Love is a Fire
The Sufi's Mystical Journey Home
By Llewellyn Vaughan-LeeThe Golden Sufi Center
Copyright © 2013 The Golden Sufi Center
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-890350-03-1
Contents
INTRODUCTION,
1. THE PATH OF LOVE,
2. THE ELEMENTS OF THE PATH,
3. THE ONE THING,
4. THE JOURNEY HOME,
5. TWO WINGS OF LOVE,
6. LOVE AND ANNIHILATION,
7. PRIMORDIAL NATURE,
8. LIGHT UPON LIGHT,
9. THE TIMELESS MOMENT,
10. THE VEILS OF GOD, PART I,
11. THE VEILS OF GOD, PART II,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
GLOSSARY,
INDEX,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
CHAPTER 1THE PATH OF LOVE
You are a Sufi when your heart is as soft and as warm as wool.
traditional
LOVERS OF GOD
Sufism is a path of love. The Sufi is a traveler on the path of love, a wayfarer journeying back to God through the mysteries of the heart. For the Sufi the relationship to God is that of lover and Beloved, and Sufis are also known as lovers of God. The journey to God takes place within the heart, and for centuries Sufis have been traveling deep within themselves, into the secret chamber of the heart where lover and Beloved share the ecstasy of union.
There are some people for whom spiritual life has to be a love affair, a passionate affair of the soul. This tremendous love affair takes place within the heart, and is one of the greatest mysteries of being human. To love God and to be loved by God, to experience the depth and intimacy of this relationship, is a secret long known to the Sufis. Within the heart we come closer and closer to our Beloved, so close that finally there is no separation as the lover merges into the Beloved, the lover becomes lost in love. Step by step we walk along the path of love until finally we are taken by love into love; we are taken by God to God, and then there is no going back, only a deepening and deepening of this love affair of the soul. This is the ancient journey from separation to union, the journey from our own self back to a state of oneness with God.
On this journey love is the power that will take us Home. Love is the most powerful force in the universe and it resides within the heart of each of us. But this love needs to be awakened. The heart needs to be activated so that it can come to know its primordial passion, this link of love that runs through the world and is our own essence.
Since the beginning of time there have been masters of love, spiritual teachers who understood the ways of love, how to activate and channel this latent power within the human being. They carry the knowledge of how to awaken the longing that the soul has for God and help the lover live this longing, of how to allow this longing to fulfill itself so that the lover comes to experience nearness, intimacy, and finally union with God. This is the ancient wisdom of love, how to activate the heart, how to work with the currents of love so that the human being is taken back to God. And this is the wisdom of the Sufis, the ancient path of love that has always been here, long, long before they were called Sufis.
There is a story about a group of mystics, a band of lovers of God, who were called the Kamal Posh. Kamal Posh means blanket wearers, for their only possession was one blanket which they wore as a covering during the day and used as a blanket at night. As the story goes they traveled throughout the ancient world from prophet to prophet but no one could satisfy them. Every prophet told them to do this or to do that, and this did not satisfy them. Then one day, at the time of Muhammad, the P
