As you walk this crazy path…
“Divine Guidance leads a man to perplexity”
You begin to notice the spirals in your life. I have begun to note them here for three reasons.
- It adds to the flavour of the tales here
- It is a reminder to myself – I can’t recall everything (in fact I can’t recall many things)
- As the great psychologist and explorer Abraham Maslow demonstrated experimentally. The more you talk about them, the more they happen or the more you recognise them.
As a previous post intimated, I am on a journey (along with a Facebook group of 150 people) of exploring the Forty Rules of Love ostensibly a novel written by Elif Shafak (another person who seems to have got involved in my quests – Wand ingredient). One of the explorers, suggested I read a book called The Last Barrier by Reshad Feild.
It sounded interesting and so I bought it and what a surprise it turned out to be. Here is an Amazon description…
This classic work by Reshad Feild, one of today’s best-known Sufi teachers in the West, tells the compelling story of his journey into an ancient and powerful spiritual path. Starting as a London antique dealer, Feild comes into contact with the enigmatic Hamid, a Sufi teacher who leads him into a world of mystery, knowledge, and limitless love. On his journey, which takes him to the mystical sites of Turkey, Feild is forced to confront his own inner weaknesses and falsehoods. Hamid and the events of his search take him again and again into confrontation with the limits of his own being, enabling him to shed the false conditioning that lies between himself and his true nature. This hard-to-put-down adventure is a travelogue in more ways than one. It tells of Feild’s exhilarating explorations into mystical Turkey, a land of whirling dervishes and the tombs of great saints, but also a world that opens into the divine love that lies at the heart of all.
The previous owner had left a comment inside to say that they had got to page 24 before giving up. I can understand why. Although it is an easy read, there are places where one gets lost because of the aforementioned perplexity. As I read through the book, it’s only a 180 pages, I got a nagging sensation that I had read it before. Odd! It was about page 40 when I understood what that sensation was, Carlos Castaneda! The book reminded me of his apprenticeship to a shaman. In fact the more I read this book, the more it reflected Castaneda’s works.
The huge part of me wants to believe in the veracity of Feild’s journey, but the deep relation to Castaneda’s work makes me wonder. Of course, you could read sections of this blog and relate it to either of these authors journeys without any need for embellishment. Which reinforces my view that the sufi journey is indeed an accurate account.
It makes me feel good inside to see something from my bygone era (Castaneda) coming back into my life in a completely unexpected way through the last barrier. From a personal point of view then…
I really liked the book, it related to my own journey in many ways, not the least the Sufi part of it. I confess, at one point when it was talking about the need for patience on the journey I was left midway between laughter and tears. Then there is the esoteric areas that the book covers or glosses over and the mysteries that are hinted at.
In the book the author learns that progression isn’t about measurement, a point I absolutely agree with. Having said that, I note with some hope that I understood much of it and the bits that I didn’t understand weren’t understandable.
“We cannot see the lessons that other people are being taught” #Kalism
So another spiral turns and now I am off to purchase another one of Feild’s books and consider how much is the Sufi path aligned with the Shaman path.
