Book by: Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Review by: Zia H Shah

Prayer is born from need. We feel alone and in need. And only the Divine can answer this need. This need draws us to the place of prayer within us, to our heart that looks towards God.

Calling out from the depths of our being, we make known our need to our self and to God. We pray according to our need, and according to the need of the moment. At different times our needs are different. We may pray for forgiveness, for understanding, for kindness. We may pray that our relationships not be clouded in mistrust or that our children not suffer. All of the myriad difficulties that we encounter in our daily life we can embrace in our prayer, the difficulties of our own self and of family and friends, the troubles of the world.¹¹ We hope to bring God’s attention into our world and help with the pain of being human.

Prayer is infinitely powerful because it connects us with God’s infinite power. Praying, we offer up the difficul­ties of living in a world in which the Divine often appears to be absent, in the deepest knowledge that only the Divine who is the source of all life and all love can really help us. We who are so small and alone look to God, and so turn our attention from the many back to the One. Sometimes people think, ‘Why should I bother God? How can my dif­ficulties be of concern to this Great Being?’ But this is the voice of the ego, because it sets the individual falsely apart from God. We are a part of God’s world, and if we are in need we should turn towards God.

So many times it appears that our prayer is not heard, that we are forgotten, alone. And yet as the mystic says, ‘If the heart has heard the prayer, God has heard the prayer.’ And more important than any specific answer is the act itself of prayer, the turning towards God. In our busy lives it is so easy to forget the Divine, to be immersed in our own problems and our own selves. The mystic knows that what really matters is the inner connection of the heart in which our heart opens and cries. It is something so simple and yet so easily overlooked. Prayer is a way to be with God.

We each have our own way of being with this inner­most mystery, our own way of prayer. For some of us prayer takes place in the dark hours of the night, when we lie awake and our need is most pressing. Some find it easiest to pray as they walk, or find the presence of nature a way to gain access to this inner communion. Others may pray while they are in their garden, feeling the presence of the Divine among their flowers. Some pray when they see suf­fering, while others may find their heart opens when they experience beauty. For the mystic the prayer of the heart draws us deep within the center of our being where we can be alone with our Beloved, where the heart can cry and we can be present with its cry. Where we can speak and live the deepest longing of our soul: to be with God.

I have carefully read the first chapter and there is no mention of Trinity and only of Transcendent God of the Abrahamic faiths, who is beyond time, space and matter.  The first chapter also talks about seeking our insights from God and quotes Rumi to that effect:

Make everything in you an ear, each atom of your being, and you will hear at every moment what the Source is whispering to you, just to you and for you, without any need for my words or anyone else’s. You are—we all are—the beloved of the Beloved, and in every moment, in every event of your life, the Beloved is whispering to you exactly what you need to hear and know. Who can ever explain this miracle? It sim­ply is. Listen and you will discover it every passing moment. Listen, and your whole life will become a conversation in thought and act between you and Him, directly, wordlessly, now and always.

In another chapter, the author very effectively quotes from the Holy Qur’an:

The work of the mystic is to live in the two worlds. However much we are engaged in the outer world, we remain inwardly in a state of prayer, resting in God. This practice of constant inner prayer is described in the Qur’an: ‘Men whom neither business nor profit distract from the recollection of God.’ And for the Sufi it is expressed in the saying ‘Outwardly to be with the people, inwardly to be with God.’We live amidst the ordinariness as well as the dramas and difficulties of everyday life, with our family and job. And yet we remain inwardly vigilant, our heart awake to the needs of our Beloved.

The first chapter concludes with the following paragraph:

We pray to our Beloved who answers us. Knowing that our prayers are heard, we feel the wonder of experiencing that the inner connection of the soul to God exists, not just as an abstract idea, but as a living reality. Being told that God cares for us is very different from experiencing the intimacy and individual nature of this care. The response to our prayers brings into our consciousness, into our daily life, the soul’s link to its Beloved. We then no longer believe in God, we know.

The book is now available in Amazon.  About the author from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee (born 1953, London) is a Sufi mystic and lineage successor in the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Sufi Order. He is an extensive lecturer and author of several books about Sufism, mysticism, dreamwork and spirituality.

History

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee was born in London in the year 1953. He began following the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Sufi path at the age of 19, after meeting Irina Tweedie, author of Daughter of Fire: A Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master. He became Irina Tweedie’s successor and a teacher in the Naqshbandiyya Sufi Order. In 1991 he moved to Northern California and founded The Golden Sufi Center to help make available the teachings of this Sufi Lineage (see www.goldensufi.org).

Works

Author of several books, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee has lectured extensively throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe on Sufism, mysticism, Jungian psychology and dreamwork. He has also specialized in the area of dreamwork, integrating the ancient Sufi approach to dreams with the insights of Jungian Psychology. Since 2000 the focus of his writing and teaching has been on spiritual responsibility in our present time of transition, and an awakening global consciousness of oneness. More recently he has written about the feminine, the world soul, the anima mundi, and the emerging field of spiritual ecology (see www.workingwithoneness.org). He has also hosted a number of Sufi conferences bringing together different Sufi orders in North America (see www.suficonference.org).

His initial work from 1990 to 2000, including his first eleven books, was to make the Sufi path more accessible to the Western seeker. The second series of books, starting from the year 2000 with The Signs of God, are focused on a spiritual teachings about oneness and how to bring them into contemporary life, with the final book in this series being Alchemy of Light.

Llewellyn has been featured in two films, One the Movie & Wake Up. He has also been featured in the tv series Global Spirit and more recently been interviewed by Oprah Winfrey as a part of her Super Soul Sunday series.