Evolutionary Transformation: A Sufi Perspective

"We have forgotten that the world belongs to God. That is the most basic fundamental reality that exists - that the world belongs to God. Not only have we forgotten that the world belongs to God, we have forgotten that we have forgotten."

-- Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee --

In the attached video, Sufi teacher and author, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee ("Love Is a Fire: The Sufi's Mystical Journey Home") deftly answers a slew of the most fundamental questions that we all have, such as: What happens to a person when they die? Why is there suffering and poverty? Where can God be found? etc. His answers to these existential questions reveal an enlightening depth both to the Sufi tradition and teachings, as well as to the basic nature of humanity itself.

Asked to describe the circumstances under which the world as we know it will come to an end, Vaughan-Lee makes the prescient observation that "the world as we know it has already come to an end."

"As a mystic," he observes, "you see how things change first in the 'inner.' There is a law that everything that happens in life first constellates on the inner planes. If you do mystical practices, you will begin to see how things come into being.  And the world as we know it inwardly has already ended. It is already over. . . . Somebody once said, "It is like the last dance on the Titanic."" 

"There is," he notes, "a whole other level of evolution which I call evolution of 'Oneness' or 'global awareness.' . . . It is already setting the scenes for the next level of human evolution. . . .The Internet," he points out, "is a direct example of how 'Oneness' works, and how it is incredibly efficient and it is everywhere at the same time, and anybody (or anybody who has a computer) can have access to it. And it was just given to humanity, and it works. So the world as we know it has somewhere already ended."

"But it is our work," Vaughan-Lee cautions, "to bring this next evolution into being, because it needs human beings who can see beyond the debris of the civilization that is around us."

"If you look around with open eyes," he points out, "you see the debris of a dying or dead civilization. Why? Because there is no meaning. What is it that gives life to any culture? It is meaning. And without meaning - and 'meaning' does not mean to have a bigger car or bigger house, because human beings are made in the image of God, we are divine, we are spinning organisms of light and love - and it is the spiritual, always if you look back throughout all the cultures, it is the spiritual that always gives meaning to people. 

 "It is our work," Vaughan-Lee stresses, "to bring this next level of evolution into form."

Vaughan-Lee points out that the major transformational shift which we are going through is not the end of a thousand year cycle, but rather the end of a one hundred thousand year cycle - a cycle as old as the evolution of humanity as a species.  It is, he notes, a major evolutionary transformation that will play itself out not over thousands of years, but over the next twenty to thirty years - i.e, a transformation that will occur during our lifetimes, or the lifetimes of our children.

This, of course, begs the question: Are we aware that this transformation is already occurring around us? Do we know that the world as we have known it has already ended?

Tolle, Huxley and Meister Eckhart: "On Connection"

Aldous Huxley
(1894-1963)

"There is a way to Reality in and through the soul," writes Aldous Huxley, "and there is a way to Reality in and through the world. Whether the ultimate goal can be reached by following either of these ways to the exclusion of the other is to be doubted. The third, best and hardest way is that which leads to the divine Ground simultaneously in the perceiver and that which is perceived."

["The Perennial Philosophy," pp. 56-57.]

Meister Eckhart
(1260-1327)

"When a man sees one thing separated from another," he is "in mere understanding," Meister Eckhart observed. "And when is a man above mere understanding? That I can tell you: "When a man sees All in all, then a man is above mere understanding.""

[Ibid., p. 57]

These observations, written in 1945 and the early 14th century, respectively, point to a timeless truth, that is very much at the heart of modern spiritual teachings. One of the world's most innovative, authentic and popular spiritual teachers, Eckhart Tolle (who took his name from Meister Eckhart, the great German mystic), speaks to this truth when he talks of the Presence and Being which exists eternally in the present moment of a universal consciousness.

"The problems of the world," Tolle observes in the video, below, "are there because we have lost touched with the Source out of which everything came. So by going into further differentiation, we cannot solve the problems, we actually increase them."

"Connected with the timeless, formless Source of all life within, the space of no thought," he notes, "connected with that, then we can create - not 'we' as individuals, but 'we' as a universal movement of consciousness."

"We need conscious connection with the Source," Tolle concludes. "That is your destiny, that is your life's purpose. That's why we are here. And if it sounds complicated to your mind, it is only to the mind. It is not complicated at all. It's very simple."




But, cautions Huxley: "To find the Kingdom of God exclusively in oneself is easier than to discover it, not only there, but also in the outer world of minds and things and living creatures."

"It is easier," he explains, "because the heights within reveal themselves to those who are ready to exclude from their purview all that lies without. And though this exclusion may be a painful and mortificatory process, the fact remains that it is less arduous than the process of inclusion, by which we come to know the fullness as well as the heights of spiritual life."

Finding Rumi on the Spiritual Path

For the "spiritual not religious" soul who wakes up as if from a daze and finds him or herself suddenly thrust along a spiritual path, perhaps there is no more reassuring and inspiring a book than the translation of Jalalludin Rumi's mystic Sufi poetry by Coleman Barks and John Moyne, "The Essential Rumi."

Rumi, the renowned 13th century Persian poet, speaks to the emptied vessel of the spiritual aspirant, acknowledging the spaciousness of a mind uncluttered by the troubles of the day, saying:

Jalalludin Rumi (1207-1273)

"I honor those who try
to rid themselves of any lying,
who empty the self
and find only clear being there."

Rumi was the son of Bahauddin Valad, a noted Islamic jurist and teacher, who was caught up in the delirium of mysticism which would ensnare his son and carry his son's poetic voice down through more than eight centuries of history to this day.

Rumi was only 24 years old when he lost his father, and he was to wait another 13 years, quite alone in a spiritual sense, with only his father's writings to guide him, until he met Shams of Tabriz, the "Sun" around whom Rumi's "Earth" would thereafter orbit. In the interim it was Bahauddin's notebooks, the Maarif, which would nurture Rumi's poetic soul until his muse in the form of Shams, the itinerant Sufi wanderer, would appear.

Bahauddin, like his son was a lover of both the sensual and the divine, and his writing (as translated by Barks and Moyne in the "The Drowned Book") melds the two. Often Rumi's poetry seems to pick up where Bahuaddin's writing has left off.

Bahauddin writes:

"Someone asked me what is the knowing I speak of and how does the love I mention feel? I said if you don't know, what can I say? And if you do know, what can I say?
        The taste of knowing love has no explanation, and no account of it will ever give anyone that taste."

Rumi responds:

"There are guides that can show you the way.
Use them. But they will not satisfy your longing.

Keep wanting that connection
with all your pulsing energy.

The throbbing vein
will take you further
than any thinking.

Mohammed said, "Don't theorize
about essence!" All speculations
are just more layers of coverings.
Human beings love covering!

They think the designs on the curtains
are what's being concealed."

Bahauddin writes:

"How can I explain the other worlds to those who say there's nothing beyond what we touch and see?"

"Materialists quickly reach their limit like a man so stuffed with food he finds everything tasteless. The feeling that there is no further delight comes from ingratitude and a refusal to admit your failures."

Rumi responds:

"For hundreds of thousand of years
I have been dust grains
floating and flying in the will of the air,
often forgetting, ever being
in that state, but in sleep
I migrate back. I spring loose
from the four-branched, time-and-space
cross this waiting room.

I walk into a huge pasture,
I nurse the milk of millennia.
Everyone does this in different ways.
Knowing that conscious decisions
and personal memory
are much too small a place to live
every human being streams at night
into the loving nowhere . . ."

 * * * * * * * * * * * * *

If one wakes up and indeed finds one's self on a spiritual journey, then there could be no better guide than Rumi for whom his father provided the inspiration and Shams the sunlight that would make Rumi's poetry a beacon of the divine for countless generations . . . and countless generations yet to come!