Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, PhD: Working with the Power of the Earth
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee is a Sufi mystic, PhD, lecturer and prolific author. I have been reading through his books in a type of fever—they are some of the most powerful, and clarifying, treatises on spirituality—and what this whole experience is about—that I’ve ever read.
Vaughan-Lee began following the Naqshbandi Sufi path at the age of 19, guided by Irina Tweedie, who brought this particular Indian branch of Sufism to the West. He eventually became her successor, and moved to Point Reyes, California where he founded the Golden Sufi Center—continuing to expand the reach of his Sufi lineage, making its teachings ever more available to the Western seeker. While he is in retreat as a teacher, he recently launched a podcast, called Stories for a Living Future that is beautiful.
His many books provide a detailed exploration of the stages of spiritual and psychological transformation experienced on the Sufi path. More recently, his writing has focused on our spiritual responsibility to the earth, in the present time of transition; awakening our awareness of oneness with the world and all that is in it; and the presence of the amina mundi, or the world soul. Today, Vaughan-Lee joins the podcast to discuss one of his latest books, Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, which is a collection of essays from some of our most esteemed leaders across faiths and dimensions, including Joanna Macy, Thich Nhat Hanh, Wendell Berry, Richard Rohr, and Vandava Shiva. As he explains today, we have lost awareness of the sacredness of creation, a loss that has allowed us to abuse an Earth regarded as unfeeling, unknowing matter. This is the spiritual root of our ecological crisis.
He implores us to follow the thread that allows us to once again live in direct connection with creation, noting that real change can only happen when we regain our magical consciousness; grow closer to the lumen natura—nature’s light—and allow ourselves to fall in love with the Earth once more. Llewellyn does a remarkable job of placing our human story within the story of the Earth—in turn, he leaves us yearning to rediscover our place within the whole and thereby reaffirm our primal connection with our sacred home.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
A tree is not just timber, it is a spirit…17:20
Regaining our magical consciousness..28:06
The great unraveling of present civilization..35:00
Healthy society needs cultural eldering…44:30
MORE FROM LLEWELLYN VAUGHAN-LEE:
Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth
Seasons of the Sacred: Reconnecting to the Wisdom Within Nature and the Soul and other books by Vaughan-Lee (I love the six-part series on Spiritual Power & Oneness).
Stories for a Living Future Podcast
Check out The Golden Sufi Center and Working with Oneness
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Well, it is such an honor to talk to you. And it's funny because, as you know, when I was reading Bittersweet, Susan's book and she talked about she has her revelation where she feels like she found her teacher and then in that same session you announce your retirement. That sent me on a deep LVL as she calls you, Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee, right into it, I have a dedicated section in my library of your books now.
LLEWELLYN VAUGHAN-LEE:
Oh wow.
ELISE:
I treasure them. They're beautiful.
LLEWELLYN:
That's kind.
ELISE:
So we're going to talk today primarily about Sacred Ecology. In fact, Rumi was Sufi, right?
LLEWELLYN:
Yeah. He was Sufi.
ELISE:
Yeah. And that's most people's introduction. I guess they probably don't know that, but can you explain further initiated, the basic tenants?
LLEWELLYN:
Of Sufism?
ELISE:
Yeah.
LLEWELLYN:
Sufism is a mystical path to God, to reality, that takes place within the heart, through the energy of love. It's what is central to Sufism is the relationship of lover and beloved. For us, God is the beloved. It's a love affair, as Rumi says, step out the circle of time and into the circle of love. And it's this whole mystery of divine love that takes place within the heart. And you go deeper and deeper within the heart. The Sufi is actually mapped out the heart, the spiritual heart, just as we have a physical heart, we also have a spiritual heart. In Indian spirituality it's called the heart chakra. And there are these chambers of the heart. And you go deeper and deeper within the heart into the states of oneness with God into states of bliss and beyond, into the formalness and beyond that into truth. But really it's a love affair. That central essence of Sufism is a love affair with God. Sufi says there are as many ways to God as there are human beings, as many as the breaths of the children of men. And we each have our own way of going to God. And some people need to go via love, via this divine love affair that takes us from the illusion of separation. That we are separate from God, into the truth, that we are one with God. Like Rumi said, somewhere the minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you not knowing how blind I was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere, they're in each other all along.
And it's this realization that we are always with God. nd there is nothing other than God. There is one great Sufi, Ibn Arabi, talks about the oneness of being, the unity of being. And for me the I am by nature a traditional mystic. I met my teacher when I was 19. She'd just come back from India. She was an elderly Russian born woman, Irina Tweetie. She’d just come back from India where she'd been trained by a Sufi master. In fact, she was the first woman to be given this specific spiritual training in this system. And I looked in her eyes, she had these amazing piercing blue eyes. I was 19, I’d been practicing yoga and meditation, but I'd never met what you would call an enlightened human being. And she lived in this little room in north London beside the train tracks where we would meet, a small group of us young people. And I would remember looking in her eyes and I knew that she knew and I wanted that knowledge more than anything I've imagined before. I was brought up in a, what I call a gray middle class English childhood, sent off to boarding school at the age of seven, coal bars, Latin, Greek.
I don't think the word love was ever spoken in my childhood. I had no knowledge of feelings or emotions or anything. And suddenly I was in this little room with this white-haired old lady who'd just come back from being with this Sufi master in India. And I wanted what she had. So I sat there and in India, it's called satsang, sitting in the presence of the teacher. And I sat there for many, many years going deep within, in meditation. I love meditation. I always love meditation. It's just stamped into my being ever since I was 16 when I first started meditate.
And I found this truth within the heart and had many, many experiences of what I would call divine love, particularly from somebody who didn't know what love was growing up with an alcoholic mother and an absent father and boarding school and sports. And then I began to experience that this oneness of love happened not just inwardly within the heart, but also was experienced in the world around me. This unity of this oneness, this divine oneness that you see, that everything is a living expression of oneness. And I was sent here to California in the early nineties with my family and we made a small Sufi center out here in the hills. And we lived in the spiritual community in London for a long time. My wife looked after Mrs. Tweedie as she liked to be called. And then we were sent here. And for the first year or so, it was very quiet.
We'd had so many people in London around us and I would walk the hills here, the beautiful trails in the hills. And I had this experience that everything is one, that all the trees, all the leaves, all the animals, the paths, the ocean, the sky was all one being. And so I began to experience that this oneness within the heart also belonged to the outer world. And then in the early 2000s I had a series of visions in which I was shown that this oneness, which was at the time a very fringe idea, it hadn't entered popular culture, was really one of the cornerstones of the next step in our human evolution. That as a civilization, if we were going to, we needed to step out of this illusion of separation that we are separate from the earth, or even separate from each other. And that we are one part of one living beings extraordinary living, being we call the earth, which is so beautiful, so incredible in which we are abusing so much.
And that really drew me into the field of sacred ecology, to try to understand what we are doing to this earth, why we are destroying, polluting, desecrating, this incredibly beautiful being that I have the good fortune to see around me in its beauty. Every day I live, now I'm looking out over the bay and where the tide comes in and out and the egrets, I can hear squawking in the distance. And what are we doing to it? Why have we forgotten? That is so beautiful. It is sacred. And then I went deeper, Rumi, he says, “return to the root of the root of your own self.” That you have to find the root if you have a problem, If you have an issue, you have to find the root. This is part of the central mystical practice. You go deep within yourself, you uncover, Sufi talks about the veils that separate us from reality, that you uncover them. You go deeper and deeper and deep, deeper. And as I say, you go deeper within your own heart. You discover that you are one with God. You always will one with God. That can never be anything else because how can there be two? This is when “I am He whom I love, and He whom I love is me.” But in the outer world to try to understand what is happening to our world, I realize that we are in a way unique as a culture and that we have lost this awareness of the sacred nature of creation. It was the foundation of almost all previous cultures. And because we lost this awareness, this allowed us to abuse the earth. I think it was regarded in the early times of Newton as unfeeling matter. It's just an unfeeling. It has no soul. But if you go deeper, of course you find there is a soul. You find that it is a spiritual being just as we are spiritual beings. How can we be separate?
And then I research this a bit and there is of course the ancient tradition of the Anima Mundi, the soul of the world which belongs in the Renaissance and even earlier than that. And that's why when I wrote this, or edited this compilation of spiritual teachings, I asked all the spiritual teachers and visionaries I knew about what they thought was a spiritual route of this ecological crisis. And I edited this book, Spiritual Ecology and I called it Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth. Because if you listen deeply and listening is of course a very feminine quality, which everybody wants to talk, but nobody wants to listen. And if you listen deeply, you can hear the earth crying, the soul of the earth crying. And what does this mean that this mother, this one spirit is crying and we don't know how to listen, we don't know how to hear. And that is why I was drawn into all of this, trying to understand why we have become alienated. One of the earliest voices of spiritual ecology, Thomas Berry, he wrote about this and he says how we have broken the great conversation. We are not listening. We are only talking to ourselves. We are not listening to the rivers. We are not talking to the rivers. We have broken the great conversation. And so I try to follow, it's interesting you talk about your podcast being about threads, I always, in my life always tried to follow a thread just like woven between the worlds. And I followed this thread back in that we have to learn again to reconnect to the earth as a spiritual being. And if we're going to continue this journey together with the earth over the next centuries, we have to reconnect. We have to learn to listen what is happening to the earth at this time.
ELISE:
Yeah, beautiful. And throughout the book there are various, as you mentioned, spiritual teachers who talk about their perceptions. And some of it is this idea and at least the Judeo-Christian world that we've been banished from paradise. This is not paradise. This is some other world apart from God and how insidious some of that programming is in our minds, that we are supposed to be stewards yet we treat the earth as something to ravage and plunder. And then you talked about Newton and Descart and the birth of science and this idea that, I can't remember who said this, but it was such a stunning phrase. One of the contributors wrote about how we have decided to learn about nature, rather than learning from nature, this complete distinction. And in the definition of nature, humans are not included according to the dictionary.
LLEWELLYN:
It's very strange. I mean one of the most pressing points I feel is that we have all, we're aware that we're in an ecological crisis. We are destroying our own ecosystem. We're aware there's loss of biodiversity, these beautiful species going extinct and who is the prime partner for us is the earth. But you go to a ecological conference like they are having now in Egypt and who listens to the earth where is the voice of the earth herself, she's not heard, she's not asked, nobody asks the earth. And she is this ancient being. And so wise, she has been through mass extinctions before. Indigenous people knew how to ask and how to listen and how to talk to the earth. And that's why a lot of my writings recently are about trying to find a way to reconnect, to regain this way of being present with the earth, of listening to the earth, of just being with her. And so her voice can be heard. Because if we don't make that connection, I don't see how we can go forwards into a living future.
And it's interesting, you talk about this loss of Eden and I know that you studied Milton, but this is important because it's this dominant myth. We have to live by the sweat of our brows. Very different to indigenous people who live in an earth full of generosity, full of kindness. It's a very different worldview. And something very interesting happened to me. At the beginning of the pandemic, I stopped teaching. I'd been teaching Sufism for 30 years lecturing and teaching. And just before the pandemic I stopped. I was very burnt out, 30 years, I'd given everything I had to give. And I found myself drawn to nature just to heal myself. I was really battered and I walked on the beaches and the trails here where I live. It was an ancient memory began to resurface inside of me. Whether it lost paradise when the earth was alive, we were a part of it. And I'm quite convinced that the early human beings who lived as small groups to this gatherers, they lived in direct connection to this magical dimension of creation that we lost. Part of the rational consciousness has censored it from us. And I have a pressing need to reaffirm this primal connection we have with nature is something sacred and something magical because nature is magical. A tree is not just timber, it's a spirit. And many people go and sit under a tree and they feel this communion and actually a tree, I don't know if you know that a tree can take away your psychological problems, if you sit with sit under a tree, it can actually absorb emotional toxicity and help you. And many people have a tree or that they can sit under and they feel this presence. And there was a time before the fall and I think we need to reconnect with that.
I don't know if you know the poem Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas the Welsh of it. Well he talks about this magical moment that when everything was alive for the first time, it's a child's view, and there's just one I was thinking about sharing it. There's a sentence that he writes from Fern Hill: “And the son grew around that very day. So it must have been after the birth of the simple light in the first spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm of the winning green stable onto the fields of praise.” And that is that moment before the fall, which is alive is like that moment when a spring in springtime when a bud's open and color comes. And it doesn't have to be lost in some mythological past, but you can feel it is every moment coming alive for the first time.
ELISE:
Yeah. One thing that strikes me too, and with G.I. Gurjeff, was a Sufi as well? I know he is over my head, much of what he says and I have to look to people like Cynthia Bourgeault to translate him for me. But in his great cosmic ray, in his articulation of worlds, that I feel like is also so resonant and yet so missing, this idea that we are feeding energy down this ray of creation because at least I grew up with this idea, not that I had a spiritual or religious upbringing at all, but that it was a one-way transfer down to us. And what he articulates is a two way and the essential nature of co-creation with the divine, which is a much more beautiful feeling. But I feel like we feel so silly and powerless when, in fact, we obviously have way too much power.
LLEWELLYN:
Well that is because one of the great unspoken tragedies is how we have been censored from a certain spiritual awareness from a certain, Cynthia talks about the imaginal world, this intermediate world between the world of the senses and the world of the soul alongs very much the Sufi tradition. Sufi writes a lot about it. And we are part of this living spiritual breathing. Well go back to the breath. Look, the breath is the basis of many spiritual practices, whether it's yoga or Sufism or a mantra. It's the breath and it's become part of the mindfulness tradition, awareness of breath. And there is this cycle, it's the most basic cycle in the human being. Breath, without breath we wouldn't be here, there would be no life, but what is not so well understood is a spiritual dimension of the breath.
With every breath the soul comes into manifestation on the out breath. And then there is this moment between the out breath and the in breath. And then with the in breath it goes back, the soul goes back to its own plane. And there is this moment between the in breath and the out breath, which is actually a moment of bliss when you experience the reality of the soul. And it's that continual cycle from the world of mystery, from the world of the soul into this world where it meets this sacred quality of creation. “I was a hidden treasure and I long to be known, so I created the world” and it's this whole mystery of divine revelation, which is why nature is supposed to be the first book of Revelation, which is around us all the time. But our rational consciousness has censored that, it's like it's burnt the books, when the early Christians burnt all the pagan books, we've been denied that sacred heritage in which, well the outcome is say as above so below. There is this in-breathing and out-breathing of life. And it is, as you said, it is co-creation, everything. And one of the experiences of a mystic is you experience how everything is alive with divine presence and everything is this in-breathing and out-breathing of this divine spark. And it's within our hearts and it's also within creation. And this is what we have to reclaim. God is not in heaven. God is everywhere. Yes there is heaven. Heaven's very beautiful. You can go there in meditation. There are angels. I love angels. They are my dearest companions. I couldn't live without angels, without the angelic world. They are beings of light, incredibly beautiful. They heal us. They can help you. Every child has their own guardian angel. But this world in matter is also living sacred. Being is alive with light.
I studied Carl Jung a lot and he reclaimed that tradition of the alchemists. There are two lights. There is the lumen dei, which is the light of the divine. And you can go into meditation and you can go there. It's unbelievable. If you stay there too long, you get blinded, it's so bright, the light of God, the transcendent aspect of God. But there is also lumen naturae, the light within nature. And we have cut ourselves off from that. And part of what I'm trying to do in my writing is to find this hidden pathway back to this quality within nature that belongs to our heritage. I studied Shakespeare. I think you studied Shakespeare, too? I used to teach it to, I was an English high school teacher. That's another story.
And in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the most wonderful character is Puck, the merry wanderer of the night. And he belongs to this magical part of nature. And this was the last time when that was what 16th century beginning to be faded away from English consciousness. It was still present, everybody in the audience knew Puck. It was not some fantastical being, you didn't need psychedelics to get there. But he was this magical person that made people fall in love when they shouldn't have fall in love. And they knew that nature was alive in that way cause they lived much closer to the elemental world. And then soon after 17th century, the birth of science reason rational mind, I think therefore I am. Which is absurd cause I can tell you as a mystic you can be very present with no thoughts. In fact, it's one of the mystical meditation states, zen meditation, empty mind. And you are very much alive, more alive than when you have thoughts actually.
And then we cut ourselves off from it. And to me that is the great unspoken tragedy of the present time that we've cut ourselves off from the inner worlds. Cynthia Bourgealt talks a lot about the inner worlds and the awareness of the inner worlds. And I was a English school boy and I found myself in little room in North London sitting in the presence of a white-haired Russian woman in which the inner worlds were just present all around her. There were more beings in that room than I could name. And the miracles happened and I've lived in that environment for now 70 years. And I can't imagine what it's like just to live in a rational three dimensional world that's like a flat earth. How do you manage? You know what to do? How do you get help? How do you get healing? I have children and grandchildren, how many times I have prayed for them and that this mystery that is life can touch their outer lives and their inner lives, their body and their soul. And you know what that's like. This world is a mystery. I grew up in such a gray world of just money and boarding school. And then the world came alive for me. And I'm just trying to give a little bit back to say there is a hidden pathway.
It is like where I live, there are a lot of deer outside my house. They come and eat in the leaves, in the grass, in the garden and in the spring, in the early summer. It's so beautiful to see the young fawns and with their mothers and it's like it's being back in Eden somewhere. And there are these little trails because around us there is deeper forest and there are these little trails that lead from our lawn. It's not a tended lawn, it's just wild grass going into the forest. And I try to say there are these little hidden trails that can take us back to this magical consciousness. And if we don't regain that magical consciousness, we can have all the discussions about carbon emissions and biodiversity. But the earth is so much more than that. And we need our help if we are to help to heal this damaged world. We need her magic, we need her wisdom, we need her wonder.
ELISE:
Maybe less knowledge, more wisdom. And I was listening to your podcast and you were talking about the deer trails and this idea too that indigenous cultures had these original instructions and we can't obviously, and you were making this point, we can't go back to indigenous ways of living. But can we reconnect in some way to something essential? And in my experience, not that I am sort on a very low wrong on my quest to understand, but that as you become closer to that animating light, your interest in the more consumer materialistic parts of the world starts to fade. And that's clearly something that has to happen for all of us. And also I was reading, Including the Earth in Our Prayers, and you were talking about how so often spirituality has now become a process of personal evolution or personal and that that's not really the point to move past our ego to heal the whole. What are you hoping to see in this new era? What do you think is we're being called to do?
LLEWELLYN:
Wow. Well, just as there are many ways to God as there are human beings, I think each human being is unique. And for example, my daughter is very involved in humanitarian work. She actually met our husband in Ukraine at the end of the last war. And she was helping people with that. And I think different people are called to work in different ways. And to me this is very important. I have tremendous admiration for the young activist, Greta Thunberg, who has brought this awareness, this vital awareness to a bigger consciousness and to young people crying out for a future being stolen from them. I'd say for wildflower meadows, they may never see. And to me that's a very important work and it's a very important work to reduce carbon emissions, to restore wetlands, wild places, to stop this loss of biodiversity. And there are many people who have talents who are drawn into this work, this activist work.
Now there are also people who are looking a little bit further down the road and they say we're heading for a very difficult time in humanity. There's a new word, polycrisis. I don’t know whether you've come across this, of all the cascading crises that are happening. We had the pandemic, we have the financial crisis, we have the war in Ukraine, we have the climate crisis. And they're saying that we need to develop resilience to weather this coming time. That the option is not just to go into a bunker with food and guns, but what are the qualities we need. And I believe for example, that loving kindness is more important than stockpiling provisions.
And then there are people who are looking a little bit further and they are, how can we transition to a sustainable future? I don't know if in the United Kingdom there was a transition town movement that started in Devon in Topness and they're looking, for many years they've been looking to a post carbon environmental future. And there's also an eco village movement in Europe that is connecting people all around the world who have eco villages. And they're looking at what are the models for the future. Now what happened to me is that 20 years ago I had a series of visions about the next era of human civilization. They were incredibly beautiful, Elise, I can tell you they were so full of light. I saw that we're gonna have a civilization based upon oneness and awareness of the interconnected nature of all of life. And it was gonna be alive in ways we can't even understand now. And there was going to be new knowledge given to humanity. For example, I was shown very clearly waiting somewhere there is a completely free energy source from the sun we can use. All this talk about fossil fuels, it belongs to a past era. And I was shown, I had a number of years, I wrote a whole series of books about them, about this living future that would be quite different from now, a completely different era that would be alive in a way we can't imagine now. And for example, the wisdom of the shaman and the wisdom of the Western physician would come together and we'd have new understandings, new wisdom about how the physical body works and its energetic nature. All of that belongs to a new era. And so, since then, even as I've seen this cascading crisis that belongs to the end of an era, and here I agree with Greta Thunberg that it's over this present civilization is simply unsustainable.
And people who think let's dream of electric cars or wind farms, they don't see the bigger picture. They're caught in this image of the past that the only way forward is through this patriarchal, hierarchical, energy intensive way of life. And because I'm a visionary and a mystic, I was shown something completely different. And my work has been to try to outline the foundations for this new civilization. It's not gonna happen immediately. This, I don't know if you know the work of Joanna Macy, and for many years she spoke about the great turning about returning to a life sustaining civilization. And she was teaching how to go back to that. But then recently she has changed a bit and says we have to are going to go through this great unraveling first as this present civilization, which is so toxic, becomes unraveled. She talks about it being in the bardo, which in the Tibetan Buddhism is the time between death and rebirth and we're in this bardo and if you knew how toxic this civilization is and how toxic it is to the soul because our soul is not nourished.
You can have 10,000 things, 10 million things. The Chinese always used to talk about the 10,000 things. Now I say it's a 10 million things and you look around all the stuff in this world, but it doesn't nourish the soul. And so I've been drawn to think what are the steps? What are the foundations for a new civilization that nourishes our soul and the world's soul, that we come together in a new way and it's not gonna happen right away. When I was shown these visions 20 years ago, I was so excited and I thought, oh of course people will want that. But I've now realized that I'm never gonna see it in my lifetime. That the next a hundred years or so we're going to watch a civilization fall apart. But what matters to me is to be prepared for that. I don’t if Rumi, his teacher was Shamsi Tabrizi, this great mystic, incredibly powerful mystic, and he met Rumi one day in the square in Konya and Rumi was a theology professor and he was walking by with a great pile of books and Shams looked at him and said, If those books don't free you from yourself, what is the point of them? And then either he tossed all those books into a well or they burst into fire depending on what story you like. But this was the time of the Mongol invasions when the whole civilization in the Middle East was destroyed by Genghis Khan. And there's this lovely story that one of Shams disciples came to him and said, The Mongols are coming, the Mongols are coming terrified. And Shams said, I've been teaching you to be a duck, now swim. And it's like, what do we need to make this transition to a living future? And that's what my work is focused on. And for example, the other day I saw that the future when it comes needs to have certain foundations. At the moment, we have no foundations in our culture. As Yates wrote over a hundred years ago, that things fall apart. The center cannot hold near chaos that loose upon the world.
And for example, the first central foundation is we need to have respect for women and the feminine because without these certain feminine qualities, patience, listening, nothing can be born without respect for women and the feminine principles, you can't have a rebirth. It's very basic. A man cannot give birth. And we are still living in this wasteland of this patriarchal culture that has no respect for the divine feminine, for the feminine principle. And sadly, I mean what's happening in Afghanistan at the moment is tragic women are not even allowed to go to the park anymore as these, sorry, I get very impassionate by this, but it's like if we don't start now to create the foundations for a future, for our grandchildren's grandchildren, the Native Americans, they talk about seven generations. You have to look to a future, seven generations or more. If we don't work for this future for seven generations or more. If we think let's focus on electric cars, which what do electric cars do? Yes, they don't pollute the atmosphere but they create an ecological disaster in Congo where the cobalt comes from and there's exploitation of children working in the mines. Is that the basis for a new civilization? Is that the basis for a living future? And so I believe we need a respect for women. I was very fortunate, my teacher was a woman. She was incredibly powerful woman. She just was herself. She'd been trained by this Sufi master in India and she was just a beautiful, powerful old woman who told me so much. And my wife has taught me so much.
ELISE:
Well, and you know, started the conversation talking about this idea of matter and that it being, this idea of it being what a Newton call it, lifeless matter, but matter, the etymological root of matter is matter it's mother.
LLEWELLYN:
A mother of the earth.
ELISE:
And so all of it in some is about the desecration of the feminine and for men the disavowel of the feminine within themselves. It's not a gendered concept. That's what drives me crazy
LLEWELLYN:
I was sent to boarding school, all male boarding school from 7 to 17 and then suddenly I was introduced to the world of women and deep women with a connection to the sacred, to the feminine mysteries. They used to be taught in Eleusis, Greece for thousands of years, never written down because they were too sacred. And we lost them. We didn't just lose them, we desecrated them and we need them because again, it's very simple. Without the feminine, nothing can be born. That's why my wife got me to write this book, The Return of the Feminine. This is a primal principle in life and you can see it in Daoism that had a much healthier relationship to the natural world.
ELISE:
Well, and even the unraveling what you're writing about the darkness that the void that we must go through and we are going through small voids, but building resilience and understanding of that sense of darkness, that's the womb. That is how anything new emerges.
LLEWELLYN:
If we dare.
ELISE:
If we dare. But as we know, we were all there. Whether we were able to be conscious about it or not, we understand those contractions, we understand the unknown, but absent embracing it, we're lost.
LLEWELLYN:
And my sense is that there are many people, tragically who are going to be really negatively impacted by the breakdown of our present civilization. And you can see the beginnings of this in Africa or for example, the pastoralists in Somalia who've been really hit by the climate crisis and they've lost their herds. And then in the west you can see these fractures. In American culture for example, my sense is that they come from a deeper reason than people realize that deep in the collective psyche, for example in America, there is a knowing that the American dream is over this dream of material prosperity. I mean it's logically unsustainable. It needs what one and a half worlds or three worlds for us all to live like this. And there is this fear, there is this panic that we're never gonna have it so good again on a material level. And people are gonna be hit by that. People have invested not just their money, but their ideology, their belief systems in material wellbeing. The next hundred years are gonna be very hard. But what I am working towards is how can we create communities that can help in this transition that have been trained to be ducks, that can learn to swim in this destabilizing time, that have the resilience, that have, I think for example, to have a simple spiritual practice, even just awareness of breath that can ground you in something other than the mind, other than your material wellbeing. And I think communities will form and different, all sorts of different communities will grow around that and they will support people to help them through this time of transition.
ELISE:
Bill Plotkin’s essay, I don't know if you remember it intimately, but he talked a lot about, it was really beautiful about the loss of elders, true elders in this world, and supporting the work of true elders who do still exist and then joining in organizations that could perform cultural eldering as a function of a healthy society. And then he also talks about how it's not necessarily a true elder is not necessarily someone who is old but who has reached the developmental stage in which their ability to hear the world itself and their desire to care for the soul of the world has become their number one priority, which is the beautiful idea
LLEWELLYN:
For the soul of the world. Yes, it needs to be cared for, It needs our love and care and attention. And that's why I love the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk who passed recently when he said, Real change will only happen when we fall in love with the earth. Cause love goes where it is, needs to go to heal, to care for, to replenish love and care. One of my basic principles, love and care for each other and for the earth you can't go wrong and you can care for the earth in a window box in a city you can care for it in the garden, you can care for it as you help, as you show your children the sky and a sunset. And we are part of it. We are part such a mystery. At least if people only knew and it's waiting to be related to. Again, this is a feminine principle relating, I grew up in a family which nobody related to anybody. And then my wife actually, she taught me to relate. She taught me to listen. She taught me to respect space, how just to be present and it is waiting to be heard. The earth is so beautiful, such a magical being. And we have abused it. Gosh, we have abused it and we continue to abuse it for what? So we can have a faster car so we can get more things online.
ELISE:
One of the saddest things to me, I don't know if you feel this way too, is that in this exceedingly secular and scientific world, there is this idea that you cannot believe in multiple things in our ideology. And if you believe in the spiritual or the sacred or that there's more than what we can explain through math and science, that somehow you're dumb or intellectually inferior or there's something about the way that it's been structured that to have faith is silly. Also, I feel like, keeps people away.
LLEWELLYN:
Oh I always feel it's one of the great unspoken tragedies of the present time, that this rational consciousness has cut ourselves off. It's isolated us from the world around us. That we've paid enough, been through enough sorrow, there's been enough, or sadly it's going to get worse because the climate crisis is not gonna slow down. And my daughter wonders what world her child will grow up in.
ELISE:
Yeah, I mean this is an Albert Einstein quote that was in the book: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift. And the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a world that honors the servant but has forgotten the gift.”
LLEWELLYN:
Absolutely. I think you look, the science has done wonderful things, but it's only part of our consciousness. And we have to regain this earlier consciousness, this mythic consciousness. This Joseph Campbell talks about it, this what every other civilization knew about. And that's what is amazing. Everybody else knew that the earth was sacred. Everybody else knew that it was one living spirit. Everybody else knew that you had to respect it, you had to treat it with reverence, you had to treat it with care. And luckily there are some scientists, I don't know if you know the work of Suzanne Simard who talks about the wood-wide-web and she combines both the scientific understanding but also the wisdom of the indigenous people who knew about these micro-causal networks, these fungal networks long ago and knew to put salmon bones underneath the trees to nourish them. And she can bring the two together to help us understand this mystery of which we are apart and how to work with it, how to breathe with it, how to live with it.
ELISE:
Love Suzanne. She came on the podcast. Do you feel that the paces that we're going through now, this era was inevitable as a necessary stage for us?
LLEWELLYN:
That to me is the deepest question. And 20 years ago when I had all this series of visions and I saw, like Joanna Macy says, We can have this great turning. And I saw the internet as an aspect of that because it has a quality of oneness. Knowledge is everywhere, instantaneously accessible. And I thought we could make this great turning. And then I saw all the forces resistant to it, these forces of our consumerist culture, these corporations, these people in power, and they don't want that change. And there is this darkness behind them that's now erupted in the war in Ukraine, this very inhuman darkness. Because to me the darkness is something that strips away this human quality that is most important that we've fought so much to honor whether in civil rights or in many different ways. And then I saw somehow, I don’t know if it was a conscious choice or it was just too difficult. It is like this fantasy people have about continued economic growth, which is the basis of our now global industrial economic culture that we can continue to grow. And it's what politicians talk about economic growth. Now in the seventies there was a seminal book written called The Limits to Growth and it became a best seller but then it was immediately repressed by all the governments and the institutions because they were addicted to this, what Greta Thunberg calls, this fairytale of endless economic growth, which is just a story we've told ourselves, has no basis in reality. It's just another myth except it's a very self-destructive myth. And somehow we made a choice to stay with this consumerist story. I hate the way the word consumerist, consumer, human beings are not consumers. One, they are incredibly beautiful sacred beings.
One of my earliest experiences, Elise, mystical experiences, in my twenties, I had a lot of mystical experiences. I was standing by the park entrance to a park and I saw a group of young school children, they must have been five and six walking to the park. I don’t know if you have it in America, in England at that time they used to walk two by two that each child would hold the hand of another child. It was called crocodile. And they were five or six years old and they were walking to the park with their teacher and suddenly the veils were lifted. This is what can happen mystically. Suddenly you see things as they are like. So Paul says, “now we see through a glass darkly, then we shall see face to face.” Suddenly the veils were lifted. And I saw these young children as they really are and where their hearts were, there was this incredibly beautiful bright light. They were radiant being so full of light. It was just took my breath away, only saw it for a few seconds. You can't see that too much. The intensity was just so bright. And that's what human beings really are. We are not consumers. We're sacred beings come to earth to have a sacred experience. Yet there are forces in this world and I don't really understand them because as I say, I prefer the worlds of light. The world of angels that want to deny this for us. Like how quickly do children forget? What is it Wordsworth said, “not in entire forgetfulness and not nakedness but trailing clouds of glory. Do we come from God who is our home?” But then he says “the prison walls close around the growing boy,” and children, I've seen it in both my children and my grandchildren. They live in this magical world for the first years, maybe you've seen this in your own children, time doesn't exist. My four year old granddaughter was here over the summer and everything is for the first time. It's like everything is waking up and then suddenly she can be upset and cry and there are tears and then it's all over an hour later it's forgotten. And it's like then everything is back again for the first time. And it's this magical moment and it's deeply spiritual. And yet there are forces that make us forget that the American poet coming said and down, they forgot as up they grew. That line has always stayed with me and down they forgot as up they grew. And by the time they are eight or something, it's all gone. Unless you are a poet like Dylan Thomas or Wordsworth and you can remember that shining light of the first day. And why do we have to forget?
If you're on a spiritual path, then you have to spend years doing spiritual practice to regain it, to reconnect with it and and all I can say is that all I've ever tried to give my children is that if I held an awareness of it, then they didn't have to forget completely. And they could still hold a memory of that wonder. That is our real self And that is why I've worked with dying people as well, being a Sufi teacher, you work with both babies being born and souls dying. And there is this primal near death experience, I'm sure you've read about when you see this light at the end of the tunnel and people say that it's God, yes, it's not actually God. It's your own self own soul that is waiting for you to reconnect. I remember I had one of my students and she was dying and I was sitting with her in hospital and suddenly her eyes there was this in her eyes, suddenly her eyes shine with this incredible light. And I said, Ah, I've done my work and she can go now cause she'd reconnected with that light while still in this world. And that is, like the completion, what is it? T.S. Elliot said, “we arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” And somewhere it is so simple, Elise.
ELISE:
I know, don't you think it's this? Like it is the mixing of the light with the shadow. And now that's our job. The source of energy is to infuse shadow with light and mix them and that right now we also see sort of a disavowel of the shadow of the darkness, of that void. And we just wanna go to the it's light up, right?
LLEWELLYN:
Light and darkness. Light and darkness are part of the journey. My teacher said before she went to India, she said, I hope for instructions in yoga, I expected wonderful teachings. But what he did was force me to face the darkness within myself and it almost killed me. This is the descent into darkness that is central to the mystical path. And I think sadly tragically is going to be part of humanity's journey over the next decades. I don't think now, I think as you say, whether it was inevitable or it was a choice humanity made. I'm not sure that our children, our grandchildren, are gonna have to walk that path in a world that's falling apart in a world. Whether it's social collapse, as many are preparing for or just we've lost our way. This civilization has lost its way. It no longer nourishes the soul.
But of course you can't never tell that to a politician, just like you can't tell that to a business leader. You can't tell that to anybody who wants power cause it's not about power, it's about freedom, it's about beauty, it's about wonder. It's about love. You can't buy or sell love you. It's free. It's for everyone. I grew up to the say in a family where there was no love, wasn't even mentioned. And then suddenly I found myself sitting with this old lady in a little room in North London and there was just this love, unconditional love. It touched every cell in your body. I remember the first time she cooked a meal for me. I was in my twenties. She invited me to cook and she made Indian fritters with chutney. And I never realized before you can taste love. You could taste it. She cooked with love so you could taste it. And I wrote a little while ago, I wrote a book, Spiritual Ecology: Ten Pactices for Reawakening the Sacred in Everyday Life and cooking with love. That's why I don't like to eat out cause you never know what thought forms a person has put into it.
Cook with love, cook with attention. In fact, one of the founders of Zen Buddhism, he learned more from a cook than anybody else. Cook with a lot of cook with attention, cook with awareness of the earth. It's come from. And then you are part of the cycle of life. You are part of this living cycle of generosity. I'm not very good. I don't have green fingers, but my wife's a bit better. But this year we had some broccoli, we had some tomatoes, we had kale. Lots of kale. And just to feel it doesn't last long. Cause we don't have a big vegetable garden. They don't have green fingers. But just to feel that you grew the food with love, you watered it with love, you fed it with love, you put compost on it with love and attention. And then you cook it. And then you eat it and it's like your back. We've lost that. We've lost part of that cycle of life. We don't know where the food comes from.
ELISE:
No. Well this has been such an honor. Thank you. And congratulations on your first Zoom.
LLEWELLYN:
<laugh>. Thank you Elise for making it happen. Been lovely to talk to you.
ELISE:
I hope you come. I hope you don't retreat again. We need you. But you've done a lot <laugh>.
LLEWELLYN:
Well you just touched my heart somewhere. I feel this openness, this sympathy, and like a spark. That's all. So I could felt free to talk.
ELISE:
Oh good. That's all to say. That's my greatest hope. Well that was very moving for me and I'm really honored.
ELISE:
What an honor to have time with Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, that was his first Zoom and first outing post-COVID, so I am very touched and touched by that conversation and everything he said. It gave me many full-body-chill moments and I was moved to tears a few times. This book, I mean he has written so many beautiful books, you could pick just one and find enough nourishing wisdom for a year. They are just loaded with wisdom, but Spiritual Ecology, which we were talking about today is a compilation that he put together and it has Thich Nhat Hanh, Joanna Macy, Wendell Berry, Father Richard Rohr, so many beautiful essays written a decade ago, but is as prescient now as it was then, if not more so. He writes in the introduction: “When our western monotheistic culture suppress the many Gods and Goddesses of creation, cut down the sacred groves, and banished God to heaven, we began a cycle that has left the world destitute of the sacred, in a way unthinkable to any indigenous people. The natural world and the people who carry its wisdom know that the created world and all of its many inhabitants are sacred and belong together. Our separation from the natural world may have given us the fruits of technology and science, but it has left us bereft of any instinctual connection to the spiritual dimension of life. The connection between our soul and the soul of the world, the knowing that we are all part of one living, spiritual being.” It is my greatest hope, and I know it is his, that we find those original instructions and recover our connection to the earth. He quotes Wendell Berry, he says: “The care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope.” Okay, thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week.
