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Quote by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Work

Travelling the Path of Love: Sayings of Sufi Masters

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Author

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee is a renowned lecturer, born in 1953. His areas of study encompass religion, philosophy, and spiritual growth, dedicated to spreading wisdom and knowledge. more

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“Everything starts with a thought. The universe is very sensitive to a human being. Even just one single clear thought, goes off into the universe and creates its own replica of it into form and comes back to you in kind. You can think of your thoughts like little thought-babies, if you like, that go off into the universe and come back as a solid matter experience, or an object in your life. Now one does not need to panic about this! What you need to do is not re-write your life because of this knowledge, but simply to be aware of it and to tweak it here and there. As you get older and wiser you tweak the tweaked bits and try to think thoughts that are more in line with what you want and less in line with what you don’t want.”

“Four thousand years before God created these bodies, He created the souls and kept them beside Himself and shed a light upon them. He knew what quantity each soul received and He showed favor to each in proportion to its illumination. The souls remained all that time in light, until they became fully nourished. Those who in this world live in joy and agreement with one another must have been akin to one another in that place. Here they love one another and are called the friends of God, and they are brothers who love one another for God’s sake. These souls know one another by smell, like horses. – Sheikh Abu-Said Abul-Khayr”

“God placed within the heart the knowledge of Him, and so the heart became lit by God’s Light. By this light He gave the heart eyes to see. Then God spoke in a parable and said, “Compared to a niche wherein is a lamp.” The lamp of the Divine Light is in the hearts of those who believe in the Oneness of God. – Al-Hakim at-Tirmidhi”

“So then where is the kingdom of God in man? It is in the heart. That is heaven. That is God. The heart is the station of God. All that matters is there. This is where God, the soul, and the light of wisdom exist. This is a temple of God which is formed as an atom within an atom, heart within the heart, the qalb within the qalb. It is within what is within. It cannot be destroyed by the five elements. You must understand this. It can never be destroyed...(p. 96)”

“Ibn ul Farid, the thirteenth-century adept in practical and theoretical mysticism, lived in Cairo. He attained to permanent union with his real self (the Beloved) by getting rid of the dualistic illusion of two selves. "It is like a woman possessed by a spirit," he said. By casting off his self-existence he had found the Beloved to be his real self. "Naught save otherness marred this high estate of thine," the Beloved said to him, "and if thou wilt efface thyself thy claim to have achieved it will be established indeed!" (Among Sufis otherness is equivalent to thinking of one's self as something other than God.)”

“Iraqi became a work of art before producing works of art. If he sang the love of God in verses of great beauty, it is because his soul had itself become a song of God, a melody in harmony with, and a strain of, the music issuing from the abode of the Beloved. Iraqi was a gnostic who spoke in the language of love. For him, as for Sufism in general, love is not juxtaposed to knowledge. It is realized knowledge. The Truth, which is like a crystal or a shining star in the mind, becomes wine when it is lived and realized. It inundates the whole of man‘s being, plucking the roots of his profane consciousness from this world of impermanence and bringing about an inebriation that must of necessity result from the contact between the soul of man and the infinite world of the Spirit. But Iraqi was a Sufi gifted particularly in expressing the „mysteries of Union“ in the language of love. (p. xi)”