A perfect setting for deepened, renewed inner life, but it can as easily be life-threatening. It demands decisions, choices, and we have to make the right ones or our lives are in danger. One is stripped down to essentials. It is a place where one cannot hide from one's own truth. The place of the greatest closeness to God and spiritual sense is never a place to stay. It is a situation to go through…you journey on and out.
The desert has a strong relationship with spiritual quests. The desert itself invokes images of a vast expanse, where man may be alone to commune with the higher power and forces of nature. For the Sufi poet Rumi, poetry about the desert was an allegory for a spiritual quest of the Soul journeying into the infinite. The desert is a dry, dusty, desolate place. The tradition of desert connotes caves, silence, solitude and a withdrawal from people. It offers a place for inner reflection and contemplation to encounter our relationship with Almighty and self.
The desert experience is our spiritual purification for a new life of freedom and love in the land that God will show us. Here we seek to discover new spiritual energy from the depths of our own hearts, which are like a hidden oasis planted there by God. Meaning makes life worth living. To accept the desert experience, one must let go of over-control and let things unfold with inner truth revealing new meanings and the deepening of the mystery of life. The desert experience lays bare one's inner emptiness, detaches one and can simplify a person's life down to the bare essentials.
In emptiness, the truth of one's own inner poverty and wretchedness leads one to total dependence on Creation. The desert experience along with an intense hunger and thirst for the creator alone, is a normal development in spiritual life.
"In the Desert of the heart,
Let the healing start;
In the prison of his days,
Teach the free man to praise."
- W.H.Auden
The Desert is the Spiritual Retreat for a Sufi also known as KHALWAH. The literal meaning of khalwah is seclusion . It is the act of total self-abandonment in desire for the Divine Presence. In complete seclusion, the Sufi continuously repeats the name of God as a highest form of dhikr (remembrance of God meditation). and passes through the various stages in the Desert Experience.
Ibn Arabi suggested: "The Sufi should shut his door against the world for forty days and occupy himself with remembrance of Allah, that is to keep repeating, "Allah, Allah..." Then, "Almighty God will spread before him the degrees of the kingdom as a test. First, He will discover the secrets of the mineral world. If he occupies himself with dthikr, He (God) will unveil to the secrets of the vegetable world, then the secrets of the animal world, then the infusion of the world of life-force into lives, then the "surface sign" (the light of the Divine Names, according to Abdul-Karim al-Jeeli, the book's translator), then the degrees of speculative sciences, then the world of formation and adornment and beauty, then the degrees of the qutb .. Then he will be given the divine wisdom and the power of symbols and authority over the veil and the unveiling. The degree of the Divine Presence is made clear to him, the garden (of Eden) and Hell are revealed to him, then the original forms of the son of Adam, the Throne of Mercy. If it is appropriate, he will know his destination. Then he will reveal to him the Pen, the First Intellect (as it is called by Sufi philosophers), then the Mover of the Pen, the right hand of the Truth. (The "Truth" as defined by al-Jeeli is that by which everything is created, none other than God most High.)
The practice of khalwah is regularly followed by the Sufis. The Sufis base the assigning of forty days of khalwa period on the forty days Allah had appointed for Musa (Moses) as a fasting period before speaking to him, as mentioned in different chapters in the Qur'an. One of them is from surat al-Baqarah.
The Desert also serves as a trope, a symbolic space suggesting, on the one hand, unfamiliarity, risk, danger, absence, loss and, on the other, the unexpectedness of encounter, the surprise of revelation, the promise of renewal and transformation. Just as deserts are hazardous places of pilgrimage, meeting, and testing, they are likewise regions that occasion opportunities for repair, strengthening, fresh beginnings, hope. The role of desert and wilderness is pervasive in the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This oscillation between place and space that is desert opens up promising avenues for exploration...
P.S. For Assistance---please email us directly. Thank you!
The desert has a strong relationship with spiritual quests. The desert itself invokes images of a vast expanse, where man may be alone to commune with the higher power and forces of nature. For the Sufi poet Rumi, poetry about the desert was an allegory for a spiritual quest of the Soul journeying into the infinite. The desert is a dry, dusty, desolate place. The tradition of desert connotes caves, silence, solitude and a withdrawal from people. It offers a place for inner reflection and contemplation to encounter our relationship with Almighty and self.
The desert experience is our spiritual purification for a new life of freedom and love in the land that God will show us. Here we seek to discover new spiritual energy from the depths of our own hearts, which are like a hidden oasis planted there by God. Meaning makes life worth living. To accept the desert experience, one must let go of over-control and let things unfold with inner truth revealing new meanings and the deepening of the mystery of life. The desert experience lays bare one's inner emptiness, detaches one and can simplify a person's life down to the bare essentials.
In emptiness, the truth of one's own inner poverty and wretchedness leads one to total dependence on Creation. The desert experience along with an intense hunger and thirst for the creator alone, is a normal development in spiritual life.
"In the Desert of the heart,
Let the healing start;
In the prison of his days,
Teach the free man to praise."
- W.H.Auden
The Desert is the Spiritual Retreat for a Sufi also known as KHALWAH. The literal meaning of khalwah is seclusion . It is the act of total self-abandonment in desire for the Divine Presence. In complete seclusion, the Sufi continuously repeats the name of God as a highest form of dhikr (remembrance of God meditation). and passes through the various stages in the Desert Experience.
Ibn Arabi suggested: "The Sufi should shut his door against the world for forty days and occupy himself with remembrance of Allah, that is to keep repeating, "Allah, Allah..." Then, "Almighty God will spread before him the degrees of the kingdom as a test. First, He will discover the secrets of the mineral world. If he occupies himself with dthikr, He (God) will unveil to the secrets of the vegetable world, then the secrets of the animal world, then the infusion of the world of life-force into lives, then the "surface sign" (the light of the Divine Names, according to Abdul-Karim al-Jeeli, the book's translator), then the degrees of speculative sciences, then the world of formation and adornment and beauty, then the degrees of the qutb .. Then he will be given the divine wisdom and the power of symbols and authority over the veil and the unveiling. The degree of the Divine Presence is made clear to him, the garden (of Eden) and Hell are revealed to him, then the original forms of the son of Adam, the Throne of Mercy. If it is appropriate, he will know his destination. Then he will reveal to him the Pen, the First Intellect (as it is called by Sufi philosophers), then the Mover of the Pen, the right hand of the Truth. (The "Truth" as defined by al-Jeeli is that by which everything is created, none other than God most High.)
The practice of khalwah is regularly followed by the Sufis. The Sufis base the assigning of forty days of khalwa period on the forty days Allah had appointed for Musa (Moses) as a fasting period before speaking to him, as mentioned in different chapters in the Qur'an. One of them is from surat al-Baqarah.
The Desert also serves as a trope, a symbolic space suggesting, on the one hand, unfamiliarity, risk, danger, absence, loss and, on the other, the unexpectedness of encounter, the surprise of revelation, the promise of renewal and transformation. Just as deserts are hazardous places of pilgrimage, meeting, and testing, they are likewise regions that occasion opportunities for repair, strengthening, fresh beginnings, hope. The role of desert and wilderness is pervasive in the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This oscillation between place and space that is desert opens up promising avenues for exploration...
P.S. For Assistance---please email us directly. Thank you!