Description
Awakening: A Sufi Experience
by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
For readers encountering Sufism for the first time, Awakening is the perfect companion and introduction to the way of the dervishes—as well as a doorway to a direct experience of the Divine.
Pir Vilayat not only guides readers in specific practices and meditations—involving the breath, light, and the Divine qualities—but shows how they can seek out their own individual teacher from the pages of the world’s great religious and ethical teachings. In addition, he explores how we can make our home, workplace, and other daily settings into a “temple for the Divine Presence.”
Pir Vilayat shows readers how to use the passion of the dervishes and the modern day pursuit of knowledge to create the awakened life. Like a spiritual alchemist, he combines the perfume of ancient Sufi mysticism with the consciousness expanding theories of quantum science and the imperative of social conscience, thereby creating a contemplative practice uniquely relevant to today’s seeker.
Read an excerpt from Awakening: A Sufi Experience
“Sufis make a distinction between acquired knowledge and revealed knowledge. Acquired knowledge is the information we accumulate during the course of our everyday experience of life. But when we begin to view life through the antipodal standpoint—seeing through the eyes of God—then we access an inborn, intuitive, revealed knowledge that exists irrespective of the human condition. Meditation is the art of moving back and forth between two perspectives—the human and the Divine—downplaying one level in order to highlight the other. Eventually, we learn to extrapolate meaning from the synthesis of these different levels. This state is what I call awakening in life. For the culmination of the soul’s journey of awakening is not just returning to its original state. Instead, it is how the soul has evolved through its passage on earth: what meaning has been extracted from its experiences; what archetypal qualities have unfolded as a result of the immense difficulties it has endured; and the unique way each soul’s unfoldment has contributed to the evolution of the Universe itself.”
