Stories for a Living Future

My own story has been a journey of love. Sitting at the feet of my teacher I experienced a love that was all-embracing, and which took me on its path, back to the Beloved and also into life. Half a century later a new quality of love has emerged, simple and most ordinary, a living light in the web of creation which stretches to the stars and beyond. And because love belongs to oneness, I know that this love is found within the heart and within the cells of everything that exists as well as the primal emptiness I experience in deep meditation. It is my own story and also my gift to life, to the Earth, to the heart of the world.

Transcript

Transkript in Deutsch

In these podcasts I have woven together my own story with that of the Earth, Her distant past and possible future. I have shared my visions and dreams, as well as a sadness for what is being lost, a sacred story forgotten, and a way to find a thread to a living future, when once again we might hear the song of the heart of the world. Now, as Spring turns to Summer out here on the coast, and the coyotes I often encounter on my morning walk have four young cubs, I want to tell how my own story has been about love, the love that makes the stars to sing and is the thread that holds us all together.

Since I first experienced the piercing blue eyes of my teacher, I have been taken on love’s journey. This love that is given freely from heart to heart, from soul to soul, took me along the ancient path of the dervish, deep into the inner worlds, beyond time and space, and also into life, its vibrance, beauty, and sorrow. My own individual story is bonded together with the story of this Sufi path, but it is also a story of my own offering to life and to the Earth, what I can pass on as a seed for a living future. For just as we can only live our own destiny—what has been written in the book of life—so we can only give our own story, our laughter, our tears, the love that has been awakened within our heart.

Many years ago, in my early thirties, I spent seven years journeying in the archetypal worlds—that inner dimension of our collective psyche that used to be the domain of the gods and goddesses, and where the stories of our individual and collective destiny are written.¹ The great beings whose forces underlie creation² told me their stories—the sacred feminine hardly able to see through her tears from the abuse of the masculine; Kronos, Lord of Time, told me how our present image of time as solely a succession of minutes, hours, days had robbed him of the sacred rhythms of nature and the timeless dimension of the soul. I was also told of the importance of our own individual story, and how it can be an offering to life, to the Earth, to the Beloved:

Wait till you feel your own story like a dream, like a possibility, and then give it to the Earth as an offering. Give your own story to the Earth as an offering, full of meaning, full of possibilities, and full of the song of the soul, that ancient song, so ancient it was born before the beginning and yet also knows the meaning of time.

The Earth has been so much cut up that it needs again to know wholeness, to be given wholeness as a gift. What you can offer is your own story which is your own wholeness, the essence of your becoming, to give that as a seed to the heart of the world. It has been given to you and so you give it, you pass it on, your own story, the essence of your own unfolding. Each moment we expect something to happen and so we do not give ourselves, not realizing that this gift is the happening. When we give ourselves to life, life is impregnated with the future. Life is longing to be opened, to be made holy, to be redeemed from so much materialism. And remember this is only the beginning, this opening to a different dimension of being.

You have arrived. There is nowhere else to go. You are where you ought to be. There is no future and no past in this moment. But you make it holy through giving yourself.

Just give the seed of your own story to life; open it with love and life will respond. Life will take your seed and place it in the heart of the world, where it will keep alive the fire that burns there, that burns in the heart of the world. That is your offering. That is all that you can ever give. Slowly the world will start to spin on a new axis of love.

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MY OWN STORY: A RETURN TO LOVE

I grew up in a home where love was absent. I don’t think that my parents ever knew about love, and I never heard the words “I love you.” For ten years I was sent to boarding school and when I first arrived as a seven-year-old I remember boys in their beds crying themselves to sleep from homesickness, but I did not know what they were crying about. At school the prescription for well-being was cold baths and endless cross-country runs in muddy boots. Affection or care were not words or actions I encountered.

Then when I was twenty, I experienced love in a small room in North London, sitting at the feet of an elderly Russian woman with piercing blue eyes, who had just returned from India where she had been trained by a Sufi master. But this was not a love born from the tangle of human relationships, caught in patterns of codependency or sexual desire. This love was free and all-embracing, touching the cells of the body as well as the soul. It spoke of a Truth that cannot be named and a way to walk towards this Truth, to travel the ancient path of the mystic. And so this room became my home, our weekly meetings the only sustenance I craved. And slowly I learned about love, as a feeling, an energy, a longing to find what I saw reflected in my teacher’s eyes.

Love gradually became part of my life. Like an invisible scent, a perfume from a hidden garden, it began to permeate me, and in one of the greatest mysteries that can happen to a human being, my heart woke up—that spiritual organ of divine perception that is the direct connection with the Source of love, what the Sufis call the Beloved. And so I fell in love, in love with the Beloved and also with the woman who was to become my wife, because this love was both human and divine, both erotic and intangible. But it was real, as real as the light I saw in my children’s eyes after they were born, as real as their laughter and tears. It was a love that took me into life, even as it opened me in deep meditation, gave me access to realities beyond the mind.

Then years later, when my children were already at school, I was asked to follow in the tradition of my teacher, and teach this ancient mystical path of love. I learned how the transmission given through the grace of the tradition spins the heart and awakens the wayfarer to the connection between the ego and the soul. And I learned how love is given, effortlessly, the love that is needed to take the wayfarer Home, back to the Beloved. It is very simple, this flow of love from heart to heart, from soul to soul, even as it is one of the greatest mysteries. And it is needed, for without this love there can be no journey, no lover’s embrace.

I have written books about this love, about the Sufi tradition of love and longing, those two sides of love, and how it tears the heart even as it awakens the soul. How it is the magnet towards which we are drawn, the wine whose single sip we crave. Now I will just say that it is real, and it is given through the grace of the teacher. Sometimes it was given to an individual sitting in front of me, what is called tawajjuh, a spiritual transmission. Or at a group meeting, even a seminar of three hundred people, it would flow to all those present, reminding them of their true nature, of the greater love to which we all belong.

Sometimes giving this love was intoxicating, sometimes draining. After twenty years of this work I was exhausted, until, as I have shared, I was awakened to an inner dimension of pure love, what I have called a landscape of love, where there were rivers of light. This was a place where love is, and I would be present in this landscape, knowing nothing except the truth of its presence. But at the same time, even as I became aware of the immensity of this love, and how it is our divine heritage, I was forced to recognize how few people wanted it for its true nature. Many of those who sat with me wanted a more personal love, one that offered comfort or understanding, even a relationship. They liked the feeling of love, but were not fully open to its demands. It was given for the sake of Truth, but used for so many other purposes, how it often filled an emptiness in their lives, healed their wounds. And this saddened me, as seeing those who mistake a small pond for the ocean. But because an essential nature of this love is freedom, I just watched this endless drama of love unfold. I watched how people were satisfied with the crumbs from the table of love.

But once again I became exhausted, and something in me withdrew. Finally I finished teaching, gave my last lectures, closed my meditation group, passed the transmission onto my son. I preferred to be in nature, which more honestly expresses the wonder of divine love and unity. The coyote on the trail, the hummingbird drinking nectar in my garden, the daffodils I planted opening yellow in the early Spring, were all true to their essential nature, were love incarnate. And this is where I remained for many years, living mostly in seclusion and prayer, far from the confusion of human relationships and the misunderstandings of a love that is given freely.

My own journey continued, as I have documented in these stories. I watched the tide rise and fall many times, heard the winter storms batter the roof in the night. The newborn still-speckled fawns eating the grass in my garden have become my friends, the chipmunks scurrying for seeds dropped from the birdfeeder my companions. And inwardly I watched the world turn, patterns of darkness arise on the horizons and then come into play causing endless suffering. Meanwhile my heart began to turn with the stars, with the inner constellations as well as the presence of the masters of the path who have walked before us. Angels and devas spoke to me more than people.

Love was always present, but no longer pressing. Often my heart cried and I tried to love our suffering Earth, to hold it in prayer. But I understood less and less of the ways of the world, of its patterns of distraction, its desires and addictions, the toxic world of social media and the false promises of AI. But then, as if from beyond the stars, from where Atman and Brahman meet, a thread of love returned. The simple love that links us to each other and to the Earth. It came like a light in the heart. This was not the love whose purpose was to carry the imprint of Truth, but maybe just the love I never knew as a child. It is a love that wants nothing for itself, but is like a dewdrop on an early Summer’s morning. And so I watch this love, as one would watch a newborn, with wonder and stillness. Love is such a mystery, is the greatest mystery. It comes from far beyond the mind and senses into our heart and our lives. It speaks of what it really means to be alive, to watch the in-breath and the out-breath. It is the core of all that exists, even as it reaches to the stars.

I am no longer searching for anything, except maybe an understanding of why I am still here. As my previous writings hint, I am too exhausted, battered by years of giving of my own essence, to do more than go for my early morning walk and enjoy the lunch my wife cooks. My work is done and there is little left in me to engage, my consciousness has wandered too far into other worlds. I have lost the language of today and prefer silence and prayer. But I wonder if this love has a message, a calling to return to what is simply human, that sweetness that was before honey or bee. Love is the simplest, most direct connection, to each other, to the Earth, and to the Beloved. It should be tasted with our mother’s milk and sensed in our earliest relationship to the natural world around. It is in the dawn chorus and the first green shoots of Spring. It is watching a tomato ripen and tasting a freshly picked berry. It is the world our ancestors inhabited, still present in landscapes that have not been lost or polluted. It is pushing a swing in the playground and bedtime stories, and those simple words “I love you.”

Maybe there is a reason that I began this life with a blank page so that I could experience this central human quality without prejudice or preconceptions. Love is free, it cannot be bought and sold, as in the lyrics “money can’t buy you love,” even though many try to package and promote it. It does not belong to our world of time, as Rumi simply expresses, “step out of the circle of time and into the circle of love.” This is why when you fall in love it is always forever, even if it lasts just a month. And as the great Sufi Dhu’l Nun recounts when, standing on the shore, he was told by a woman, “love has no end because the Beloved has no end.”

Love, human and divine, has been central to my own life story, in particular what I have called “The Bond with the Beloved,” the link of love that is found within the heart and within the cells of everything that exists. It connects us all together in a living unity of divine love, what the Sufis call the unity of being. And yet it is also very individual, speaking to each of us in our own way.³ And for me it has now returned, or reemerged, as a simple spark within the heart. Maybe this is where my story will come to an end, with what is simple, human, and most ordinary, even as it contains the greatest mystery in creation.

And what is most simple and ordinary is a living light in the web of creation which stretches to the stars and beyond. From the unborn and undying emptiness first light is born, the pure light of the Logos principle, known to the Sufis as the Muhammadan Light, or al-Nur al-Muhammadi. And with this light of pure intention comes love, because it is love that binds the worlds together, linking all of creation—its distant galaxies and falling leaves—directly with the Creator in the mystery of divine revelation, the self-disclosure of God. Here, in this world, the web of life, with its interconnected, interdependent patterns, is mirrored in the web of light and love, which holds the spiritual purpose of everything that is created.

In a human being this light and love is imprinted into the unborn embryo of the child, its first spiritual heartbeat. And for each of us life’s journey is to live this light, this love, to stay true to its original impression, our first heartbeat. How to make this journey was explained in the “Original Instructions”—now mostly forgotten—how to live in praise and thanksgiving.⁴ For some this love is hidden, as it was in the first years of my own life. For others it is more visible, and can help them to find their way, attract them to others with whom their heart resonates. It may draw them into service or towards spiritual practice, or even be bright enough to help others to recognize their own light. It can grow, shine more brightly, or become covered over, become less visible.⁵ But it remains in the core of our being, until one day we pass on to the further shore where our spiritual twin is waiting, and then into that Greater Love which embraces us. Mostly we forget, caught in life’s many illusions and distractions, but this principle purpose remains, and the rest of our life is mainly just shadows passing on the surface of the water. This light and love contain the song of our soul, and our true contribution to the whole of life, our note in life’s symphony.

I have seen my twin waiting on a further shore and sense that my life’s journey is coming to an end.⁶ And so I return to this simple light, this love that is life’s greatest gift. I can sense it in my love for the Earth, especially as I witness Her suffering, and in my love for the Beloved, awakened at the feet of my teacher. With the single eye of the heart I have watched my children and grandchildren grow even as I have looked inward into a love and light that is vast and undefined. But love itself remains a simple feeling, and as the Sufi says “the heart alone knows what the substance of love is.”

I have tried to live this love I have been given. Love’s longing helped me find my way towards Truth, and its light maybe helped guide others on their way. With this love I have been able to see the colors of creation, glimpse the wonder of a red-tailed falcon or smelt the fragrance of the honeysuckle climbing the fence. I have felt the simple mystery of the connection between people, a quality of closeness and tenderness not known in my own childhood. And because love belongs to oneness, I know that the love I feel belongs to all that exists as well as the primal emptiness I experience in deep meditation. The spark I was given as a gift before I was born has told me its story, how in love there are never “two,” but “lover, Beloved, and love are one.”⁷

©2024 The Golden Sufi Center, www.goldensufi.org