To meet You I look at face after face, appearance after appearance….
To see Your face I pass by like the morning wind.
– Al-Hallâ j
Romantic love
A woman is God shining
through subtle veils.
– Rû mî [1]
Falling in love
A young man once came to a Sufi sheikh with the intention of becoming one of his disciples. He had read many books about the path and begun practicing austerities. But to his immense surprise the sheikh asked him, “Have you ever been in love?” The young man felt quite indignant. He had come to the sheikh to follow the Sufi path, to realize the truth of Lâ ilâ ha illâ llâ h (There is no God but God). He had read spiritual books and prayed in the night, but instead of being questioned about his spiritual aspirations, he was being asked about something so worldly. No, he had never been in love. He had no time or interest for such things. “Go back into the world, fall in love, marry, suffer, and then come back,” was the sheikh’sresponse. Despite his righteous indignation, the aspiring student followed the sheikh’s guidance. He fell in love. He married. Years later he returned to the sheikh and was accepted as a disciple. Eventually he became the sheikh’s successor.
I did not need any such incentive to fall in love. Love had been awakened in my heart and there was an irresistible desire to project this love on the tangible form of a woman, to be caught in the mystery and wonder of romantic love. She whom I loved I adored. In the light of my love she became most beautiful woman I have ever seen. For over a year I waited for my “heart’s desire,” and once my love began to be returned I was lost, engulfed in this ocean. I had then and have now no resistance and no regrets. Human love is a wonderful way to die.
Since adolescence I had been very romantically inclined, not knowing that the depth of my longing to love and be loved belonged to a different Beloved. I wanted desperately to give myself to the sweetness, intoxication, and deep meaning which I knew to be love. But I never found this quality of love returned, this hunger answered. When I was fifteen I fell in love, and this girl became my closest companion until she left me soon after I came to the group. We had a deep connection of the soul, and at times I was in love with her. Our connection beyond the level of the personality brought with it an intimacy and depth of friendship that neither of us had ever known. But we were not ready for the descent into the bliss and craziness of passion. We were too young, and we each had very difficult home situations, which made our loving friendship too important to be endangered by the tumult of being deeply in love. We needed the security of our relationship more than the danger of intoxication.
After she had left me I had journeyed inward, confronted my family shadow and freed myself of many insecurities. The dark, terrible feminine had become partly transformed, opening me to her beauty and wonder. I was now ready to lose myself without the fear of being torn apart. I could encounter the mystery of the feminine without being engulfed.
Sufism is a path of love in which the energy of love is used to transform the wayfarer and take him or her back to God. Giving ourself to love, we open the door of the heart through which this tremendous power can come into our life in whatever way it will. We gladly become the victim of our loving, knowing that our heart is in the hands of Him for whom we long. Often He will take us into the arena of human love, which is both tangible and elusive. In this arena we can be melted and remade, can come to know the beauty and wonder of being human. Finally we can be taught that we belong only to Him, that no other lover will suffice.
I had longed to be in love and this doorway was open. I could be with a beautiful woman and see in her the face of God. At the beginning of the relationship I thought deeply about whether loving a woman was just falling into the trap of illusion, running away from the inner emptiness which I knew was the only lasting reality. I wrote at the time:
I put my longing in a woman. Will the beauty of our love be a flower that I can offer up to You? Or am I just putting Your eternal jewel in another vessel so that neither You nor I can see it in its fullness?
But I wonder if any philosophical speculations could have held me back—I wanted so much to feel, to touch, to taste the loving.
Writing this now, returning to those feelings, I see that I had little awareness of who she was. I can see my own feelings, the depth of my need and awakening love, but little knowing of the actual person of my beloved. The loving was enough—it swamped all sight. She had come to our group, and for many months I had seen her across the room. I felt that we shared the same deepest longing. Her English was not very good as she had recently arrived from Israel. Her name is Anat and she is an artist. But these outer realities were just on the surface. Far more potent than the desire to know her was the call to enter into the mystery of human loving, into the sacred space where man and woman meet. Invited into this space, a man can taste the eternal quality of the feminine, of the Goddess herself. Love had invited me and this was enough.
Since then I have read many psychology books. I know about projection, how a man or woman projects his or her inner partner onto another human being. This projection creates the magic and danger of the relationship, as we see our own inner divinity in the eyes and body of another. She whom we love becomes a goddess, he whom we adore a god. Falling in love, we feel we have known our lover forever, not realizing that we only see our hidden self, our archetypal inner partner whom in truth we have known forever. Then there comes the crash, when the ordinary person whom we think we love cannot live up to our projection, when we are confronted by the human and not the divine. Lost in the magic of our projection, we cannot and do not want to see the ordinary nature of our partner, his or her faults and character traits. But then the realities of life break through the wall of our projection, and mystery topples into the mundane, as the singer Donovan humorously expressed, changing the lyrics of his love song from “Yellow is the color of my true love’s hair, in the morning, when we rise,” to “Yellow is the color of my true love’s teeth, in the morning, when we rise.”[2]
But would it make any difference if we knew about projection, about the psychological process of falling in love? This inner archetypal happening is so potent that in the moment of its awakening it would throw off any theory. There is a need in the human psyche to engage in this psychological ritual, a need which is almost as strong as the sex-drive itself. In our culture the desire for romance and sexuality appear to arrive together, as my adolescent daughter hinted when I asked her if she believed in romantic love. She replied, “Of course, I’m a teenager.”
We need to find ourself in another and taste the archetypal fruits of this inner embrace. Later, after our initial encounters, it can be helpful to understand what is happening, and how romantic love can lead beyond sex into the inner union of masculine and feminine. When my daughter was four she one day stood up in the bath and surprised us with an understanding of this deeper truth, stating, “When a boy grow up he becomes a girl, and when a girl grows up she becomes a boy. And that means sorted out.”
The beauty of God’s physical form
I have always had a deep conditioning to seek God only in the emptiness, beyond form or image. I have never been attracted by the idea of a personalized God, especially not the heavenly father-figure of Christianity. Although I went to church every Sunday of my childhood, there was no internal resonance and in my early adolescence I became an atheist. Then, at sixteen, awakened by a Zen saying, I found tremendous meaning in the formless void of this tradition. “Enlightenment” in Zen does not involve any relationship to a personalized deity, but a state of inner awareness that is often symbolized by an empty circle. This emptiness of Zen was not just an abstract idea, but a dynamic reality which I had experienced in meditation, and also found in nature. Only through the empty mind of the watcher can the haiku-like moment be realized. The pure experience of the moon on the water evokes a quality of life that just is. The simplicity and formlessness of Zen evoked a deep echo within me, a formlessness which is also a state of being.
However, although I had experienced moments of pure being in nature, I was more attracted to the inner emptiness beyond creation. For me the created world carried the shadow of the feminine, the limitations of time and space, which I longed to escape. I was more drawn to His transcendence than His immanence, looking inward in meditation rather than outward into life. After I had been with my Sufi teacher for about a year she gave me a practice in which I had to try and see God in everything. Wherever I walked, whatever I did, I had to feel His presence. At the same time she gave me an invaluable little book, The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. This seventeenth-century monk, whose only concern was to live in the presence of God, describes his simple spiritual practice of living “as if there were no one in the world but Him and me.”[3] Working in the kitchen, washing the potatoes, whatever his daily activity, he felt himself in the living presence of God.
I had found that this little book opened a door into a new way of living in which I no longer had to escape this world in order to find Him. He was not only in the intangible emptiness, but could also be found in this world, alive within His creation. But after a while it was no longer enough to try to feel His presence. I needed to love Him in a tangible, created form. Ibn Arabî writes that “Woman is the highest form of earthly beauty, but earthly beauty is nothing unless it is a manifestation of Divine Qualities.”[4] Through this beauty I could come nearer to Him, feel Him in the closeness of His creation.
I found something wonderful and unexpected about being able to love God in a woman. A deep, passionate need was being met, the need to feel the beauty, the softness, the warmth of His feminine form. I found an intimacy I never believed possible. Sometimes just being near to Anat I would experience a bliss that I now know comes from feeling the embodiment of the divine, the numinosity of the eternal feminine. Anat carries this quality, the sacred nourishment of life, which is a part of the essence of a woman, because a woman gives birth out of her own body. There was also the continual sense of mystery, of the unknown and unknowable, which belongs to the feminine, to the veils of the Goddess. At the time I was just caught and often confused in this encounter. I was bewildered, but blissfully, knowing I had fallen into love’s trap, as is echoed in a Sufi poem:
Her tress is a trap,
Her mole is a bait;
I, by such ruse,
Hopeful-hearted fell
Into the Beloved’s snare.[5]
My heart’s desire was full of the contradictions of the feminine. I was a victim, turned this way and that, accepted and then rejected. But deep within me I did not care. I felt like a winter-worn ascetic unexpectedly encountering a warm and wonderful spring. I had recently read a story by Tagore, which I found hauntingly appropriate to my own state:
In the depths of the forest the ascetic practiced penance with fast-closed eyes; he intended to deserve Paradise.
But the girl who gathered twigs brought him fruits in her skirt, and water from the stream in cups made of leaves.
The days went on, and his penance grew harsher till the fruits remained untasted, the water untouched: and the girl who gathered twigs was sad.
The Lord of Paradise heard that a man had dared to aspire to be as the Gods…and he planned a temptation to decoy this creature of dust away from his adventure.
A breath from Paradise kissed the limbs of the girl who gathered twigs, and her youth ached with a sudden rapture of beauty, and her thoughts hummed like the bees of a rifled hive.
The time came when the ascetic should leave the forest for a mountain cave, to complete the rigor of his penance.
When he opened his eyes in order to start on this journey, the girl appeared to him like a verse familiar, yet forgotten, and which an added melody made strange. But the ascetic rose from his seat and told her that it was time he left the forest.
… For years he sat alone till his penance was complete.
The Lord of the Immortals came down to tell him that he had won Paradise.
“I no longer need it,” said he.
The God asked him what greater reward he desired.
“I want the girl who gathers twigs.”[6]
Aloneness and loneliness
Love was bringing me back into the world, a world not of alienation and rejection, but a place where I wanted to be. Anat seemed to be a part of life, to have a natural connection to people and life itself. Relating for her seemed natural, not something to be learnt. Through her I sensed that I too could connect to life and to people.
For a long time I had felt deeply isolated, unable to relate to others. At times I felt like the wanderer in the cold, desolate street who, looking in through a window, sees people together, talking, laughing, in the light and warmth. My only real companionship was friends from the meditation group, fellow wayfarers. But here I still felt separate. At our meditation meetings we meditate in silence, and then drink tea and talk, before discussing dreams or other spiritual questions. For many years I did not understand the need for people to be together and talk of ordinary things. I came to the meetings to meditate, to reach an inner goal, something beyond the outer world. Years later I came to understand the importance of just being together, fellow wayfarers on a path of infinite aloneness. But then I found it very difficult to relate to anyone; only meditation held the promise I desired.
How long this deep loneliness had haunted me I don’t know. I only became consciously aware of my inner self when I was about fifteen, and have few memories of how I felt as a child. Probably I repressed many feelings. I remember as a teenager at boarding school feeling very separate, unable to join in. After I came to the group these feelings were again surfacing, together with the impression that those around me in the group had an ability to relate, to be together in friendship, that was somehow denied to me.
There were two sides to these feelings. One was a deep inner aloneness in which I was quite content with my own company. I have always liked myself, and later in life was astonished to discover that many people do not like themselves. I have since wondered how someone can live with herself if she does not like herself. Because we see only through our own eyes, conditioned by our own character, other people’s problems are often a mystery. But my own aloneness also carried an arrogance, a feeling of superiority to those around me. This arrogance was not just compensation for feeling separate, but egotistic pride. My first years on the path when I was unable to sleep, unable to eat ordinary food, unable to join in with others, was a time of painfully grinding down this arrogance, teaching me the wisdom of humility and being ordinary.
But there was another aspect to this aloneness which I remember surfacing with my teenage years. I felt unable to participate in superficial social interaction. This was partly an adolescent rebellion against my middle-class background with its codes of superficial talk and social politeness, in which, according to English custom, no feelings are ever expressed. But there was also a hunger for a real inner connection with something deeply meaningful. I could not accept the emptiness and superficiality I felt around me, and the only path was inward into aloneness.
I hungered for meaning, for relating from the depths, and at times I found this in individual relationships. My first girlfriend was partly Greek and did not have the English inhibitions about expressing feelings. Also our deep inner connection allowed a depth of relating beyond the level of personality. After she left me I was in deep despair and terribly alone. Then, within my meditation group I again found the intimacy of real friendship. However, even in the midst of this deeply nourishing friendship, I still carried a sense of being cut off, isolated. Often this isolation evoked a sense of despair, and I would think of going out and relating, being with people in order to fill the emptiness within me. But at the same time I instinctively knew that this door was closed—there was no point in picking up the phone. Even when I was together with friends whom I loved, after a time I would find myself exhausted and would withdraw.
Now I understand why I carry such a strong imprint of aloneness, how I need to be alone in order to live out my destiny. The mystical path is a one-to-one relationship with God, and as such demands a degree of aloneness that most people would find frightening. Ultimately the mystic needs to be free from any attachment; the lover must look only to the Beloved. The instinctual aloneness imprinted into the soul forbade me from becoming attached to the outer world. It had the effect of making empty any relationship that did not help bring me nearer to God. The ninth-century Sufi Dhû -l-Nû n tells a story which has always touched me:
I was wandering in the mountains when I observed a party of afflicted folk gathered together.
“What befell you?” I asked.
“There is a devotee living in a cell here,” they answered. “Once every year he comes out and breathes on these people and they are all healed. Then he returns to his cell, and does not emerge again until the following year.”
I waited patiently until he came out. I beheld a man pale of cheek, wasted and with sunken eyes. The awe of him caused me to tremble. He looked on the multitude with compassion. Then he raised his eyes to heaven and breathed several times over the afflicted ones. All were healed.
As he was about to retire to his cell, I seized his skirt.
“For the love of God,” I cried. “You have healed the outward sickness; pray heal the inward sickness.”
“Dhû -l-Nû n.” he said, gazing at me, “take your hand from me. The Friend is watching from the zenith of might and majesty. If He sees you clutching at another than He, He will abandon you to that person, and that person to you, and you will perish each at the other’s hand.”
So saying he withdrew into his cell.[7]
Infinite longing and the feminine
The path of love takes us from our own aloneness into an embrace which fulfills our deepest need. In my aloneneness I have felt unbelievable nearness, such intimacy, love, and belonging that any sense of separation dissolves—walking, feeling His companionship, going to bed to know that He is waiting to take me to Him. I have almost felt guilty, wondering why I am being given so much. I know that the Friend wants me for Himself, could never allow another to come between us. But I also remember the times in the desert, the agony of isolation, the desolation of loneliness. Even when I was deeply in love, entranced by Her beauty, the soul’s hunger was also present, underlying every physical embrace. Reading through a book of old poems I discovered a few lines that I wrote at the time, words that speak of the painful solitariness of a wayfarer seeking what cannot be found, knowing that the journey is infinite and the real Beloved beyond reach:
It was not really because he was lonely,
but just
there seemed to be an ocean
without end.
Longing is the mark of the lover, the soul’s song of separation. Deeper than any worldly loneliness is the sense of separation that haunts the mystic, the separation of the soul from the Source, the lover from the Beloved. Looking back, I know the journey is worthwhile because I now know what awaits the traveler. But then there was no such knowledge and the path seemed to stretch forever, the goal just a distant dream beyond the horizon. All I knew was my need and the sense that no one person could answer it. I wanted what the world could not give, and this evoked a quality of aloneness beyond imagining.
Yet I was also in love and at times deeply happy. There is no contradiction, because just as there are different degrees of closeness so are there different qualities of aloneness. On a human level, as a man, as a lover, I had found my heart’s desire. I had found the one woman whom I would love for the rest of my life, the one person with whom a certain closeness and intimacy would be allowed. But if I looked closely I also knew that this was not enough, that I longed for a deeper and more complete union than could ever be reached with another person. And I came to know that Anat shares this stamp of the mystic, that she can never give herself completely to anyone but the Beloved. For both of us something pointed beyond what was given, towards the innermost chamber of the heart that belongs only to God.
In every human relationship, however close and loving, there are always two. The mystic is born with a memory of a different love in which there is only oneness, in which lover and Beloved are united forever. In a human love-affair we sense this possibility. In the deepest human relationship there can be a meeting of souls, a sense of intimacy that is beyond the physical. To experience this for the first time is intoxicating. Making love is more than physical orgasm, for one merges into the beyond, into the infinite inner space which feels like the cosmos itself. Physical closeness becomes a doorway to the inner worlds, to mysteries which have always belonged to the feminine. These were part of the mysteries taught in the temples of the goddess, whose priestesses were trained to initiate a man into the sacred spaces of the feminine. In the moments of merging, of being taken beyond oneself, it seems as if an ancient promise is being fulfilled, that we are being touched by finger of our Beloved. There is also a sense of real wonder that a human lover, a physical embrace, can take us into this inner ecstasy.
But there is also a danger for the wayfarer, and I think in particular for a man. The world of the Great Goddess is in essence a world of unconsciousness, the instinctual round symbolized by Orobouros, the serpent eating its tail. Every man has a primal pull to return to this unconscious oneness, the archetypal world of the mother from which he feels banished. There is a reason why, in primitive cultures, at puberty the boy has to leave the women’s hut or the home of his mother, never to return. The feminine mysteries hold the instinctual attraction of returning to the unconscious oneness which allows us to lose the burden of consciousness. I found this pull almost irresistible. To lose myself in a woman whom I loved was like a doorway to eternal childhood, to be forever in the arms of the Great Mother. There I could receive the nurturing and warmth I had always desired, and every instinct would be fulfilled.
I do not know how many others have consciously experienced this test. I have always been very open to the archetypal world, and the drama of the inner feminine has been central to my life. Projecting the anima, my inner goddess, onto Anat took me deeper into the inner world than I knew possible. I felt the bliss of her seduction. But luckily Anat was very aware of the moment I changed from a man into a child. She in no way would play the mother—an instinctual taboo forbade it. Thus the pull of the inner also evoked a rejection—I was allowed to taste but not become lost in Her embrace. I could sense the eternal beauty of the feminine, but I was always to remain outside. At times this evoked anger and a feeling of betrayal. She who was so close was also forbidden. Now I am grateful because I know a more enduring love-affair, and how the embrace of the feminine can carry the curse of forgetfulness.
A human love-affair gives us a taste of togetherness, a hint of union. The heart can be opened to a depth of passion that transcends reason. But finally, however close we become, we are always two separate individuals with different needs. A human love-affair can remind us of love’s touch, can make us realize that love needs to include all of ourself—that it is not a cerebral affair. (There is a real reason why mystic love poetry is so full of erotic imagery.) But what the soul hungers for is a union in which duality does not belong on any level, in which there are a merging and quality of completeness dependent only upon Him. Another human being can never give us what we want. I knew this and yet I was also caught in the wonder of what was given through a woman.
This struggle was central to my years of romantic love, and was a way of fully incarnating my own love and devotion. I have found that in many relationships there are a lover and a beloved, one who loves and one who is loved. I was the lover. I needed to love, to adore. There was an inner certainty that this was the one woman I would love. Early in our relationship I had a powerful experience when sitting with her one evening. I suddenly found myself out of my body on the inner plane of the soul. In that space I was with her soul and I knew that I could trust her on the level of the soul. Whatever the difficulties and differences on the level of the personality, I could give myself to my loving of her with the totality of commitment that is my only way to live.
Cooked in the pot
In a human love-affair the inner wonder and taste of bliss are caught in all the complications of personal psychology and character differences. The opposites of the soul and the personality can tear a relationship apart and bring immense suffering. Here lies the danger of projection, in which we expect our partner to carry our idealized soul-image, and we give little consideration to the difficulties of personal relationship. For this reason the Jungian Robert Johnson advises against marrying someone with whom you are in love, saying that after a few weeks of bliss come years of suffering. Yet, acknowledging the power of romantic love in our culture, he likens it to a Zen teaching that inner growth always involves an experience of “a red hot coal stuck in the throat.” “We can’t live with it, and we can’t live without it—we can’t swallow it and we can’t cough it up!”[8]
Romantic love throws us into the primal contradiction that we are human and divine. Seeking our divinity in our partner, we are only too often confronted by human failings. Combined with this are the very real difficulties of communication between men and women. The English mystical painter Cecil Collins was known to remark that men and women are so different it is astonishing that they can even talk to each other! Yet romantic love can be an alchemical vessel of inner transformation, a vessel in which the opposites are melted down and reformed. The “red hot coal” can take us beyond duality into the paradoxical realm of a deeper truth. I once asked a wise old man, Werner Engel, who had been a friend of Jung, what was the way to resolve the seeming impossible contradictions of being in love. He replied with two words, “unconditional love.” “Unconditional love” has no reason or limit to its loving.
Romantic love was a deeply painful place of my own transformation. The power of my projection, my idealized inner feminine, was balanced by deep differences in character between my beloved and me. For example, Anat is a feeling type; feelings are her primary mode of experience and expression, which is combined for her with a great sensitivity. I was brought up in a family and collective atmosphere in which feelings are strictly taboo—I never so much as heard my parents disagree until one week-end when I was fourteen and they announced to all six children that they were getting a divorce. I was also sent off to boarding school at the age of seven. A collective masculine environment with cold baths first thing in the morning is hardly conducive to developing feelings or sensitivity! Added to the alchemical pot of our relationship were ancient masculine and feminine wounds and shadow patterns. These and other personal and archetypal dynamics were bound together with love, a deep connection on the level of the soul, and a shared commitment to the path. I often felt like the chickpea in Rû mî ’s story, in which the chickpea tries to escape the boiling pot, only to be knocked back down with the cook’s ladle:
“Don’t you try to jump out.
You think I’m torturing you.
I’m giving you flavor
so you can mix with spices and rice
and be the lovely vitality of a human being.
Remember when you drank rain in the garden.
That was for this.”
Grace first. Sexual pleasure,
then a boiling new life begins,
and the Friend has something good to eat.[9]
Every wayfarer has to be cooked, boiled to perfection. We each have our own vessel, the container of our transformation. On the deepest level this container is the relationship with the Beloved, reflected in the relationship teacher and the path. But for many seekers a human relationship can also be a powerful and potent pot, for which passion, feelings, and love are the fire.
How many nights have I cried silently, caught in the opposites of the human and divine which form the cross of every lover’s crucifixion. I felt like an ancient ascetic, a monk of many lifetimes, bewildered by the contradictions of the feminine, unable to reconcile the power of my projection with the human differences that confronted me. There is love, devotion, a deep connection of the soul. Why cannot one live forever within that sacred circle, that intense, luminous loving? Why do the personality, the differences of character, intrude, bringing one back to earth from worship and wonder?
The wayfarer is always thrown between the opposites, the more potent the loving the more powerful the oscillation. Meditation and the energy of the path add to this effect, dramatically energizing outer situations and relationships, stirring the pot, bringing aspects of the psyche into consciousness. Mrs. Tweedie calls it the “yo-yo syndrome” in which we go up and down, from nearness to separation. In my loving this was played out to every extreme. Divine nearness was followed by two egos breaking apart, leaving me in the anguish of separation. In this despair and isolation I would turn inward into the emptiness, cry out for help, and then the love and nearness would return. Divinity would again be in front of my eyes.
I was being cooked in the pot of my own loving, tenderized by the impossible opposites of masculine and feminine, and human and divine. I once had a dream in which I was told that I had been “made soft by a very hard system.” The Sufi system is hard because it takes you to the extremes within yourself, pushes you beyond seeming endurance. Sometimes this is just an inner drama; sometimes it is dramatized on an outer stage. A human love affair can combine the inner and outer, the secrets of the soul and the visible dynamics of two human beings. When the deepest contradictions of your own nature are continually thrown in your face, there is no alternative but to surrender, to give up the pretensions of the ego, the desire for power or the demand to be right, and leave everything to be burnt away.
Arrogance and independence, anger and alienation, vulnerability and defensiveness, all these aspects of my character were cooked in the cauldron. They were brought to the surface, into the drama of the relationship and the light of consciousness. I remember that it was particularly painful to be vulnerable in front of another person, to allow my defenses to dissolve and stand naked. Often in these moments I would react in anger—the anger covering my wounds and vulnerability. Within myself everything was exposed and stripped of pretensions. The opposites of our characters constellated aspects of myself that might otherwise have remain hidden. Finally I had to accept my own failings, my own inadequacies, my own ordinariness. I was just another human being, nothing special, just a soul walking home. Longing to see the divine in another, I was forced to accept my own humanness. With humility these opposites were brought together.
The wounded feminine
Romantic love awakens the anima in a man. She is not only a goddess, but also his muse and guide in the underworld. As my own journey into the inner world continued, leading me into the personal and archetypal world, I found aspects of my shadow, my cruelty and carelessness, as well as my own feminine self. The intimacy of a relationship allows many aspects of the psyche to surface, many dynamics of projection to be played out. The energy of love is the container for a whole psychic story to brought into consciousness and then accepted, allowed to live in the sunlight.
My inner feminine was experienced projected onto my partner, but my anima also appeared in different forms in dreams. Sometimes she was an artist, a therapist, or an unknown lover. I also remember her wounded, in a wheel-chair. This image of the wounded feminine returned many times, and I responded with active imagination, Jung’s technique of going back into the feeling quality of the dream. There I would ask her about her pain and try to heal her. Our masculine culture easily wounds the feminine, and we thus lose our sensitivity, our openness to feelings and emotions. But a wound can also take us deeper within ourself, as the desire to heal and understand draws us inward.
I wandered through the maze of my inner self for many years, guided by both the wisdom and the wounds of the anima. Deeper and deeper I went into my own treatment of the feminine, my rejection of her and my need to redeem this wound. Again I had to encounter the dark, terrible power of the feminine of which men are most afraid. I had experienced this fear in my childhood in the demonized, shadow-figure of my mother. Now, at another level of the spiral, she appeared, powerful, but no longer so demonic. I found her both acted out in my partner and alive within myself. In the entanglement of a relationship it is often difficult to know what is a projection and what belongs to the other.
She, who is described in the Song of Songs as “fair as the moon, clear as the sun and terrible as an army with banners,”[10] is the primal energy of the feminine. She carries the instinctual wisdom that belongs to nature and to the unconscious wholeness of life. Ignorant of her wisdom, and frightened of a power so different from the visible world of masculine consciousness, men have projected their fear and burnt her as witches. Finding this archetypal fear within myself, I was relieved to discover that Jung towards the end of his life also acknowledged it: “Woman is a very, very strong being, magical. That is why I am afraid of women.”[11]
Romantic love had taken me into the arena of the feminine, into her passion, power, and beauty. It was easy to follow the collective pattern and idealize her, like Hamlet calling Ophelia his “soul’s idol.” I projected this image, the purity, warmth, and nurturing care, that has become symbolized by the Virgin Mary. But her dark sister is always present and cannot be ignored. Encountering her passion and power, her terrible beauty, I uncovered a personal and archetypal wound. I tried to close the door, to keep my love celestial and soulful, but I had chosen a woman who would not allow such rejection, who would not play this collective denial. She is too natural a human being.
Finally, one night I had a dream in which I heard the most pitiable and sorrowful sound I have ever heard, the cry of a wounded tiger. Until then I never realized how I had hurt the feminine, and how my fear of her power was a cause of this hurt:
I am left to look after a house while the owner of the house goes out for the evening. A fire breaks out in the house and I go in to rescue a couple who are living there. They represent the idealized anima relationship. I suddenly see that there are three tigers in the house, and realize that they will be made very nervous by the fire and could be dangerous. I rescue the couple but close the door so that the tigers cannot come out and attack us. The owner comes back and telephones the fire brigade, which is in fact already on its way. He rescues the tigers who are his pets. They are very badly burnt and as they come out one makes such a sound of pain and distress that it is awful to hear. I have never heard such a whimpering and sorrowful sound before and it deeply moves me. Two tigers are taken off to the hospital and one is left with me. Because of its pain I am not afraid of it.
Within the house of my psyche there is a fire, a conflict. From this conflict I try to rescue my idealized anima relationship, my fantasy of how a man and a woman might be together. However I find that this couple are not the only inhabitants of the house; there are also three tigers. The tigers image the primal power of the feminine—traditionally the goddess rides on the back of a tiger. A conflict was burning within me, a split between the idealized feminine and her darker, more powerful nature.
But I am frightened of the tigers, and so shut the door of the house and leave them to burn. How often through fear do we close the door on our shadow, unaware of the pain that this inflicts on these wounded and neglected figures? These figures of the unconscious are real, and the pain that they felt was my own inner suffering. Possibly these tigers could be dangerous; such primal energies will always have a dangerous element. But out of my fear I left them to burn. I left them caught in the conflict.
Eventually the tigers come out of the house and their pained moaning is one of the most distressing sounds I have ever heard. To see such beautiful and powerful animals limping from the house, moaning in distress, touched me deeply for days. Later, in active imagination, I asked one of the tigers, “Why did this happen?” To which the tiger simply answered, “It had to be that way.” Possibly the only way I could realize this inner energy and treat it with love and not fear was to see it so wounded, so pitifully hurt.
When the owner of the house comes back he knows exactly what to do. The fire brigade is already on its way. The owner rescues the tigers who are his pets. The owner is the Higher Self, the master of all the energies of the unconscious. The Self, the true owner of the house of my psyche, let my ego experience the conflict and the pain caused by my idealization of the feminine. Only through seeing the pain of the tiger would I cease to fear her, and thus be able to live the power of my primal feminine self. The day after the dream synchronicity reinforced its significance when I saw a film on television about a “wild boy” from Africa, whose pet was a tiger.
After this dream I embraced the wounded tiger, took her to my heart and, with the energy of active imagination, nurtured her with love. Months later this dream had a sequel which imaged a deeper integration of the feminine:
I am with my teacher beside a clump of tiger lilies which have to be cut down. I cut them with a bush knife. In the next sequence I have woven a meditation mat from these lilies and am shown a diagram which describes how their energy is integrated.
The image of the tiger lilies beautifully embraces the two sides of the feminine. The lily is sacred to all virgin goddesses, and in Christian symbolism is associated with purity, innocence, and the Virgin Mary. The tiger lily thus images the natural flowering of the feminine, in both her purity and her passion, her innocence and her instinctual wisdom. Yet this flower has to be cut down; only then can the dual nature of the feminine be integrated and its energy put to creative use. The tiger lilies are woven into a meditation mat, suggesting that this energy now has a spiritual dynamic. The feminine no longer holds me in the embrace of an idealized lover, but has the potential to reveal the secret hidden within creation.
The cutting of the natural flowers points to the alchemical mystery of the opus contra naturam. On one hand the alchemical opus is the most natural process. The birth of the Self follows the deepest rhythms of the psyche, and dreams often use the images of nature—of giving birth and the opening of flowers—to express this mystery. Yet, in the realm of the Great Mother, there is no such transformation. In the rhythms of nature everything that is born decays and dies; nothing can escape this closed circle. The Great Mother is the spider-mother eating her children, resisting the birth of individual consciousness. She resists even more the inner birth that takes us beyond the duality of opposites, beyond life and death. It is the flowering of the Self that finally frees us from her power, and this is experienced as a violation of nature, as in the cutting of the flowers.[12]
My relationship, my human loving, had taken me deep into the realm of the Great Goddess. There I found both the power and the wounds of the feminine and was able to nurture her pain. The transformation of the feminine took me out of the captive wonder of her embrace, beyond the opposites of masculine and feminine, into the mysterious union that belongs to the birth of the Self. Soon I began to have dreams of babies, children born with stars in their eyes.
Learning the flow of love
Romance was a loving and painful way to be cooked. There were different ingredients, different herbs and spices. On the deepest human level there was a soul-link, a relationship and love that belong to a different dimension, that we brought with us from before. I always knew that Anat was the one woman I would really love; about this there was never a question or doubt. I also sensed that we had come together for a certain work, a purpose beyond our own individual life. Years later, when we came to California to start a Sufi Center, this purpose became clearer.
But in those early years there was just the intensity of loving, and the soul-link was combined with a powerful projection. She was my goddess, and embodied the beauty and mystery of the feminine world. I was held fascinated, enthralled. One day, some years later, I was shown the simple power of this projection, and how it can turn an ordinary woman into a mysterious goddess. By this time I had realized the real inner wonder of the anima and no longer needed to project her. But in the short space of an hour I saw this projection fall onto a woman and transform her. It happened after meditation one day in Mrs. Tweedie’s flat, as I visibly experienced a woman suddenly become mysterious, profoundly beautiful, and alluring. For fifteen minutes she carried the irresistible attraction of the goddess, and my eyes and my whole inner attention were drawn to her. Then something in me withdrew the projection, and to my astonishment she was suddenly just an ordinary woman. There was no mystery, no allure. She was just another woman in the room. Again my projection fell on her, and in that moment she changed back, once again carrying the magic of a goddess. Then finally the projection was again withdrawn, the curtain that caught the light of my own soul was lifted, and the woman in front of me was again dressed in the clothes of this world. I had been allowed to witness the wondrous power of the anima projection.
For about seven years I was lost in the magical whirlpool of romantic love. I had found my soul’s idol and worshipped her. I tasted the honeyed nectar of the goddess and also encountered her terrifying power. I was torn between the opposites of the divine and the ordinary, between the projection and the personality, between the heart’s desire and the difficulties of two strong individuals living together. Through prayer and pain I tried to reconcile these impossible opposites, and was taken inward, along the maze of the psyche, forced to confront and accept many difficult aspects of myself.
I began to learn about the nature of human loving, the mysterious ebb and flow of love that happens between two people. Like everything in this world, love has masculine and feminine qualities. The masculine aspect of love is “I love you” and it carries a commitment to stay true to this statement of the heart. For me this was easy, to be steadfast in loving whatever the difficulties, for it carries the quality of a challenge and the drive to persevere. Whatever the difficulties, the love remained, and I knew that love was the only lasting reality. Once, when the relationship seemed to be swamped by psychological difficulties, I inwardly asked my sheikh, and in a dream he just told me, “Love is the wine.”
I found the feminine nature of love more difficult. Mrs. Tweedie often quoted the lines of an Italian love song, “to hold love with light hands,” and I had to learn this wisdom. While the masculine holds firm in loving, the feminine nature of love is its eternal flow and change, the fluctuations of the heart. The currents of love would carry me back and forth, sometimes deeply in love, sometimes withdrawing. I began to understand the sacredness of the space between two people, and how that space holds the real magic of the relationship, its invisible quality. At the beginning I wanted to always hold her, for the wonderful closeness to be always there. But gradually I became aware that this limits a relationship, limits the ability of love to flow. When we were married, Mrs. Tweedie quoted to us the passage from The Prophet by Kahil Gibran:
Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls
… Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
Learning to give space to another’s loving and another’s life is not easy. I wanted to hold, to possess, to feel the security of ownership. Soon after I was married I felt a primitive instinct to take my wife off to a cave of my own, where she would belong only to me!
Spirit and matter
The Sufis say that the only real relationship, the only real loving, is with the Beloved. But through human relationships we can learn to love Him, just as a little girl plays with dolls, because one day she will become a mother. Through the power of projection I was drawn into the arena of human loving, into the touch and taste of lips meeting. I began to understand my own human nature, as well as the ways of love. I finally put aside the cloak of the ascetic, my desire to renounce the world. I had found love, not on the remote mountain-top or in the desert, but in a physical embrace, in the magic of the feminine.
I came to realize that the particular power of the anima and the potency of being in love come from the combination of spirit and matter. The eternal beauty of a woman combines the two worlds, the Creator and the creation—as Rû mi says, “A woman is God shining through subtle veils.” In the face and body of her whom I loved I experienced the inner and outer worlds dancing together, the magic at the core of creation. One night I was told in a dream that the essence of the anima is “spirit impregnated with matter.” The anima belongs to the soul, to the spiritual center of ourself, but she carries the seed of matter, the wonder of the created world. The anima rises from the unconscious through the alchemy of love in which there is the need of the soul to be known, to be experienced here, in this world. Pure desire, solely physical attraction, will never constellate the anima. Love alone can combine the two worlds, and the deeper the love, the more unconditional its nature, the more these worlds, the human and the divine, can be brought together. From this union of love, the qualities of the soul can become conscious.
But love drew me further, and I was not allowed to remain forever with my eyes and heart turned towards a woman. The very captivating quality of love, that it combines the human and divine, was also the crucifix that freed me. In the impossible moments, when the conflicts and the difficulties of human loving seemed just torture and betrayal, I cried to God, to the one Beloved who I knew could never desert me. I asked why I was made to love in this world of contradictions and imprefections, why I was caught in the web of loving a woman. In these nights of despair and soul-searching, when the opposites seemed irreconcilable, an alchemical inner process was turning lead into gold, transmuting my romantic nature into devotion. The inner feminine began to return to my own heart, to reveal the qualities of Sophia who opens us to the deepest meaning of life. She is the divine feminine who leads us into the presence of Truth.
One day I suddenly knew that I could never be in love again. I knew that this phase of my life was over; the clothing of the romantic had been put aside. I felt tremendous sadness at the time, as if a door to a human experience had been closed. Since adolescence I had felt the attraction of romantic love and the desire to worship a woman. The inner process of the path had freed me from this attachment, but I also regretted its passing. Once again I felt separate from the normal patterns of human life. I felt the inner aloneness of the mystic. But since then I have found a love that is far beyond anything that can be experienced between people, however much they are in love. I see the frailty of human love-affairs, and how much of an illusion is romantic love. With my Beloved there are no psychological problems, nor differences of character. There are not two people, but a merging and melting into oneness, and a presence that is always within the heart.
Recently I sat next to a young woman on a plane and we began to talk. I told her that I lectured on dreams and she shared a near-death experience she had had. I knew from the experience that she was an old soul who was destined to see beneath the veils of illusion. The young woman was just out of college, and was telling me about a man she loved, who did not seem to be in love with her. I asked her what she wanted from life and she replied, “To love and be loved.” In my heart I knew the truth of what she said, and how a man could never answer the depth of her need. However, as she talked about her boyfriend I saw that she had, as yet, no other concept of love. I said nothing, but felt the sadness of an old traveler who knows the length and suffering of the journey that awaits someone just starting out.
Shaper of beauty
There was another ingredient to my romantic loving which only now I begin to appreciate. I realize that what I saw in Anat was not just the numinosity of my projection, the beauty of the soul. There was another light dancing around her form, caught in the curl of her hair, in the curves of her body. Through the veils of form the beauty of the real Beloved was shining; a luminous epiphany permeated her being. Inwardly my eyes were open to this light. Seeing but unknowing, I was caught, entranced.
Over the centuries we have separated the sensual and spiritual. But lovers have left hints of the secret hidden within the physical world, reflected in its beauty. Sufi poetry uses the symbolism of a woman’s beauty to describe aspects of the divine: her curl signifies “the Divine Selfhood, unto which no one can penetrate,”[13] her beauty spot the “Divine Essence itself.” More explicit is the poetry of Mirabai, who knew of the soul’s rapture with her Dark Lord, Krishna, and speaks of the body’s “hidden treasures”:
O friend, understand: the body
is like the ocean,
rich with hidden treasures.
Open your innermost chamber and light its lamp.
Within the body are gardens,
rare flowers, the inner Music;
within the body a lake of bliss,
on it the white soul-swans take their joy.
And in the body, a vast market —
go there, trade,
sell yourself for a profit you can’t spend.
Mira says, her Lord is beyond praising.
Allow her to dwell near your feet.[14]
The body of a woman beckons to a man with the secret hidden within creation, the beauty of the Beloved’s face. The feminine holds this secret, which for the Sufi is symbolized in the very word of creation, Kun (Be!).
In the beauty permeating my beloved I felt for the first time this quality of divine immanence rather than transcendence. Before, I had always loved Him as beyond form, sought Him in the emptiness. Now I felt Her, saw Her, could even touch this divine quality. In this way the Beloved drew me nearer, revealed more of His secret. In Himself He is unknowable, but through His qualities, His names and attributes, we can come to know Him. I found Him as Al-Musawwir, the shaper of beauty.
The danger in feeling the sensuous beauty of the divine is that we may try to possess It. With my invisible Beloved I am always the victim, waiting for Him to come. In my longing I cry to Him, but I never know when I will feel Him in my heart. Sometimes He has been absent for months. But the physical world is a tangible presence. She whom I adore can be held in my arms. Reaching out I can feel her softness, sense the nourishment of the divine. To experience the beauty of the Beloved in a woman can be a dangerous addiction, in which physical desire can be confused with longing. Longing for God, feeling the pain of the heart, I would also know that there was a woman, a physical presence, with whom I could taste a bliss that was not just sexual. Whose scent did I really smell when the perfume of the Beloved was mingled with that of a woman? Longing and pain, confusion and bliss, the different realities interpenetrated. But through the ebb and flow of our relationship I have never been allowed to feel any sense of possession. I also knew deep down that no external beloved would be enough, no human loving fulfill me. Inwardly I was always looking elsewhere, crying out in my heart to be taken by God to God. The passion of my soul was only partly contained in a woman, long enough to know Her presence, to no longer reject this world as empty of love.
Finding the Beloved here, in the beauty of a woman, opened my heart. When the heart is opened it knows the source of its longing and turns towards this One Light. The power of the heart’s deepest desire helped drag me through the maze of the psyche, and also pull back the projection of my own soul. The light of the Beloved was a catalyst in this process, drawing me into the physical embrace, but not then allowing the divine to be limited to a single person. Finally I found this light all around me, saw His beauty wherever I looked.
Abi’l Khayr says that “love is God’s trap.” I was trapped long ago, my soul caught in His embrace. But I needed to put aside the limitations of the renunciate and bring this love into the world. For the imprint of His presence to be made real I was caught in the beauty of a woman, in the wonder that is hidden within creation. Slowly this wonder crept into consciousness. I was no longer alienated from this world, but began to feel the magic that is life itself.
NOTE: This memoir is an excerpt from Vaughan-Lee’s book, The Face Before I was Born: A Spiritual Autobiography, published by the Golden Sufi Center and reprinted with permission. See also Vaughan-Lee’s Working with Oneness: The Role of the Feminine and the Reemergence of the World Soul.
[1] Rumi, Fragments, Ecstasies, p. 14.
[2] Yellow is the Colour by Donovan.
[3] The Practice of the Presence of God, trans. John Delaney, p. 87.
[4] Quoted by Laleh Bakhtiar, Sufi Expressions of the Mystic Quest, p. 21.
[5] Hâ fez, Sufi Symbolism, Vol. 1, Javad Nurbakhsh, p. 78.
[6] Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore, pp. 441-442, slightly edited.
[7] Told by Faridduddin ‘Attâ r, Muslim Saints and Mystics, trans. A.J. Arberry, pp. 93-94.
[8] The Psychology of Romantic Love, p. 3.
[9] Trans. Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi, pp. 132-133.
[10] Song of Songs, 6:10.
[11] C.G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff, A Collection of Remembrances, p. 53.
[12] The passage about the two dreams is adapted from the author’s The Call and the Echo, pp. 83-86.
[13] Nurbakhsh, Sufi Symbolism, Vol. 1, p. 75.
[14] Women in Praise of the Sacred, ed. Jane Hirshfield, p. 138.
The post Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee | Embracing the Beloved appeared first on The MOON magazine.