Be sure to check out John’s fantastic compilation: “A Treasury of Mystic Terms”
John Davidson: Mystical Space
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Attar’s Seven Valleys of Love
The Valley of the Quest
When you enter the first valley, the Valley of the Quest, a hundred difficulties will assail you; you will undergo a hundred trials. There, the Parrot of heaven is no more than a fly. You will have to spend several years there, you will have to make great efforts, and to change your state. You will have to give up all that has seemed precious to you and regard as nothing all that you possess. When you are sure that you possess nothing, you still will have to detach yourself from all that exists. Your heart will then be saved from perdition and you will see the pure light of Divine Majesty and your real wishes will be multiplied to infinity. One who enters here will be filled with such longing that he will give himself up completely to the quest symbolized by this valley. He will ask of his cup-bearer a draught of wine, and he has drunk it nothing will matter except the pursuit of his true aim. Then he will no longer fear the dragons, the guardians of the door, which seek to devour him. When the door is opened and he enters, then dogma, belief and unbelief–all cease to exist.
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Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee: Darkness and Light
"At this time of transition, as humanity deepens
its self-destructive nightmare,
the light of the sacred is calling to us and we can still respond."
DARKNESS AND LIGHT
A few years ago I came out of a meditation with a sentence that disturbed and surprised me. The words I was given were simple: “Those who follow the light follow the light. Those who follow the darkness stay here.” At that time the focus of my writing and teaching was on oneness: I was exploring how the next step in our evolution will be to awaken to the consciousness of oneness—the consciousness that we are all part of one interconnected spiritual organism. And here I was given a profound and almost paradoxical statement that said otherwise: that there would be a division between those who follow the light and those who follow the darkness. I was left with a strange sense of unease.
Over the years since I have meditated on this saying, trying to understand its message. Watching the outer world, listening within, and to the dreams and visions of others, I have come to believe that we have arrived at such a time of division, of separation between darkness and light. Looking around at a world covered in materialism, wrapped in a profound forgetfulness of the sacred, there is little to indicate a world of light.
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Martin Lings: Sufi Answers to Questions on Ultimate Reality
Source: Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 13, Nos. 3 & 4 (Summer-Autumn, 1979). © World Wisdom, Inc.
In connection with the origins of Sufism, attitudes have changed very rapidly in the last decades. The change has not been unanimous; but there is an undeniably increasing tendency for opinions to shift away from the notion that Sufism has its roots in Hinduism or Buddhism or Neoplatonism or Christianity rather than in Islam, and towards agreement with the Sufis themselves in maintaining that Sufism is an integral part of Islam, or more precisely that it is and always has been “the heart of Islam.” But Islam has stood the test of time; and to do so—or even, we might say, to survive—a way of worship must be capable of appealing to the wisest and deepest elements in the collectivity which practices it, capable of enlisting those souls which are most imbued with a sense of Ultimate Reality. For this it must have the dimension of mysticism; and if Sufism is not Islam’s mystical dimension, what is? Without Sufism Islam would be a strange anomaly. It would not even be a religion in the fullest sense of the word. That is of course what many people liked to think in the past.
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