Reclaiming the Inner Worlds - Discussion and Questions with Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

so when I talk about the heart I should explain that just as we have a physical body we also have a spiritual body for most people their spiritual body is dormant until it becomes activated as you ask this in question about awakening of the heart which is in Sufism this moment of the heart awakening is called alba or the turning of the heart in which the spiritual center of the heart starts to spin at a higher vibration that begins to give you access to spiritual consciousness and it is said this moment of Talmer the awakening of heart of the heart is always an act of grace it is given to the human being because well it is an act of grace it is it is said Allah guides to Allah whom Allah will but you can do the preliminary work to prepare for it work of in a purification of living with the right attitude of aspiration all of those spiritual qualities of turning towards God but even for example the great Sufi saint Rabia was one of the first Sufi Saints to actually talk about love divine love somebody asked her if I renounced the world and turned towards God will God turn towards me and she said no God first has to turn towards you and then you turn towards God so the awakening of the heart is always an act of grace the Sufis actually have a very detailed description they talk about the different chambers of the heart in one of my recent book fragments of a love story I have a chapter about this there are these different chambers within the heart which you access through deeper deepa states of prayer and meditation that take you right back to ultimate truth and Sufism has really developed a spiritual science of the heart the heart is quite extraordinary it can be as big as a universe you can put you know the it expands as a human being develops in their spiritual practice the heart center gets bigger and bigger and bigger and and the love experience of love gets greater and greater but to be very specific yes well how every human being has a spiritual organ of divine consciousness which is what we call a heart in most human beings it's latent but when you begin the spiritual journey or it begins within you then it becomes activated and as I say Sufism has really developed a very detailed science of the spiritual heart and how to make the journey back to God within the energy center of the heart the Sufis would say that that the longing is already God's presence within you you wouldn't experience longing if you were not aware of what you learned for if you are living in a complete state of unconsciousness why would you longed for God but when God looks towards you and touches your heart with his or her with divine presence then that awakens the longing within your heart wasn't Augustine called the divine discontent and in a way that the spark of divine consciousness if you like gets blown upon in your heart the embers get blown upon and then out of that there is this awakened this longing this homesickness you want to go home and that is the start of the journey but some people are born with longing because they don't forget they are just the soul impresses into the human consciousness the remembrance of where they have come from so strongly but they don't forget but most human beings it seems as as part of the the mystery of human beings is that they forget I always remember this experience I had in a waiting room in Seattle Airport it was between flights and and people were standing around as they do in waiting rooms in apples talking on reading newspapers and I just saw how every human being was completely filled up with God except for the last little bit and I saw that the mystery was not that we were God but that we'd forgotten we were God and that is really the great human mystery is is that we have forgotten the fact that everything in his his God is in a way the most obvious thing it's the real human mysteries that we've forgotten this and most human beings live their whole life in the state of forgetfulness but the moment you get awakened to the remembrance of your divine nature then the longing begins then the journey begins which is why the Sufi says traditionally don't look for water be thirsty they know that the longing is the most direct way back to God it's not a concept as an experience and it draws you or you follow that thread within your heart that takes you home but longing is sadly in this culture because we don't understand it very much often people who have longing missed diagnose it as depression and which is sad because it won't be solved with antidepressants there is the danger on the spiritual journey of a spiritual eyes Diigo in which the ego-self which is really as I say what separates us from our divine consciousness creates an image of a spiritual self would you it identifies with traditionally you actually need a teacher to tell you look you know you're kidding yourself somebody who knows who can see what's going on if you don't if you're lucky life will deliver you a crushing blow [Music] and you kind of wake up out of it I think on the spiritual path humility is very important if you don't have the humility to realize you're wrong most of the time then do something else you know nowadays most people can climb Everest or something can't they if they really put their mind to it you got a guide and you go I mean do that you get real results but you know I I'm kind of old school so I take spiritual life very seriously and I don't like to see somebody wasting all their time and effort and intention with a spiritual I see ego but if you are really sincere something will come and dispel your self illusion you can always you know we work a lot with dreams on our path and you can always tell when a dream is a little bit too perfect when the spiritual states are a little bit too right when the guidance is a little bit too good and it just it smells a bit prepackaged but it's something you really need to be careful of and sadly in this culture it's much easier to sell ego spirituality than real spirituality one of the things is you can't charge for real spirituality so there's not a lot of profit to be made from it but ego spirituality you can mark it and you know and make a good living from so it's it's much easier it's also what is interesting is something I discovered is something is a bit corrupted it's actually more tangible for people if something is really pure it's it's a bit too fine it's not so visible you know spirit real spiritual life is terribly ordinary and that doesn't people want to be a bit different they want to be special and you know you can make a nice spiritual special ego but who wants to be just an ordinary human being I always like this saying of Hamlet I am myself indifferent honest now this is important question because it has to do with the path of service which Sufism is which in Buddhism will be the Bodhisattva path there are spiritual paths where you just completely turn away from the world you it's not so easy now but a while ago you find yourself a nice cave in the Himalayas and you know get a bowl of rice every couple of weeks and you go completely inward you can go you know you go really deep and ready in inner states of consciousness this world fades away very quickly there's not much to attract you to being in this world but the buddha school as well as samsara of illusion suffering and you you go into States or Nirvana or very very very deep states of meditation and you don't come back I mean the physical body remains as long as it remains and then you just the individual consciousness dissolves into universal consciousness and you don't come back there the body sattva path or in Sufism I had this experience actually when I was 23 with this time I went certain a lot of very very powerful spiritual experiences and I remember I was I was standing in a park and I suddenly got taken out through the top of my head and I was told you could go now and I remember saying very clearly no I am a Sufi I am in service and I came back and looking I didn't really understand it then I was just 23 looking back I know how easily it would have been just had had a heart attack and just told God you dissolved in the light but Sufism is in Sufism it is said after the State of Union of oneness comes the station of servanthood and so that is the Sufism is a path of service some people are in service and the outer world some people are in service in the inner world there are different places different ways to be of service so there is these two in a way distinct spiritual paths and you do get a choice at certain times on the path you can't go until you've paid off your debts in this world what they call Karma's you don't get the choice and some people when they die they get the choice to come back to be in service or just to go off either into other worlds because this physical world is just one world of many many worlds or to dissolve into the light just to dissolve and go back to the source return to the nothingness it was interesting I saw a science program the other day about time and the galaxies and they said yes everything in this galaxy in in in all of the galaxies in the universe will eventually return completely to non-existence all the stars will have burst will have contracted the dog and it was interesting the timescale that they had for this to happen they said imagine an atom is a year now imagine all the atoms in the known universe that is the number of years it would take for this to happen so my sense is you know for the foreseeable future there's going to be a bit to do if not in this world in another world in an in a world there of many different worlds and sometimes when you finish working in this world you get work somewhere else yes I think for example at this time there is a deep need to hold an awareness of the remembrance of God in our daily life now what that does is that creates a center of light in the inner worlds that is present in this world we live in a world of so much forgetfulness of the divine I would say we have forgotten so much we have even forgotten that we have forgotten it is not present in our collective consciousness hardly at all and that makes it very very difficult for people it's as if some essential note in life some resonance of the soul has been forgotten now if you live that simple awareness what Sufis call the remembrance of God or the awareness of the divine that means in you in your daily life wherever you go that light is present and that nourishes life in the deepest sense a human being who remembers God in their daily life even just for five minutes a day is a tremendously beneficial influence on their surroundings and that is a work in the inner worlds because nobody can notice it it is real and it is I think of upmost importance at this time there is other work but it can be done on the inner worlds but that is there is a pressing need to do that the particular I give you a slightly different example which I actually described last time that in the in the last few years the the group I work with we have been directed to to work or work more directly with the soul of the world what's called the anima Mundi the spiritual body of the world because that has been dying through neglect through abuse through what we have been doing to the environment and there's a certain prayer and remembrance and connection that again in this little book on prayer I just published I have a chapter on the prayer for the earth there's a way to connect one spiritual devotion one's spiritual awareness one's prayer with the anima Mundi with a spiritual body of the world so that some there can be some healing that can help the soul of the world have the spiritual body of the world at this time of ecological and spiritual crisis so that's another example of working in the inner world there are some souls who were taught how to help people to die how to help their soul make that transition from this world to the other world there are different there's different work to do in the inner world but I think most central is just the simple remembrance of God awareness of God in one's daily life I think it is very beneficial to the environment free I give you a simple example because Mercy center here is a spiritual center because there are nuns here have been doing practices from you know for many years there is a certain energy presence here which means when I come here and give a spiritual talk I don't have to start from scratch there is already a ground here I hate giving talks in hotels I don't really do it anymore because you have to use the first half of the talk to clear a space from all the worldly thought forms that are present in the hotel you know all the affairs that are being held in all the different rooms and that it's all there and you have to you know the first sight you have to clear it of all of that before there can be any living remembrance of God that is made alive but here because there is already spiritual work has been done here for many years there's a certain energy present it it also has to do with a state of being we live in a culture as very masculine that values action rather than being and a lot of spiritual work which typically to do with the in it has to do with the state of being yes the pain of longing give me the pain of longing the pain of lung and I will pay any price you ask give the joy of love to others to me the pain of love why because longing the pain of love takes you back to God takes you home and it kind of turns you from this world back to God and wrenches your heart in my own experience and also in other people the initial intensity of that longing you cannot live with for more than five six seven eight years it would just be too intense there you cry too much you I always give the example of mrs. Tweedy went to India she had a blue handkerchief and she kept it when she came back and it turned white by a bleached by all the tears she cried real longing you know it tears your heart apart I don't think is anything more painful because it's everything else you can blank off but this is your own heart that's being torn apart but it does turn you away from this world and you back to God it takes you on the way back to God in my experience there that comes a time when the longing gets less intense and many people have come to me and they felt they're doing something wrong because the initial longing isn't there anymore and I think it's because it's done its work and it's really I often use the the example of some Teresa stages of Prayer because I like some trees are very much and she really articulated the stages of prayer and she says at the beginning you have to make it stick you have to return to it and return to it and return to it and make it stick and the Sufi has the image of light upon light light rises towards light and light upon light when your heart cries for God when you have this longing particularly in the night you cry to God and what you're not aware of is that your cry to God is echoed is met by a light coming down your aspiration going to God is met by the light coming towards you of God you feel alone you feel abandoned you feel lost but actually your aspiration brings down the light of God and like some Teresa says there comes a time when it sticks this is what the Sufis called the mystery of light upon light when they meet and and then the longing changes into belonging really it still comes back when you feel you don't belong when you feel feel abandoned and and it can come back but not with that original intensity and and then you just feel you belong and you are you get taken into other states but really the initial agony of separation passes away although it is sometimes replaced by something that is even more difficult to bear which is nothing there is a time on the path of when it seems completely completely empty there is nothing it is like in being in a desert and you actually get along for the pain of longing because at least then you felt you aspired to God at least then you felt you were alive and you know you were cold you were your heart was singing even if it was even if it was with blood but this next stage of of desolation of complete nothing weather seems to be no longing no God you're just alone day after day after day and that initial intensity is no longer with you I think that is even more difficult to bear and then one day that passes too suddenly they are not just I always say there are like flowers appear amidst the stones and then something changed and then comes a time when you know you were always with God and whatever happens whatever you do whatever you don't do you're always with God you could never they say he is the companion of he who remembers him it is this companionship it is this deep belonging it is this you were just with God and then one day even that goes because there's nobody there to be with God it's just something else but so the longing is I think a very valuable stage but yes it does pass I like this saying of the Prophet Muhammad if the world is going to end tomorrow plant a tree just blunt a tree just that's why I said to the city just hold the remembrance of God I think yes I agree were on a Titanic and were sailing towards a cataclysm it's visible in the ecological Cataclysm it is as visible as our denial of it is visible and by meeting this this week Indo hard to deny it all again to say well in 2015 we might make a decision and in the last two or three years I'd been given the very unpopular job of suggesting that there is a spiritual Cataclysm as well that what is happening in the outer world is reflected in the inner worlds that our treatment of the environment are mirrors such a deep disregard for the sacred nature of life the sacred nature of creation that is having as I say a terrible effect to the soul of the world to the in a spiritual body of the planet that I don't know if it goes on much longer how long it can sustain the spiritual evolution of human beings certain substance I call it the sacred substance of creation is being lost and you know it is like the ecologist something we've already passed the tipping point it's already too late but does that mean you stop remembering God no and either because there is a possibility for grace which is a mystic I believe in completely the possibility for grace all because that's what you do you know a plumber fix his sinks a mistake remembers God like Blake said we are put on earth a little space to learn to bear the beams of love and you don't bear it just because things are going well you bear it because you bear it you remember God because you remember God sufis gathered together because that's what they do it's actually a lovely story of Sufi story of of Bukhara and there was a mongols were coming and so everybody fled to the hills but there was a sufi there and he was a weaver and he just continued doing his weaving and so the mongols came and and they were so astounded to meet this guy who was just doing his weaving that they took him to take his gun or one of his sons and he said you know what are you doing sitting here everybody is run everybody is frightened everybody is terrified and the sufi weaver he said well my out her attention was with my weaving my inner attention was with remembrance of god what time do I have to be afraid and the Khan was so impressed by his attitude that he didn't destroy the city and you know maybe we can be that person so that it doesn't get destroyed if you realize even in the physical world are you a part of everything the food you eat what nourishes you comes from now many different places in the world we are nourished by the by the rain by the water by the earth by the I guess by the drugs nowadays aren't we by the fertilizer nothing is separate we are part of this living whole it is the great illusion our culture has kind of perpetrated on us that we are this separate individual and yes we have a unique consciousness but we are part of this living membrane of life like I said this injure is net it doesn't belong to us the world doesn't belong to us we may try to think it does but we learn to work with it we learn to breathe with it every breath the air comes into us from somewhere and nourishes us and then goes back we are part of this whole cycle of nature this whole cycle of life on the deepest sense the whole cycle of the divine coming into manifestation with every breath and then going back to the inner worlds and once you realize that you are just part of this whole living breathing system well even systems living breathing being divine being it is divine our divinity is just an inherent part of what is it's not special to us it is everything is divine we have just forgotten that then maybe you can put down this burden of of yourself I think it is such a heavy weight to be this individual that you know everything is dependent upon you oh it's so much easier to you know to have a little rucksack with it just a few things a couple of prayers a suti ona calculator to add up your debts and yeah we're such a results-driven or achievement driven culture we expect to know what is happening and to achieve something but the real spiritual mystery the real spiritual journey actually happens a deep deep within us the Sufi say in the innermost chamber of the heart there is this secret substance that is both the pilgrim and the path and it is this inner transformation happens deep within the heart and it really to the soul itself and and most of it is a complete mystery to this consciousness there is a very simple reason for that and that is this consciousness is designed is created to function in this world it's what you do to go shopping you know don't go shopping with a spiritual consciousness I always say because all the breakfast cereals will be one I mean they're all the same anyway but is the real the real spiritual transformation it happens to your spiritual body it happens to your spiritual self yes there are side effects in this world that you can have more love you can have clarity at times or your heart opens there are many different side effects but they are basically side effects of the inner transformation of the soul and I always think this is you know I could kind of have a long-term view spiritual life is a long-term process and you want to take it with you and as you know I like throughout with the Beatles you know this song of John Lennon's last night the wife said you know when you're dead you don't take nothing with you but your soul and if that's what's transformed and that's what you take with you so sometimes it affects your conscious life and sometimes it doesn't but that is really the sometimes you know when you are taken sometimes you just feel you are taken into this greater mystery and there is a sense when you come back oh I was taken somewhere I became aware of something and sometimes you don't you you don't look for anything because it's really a path of surrender in which you recognize there is a deeper mystery within you then your own conscious self and often your own conscious self becomes not irrelevant because you have to live with it but less important and as I say the misunderstanding I think is that people expect you know conscious results in their daily life from their spiritual practice but the spiritual practice or mystical practice should I say is not about that yes there are spiritual practices where you can bring more light into your everyday life where you can bring more awareness or presence into your everyday life they are very good practices but mystical life is not about that it is about a deep surrender to God to the unknown who like the unknown face of God the Cloud of Unknowing and you get given but often in ways you don't envisage or expect so it's not really a quality of life improving business a deep giving of yourself to the mystery of what it means to be a human being which is being made in the image of God I'm not saying there aren't results but they're often quite different to what do you expect or look for I mean there is the you know there is the the deep fulfillment of having a living relationship with the other and a capital ho and as Thomas Keating beautifully puts it then you realize that you and the other are one who never was another and the sense is you do begin to go beneath the surface of life into life's deeper mystery as I mentioned at the beginning I think as a culture that's what we're starved of we have lots of technology but not so much mystery at different times and at different places in human history since the very beginning there have been spiritual teachers and teachings and schools that enabled human beings to access to and to to learn about the deeper mystery of what it means to be a human being this is very very important they're actually at different times the focus of the loci were different places in the world there is for example the strong tradition that Christ was taken to Egypt was part of the Essene Brotherhood which was a mystery school that was present there and he was taught certain esoteric mysteries before his teaching began and this is like a living spiritual stream that belongs to the esoteric dimension of humanity and that appears at the world in different places in different times under different guises but actually is the same stream some people call it the perennial philosophy in the Sufi tradition they're sometimes called the Masters of wisdom or the Masters of love this is this is like a certain current under the surface that belongs to this deeper dimension of humanity that we as a country now have forgotten we have we have forgotten this inner spectrum this inner dimension of spirituality it's not traditionally it's not something that was learned you learn in a book or you go to a workshop like you know my own living experience of this is you know my teacher was a Russian woman who went to India and and was trained by a Sufi master and in the sixties and then was asked to bring this tradition back to the West where it had never been and then she came to America in 85 and 87 and then I was asked in a way to bring it here to America where at this particular esoteric tradition that never been and it kind of goes where it is needed at different times in different human history these different order they're like threads like I often call them threads of love that are woven into the fabric of humanity if they're not there something begins to be lacking within the human consciousness on a very practical level those human beings who are drawn to experience this inner depth within a human being and I say drawn very particularly because it's not something you do of your own volition but you have a longing to go beneath the surface and go to explore the very interior realm of being a human being which in the Sufi tradition is go right into the core of the heart into the heart of hearts you need to find a living tradition you can't do it any other way and so it it used to be you know you heard a story about somebody somewhere and you went off say mighty jet all the way to a small town in India by rather security's route where she met a teacher now it's apparently more visible but this is this in a dimension of humanity that it carries the the deeper mystery of what life is why we are here what is the purpose of the human incarnation how Sufis you know Sufis love laughter because they just do this actually a nice story of other early what you might now call interfaith conference that took place in in Kashmir many years ago and there was like a it was in the evening and there were all these different groups and you know sitting around the fires and the everybody at the end of the day went back to their own group and somebody said you know you could tell what the different groups were you could see where the Jewish group because they were discussing things in great detail and this discussion and you could tell which was the Buddhist group because they were all sitting there in silence and you could tell which was the you know the Hindu group because they were doing this beautiful chanting and you could tell which was a Sufi group because they were just sitting back and laughing and laughing and telling stories and laughing and if you're in a super group there's always laughter it was always stories and because why because it's so crazy though things so crazy and there is also the like to say it but a deep spiritual joke to the whole of life which the Sufis have the key off you know and everybody else has to work so hard and do their practices so diligently and the Sufis just love gardened and we eyes own personal idiots we are Sufis are known as the idiots of God his own personal idiots I was once told in a dream he has a special tenderness for his own personal idiots [Music] so they just love beloved you do well that's what you will we are fairly helpless fairly hopeless lost causes but we love you you know it's like just like the story of my favorite Christian story of the three monks and who were in this lived in this cave and they had one prayer and that one prayer was we are three and now at one and we love thee and that's all they did and somehow the people in the town when they came into contact with these monks they got healed nobody knew why the monks didn't do any healing ceremonies or purify any water but they got healed and think miracles happened and finally the bishop got to hear about this they were honor monks they've done an island it's a town and there was a mountain there was a cave in the mountain so the bishop with his retinue came to visit these monks and he got in his boat and he sailed from the city where he had his Cathedral and he sailed to the little Harbor and all his retinue went up and and sat with the monks and done and eventually you know he said you know what you're doing it is very good but this is not really a proper prayer you know you're a proper Christian you to the Paternoster at least in those days prayers were all in Latin and anyway he instructed them again in the Paternoster and some Ave Marias and not very good on my Christi prayers but um you know and they listen very attentively and then the Sun was coming setting so they the bishop and his retinue got into the boat and sail back towards the mainland and and the lookout suddenly cool look looked towards the island and they saw these three lights coming across to the belt very quickly as they said as they bring down the sails you know stop the boat and the bishops that looked out at least three times so there was these three monks running very quickly across the water and they came to the boat and they said your grace your grace can you tell us again these prayers we have forgotten go back do what you are doing before we are three and thou art one and we love thee they pretended remember the first time I came across that was when I read Wilhelm's translation of the secret of the golden flower which is a Taoist text well who translated the e Ching was actually one of the first Westerners to be initiatives before the Revolution to be initiated into the ancient Taoist tradition and that techniques and they one of the few places in the world at that time that had a living esoteric tradition and in the secret of the golden flower they talked about creating a light body and there they used certain breathing techniques but although the spirit we all have a spiritual body is latent within us and for most people they they just they live a physical life although is and it remains latent but if you want to do spiritual life you you have to activate it and then through really serious spiritual work you build you create a light body or a spiritual body that has different it allows you to experience the spiritual world while in this body most people they say only get to experience the spiritual world after they die they leave this body behind they leave this mental image of themselves behind and then they find themselves in spiritual world where they learn about their spiritual self one of the first things you have to do is you have to do a certain purification because the spirit body if it's going to have experiences in the spiritual world which is much finer than this world it has to be purified and that's why Carl Jung he said enlightenment does not come from in imagining figures of light that by making the darkness conscious the latter process however is disagreeable and therefore unpopular there is a real danger if you open yourself to too much spiritual energy before you've done the purification because the spiritual light energy doesn't come through the spiritual body it starts to balance off all the impurities it just starts to ricocheted around inside of you and can be very confusing and very destructive so on some paths they do you know they focus on the right diet on the right posture as a way of purifying they purify the physical body and take it apart that I belong we've focused on inner work which is primarily psychological working on the shadow on the darkness within oneself loving and accepting the dark rejected parts of himself we have incorporated a Jungian model - because the Western psyche is slightly different to the Eastern psyche where our tradition came from and Jung had this understanding of the inner process of transformation that belongs to the spiritual journey he reinterpreted it from alchemy and so you begin with the process of purification of working on the shadow also working on your negative attitudes and those qualities within you I find for most people that takes the first seven years of just creating the vehicle that can then begin to contain the higher spiritual energies that belong to the human being and then through we pay particular attention to awareness of breath the awareness of breath is actually helps to create a powerful and strong inner container breath is very essential to most spiritual practice and the combination of just being aware of the breath is helps to create a spiritual container together with the meditation practice that we do and one of the if you build a really healthy container then you can have access to spiritual energies function at a much faster vibration than the energies in this world they change much more quickly you actually also have to learn to think in a different way because most people's thinking is even their thinking is very very structured and doesn't change very much and you have to the spiritual energy changes it amount you can change very very quickly from moment to moment so you have to learn to be much more responsive just in your inner attitude and less that's rigid if you have rigid thinking patterns don't come near Sufis because the the frequency of the love actually hits people who have rigid thinking patterns they don't like it they can't hold it so gradually over the years through the practices you create in a container that allows you to experience the faster higher energies that belong to your spiritual nature without being disturbed by them and and hopefully during this time you also develop certain human qualities in order to to live an ethical life like respect for others and loving kindness because that is kind of needed if you are going to live in accord with your higher spiritual nature which is it's not that it's better it's just faster and the more thing when things speed up they they require a different way to live and then this inner vehicle is also a vehicle that in deep meditation or during the night can take you to take your soul to two different places in the inner worlds most people's soul doesn't travel very much even when they're asleep it just hovers around it is a very very particular science really deep spirituality it's you know it is just a science it's a science our science and technology is focused on the outer world there is a very deep science of the inner world so friends thank you so much for coming together at this time so nice to be with you all we will meet again

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Keywords: Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, mysticism, oneness, inner worlds, spirituality, Sufism

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Length: 51min 32sec (3092 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 17 2016