The Sufi Book of Life Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Setting Out on the Journey

  0. The Yes and No of Existence

  1. The Sun of Love

  2. The Moon of Love

  3. The “I Can” Power of the Cosmos

  4. Sacred Space

  5. Peace at the Beginning

  6. Support

  7. Protection

  8. The Strength of Form

  9. Repair and Restoration

  10. Concentration

  11. Carving and Forming

  12. Radiating Creativity

  13. Designing and Training

  14. Burning Away Tension and Hurt

  15. Natural Power

  16. Flowing Blessings

  17. Sustenance

  18. Opening to Unity’s Breath

  19. Understanding Names and Forms

  20. Contracting Boundaries

  21. Expanding Boundaries

  22. Diminishment

  23. Exaltation

  24. High “Self” Esteem

  25. Low “Self” Esteem

  26. Awakened Hearing

  27. Awakened Sight

  28. The Sacred Sixth Sense

  29. Putting Things in Order

  30. Subtle Mystery

  31. The Seed of Potential

  32. Dissolving Chains

  33. Flexible Strength

  34. The Forgiveness of Light

  35. Gratitude, Giving Back

  36. Experiencing Life at Its Peak

  37. Outward Creative Power

  38. Remembrance and Preservation

  39. Embodying a Steady State

  40. Feeling Divinity in the Details

  41. Pooling Strength

  42. Abundant Expression

  43. Watching with Presence

  44. Reflective Listening

  45. The Heart Has No Limits

  46. Discriminating Wisdom

  47. Love Is a Give and Take

  48. Dazzling Energy

  49. The Return of What Passes Away

  50. Experiencing a Universe of Unity

  51. The Truth in Each Moment

  52. Meeting Challenges

  53. Winds of Change

  54. Step-by-Step Persistence

  55. Friendship

  56. The Gift of Purpose

  57. Assessing What Is

  58. Individuated Creation

  59. Reviving What Is Worn Down

  60. Personal Life Energy

  61. Transition

  62. Universal Life Energy

  63. Rebounding

  64. Extraordinary Sensing

  65. Channeling Extraordinary Power

  66. Counting to One

  67. Uniquely One

  68. Refuge for Every Need

  69. Holding the Center

  70. Embodying Power in Action

  71. Preparing the Way

  72. Doubling Back on the Path

  73. Sacred Surprise

  74. Completion

  75. The Star

  76. The Hidden Traveler

  77. Mastering Life

  78. Inhabiting an Expanded Consciousness

  79. Burnishing

  80. Returning to Rhythm

  81. Sweeping Out

  82. Blowing Away the Ashes

  83. Healing Wings

  84. Passionate Vision

  85. Overwhelming Power and Beauty

  86. New Roots, New Foundation

  87. Gathering Gems

  88. Tending Your Garden

  89. Life’s Larger Garden

  90. The Gift of Resistance

  91. Pain and Loss

  92. Immediately Useful Blessing

  93. The Light of Intelligence

  94. Most Direct Guidance

  95. Unexpected Wonder

  96. The Real That Remains

  97. Reclaiming a Forgotten Inheritance

  98. Illuminating the Path of Growth

  99. Perseverance

  Biographies of Sufis Cited

  Contacts for Sufi Teachings

  Formal Transliterations of the Pathways of the Heart

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Praise for The Sufi Book of Life

  “A teacher once told me, ‘You want to be wise too quickly. Take small sips.’ This book reminds us of the small-sip practice of inner patience. Slow down. Open at random once a day. Read three pages. Wait for insight. Breathe.”

  —Coleman Barks, editor of The Essential Rumi and co-author of The Drowned Book

  “At the present time understanding Islam and familiarizing oneself with the treasure of the Qur’an are becoming important pursuits in the western societies. There are few books written by western writers and scholars seeking to familiarize the reader with the treasure of Islam as a way of life. This book is one of them.”

  —Nahid Angha, codirector, International Association of Sufism

  “With warmth, wisdom, humor and common sense The Sufi Book of Life makes accessible the Sufi path of inner transformation. This valuable book brings alive an ancient tradition of mystical love that is much needed today. Here is practical guidance for any spiritual traveler, pathways to help us uncover the real wonder of our divine nature.”

  —Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, author of Sufism, the Transformation of the Heart

  “Written simply, tenderly, and with great wisdom, The Sufi Book of Life helps you open your heart, find ease in a stressful world, and gain perspective on the daily challenges of life. The message of love, honesty, and kindness is deeply embedded in the clarity and warmth of the prose. To read it is to be changed.”

  —Charlotte Kasl, author of If the Buddha Dated and If the Buddha Got Stuck

  “Highly inspiring . . . Neil Douglas-Klotz has accomplished the great task of drawing esoteric wonders into our daily lives, so that honest seekers on the path of truth may discover the magic jewels which are spread before them.”

  —Hidayat Inayat Khan, representative, International Sufi Movement

  THE SUFI BOOK OF LIFE

  Neil Douglas-Klotz, Ph.D. (Saadi Shakur Chishti), is a world-renowned scholar in religious studies, spirituality, and psychology, and a leader in the International Association of Sufism. An American living in Edinburgh, Scotland, he is codirector of the Edinburgh Institute for Advanced Learning and cochair of the Mysticism Group of the American Academy of Religion. He is also a founder of the worldwide network of the Dances of Universal Peace. A frequent speaker and workshop leader, he is the author of several books, including The Genesis Meditations and Prayers of the Cosmos.

  PENGUIN COMPASS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada) 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Books (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,

  Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New

  Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg
br />   2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Penguin Compass 2005

  Copyright © Neil Douglas-Klotz, 2005

  All rights reserved

  Pages 290-291 constitute an extension to this copyright page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Douglas-Klotz, Neil.

  The Sufi book of life : 99 pathways of the heart for the modern dervish /

  Douglas-Klotz Neil.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-68424-1

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For

  Hazrat Pir Moineddin Jablonski (1942-2001), friend and teacher—

  a “comrade of the tulip and the rose”

  Quick-Start Guide

  NINETY-NINE PATHWAYS OF THE HEART FOR THE MODERN DERVISH

  Don’t start by reading this book from the beginning. Instead, open it at random a few times and read what you find. If something strikes you, stay with it. You will likely discover some things you can identify with immediately and others that seem like they are from another planet. If you first try to read the book from start to finish, you may not be able to face so many seemingly paradoxical corners of your heart all at once.

  Don’t worry about “getting the point.” The Sufi teaching stories scattered throughout the book work on many different levels. The obvious meaning or moral shows only the surface level. The rest of the story works “below ground,” so to speak, in your subconscious. If you get a chuckle or even a “humph!” from a story, it’s probably having its effect.

  Browse consciously. Read the preface, “Setting Out on the Journey.” Then take some time each day, perhaps before bed, to familiarize yourself with some of the pathways. Each one presents a quality of feeling, sensation, or experience. Some may be familiar to you, some may not. Some pathways seem to contradict others. Some pathways connect to others, as I have indicated in the Roots and Branches section of each chapter (for instance, themes of work, love, power, relationships, and so forth). Do any of the qualities or challenges speak to your situation in life right now?

  Forage. When confronted by a situation in life in which you would like some guidance, take a breath or two with your hand placed lightly over your heart to calm yourself, then open the book at random, as you would an oracle. This may be the best way for the new user to experience the pathways. If you use the book this way, you might also want to read the pathways immediately before and after the one to which you’ve opened. The Sufis have used lists of the pathways of the heart in this way for more than a thousand years. The Meditation section of each pathway suggests ways to contemplate or experience the quality. The default meditation is simply to breathe in your heart with the feeling of what you have read.

  Cut up the book. Or you can photocopy and enlarge the table of contents, cut the list of pathways apart, and place the pieces in a bowl. Take a breath and pick one. This is another way to use the pathways as an oracle, as mentioned above. Alternatively, a list of pathways that you can easily cut up is posted at www.sufibookoflife.com. This site will also link you to other sites where you can hear various traditional pronunciations of the practices.

  Hunt. Perhaps you are consciously working on an issue in your life or psyche, or supporting other inner work such as counseling or psychotherapy. Check the table of contents or index for a topic that seems relevant and, still breathing in the heart, find what you need.

  Read this book. After you have done all of the above for a while, begin to read the book from the beginning to the end. Take a break and put the book aside occasionally, so you don’t get indigestion from meeting too many different facets of yourself. Just as wine tasters need to frequently clear their palates, you may need space from tasting the wines of your soul. To help you create this space, you will find several unnumbered chapters titled “Bathing in Unity” interspersed throughout the book. Use these to dive into the pure ocean of the Beloved before looking down another pathway.

  A Note About “Bugs.” The book’s “program” has not been debugged. Actually, it has been re-bugged. Paradox and foolishness are built in, as is what is deeply serious. Sufism is a living twenty-first-century tradition with many different approaches. Expressions in the book such as “a Sufi would say . . .” or “the Sufis . . .” should not be taken to imply that there is one unified Sufi way of being or acting. The program is incompatible with any attempts to use it to find a consistent philosophy, metaphysic, or history that can be called “Sufi.” The programmers take no responsibility for your rational system crashing under these circumstances.

  Your heart is the browser.

  The pathways are the search engine.

  The universe is the real Internet.

  And there are many addresses to the Beloved,

  whose server is always online.

  Introduction

  ACCORDING TO A NUMBER of news sources, the bestselling poet in the English language today is Jelaluddin Rumi, a thirteenth-century Persian Sufi. Is this good news for Sufism, or bad news for the state of English poetry?

  Both Rumi and Hafiz (who lived a generation later) have entranced readers because they emphasize passionate love. We are all looking for love, and while we may not know what the word means, we know love when we feel it. Sufi poetry speaks eloquently and passionately about the Beloved, and about intoxication, longing, lust, misunderstanding, and mistaken identity (of both lover and beloved). That is, all the stuff of life and soap opera. What makes Sufi poetry and story different from soap opera, however, is that they take place in a kind of magical universe of long ago and far away, a universe in which some greater, benign Reality encloses everything.

  Most contemporary English poets would reject the whole context of Sufi poetry as romantic and idealistic. What matters today is today’s world, one in which we construct our own meaning. We can’t be anywhere but here, slogging along in the bleak reality of postmodern life.

  Try telling that to the millions of people who are reading Sufi poetry. Their response is the good news for Sufism.

  The bad news is that most people reading Rumi and Hafiz would like to bridge the gap between reading about divine love and actually experiencing it, but don’t know how. They have been led to believe (often by some academic or scholarly source) that Sufis only lived long ago and far away, where they wore robes and turbans and spoke with foreign accents. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  Sufism is a living twenty-first-century tradition, with many different approaches and practices. Authentic Sufis speak in all languages, and may wear completely ordinary clothing. The word dervish means one who sits in the doorway, or on the threshold of something, ready to move on and transform him- or herself. This book is for modern dervishes, people who want to start living the Sufi poetry of love. It is based on this writer’s experience following the Sufi path for the past thirty years and applying it to everyday life.

  If Sufism is a living spiritual path today, why isn’t it better known?

  The twelfth-century Sufi Saadi once said, “You can get ten dervishes under a blanket, but you can’t get two kings to share the same continent.” However, in the modern era it has seemed more like wherever you have two Sufis together, you have three opinions. Since the Indian Sufi Inayat Khan brought a form of Sufism to the West in 1910, many different groups and teachers have arrived.

  Most Sufi books have presented academic, historical, or philosophical information on the tradition, designed to appeal to the intellect. Some contemporary t
eachers have presented their own work and approaches, which often seem contradictory to the work of others. This has actually been a blessing, since unlike some other traditions, Sufism has not been organized to the extent that its wild character has been tamed.

  Historically, diversity has been Sufism’s strength. It is ultimately a nomadic tradition, one that has constantly deconstructed and transplanted itself rather than settle and build gigantic shrines, institutions, monolithic rituals, or organizations. There is no Sufi Vatican or Potala. Rumi, for instance, was well positioned to take over his father’s business, being the main Sufi preacher of Konya, but along came his spiritual soulmate Shams-i-Tabriz. Rumi gave up his ordered way of life, spent all his time with Shams, and ultimately became a broken-hearted dervish who created the greatest oriental poetry in history. Ibn Arabi could have remained in Spain and built up a large following, but instead he chose to spend most of his life moving from place to place. On the other hand, when the Sufis have been co-opted by the establishment (as in the late Ottoman Empire), they have usually experienced serious problems. We Sufis are itinerant and like our freedom, which is probably also why we usually agree to disagree.

  Who (or What) Is a Sufi?

  Sufism is, first of all, a series of “not’s”—not a religion, not a philosophy, not even a mysticism, as that word is usually conceived. It’s best to call Sufism a way of experiencing reality as love itself. The modern Sufi writer Massud Farzan said it well and succinctly:

  Sufism is a unique phenomenology of Reality. The psychology of Sufism is Sufism itself; the art and science of Sufism is the very practice of Sufism.1

  Given such a slippery definition, is it possible to talk about any kind of “pure Sufism” today? A person with common sense would say no, but this has not stopped scholars and Sufis themselves from attempting to answer this question. Even the relationship of Sufism to Islam is fraught and may be another reason why Sufism as a path is not more popular today in the West. Is Sufism, as the more simplistic dictionary definitions maintain, the “mystical side of Islam”? Does Sufism (or its philosophy or practices) predate Islam? Is Sufism “the real Islam” (just as some people would maintain that such Christian mystics as Meister Eckhart or St. Francis of Assisi represent the real teachings of Jesus, more than any form of the institutional church)? Here is a typically Sufi answer, again given by Massud Farzan: