The Sufi Path

The Sufi Path

As human beings, we have inherent, deep potentials for a life filled with joy, wisdom, love, for living in felt connectedness to each other and the earth’s ecology, for acting with justice and integrity, and to shape our experience and world towards the good of all.

Our potentials are frequently blocked in their full expression by emotional wounds, social conditioning, and simple unawareness or disbelief of what is possible for a human being. Lasting happiness and inner peace elude us. As Thoreau said, “Most... lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” This has never been truer than now, when even life itself has become commoditized.

The Sufi path offer keys to unlocking these human potentials. It does so in a way that engages and works with the stuff of life: body, vocation, emotions, and relationships— in addition to the realms usually considered to be “spiritual.” Sufi spiritual practice is in life rather than a monastic withdrawal from life, using the experience of daily life to fuel the interior harmonization of our being. The Sufi path is one of direct personal experience and personal transformation, rather than one of subscription to beliefs or premises, and the results are felt as a sense of spacious inner freedom, deep fulfillment, and fluid aliveness.
Practical benefits of Sufi practice that are commonly experienced:
• reduced stress and anxiety, and elevated mood
• greater self-confidence and self-acceptance
• deep emotional healing and emotional stability
• enhanced physical healing
• deeper insight into life and human nature
• improved concentration and mental clarity
• enhanced problem-solving ability
• a naturally open heart, speaking and acting with integrity under all circumstances.
These are not the goals of our practice; they are natural results of unfolding ourselves as the divine beings which we truly are. As we release ourselves from what we are not, our felt-sense of self moves from one of contraction and limitation to one of spaciousness and freedom.

Our bodies are star-dust, gathered and animated by an all-pervading life force, informed and illuminated by a timeless, transcendent intelligence. Some deep part of us has always known this, and the desire to know it fully is the source of all our outward longings. This path is the promise of the fulfillment of that desire.
The Sufi Order International
The Sufis are an ancient spiritual freemasonry, of somewhat uncertain historical origins, which took its present form in the Mid-East and Central Asia beginning about a thousand years ago, in a confluence of recognizably “Sufic” elements reaching back to the Egyptian and Greek Mysteries, the Zoroastrian Magi, the Kebzeh tradition of the Caucasus, and Central Asian shamanism, as well as inner teachings of the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic streams indigenous to the Mideast.

The term “sufism” is an unfortunate linguistic convention. The Sufi “way” is not an “-ism” or a religion or a belief system; it is an empirical approach to self-work, designed to nurture the unfoldment of our latent human potential under Divine Guidance. This work leads to an awakened consciousness and an abiding happiness which is independent of outer circumstances. The Sufi approach is not based upon beliefs or premises but upon direct personal experience. While having much in common with other paths such as Yoga, Buddhism, Kabbalah, and the teachings of the Christian mystics, it is also a particular approach to spiritual practice in its own right, having its own style and methods which answer the need of humanity in today’s world in a unique way.

There are numerous Sufi “orders” throughout the world. These are really lineages founded and inspired by one or more historical Sufi masters in an initiatic succession down to the present day. Each order has its particular form of ritual and practice, but the inner teachings differ only in detail. As the basis of this path is held to be inherent in the essential structure of the human being and in consciousness itself, Sufism has had exemplars but no “founder,” and can be said to have existed since human beings attained their present form.