By Vern Barnet-The Kansas City Star-Kansas City/MO, USATuesday, February 5, 2008
Perhaps no American spiritual movement is more identified with the experience of mystical love than Sufism.
Sufi orders developed in Islam shortly after the death of the prophet Muhammad in the seventh century.
Early in the 20th century the Indian musician and Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan came to the West and developed what is called “Universal Sufism.”
His American student Sam Lewis founded the “Dances of Universal Peace,” which use materials from many faiths with chanting and movement as meditation.
I asked Wali Ali, the personal assistant to Lewis, about love.
“Sufism has been called the school of love, but it is not a school where it is particularly important to conceptualize what love is,” he said. “What is essential is to make it more and more a reality in one’s life, to realize it in all one’s relationships.
“Ultimately one may come to feel, as (the Sufi poet) Rumi has said, that the Beloved (God) is all in all, and the lover but a veil over the Beloved. It is a universal phenomenon that pulses through every particle of the universe and connects everything.”
Wali Ali is the head of the esoteric school for the Sufi Ruhaniat order, based in San Francisco.
Sufi orders are important because the teachings are transmitted from master to student through a lineage more than by reading books. Mystical love is an experience more than an intellectual attainment.
Mystical love involves abandoning attachments to ways we identify ourselves that separate us and isolate us from others.
Wali Ali is working with several others on the Wazifa Project, an exploration of the psychological and mystical meanings of the 99 names or characteristics of God traced to the Qur’an, used in meditation practices to experience the dissolution of the false self into the divine embrace.
Of his visit to Kansas City, Wali Ali said: “The workshop will combine dances, walking attunement practices, and sitting contemplation practices on Sufi themes based on classical and contemporary approaches.
We will work a great deal with the 99 names of God as means for uncovering the potentialities in our soul and healing the places of disconnection.
“There will be opportunities for questions and discussion. There is no prerequisite for attending. All are welcome.”
Wali Ali Meyer, the personal assistant and “esoteric secretary” to Lewis, will lead a workshop Feb. 22-24 in Kansas City for the Shining Heart Sufi Community, founded here 25 years ago. Daytime events will be at 3HO Ashram, 3525 Walnut St.; evening events at Body and Soul yoga studio, 649 E. 59th St.
[Visit the Sufi Ruhaniat website: http://www.ruhaniat.org/].
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