Gregory Blann

Introduction
 
     This book brings together the perspectives of two contemporary, universalist spiritual teachers and friends, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, and explores the deep commonalities between the mystical paths of Sufism and Hasidic Judaism, which are their respective traditions. Each of them were progressive thinkers and creative trailbrazers within their own traditions, fearlessly exploring the cutting edge of spirituality, redefining and renewing our concepts of the Divine, stressing direct experience and realization, and always striving to uplift the hearts and souls of those around them. These two beloved spiritual leaders met in 1975 and initiated one another, rekindling a cross-fertilization of traditions which echos the thirteenth century blending of Jewish-Sufism in the spirituality of Rabbi Abraham Maimuni, the son of Maimonides. This has, in the twenty-first century, given rise to a new Sufi-Hasidic tarikat known as the Inayati-Maimuni Order.
     I am deeply grateful for having had the opportunity to study with these two teachers and hope in the present volume to bring through some of the richness of their unique contributions to the field of contemporary spirituality. Their teachings reveal the profound mystical depths and universal foundations that connect these two vast expressions of the Abrahamic tradition at a time when many of their respective followers in mainstream Judaism and Islam have become entrenched in open conflict. These two traditions are like vast bodies of water formed out of one great ocean—and certainly Christianity, which is my own birth tradition, is the third great expanse of this one ocean and its perspective will also be considered in this book. Sufism and Hasidism represent the inner teachings of Islam and Judaism, and emphasize the religion of the heart, the love, compassion and joy that is their true raison d’etre.  
     From the modern convergence of these two great traditions—which are historically distinctive, but inseparably rooted in the realization of divine oneness—comes the metaphor that inspires the title of this book, When Oceans Merge. The phrase harks back to the title of a Persian treatise called Majma ul-Bahrain (variously translated as “The Merging of the Two Oceans,” “The Mingling of Two Seas,” and “Where the Two Oceans Meet,” ca.1654-55) by Muhammad Dara Shikoh, son of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, the grandson of Akbar and builder of the Taj Mahal. Dar Shikoh was a champion of coexisting heterodox mystical traditions, and in the title of his famous work, referred to the affinities between the traditions of Sufism and Vedanta which freely co-mingle in India. The title is equally applicable to the underlying wellsprings of Sufism and Hasidism, which have both come forth from the fountainhead of prophetic inspiration transmitted through Abraham, the one who, four millennia ago, in an age of polytheism, received the revelation of the Divine Oneness, the indivisible singularity of the Source.
      In sixth century Arabia, in the time of the Prophet Muhammad, the righteous ones who upheld the Divine Oneness in the universal tradition of Abraham were called the hanifiyyah. These hanifs were distinguished from Jews, who followed the Jewish law which was revealed to Moses hundreds of years after the time of Abraham, and from Christians, who saw Jesus as the fulfillment of the law and the second person of the Trinity.  The earliest Christian community in Jerusalem, headed by James the Just, the brother of Jesus, recommended, as a minimum commitment for Gentile converts to Christianity, the observance of the seven laws of Noah, which comprised less restrictive guidelines (for instance, omitting the Jewish requirement of circumcision) revealed for all righteous humanity prior to the more specific Mosaic covenant with the Jewish people. With the subsequent rise of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the original primordial religion of Abraham—originally one great spiritual ocean—trifurcated into three great related sacred traditions. The Qur’anic revelations which came through the Prophet Muhammad confirmed some of the Jewish dietary laws, prophetic revelations, and the biblical and midrashic stories of Judaism, along with the exalted station of Jesus (Isa) and the Virgin Mary (Maryam), with the understanding that Islam represented, not a new separate faith or “ism,” but a continuation and renewal of the original Abrahamic tradition prior to its Jewish and Christian customizations. Reb Zalman once summed up the historical progression in conversation with a Sufi sheikh in Hevron (Hebron, Israel), who was amazed that a Jew could accept Muhammad as an authentic prophet and would want to join in the mystical practice of zikr with his Sufi dervishes:

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        There was Ismail, the son of Ibrahim Habibullah, Abraham the friend

        of G-d….  Ismail still had the Tawhid, the knowledge of the oneness of

        G-d, but his children fell into the dark ages, into the jahiliya, into the

        unknowing. And so, they had lost their way to the oneness of G-d.

        So, Ya Rahim, Ya Rahman, the Merciful, the Compassionate, sent out

        a messenger to the children of Ismail to bring them back to Tawhid,

        to the oneness. I believe that he was a true messenger.

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       Centuries after the Prophet’s time, in thirteenth century Egypt, Abraham Maimuni (Rabbi Abraham ben Moses Maimonides), along with his son, ‘Obadyah, and other Jewish pietists of his time, saw the mystical path of Sufism—although practiced primarily by Islamic descendents of Ishmael—as having preserved the original spirit and praxis of the Jewish faith more faithfully than could be found in the Europeanized Judaism of the time, and thus looked to Sufism as an aid to Jewish Renewal and restoration. As Pir Vilayat Khan recounts this history:

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      The long-standing interface between Islam and Judaism deserves our

      attention. During the flowering of Kabbalah in the eleventh and twelfth

      centuries, Kabbalists and Hassidim frequented the khanaqas of the Sufi

      mystics of Baghdad. Bahya ibn Paquda’s Duties of the Heart bears the

      unmistakable imprint of the Sufi exhortations of the time, although some

      he has reservations about the self-annihilation found amongst Sufi

      ascetics. While the Crusaders were besieging Jerusalem, a large

      number of Jews fled to Cairo, fostering a Jewish-Sufi movement;

      they were, no doubt, encouraged by the progressive philosophy of

      Moses Maimonides, and even more so by the influence of his son,

      Abraham Maimonides, whose attachment to Sufis is known. The Jewish

      Sufis found in Sufism a restoration of practices that had been prevalent

      in Israel in former times. Abraham Maimonides was quoted as having

      said, in reference to the Sufis: The latter imitate the prophets (of Israel)

      and walk in their footsteps. But it was in the Al-Maqalat al-Hawdiya

      (The Treatise of the Pool), authored by ‘Obadyah b. Abraham  b. Moses

      Maimonides, the grandson of the renowned philosopher, that deep

      familiarity with precepts reserved for the Sufi initiates evidences an

      initiatic affiliation with a Sufi order.

 

    Abraham Maimonides was one of the most respected Jewish authorities of his time, during one of the most creative and formative eras of Jewish mysticism.  Author Tom Block ventures that

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       It would not be too far of a stretch to say that the Sufi leanings of

       Abraham influenced virtually all mystical writings in Judeo-Arabic

       over the next two hundred years, the formative years of the

       Kabbalistic system! In fact, his works were still being studied by

       Kabbalists in 16th-century Safed, where the Lurianic Kabbalah was

       setting the scene for the entrance of Hasidism onto the Jewish mystical

       stage…. Jewish practitioners today of the Kabbalistic sciences and

       Hasidism certainly have no idea just how much of the Sufi Way is

       wrapped into their traditions.

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     The mystical dimensions of Judaism which paralleled Sufism developed esoteric traditions based in part on the ancient oral transmission of the Torah, which was so important to the formulation of the Kabbalistic tradition, building on the visionary insights of Jewish mystics such as Moses de Leon, Isaac the Blind and Isaac Luria. Then, in the time of Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the Ba’al Shem Tov (ca.1700-1760), a great wave of Jewish renewal appeared in the form of the Hasidic tradition in Eastern Europe, paralleling the mystic way of the Islamic Sufi orders, yet developing along distinctively Jewish lines. In Mughal India and Ottoman lands, Sufism continued to expand its own traditions. Practitioners of both Sufism and Hasidism extolled love, engaged in regular prayers, sought the divine intimacy, studied and chanted the divine names, sang mystic hymns, spoke of the four worlds, emphasized allegorical, rather than literal, understandings of scripture, and both, to some degree,  incorporated aspects of emanationism (in common with the Neoplatonism), seeing all life as emanating from the One and Only Being and creation as an ever-ongoing emergence of the Source.
     This reciprocal cross-fertilization, renewal and development over the centuries has enriched the mystical traditions of both Sufism and Hasidism, as they have been handed down to the present generations. Likewise in the Christian world, the Hesychasts and later monastic orders developed the inner teachings of Jesus and produced great teachers who shared commonalities with Sufism, such as St. Francis of Assisi, Meister Eckhart and Thomas Merton.  These three parallel mystical paths are currently undergoing fresh interpretations by forward-thinking teachers within these traditions whose love of the world’s sacred legacies often extends to other paths beyond the traditional boundaries of their faith, as today’s spiritual practitioners discover new dimensions of the sacred in a modern interspiritual Axial Age.
     The two teachers who are the focus of this book epitomize the new approach to spirituality. Both addressed the issues of exclusivism, fundamentalism, pluralism, and the modern contributions of science and psychology, reaching beyond the surface of the traditions to see the one essential religion, the one Divine Reality behind all the doctrines, creeds and opposing claims on truth. Both of these spiritual leaders were futurists, steeped in the traditions of the past, yet dedicated to a vision of what spirituality could become in the coming centuries. They enjoyed deep friendships with spiritual teachers and progressive thinkers from other faith traditions, both Eastern and Western; they studied and incorporated insights and practices from these traditions into their own teaching, bringing further enrichment, universality and fresh perspectives to their own path. Both authored multiple books, innovated within the traditions they represented, sought to update stale, literalistic understandings of the Divine, and were to some extent musicians, for whom music was an important ingredient in their method of sacred transmission and celebratory worship.
      In writing about these two teachers, I have chosen to detail various facets of their life journeys, their struggles and distinctive spiritual contributions, occasionally including in the narrative my own interactions, experiences and dialogues with them, in an attempt to impart an experiential understanding of the progressive and changing spirituality in our times, as it flows forth from the mystical wellsprings of the Abrahamic tradition.
     As for my own background as an author, I was raised in a Protestant Evangelical Christian family, with a paternal grandfather who was a Wesleyan minister in upstate New York, and a maternal grandmother who started the first rescue mission in Nashville, Tennessee, in the 1940’s. Raised in France and in the United States, I received a liberal arts education at Vanderbilt University and Peabody College in the early 1970’s. I received initiation from Pir Vilayat in 1980 and met Reb Zalman the following year. Throughout the 1980’s, I undertook an extensive study of the world’s religions, attending various retreats and spending as much time as possible with Pir Vilayat, Reb Zalman and a host of other spiritual teachers. During this same period, I began to lead a Sufi group in the Nashville area. In the 1990’s, I received initiation from Sheikh Nur (Lex Hixon) in the Halveti-Jerrahi Order, an Ottoman Sufi tarikat based in Istanbul, and was invested as a sheikh in that order in 1994.
      In the following years, I began to bring together the rich spiritual resources to which I had been granted access, and write about the spiritual path, not as an academic scholar, but as a spiritual practitioner inside these living traditions, who is drawn to document the evolving teachings and new perspectives that are currently renewing and infusing these time-honored sacred traditions with new life. Sufism, as I understand it, is the religion of the heart; as such, its approach is open and life-affirming, placing a high value on peace, love and harmony between people, while rejecting any political or ideological interpretation of religion that encourages violence against other faiths in the spirit of intolerance.
     Today, with the resources provided by the internet and mass communication, we have more and more access to the wisdom offered by these great traditions (as well as new unaffiliated spiritual systems); yet the institutions associated with these traditions have too often tethered the spirit to outdated precepts and culturally limiting parochialism instead of freeing the spirit and allowing it to rise in love. My first two books (The Garden of Mystic Love and Lifting the Boundaries) conveyed the history and teachings of the Sufi path, presenting the essential transmission as I had received it and interpreting it in ways that might speak to a contemporary Western audience while accentuating the authentic underlying universality of the tradition. In this book, I endeavor to take the process further by going to the heart of interspirituality and chronicling two highly innovative teachers who represent a progressive window on the universal, timeless, yet evolving aspects of contemporary spirituality with its roots in the authentic mystical traditions of the Abrahamic faiths. This resonates with my own spiritual orientation which is aptly summarized by the words of the Sufi, ‘Abdul Allah:

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        Qur'an, the Bible, or a martyr's cry, all these my heart can tolerate,

        since my religion is love alone.

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     Pir Vilayat Khan was a Sufi murshid who possessed a great gift for lifting people beyond their limited assessments of things into the higher realms of meaning and glorification. Born in London and raised in France, Pir Vilayat was endowed with a predilection toward the meditative attunement of the sannyasin (a spiritual renunciate, retired from the life of a householder) and an intense desire for spiritual liberation, both for himself and for others around him. Pir Vilayat’s genetic heritage made him a natural cultural bridge between East and West, with an American mother and Indian father and sympathies for both worlds. A pioneer in the field of interspirituality, in the1960’s he launched an annual interfaith congress near Paris, a convocation of representatives of all the world’s major religions which continued for two decades, and he was the inspiration behind the founding of Omega Institute in upstate New York.
     Pir Vilayat’s father, Hazrat Inayat Khan, brought Sufism to the West in 1910 and bequeathed to the modern world a treasury of profound contemporary spiritual teachings that emphasized the universality of the spirit and the awakening of humanity to its own divine inheritance. This legacy became the touchstone for Pir Vilayat’s teachings, as he traveled the world, leading retreats and seminars which drew upon the practices and inner teachings of the great mystics of all traditions, with an emphasis on Sufis such as Ibn al-‘Arabi and Mevlana Jalalludin Rumi.
     With his Oxford English accent and Indian robes, Pir Vilayat at times radiated an almost aristocratic atmosphere, which he balanced with a mirthful sense of humor. A master of meditation, he endeavored to uplift the consciousness of his listeners, reviving the memory of the soul’s glorifications in the heavens. This was facilitated through guided meditations, Sufi zikr, and the sacred music of inspired composers from J. S. Bach to Samuel Barber, all utilized in the service of attuning the individual to the transcendent, eternal dimensions of Reality behind the everyday, pedestrian world, with all its problems. In his talks, Pir Vilayat occasionally highlighted cutting-edge insights from contemporary physics, but when he spoke of the great Sufi masters and led zikr practices in a retreat setting, one felt strongly the intimate attunement of the dervish lover lost in rapturous contemplation of the Beloved.
      Both Pir Vilayat and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi lived long lives, just short of ninety years. Born of Jewish parents in pre-holocaust Poland, Reb Zalman escaped with his family to America where he continued his Hasidic training with the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, received ordination as a rabbi, earned degrees in psychology and religion and, after a decade as a congregational rabbi, went on to become a university professor and progenitor of the Jewish Renewal Movement. Both Reb Zalman and Pir Vilayat passed through the alchemical fire of suffering and struggle at an early age, Reb Zalman and his family narrowly escaping Hilter’s regime, and Pir Vilayat losing his father at age 10, then his beloved sister, Noor, at the hands of the Nazis during his twenties, followed by the sudden death of his fiancé a few years later. In Reb Zalman’s case, he not only lost close relatives, but saw the annihilation of many of the great Jewish rebbes of Europe in the smokestacks of the second World War. The resultant Jewish anger at God over the Holocaust and the subsequent migration of so many contemporary Jews to Eastern religions and secularism fueled the spiritual fallout and impoverishment within modern Judaism which Reb Zalman longed to redress and heal throughout his adult life.
      Reb Zalman has been called the father of the Jewish Renewal Movement, and was also known by the affectionate moniker, “the be-bop Rebbe.” Possessing a penetrating mind and a big heart, Zalman’s spiritual ecumenicism and modernizing tendencies, in the service of revitalizing and updating Jewish spiritual practice, inevitably outgrew the insular restrictions of traditional Hasidism. He counted as friends practitioners from other spiritual paths such as: Thomas Merton, the Dalai Lama, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Father Thomas Keating, Pir Vilayat Khan, Jean Houston and many others. He even founded a Jewish-Sufi tarikat late in life, but he never wavered in his goal of revivifying his root tradition of Judaism and reacquainting his followers with the neglected mystical depths of Kabbalah.
     He endeavored to inspire fellow Jews to reach beyond the post-Holocaust wounding and rationalistic flattening of worship so prevalent in modern Judaism, striving to unveil the tradition’s true universal, generic core, and mystical dimensions, without abandoning the distinctive Jewish practices, insights, humor and love of knowledge which characterizes it. He opened up Kabbalistic teaching to non-Jews as well, reaching out to find common ground with other faiths. In later life, he championed spiritual eldering and women’s ordinations, pointing to the duty of authentic religion to advocate a pro-active “eco-kosher” approach to the environment in order to help heal Mother Earth. Like Teilhard de Chardin, he saw religion, the universe, and even our God concepts as always changing, growing and evolving toward an ever greater expression of divinity.
     Reb Zalman reflected on his own journey, saying,

It was not my achievement that I have a foot in the past and a foot in the future; it was my given. I was uniquely placed to comprehend and bridge many worlds both by historical events and personal disposition. My real achievement was that I held fast to both.

     His friend and long-time student, Rabbi Arthur Green, described Reb Zalman’s prolific intellectual pursuits as including “the language of psychedelics and new-age consciousness in the sixties, humanistic psychology in the seventies, Marshall McLuhan in the eighties, Ken Wilbur and Integral Studies in the 90’s, environmentalism and Gayan language in the new century, [and] more recently the latest studies in brain physiology and the relationship between brain, mind, and consciousness,” all of which he was anxious to translate and infuse back into the language of the religious traditions which he loved. As Reb Zalman once remarked in reference to the currently available harvest of spiritual possibilities and our opportunity to consciously participate in the emergence of planetary consciousness, “In the history of our earth there are only a few times like ours. What a blessing to be incarnated now!”

     May you, dear reader, whatever your tradition, experience in this account of two modern spiritual innovators and their teachings, new and helpful seed-thoughts to ponder and assimilate on your journey to union with Truth.

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