Dr Javad Nurbakhsh, Rumi and a poem from Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi

Hello Everyone,

Over the last few weekend I have seen and felt such a strong flow of feeling for Dr Javad Nurbakhsh. I have experienced darvishes at both extremes, extreme happiness that he is finally free from the trappings of a moral coil, or those immensely saddened that the Master has transitioned.

I remember a very beautiful poem was read taken from Rumi  Diwan-e Shams-e Tabriz-i .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I am finally buried in my grave

Do not imagine I feel any more pain.

Don’t weep tears for me or lament

(If you’re trapped here with demons, then lament!)

When you can see my hearse pull slowly away

Don’t cry out “Separation!”

For at that moment is the final meeting

When I will join the ones of the deity.

And when you lower me in my grave, don’t say “Farewell!”

Hiding our heavenly reunion, the grave is just a viel.

You’ve seen me lowered, but I will rise up soon –

Does setting spoil the sun? Does waning weaken the moon?

It looks like sunset now; in fact it’s sunrise:

This grave will free my soul, so it can fly.

Once seeds are planted they will quickly sprout;

This human seed will rise up too – why should anyone doubt?

The pail is not drawn empty from your well.

So why lament the well of Joseph’s handsome soul?

After you close your mouth to this world, first wait,

Then open it with a scream of joy beyond all time and space.

In all my experience occult and mystical I have learned that it is only ourselves that are a barrier to any act pure and sincere. The world just beyond this one, isn’t forbidden to us. it is only forbidden to those of us who would pollute it with our avarice, greed, and love for the intransient and material world. Believing that this world is forbidden makes it forbidden and thus closes our hearts to it.

 

For me nothing keeps us seperated from pantheon of great souls that have gone onwards in the journey  other than our sometimes smug assurance that death is the final answer to human life. Nurbakhsh is as alive as always, even more so now that he doesnt have a body to shackle him to this realm of limitations.

 

In the depths of meditation, and Zekr, and all true spiritual practice we are all unified; the past the present are all fictitious demarkations in the movie that is our life. We all remember being in a school play. After the play was over we didnt lament for the characters we played at being for a short time. We gladly went home to our real life.

 

I hope that we all at some point can prolong those glimpses of the  real life that we are assailed with every day through the smiles and laughter of friends, through our own tears and those of our neighbors and all the multitude of forms experience and being can take and not have to wait till we are buried to utter that cry of joy

 

-dave

 

 

 

Why I am taking a two week hiatus – Becoming a Dervish

Hey Friends,

            How are you? I hope all is going well. It finally the weekend and its halloween. We can all sit back and relax for a bit , and thankfully we get an extra hour from daylight saving time, which maybe might make the difference in making our morning commutes a bit more manageable.

           I recently closed on chapter in my life and opened another. I became a darvish. it has been a wonderful awakening for me.  I feel like a new person, I see my clothes my stuff and my apartment but it doesnt feel like me. I feel like I have been given a blank slate again and looking back on the last 27 years there are many mistakes I dont want to make anymore.

            I need some time to think and get into a new rhythm. So I will be taking some time away from the blog. Also I am writing some things for publication, I want to take some time to get my work a little further. Writing a novel is a beautiful and painful process, as some of you already know or can imagine.

           Before I go though there will be a few posts I will be writing on. Since I got nominated for best blog in sufism which I am still shocked, I  searched through my blog for posts directly on sufism and I found less that 10%  of my blogs are directly specifically strictly on sufism. I thought it would be nice to put together what  I feel and know about sufism, and I thought I would write a serious about my spiritual journey that culminated in becoming a darvish, and then take my haitus.

My poll is still up for a week. It is under the title a question for you the readers, i think thats the name or at least it is the one sequentially before this post. Check it out

Dave

A question for you the readers

Hello Friends,

                   Sometimes I oscillated betweenhaving too much to say,(my hands cannot keep up with my mind)  other times I feel I have nothing much to say at all because after all in silence we find God and I feel I have nothing to say worth breaking the sanctity of that silence. I have again felt the need to go silent for a bit. I talk about many many things an inordinate number of things, because almsot everythign inspires me.

I recently became a darvish/dervish and I would like to know if those of you who are interested would like me to post a series before I go silent for a week or 2  on how I got to this point, of the problems and pitfalls of spiritual endeavor, the highs and lows I faced, how my life has changed how it hasn’t etc. I have also been thinking of talking about myticism myth and magic and their implicit anthropological relationship, and or my conception of Sufism and the Sufi Path. If there is something else you would like to see me talk of please feel free to share.

I will keep this poll up for a week….

A beautiful Poem by Hafez: From behind the Caravan

Hey Friends,

             I hope life is treating you well. I read something beautiful by Hafiz I thought I would share. I am not so familiar with Hafiz but as this blog is called My Caravan of Dreams and the poem or song by Hafiz is called From Behind the Caravan, it had to make an appearance.

 

We, to this door, not seeking pride or glory — we have come.
For shelter from ill-fortune, here — we have come.

Travelers on the stage of love’s journey are we, and from the limits
of nonexistence,
up to the realm of existence, all this way— we have come.

O ship of grace, thy anchor of forbearance is where?
For in this ocean of generosity, immersed in sin — we have come.

Hâfiz, cast off this woolen cloak , for we from behind the caravan, with the fire of the sigh “ah!”— we have come.

 

In all humility, I feel that there is no way I can provide anything in the way on usefuly commentary to such a beautiful song/poem.  Please enjoy it and lets share our comments and ideas on it

Dave

Forsaking Homework and The Educational Experience

Hey Friends

            My lil sister recently shared with me something interesting she had read from the Golden notebook, an awesome book by last years Nobel prize winner Dorris Lessing. Lessing if I remember somewhere in the prologue, mentions how a lot of people who were english majors or students of literature end up abandoning their love of literature to go and do something else due to the fact that the current school system doesnt allow for  creativity.  Its seems, paraphrasing of course, that the need to base all opinion on documented criticisms and analysis  never allows the student to come up with new valid insight.

I whole heartedly agree and recently had the opportunity to to witness this first hand. My sister is taking a course on British Literature. The teacher has talked ad nauseum about Beowulf and the Canterbury tales but I feel not made the students any richer for it. Actually insight given by students are penalized mostly because:

1. Simply the professor has a PhD and the students dont. He cannot or will not accept any insight from a student
2. As was very captiously describe in Jose ortega’ y gasset essay/book in the 1930’s misison of the University, modern day academics were referred to by ortega as modern day barbarians in that they are hyperspecialists to the point that they only know and cant working in one small niche. Many a time  they are ingorant to everything outside of there small niche. Compare this to the intellectual lights of our history, Shakespeare, Francis Bacon,( i wonder if ther eis  significance in putting them in that order) Leonardo da Vinci.

For some reason I feel like with many of the great authors of british literature many teachers teach them like they are an island. Ironically like the british isle themselves, these writers are separated and isolated from the rest of the world ( which is of course for a long time was continental europe). Chaucer is one such person.

I was happy to tell my sister that the sufi attar the chemist ’s parliament of the birds was  actually was the source or an inspiration for Chaucer  as well as some of the works of Rumi which were well known during Chaucers day. I refered my sister to this section of The Sufis, written by Idries Shah, please bear with me lol

 

His [Rumi] work was well enough known within less than a hundred years of his death in 1273 for Chaucer to use references to it in some of his works, together “with material from the teachings of Rumi’s spiritual precursor, Attar the Chemist (1150-1229/30). From the numerous references to Arabian material which can be found in Chaucer, even a cursory examination shows a Sufi impact of the Rumi school of literature. Chaucer’s use of the phrase, “As lions may take warning when a pup is punished . . .” is merely a close adaptation of Udhrib el-kalba wa yatrf addaba el-fahdu (“Beat the dog and the lion will behave”), which is a secret phrase used by the Whirling Dervishes. Its interpretation depends on a play upon the words “dog” and “lion.” Although written as such, in speaking the password, homophones are used. Instead of saying dog (kalb), the Sufi says heart (qalb), and in place of lion (fahd), fahid (the neglectful). The phrase now becomes: “Beat the heart (Sufi exercises) and the neglectful (faculties) behave (correctly).”

 This is the slogan which introduces the “beating the heart” movements encouraged by the motions and concentrations of the Mevlevi—Whirling-Dervishes.

 The relationship between the Canterbury Tales as an allegory of inner development and the Parliament of the Birds of Attar is another interesting item. Professor Skeat reminds us that, like Attar, Chaucer has thirty participants in his pilgrimage. Thirty pilgrims seeking the mystical bird,  Simurgh makes sense in Persian, because si-murgh actually means “thirty birds.” In English, however, such a transposition is not possible. The number of pilgrims, made necessary in the Persian because of the requirements of rhyme, is preserved in Chaucer, deprived of double meaning. “The Pardoner’s Tale” occurs in Attar; the pear-tree story is found in Book IV of the Sufi work, the Mathnawi. of Rumi.

Armed with all this cool information, and some quotes by Jorge Luis Borges’ book: This craft of verse ( seven lectures he gave in Texas I forget for which university) where he gave a lot of valid insight into Beowulf, my sister went back to class only to get told that the the information she had was just merely conjecture, though she was willing to provide valid reference and has no place in the class.  The Professor even said that the travelers in Chaucer’s stories weren’t transformed by the  pilgrimage, which goes against my  understanding of a pilgrimage.

From my own experience, it seems really that nothing kills creativity more than school.   My sister now has a growing love for literature and spends most of her time reading books that inspire her, instead of doing her homework. As a student of literature , it kind of hurts to see but its make sense. Here is a cool quote by frank zappa:

Kid’s heads are filled with so many nonfacts that when they get out of
school they’re totally unprepared to do anything.  They can’t read, they
can’t write, they can’t think.  Talk about child abuse.  The U.S. school
system as a whole qualifies.

Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to
our mundane educational system.  Forget about the Senior
Prom and go to the library and *educate yourself* if you’ve
got any guts.

And my fav frank zappa quote of all time

If you want to get laid, go to college, but if you want an education,
go to the library.

- Dave

The annoying commute home, annoying people and Salvation

Hey Friends

              

This weekend a major part of my life came to an end and a new one started, but before that I thought I would share my thoughts on somethings. I was thinking about a quote i had read about in one of Paramahansa’ many books, he said paraphrasing of course

 

 

The sun shines equally on a diamond as it does a lump of col but its only the diamond that can reflect back the brilliance of the sun.

The diamond and the lump of coal are in Yogananda’s example analogous to the heart of not only the spiritual aspirants but of all of us. How do we go about making our hearts reflect light back outwards into the lives of all of those who coem across our path in life? In nature the lump of coal is subject to the the right amount of heat, the right amount of pressure far away from observing eyes.

What is the analgous  situation in our life ? I feel its each other.  I think l’infer est les Autre like Sartre said but not in the same context.  Other people provide us an opportunity through their rudeness on the train ride home, or their malicious attitudes at work, through even the long lines at the market waiting for the cashier to get off her two-way while you are already late for  a few after work engagements.

When you encounter these sort of things, well when I do I always like to think that I am in a crucible. All my more crass tendencies, like for sarcasm being a smart ass, unleashing a violent temper on the world and scorching the earth, are being burned away.  The questions I feel isnt to be the change you want to see , because that implies becoming something according to how your mind perceives and conceives the situation.

I feel that the solution rather is selflesness.  Meaning that good and bad is completely irrelevant because they both have the same divine origin. I know some will say God makes us suffer for his whim if we are to believe that good as well and bad comes from God.

I feel that we define good and bad by our immediate cache of wants and desires.  i think our vision is short sighted.  Some of the best things that have happened to me in life have been some of the worse experiences. I feel that the more wrapped up I was in things the harder and stronger a dosage of reality I had to be hit with to wake up.

We always say that bad thing happen to good people, but never to bad people. I wonder if we have the insight to determine who is really “good” and who is really bad, or if we are ever able to go past external appearances ?

The person making you angry or annoyed just maybe be that one opportunity to make amends with life, and yourself and move forward

What do You think ?

 

Dave

Flowers for my Friend Sahar – and to all our friends we havent seen in a While

Hello  Friends,

How goes it? One thing you may or may not know about me is that I love plants. I have a green thumb, my 6 pets dont allow me to show off my skills. I was talking to my friend Sahar the other day, it had been a long day since  we had spoken due to the Jewish holidays, and I was so happy to hear voice. We ended up talking about flowers.

As with all my conversations there was a fair share of joking around and teasing, name calling lol. But in all my joking and gesturing I was thinking about symbol of flowers and of plants itself. If you look at the mythology supposedly one of the definitive changes that marked the change from a hunter gathering society to a agrarian system was that the main god became the god of the harvest and like Osirus which is one of the best examples was dismembered, and from his body somewhere in the earth plants grew.

Anyways there is something about the image and symbolism of a flower, it perrenial, every year it makes an appearence, its gradually opens every day a little bit more and more, its almost imperceptible the small bit it opens day, and then one day you see your flower in full bloom. Its for this same reason that flower has alwaysbeen use in alchemical and other spiritual symbolism. They represent the heart of the aspirant gradually opening on it won accord having finally come into tune with that which is the original cause.

We have been friends for a while and it has been a privilege. During our friendship we have both gone through difficult time and it has been I feel a gradual blossoming in the both of us and it great to hear you happier and vivacious.

I pray that the Kool Aid man doesnt take back his smile from you

Some thoughts about a quote by Junaid

Hello Friends,

                  Its a gray rainy day, the kind where in elementary school you didnt want to get out of bed, you got a pb and J sandwich for lunch and a banana that for some reason always get smashed into pulp, and despite the fact that you had an umbrella and spent most of your time in a bus or on a train you still smelled like a wet dog.

                   LOL memories. Long back on my own memories about grey cludy days, I have this sense that our vision is always a bit myopic, or short sided. What I mean by that is that many a time we can only understand things that happen to us in the short-term. Todays suffering may be the door to tomorrows happiness, todays enemy my be your future best friend, or yesterdays student is tomorrows teacher. I can go on.

                     But the issue here I guess is that human beings are never static, there is always aaprt of us interating with the world at large, and generalising and organizing everythign that happens to us according to some model. Once somehtign happens that we did not expect or doesnt fit our model we panick get frustrated. Such is life I feel. However this is not a limitation I feel just a momentary barrier. The one thing I have noticed that i do want to share with you is something I came to realize this weekend.

All the pain we experience, all the wrong turns we take, everything that we see as being negative in our life happens to prepare us for our experience of that grand thing in life we are seeking n our heart but is often  unknown to our minds. Each experience is an opportunity to attune to the sincere wants of our hearts.  Every time I read the following quote from Junayd I am  reminded that no so i so far gone that they cant be made smile or laugh, or made more resplendent by some unknown alchemy.

I will walk a thousand leagues in falsehood so that one step of the journey can be true. -Junayd

This quote reminds me of a story that I put in my second posting here , but I will save you the trouble and reprint it below. It is taken from the book, the Commanding Self By Idries Shah

A donkey and a camel were walking along together. The camel moved with long strides an the donkey moves impatiently, stumbling every now and then. At last the donkey said to his companion. “How is it that I am always in trouble, falling and grazing my legs, in spite of the fact that I look carefully downwards as I walk; when you, who never seems to be aware of what surrounds you, with your eyes fixed upon the horizon, keep going so fast and yet seemingly at such leisure?”

The camel answered: ” Your problem is that your steps are too short and by the time you have seen something it is too late to correct your movements. You look all around and do not assess what you see. You think that seeing near is the same as seeing far.

You guess that I look at the horizon. In fact, I am merely gazing ahead so as to work out what to do when the far becomes near. I also remember what has gone before, and do not need to look back at it and stumble once again. In this way what seems to you bafflig or difficult becomes clear and easy.’

Similarly donkey-minded people are  those who believe that they can learn enough to improve themselves or their lot by short sighted means. This means not looking towards the future or even into it. It  includes demanding a certain pace without realizing whether it is counterproductive or not. The ass is the ordinary person, the camel is the sufi.

BTW – That picture was taken by my wife, just wanted to thank her for lettign me use it and teaching me how to iron pants and shirts without getting 3rd degree burns on my fingers

My Favorite french Writers and a Quote from Dr Javad Nurbakhsh

Hello Friends,

                    Some of you may or may not know but my favorite writer is Antoine de St Exupery. beautiful prose, for me at least. We all know him as the writer of the  Little Prince, however how many of us know his as the writer of  ” Les courrier Sud” ( Southern mail), Les Terres des Hommes (Wind Sands and Stars), Le vol du nuit (Night Flight). These have been for me some of themost inspiring books I have read.

                  I was talking to my friend from the land of eagles (each time I type that I laugh lol), and St Exupery came up. I remembered a quote from him that really impacted me when I was much younger

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward in the same direction.

Its a really touching quote, I think its from Night Flight, but I cant remember. There should be a cool SQL for the mind. There was another quote by Camus that the afore mentioned one calls to mind and that is:

Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

Both these quotes for me allude to the same thing, unity and mutual participation which are the alluring dream of religion and the end point of the mystics. I have had this quote in my mind from Master Nurbakhsh which precipitated this posting for me.

O Sufi!

What is Sufism?

Sufism is the apprehension of Reality through the attraction of Divine Love. It is the struggle to bring about unity of attention in one’s inner and outer being, under the guidance of a master of the path. In other words, Sufism means looking in one direction and seeing all things as One.

 

Sufism, love, true fraternity, the higher goal of mankind, whatever you want to call it is all about moving in one direction, past opposites, past differing ideologies, past our conceptions of ourselves, past even this movement itself to a Singular existence. I believe that is what the true annihilation of self is.

-Dave

Hello Friends,

                     I was told as a little child that the surest way not to acheive something is to talk about it. The more we talk of our hopes and dreams the more they get defiled till the point that whatever inspiring quality they had fallen from its lofty air and become quotidian, now they were jsut another task. Yet there has to be something said about sharing experiences with people whether visible or not.

                   I got this beautiful quote from someone “Michelle” who reads my blog. She said something really touching to me. She said

“We are out here listening to you. It’s nice to know we have fellow companions on this journey of life who inspire us whether they know it or not…”

Having someone willing to listen to you is a such a sublime gift. How many of us walk through life looking for someone to bestow a ray of solace on us, and in doing so apply some magical salve to our wounds, whether they are external or internal.

I remember in school, it was one of those assemblies they gather everyone in the school or that particular grade together to subject you to some incredibly older person’s pontificating.  As Camus says

Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.

This particular lecturer, and it was for our highschool graduation, said that we are all in need of healing, all in need of forgiveness. Finally after 4 years of senseless babble a cohorent impactful message. In my own journey In life I have seen people, outwardly they may have been mean or angry or frustrated frowning, but they are all waiting for some solace, for a sense of being made whole again.

it just reminds me of that analogy where they descrbie hell as being 2 infinitely long wall with the damned chained on each side. There is a food in the middle of this hall, but the sintruments given to these wretched souls so that they may eat are too large for them to ever bring the food to their mouths. Supposedly according to this analogy heaven is is the same except that the prisoners on one side used their utensils to feed the prisoner on the other side.

There is a cheap kind of after school special moral in there , but to me I really see that we have such a  dear and maybe dire responsibility to each other, that transcends, race, gender, age, creed etc. we are really each others keepers. We truly should offer each other only the best of what we have to offer which is ….understanding, or maybe acceptance or maybe love, since understanding and acceptances are applications of love in specific affairs.

No man/woman is an island especially with such a  large world population, and the fact that whether we see it or not we are endebted to each other make me sometime view existence as a motley and crazily colored image of which we are each like a single dot. Like a speck of color on an impressionist painting we are when we choose to isolate ourselves, we separate ourselves from a  vast living image.  Thats why i feel now that the true test of any mystical practice is to life in this world, is to see and create unity, to help us experience the picture in its entirety while play our own part.

 Sometimes i wonder whether the  idea of safety is intself an illusion for it implies somethings outside of us that we need to shelter ourselves from. We have only the unknown to be scared of.

Yes I can imagine as some of you are saying, there is the threat of war or starvation or some giant meteor getting ready to annihilate life. My response to this is that  how close do we come everyday to suffering?, to hunger, starvation to death? Will we ever know ? We cannot really crate life nor do we really understand how it just magically can appear, I cannot imagine us being able to control it so that we can every be at a point where we can stop some catalysm.