Quotes About Sufi

An eighteenth-century Gujarati text of the Satpanth Nizari Isma'ilis tells of a renowned Isma'ili and Sûfî master imparting Tantric spiritual instruction to a Nath Siddha Jogi master. It includes both Islamic and Tantric terms, and demonstrates the intersection of these two traditions. A portion of this document has been published with a study by Dominique Sila Khan as "Conversation between Guru Hasan Kabiruddin and Jogi Kanipha: Tantra Revisited by the Isma'ili Preachers.

The goal of the Sufi is not to destroy his or her body, but to awaken each cell to Blessed Awareness of the One Living Truth.

The Sufi must feed daily at the waters of the Original Wholeness. We are completely dependent upon Allah. There is no existence but the Ultimate Reality, nor does anything exist other than the Ultimate Reality, 'in that you are His Form, and He is your Spirit.

Who is awake within yourself while you are asleep? There is a witness who does not rest who is inseparable for your life. This witness watches everything that occurs in your waking state as though it were a dream. THAT witness is aware. The Way of the Sufi inspires you to see THAT.

Magic in the form of Qur'anic numerology (in relation to letters), amulets, scrolls carried on the body, and the repetition of certain Names of Allah a specific number of times, is still widely practiced by some Sheikhs and women Sufi healers throughout Eastern Europe, the Middle and Near East.

The Sufi, realizing this, takes the path of annihilation, and, by the guidance of a teacher on the path, finds at the end of this journey that the destination was he. As Iqbal says: I wandered in the pursuit of my own self; I was the traveler, and I am the destination.

Die Arbeit, welche ein/e Sufi als seine oder ihre heilige Pflicht ansieht, hat nichts mit einem bestimmten Glaubensbekenntnis zu tun und auch nichts mit einer bestimmten Religion. Es ist nur diese einfache Sache: im Rhythmus mit den Umständen des Lebens zu schwingen, und auf das Unendliche eingestimmt zu sein.

There are many things in the life of a Sufi, but the greatest is to have a tendency to friendship; this is expressed in the form of tolerance and forgiveness, in the form of service and trust. In whatever form he may express it, this is the central theme: the constant desire to prove one's love for humanity, to be the friend of all.

Rumi, the great Sufi poet, wrote: Today like every other day we wake up empty and frightened. Don't open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

the work of the (Muslim Sufi) dervish community was to open the heart, explore the mystery of union, to fiercely search for and try to say the truth, and to celebrate the glory and difficulty in being in human incarnation.

When Peter renounced the world he grew up in and the people he grew up with, I believe it was exactly as heroic as that of a person who, finding himself prone to violent seasickness, renounces yachting. Hell, Pete was hardly 'in the world' in the first place. That was just the problem. He knew more about 13th century Sufi Orders and the Ptolemaic Universe than the rivers and hills and sewers and mills in southwestern Washington.

A joyful task,' he says and she realizes that he welcomes the idea of years of searching, tile by tile, inscription by inscription, cornice by cornice and niche by niche, that the painstaking search of Sinan's greatest achievement, decades long, is the holy task; that the secret letter is cut in every stone and tile. By the time you find it, you have realized the supreme unimportance of finding it. A Sufi lesson.

There can be no spirituality, according to the Sufi masters, without psychology, psychological insight and sociological balance.

To be a Sufi is to detach from fixed ideas and from preconceptions; and not to try to avoid what is your lot.

The Sufi is 'One who does not care when something is taken from him, but who does not cease to seek for what he has not.

Like the bat, the Sufi is asleep to 'things of the day' - the familiar struggle for existence which the ordinary man finds all-important - and vigilant while others are asleep. In other words, he keeps awake the spiritual attention dormant in others. That 'mankind sleeps in a nightmare of unfulfillment' is a commonplace of Sufi literature

Abu-Yaqub al-Susi: the Sufi is 'One who does not care when something is taken from him, but who does not cease to seek for what he has not.

The main problem is that most commentators are accustomed to thinking of spiritual schools as 'systems', which are more or less alike, and which depend upon dogma and ritual: and especially upon repetition and the application of continual and standardised pressures upon their followers. The Sufi way, except in degenerate forms which are not to be classified as Sufic, is entirely different from this.

It is axiomatic that the attempt to become a Sufi through a desire for personal power as normally understood will not succeed.

Scholars of the East and West have heroically consecrated their whole working lives to making available, by means of their own disciplines, Sufi literary and philosophical material to the world at large. In many cases they have faithfully recorded the Sufis' own reiteration that the Way of the Sufis cannot be understood by means of the intellect or by ordinary book learning.

Christian scholars often say that Sufi theories are close to those of Christianity. Many Moslems maintain that they are essentially derived from Islam. The resemblance of many Sufi ideas to those of several religious and esoteric systems are sometimes taken as evidence of derivation. The Islamic interpretation is that religion is of one origin, differences being due to local or historical causes.

To say "yes" to the Sufi way is to say "no" to imagined escapes.

The Sufi teacher's mission is to be in the service of those who can learn.

The Sufi way is through knowledge and practice, not through intellect and talk. As Prince Dara Shikoh says, in a Persian poem: Do you wish to be included with the Lords of Sight? From speech (then) pass on to experience. By saying 'Unity', you do not become a monotheist; The mouth does not become sweet from the word 'Sugar