Tag: Mark Nepo

95 EDITORS’ NOTE

For the Sufis the experience of the sacred can happen anywhere, at any time. Given the conjunction of spacetime in contemporary physics, this statement in Alireza Nurbakhsh’s discourse may be reassuring. The sacred is available, but it is also (and not just etymologically) “set apart”—not intrinsically, but because people usually do not perceive it, or do not know that they are in it. What all the authors in this issue of Sufi find is that it takes at least one of the five physical senses of the human body, in combination with a consciousness devoted to service to others, to detect and create sacred space.

Kim Lisson’s interview with Nyoongar Aboriginal Elders reveals the need to feel with the whole body and a whole history of stories and connections. Then perception shows the routes that lead to a person’s experience of a specific sacredness in specific places. The locations where this issue’s articles happen: Istanbul, England, Pakistan, Japan, Australia, New York, Oregon, the place of poetry, and the mother of them all, the space of the heart—are already sacred space. As Mark Nepo says, though, frequently we need another person or community to remind us of all this. When the going gets tough, the tough ask for help. Friends, teachers, ancestors, saints living and dead, will answer the call. Then we can remember to stop, look, listen, touch, smell, and taste Nature, the sacred space we already inhabit. How can that happen? According to 2014 United Nations figures, more than half (54%) of the people on Earth are stuck in cities. But our authors remind us that under the cities is pure planet, and anyone who has been to town knows that tiny leaves push up through cracks in the man-made. Like it or not, with then senses alive as we can feel them, it’s time to hit the road, or we won’t find the sacred space we can’t get away from anyway: “I set out on the journey to see my beloved; the wind carrying her scent reached me first and I passed out.” We took our first breath of sacred space before we knew it.

—The Editors of SUFI

 

ARTWORK © RITA FABRIZIO

94 EDITORS’ NOTE

There are times when we find ourselves shrinking from life, from beauty, from the truth. From the story of love unfolding all around us, and within ourselves. It often happens in the moments where we allow the mind to transport us; when we allow the material world and language to determine the limits of our understanding and experience. As Mark Nepo describes, these tendencies can construct a prison of our own making, within which only sorrow and sadness grows.

This issue of SUFI explores the different effects of this retreat, and the routes we can take to return to presence.

The experience of beauty, writes Alireza Nurbakhsh, has the potential to cultivate divine love. Navigating the delicate line between worldly desire and divine inspiration in interpreting our experience of beauty, says Nurbakhsh, can be aided by the spiritual community and the guidance of a master. David Godman further expands on the importance of a guru. Sharing insights from his many years in Arunachala, India, he reflects on the importance of a guru not only for receiving verbal guidance, but also for “direct transmission”—quietening the mind and accelerating the process of awakening— most powerfully in silence. Yet is it precisely this silence which can frighten us most. In “Unoccupied Prayer” and Divine Love, Mary Gossy observes that “Doing nothing is not for the faint of heart.” It is in silence and complete surrender to God that the impasse of logic and over-thinking is overcome. By surrendering to “whatever breath of grace there is that moves the foot to take a step into empty air,” we can begin to walk a path beyond the limits of what the mind thinks is possible. Indeed, beyond words.

It is after this leap of faith that the heart and the mind can work together.  In his reflection on Rumi’s life and work, Jawid Mojaddedi unpacks the paradox of Rumi’s intellectual rigor and scholarly knowledge being both an impediment to spiritual insight, and also a powerful medium through which to communicate the importance of seeing the mind as a servant of the heart. Tech entrepreneur Nipun Mehta takes us one step further: from mind and heart to action. He shares his vision for change through service and how, by combining the head, heart and hands in everyday acts of kindness, we unlock the power to transform ourselves and the world. It is in the doing that we can become the “instrument of a larger flow,” find release from the anxieties of our ego, and become part of a collective consciousness that becomes community, generosity, equality and compassionate models of leadership— all shifting the cultural narrative from transaction to transformation. We hope you enjoy reading. We’re also releasing monthly doses of Sufi poems and music via our newsletter.

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PHOTO © SERVICESPACE

94 ALWAYS PART OF SOMETHING LARGER

by Mark Nepo

Life is the greatest storyteller. No matter what we’re going through—sick or well, in despair or wonder—faith in life means believing that there’s always more beyond the condition of our understanding—the way the rest of the Universe whirls beyond the light of any given star. In just this way, we’re always part of something larger than our condition, and the circumstance we’re in—real and consuming as it can be—is not the condition of the Whole. Faith in this distinction allows for healing.

It helps to tell stories. I share this one because Tom’s story is our story. Tom is an architect who feels very lost. Today, he’s leaving work, entering the elevator on the fiftieth floor, alone in the metal box taking him back to the ground, stopping along the way to gather others. As he descends, he leans against the wall of the elevator, wondering how he came to be so tired and lost. Tom is a man who started out in innocence, but as he tried to love, he was hurt. As he tried to help others, he was manipulated and betrayed. Tom began with a sublime trust in life, but became jaded and fearful. What he doesn’t know is that when he’s afraid, he forgets what he knows. When he fears situations, he forgets what he’s learned about moving through the world. When he fears he’s lost his way, he forgets who he is. When he fears the world is lacking, he forgets the gift of life.

Each of us struggles between being insular and making our way in the world. One more story that is our story. On a dreary day, a vital, thoughtful woman hurries to live behind a tall, thick wall. She thinks she’s building a castle, but it soon becomes a prison. Though she thinks the wall keeps everything painful out, surprise curls over the top like a cloud and circles her head like a fog. And sorrow seeps through the cracks in the wall like a distant memory that lodges in her ear. In time, she puts her sad ear to the wall and listens for life on the other side.

Those who love her pound on the wall for her to come out, but she just backs away and hides. No one knows what pain or argument with life had sent her into exile within herself. But after a while, life leaves her alone.

ARTWORK © CECILIA PAREDES

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92 Editors’ Note

EDITORS’ NOTE

Issue 92, Winter 2017

This issue of SUFI brings the reader right up against what is uncomfortable. Forget about politics: let’s talk about the weather. Too hot in cold months, too dry in wet ones, ferocious when it should be bleating like a lamb.

Alireza Nurbakhsh, current Master of the Nimatullahi Sufi Order, describes the planetary climate, and then the spiritual one. He finds that excessive consumption—of goods, people, ideas—probably anything—is one of the causes of deadly changes in our environment. This is not necessarily a surprise, but the cure he prescribes for the problem is. Contentment, “a state wherein one is happy with who he or she is and what he or she possesses,” is the antidote, and what makes contentment possible, he clearly shows, is unconditional loving-kindness, a broken-open love that asks for nothing in return, and sees the Beloved right in front of it at every moment.

Mark Nepo advocates an unflagging and faithful “devotion of attention” to the one moment in front of you as part of the path leading to the love and truth in our hearts, broken open and blooming like window box geraniums when we least expect it.

Marilie Coetsee shows how the medieval Sufi thinker al-Ghazali discusses an experiential knowledge similar to the contentment that can only be acquired through engagement in loving kindness. In this case the special knowledge is acquired through the medium of emotions specifically and is unattainable through the intellect alone, demonstrating that “the heart has its reasons” in a new and profound light.

Edwin Bryant, interviewed by Komal Majmundar and Jawid Mojaddedi, shows that a muscular approach to spirituality is not always the most direct path, although it can certainly be one of them. He discusses the differences among bhakti yoga and other branches of yoga, grounding his remarks in Patajali’s definition that “yoga is the stilling of all fluctuations of thought.” Stop for a second, pay attention, love is arising, in all its forms.

Scenes as disparate as a pristine Quaker meeting house in Vermont and a center for sex workers, addicts, and other desperate youth in New York City, the first in J. Brent Bill’s article on silence, the second in Safoura Nourbakhsh’s interview with Adam Bucko, co-founder of The Reciprocity Foundation, find that deep listening and contemplative silence are the core of loving and transformative action on behalf of others.

In every contribution in this issue of SUFI, readers will find that what we most need is not for sale. Grace is freely given, but we do not dictate the terms of delivery. Love, in its rhythms heard and unstruck, is there when we quiet down and let go of everything else.

—The Editors of SUFI

 

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Finding Birdsong

Nepo_1by Mark Nepo

This chapter, from my new book, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, speaks to the slow conversation that takes place over time between the spirit and the body. For me, that conversation goes back almost twenty-five years to the heart of my cancer journey.

Archives Issue #84: Altruism, Healing and Sufism in West Africa

FROM THE EDITORS

In this Issue of SUFI, Dr. Alireza Nurbakhsh tells us altruism is fundamental not only to our spirituality but to our identity as human beings. Examples of this are found in the powerful healing combination of Sufism and shamanism embodied by Shaikh Rahmi Oruç Güvenç and in the ancient Blessing Way chants of Medicine Woman Sheila Goldtooth. Readers will also find in this Issue a fascinating exploration of Sufism in West Africa through the eyes of a contemporary Sufi Shaikh in Senegal.

DISCOURSE, ARTICLES, NARRATIVES AND INTERVIEWS

CARING FOR OTHERS Sufism and Altruism Discourse by Dr Alireza Nurbakhsh | Read entire discourse >

SHAMANIC TRADITIONS AND SUFISM Oruç Güvenç and the Healing Power of Music by Azize Güvenç and Yousef Daoud | Read more >

SUFISM IN WEST AFRICA by Zachary Wright

BLESSING WAY SINGER A Visit with Navajo Medicine Woman Sheila Goldtooth Interviewed by Chara Nelson, Photography by Alex Cowie

SENEGAL, SUFISM & POLITICS A Conversation with Seydou Diop Interviewed by Annie Stopford and Eugene Ulman | Read more >

THE ENORMITY CLUB Narrative by Jan Shoemaker | Read more >

CULTUREWATCH

MERCAN DEDE Turns the Tables on Sufism by Michele Rousseau | Read more >

HELIOFANT PRODUCTIONS I, Pet Goat II by Sholeh Johnston

JESSIKA KENNEY Singing from the Heart by Sholeh Johnston

FILM REVIEW Beasts of the Southern Wild by Peter Valentyne

BOOK REVIEWS by Peter Valentyne
Seven Thousand Ways to Listen
(Mark Nepo)
The Divine Flood (Rudiger Seesemann)
Saracen Chivalry (Pir Zia Inayat-khan)
In this Forest of Monks (Daniel Skach-Mills)

POETRY

From Him by Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh
Prayer of the White-Tailed Tropical Bird by Eve Powers
Attendant Spirits by Mark Nepo
Silence by Alex Cowie
We are all Born Naked into this World by Robert Sternau
To Love by Roger Loff The Obedience of Iblis, the Devil by David Sulivan

FEATURED POET

MARK NEPO Poet & Philosopher(marknepo.com)

FEATURED ARTIST

YARI OSTOVANY Painter (yariostovany.com)

(front cover artwork: Bear Bull Shaman, Blackfoot Medicine Man by Otto Rapp)

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Featured Poet: Mark Nepo

MARK NEPO is a poet and philosopher who has taught in the fields of poetry and spirituality for over thirty-five years. Here, he shares with us four of his recent poems.