Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

The work of The Golden Sufi Center is to make available the teachings of the Sufi path. Based on live talks and meetings with Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, this is an introduction to the passion and wisdom of the Sufi path of love. The call of the heart and how it draws us back to divine union is one of mankind's greatest secrets, and for the Sufi, this love is a fire that burns away all traces of separation. Vaughan-Lee teaches how to live this burning and describes stages of the path of love on the soul's journey home. Love Is a Fire includes descriptions of the "friends of God," early Sufi saints who burned with the fire of divine love, including Rumi, Ibn 'Arabi, and Rabi'a. It also introduces elements of the path and important tools that purify the wayfarer: tauba, the moment of the turning of the heart when the soul remembers its divine origin; dhikr, the central Sufi practice of remembrance of God through repetition of the name of God or a sacred phrase; meditation, a way of drowning thoughts in the fire of love; and dreamwork, a way of listening and attuning to the mystery of what is hidden within us—the stories of our deeper selves.

The Sufi's Mystical Journey Home

Love is a Fire

Laura Mei

Within the heart everything is one. The wayfarer needs to turn away from the world of illusion and yet also embrace the wholeness of life. To be "in the world but not of the world" is to embrace the world with all its confusions and glory. When we open our heart to life we are not limited by duality or caught in contradictions. The heart is the home of the Self and the Self contains all opposites within Its essential oneness. The multiplicity of life reflects an inner oneness; oneness makes itself known through multiplicity. Life is sacred only in its entirety.

Each step we take on the path increases the influence of the Self, whose energy has the effect of dissolving patterns of ego-attachments. True renunciation is not the renunciation of the world but the renunciation of the ego, of one's limited, separate self. However, because the ego's identity is so embedded in the outer world, in possessions and attachments, turning away from the world can be a process of breaking the grip of the ego, freeing ourself from its patterns of identity. At the root of renunciation is the journey from our own isolated self towards union. This journey demands that we leave behind the ego, that we "die before we die." We need to cooperate with the energy of wholeness that separates us from our limited sense of self, our identity, our values and attachments. We need to see the limitations of our own life as we know it, its empty and illusory nature. And we need the sword of love to cut us away from our attachments, just as we need the warmth of love to melt the boundaries of our own being. The guidance of the Self and the energy of the path activate the movement of the spiral and the inner process that accompanies it.

There are some people for whom spiritual life has to be a love affair, a passionate affair of the soul. This tremendous love affair takes place within the heart, and is one of the greatest mysteries of being human.

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