But I also sense that there is another mystery present in the real nature of myself as a human being, as a part of this limited world of forms, of thoughts, emotions and sensations, and it is this mystery I am trying to comprehend. I know that my human consciousness can only understand a little of the Divine, of Its unlimited nature, and the mysterious ways It comes into existence. And yet at this time I am for some reason drawn to understand a little more of this paradox that is my own existence, this mixing place of the two seas. Maybe I will only fully understand this story in the moments before physical death, when this human tale is almost over. I am left trying to understand the human dimension of what it means to be where the two seas meet. And yet still there is this person trying to tell this story, to make sense of a journey in which I was lost and found and lost again. I was given many experiences of an inner reality where there are no limitations, a landscape which I have called “the further shores of love.” Like many wayfarers before me I have been taken, sometimes dragged, beyond myself into the presence of a love that knows no sense of self, that is as it always was. I practiced and meditated, worked with the light and tried to transform my darkness. This whole book is an attempt to understand what this means: what it means for the two seas to come together, and what it means to live in this place caught in the currents of the ocean of divine consciousness and yet also held in the sea of human experience.įor so long I struggled to become free of the fetters of existence, of the patterns and problems that bound me to this world of forms. And yet in this love story of the soul something has always remained, and gradually I have come to understand a little of the meaning of where this journey takes place, “the place where the two seas meet.” It is here, where the divine and human come together, that Khidr is always found. And I have been given glimpses of a reality where the ego is not present, where there is no “I” to tell its story. 1The spiritual journey is a way to live with this spiritual substance, to be burned by its fire, to be consumed by its love.įor many years on the path I longed for this destruction by love, for this transformation so complete that nothing of myself would remain. When we meet our teacher, when we meet the path, this is what happens something becomes alive within our heart and soul: we become nourished not by spiritual texts or teaching, but by direct transmission. In this story in the Qur’an Khidr is found by Moses at “the place where the two seas meet.” This place where the two seas meet is the locus of the mystical journey, “where the dead fish becomes alive,” where spiritual teachings become a living substance that nourishes the wayfarer. Khidr first appears in the Qur’an where he is not mentioned by name, but as “One of Our servants unto whom We have given mercy from Our Mercy and knowledge from Our Knowledge” (Sūra 18:65). Khidr is the most important Sufi figure, the archetype of direct revelation. Much later I understood this as the knowledge that can only come from direct inner experience, which for the Sufi is imaged as Khidr. From that moment, without knowing why, more than anything, I wanted what she had. When I first met my teacher, Irina Tweedie, I sat in her small room, looked into her blue eyes and I knew that she knew. Excerpt from the last chapter of the bookįragments of a Love Story: Reflections on the Life of a Mystic
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