Why did you come to me?

“In the heart of the world there are sources of power needed for the evolution of humanity and the whole of the planet. Without this energy we will remain stuck at the dawn of the coming era, unable to step into the sunlight of the future. At present, the doors to these places of power are closed, inaccessible. And we remain distracted and dominated by the dynamics of physical and economic force. Real power does not belong to humanity. It is a gift from the inner worlds and carries a stamp of the divine. It is given for the sake of the whole, not for our own personal gain. The next step in our evolution includes accessing this power, and using it to assist in the tremendous changes taking place in our world.

In order to access these places of power, we first need to understand why they are hidden. There are many reasons that power is hidden from humanity. Often it is to protect it from being used for the wrong reasons or by the wrong people. We know of the danger of the dynamics of power and domination, how easily power corrupts and is corrupted. Spiritual power, power which belongs to the nonphysical realm, is as corruptive as worldly power, and often more dangerous because it is invisible and not so easy to recognize or defend against. Traditionally, only initiates have access to frequencies of spiritual power; the greater the power the more demanding the initiation. Supposedly these initiations rejected those who were not pure enough, only giving access to those who could not be corrupted. However, such safeguards are rarely perfect, and human nature is too complex for any safeguard to be fully effective.

Because our present culture’s focus is on the physical world, we are familiar with the misuse of power that belongs to this dimension; we have little awareness of spiritual power or its misuse. We see economic and political corruption around us, as well as the underworld forces of drugs, prostitution, slavery, and other forms of human exploitation. Our history, present and past, tells stories of military power that has been used to dominate and enslave. There is also the dark history of religious power, including the Catholic Inquisition and other forms of religious intolerance. But all these forms of power still belong to the physical, material dimension. Even psychological manipulation mainly has its end in physical or material gain.

Spiritual power belongs to a different dimension, and is invisible to someone who sees only the physical world. But this power is real and has a vast range of possibilities. Traditionally it can be used locally, to heal an individual, or in communities, for example to help the rains come. Or it can have a global dimension, involving the well-being and evolution of the whole. We can see the remains of past cultures that used spiritual power in the pyramids of Egypt or the stone circles of England. We may have lost the knowledge of how spiritual energies were channeled through these monuments, but we can sense their mystery and potency. If the new era that is now being born around us is to come into fruition it needs spiritual power, on not just an individual but also a global scale.

Many spiritual traditions and practices have given individuals a taste of spiritual energies that can free them from the prison of a solely physical, material life and open them to other dimensions. But if the future is to be for the whole of humanity and not just a spiritual elite, then we need to find the sources of power that can transform the whole—give the whole of humanity access to a different dimension, a different way of life. Without these sources of power the transition that is beginning will stagnate. It will not move beyond the individual. These sources of power are present, but hidden. They have been protected from misuse and the dangers of corruption. And there are even forces that resist their discovery. But the time has come for them to be uncovered and used.

We need to reclaim spiritual power and learn how to use it. But how can we access it when we have forgotten its existence? How can we reclaim this power when it has been so carefully veiled? If we accept the existence of spiritual power, then we will need to accept that there are those among us who know how to use it. In the last era in the West, matter was separated from spirit and the deity was imaged as a paternalistic figure in heaven, a spiritual realm accessible after death. The magi, the initiates who were masters of the inner worlds, witnessed the birth of Christ. But the Christian priesthood preferred temporal to spiritual power, and those who had direct access to the spiritual dimensions, like the Gnostics, were persecuted. The masters who knew how to use real spiritual power in this world wisely became hidden. As these spiritual masters veiled themselves, the knowledge of places of power and their use also became veiled; knowledge of their existence remained only in spiritual folklore.

Humanity busied itself with its material pursuits, and the spiritual was understood as belonging to a different reality from everyday life. Power became associated with might and domination, rather than understood as a source of energy that belongs to all of life, to be used for its benefit. Even when the industrial revolution brought us new forms of energy, such as electricity, their cost was the exploitation of nature and clouds of pollution. The notion of a power that is free and pure no longer belongs to our world. When we banished the spiritual dimension to heaven, we also exiled ourselves from the purity and freedom of its power.

The masters of wisdom, those who know how to use spiritual power, have remained among us. They are hidden in their apparent ordinariness. They do not need the trappings of worldly power, whose encumbrances could interfere with their work. Wealth or recognition holds no attraction for those who have passed beyond the confines of the ego and work for the well-being of humanity. If their knowledge and ability are to become known, it will mean a shift for them and their work. But they have been preparing for this transition. They have been slowly lifting the veils of protection that have kept them hidden. They are working more visibly in the world.”

~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Spiritual Power: How It Works

“One evening when I was nineteen years old, I was invited to a talk on the esoteric dimension of mathematics in South Kensington Library. Sitting in the row in front of me was an old lady with her white hair tied up in a bun.  After the talk I was introduced.  She gave me one look with these piercing blue eyes and I had the physical experience of becoming a piece of dust on the floor. I had no idea what it meant. I had no idea what was happening.  She invited me to her meditation group, and then another story began—I became part of a very ancient story.

Years later I discovered the Sufi saying that the disciple has to become less than the dust at the feet of the teacher.  The experience of becoming a speck of dust on the floor referred to a whole tradition of what happens to the disciple in the hands of the teacher. I knew nothing at the time; I didn’t study Sufism. Irina Tweedie, who was the white-haired woman with piercing blue eyes, didn’t even teach Sufism the way we understand teaching. But looking back it was like another whole story had begun—a completely different book. I wonder if it was really my story because, in a way, it was also her story that began twelve years earlier when, in her fifties, she arrived in a northern Indian town called Kanpur. Leaving the railway station she got into a horse-drawn carriage, a tonga,  and went to meet a guru.  She arrived, hot and dusty from the journey, and coming towards her from a white bungalow down to the gate was a tall Indian man with a long grey beard and blazing dark eyes. He greeted her and told her to come the next morning, when he asked her “Why did you come to me?”—the traditional question that the teacher asks a would-be disciple.

That exact phrase belongs to another whole story and a whole tradition and a whole destiny, which actually began many centuries before when one of the early Sufi masters, Yûsuf Hamâdanî, set out from Baghdad with twelve friends and travelled to Bukhara, where he was to meet ‘Abd’l-Khâliq Ghijduwânî, the founder of the Naqshbandi tradition.  Their meeting began the story and destiny of the Naqshbandi path, transmitted from teacher to disciple, which continued many centuries later with this meeting between Irina Tweedie and her Sufi sheikh, Radha Mohan Lal, through which this particular Sufi path came to the West.

The experience she had was that something in her instinctively came to attention before him, she knew she was in the presence of a Great Man.  Where this comes from, one doesn’t know because it’s such an old story.  This English schoolboy who had a few experiences of meditation, who met a few spiritual teachers, suddenly stepped into the pages of a very old book and suddenly that book became my story.  Again what has it to do with me? Even looking back now forty years, I wonder.  Suddenly I was in the hands of an ancient tradition and I had no knowing about it.”