God turns you from one feeling to another
and teaches by means of opposites,
so that you will have two wings to fly,
not one.
- Rûmî (1)

THE MASCULINE AND THE FEMININE PATH

Everything that comes into manifestation has a dual aspect, positive and negative, masculine and feminine. Even the primal energy of love has a masculine side, “I love you,” and a feminine side, “I am longing for you.” The spiritual journey itself also has a masculine and feminine nature. The masculine aspect of the journey is the path from multiplicity to oneness, in which we turn away from the veils of illusion to seek the inner reality beyond form. In the previous chapter I described how through this journey of turning away from the outer world we complete the circle and come to know Him whom we love reflected in His creation.

However, for the feminine He is always present. The feminine embraces the deepest secret of creation in which the Creator and His world are eternally united in love. The feminine path is to make conscious this instinctual link of love, this bond born outside of time. For the feminine the circle is always complete because the nature of the feminine is wholeness. Her work is to bring the circle of love, the natural wholeness of the Self, from the instinctual world into consciousness.

Yet because the outer world involves the limitations of time and space, its divisions and dualities, the feminine fears the violation of her instinctual wholeness. Within the psyche and understanding of the feminine there is no separation, only the sacred oneness of life and love, but the outer world continually confronts her with the pain of separation.

Consciousness itself necessitates separation, the division between subject and object. Only in the higher consciousness of the Self is there no duality; there the knower and the knowledge are one. But to reach this quality of consciousness the feminine needs to experience the penetrating power of masculine spirit which appears to violate her instinctual wholeness. This experience of violation is a loss of unconscious oneness, a loss that is necessary if the wayfarer is to reach the higher consciousness of the Self. The instinctual sense of wholeness is broken in order to be reborn in a different dimension.

The masculine path takes the wayfarer away from the illusion of forms into the formless inner reality, from which he returns with a quality of consciousness that can embrace the two worlds. He discovers the oneness beneath the veils of duality. The feminine always embraces this oneness because she is made to carry the sacredness of life within her womb. She is a part of the Great Mother who is the oneness of all life. But that knowledge is hidden within her, and, like all aspects of the Great Mother, carries the taboo of consciousness. The great flow of all life does not know its own oneness. Only humankind has the ability to make this oneness conscious, and yet consciousness carries the pain of separation, the eviction from the paradise of oneness.

In order to consciously know her own oneness, the feminine has to bear the cruelty of consciousness, which can feel like a violation of her own sacred self. She has to learn to contain the contradictions of a world in which her instinctual oneness appears lost. The masculine spirit of consciousness confronts the feminine with duality, but this duality contains the seed of her higher consciousness. The rape of Persephone separates maiden from mother, but also takes us inside the cycles of nature into the mysteries of the soul.

THE DUAL MOVEMENT OF THE SPIRAL

One of the difficulties confronting the contemporary wayfarer is that most texts describing the spiritual journey have been written by men and emphasize the masculine journey of renunciation. They stress the need to turn away from the world and seek a oneness that can only be found elsewhere. The ancient feminine mysteries embrace life and reveal its secret meaning. But these mysteries were rarely written down. In Greece they were taught at Eleusis and for over a thousand years were the center of religious life of antiquity, but it is a testament to their power that despite the thousands of initiates their secrets have never been made known. The feminine is naturally hidden and the secrets of creation do not show themselves easily.

The quality of the masculine is consciousness. While the feminine likes to remain hidden, the masculine seeks to make itself known. The masculine leaves its imprint only too visibly while the feminine is veiled. We live in a culture that values what is visible and easily rejects what is hidden, yet we know we need to embrace both. The masculine and feminine need to be united in our quest, for they are both a part of the spiral path that is our journey Home.

A spiral has both a circular and a linear movement. The masculine is what takes us in a linear direction, towards a goal, which can appear to be upward or downward but in truth is inward. This linear direction demands a focus of intent and a conscious commitment to persevere despite all the difficulties that may be encountered. The feminine is the spiral’s circular movement which is inclusive. The feminine requires us to be flexible and continually changing, inwardly responsive to the inner oscillations of the path. To remain fixed is to remain static, caught in a concept or locality. The journey of annihilation is a journey of freedom in which all concepts and ideologies are swept away. We need to allow ourself to change beyond recognition, to be swept into a dance that takes us beyond ourself. The Sufi Master Bhai Sahib described where he lived as “a house of drunkards and a house of change.”

Both men and women have masculine and feminine qualities and these are reflected in our spiritual drive. In each of us masculine and feminine are emphasized to a differing degree. There is also the collective conditioning that may overshadow our natural tendencies. For some women the masculine focus of the quest is easier than the all-embracing feminine; the ideal of renunciation is easier than the instinctual awareness of life’s sacred nature. This masculine emphasis can be the result of cultural conditioning, a wounding of the feminine, or a deep orientation of the soul. Just as there are many variations across the physical spectrum of masculine and feminine, so is a wayfarer’s orientation not limited to sexual typecasting. There are men who are in tune with the creative dance of life and can find the Beloved most easily in the mysterious beauty of His forms. An artist may have this spiritual temperament, and through surrendering to his work come closer to Him whom he loves.

On the spiral dance of death we need to embrace both masculine and feminine qualities, to breathe in and to breathe out. Yet we also need to acknowledge our own nature, to find our own way of being with God. The Sufi Râbi‘a was one of the great women saints and she stressed the supremacy of divine love in contrast to some of the earlier Sufis who stressed asceticism. Yet she had a quality of inner focus that could not be disturbed. She could not be distracted by the forms of the world, as in the story of when, one glorious spring day, she was sitting inside with the shutters drawn. Her maid came to open them, saying, “Look outside at the beauty the Creator has made.” But she refused to step outside, and Rûmî tells one version of her response:

The gardens and the fruits are in the heart—
Only the reflection of His kindness is in this water and clay.(2)

Rûmî himself withdrew from the world when he met Shams-i Tabrîz. Divine love called him and he left his family and disciples, making them so jealous that in the end they chased Shams away. With Shams Rûmî travelled the road that leads far beyond the forms of this world:

I was invisible awhile, I was dwelling with Him.
I was in the Kingdom of “or nearer,” I saw what I have seen.
… I have gathered a wealth of roses in the garden of Eternity,
I am not of water nor fire, I am not of the forward wind,
I am not of moulded clay: I have mocked them all.
O son, I am not Shams-i Tabrîz, I am the pure Light.
If thou seest me, beware! Tell not anyone what thou hast seen!(3)

But Rûmî’s capacious nature embraced both the masculine and the feminine. In the same poem he also describes a oneness with life in its differing aspects:

I am the pangs of the jealous, I am the pain of the sick.
I am both cloud and rain: I have rained on the meadows.
Unlike Râbi‘a, Rûmî celebrates the beauty and wonder of the creation:
Thanks to the gaze of the sun, the soil became a tulip bed—
To sit at home is now a plague, a plague!(4)

To deny the creation is to deny the link of love that runs through all of life. Within the heart there is no separation, no need to turn away from form, because it embraces formlessness. Love is an ocean without limits and the feminine includes everything within her sacred arms.

INCLUSION AND EXCLUSION

Feminine and masculine, inclusion and exclusion—the wayfarer needs both these qualities: the wisdom of union and the wisdom of separation. On the path of love even renunciation is a limitation, as in the saying that “Renunciation of renunciation is renunciation.” To be “in the world but not of the world” is to embrace the world with all of its confusions and glory, “the pangs of the jealous, the pain of the sick.” 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 the opposites within Its essential oneness.

Multiplicity reflects oneness; oneness makes itself known through multiplicity. To deny the wonder of multiplicity is to deny the life that enables us to recognize that He is One. We are not only a mirror to His beauty but a part of His beauty. We carry within ourself the hidden secret of creation, the secret that is brought into existence by the very word of creation, Kun (“Be!”).

The feminine, caring for all of her children, knows the danger of exclusion. Life is sacred only in its entirety, only because everything is He. True renunciation is not the renunciation of the world but the renunciation of the ego. 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. If our individual identity is contained in an outer position, in a beautiful house or in the car we drive, we are imprisoned in these limitations. Struggling to look only towards Truth, to identify with what is highest within ourself, we need to cut these cords of attachment.

In turning away from the world, the wayfarer is turning from the ego towards the Self. The Self, “lesser than the least, greater than the greatest,” is a quality of wholeness that contains everything, including all life, within itself. The Self cannot exclude anything, as reflected in the story of the soldier who asked Jâmî if he was a thief. The great saint replied, “What am I not?” Turning towards the Self, the wayfarer’s personal self becomes included within the greater dimension of his innermost being: “whole, he passes into the Whole.”(5)

Renunciation is a falling away of attachments as the wayfarer is caught and held within the larger dimension of the Self. The lesser falls away under the influence of the greater. Each step we take on the path towards Truth increases the influence of the Self, whose energy has the effect of dissolving patterns of ego attachments. The Self gives the wayfarer the power to turn away from the world. Without this power we would be forever under the spell of the ego and its patterns of illusion. The ego is so strong and its attachments so potent that the wayfarer could never break its grip. Only because we are included within the gravitational pull of the Self are we able to make the transition, step into the spiral of the path.

At the root of renunciation is the Self's totality of inclusion. But this inclusion 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 own identity, our values and attachments. We need to see the limitations of our own life as we know it, its emptiness and illusory nature. To be embraced by the Self is to have to break through the barriers of creation into the dimension of eternity and our essential nonexistence. 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.

Contraction and expansion, in-breathing and out-breathing—the path is a continual process of movement and change. There are times when we need to focus and keep our attention one-pointed. But there are also periods of expansion when the heart opens to include a diversity of experiences, when the manifold aspects of both ourself and the Beloved come into consciousness. The real limitation is to remain caught in one stage, in the masculine dynamic of contraction or the feminine quality of expansion. Each has its time and purpose, and then changes into its opposite. The guidance of the Self and the energy of the path activate the movement of the spiral and the inner process that accompanies it. The danger is that we can remain attached to a particular spiritual dynamic. For each of us, different aspects of the path are easier and more appealing. Some wayfarers find the masculine energy of renunciation more attractive, while the feminine work of inclusion may evoke feelings of vulnerability. Others are naturally attuned to the work of embracing, and find the knife of exclusion difficult to wield.

DIFFERENT CHALLENGES FOR MEN AND WOMEN

We all have masculine and feminine qualities within us, but men and women are made differently: physically, psychologically, and spiritually. Because a woman creates new life from her own body she has an instinctual understanding of the spiritual essence of life. This knowledge comes from the creative power of God which she receives in her spiritual and psychic centers at birth. A man has to work hard to gain this knowledge. A man needs to transmute his instinctual power drive until it is surrendered to the will of God. A woman’s instinctual nature always connects her with the spiritual essence of life, but man’s instinctual drive has to be transformed in order to realize its divine potential. In her natural self, woman is always at the sacred center. A man has to make his heroic journey in order to rediscover within himself his spiritual nature.

Women instinctively know life’s wholeness, but find it difficult to leave outer attachments. Generally it is easier for men to be detached and to focus on an invisible goal. Irina Tweedie explains this:

Because women have children they are made in such a way that things of this world are more important than for a man. We need warmth, we need security. For a woman a home, warmth, security, love, are very much more important than for a man. You will see in India many more male sannyasins than female sannyasins. For a woman it is much more difficult to renounce the world…. For us women spiritual life is easier than for men, but to renounce is more difficult than for men. (6)

For a woman, detachment can carry the pain of cutting her away from the all-inclusive nature of life. Although the Great Mother embraces everything, she requires that her children remain unconscious and bound to her in servitude. The spiritual path takes us beyond the limits of created nature: we become bound to the Creator and not to His creation. The wayfarer bows down before no one but God. Detachment is the work of freeing oneself from the grip of creation while at the same time honoring its sacred nature.

The alchemists called the process of transformation an opus contra naturam because they understood how the enclosed cycle of nature must be broken for a higher level of consciousness to evolve. Consciousness involves separation, and while the feminine honors the wholeness of life she also needs to break free from a total dependence upon the Great Mother. The symbol of ouroboros, the serpent eating its tail, images the realm of the Great Mother in which everything returns upon itself, and the wheel of life keeps us endlessly imprisoned.

A boy’s passage into manhood instinctually frees him from the mother. His spiritual journey is then to rediscover this sacred wholeness within himself. The girl never leaves the arms of the Great Mother, and womanhood is a celebration of her belonging to the creative cycle. A girl’s first menstruation symbolizes how she holds the power of creation within her body and can herself become mother. Learning to become detached can feel like a violation of life’s all-embracing nature, and can also carry the guilt that comes with freedom and higher consciousness.

Guilt is a weapon that the Great Mother wields with great effectiveness in order to keep her children imprisoned. Women, being closer to the Great Mother, are more susceptible to the effects of guilt. For example, a woman who was on retreat became aware that although she loved her husband and children, she was also quite happy alone. This revelation surprised her with a new-found inner freedom, but she quickly felt guilty: “Maybe it is wrong to feel happy being alone when I am a mother and wife.” Through such feelings of guilt the Great Mother works to draw her daughter back into the womb of the collective where she belongs just as mother and wife. The woman at the retreat needed to be reassured of the importance of the new consciousness awakening within her, and that it was in no way contradictory to her maternal role.

The spiritual journey is a work of bringing into consciousness our own inner connection to the Beloved. Every soul carries the imprint of His face, the memory of His nearness. Bringing the heart’s remembrance into daily life means to consciously acknowledge our spiritual dimension. While women are more instinctively attuned to the sacred, consciousness is a masculine quality. The nature of the feminine is to remain hidden and veiled, and the Great Mother has placed a great taboo upon consciousness. To make conscious the mystery of life’s sacred essence can feel like a violation of Her command to keep this secret hidden.

Consciousness also carries the pain of limitation. The nature of the unconscious is unlimited and undefined. The ocean of the unconscious is without borders or differentiation. The moment something is made conscious it is defined and limited by this definition. To say something is “like this” excludes it from being otherwise. This is against the all-inclusive nature of the feminine. The feminine also knows the danger of definition, how easily life can become crystallized and lose its dynamic, evolutionary nature. The essence of life cannot be fixed or limited, and in the very process of naming what is sacred its eternal nature can be lost. The ancient wisdom of the Tao expresses this:

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the Eternal name.
The unnameable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.(7)

The feminine knows the mystery and instinctually feels the peril of making this mystery conscious. What the heart knows cannot be understood with the mind. Yet the spiritual path involves the work of bringing together the inner and outer worlds, living outwardly in harmony with one’s innermost self. Keeping one’s feet upon a path which is “as narrow as the edge of a razor” needs the light of conscious discrimination. We need to see the path as clearly as we are able. Ultimately the wayfarer knows that he cannot know, as in the prayer of Abû Bakr: “Praise to God who hath given His creatures no way of attaining to the knowledge of Him except through their inability to know Him.”(8) But in order to live in this world as His servant, constantly attentive to His will, we need to know in the mind as well as in the heart that we belong to Him.

The feminine, attuned to the mystery of what is hidden, can experience consciousness as a cruel and bleak light that brings limitation and misunderstanding. The sacred can seem violated by a harshness that denies both subtlety and change. There is a further difficulty in that the consciousness of our contemporary world is dominated by rationalism and materialism. As a result we lack even the language to describe the qualities of the spiritual. Our language has developed to describe a rational view of a tangible outer reality, and the poverty of language to articulate feelings is an example of our difficulty in describing a fluid, irrational, inner experience. The inner world and its experiences lack the clear divisions which characterize the outer world. A similar limitation of verbal language has become evident in describing recent subatomic field theories, where

…the task of articulation requires that a vision of a dynamic, mutually interacting field be represented through a medium that is inherently linear, fragmented and unidirectional. (9)

Making the spiritual conscious confronts the wayfarer with a collective culture, its language and thought-forms, that have for centuries rejected the sacred in favor of the rational and the material. The limitations of consciousness have never been more evident.

One further difficulty confronting women in our western culture is the way its masculine values in themselves can be experienced as a violation of the feminine. Entering the patriarchal workplace, women are often forced to adopt masculine attitudes and goals that violate their instinctual awareness of the sacred wholeness of life. In order to compete or just survive in today’s world a woman may have had to sacrifice her nurturing, maternal self. The emptiness that many people feel in today’s material culture can be traced to the fact that the feminine’s role of carrying the sacred meaning of life has been rejected and forgotten. The quality of joy that belongs to life lived from a sacred center has been replaced by a search for pleasure. We all suffer from this collective impoverishment, but women, being closer to the core of creation, feel this desolation and violation more strongly. Yet for the same reason more women than men are at the present time attracted to spiritual life. Women feel more acutely the need within themselves and within the collective to remedy this primal pain. But at the same time there is an understandable fear that the mystery which they bring from the soul into consciousness will be again abused and rejected.

A man needs to rediscover what has been lost to masculine consciousness, learn to surrender his instinctual power drive so that the feminine soul can give birth to the divine mystery. He has to cross the threshold of vulnerability and lay down his sword at the feet of his inner feminine. A woman carries the divine essence in every cell of her body, in the very substance of herself. She needs to bring this sacred self into consciousness despite the fear of violation and pain of misunderstanding. Freeing herself from her attachments in this world, she is able to consciously know and nourish others with the mystery that forms the fabric of her being:

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

THE CIRCLE OF THE SELF

While the arms of the Great Mother embrace all of creation, the circle of the Self includes the two worlds. Renunciation is not a denial of life but an affirmation of the soul’s freedom. Consciously acknowledging our spiritual nature, we step off the endless cycle of life and death onto the spiral path that leads to the very center where non-being and being meet. Here, where creation is born out of nothingness, love comes into the world and life is imprinted with its deepest purpose.

The wayfarer’s conscious commitment to his or her spiritual self is the key that opens the door to this path beyond creation. Locked within the ego we see only the horizons of time and space. When we affirm the Self we begin the work of limiting the ego’s autonomy. This work of limitation is a period of constriction that is painful and demanding. But it is mirrored by an inner expansion as the dimension of the Self opens within us. This inner expansion is not immediately accessible to consciousness. We need to develop a new organ of consciousness in order to experience the inner dimension that is being revealed. The eye of the heart has to open.

We need perseverance if we are to stay on the path as the experience of limitation intensifies. We need to remain focused on our invisible goal despite the difficulties placed in our way by the dying ego. As the ego’s horizon closes in we have to trust that we are being guided and not deceived. This period of transition usually lasts for several years, although it will vary in intensity. The opening of the eye of the heart takes time and requires patience.

Gradually we make the transition from the ego to the Self. Within the Self the masculine and feminine aspects of the journey merge together, and there also any distinction ceases between the wayfarer and the path: “Since in Unity there is no distinction, the Quest and the Way and the Seeker become one.”10 The journey to God becomes the journey in God as the servant comes under the direct influence of his Lord. There are still times of expansion and times of contraction, but they are experienced directly within the heart and come from the Beloved. When aspects of His beauty are revealed, the heart opens and experiences His kindness, His mercy, and His grace. Then there are times when His majesty is revealed, namely power, magnificence, and might. Then the servant is absorbed in awe. Finally contraction and expansion happen simultaneously as Najm al-Dîn Kubrâ describes:

In the first stage of entering this arena the heart is at times expanded…and at times contracted…. This is however the stage of variegation in the arena of contraction and expansion. But the one who has been established in it is contracted-expanded [synchronically]…they are contracted in their bodies as if fettered by chains from the intensity of veneration (waqâr), perseverance (anâh), and remembrance (tidskâr), and [at the same time they are] expanded in their hearts and spirits like the expansion of a fine skin when the winds blow.(11)

The servant bows down before his Lord at the same time as his heart expands from the presence of his Beloved.

When the ego is surrendered, we step into the all-embracing arena of the Self. The Self allows the ego the autonomy it needs in order to function in everyday life. The wayfarer needs to keep constant vigilance as the ego may try to overstep its boundaries and increase its power. We need to keep an inner eye always watching that the ego not make new attachments, that we remain free. Constantly vigilant, we know that the ego waits behind every corner, subtly trying to seduce us back into the illusions of the world. Sometimes the ego can become frightened by a deepening awareness of the infinite inner emptiness, and try to pull us back from this brink. But once we are surrendered we are protected and guided by the energy of the Self. Spiritual evolution does not go backwards.

On the Sufi path the wayfarer is protected not just by the Self but by the chain of transmission that holds us in the grace of the tradition. The heart of the wayfarer is held within the heart of the teacher, and when we are surrendered this merging of love protects us with both power and grace. When Irina Tweedie was with her teacher, Bhai Sahib, she noticed the deep fondness he had towards his grandson, and was concerned that he might be attached. But he responded:

Those who are always with their Guru do not possess worldly things. They rest in their Guru, and everything else does not touch them. I am merged in my Rev. Guru Maharaj. All else is here; I partake of it….(12)

Although we live in the world we are immersed elsewhere. The world falls from us and we remain unattached: “If you go and have a bath in the Ganga, and you go out, does it remain with you?—of course not!”(13)

NO BIRD AND NO WING

Surrendered to the Self, the wayfarer is in a state of both total inclusion and total renunciation. Everything within the two worlds is held within the circle of the Self, a circle “whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.” The Self is free from any limitation, any attachment. Free even from the need for renunciation, the lover looks only to the Beloved. This is the state of mystical poverty, the poverty of the heart, whose “inner truth is that the servant is independent of all except God.”(14) Mystical poverty is the heart’s inner attachment to its Beloved and freedom from all other attachments. It is in this sense that the Sufi regards absolute poverty as absolute richness.

Mystical poverty allows the lover to know his Beloved in the inner and outer worlds. Attached to the world of forms, we see only the outer shape of creation. Unattached to forms, the eye of the heart sees the secret hidden in the outer world, the feminine mystery of creation that came into being with the command “Kun!” In the words of ‘Attâr,

If the eye of the heart is open
In each atom there will be one hundred secrets.(15)

The Sufi poet Shûshtarî describes how the state of poverty draws the lover into the inner mystery of his own being, where he is able to make the true connection between the outer and inner world, and thus realize creation’s secret:

If my clay veils me
from my essence,
the richness of my poverty
draws me to me.
You who seek poverty,
if you connect
the corporeal world
with the Secret,
creation and its mandate,
the Name will be revealed to you at once.
You will see the extent
of the command—kun!—
and He Who is its Initiator.(16)

Poverty is an inner emptiness which reveals the Name hidden at the core of creation. Within the heart, poverty is a state of annihilation in which there is only the oneness of love. Love’s oneness is symbolized by the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, | (alif), which “represents graphically the straightness, non-deviation and unity of all opposites within the source and beginning of phenomena.”(17) This oneness which is both the beginning and the end of creation is eternally present within every atom. For the lover this one letter, Alif, is written in fire on the back of the heart. Within the heart His oneness burns away the veils of duality. Externally the lover may remain in the world of multiplicity, but his love for God has merged into God’s love for him. Kubrâ explains this state in which the opposites have been united and then dissolved:

When the lover is annihilated in Love his love becomes one with the Love of the Beloved, and then there is no bird and no wing, and his flight and love to God are by God’s Love to him, and not to Him by him.(18)

As we travel the path of love, the opposites spiral inward towards the center where the two worlds meet. What we know as ourselves, the form of the lover, remains in the outer world of opposites. We feel the fluctuations of the heart, the expansions and contractions of love. But inwardly the states of the lover, the stages of the journey, have been replaced by the effects of the Beloved, “who holds the heart of the faithful between two of His fingers and turns it as He wills.” The masculine and feminine aspects of the path are merged into oneness as “The mystic passes away from what belongs to himself and persists through what belongs to God, while conversely he persists through what belongs to God, and so passes away from what belongs to himself….”(19)

© 1996 The Golden Sufi Center

FOOTNOTES

Chapter 5: Two Wings to Fly
1. Mathnawî, II, 1552f, trans. Camille and Kabir Helminski, Rumi: Daylight, p. 143.
2. Mathnawî, IV, 1357f., quoted by Schimmel, I am Wind, You are Fire, p. 71.
3. Diwân, “The Soul of the World,” trans. R.A. Nicholson, Rûmî, Poet and Mystic, pp. 182-183.
4. Quoted by Schimmel, I am Wind, You are Fire, p. 71.
5. Mundaka-Upanishad, The Ten Principal Upanishads, trans. Shree Purohit Swami and W.B. Yeats, p. 56.
6. “Tested by Fire and Spirit,” unpublished video interview, 1988.
7. Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Stephen Mitchell, 1.
8. Quoted by Bhatnagar, p. 144.
9. Katherine Haynes, The Cosmic Web, p. 59.
10. Mahmûd Shabistarî, quoted by Bhatnagar, p. 116.
11. Fawâ’îh al-jamâl, trans. by Sara Sviri, “Between Fear and Hope,” Jerusalem Studies for Arabic & Islam, Vol. 9, 1987, p. 343.
12. Daughter of Fire, Irina Tweedie, p. 226.
13. Tweedie, p. 226.
14. Yahyâ b. Mu‘âdh, quoted by al-Qushayrî, Principles of Sufism, p. 290.
15. The Book of Secrets, Chapter V, ll. 642-3.
16. Trans. N Scott Johnson, “Ocean and Pearls, Ibn Sab‘în and the Doctrine of Absolute Unity,” Sufism, Issue 25, p. 29.
17. Sviri, p. 349.
18. Sviri, p. 344.
19. Kalâbâdhî, quoted by Sviri, p. 346.