Page 13 - News and Views Spring 2023

Isaac Penington wrote: ...sink down to the seed which God sows in the heart, and let that grow in
thee and breathe in thee and act in thee, and thou shalt find by sweet experience that the Lord
knows that and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of Life, which is its portion.
QF&P26.70

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Al Ghazzali, an 11 century Arabian mystic, wrote, ‘Sufism is based on experiences, not premises’.

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Joe Miller, a 20 century American mystic, wrote: ’Only the feel is for real.’

Here is a dervish story about words and truth. A dervish, a holy man in his own eyes, was walking
beside a river when he heard a dervish chant being done wrongly. The words should have been Ya
Hu, roughly praise to the divine oneness. The voice from a little island in the river was chanting u Ya
Hu. The dervish took a small boat and rowed across to the island, found the man chanting his
devotion and corrected him. The man humbly thanked him. As the dervish rowed back to the river
bank, he heard the man calling, ‘I’m sorry, sir. What was my mistake again?’ as he walked across
the water towards the dervish’s boat.

Each of us has a particular experience of God and each must find the way to be true to it. A&Q 17

Let’s look at a fairly common experience which people have. One might be standing on a hillside in
the country or a cliff top overlooking the sea on a cloudless evening. Looking up, one catches one’s
breath at the enormous and beautiful vision of countless stars shining in the black velvet vault of the
sky. One is so tiny oneself, and yet is a part of this infinity. The spirit within each of us is infinite too.
My own deep spiritual experiences have tended to come not during prayer but when in - or looking
out at - nature. For example, once gazing out at the garden suddenly there was an awareness of the
inner being expanding impossibly rapidly until there was a feeling that half of the universe was now
contained within the being and was in perfect equilibrium with the half which was outside. At once,
there was a kind of flip and the half which had been outside was now inside, and the inside had
become outside.

Each of us may recall a personal spiritual experience.

Some experiences are very quick, while others develop over months, even years. A willingness to
surrender to the experience and to try to learn from it (which may be a slow revelation) is helpful.
Have you ever shared one of your experiences with Friends at a Meeting discussion group?

Different spiritual traditions have naturally evolved with somewhat different aspects. To take a
simple metaphor, if we each imagine that we want to travel from the point where we are now to, say,
Merthyr Tydfil, we could go alone or with one or two friends or in a big group. We could walk, ride,
go by car, bus, coach, train, helicopter... We might use one and then another.. It would be our
choice, within our circumstances, how to proceed. Some people, of course, through no apparent
fault or virtue of their own, are actually born in Merthyr Tydfil.

How does a Sufi initiate, for example, proceed along his/her individual path without the formal
constructs of a religion with all its rules and set practices? Sufi mysticism uses a personal guidance
system. The would-be Sufi chooses a guide and trusts that person to advise him or her on their path.
There is no payment for this invaluable service. Every guide has his or her own guide. The guide will
suggest a practice or a mantra which the initiate can follow. There is no compulsion. If, for any
reason, the relationship does not work, the initiate can choose another guide.

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