There are no emotions in the heart (2) – Text of a Speech by Llewelyn Vaughan-Lee

This continues the previous post with the same title.

Then it is up to Him, up to the great Beloved. Then it is the real thing. The love that takes out your heart or that turns your heart. I remember years ago in my twenties when I had this experience I didn’t now what it meant then in which somebody came from behind and they took out my heart and they breathed on it and then they put it back. That meant strictly speaking my heart no longer belonged to me. Somebody took it out, somebody put somebody else’s breath on it. Because that is the real sacrifice we make on the Sufi path, we give our hearts to the Beloved. The rest we get to keep for ourselves, look we get to keep our mind most of the time for ourselves,…our physical body..yeah that is ours you know… it gets few more wrinkles as you get older a few more aches and pains… our emotions well that’s your own emotion, but our heart -our heart belongs to our Beloved to do with as he will.

They say “He holds the heart of the faithful between his two fingers and he turns it as He wills. Sometimes he turns us , our heart towards Him and you get these states of nearness these states of intimacy these states of bliss, these states of incredible sweetness, then He turns the heart away back to the world away His Intimacy and then you get those days of desolation those days that stretch endlessly from horizon to horizon when the Beloved seem to be no longer there.

That is the sacrifice we make. We give this most precious part of ourselves up back to God. Do with it as thou wilst, I am just here for Your sake.Then we have to live it. One thing is to step into the arena of love, and then it is to live in the arena of love for the rest of your life, not knowing and finally not caring. Now that is this inner relationship this inner axis of love which we are privileged to experience and please I use the word privileged very, very specifically. It is a tremendous privilege to belong to God.

You say everything belongs to God, yes everything every leaf on the tree every politician in Washington belongs to God of course they do there is nothing other than him, everything is a revelation of Him. But there is this step in the incarnation of the soul when you consciously give yourself back to your Beloved, when you fulfil that ancient pledge ..”Am I not your Lord…yes we witness it, and you bring that inner most pledge of the soul into consciousness, into the breathe, into the awareness. Pir Zia was talking about the importance of the awareness of breathe, why? because the breathe is life without the breathe there would be no life and you bring that pledge of the soul back from the ancient memory stored within you, back from that pre-eternal moment when the souls were with God, andyou say Beloved now I live it.

Of course you forget it but then you remember. And there comes  atime when all of those yearsr of struggling to remember and all teh pain of forgetfulness dissolves.This is what the sufis called the state of baqa – abiding in God. When you beocme the remembrance of God in the world, when you are a place of His remembreance of Himself in his creation, Then you are a sufi. Until then you are walking on the road.

Now the breath goes into the world and back. It comes from the soul, it comes from the inner most recesses and goes back into the world and love also does the same. Love is like the breath of God. It is beautiful, you can go in meditation to a place where you see love coming out of the infinite emptiness.

For many years I couldnt understand, something my sheikh said to Mrs. Tweedie. He said there comes a time when even the love will go. I didn’t understand that. I remember somebody also had a dream in which they  said to sheikh “I love you” and he said in the dream there will come the time when each of those three little words will go, there will be no I, there will be no love, there will be no You. Because there is actually a place deep in the very core of one’s being in te emptiness and that whichis before existence where there is no love, the love has not yet come into existence. It is very very cold, very desolate place, very empty place. I find it infinitely beautiful. There is only a little fragment of consciousness there only a little something to see what is not. It doesn’t make much sense but that is the best I can explain it.

And then there is this like light, at time it is still a dark light of love that comes, that is born there in the emptiness, in nonexistence, it is the first hint of creation and then slowly it comes into the world and it becomes this whole magnificent creation and again for some reason in our culture,  I dont know why, it is a strange culture we live in I often think, a strange time, we have forgotten that everything is love. We have forgotten that the substance of everything is love because how can anything not be love? I suppose this is because we have kind of perfumed love and we have put it in personal relations and we tried to find it in the therapist room, ..I dont know. But God is Love, our Beloved is Love and He made the world out of His own substance and His own substance is love…..

Tags: Bhai Sahib, God, Golden Sufi Center, Health, Heart, Inspiration For Today, Intimate relationship, Irina TWeedie, Llewellyn Vaughan Lee, soul, Sufism, United States, Washington, Zia Inayat Khan