has been in existence for a year and a half now, and with each passing season our “house with no walls” has taken fuller shape. From the beginning it has been our intention to cultivate collaboration and make a place at our table for practitioners of all traditions, arts, and sciences.

Over the months, a number of individuals have answered our call who are kindred spirits in the aspiration for a fuller integration of the many strands of contemporary human life. It is my pleasure to announce that this group of inspired and inspiring individuals will be known henceforth as the Guiding Voices of Seven Pillars.

The role of the Guiding Voices involves contributing to the theoretical and practical elaboration of our four thematic areas (Cosmology, Revelation, Mysticism, and Chivalry), participating in our events, writing for our website, and helping to foster communication and friendship within our growing interspiritual community.

In May this group will meet for a three-day retreat at The Abode, with the intention of deepening our bonds of common purpose and furthering the vision of Seven Pillars’ development. A process for appointing future Guiding Voices will also be determined.

I hope you will join me in extending a very warm and appreciative welcome to the Seven Pillars Guiding Voices.

An updated list of Guiding Voices has just been posted on our People page.

In the interest of getting a good night's rest, I've tried banishing these pictures from my mind. As if commanding me to bear witness. However, the images refuse to fade. The donation I make offers little relief. And so, lately, I've turned to praying my way to sleep. Summoning that force of compassion called by various names throughout the world's religions, I ask for Haiti's ongoing healing and protection.

Prayer has always been central to my spiritual practice -- especially during those dark-of-the-night moments when anxiety over life's problems can send my heart racing. It was my mother who first taught me how, through prayer, to "put things in a basket and give it to God." Kneeling beside my bed as a girl, head bowed, I'd fold my hands and repeat "God bless my sister," "God bless my brother," and so on, until I had prayed for every family member, pet, and friend. I learned how to pray, too, from the Catholic nuns of my childhood. Reciting the Hail Mary continued to bring solace long after I left the church.

But it was from the Sufi tradition, handed down through the teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan, that I learned about the mystical dimension of prayer. There are those who recite prayers out of a sense of duty or to receive something. However, Inayat Khan wrote in "The Effects of Prayer," there is another person who prays "with imagination strengthened by faith." This person, he said:

Does not only pray to God, but he prays before God, in the presence of God. Once imagination has helped man to bring the presence of God before him, God in his own heart is wakened. Then, before he utters a word, it is heard by God: when he is praying in a room, he is not alone, he is there with God; then God to him is not in the highest heaven, but next to him, before him, in him . . . Then every word of prayer he utters is a living word. It does not only bring him blessing, but blessings to all those around him. (The Unity of Religious Ideals).

This intimate form of prayer not only brings us closer to God -- it brings us into human community, as well. For prayer, Inayat Khan taught, "becomes a thousandfold greater" when performed by those united in the same thought. The effects of this kind of collective concentration, wrote Inayat Khan, can be powerful. The world is like a dome, he said, and every word uttered in it resounds. Studies on the effects of directed prayer are beginning to bear out Inayat Khan's wisdom. There is considerable evidence, write Marilyn Schlitz, Ph.D. and Nola Lewis, M.S. of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, that "certain individuals, operating at a distance under controlled conditions, can positively affect a wide range of systems" including plants, animals, and human beings. (Directed Prayer and Conscious Intention: Demonstrating the Power of Distant Healing.)

Prayer can never be a substitute for action on the ground. But it can be a potent supplement. The Herculean relief efforts for Haiti are testament to humankind's awakening heart. Yet when we have done all that we can during the day, laying down our burdens on the altar at night helps us to let go and get the sleep we need. This turning over of our struggles to a greater power is a way of acknowledging our limits before life's mystery. It protects our spirits from breaking under the pressure. Something inside us instinctively knows the wisdom of prayer: In the face of large-scale disaster, offerings of prayer tumble naturally out of the mouths of everyone alike.

Indeed, when battling sleeplessness at night, I often think of my prayers as part of an invisible "prayer relief effort" made up of all those who, like me, are offering up silent words for those in crisis. Joined across the boundaries of faith, all speaking the international language of prayer, this inter-religious net of empathy provides spiritual sustenance to those giving and receiving aid. If only we could recognize in these night prayers the power for compassion encoded in each other's traditions -- to what new level of consciousness could humankind rise?

The Sioux Holy Man Black Elk expressed the spirit of healing prayer in these humble words: "Grandfather, all over the earth the faces of the living ones are alike ... Look upon Your children with children in their arms that they may face the winds/And walk the good road to the day of quiet ... Give me the strength to understand and the eyes to see. Help me for without You I am nothing."

This is the prayer I'll take to bed with me tonight. I'd love to hear your prayers, so if you have a favorite offering for Haiti, or for others in need, please post it here.

Links:

www.sufiorder.org
www.noeticsciences.org
www.beliefnet.org
www.worldprayers.org
www.prayerinamerica.com
www.charterforcompassion.org

This blog post was originally published on huffingtonpost.com on January 31, 2010.

Statement to Honor the Founding of The Universal Order of Sannyasa

The Qur’an affirms that prophets have been sent to all peoples and admonishes against making distinctions between them.  Hence the Sufis have always been drawn to form spiritual connections with practitioners of other sacred traditions. Each encounter of this kind contributes a new patch, as it were, to the patchwork robe of the Sufi, symbolizing unity-in-multiplicity.

Sufism teaches that every religion configures the heart to receive a certain dispensation of God’s grace.  But if the heart is to become truly God’s own, it must be made so expansive and malleable as to be sensitive to each and every divine revelation.  Thus Ibn ‘Arabi wrote, “My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks, / and a temple for idols and the pilgrims’ Ka’ba and the tables of the Torah and the book of the Qur’an. / I follow the religion of Love: whatever way love’s camels take, that is my religion and my faith.”

I bear reverent witness that the heart that Ibn ‘Arabi describes is the heart that beat radiantly in the breast of Brother Wayne Teasdale, and that still beats in his spirit, calling us to unity.

This upbringing, passed down to me from my father, ingrained in me a deep and sensory awareness of nature's shifting moods. Both a farmer and a flight engineer for TWA, Joe Carroll's work on land and in the air turned on the weather. Schooled by farmers and pilots, he developed a keen nose for the smell of coming rain, and a sharp eye for the sickly yellow sky that precedes a tornado. It was my father who taught me the difference between harmless, marshmallow-light cumulus clouds -- and the ominous cumulonimbus thunderheads that signaled a coming storm.

Weather's brooding omnipresence fused in my childish imagination with God -- as if it were God's great face I glimpsed behind the wind, sun, and clouds. Even today, though I live far from the Missouri plains of my childhood, the weather outside continues to occupy a central place in my inner life. Whenever I'm hurting or my energy is scattered, mindfully shifting my awareness to the scent and feel of the air, or turning my face skywards, always helps to steady my soul.

Attention to weather this way corrects one of the common misperceptions around the "inner" life: That it is self-contained and private -- just me and my soul. But inner reflection is also about attuning to the greater existence within which we all live. Like a Buddhist meditation or a Christian prayer, contemplating a snowfall or even the swath of a hurricane on the weather channel helps to remind us of one of religion's core teachings: Before the infinite mystery of the cosmos, we humans are merely mortal creatures.

Nature's cyclic changes can have psychological as well as spiritual effects. Especially in the winter, when night falls early and the sun glimmers weakly, happiness can plummet into depression and loneliness. Psychologists call this Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD. But I wonder if, in our modern-day separation from the rhythms of nature, we've also become disconnected from the naturally occurring emotional cycles of hope, joy, sadness, and melancholy.

Indeed, as we enter the last season of the year, I find myself reflecting on the meaning of winter. As a writer, I find that I work best during the winter months. The recent record snowstorm in the city of Washington, where I live, reminded me of how winter is the season of creativity. The biting cold and thick, falling sheets of snow outside pushed me inward to that receptive space where my inner imagination resides. Some of us, as Donald Hall confesses in "Winter: A Spiritual Biography of a Season," are "darkness lovers. We tuck ourselves up in the long sleep and comfort of cold's opposite ... lighting ourselves by darkness's idea."

Light -- the radiance of spiritual illumination, the burning flame of faith -- has always been celebrated by the world's religions. Yet like a season of the soul, the darker emotions of despair and even depression offer a different kind of illumination. Melancholy emotions press the soul downwards. Nestled among the tangled roots of darkness, like the winter seed in the fallow field, the soul germinates new life.

Those teachers who have charted the inner weather of the psyche have named the plunge from the heights of joy the "dark night of the soul." Like miners, philosophers such as Soren Kierkegaard or mystics such as John of the Cross have tunneled their way into the depths, seeking the vein of wisdom. The struggle doesn't have to mean permanent loss of faith or optimism, but can be seen as a state of fruitful emptiness until that time when we can be filled again by a more expansive state of mind.

The ancients knew this secret of the rhythms of life, constructing their quarterly rituals of Solstices and Equinoxes around the four seasons of the year. The taciturn Missouri farmers of my childhood didn't talk much about the spirituality of weather. But with their slow style of talking and keen sensibility for a drop in temperature or a shift in the wind, they conveyed the well-tempered patience that comes from humbly weathering nature's cycles.

And so, as Winter lays her solemn mantle over the Northern hemisphere, I'll look to the farmers, philosophers, mystics, and ancients who've gone before to guide my way. Mindfully observing the weather outside, I'll let nature take her course -- even with me. Turning within, I'll light the fires of my creative imagination -- and seek the treasure hidden in the long, dark hours before the dawn of emerald spring.

This blog post was originally published on huffingtonpost.com on December 24, 2009.

The not-for-profit media organization Odyssey Networks is filming and providing video updates of Faith in Action at the conference. Visit http://www.odysseynetworks.org/ to witness what faith leaders are saying about climate change and global priorities going into the next decade.

But for a highly improbable string of discoveries, Thomas Traherne’s mystical masterpieces might have been irretrievably lost in the sands of time. The discovery of the 17^th-century Anglican vicar’s Centuries and Poems in the bin of a street bookstall—“that last hope of books and manuscripts in danger of being consigned to the waste-paper mills”—created a literary sensation in fin-de-siecle London. More discoveries were to follow. In the 1960s, while looking for old car parts, a certain Mr. Wookey found Traherne’s Commentaries of Heaven smoldering on a burning rubbish heap. In 1997, six new works turned up in libraries in Washington DC and London.

These discoveries are no mere “curiosities of literature.” They are unearthings of a powerful and timeless voice. Traherne must be read, and there is no better means of approaching his oeuvre than through the eyes of his leading interpreter, Denise Inge. In Wanting Like a God, Inge offers readers the fruit of ten years of meditation on Traherne’s prose and poetry.

Traherne’s central theme is desire. The commonplace that “God is love” takes on vast implications in Traherne’s penetrating exegesis. God wants. To want is to experience a lack, a need. God possesses infinite abundance—“the fullness of all Blessedness”—and yet, paradoxically, God is “from eternity full of want.”

We are summoned into existence by the force of God’s longing. Humans are enflamed with perpetual desire not because we are fallen, but because, made in the divine image, we naturally partake of God’s passion. The problem with our desire is not that it is excessive, but that it is insufficient. To obtain real satisfaction we must become serious about wanting; we must “want like a God.”

To want is to seek “treasures,” the desiderata of the heart. The whole of creation is a treasury of endless aesthetic and spiritual riches, but a treasure is invisible until its value is discerned and prized. Each of us is the unwitting heir to a boundless estate, and Traherne urges us to open our eyes and claim our birthright: “You will never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.”

Wanting is bound up with choice. God endowed the human soul with the freedom to choose its destiny. To use Traherne’s word, God “adventured” our freedom. For God’s treasure to be discovered and enjoyed we are needed, but the turn toward God must be our choice. God takes a risk on us, curbing his power to compel in the hope that his limitless desire might be freely returned. The gamble pays off when we willingly choose love—when we drink the world down to its dregs and send it back to God on waves of praise.

Thomas Traherne has often been seen as a sort of “ineffectual angel” (to borrow Arnold’s characterization of Shelley). Wanting Like a God demonstrates the injustice of this assessment. Inge shows us a Traherne who is critically engaged with the outstanding religious, political, social and scientific questions of his time. His poetic reflections on infinity and eternity, for instance, appear to owe as much to “the new infinities of microscope and telescope” as they do to private contemplative insight. His praise of common, simple and useful things can be seen as a prescient critique of the rise of an economy premised on exchange-value, where money becomes a means and end unto itself.

As a practitioner of Sufism, I am fascinated by the many nexuses of thought that link Traherne’s theology of desire to the spiritual psychology of the Sufi “School of Love.” I imagine Traherne and Rumi crossing paths in Hurqalya, the plane of visionary encounters. Rumi quotes God’s words from the hadith qudsi, “I was a hidden treasure, and I wanted to be known, so I created the world.” Swooning, Traherne answers with an exhortation from his Centuries—“You must want like a God that you may be satisfied like God!”—and the two whirl in ecstasy.

To me, Seven Pillars has a unique voice on the subject of spiritual chivalry, and this book provides an opportunity to address in published form some of the nuanced aspects of this topic such as the relevance of moral codes in contemporary culture, the role of service in modern society, and the relationship between enlightened action and violence. Rather than rehashing antiquated modes of chivalry, what can we take from historical example and mix with new ideas to create a new code for our time—one that can speak to people of many ages, nations, backgrounds and cultures?

We are especially interested in a diverse range of first-person narratives, and invite all who are inspired by chivalry to submit essays by May 1, 2010.

The full submission guidelines can be found here.

And yet this tomb is treated with the same reverence and etiquette as the shrines of any of the great mystics that dot the landscape here. In fact, if the visitors’ emotions are anything to go by, this shrine seems to have unparalleled power, for on any given day, devotees can be seen sitting in corners of the marble mausoleum, sobbing softly as they contemplate the tragic story of the beautiful Heer and the devastated Ranjha.

Images of the young, romantic Ranjha, with his long hair, sitting alongside the shy Heer on the riverbank watching the cattle graze as he played his soulful flute for her, dance above the devotees’ heads. Visions of her angry uncle spying on them, her parents forcefully marrying her off to a suitor of their choice and sending her to a distant town while the devastated Ranjha becomes a yogi, continue to haunt the visitors.

Dressed like a beggar with ash rubbed on his body, wearing large earrings and carrying a begging bowl, Ranjha takes to the streets, going from house to house and village to village, outwardly seeking alms but inwardly seeking Heer. Pining and longing for each other, burning in the fire of separation, anguished over a union not meant to be, the two eventually do find each other, Heer recognizing Ranjha by his eyes.

They convince the Raja of Heer’s marriage against her will and receive his permission to get married. But before they can do so, Heer is poisoned by her uncle and buried. When Ranjha finds out, he collapses at her grave and prays to be united with her, at which point the grave opens up and swallows him.

It is a poignant story, one that continues to live long after the lovers’ bodies have disintegrated. Even today, the music, art, poetry and literature of Pakistan are replete with allusions to this tragic tale, the unwavering perseverance of Heer and Ranjha kept alive as a lesson and as a source of solace.

In The Mystic Love of Heer and Ranjha, Umair Ghani describes an old, bare-footed woman who regularly frequents the shrine of Heer and Ranjha in the town of Jhang, today.

He describes the wrinkles that fill her face like deep trenches in dry land, of how she walks up to the grave, kisses it, closes her eyes and clasps her hands for several minutes as if taking part in a secret ritual. And then, like a whirling wind, she begins to dance in the tomb. Her bare feet strike the floor with a loud thud. “Two bodies in one grave, but body is nothing,” she says as she dances. “The soul is everything. The soul is dance. I am a soul and I will dance!”

What is it about this story, one wonders, that continues to hold the hearts of so many people captive, more than five centuries after the lovers passed? Is it the timelessness of the motif of separated lovers that runs through every culture and every age or something deeper that touches the soul?

Like other traditional love stories from the Punjab like Mirza-Sahiban, Sassi-Pannu and Sohni-Mahiwal, the Qisa i Heer Ranjha is more than a tale of unrequited love. As Syed Waris Shah, the great Sufi saint of the Chishtia order who immortalized this story through his poetic rendition of it in 1766, explains in his introduction, the story of Heer and Ranjha is not just a tale of ill-fated lovers; it is also about the journey of the soul in its quest for God.

In fact, the intense yearning of the two lovers can be explained by a deeper spiritual longing, a primordial desire to be united with our Source. Rumi speaks about this longing in the first part of the Mathnawi as the plaintive song of the reed flute lamenting its separation from the reed bed. Likewise, the profound longing to be united with another often carries with it more than just physical desire; it also carries the innate need to find our way back to our Source, which we try to find in our beloved.

And yet the physical longing of Heer and Ranjha for each other cannot be dismissed. In fact, on the Sufi path, Ishq-i-Mijazi, love for the physical, is often a stepping stone for Ishq-i-Haqiqi, love for the Divine. Contrary to what the orthodox would have us believe, these are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary expressions, Ishq-i-Mijazi being a powerful tool that can eventually lead to Ishq-i-Haqiqi. To quote Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, “To love another person is to see the face of God.”

Ai jogi naheen, roop hai Rab da (“He is not just a yogi; he is a form of God.”) says Heer when she sees Ranjha after their long period of separation. Even though she does not recognize his physical appearance anymore, there is something in her soul that does recognize the presence of the One in her beloved.

Pir-o-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan describes love as a fire. He compares the glow that rises from its flame to the wisdom that eventually rises from the devotion of the lover. For “In love,” he writes, “abides all knowledge.” It is this knowledge, these lessons on the spiritual path, that the Qisa i Heer Ranjha describes.

An example of futuwa, or the Sufi concept of chivalry, the Qisa i Heer Ranjha describes the unwavering faith of two lovers in the face of all adversity. Despite their separation, they hold steadfast to their belief in their love, and through their suffering are elevated to the status of sainthood.

The Ishq-i-Mijazi of Heer and Ranjha leads them to Ishq-i-Haqiqi because the lessons on the Sufi path are no different from the lessons imparted on the path of love.

Ranjha, Ranjha kaindi ni, main aap hi Ranjha hoi, says Heer (“I spoke Ranjha’s name so much, I became him.”). This is a line that recurs again and again in contemporary Punjabi music and poetry, not just because it shows the devotion of Heer, who can see no one but Ranjha when she is separated from him, but because it explains the age-old concept of fana—the annihilation of the self and the subsequent absorption in the object of one’s devotion.

This is the very idea that Zikr, or Sufi chanting, is based on. In Zikr, the attributes of the Divine are invoked in the hope that they will rub off on those chanting. So by repeating Ya Rahman, Ya Raheem, one is aspiring to develop the qualities of compassion and forgiveness just as, through the invocation of other Divine names, different qualities are being fostered.

Thus when Heer starts seeing herself as Ranjha, erasing all distinctions between the lover and the beloved, she has accomplished what Sufis spend their whole lives trying to do: she has emptied her self and become a reflection of her object of devotion.

Heer’s claim that she is no longer herself but Ranjha can be compared to the statement made by Rumi when he names one of his books the Diwan i Shams i Tabriz, or literally, the collection of poems by Shams of Tabriz. By signing his poetry with the name of Shams, he too is saying that despite his physical separation from Shams, their souls are one.

In the story of Yusuf and Zulekha, the only love story in the Holy Quran, Zulekha, is so enamored by Yusuf that, for decades, she sees nothing but him. Rumi explains how, “She loved him so much she concealed his name in many different phrases, the inner meanings known only to her … anything she praises, it’s Yusuf’s touch she means, any complaint, it’s his being away.”

“The miracle Jesus did by being the name of God, Zulekha felt in the name of Yusuf,” writes Rumi. “When one is united to the core of another, to speak of that is to breathe the name hu, empty of self and filled with love.”

So through a continual concentration on her object of devotion, Zulekha finds Yusuf within herself and is eventually united with him—just as Rumi sees Shams within himself, writing verses, and Heer sees Ranjha in her own tear-soaked eyes.

Another lesson on the Sufi path, concentration, is taught as the secret of every attainment in life. For it is through concentration, mystics believe, that they are able to achieve mastery over all things in the world. While many seekers struggle to center their mind on one object, holding the vision of the beloved is the most natural thing in the world for the lover. So as Heer is being carried away to another man in her palanquin, all she can see is Ranjha. And in his quest for his beloved, as Ranjha limps from one dusty village to another, he sees in every passerby the face of his beloved Heer.

Pir-o-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan once wrote that you cannot lose in love. If you master the situation, you are a master. If you lose everything, you are a saint. Heer and Ranjha did not win in the eyes of the world. But it was their courage, their conviction and their willingness to be burned by the fire of love that elevated them to the status of saints.

***

Nizam-un-Nisa Ayeda Naqvi has been a journalist by profession for seventeen years. She specializes in the fields of Sufism and interfaith issues and has a double Masters in Journalism and Near Eastern Studies from a joint New York University/Princeton University program. Currently she lives and works in Lahore, Pakistan, where she writes for numerous publications, leads spiritual retreats and teaches meditation.

And there is also on the island both a magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo and a notable temple which is adorned with many votive offerings and is spherical in shape. Furthermore, a city is there which is sacred to this god, and the majority of its inhabitants are players on the cithara; and these continually play on this instrument in the temple and sing hymns of praise to the god, glorifying his deeds.

Tesseract

The Hyperboreans also have a language, we are informed, which is peculiar to them, and are most friendly disposed towards the Greeks, and especially towards the Athenians and the Delians, who have inherited this good will from most ancient times. The myth also relates that certain Greeks visited the Hyperboreans and left behind them there costly votive offerings bearing inscriptions in Greek letters.* And in the same way Abaris,* a Hyperborean, came to Greece in ancient times and renewed the good will and kinship of his people to the Delians. They also say that the moon, as viewed from this island, appears to be but a little distance from the earth and to have upon it prominences, like those of the earth, which are visible to the eye. The account is also given that the god visits the island every nineteen years, the period in which the return of the stars to the same place in the heavens is accomplished; and for this reason the nineteen-year period is called by the Greeks the "year of Meton." At the time of this appearance of the god he both plays on the cithara and dances continuously the night through from the vernal equinox until the rising of the Pleiades, expressing in this manner his delight in his successes. And the kings of this city and the supervisors of the sacred precinct are called Boreadae, since they are descendants of Boreas, and the succession to these positions is always kept in their family.

____________

* Abaris is apparently a purely mythical figure, who in some authors sailed on his arrow, as on a witch's broomstick, through the air over rivers and trees. Diodorus of Siculus, Volume II, trans. C. H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), pp. 39-41.

Halloween is the survival of the ancient Celtic feast of Samhain (pronounced Sawin) that marked the midpoint between the summer and winter solstices. Our secular and capitalistic giving of candy for Trick or Treat dimly recognizes an archaic harvest festival's celebration of the sweetness of abundance. But these ancient festivals are not simply about fertility and a spooky day in which the ancestral dead visit us to join in the dance of life; they are performances of the mysteries of time and and a renewed awareness of the universe. This awareness is something we will need to recover if we are to have a planetary civilization that is no longer founded on greed and industrial values.

Thanks to the actions of "the little people" of cyanobacteria billions of years ago, we have a blue sky and are blessed, in some places, with a grand view of the stars. If we do not recover a sense of the sacred and a renewed awe of the cosmos—and thanks to the Hubble telescope and its gorgeous images, we are—we risk living on a smog-covered planet in which the stars are a myth, like Atlantis, that no serious global businessman believes in.

The ancient Greek-speaking cultural historian Diodorus of Siculus presents us with a vision of the Hyperboreans dancing with their god through the night at their temple. The windows of their ringed temple are to highlight the appearance of their gods on the horizon, and in particular the appearance of the Pleiades, which at the time of the feast of Samhain reaches its zenith, and at the time of the winter solstice appears just after dark, after the sun has set in the west in the window of one trilithon and the full moon has risen in the window of the trilithon to the east. The Hyperboreans' notable ringed temple is, most likely, Stonehenge.

The procession in the Grail Castle of the Fisher King before the silent Perceval has often baffled readers of the medieval classic, Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval ou le Conte du Graal.¹ (See Eric Rohmer's film, Perceval, of 1978 on Fox Lorber DVD to view a faithful rendering of the procession in the Grail Castle.) The lance with bleeding tip is a medieval Christianization of the shaft of light of the setting sun, the Celtic god Lugh. The demoiselle with the bright platter is the rising full moon. The two valets in the procession are the two stars, Atlas and Pleione, said by the Greeks to be the parents of the Seven Sisters. The candelabrum with several to ten stars is the constellation of the Pleiades. The Pleiades rise after dark at the winter solstice, and this bleak and barren time is the time of the Waste Land of Jesse Weston and T. S. Eliot's studies.²

This bleak time of the Waste Land was probably the time of human sacrifice to insure the rebirth of the sun and the return of spring. The numerous burials at Stonehenge are most likely the remains of all the kings of the year that had to die and enter the realm of the dead so that the new young king of the year could be wed to the feminine "Sovereign" of the land, who was an epiphany of the Great Goddess herself. These rituals are even more ancient than Stonehenge, Avebury, and Newgrange and go back to proto Indo-European rituals in Anatolia, and from there into Iran and India.³

The Celts were a warrior society like the Maya and like them they lived in a culture of perpetual conflict. Julius Caesar describes the Druids unsympathetically⁴, as an enemy would be expected to do, but to try to enter into the archaic mind of the Druid one can imagine that these wizards were using ritual to sublimate this violence to get the savage tribal peoples to look up at the stars and regain a sense of cosmic connection. With a belief in metempsychosis and with a more labile ego-formation that lived in a liminal world in which dreams were experienced also in the waking mind, death for an ancient Celt was most likely an easier crossing than for a modern Celt like Dylan Thomas who believed in raging against the dying of the light. Perhaps the Druids instituted human sacrifice as an inoculation of violence to keep the primitive tribes from the excesses we now see in the return of human sacrifice to modern society in terrorism, suicide bombers, gang violence, assassinations, our ritual-like fascination with celebrity death, and our unending gang and tribal wars funded by drugs and guns in Mexico, L.A., Columbia, Somalia, and Afghanistan.

Stonehenge

Chrétien de Troyes's medieval Grail Castle is an allusion to the ancient winter rituals of Stonehenge. The poet probably received his esoteric knowledge from his Welsh Celtic sources with their traditional Brythonic bardic recollections of ancient ritual.

Modern Sufis are in a good position to understand how such esoteric knowledge can be transmitted over centuries and millennia, for Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan told me years ago that their own esoteric traditions predate Islam and go back to ancient Egypt. And Sufis are also aware that when there is a break in the generations of cultural transmission, angels can step in to provide direct illumination to the poet. Because Chrétien de Troyes was closer to Welsh Celtic sources than many of his contemporary writers, his version is more archaic and filled with echoes of ancient Hyperborean rituals. The medieval Grail literature of the Cistercians in La Queste del Saint Graal, or of Robert de Boron in Le roman de l'histoire du Graal, was more heavily rationalized and turned myth into a conceptual Christian allegory. In the terms of my own theories of the evolution of consciousness, this shift from Gebser's Mythic structure to the Mental structure also expresses the shift from the Geometric to the Algebraic Mentality.⁵ As Eric Rohmer showed in his film version of 1978, the mythic is more to our contemporary taste.

* I am indebted to Karen at Oddity Journal for her wonderful image of the tesseract. See http://odditycollector.livejournal.com/173945.html

FOOTNOTES

1 Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval ou le conte du graal, Traduction inedité et presentation de Jean Dufournet (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), 196-201. See also Jean Maurice's  vade-mecum on Perceval ou le Conte du Graal, Chrétien de Troyes (Bordas/Sejer, 2004) where he states on page 28: "Le defilé du Graal est d'abord mis en rapport avec des mystères initiatiques liés à des cultes de la fecundité et de la végétation." For Stonehenge, see Lionel Sims, "The Truth about Stonehenge," TV Program, not yet published. See http://numoon.net/Soli-Luna/index.php?option=com_fireboard&Itemid=28&func=view&id=1&view=threaded&catid=4

2 See The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose, ed. Lawrence Rainey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), also Jesse Weston, From Ritual to Romance (New York: Doubleday, 1957).

3 See Calvert Watkins, "The Asamedha or Horse Sacrifice: an Indo-European Liturgical Form" in his How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 265-277.

4 Julius Caesar also says that the Druids wrote out their public messages in Greek letters but restricted their esoteric lore to oral teaching and memorization only. He also comments that the Druids in Celtic Gaul sent their disciples to Britania, where the teachings are said to have originated. It is not fanciful, I think, to look upon Stonehenge and the environs of Avebury and Glastonbury as the site of a Druid college with a focus on astronomical knowledge. See Caesar's Gallic War , an Interlinear Translation of the First Seven Books (New York, NY: David McKay, 1952), Liber VI, 13-16, 330-336. Since Druid lore was an oral tradition, the Welsh bards Chrétien de Troyes encountered would have been conversant with the lore and rituals of Stonehenge.

5 See William Irwin Thompson, "Artistic and Archetypal Mathematical Mentalities in the Evolution of Culture" in Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Culture (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2009), 35-50. For Jean Gebser, see Everpresent Origin (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1984).

On October 12th I had the pleasure of attending "The Promise of Judaism," a lively discussion between Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Rabbi David Ingber, Maggid Yitzhak Buxbaum, and Rabbi Yaakov Kellman, hosted by Pir Zia Inayat-Khan and moderated by Rabia Povich. This was the second in a series of dialogs exploring the focus area of Seven Pillars called Revelation.

Over the several hours of the panel we came to know the diverse personalities and approaches of our four guests, particularly their distinct range from the deeply mystical to the practical and pragmatic. Each guest displayed his own fresh sense of humor ("Are all rabbis comedians?" one quipped), a simple humility, and a bravely honest authenticity willing to face difficult questions.

To be fair, none of the speakers would have been present had they not been the kind of open-minded leader willing to show up in a Sufi community to share their religion. Unfortunately, of the many terrific female rabbis, none whom Seven Pillars contacted was available to attend this event. (As one of the rabbis pointed out, the women all have jobs—we're the schlumps who are out of work and free to attend gatherings like this.)

Our distinguished guests initially addressed the question, "What special wisdom does Judaism offer to the non-Jewish world?" Maggid (story teller, teacher) Yitzhak spoke of Judaism's twin gifts to the world of monotheism and humanism. Rabbi Rami spoke of the iconoclastic origin of Judaism, the smashing of idols, whatever they may be, an attitude that continues in new forms to this day. Rabbi David listed charity, ethics, the sacred space in time for Shabbat, and the ongoing learning and wrestling with ideas, meanings and ethics. Rabbi Yaakov lifted the focus by remarking that what Judaism offers includes all those things, and also transcends those things, offering an experience, a resonance, a light for humanity that may be experienced without narrowing it by words. Pir Zia pointed out that another contribution of Judaism is its introduction of "history" to world culture, replacing a more impersonal cyclic vision of time with a sense that people as a whole are part of an ongoing story that we constantly revisit and revise.

Indeed, Jews wrestle with the stories; as Rabbi David noted, they create verbal asanas with the text. The Jewish culture, starting with the Torah, encourages us to talk back to G-d, to wrestle with the angels, to question and explore the language and meaning down to each word. As one said, how could the words of G-d, who is infinite, have only one meaning? It is common practice to fill in the gaps in the traditional stories with explanations of why something may have been done or said, of what may have been the context. These stories are not seen as "true" so much as "possible." There is an enormous sense of freedom in the open-ended richness of these stories, which creates a field of ethical and aesthetic possibilities that is the antithesis of fundamentalism. Sometimes, as the collective morality of the people evolves, the leaders sense a shift in this field, leading to legal revisions in interpretation of laws similar to what happens in our Supreme Court. Virtually nothing is impossible; as it is said, "Where there's a rabbinic will, there's a rabbinic way."

This wrestling was made concrete when one member of the audience asked about how Judaism deals with suffering. The response led to discussion of the painful state of the relationship ofthe Jewish nation with Palestine. We all felt the difficulty, discomfort and struggle this critical issue stirs within the Jewish people. Rabbi Yaakov shared a heartfelt dialog that he recently had with his son serving in the Israeli Defense Forces on the West Bank, who called in distress about the degrading treatment of Palestinians that he had witnessed. Rabbi Yaakov counseled his son that he must remember where he is, but “you cannot take the image of G-d away from anyone.” All of the panelists agreed that there is great pain on both sides, everyone is wounded, and that we need to get above the politics and the hatred to begin a process of healing. We must recognize that every human is sacred, and strive to treat all beings ethically.

Judaism has grown and matured through its many thousands of years, and has been continually revising its view of our place in the world and of the ideal we know as G-d—once stern parent, later sensual lover, and ultimately the ineffable ground of being from which all life springs and through which we are all connected.

The Promise of Islam, the third in Seven Pillars series of dialogues on the Abrahamic traditions, will be held spring 2010. A dialogue on Christian Revelation was held spring 2008.

Ron Povich contributed to this blog post.

Solomon erected the first Temple on the Holy Mount. In Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg relates the circumstances:

Among the great achievements of Solomon first place must be assigned to the superb Temple built by him. He was long in doubt as to where he was to build it. A heavenly voice directed him to go to Mount Zion at night, to a field owned by two brothers jointly. One of the brothers was a bachelor and poor, the other was blessed both with wealth and a large family of children. It was harvesting time. Under cover of night, the poor brother kept adding to the other’s heap of grain, for, although he was poor, he thought his brother needed more on account of his large family. The rich brother, in the same clandestine way, added to the poor brother’s store, thinking that though he had a family to support, the other was without means. This field, Solomon concluded, which had called forth so remarkable a manifestation of brotherly love, was the best site for the temple, and he bought it.¹

This is an extraordinary story. And the story of the story is just as extraordinary.  Most of Ginzberg’s legends belong to the established canon of rabbinical lore known as the Talmud. This one does not. Its source is an oriental travelogue published by the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine in 1835. Lamartine, in turn, learned it from a Levantine Arab.  In other words, just as the brothers in the story shared their harvest, Muslims, Christians and Jews have shared the story of that sharing.

The moral of the story is clear. The sacredness of the Temple is in the sharing of it.

1. Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vol. 4, p. 154.

Every prophet is a mystic, but not every mystic is a prophet. The mystic ascends the cosmic mountain and descends with a secret. The prophet too ascends and descends the mountain. But what the prophet brings down is not a secret; it is a message.

The Qur’an affirms that God has sent prophets to all people (10:47) and calls for an impartial acceptance of them all (2:136). On this basis, Sufis have historically adopted a positive view of the prophetic sources of the religions they encountered. For instance, an 18^th-century Indian Naqshbandi shaykh wrote: “The Holy Qur’an says that there are some prophets about whom information has been imparted to you, while there are others about whom you have not been furnished any particular. Therefore, when the Holy Qur’an has preferred to remain silent about many, it is incumbent on us to adopt a liberal attitude with regard to the prophets of India.”¹

Although the history of Sufism affords many examples of noteworthy liberality, generally Sufis have not expressed their ecumenism in comprehensive, systematic terms. There are, however, significant exceptions. In the pre-modern period, one might cite Dara Shikuh, the Mughal crown prince who initiated a groundbreaking intellectual dialogue between Sufism and Vedanta.² In the modern period, Sufi ecumenism found a clear and cogent voice in Hazrat Inayat Khan—most notably in his Song of the Prophets.³

Many of the lectures that make up Song of the Prophets were originally delivered as sermons for a service known as Universal Worship, an interfaith ritual created by Hazrat and some of his leading followers in London in the aftermath of the First World War. The service involves prayers, the lighting of candles on an altar, and the reading of scriptures from each of the world’s great religious traditions.

Europe emerged from the Great War in a mood of profound self-criticism, its intelligentsia riveted by the idea of a crisis of civilization. A whole generation of young men had perished in the trenches, and with them seemed to die the infallible authority of rational progress and its major manifestations: materialist science, militant nationalism and imperialism. 

The moment was ripe for messianism, and indeed many of Hazrat’s leading followers were self-described messianists. They expected Hazrat to reveal himself as the prophet of a new religion. This he would not do. And yet, like them, he believed that a large-scale shift in consciousness, a “wave of illumination,” was imminent.

The shift that Hazrat envisioned was a move from religious exclusivism to a planetary perspective of the sacred. Hazrat asserts that what is needed in the present epoch is not a new religion, but “the religion.”  The religion is the sum of all religions. In the way that notes combine to form music or organs to form a body, the various religions of the world are parts of a single whole, the universal wisdom that belongs to all of humanity.

The first section of Song of the Prophets articulates Hazrat’s universal vision of religion. A brief but illuminating chapter is devoted to the various aspects of prayer: thanksgiving, repentance, supplication, invocation, and communion. The second section of the book concerns the God-Ideal, the divine image configured in the worshipper’s heart. Although this image is a product of the believer’s imagination, imagination proves to be a powerful and penetrating faculty of perception when the full force of the awakening heart is behind it. The third section deals with the Spiritual Hierarchy and includes several chapters describing the inner state of the soul of the prophet. The fourth and final section consists of sketches of the lives and teachings of Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Abraham, Moses, Zarathustra, Jesus, and Muhammad.

The Qur’an refers to Muhammad as “the seal of the prophets” (33:40). Most Muslims understand this to mean that there will be no prophets after him. The Sufis grant this, yet maintain that prophetic inspiration nonetheless continues, only under different designations. Ibn al-‘Arabi asserts that while legislative prophecy is finished, “general” prophecy survives. Rumi contends that, “the intrinsic meaning of prophetic inspiration is present even though it may not be called by that name.”⁴

As a Sufi, Hazrat was averse to talk of new prophets and new religions. Not all of his mystically minded contemporaries shared his reservations however. While Hazrat was giving the lectures compiled in Song of the Prophets, Annie Besant, the president of the Theosophical Society, was preparing Jiddu Krishnamurti to become the prophet of the age, the “World-Teacher.”

In 1929 Krishnamurti formally renounced the assignment that had been imposed on him. Thus ended Theosophy’s messianic dream. Or did it? In 1933, the year of Besant’s death, the Irish poet and Theosophist A.E. (George Russell) published a remarkable novel entitled The Avatars: A Futurist Fantasy. The novel concerns the advent of two prophetic figures (Avatars) and the whorl of spiritual speculation that follows in their wake.

The difference between Besant’s messianism and A.E.’s is a difference between prose and poetry, or between doctrine and myth. A.E.’s Avatars have no institutional backing. Wild and free, their footsteps hardly seem to touch the ground.

The book’s protagonists are a group of “spiritual anarchists, pagan poets and vagabond idealists” who have fled the city and formed a loose-knit utopia in the hills. (Hakim Bey’s idea of the TAZ, or temporary autonomous zone, comes to mind.) The substance of the novel is made up of the esoteric musings of these good-natured bohemians.  

Entering A.E.’s world is like walking into a Nicholas Roerich painting. Numinous lights gleam through amethyst landscapes, the earth breath visibly rising in “serrations of flame about the sacred mountain.” The animate Earth, “unfallen nature,” is the living ground upon which all action occurs.

In truth, there is little action in this dreamlike novel. The plot is driven largely by rumored sightings of the two Avatars of the title, the queen-like Aoife and the Fairy Fiddler Aodh.  In the end, the book resolves itself into a Socratic dialogue on the meaning of their advent. Did they come to demonstrate freedom, to reveal the music in the nature of things, to teach men and women true companionship? No answer can be definitive, as the Avatars left no gospel behind. “Whatever has been told about them, all that is wonderful, has come from vision or intuition of the onlooker.”

In the preface, A.E. complains, “I have, I fear, delayed too long the writing of this, for as I grow old the moon of fantasy begins to set confusedly with me. The Avatars has not the spiritual gaiety I desired for it.” This self-deprecating appraisal may be part of the reason A.E.’s visionary masterpiece has languished in neglect until now. Coracle Press is to be heartily commended for bringing The Avatars back into the light of day.

In ancient times, the prophet was conceived as an interlocutor with angels. The Ptolemaic universe was populated with multitudinous celestial intelligences, each star the body of an angelic light. For the modern imagination, the night sky harbors a different mystery: not angels, but aliens. As Jung recognized, the flying saucer is the great mythic image of our time.

In The Book from the Sky, the acclaimed poet (and friend of Seven Pillars) Robert Kelly explores the messianic possibilities that might follow from an alien abduction. Young Billy is carried off in a flying saucer and surgically cleaved in two, one half of his divided self restored to Earth and the other educated on a distant planet. Years later the latter half, now known as Brother William, returns as an emissary of the Superior Race, “to save Earth and its people from the overweening Public Dream of the Americans, the unconscious imperial impulse.”

Brother William’s gospel, A Book from the Sky, consists of a series of enigmatic aphorisms after the fashion of Heraclitus’s fragments. Each aphorism begins with the quaint endearment “Darling.” The revelatory source of these sayings is apparently the sky itself. Sky gazing was part of Billy’s off-world Inner Education. In the person of Brother William, he instructs his followers in the practice of “sky licking,” which involves looking at the sky while massaging the roof of the mouth with the tip of the tongue.

Robert Kelly’s novel is funny, tender and wise, as is the space-age gospel it contains. Brother William’s aphorisms reward contemplation. Here is one you might try: 

“Darling, what we give each other comes from nowhere, and the more we give, the more nowhere floods into somewhere. When we have given everything away, the world is complete.”

Consider a small town in which everyone has a house and a garden, and all the houses are clustered into small neighborhoods separated by hedges. People are aware that they are in a town but it serves more as a backdrop to their everyday lives than as a true community. Everyone is busy attending to their own affairs, their own gardens, and their own homes, with some attention left over for their immediate neighbors.

But then one day a discovery is made. There are underground wires running between all the houses, and not just the ones in a particular neighborhood cluster. The whole town seems to be interconnected in ways no one had suspected. Furthermore, these wires are attached to a peculiar instrument that had always been in the house but which had not seemed to do anything, so folks had just been ignoring it. Searching about, they found old dusty manuals that suggested that these devices, called “telephones,” could be used to talk over a distance across the hedges to people in other houses, even people in neighborhoods on the far side of town. Suddenly the sense of being part of a whole town became much more real.

Unfortunately, they also discovered that many of the wires had been broken by the digging and plowing that people had been doing in their fields and around their homes. If we really want to have a whole town, the people said to each other, we need to fix these connections so we can talk to each other. And this is what they did.

However, they discovered even this was not enough. Interconnected though they might be, and though they were now communicating and aware of each other in new ways, they began to realize that to truly be a town they had to build it together. Communication by itself was not sufficient for community. A level of mutual participation, caring, and co-creativity was also required. For the town was more than just a collection of houses and neighborhoods; it was a collaborative creation, a shared consciousness and identity.

A few weeks ago I took part in the annual Lindisfarne Fellows gathering. The Lindisfarne Association is a gathering of scientists, economists, business people, contemplatives and mystics, artists, political activists, and educators all of whom are working at the cutting edge of cultural transformation. Since its founding in 1974, it has been at the forefront of work being done in a number of fields to foster and promote a worldview that is holistic, ecological and based on the interaction of complex, dynamical systems. In the language of my parable, these are people who have been actively rediscovering the buried wiring between the houses and the neighborhoods and promoting the idea that we are all living in one interconnected town. Along with many other groups and individuals over the past forty years, they have helped make this idea commonplace in our society, even if its implications and potentials have not been fully understood or implemented yet.

Many of the Fellows are now in their late fifties, sixties or seventies, although new, younger people have been invited to join, and there is much talk about passing on the torch. The holistic worldview—or what Lindisfarne would call the “Gaian worldview”—while widely accepted, is still not yet the foundation for decision-making in the halls of government and business, though the trend is in that direction. So there is much work still to be done. But the most important work from my point of view is not merely in establishing for good and all that we live in a holistic world in which all of life (all the neighborhoods) is interdependent and interconnected in profound and complex ways. Having established that we are, in fact, citizens of a township called Gaia or Earth, the next great task is to learn how to be participants, collaborators and co-creators with the other neighborhoods that make up this world, and in the process to fix the connections that our human activities, particularly in recent years, have allowed to become broken.

For make no bones about it, we live in a broken world, though one that I feel can be repaired. The connections between parts of ourselves—between ourselves and others (particularly those different racially, ethnically, politically, economically or culturally from ourselves), between ourselves and the kingdoms of nature, and between ourselves as physical beings and the subtle or non-physical realms of life and intelligence—are nowhere near as healthy, whole, or vital as they could be. Much of the “wiring” has been buried and forgotten or outright broken, leaving us struggling within a fragmented—and fragmenting—consciousness of the world.

This to me is a huge issue, and it is not solved simply by accepting and believing in a holistic paradigm. It is solved by collaborative mind and action, reaching out across our boundaries to create wholeness through, at the very least, the use of love, caring, and appreciation. It is also helped by developing an appreciation for the many ways in which we are connected and the nature of some of the “subtle” wiring that we’ve overlooked for decades in our technological and materialistic culture. That is a topic, Subtle Activism, which I want to explore in future David’s Desks.

I suppose my summer thought then is that as challenging as the work has been over the past five decades for thousands of people to articulate and foster a holistic, ecological worldview—a worldview that has yet to be fully accepted—the real work, the “town-building” work, is yet ahead of us. If the holistic paradigm has asked us to revision and redefine the nature of the world around us, the next step asks us to revision and redefine ourselves in co-creative and participatory relationship to that world. It means accepting levels of both surrender and openness on the one hand and power and capacity on the other, with which we may feel uncomfortable and unfamiliar. It asks us to step up as partners to the world, learning to “think like a planet.”

Summer Book and Website Recommendations

I feel that these books and organizations contribute to the work of understanding and building our planetary township; and then there are some recommendations purely for fun.

Books:

• Extraordinary Knowing, by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer: an extraordinary look at some of the hidden wiring of the human mind.
• Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry, by Arthur Zajonc: a quantum physicist with a long background in spiritual and contemplative practice explores a way of developing deep insight into the world that comes closest to my own training of anything I’ve read.
• The Three Only Things, by Robert Moss: an excellent introduction to our inner capacities.
• Signs, by Robert Perry: a groundbreaking and truly innovative approach to coincidence, synchronicity and guidance; an outstanding book.

Websites:

• http://www.f4hs.org/ and http://www.williambloom.com/index.php These are the websites of Dr. William Bloom, one of the foremost teachers and proponents of holistic spirituality in the world, and, I’m pleased to say, a good friend and colleague. I often use his books as texts in my classes and highly recommend his websites.
• http://www.lindisfarne-association.org/ If you’re interested in knowing more about the Lindisfarne Association, this is the place to start. Don’t be put off by its bare-bones appearance; it’s merely a portal site. From it you can go to William Irwin Thompson’s site; Bill is the founder of the Association and here you will find information on its history and work. From the portal site, you can also explore websites of many of the Fellows.

For Summer Fun:

• GAMES: I am a passionate board game player, designer and collector, and even earned a living for a short time as a freelance designer. I would like to recommend here a board game called PANDEMIC from Z-Man Games (http://www.zmangames.com/). A scary topic; this is a cooperative game in which you play as part of a team of specialists trying to prevent pandemics from wiping out humanity. Designed for anywhere from one to four players, it’s a devilishly hard game to win but a lot of fun—and it plays in a very short time, some games ending after twenty minutes or so. It is suspenseful, and victory absolutely depends on all the players cooperating and helping each other. I love it! Finding cures for all the diseases and healing the world brings a wonderful rush of pleasure, and if you fail…well, it’s just a game and you can play again. Too bad real life isn’t so forgiving.
• FICTION: If you love modern fantasy novels, you should give yourself the treat of discovering and reading the Harry Dresden Files by author Jim Butcher, a growing collection of novels about Chicago’s only openly practicing wizard. The first book is Storm Front. Written in a very funny but suspenseful noir style, these make for perfect summer reading. Nothing enlightening here (though Butcher’s insights into the operation of magic are pretty good in my view), just pure entertainment. Enjoy!

The resurrected chivalry of the 21^st century cannot, and must not, replicate the long-dead chivalry of the Middle Ages. Yet it belongs to the same tradition of heroic idealism.

In his magisterial study of medieval knighthood, the French historian Leon Gautier distills the essence of 12^th-century chivalry in the form of ten “Commandments”:

1. Thou shalt believe in all that the Church teaches, and shalt observe all its directions.
2. Thou shalt defend the Church.
3. Thou shalt respect all weaknesses, and shalt constitute thyself the defender of them.
4. Thou shalt love the country in which thou wast born.
5. Thou shalt not recoil before thine enemy.
6. Thou shalt make war against the Infidel without cessation, and without mercy.
7. Thou shalt perform scrupulously thy feudal duties, if they be not contrary to the laws of God.
8. Thou shalt never lie, and shalt remain faithful to thy pledged word.
9. Thou shalt be generous, and give largesseto everyone.
10. Thou shalt be everywhere and always the champion of the Right and the Good against Injustice and Evil.

There is much in these admonitions that still inspires. But there are also problems, serious problems. What might a contemporary interspiritual expression of this code look like? Perhaps some slight adjustments are all that is required. Here is a proposal:

1. Thou shalt honor the revelations of all of the Prophets.
2. Thou shalt defend what is sacred.
3. Thou shalt respect interdependence, and shalt constitute thyself the defender of all in need.
4. Thou shalt love the Earth on which thou wast born.
5. Thou shalt not recoil before intimidation.
6. Thou shalt challenge Tyranny without cessation.
7. Thou shalt perform scrupulously thy duties toward all, if they be not contrary to Divine Wisdom.
8. Thou shalt never lie, and shalt remain faithful to thy pledged word.
9. Thou shalt be generous, and give largesse to everyone.
10. Thou shalt be everywhere and always the champion of the Right and the Good against Injustice and Evil.

Leon Gautier, Chivalry (New York: Crescent Books, 1989).

Listen, O dearly beloved!
I am the reality of the world...
If then you perceive me, you perceive yourself...
It is through my eyes that you see me and see yourself...

Love me love me alone
Love yourself in me, in me alone.
Attach yourself to me.
No one is more inward that I.
Others love you for their own sakes,
I love you for yourself.
And you, you flee from me...

I am nearer to you than yourself,
Than your soul, than your breath,
who among creatures
would treat you as I do?
I am jealous of you over you,
I want you to belong to no other,
Not even to yourself.
Be mine, be for me as you are in me,
though your are not even aware of it.

Dearly beloved!
Let us go toward Union
And if we find the road
that leads to separation,
We will destroy separation.
Let us go hand in hand.
Let us enter the presence of Truth.
Let it be our judge
And imprint its seal upon our union
Forever.

--Alone with the Alone, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn'Arabi, Part 1, chapter II ("The Creative Feminine, Sophiology and Devotio Sympathetica"), by Henry Corbin, pages 174-175, citation 72

By Tracy Harrington

Epiphany

by Angela Manno

Out of the depths I cry unto you,
Oh Presence, Maker of this perfect world
Out of this silence but for my own breath

Out of the darkness and weightlessness
The black infinite night
Encrusted with countless stars, cool, distant, white.

I turn my gaze hesitatingly, not ready fully to take in
The Spectacle below:

A slow procession of green and earthen landmasses
Mountains undulating
Grazed by gentle, drifting clouds
A miraculous harmony of soft and brilliant hues
Vast oceans
Shining with sunlight

From a well of tears
Come flooding . . . a sense of Being,
Connection, and yes Love
It’s all alive, life within Life.

Garden of Eden
Suspended in space,
Nothing holding it up
No fulcrum upon which it spins

But wait . . .
Two new continents have come into view
and now, suddenly
the other side of the world is before me!

I must think:
Have I some special right to gaze upon such Beauty,
The living host of all we know: all of history and music and poetry
and art and birth and death and love and tears?

What have I done to merit this moment?
This glimpse of Divinity,
Devastating Beauty,
Mother of us all?

Though I float miles above,
I am a part of that Life,
Tied to her through her breath
Which I take with me
In a tank on my back

I am afloat in the infinite sea
My heart races
There is no up or down . . .

But there is worship
There is the bursting of my heart
There is the cry from the most profound depths:

See where you live, Humanity!
See your own Self!
This tiny, miraculous island of life
Adrift in the vast cosmos

We are so alone, so fragile.
There is nothing more glorious

So said the Saint:

“Because the divine could not image itself forth in any one being, it created the great diversity of things so that what was lacking in one would be supplied by the others and the whole universe together would participate in and manifest the divine more than any single being.”

And the writer of Hindu texts: “I am Beauty among beautiful things.”

For all eternity there is but one Earth.
I will tell them, I will make them understand. . . .

Plunging back into you in a ball of fire,
I will not forget your face,
I will remember you, Jewel of the Universe,
Most Holy Ground, Home.

I ask it/him a question about why I do not need to do something – something collective, prove something - and it answers: "Because you have me." Then I ask: "Can you speak as a woman?" It answers that it can, and proceeds to do so, but the voice is so soft and gentle that I can barely hear it.

It/she says something about women and short stories. Then it returns to being masculine. It tells me bluntly and directly things about myself which are rather difficult to hear, but I listen standing my ground (swimming my ground) with my head held high, almost ceremonially, without getting my feelings hurt, able to receive the knowledge. This is a good thing. I then try to see me as the river sees me. I close my eyes, and am able to see what the River sees.It's a good exchange between us.

Then I'm in the water and there are drops of water from above, rain & like a gentle waterfall at the same time, and I stand under this with my arms outstretched, receiving the water. Then the river tells me that this is alchemical/esoteric knowledge.

I'm lifting logs over the heads of other people.  I help Z___ with a log.  [Z__ is person who designed and outlined the drawing for our neighborhood street intersection but I only remember his name began with a Z].  Someone is speaking to someone else; they start arguing.  He is saying, "you need to look into my eyes to really be contacting me."  The guy is really getting agitated and angry.  Everyone stops working.  I am thinking "bullshit" and keep working.  Z__ says, "stop, everyone sit down.  You don't understand, except maybe, her."  He nods to me.  "What is your name?, he asks.  I answer "Vadan."  And he asks, "What does that mean?"  I answer "the divine symphony."

I WAKE UP.  Immediately, this paragraph by Inayat Khan in The Art of Personality, page 199 comes to my waking mind:

In the orchestra there is a conductor and there are many who play the music; and every player of an instrument has to fulfil his part in the performance.  If he does not do it rightly, it is his fault.  The conductor will not listen if he says he did not do it properly because he was sad or because he was too glad.  The conductor of the orchestra is not concerned with his sadness or his gladness.  He is concerned with the part that the particular musician must play in the whole symphony.  This is the nature of our lives. The further we advance in our part in this orchestra, the more efficiently we perform our part in life's symphony.  In order to be able to have this control over oneself, what is necessary?  We must have control over our inner self, because every outward manifestation is nothing but a reaction of the inner condition.  Therefore, the first control that one has to gain is over one's own self, one's inner self, which is done by strengthening the will, and also by understanding life better.