Desert Flowers, our oldest online group, which meets three times a year for two weeks each time, will be opening in the next few days.
If you are interested in joining, please see the description and details below. The group is run through a closed listserv. There is no charge.
All the best,
Neil Douglas-Klotz
Dear Friends of Abwoon,
I am privileged to offer this special day with my friend Brother Joe, with whom I co-led many of the early Aramaic Jesus retreats in the 1980s. Together we shared teaching, sharing, Dances of Universal Peace and art-as-meditation in many forms. This online retreat day will include chant, body prayer, sharing, contemplation and bread-baking as our art-as-meditation—a reminder that daily life is our own unique art and gift of the cosmos.
Love and blessings to you all,
Neil
Create Through Us the Bread of Life
An Interfaith Advent Day of Retreat, Saturday, December 12, 2020
on Zoom, 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM, USA Central Standard Time
The title of this retreat is a translation of the familiar words, “Give us this day our daily bread.” sourced from the ancient texts of the Bible written in the Aramaic language Jesus spoke. This translation makes clear the mandate to be the spiritual nourishment for one another that goes beyond simply feeding the hungry. The remainder of the Aramaic text implies a radical trust that more will be provided when we are generous. “We ask only for what is needed to feed the next mouth.” Daily bread becomes the Bread of Life that welcomes all as we reach out in loving kindness to those who seek spiritual sustenance from us.
This Advent day of retreat offers an opportunity to claim a day of peace during a time of pre-holiday stress. We reclaim the ritual of baking a loaf of bread and relearn the simple pleasure of being host and guest of one another. This becomes the ancient ritual of tasting, savoring and enjoying the nourishment of bread and friendship while observing the safety measures the covid pandemic requires. We remember that we are hosts and beloved guests who feast on the gifts of the earth and the spiritual nourishment that comes through us to each other.
Using Zoom, Neil will offer teachings and spiritual practices on the Aramaic words of Jesus from his home in Scotland. Br. Joseph will guide the process of baking delicious honey whole wheat bread as a spiritual practice from his kitchen at Shem Center in Illinois.
Small group zoom meetings, breaks and an hour for lunch offline will be part of the day. Participants are asked to make a commitment to the entire retreat day from 10:00am to 4:00pm. It will only be available live, not on recording later. Registration details follow below. The bread recipe is a simple one anyone can use with guidance.
A lists of ingredients and utensils will be sent with a confirmation of registration.
Sorry, we cannot accept registrations after December 7, 2020.
REGISTRATION send via e-mail Emory Mead, registrar emory.mead@yahoo.com
Name: _____________________________________
your e-mail address: _____________________________________
donation amount: __________________________
Your donation in any amount will be received with gratitude and used to help further our interfaith/inter-spiritual missions.
After registering, go to the PayPal home page, and select “Send Money, Pay on Line,” then “Send a Request” at the top of the page. Using the Shem Center e-mail address–shemcenter1993@gmail.com —enter the amount of your donation. It will go directly into the Shem Center PayPal account.
If you prefer, you may send a check to:
Shem Center for Interfaith Spirituality
708 N. Harvey Ave.
Oak Park, IL 60302 USA
Aramaic Prayer retreat via Zoom
8 Sessions on Sundays:
September 20-November 8
With translation into Spanish
Dear Friends,
At the request of friends in Colombia, I will be offering an 8-week retreat on the Aramaic Prayer (the “Lord’s Prayer”) in English with Spanish translation, beginning Sunday, 20 September. Each session will last 1 ¼ to 1 ½ hours. They will be recorded, in case you cannot make the live session. The live session will begin at 11:00 in Colombia (GMT -5), same as in the Central Time Zone of the USA, and 17:00 in the UK.
Although this was originally envisioned only for Spanish speakers, it is now also being opened to English speakers. I will be speaking English followed by the Spanish translation. In each session, we will take up one line of the prayer. Sessions will include:
In the short video below, recorded in March, I talked about the Prayer in “virus times.” Our earth’s crisis has only become more urgent since then. A focus on the selfless meditation of the Aramaic Prayer can provide healing personally and allow us to send protection and blessing to our surrounding communities:
Because of translation, more time will be spent in chanting and meditation than in looking at word meanings. Both Prayers of the Cosmos and The Hidden Gospel are available in English and Spanish, so these are resources to begin with, which will help deepen the experience of the retreat series.
The retreat will be by donation. Because of the translation work involved, and in order to support those local communities, the organizers have suggested a minimum donation of $80, but no one will be excluded for lack of funds. Registration is required, and people are requested to sign up only if they intend to stay for the full 8-week journey.
Registration and Information:
For English speakers: Sylvia Murillo, fibati58@hotmail.com
WhatsApp: +57 315 340 2013
For Spanish speakers: Esperanza Gonzalez, yafatta@hotmail.com
WhatsApp: +57 311 254 8942
Once you have registered, you may make a donation via PayPal through the following link. You do not need a PayPal account.
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=DT6FGH3BHU7V8&source=url
Rather than use a separate listserv, I will post audio and video recordings at a web page only available to those who have registered. Questions after each session will be sent to the organizers, with my priority for answering given to those who are Spanish-speaking. I will endeavor to do my best to answer everyone, but this series is, as mentioned, primarily about devotion, prayer, healing and sending blessing rather than linguistics.
This will likely be the only Aramaic Jesus online retreat I will do this autumn.
I hope that you will be able to join us!
Love and blessings,
Neil
Dear Friends of Abwoon,
For the past two years, I have been working on a major revision of my book Sufi Vision and Initiation (1986), the autobiography of Samuel L. Lewis. It is now complete and the book, entitled Gardens of Vision and Initiation, includes the following new insights from the writing of this remarkable human being:
Until August 31st, you can purchase both the print book and Kindle ebook together for $18.95. The ebook is very helpful, since it allows one to enlarge the type (useful for older eyes!), search for any word or phrase in the book, check obscure references on the internet, and bookmark, copy and save text for later use. Please order from the the Amazon in your country for this offer. Links to a few Amazon pages below.
Yours in peace,
Neil
Ordering from the USA:
Ordering from the UK:
Ordering from the Eurozone:
Neil Douglas-Klotz
With a foreword by W. A. Mathieu
Sufi Murshid, Zen Master, Environmental and Peace Activist, Missionary to the Hippie Generation, Founder of the Dances of Universal Peace….
Drawn from his own voluminous writings, A Garden of Vision and Initiation allows us to hear Samuel Lewis’s story and teaching in his own words, the authentic voice of a spiritual original and pioneer.
“Here is the story of a mystic, a gardener, a Sufi, a Zen student, a true human being. Samuel Lewis’ spiritual practice was deepened through his meetings with Hazrat Inayat Khan, but his teaching, his wisdom, came from his own visionary nature. Garden of Visions and Initiation takes us on the inner and outer journey of this remarkable man, who left us with the gift of the Dances of Universal Peace, and the living grace of a soul who embraced both love and pain in service to God.”
–Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Ph.D., author, Love is a Fire, the Sufis Mystical Journey Home.
“The reader of Dr. Neil Douglas-Klotz’s sensitively selected and annotated writings of Murshid Samuel Lewis (1876-1971) is taken on the tumultuous spiritual journey of a truly universal being; a voyage propelled throughout his life by the quest for Truth, whether through the teachings of Sufism, Zen Buddhism or any other divinely revealed path. The reader grows with Sufi Sam as he explores with sincerity the inner and outer world, experiences hope and disappointment, and dances through this earthly life with his trademark flashes of spiritual humour and love for all. A collection of writings that will be of particular interest for those westerners who, like Lewis himself, find their path through the teachings of the east.”
–Muneera Haeri, author of The Chishtis, A Living Light, co-author with Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri of Sufi Encounters
“Murshid Sam came into my young adult life toward the end of his own, and although I thought I’d internalized his teachings through several years of personal interaction, I now have a far rounder view after reading so many of his writings as they evolved over a triumphant, fully-unfolded life. Whether you have known Lewis or are new to his work, it is illuminating to experience, in his compelling first person prose, how his determination to rise above the vicissitudes of his early years became fully realized in the form of an extraordinary capacity for healing the world.”
–W. A. Mathieu, author of The Listening Book and Bridge of Waves
“As much of a wonder-filled reading experience it is to dive into this ‘map’, this description of the territory, I’m sure that Murshid Sam would have encouraged the reader to go out and have some direct experiences, traveling the territory and leaving behind any concepts about it. Gardens of Vision offers us the opportunity to witness what a life of dynamic transformation lived through direct experiences and encounters looks like.”
–the Rev. Tasnim Hermila Fernandez, co-founder of the International Network for the Dances of Universal Peace.
These are two selections from the meditation and teaching that I shared in the online Desert Flowers group (https://abwoon.org/desert-flowers/) on March 22, 2020.
The first is a short commentary on the Aramaic Prayer of Jesus for today (13 min):
Aramaic prayer text used by Neil in the video here.
The second is a longer healing meditation using Aramaic words of Jesus for the four elements (20 min):
To join the Desert Flowers group, please go to the following page on our site:
We are still in the middle of Christian Lent with Passover following a few weeks from now and Ramadan shortly thereafter. These are all traditionally times of going inside more, doing without, changing our behaviour to help benefit others: surrender and resurrection, freeing ourselves from inner and outer Pharaohs (self-constructed fantasies), then receiving a message from Reality that empowers our actions. It is also a time in our culture when selfless leadership distinguishes itself from the “selfie” variety, in all of our institutions. Let’s be part of the former.
Stay well, stay safe and let your actions match the integrity of your prayer and practice.
Yours in peace,
Neil Douglas-Klotz
Donations for this work gratefully accepted via PayPal to: donations@eial.org
Dear Friends of Abwoon,
Millennia before humans invented myth and religion, we lived in a state of profound interconnection and inter-being with our environment and with the “great mystery” that we intuited was behind it.
“First Human” –original artwork by Fatima Lassar for “The Genesis Meditations”
Over the course of time, lifespans became longer and more focused externally. Gradually life’s choices became more complex (for instance, with the discovery of the seed and agriculture), so we invented story, prayer, ritual, religion and spiritual practice to remind ourselves and future generations of the important things in life–things we had previously remembered without these tools.
Because it is life’s nature to discover things, by trial and error, we began to focus on the tools rather than the inner remembrance. The tools became ends in themselves, distracting people from the sense of inner fulfilment, purpose and healthy relationship they were developed to help us recall. The remedies, as it were, often became toxic.
Faced with innumerable ecological and political crises, it may be time to do a “cold start” of our cultural computer, in order to repair some of the mental and emotional viruses that have infected us.
We cannot return to the state of being nomads, wandering through time in a precarious existence before agriculture. We can, however, begin to recall those shards of memory, flickers of healthy consciousness that predated our relentless drive to find the “hidden treasure” outside instead of within us.
For instance, even two thousand years ago, at the time of the Aramaic Jesus, we could not say to a friend, “I’ll meet you there at 3:15.” It was impossible to distinguish minutes or seconds. No one wore a sun dial or hourglass on their wrists. For Yeshua and his Galilean community, even the length of an “hour” changed each day according to the amount of daylight. So one was always aware of the sun, moon and seasons in a more profound way than we are.
We are now near the turning of the seasons (in either northern or southern hemisphere) and what most of us mark as a “year.” During these times of change, we can focus with more respect and love on the turning of our own breath. Can we turn away from unnecessary habits of fear and anxiety? Are we holding on to something we no longer need? Is life’s passion within us drawing us toward something unexpected in the next cycle?
Personally, I am completing another multi-year project of editing the letters, interviews, essays and unpublished poetry of my spiritual teacher Pir Moineddin Jablonski, who passed in 2001. Like my first long book, Sufi Vision and Initiation (1985), which created a type of autobiography for Murshid Samuel
Pir Moineddin Jablonski at Lama Foundation
Lewis, the founder of the Dances of Universal Peace, this new book has also presented many inner and outer challenges. Whenever one dives deeply into the life of someone like Murshid S.A.M. or Moineddin, one begins to resonate deeply with their challenges and opportunities in life. That vibration creates ripples, waves and storms that need to be navigated before one arrives at safe harbour.
Having designated Moineddin as his spiritual successor, Murshid S.A.M. passed unexpectedly in 1971. At the age of 29 Moineddin then needed to discover what a spiritual successor is, or is meant to do, and to somehow hold together a community of self-defined non-conformists, all at the same time that he continued to discover himself (and battle kidney failure). It makes for an deep, sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic, continually inspiring, personal story as well as an unique record of how one person helped an inter-spiritual Sufi lineage make the transition into the postmodern world.
Here is a short except from one of the letters Moineddin wrote to a mureed in 1991:
There is nothing but Love, and if we feel the brief crucifixions that improve our fana [effacement and surrender] let us keep Allah foremost in our heart-breath. It is all a process, at once enlightened and eternal, and also a gradual awakening according to our innocence, strength, purity and love. But until these latter become entirely of Allah, instead of “ours,” there will be more need for some little pain.
Also, the world’s condition is being poured through the kidneys of our hearts. Why should it be otherwise? We asked for this before the beginning of time.
Now let us be who we are.
With the help of a number of Moineddin’s mureeds and friends, we hope to have the new book, Illuminating the Shadow, ready to be announced in the early spring.
My own travel schedule is a bit different in 2016, in that I am only coming to the USA once, in the autumn (I will be coming at least twice in 2017, however, including an Easter Retreat in Northern California at Bishops Ranch.) My only public event in 2016 in North America will be in my “home” community of Columbus, OH, October 21-23, entitled Nomad’s Way: The Original Spirituality of the Human Being. Returning to St. Martin DePorres Center, I will explore the themes at the beginning of this letter, using walking meditation, breathing and body awareness, silent meditation, Dances of Universal Peace and other spiritual practice, drawn from my current and previous work.
With the exception of a return visit to the South Africa Sufi community, the rest of my schedule is in Europe next year. I am hoping to finish a number of other projects that have been cooking for some years, as well as to spend more time in the garden here in Scotland. A short list of events is below. You can see all of them in calendar form online at abwoon.org.
Many thanks to all of you who have purchased my mystery novel set in Yeshua’s times, entitled A Murder at Aramegddon. The second in the series is in process. For those who have yet to make their acquaintance with it (or who would like a copy for a friend), you can order it at 35% discount if you input this code (TRVSMAKJ) and purchase it at the following site: www.tinyurl.com/armageddonmurder. In addition, you will find a new Aramaic Jesus seminar download available at abwoon.org, entitled “Resurrection of Life.” Feel free to take a 50% discount off of this or any of the other Abwoon-only audio programs or recordings (not Sounds True!) at the abwoon.org site using this code at check-out: NEWYEAR16. Both codes are good until January 10.
From the whole Abwoon Network, we wish you all a healthy New Year, full of renewed purpose, free from unnecessary fear, ready for life’s always-unexpected adventures!
Love and blessings,
Neil Douglas-Klotz
PS. If you want to be updated whenever I post a new blog, please sign up in the box in the left hand column entitled “Join Our Mailing List.”
2016 Schedule as of 31.12.2015:
(All events in English unless otherwise noted.)
February 12-14: Flüeli-Ranft, Switzerland (Aramaic Jesus Sesshin, in German)
February 19-21: Crewe, England (Secret Path of the Heart, annual Spring Renewal Retreat w/Murshid Tansen)
March 4-5: The Hague, Holland (Aramaic Jesus and the Sufis)
March 9-16: Cape Town, South Africa (Sufi Interspiritual Conference) http://www.sfhfoundation.com/
30 April – 1 May: Hamburg, Germany (Aramaic Jesus, German language)
May 26-29: Allanton, Scotland (Sufi Way of Blessing with Pir Shabda Kahn)
June 17-19: Anam Cara, nr Inverness, Scotland (Green Sufism)
July 2-9: nr Hamburg, Germany (14th Ruhaniat European Summer School)
October 15: Bridge of Earn, Scotland (Beginner’s Guide to Beginner’s Mind: Interspiritual Meditation)
October 21-23: Columbus, OH (The Nomad’s Way: The Original Spirituality of the Human Being)
October 27-30: Columbus, OH (Path of Healing, Module 3, closed to newcomers)
November 17-20: near Berlin, Germany (Sufi Mureeds Retreat w/ Murshidas Sophia and Baraka, in German)
December 2-6: near Oxford, England (UK Sufi Mureeds Retreat)
All details online in “Workshops” above, and new events are constantly updated at abwoon.org
May 7-9 online. Sponsored by Rahmana Dziubany to honor the 100th anniversary of the Universal Worship service. Donations in support of the Haus Ananda Brandenberg service project. Details of teachers presenting, schedule and registration here.
Our periodic online group gathers for two weeks….details here:
Eight-week retreat with Neil beginning 11 April in English and Spanish. Focusing on the Gospels of John and Thomas, and the “I Am” sayings. Registration now open–online link below:
An online panel sponsored by the SFH Foundation with Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri, Prof. Sadiyya Shaikh, Dr. Adnan Aladnani and myself. Streamed earlier today:
Dear Friends of Abwoon,
Happy to be sharing retreat space again with good friend and colleague Br. Joe Kilikevice in Illinois, USA on 27 February, from 10 am – 1 pm Chicago time, so 4pm – 7pm here in the UK. This is sponsored for Lent by St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, IL, with which Br. Joe has a relationship. For details, see here
Stay safe…all the best, Neil
In English with German translation
Saturday 16.01.2021 and Saturday 23.01.2021
This Sunday September 13 is the last day to sign up for the online retreat in the Aramaic Prayer, which begins on Sunday 20 September, 5 pm UK time. We need a week in between for the organizers to send the details to everyone and make sure they have them. All sessions will be recorded and posted a day later to a secure web page.
I want to emphasize that the retreat is by dana, freewill donations only, absolutely no compulsion. The registrars only need your name and email address. I am not keeping track of who donates what or who donates anything. The web page will have al link to make a donation if one wishes to do so.
Registration for English speakers to:
Sylvia Murillo: fibati58@hotmail.com
For Spanish speakers to:
Esperanza Gonzalez: yafatta@hotmail.com
Stay Safe!
Yours in peace,
Neil