A Story of Beginnings: Memories of Magic and Wonder by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

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  • A child walks in front of a damaged school in the city of Zhytomyr, in northern Ukraine (March 23, 2022)
    Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images: A child walks in front of a damaged school, Zhytomyr, Ukraine (March 23, 2022).

NEW Life Amidst the Ruins: Stories for a Living Future

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, April 2022

I would like to tell a story about the end of the world. Not the end of the world as we know it, a world of supermarkets and cars, of airplane travel and pizzas. But the end of a light that has sustained humanity for millennia… Read More

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    © Diane Barker

A Story of Beginnings: Memories of Magic and Wonder

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, November 2021

What are the seeds we need for a new story to come fully alive? Returning to a deep ecology of consciousness we can rediscover the magical awareness that belongs to our essential relationship with the living Earth. Read More

  • © Sarah Killingsworth

NEW Watching River Otters

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, February 2022

First published by Kosmos

Walking in the wetlands I encounter a family of river otters playing in the water, then sliding their sleek bodies onto the land, they tumble over each other in the sand, as a blue heron watches nearby. In their primal world there is neither truth nor falsehood, just life present, unfractured. Once, long ago, we walked in this landscape, were part of this ecology of place... Read More

Fire Season

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, August 2021

First published by Parabola

We waited through the Winter of the pandemic, wearing masks, hiding from our darker fears. And then Spring came—apple blossom pink, pear blossom white. The wisteria falling lavender-blue over the garden shed, and then the jasmine, a wall of bright white, filling the evening air with sweetness. Here was another story, each year returning, and longed for as the garden comes alive with colors and fragrance… Read More

Blood Moon In Early Summer

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, June 2021

First published by Resilience

Sometimes at night when sleep escapes me I walk along the road beside the bay. The cars are long gone, and there is only the sound of the wind and the egrets squawking in the nearby wetlands. Early this morning I encountered a family of deer watching me in the long grass, before they vanished into the silence. Then I found the blood moon eclipsed through the trees, an elemental mystery that reaches deep into our ancestral memories, before our consciousness was obscured by science and reason. Read More

A Letter to My Granddaughter

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, March 2021

First published by Dumbo Feather magazine in Australia

What is the world into which you are walking, and what is the landscape you will pass on to your children and grandchildren? Will it be alive with the truth of the Earth or the false promises of technology, the distortions of social media? What are the stories that will guide you, the communities that will support you?  Read More

The Natural Order Of Things

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, July 2020

First published in Parabola

The present pandemic, which in a few short months has wreaked havoc across our world, is most likely caused by an imbalance in the natural world, as loss of habitat and biodiversity is not only driving animals to extinction but directly causing animal viruses to spread to humans. In response our leaders are using the images of conflict: “We are at war with Covid 19,” we keep hearing; it is an “invisible enemy” we need to “vanquish.” But although this virus is disrupting our lives, causing sickness, death, and economic breakdown, it is itself a completely natural phenomenon, a living thing reproducing itself in the way nature intended. Are these images of conflict and conquest appropriate or even helpful? Do they help us to understand and to respond, to bring our world back into balance?  Read More

When The Source Ran Free: A Story For The Present Time

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, May 2020

First published in Parabola

Watching the sun rise over the wetlands, the mist fading, even here in the midst of nature there is the strange stillness of a world in lockdown—waiting, wondering, anxiety, and fear its companions. I am writing these words in the time of the great pandemic, when for a few brief months our world slowed down and almost stopped; when as the stillness grew around us there was a moment to hear another song, not one of cars and commerce, but belonging to the seed of a future our hearts need to hear.  Read More

Living the Moment of Love

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee February 2019

First published in Parabola

“With an open heart we can see and sense the sacred nature of all of life.”

A simple and essential spiritual truth teaches that only being awake in the moment is real. Only then can the strawberry be tasted in its full sweetness, the plum blossom be seen in its fragile beauty, without memory or preconception. This is the Zen moment of satori, when we are fully present in the experience, in life, as it is. It is a moment “in and out of time,” which we usually glimpse only for an instant before the thoughts and the patterns of our consciousness cloud over our eyes.  Read More

Including the Earth in Our Prayers: Spiritual Practice as a Catalyst for Change

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, October 2019

First published in Kosmos Journal

We are living in a time of fundamental change, a period of increasing divisiveness, tribalism, isolationism, even as a global consciousness of oneness struggles to be born. Surrounded by accelerating ecological devastation, climate change, loss of species, many of us—and especially young people—are awakening to the need to respond, to care for climate justice and the living Earth—to embrace life’s interdependent unity, the web of life that supports us all.  Read More

Colliding Forces

By Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, April 2019

Chapter 3 from Including the Earth in Our Prayers: A Global Dimension to Spiritual Practice

Collectively we are walking along a fault line. There are vast pressures building up under our feet, primal powers in the depths which have been moving for centuries. We feel tensions in the air around us, the threat to the ecosystem, the conflicts of terrorism. But within the ground, greater forces are building, forces that belong to the future and not the present. Mostly we walk unknowingly, sensing something but having little knowledge of these vaster forces that are shaping our collective destiny. Read More

A Time for Silence

By Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, November 2017

Published in Garrison Institute

For our ancestors the rhythms of the seasons were their calendar, the rising and setting of the sun their only clock. Today our clocks seem to spin much faster and it is easy to ignore—or even forget—these more primal seasons and their meaning. And yet as our world appears to spin more and more out of balance—temperatures and sea levels rising, species depleted—there is a pressing need to return to a deeper rhythm, to the cycles that belong to healing and transformation, to the seasons of the Earth and the seasons of the soul. Read More

Unity and the Power of Love

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee September 2018

First published in Kosmos Journal

Unity holds the essential vision that we are one living, interconnected ecosystem—a living Earth that supports and nourishes all of its inhabitants. If we acknowledge and honor this simple reality, we can begin to participate in the vital work of healing our fractured and divisive world and embrace a consciousness of oneness that is our human heritage. This is the opportunity that is being offered to us, even as its dark twin is constellating the dynamics of nationalism, tribalism, isolationism, and all the other regressive forces that express ‘me’ rather than ‘we.’ Read More

Changing the Story

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, August 2018

Published online on Garrison Institute

"The only way to change the world is to change the story.” We know only too well the story that defines our world today. It is a tale of consumerism and greed, sustained by the empty but enticing promise of an endless stream of “stuff” as the source of our happiness and wellbeing. Read More

Walking

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee and Hilary Hart, April 2018

First published in Heartfulness Magazine

In the busy-ness of our contemporary life, we are drawn into ceaseless activity that often separates us from the deeper dimension of ourselves. With our smartphones and computer screens, we often remain caught on the surface of our lives amidst the noise and chatter that continually distract us, that stops us from being rooted in our true nature. Unaware we are drowned deeper and deeper in a culture of soulless materialism.  Read More

A Lover’s Journey: A Story of the Sacred Feminine

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, March 2018

First published in the blog the feminine and the seeds of the future

When I was nineteen I met my teacher, a Russian-born woman in her mid-sixties, recently returned from India where she had been trained by a Sufi master. Four years later, sitting in her small meditation group, I met and fell in love with a young woman recently arrived to London from Israel, who was to become my wife. As an intense young man, focused on meditation and aspiring to realize a formless Truth, the Sufi path unexpectedly opened me to the mystery of the feminine, and to the wonder of love both human and divine, formless and tangible.  Read More

Love: Life’s Greatest Gift

By Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, February 2017

First published in Common Ground

All of us want, or need, to be loved. The need for love is one of the most basic human impulses.  Read More

The Magic of Creation: The Sufi’s Way

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, February 2016

First published in Sutra Journal

One of the central teachings of Sufism is that God is both transcendent and immanent. Our Beloved is “beyond even our idea of the beyond,” and also “nearer to you than yourself to yourself."  Read More

Meaning and the Song of the Soul

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, February 2016

First published in Excellence Reporter

Meaning is what calls from the depths of the soul. It is the song that sings us into life. Whether we have a meaningful life depends upon whether we can hear this song, this primal music of the sacred. Read More

The Journey Towards Oneness: A Conversation with a Scientist and a Mystic

Interview with Ravi Ravindra and Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, August 2016

Published in Light of Consciousness Journal

In this interview by Global Spirit, host Phil Cousineau brings together physicist Dr. Ravi Ravindra and Naqshbandi Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee in an exploration of the concept of Oneness—tracing its evolution and expression through the deep undercurrent of teachings that point in the direction of the indivisible totality of all creation, all beliefs, all religions, and of the universe itself.  Read More

Shifting the Climate Debate Onto Sacred Ground

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, July 2015

First published on The Huffington Post

"The ecological crisis is essentially a spiritual problem." These words spoken by an Eastern Orthodox theologian, Metropolitan John Zizioulas, at the Vatican news conference on the papal encyclical are profoundly important.  Read More

Pope Francis’ Encyclical: Hearing the Cry of the Earth

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, June 2015

First published on The Huffington Post

The Earth "now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her." So begins Pope Francis in his powerful and long-awaited encyclical on ecology. "The earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor." Read More

Darkening: A Four-Point Plan

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, February 2014

One of the first responses I received to my recently published book, Darkening of the Light: Witnessing the End of an Era, was that it was “a tough read,” and “I wish he would have been clearer as to what steps we can do in our complex lives to try the best we can to return the soul of the world to its former strength and beauty.” Read More

Including the Earth in Our Prayers

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, December 2013

First published on The Huffington Post

Every morning I love to walk early beside the wetlands where I live. It is a time of natural reflection and prayer, a time to be alone with nature and the divine that is present: in the hawk sitting on the telephone lines, the skyline softening and turning golden. Read More

Sustainability, Deep Ecology, & the Sacred

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, April 2013

An edited version was first published online on The Huffington Post

As our world stumbles to the brink of ecological collapse, the “tipping point” of irreversible climate change, sustainability has become a vital issue. But in order to consider the question of sustainability, it is important to begin with the question: who or what is being sustained? Read More