For the Sake of Our Beloved: Discussion & Questions with Llewellyn Vaughan Lee

there used to be a time where you could do your prac spiritual practice in isolation you could actually live in isolation you could be off the grid in the real sense and if you did real spiritual practice you could find an ashram you know and this was before the internet before cell phones before and things didn't get to you the outside world could be cut off and you could focus on your practice this is no longer the case everything is interpenetrating much more than we're aware of and and this i don't quite understand why and i remember about nine months ago i was walking on the ocean near where i live and suddenly the beings of light from the inner world they they they said to me it wasn't supposed to be like this and they said this was supposed to be the time when we were all working together when the inner and the outer worlds were working together this was supposed to be an explosion of consciousness in which the beings from the inner world and the human beings here were working together and the light and the knowledge flowed and and somehow we have cut ourselves off from even the understanding of the inner worlds and yet everybody who does real spiritual practice knows you go into the inner worlds in the inner man dwells truth um and so you have to understand what is happening in the inner world if you're doing your spiritual practice in the outer world and the the mongols come which they did at one time you know rumi and his family fled you don't just sit around or if you do sit around you sit around in a very focused practical way i just think it's very important to be realistic in us on spiritual practice and to adapt to the time that is present there's a lovely story from um you know rumi's teacher shams and this was the time of the mongols and and one of his disciples came to him saying the mongols are coming the mongols are coming and and he turned to his disciple and said i've been teaching you to be a duck and now swim um [Music] and you know he was wise enough shams that he taught his disciples how to be in that time of complete devastation and i think because i have been shown certain things i think it's i'm only being responsible to pass on a certain understanding nothing drastic a certain focus a certain orientation that is needed in this time it may be in 10 years time the wind comes and blows it all away it may last 20 years we don't know but we can't live in isolation and our spiritual practice cannot be done in isolation and this i i have a slight bone to pick with a lot of the contemporary spiritual teachings that focuses on the now because they don't seem to be aware that the now includes yesterday and tomorrow and things beyond time and i do think we need to grow up spiritually and recognize the situation in the outer world and the inner world and in the in between worlds so yes hopefully hexagram 36 would change but and one is you know spiritually one is always attuned to change but at the same time one needs to be realistic in the moment one of the great dangers of the business world is the what is called the consumer society which i've actually studied inwardly archetypally in quite depth and i think it's much much more insidious than most people realize i think that you'd the consumer society that advertises you to buy things you can't possibly need takes both your money your time and also a certain energy from your soul i also think it's a set there's a certain dark magic in there a certain entrancement i actually gave a little video from i think from one of the talks i gave here called changing the story and the need for magic i think there that there is so little understanding about how we have become entranced by this incredibly self-destructive on every level story of capitalism and consumerism that we have been sold and again there are there are two things here that's important and i talk about it particularly in the chapter on simplicity here um if one is going to really live spiritual life it requires an attention and an energy it's not a weekend undertaking you can't just go to church on sundays and you need a certain inner and outer space to do it and so you do need to declutter your life because what we don't realize is all of the tentacles of consumer society get our attention they take our life energy and they also take a certain soul energy because they promise happiness that they're never going to deliver and so um but just like to take this one step further we have been we have been sold this story of con continual economic growth that is ecologically unsustainable but nobody dares to really in the business world to really put that together because it's the foundation of the business world is you have to grow economically so basically our whole culture is founded upon a house of cards or a pack of lies depending on how you look at it i don't believe personally as a mystic going out and shouting about it because everybody else is shouting about so many other things and they're much better at shouting than i am but i do believe that one can take individual responsibility for one's life change the way one lives and more importantly change the values upon which one bases one's everyday interactions so there is more space for loving kindness for intimacy for care for those basic human values how long this particular mirage that we call the business world will last i don't know i personally i was very surprised after 2008 that it has that it rebuilt itself the pack of cards went up again so quickly um but the illusions that human beings hold onto or the ability of human beings to hold on to illusions seems quite remarkable so i have adjusted my own way of life to become much much more conscious of just getting what i need and trying to be aware of this tentacle of consumerism i don't live in a in a hermitage or an ashram i live in everyday life just to be aware of it and that's i feel what i can do at the moment maybe that there are people who are trying to change that whole model but i don't think we've got there yet what matters is how we live in the present circumstance and that's why i go back to you know keeping alive the sacred keeping that connection alive acts of loving kindness being part of a community where the community supports each other um i find that very meaningful you know that this is the paradox of mysticism you are taken into unbelievable spaces i mean you know from the first moment i looked in my teacher's eyes and i saw the truth that she the land of truth in which she lived and i said i want that i don't care whatever it costs you are you you are given experiences that most people don't even dream exists you are given love you taste you experience love that isn't even in the story books right um and at the same time you're taken into that vastness at the same time you have to be really grounded and in a very simple honest way and that's kind of been the two poles of my experience and care for others loving kindness i think the buddhist practice of loving kindness is is incredibly precious or christianity is love thy neighbor as thyself in sufism we just practice love and we have a certain adab which is a certain way of being with others that includes that and that's what matters that's what is a contribution small things with great love i like that from mother teresa it's not what you do but the love you put in the doing then you give it to god yes i think look some people are called to be activists um whether social activists environmental activists even i guess spiritual activists and what is really really important is that it comes from a secure ethical foundation because the moment you lose that ethical foundation a certain vibration of truth gets distorted and i don't think the ends justify the means because when you see things from a spiritual perspective there's a certain note i call it a note of love or a note of truth somewhere they're the same and and my sense is that there is a network and it's completely organic and it's non-governmental and it's there is an organic network of people of groups of communities that are some connected visibly others connected invisibly that is working to do two things to hold a certain light in the world that is needed for transformation that is needed for truth and also helping certain foundational steps be made towards the next step in evolution whether you call it resistance or working for the future or i think it depends where you are called to um i you know from my own history i was i always say i was a traditional mystic i began meditating when i was 17 i wanted to go as deep within as i could to experience the root of the root of the root of the root the truth of the truth of the truth of the truth i was driven by this looking back now completely crazy desire right and and then the year 2000 something changed and the first expression of that really was the conference i organized in washington dc which was called spiritual responsibility at a time of global crisis and i really feel passionately that those of us who have access to a certain spiritual light have a certain responsibility how we live that responsibility depends upon our character depends upon our calling whether it can just be bringing a certain awareness of the sacred into our gardening or it can be you know going and setting up a social housing network it doesn't matter because i believe life is an organism that is trying to recreate itself and i do think we've hit a you know a bump in the road and it may take an extra 30 40 50 years to go beyond this bump but the earth is very old and there is enormous wisdom in the earth and it's a very very big evolutionary shift to do with a certain global consciousness and look one thing you learn if you've done a lifetime of spiritual practice is there are a lot of setbacks you know my god you really think when you're 17 you think you can sit and meditate eight hours a day and get there you know in three or four years hey right and 20 years later you see hmm 30 years later [Music] you know you kind of you realize there are a lot of setbacks and this is a setback but it doesn't change the the plan you have to adapt to the present time but there is an underlying shift towards global evolution how that is going to play out in our lifetime i don't know i'm looking now towards the lifetime of my grandchildren because i sense there i see a hope in her my granddaughter's eyes that i maybe she's seen something i haven't but we are each called in our own way and we just stay true to that and there's no big drama because the peop people who make the big dramas they they're not going to be around forever and it's it is this network of souls linked together that are here to help the world to evolve and they're still here um and let's say the evolution of the world it has been planned the next bandies are known as designers because they have access to certain designs and it won't be as we think that one thing that is for sure once you put things in the hands of god it's usually completely different to how we imagine it um but i do feel it's important that we work together and that's why i've been so moved recently to see environmentalism and spirituality come together that's why i was so moved by pope francis's encyclical because when i began this work spirituality and environmentalism were like two poles the environmentalists were didn't want anything to do with those you know airy fairy spiritual people and the spiritual people just wanted to transform themselves and weren't really interested in the environment and then when people like ted nat khan came along and said you know these are bells of mindfulness we have to wake up this engaged buddhism and the work we are trying to do in the field of spiritual ecology which is to bring those fields together is still very very foundational it's very pioneer work but i think there are seats for the future well for the sufis servanthood is really one of the highest states it said after the station of oneness comes the station of servanthood and it's really uh it's a grace to be able or to be allowed to be of service and the the simple reason for that is that with true service that there shouldn't be any ego because the moment there's an ego again you keep it within your aura your frame of reference look i think in little ways we can all be of service but um you know it's what they call selfless service and i think it's very good to ground one's practice in a certain service however you see it or call it at the same time to acknowledge say within my tradition there is a whole um it is one of the the final stations i think probably just before the station of no station there is a station of servanthood and um you know there is a title of sufis we are called his servants and his favorite title of himself god's favorite title of himself is the servant of his servants so there is a whole deep spiritual understanding of service and servanthood and it's difficult to explain or understand because we live in a culture of doing and we think service must be about what can i do but just as i gave you this shared with you this vision i had off these lights over america and um you know there are many many different ways of service and it is a practice that gets deeper and deeper and deeper as more of as more of you is drawn into being of service and what that means it is in in the end it is really an offering of one's heart and one's life to god and those of those who are fortunate enough or unfortunate enough god takes up your offer but it is i like the saying of uh mother teresa when she was asked how can you take care of so many and she said i only take care of the one because for her everything was just an expression of the divine and if you can live from that place then of course your life will be of service but it is a there is a deep honor to being of service it is really a and it is a commitment and but but like most things that have an esoteric dimension there is a mystery to it and that is difficult to describe so at the beginning there's nothing wrong with finding a place where you can be of service and if your ego is involved okay your ego is involved that's why i said just make sure it is ethical and then it is grounded in something true later on if one really walks the path you you give yourself more and more and more to god and then you can be used think of over the centuries how many people have had how many different concepts the sufi say in the name of he or she who has no name but who appears by whatever name you call it look you can call it jesus you can call it allah you can call it odin you can call it my beloved i like my beloved because that's how that is for me my beloved and because for sufis he's our beloved but it's an experience of love there's a path of love we are drawn to love and you know it's interesting because in this path we do a lot of meditation which is just going somewhere the mind stops if you practice properly and you get lost and there is nobody to pray and there is no prayer but prayer is for me is begins with that there is another i call it my beloved and i want to talk to my beloved i want to be with my beloved i want to feel my beloved i need that companionship that so often in the night when i am awake rather than meditating i pray i just go into my heart and i just call out to god what what what matters is is your feeling what matters is the the feeling with which you cry and you know the the the sufis have so many stories but there's um you know somebody once asked you know why doesn't god answer my prayers and there is one answer it's because he's listening to you um but there's another answer which i always like which is a story roomy tells about the um the beautiful young man who goes to the baker and um he goes into the baker and he asks for some helper and he's such a beautiful young man the baker looks at him he looks at all the people standing in line behind him and he said just wait over there i've got some just getting in the oven ready and he serves the other customers and um and then the the young man says but where's my alvaro and he says oh just wait just wait sweetheart for waiting ready soon and so it goes on and the baker just like to have the beautiful young man in his bakery if god can't be bothered with you he answers your prayers those he loves he keeps waiting and wait because if there's you and the experience you're not yet there if you're having an experience there's still two a real spiritual experience there's no you there anymore so if you're having an experience the ego is involved um you know you know the difference by the way between the how do i bring it up the ham sandwich and the egg sandwich oh this is my teacher mr tweeted she heard this from general schwarzkopf she really liked him and she was talking about soldiers but she applied it to god the difference between the ham sandwich and the egg sandwich is in the egg sandwich the chicken is involved in the ham sandwich the pig is committed so you aspire to being the ham sandwich and usually if you have something to gain from the experience it's the ego if it takes you out of yourself into a deeper perception that's more likely to be belong to the soul that the danger is and is at the beginning they go together that you get an experience and the ego tries to claim it and there's nothing wrong with that as long as you recognize that's what's happening and don't let the ego become too puffed up and the worst thing of course is a spiritualized ego the moment you think oh i'm a very spiritual person that's a road to disaster because one thing my teacher said it's much more difficult to get rid of a spiritualized ego than an ordinary ego so it's you know don't go down that road if you have a um a teacher the teacher can usually rub your face in a tour there was a time when my teacher arena tweedy was with in india with her teacher and she began to become clairvoyant and she could see people's auras and their thoughts and she was thinking i am progressing and he looked at her one day and he said you are not even a human being until you become less than the dust at the feet of the teacher you haven't even begun and then she realized it was all just fantasy um so you do have to be careful and with experience you can recognize it but sadly sadly many people take an initial spiritual experience and make something out of it that isn't they don't realize it they're just beginning and then you have to be very very careful so you know that's why there is there are spiritual traditions it's why i am a bit careful about people who kind of make a you know mix different bits of spiritual traditions together to make their own because usually they forget the sandpaper and a good spiritual tradition you know brings in humility and brings in a certain sandpaper that stops you from over identifying with the spiritual experience you can't help it at times but you do have to be very careful and just be attentive and a real you know the real thing leaves you behind it is you get lost there's nobody there to and you come back from them so bewildered and so out of yourself you know you can't make anything out of them you just feel humbled by them you just bow down in awe before the the greatness of god or the sweetness of god or whatever it is you have been been given the grace to experience and of course the real person who experiences something is not you it is your soul your soul is the real experience of the wonder of god but that's a whole esoteric mystery that hasn't really been understood in the west we we tend to bring everything into the sphere of the ego um there's a beautiful poem i quote in one of my books ibn arabi of of um sophia talking to the soul and you get that real spiritual dialogue which is between the soul and something higher and that is there comes a time when you realize that the ego is just occasionally gets a glimpse of the real experience but the real experience is so the ego can't look the ego is designed is born to live in this world to have his feet on the ground to go shopping to have hopeless relationships or whatever it is that careers and i don't know what egos do nowadays um it isn't designed to be with god it's you have to die before you die to be taken into that arena that place in the heart but at the beginning you have to be careful yeah and just watch out if you think oh i'm doing well you're probably not my concern is that people invest a lot in what turns out to be a distorted image of the truth without realizing it it's like in the in the 80s when gurus became popular in america i don't know if you remember that time and a lot of people in well i guess not a lot quite a lot of people invested a lot in gurus who let them down you know for example they renounced the world they gave up all their procession possessions to join the ashram you know only to find the guru had a rolls royce around the corner um and they got very very something in the soul got very sad as a result because they'd done what they thought was true and right yes they had a lesson to learn but also um they'd been conned they'd invested spiritually in something that was a distortion and later they became kind of a few guidebooks to check you know go through a checklist before you give away all your possessions to follow a guy with a long beard and what i'm saying now is it's a bit similar but on a much more collective level that things are very distorted and you've got to be very careful and i think you've you know if you are sincere in your spiritual practice and you keep it simple and you watch your step then i think it's fine but there are more opportunities for wasting your spiritual energy and intention than there were 20 years ago that's all and i it makes me look i've invested my life in this business you know i was 17 when i first had my first mystical experience i'm you know almost 50 years later i was sent to america 25 years ago and i've i've seen a lot and i know how precious that longing in a human being is it is the most precious thing there is it is it's worth diamonds more than diamonds and you need to nurture it you need to care for it's like a child you need to look after it you need to find it the right nourishment and and you need discrimination so mostly you need common sense there was a lovely uh theosophist joe miller from san francisco used to he had the sufi walk in golden gate park back in the 70s i guess and he said for spiritual life you need four things um common sense common sense and a sense of humor and somebody asking what's the fourth thing he said even more common sense but then he was the one who he met my teacher irina tweedy and he gave this wonderful talk about burn baby burn because she wrote this book the path of love it's like a bridge of hair across the chasm of fire and he said i wish i could repeat his accent but i won't even try um and he said you know you walk across this path of love this bridge of hair and into the chasm of fire and then the fire burns the bridge and you fall into the chasm of fire and it's burn baby burn so those are the two sides of the journey one is common sense sense of humor the other is burn baby burn so if you combine all of that there is the darkness of one's personal psyche which which is the shadow work in which you uncover wonderful truths about yourself or difficult truths about yourself and that's very valuable then there is the i mean my favorite of course is what is called the darkness of the deus absconditus the the darkness that is before and after creation the darkness of pure non-being which is incredible which is tremendous which is is much richer than love and and there is of course the dark knight of the soul which i think is what in a way separates those on a spiritual path to those on a mystical path the dark night of the soul is that period you experience when you have to give up every spiritual concept every spiritual idea everything that you thought belonged to god except possibly love and it torments you makes you desolate and takes you to the further shore of love there is at the moment it's as if the earth is going through a cloud of toxic gas which we can interpret as darkness and i think a lot of the time we use the images we have here to interpret what is beyond our understanding and this particular darkness i've spoken about it has a i in in the chap in the little book darkening of the light i do write a story about write a chapter about the story of darkness because i do think this darkness that we're going through has a story to tell has a a meaning to share with us yes it's very difficult for spiritual practice it's very toxic there are elemental forces present in it that i would rather not encounter on a in a dark alleyway but does it have a meaning yes i think it does so in a way light is easy because light light upon light light rises towards light and light comes down upon light and it's light upon light there is the light of our human aspiration the light of our souls and the light of god the light of the divine and they come to meet and a certain when they meet a certain spiritual life is born the life of the spirit and you learn to work with light you learn to weave light into your life you learn to just like you can weave love into your life you weave the threads of life of love into your life you weave a certain texture of light into your life life the darkness is more difficult possibly because as a culture we don't you know we've had this you know good and evil which is true but not true so we don't one of the sadnesses i have at the moment is we don't seem to have much understanding of what is actually taking place of what this of how this present darkness dehumanizes us i think one has to be conscious of darkness i'm sure there are great masters who know how to work with this darkness for me the heart chakra in the spiritual heart are synonymous on this particular path we work just with the heart chakra within the heart chakra there is a um a miniature version of all the other chakras the heart chakra is known as the king and if you work just with the heart chakra then it activates all the other chakras in the right order in the right way what is in my understanding essential is the heart chakra is the the home of our divine consciousness the in the upanishad they talk about that person no bigger than a thumb maker of past and future lives in the heart and say in the heart chakras centered like between the in the middle here there is actually an atmo heart or cosmic heart on the right hand side but say within the heart chakra there is or the spiritual heart there is that is the center of divine consciousness of the consciousness of the higher self and once that on the sufi path the the way it works is there's this initial experience of tauba which is called the turning of the heart which is when the heart chakra is spun and it's spun at a certain frequency and once it starts to spin it starts to activate the spiritual body which for most people is dormant they're not even aware they have a spiritual body until they die and then they they experience it um after they go through this tunnel the spinning of the heart chakra activates the spiritual body that then through the practice and also through the transmission because on the sufi path we work with transmission begins to wake up and begins to evolve and that's really when the spiritual evolution of the human being begins there there is a misunderstanding in the west that that that somehow identifies with a certain transformation of ego consciousness as being the spiritual path it's actually the preliminary before the spiritual path because the spiritual path has real spiritual life has to do with the evolution of the spiritual body because that's what you take with you and what i've found because on this particular path we work with souls and that the human being begins their spiritual journey where they left off last time the sufis have really mapped out the spiritual heart in more detail probably than any other spiritual path they they have these they have this understanding of the five chambers of the heart that go deeper and deeper and deeper i wrote a chapter of that in my book fragments of the love story that is really central to sufi teaching that there's the heart of hearts in the middle and there's a whole detailed understanding of the different chambers of the heart that in through which you can experience different levels of reality what they call traveling in the inner worlds or traveling within the heart and it's really this activation of the spiritual body that enables you to have a spiritual life which is a life of the spirit and that becomes present in in your daily life and in your practice and also actually quite separate from your daily life and quite separate from your practice this is again what's not generally understood is that the spiritual body evolves at a much higher frequency than our ordinary consciousness and um i think it said in the bible it's a spirit that quickens um and although it becomes part of our spiritual life part of our practice it is also separate and sometimes independent sometimes it draws you into its consciousness and sometimes it continues without you necessarily being aware of how its evolution is progressing i mean i do think that those who have access to light need to live that light fully to contribute at this time of crisis this kind of darkening i think it's an immense task and i don't necessarily think it would change anything but it could stop something worse from happening certain things have already been written and so they are going to get played out that is how it is but there could be worse consequences and it is like for example there is a very important spiritual practice of pure awareness the sufis call it shaheed i think it's similar to the original practice buddhist practice of mindfulness sati which if you are aware really aware then certain negative things cannot happen just like certain negative energies can't have access to you if you are aware it's a much deeper form than is presently understood as mindfulness which is more an active engaged practice while awareness or sati or shahid and sufism to witness is a more it's not passive but it's a it's not an active it's just an awareness and if you have that awareness then that is a light that comes out of you that stops certain negativity from taking place and i do think those who have access to a certain light who can live a certain light are needed at this time it's strange because spirituality in the west has become caught in individuality individualism and it is like it's interesting in i studied zen in the pure zen practice like in the original soto zen the whole monastery practiced together it was never one monk's practice it didn't make sense it was everybody's practice and somehow the potency or the power of the the light within the individual that belongs to the community to the sangha to however you see it has been um limited by people thinking it's just about their evolution their enlightenment their awareness their practice and it's really the the practice of life itself life itself human life itself has a spiritual practice yes it's evolved at times that some parts of the world is more shamanistic in some parts of the world it's more about pure consciousness it's a lot of it got lost in in the west due to perversions of the power practices of christianity and is only now beginning to come back but it's never just our practice and i do feel quite passionately that those who have access to that light need to need to live it for the sake of the whole

Channel: LlewellynVaughanLee

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Published: Wed Aug 26 2020