SUFI Journal of Mystical Philosophy and Practice
SUFI #107 is now out!
SUFI 107 App is available now!
NEW — HIGHLIGHT from SUFI Archives
From SUFI Issue 78
The Meaning of Surrender
By Alireza Nurbakhsh
In SUFI’s 2009 winter issue, Alireza Nurbakhsh, Master of the Nimatullahi Sufi Order, explores the meaning of surrender to God. In his discourse, he points out that surrender occurs in the context of fighting or resisting aspects of our life situation. In contemporary culture, the act of surrendering is regarded as a passive or negative quality, and we are encouraged to never to surrender to our condition. In contrast, spiritual surrender to God occurs when we tire of fighting against others and our own ego. “Once we accept the world as it is, as a manifestation of an all-encompassing Truth, we have surrendered ourselves to God…it is only when we are not at war with ourselves and others that we become creative and sympathetic to others.”
Explore more about this Sufi teaching and read the full discourse from the SUFI archive, now available free to anyone. Subscribe to SUFI to enjoy the full array of articles, stories, poetry and more in each issue.
Artwork 1999 ©Dale Wicks
SUFI JOURNAL ISSUE 107
Changing One’s Self through
Changing One’s Perspective
by Alireza Nurbakhsh
One Little Word
by Mary Gossy
What is that one little word people want to hear or say? In The Carter Family’s 1934 country hit, “One Little Word,” the singers croon, “that one little word was never spoken”, “that word was never said”—we can guess what it might be, given the context of a brokenhearted lover whose beloved has chosen to marry a richer man. One can speculate about ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ ‘you,’ ‘us,’— ‘help!’—but mysteries of ambivalence and complexity are hidden in the unspoken, and the refusal to name an absolute aloud, or to theorize about it, is part of the brilliant tact and economy of the song.
The vocabulary of love is limited. Various traditions and times have their love lexicons, but the rehearsal of the attributes of love, what it is to be in love, or not, or to be stuck somewhere in the in-betweens of loving, is surprisingly uniform across time and space. The French theorist Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments reads a selection of basic words and experiences from love’s story, examining the terms that the mind of the lover pronounces, and giving this interior process its due. But Barthes has no final word on the subject of love.
Abu Sa’id, Mr. Right Behaviour, and Me
by Annouchka Bayley
I belonged to an animal.
Through me she ran in the forests, drank from the lakes and breathed in all the green and all the starlight. And all the violence. Through me she prowled and clawed, rested and slept, loved and watched. My endless rhythms latticed her to life, pumping, pumping, speaking in her sinews, speaking in her veins, her skin, her fur, her atomic pulse—until she was caught in a hunter’s trap. Through me she felt life slow and ebb. Through my descent she felt her eyes close, slow, slower, slower,
and then hush.
Her tiger’s pelt was ripped from her body, and the hunter went to the market and sold it to bring back money for his wife. ‘It’s not nearly enough!’ wailed the wife. ‘Go see what else you can sell.’ The hunter fell about to the rest of that body, clipping claws and toes and ears and putting them all in a bag. When he returned with a few more coins his wife said ‘still not nearly enough! I need more if I am to look beautiful enough for the great warlord’s visit to our village in June.’ So the hunter returned once more to what was left. He took the liver, the kidneys, the eyes, and me. He put us all in a bag and carried us to market.
The Way of a Mystic
by Mary Potter
Though for many years I devoured the writings of mystics and avidly studied books on mysticism, only when I happened upon these words of Rabi’a did I realize that I was a mystic.
I claimed no ecstasies, no visions or visitations, no miraculous events, no esoteric knowledge, no union with the All or unique communion with God, no close encounters with animals or angels, no visions, no revelations, no extreme ascetic practices or celebrations of the forbidden, no perfection of act or purity of heart. I had no special gift or wisdom. I couldn’t be a mystic: I was ordinary.
But I did yearn unceasingly for the Friend. I was sick with love for the Beloved, a sickness that kept me jumping toward the One like a fool, a sickness I knew would not be healed until I died. That simple acknowledgement, that I was a mystic, suddenly illuminated the path I had been traveling, through turning after turning—from head to heart, from battling to become a self to surrender of that self, from fear to love—to find myself already and always on the way, to “the Lover Who Is Beloved, the Seeker Who Is Sought, O You who makes all hearts turn and turn!” as Ibn ’Arabi says. Turning to, turning from, turning away, turning back, turning inside out, turning upside down, turning round. Finding the way only to lose it. Losing the way only to be found. Turning, always turning.
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