My name is Tajali Taylor. I live and work in Melbourne Australia I became a Healing Conductor in 1991 and a Shafayat in 1996. I work as a psychotherapist and spiritual counselor. I heard Himayat give some classes at the retreat in the Mojave Desert in 1996. It ignited my interest again in the Healing Order and contributions that I might be able to make and what I might be able to learn for my own work. I did a retreat with Himayat immediately after to learn more about his teachings on using the Heart for Healing. I found it transforming.

I have two grown sons, and my first grandchild is two years old. They and my family are the light of my life. I love my work and regard it as a sacred privilege to be able to share people's truths and experience. I love the beach and my German Shepherd, Taj. I feel she is an angel sent to help me on my path. The Sufi path, practices, prayers and teachings, and Sufi Friends have deeply nourished my soul since I did a retreat with Qalbi in Melbourne in 1989. They have been my mainstay through the Dark Night of the Soul that I have undergone in the last few years.

I would like to suggest some guidelines for exchanging experiences and perspectives about this topic. I have offered these suggestions from my heart based on my own experiences and how I see things. I do not expect you to agree. Please take what fits for you and discard what does not. If your experiences and perspectives are different to mine this means that there is something I am not seeing, just as if my offerings are different to yours there may be something you are not seeing. I would like to ask that you treat these offerings gently as you would treat my soul. I will endeavor to do the same with what you offer me in return.

"Joy and sorrow both are for each other. If it were not for joy, sorrow could not be; and if it were not for sorrow, joy could not be experienced." - Bowl of Saki, Hazrat Inayat Khan

It seems to me the issue of the Dark Night is the question: what are death and suffering doing in a Good World, ruled by a Good God. The dark night is a time of suffering. So the question is why do we suffer and why do we die.

Death seems relatively easy. In the spiritual Universe which "transpires behind that which appears", there is no death. Or rather there is no death without rebirth, no destruction without creation. As our physics tells us matter can be neither created nor destroyed. As Pir teaches that is not strictly true: matter can be created out of No-thing out of Muhyi, out of the Void. When he talks of the four healing Wazai'if: Quddus, Hayy, Muhyi and Mu'id: Quddus is the energy of the Holy Spirit, The thunderbolt, the Tower, that shatters old forms, Hayy is the healing energy of Nature, Mu'id is the energy that restores, and Muhyi is creation ex nihilo out of nothingness or as the Buddhists say No-Thingness, the Void in astrophysics where there are white holes from which new matter comes into the Universe as well as black holes which seem to be entry points into other Universes and into which matter disappears.

So death is relatively easy to deal with. But what of Suffering? The question is does it have meaning and purpose? The mystical teachings of St. John of the Cross and other spiritual paths and especially the passion and death of Jesus the Christ, are that the dark night is there to connect us with God. That we can only have Union with God when the things that separate us from God have been removed or dissolved. And what separates us from God?

Everything. Well just about. All our human beliefs, ideas, experiences, ways of looking at things, which are not just incomplete, but diametrically opposed to the Divine Perspective. It is not a matter of supplementing the human perspective with the Divine but of replacing it with the Divine. As humans nothing that we see of the world is true. Pir constantly talks of "that which transpires behind that which appears". As he teaches it is not that the world is illusory in the sense of it is not real, that it is just "maya" or illusion, but that it is not what it appears to be. So suffering is not what it appears to be to our human perspective.

Even our physics teaches us that. The world looks solid, but really it is composed of atoms and subatomic particles in empty space - mostly space. The particles form a miniscule proportion of the space. So matter is not what it seems. So the world is not what it seems.

Ya Nur. as Pir says quoting the Christian fathers and mothers, is the Uncreated Light. It is the Light that we cannot see: it is too bright, it is beyond our human capacity to see it - and therefore to see with it. So what we could say is that Nur is the Dark Light of the Dark Night. It is light so bright, that we cannot see it. So what to the human being seems the darkness of suffering, to the mystic, to the saint, and to those of us lucky enough to have a glimpse of our Divine Inheritance, the darkness is really the transition to a Union with the Beloved, the removal of veils, the destruction of illusions, about who we really are about what the world is like, about what matters.

So the Dark Night can be seen to be the opposite of what it seems to us as humans. We feel it as suffering and as humans it is profound suffering often almost beyond bearing, but our souls are experiencing the dissolving or destruction of those illusions, false beliefs that keep us from the Beloved: that our bodies matter, that sickness matters, that attachments to things or people matter in some ultimate sense rather than as part of our human experience. Our human attachments keep us trapped. We need to release them so that they may be reborn as Union with All and with the Divine: Our Divine Self, the Divine Self in others and in all things.

Yet the suffering has to be gone through. It is not as though we need to or can deny that the suffering exists as a reality. In going through suffering we acquire the qualities and the attributes that are doorways to other ways of understanding and to other ways of being: faith, trust and surrender.

This is a key point: we need to allow our bodies to burn, we need to undergo the purification, we need to keep the faith to hold on tightly as Murshid says to "The rope of hope" matter what is happening in our lives. That is the challenge. The practices and prayers are a rope of hope. But even they fall away sometimes. The challenge is to be able to keep believing anyway, that our suffering is meaningful, that it has a greater purpose.

God is us: the greatest secret as Pir says which we should only whisper quietly is that we are God. If that is true, then in all our suffering whether we are aware of it or not, God is with us. How can we not be with our Selves? So we are never alone, though the brightness of the Light of God may be such that we cannot see Him.Her. We cannot see because the Light of God, as we get closer to Him/Her, as we go through the Dark Night, is so bright that we are blinded by it.

So often when people have tell their stories in Hearts and Wings, or in Asha's class, or in witnessing someone's journey, people tell of immense suffering and loss: of physical health, of loved ones, of homes, jobs, possessions, a sense of identity, of mental health. They have told of immense agony and suffering and pain. As Rumi says: Burning, Burning, Burning. Pir says "It is good to burn" In talking about the different kinds of purification: he says that the most difficult is the purification by the emotions: which he describes as purification by fire. And he quotes Shabastari' who was burned at the stake as a martyr. He asked: Why would God want me to suffer so? and he answers : "As an incense." as a purification, so that only the essence, that which is essential remains.

What is our essence? Our Divine being that loves only God: that sees everything as only God. That Sees God in all things. But I am working on it.

A Sufi Aphorism: When the heart weeps for what is lost The Spirit laughs for what it has found.

Qalbi told a story at a retreat outside of Melbourne Australia about a person that came to visit with her aunt in Los Angeles. This is how I remember the story. He was apparently a sheik, an elder and a very devout man. He carried his beads as he walked along and true to the quietly recited to himself: Allah Hu Akbar. God is great. He was taken on a tour of Los Angeles and was looking in wonder at all the buildings, and marveling at everything he saw. This was just after a serious earthquake sometime in 1991 and they went past some huge buildings that had been reduced to rubble in the quake. He looked at the buildings in ruin and his comment was: Allah Hu Akbar.

This seems like a fitting story to start Dark Night of the Soul. I would like this to be an interactive class: if people are willing to share their dark night experiences and what they learned through it. I will start off with my own most recent dark night experience. Before my 49th birthday I thought of what I would like and I prayed for a number of things, amongst them to meet my masculine counterpart. At the time I thought of this as meeting my life partner. I also at the time thought I was very "spiritual" and had been pursuing very spiritual paths for about 14 years. I had been in the Sufi order for about 3 years. So when I asked to meet my masculine counterpart I thought of only my good qualities and I was consciously asking to meet someone like myself! Or rather someone who had the good parts of me!

Well as they say: be careful what you wish for- you might get it. I went to a workshop on sexuality and spirituality and met my masculine counterpart. At first I was awed at the harmony and similarities and the beauty of the joining of our bodies, hearts, and souls. But soon I or we were plunged into the Darkest Night of my life and it has lasted on and off for about 7 years though in the last few years as I realized what was happening it became easier and easier to travel the terrain. You know how it is, when you need to work things out, the veils seem to come down, the connection to the Divine seems to become remote. I think it is because we need to develop and pull out the Divinity from within, rather than seeking it without.

In addition during this time I suffered a lot of pain, and bleeding as my uterine fibroids (a benign tumor) got larger and larger. Eventually I agreed to release my womb from further suffering and after the operation suffered a form of chronic fatigue. Then my body underwent the various changes associated with the Change which I am still going through. I do not really know what symptoms come from the Change and what comes from the Chronic Fatigue which functions a little like a mystical depression, as my friend Qayuum says. It makes you inward, often limits your physical activities, makes you celebrate the good days, and pray through the difficult ones, and teaches you to monitor your energy and body very closely.

The nature of the Dark Night was this: I was given not only what I asked for but what my soul knew I needed. As the Rolling Stones say: "You don't always get what you want.. but it you try some time, you just might find, you get what you need. And what my soul needed was to find out was all the aspects of my being that were hidden, in shadow, rejected, cast out. As I remember it, Himayat said at a workshop on Healing during the Mojave Desert Retreat in 1996 that healing and evolution were one. To evolve was to heal, and to heal was to evolve. We cannot heal what we cannot see. We cannot evolve if we cannot see. The Dark Night to me allows us to see what we otherwise could not see, as it will bring the deepest often most rejected aspects of our being into consciousness: our fear, our rage, areas where we lack acceptance, of illness, of suffering, of God, our ego identification.

How has your Dark Night or Nights given you what your soul needed?

What have the Dark Nights given that you could not have got any other way?

What have your Dark Nights revealed about you that you had not seen before?

Tajali,

I do remember a time in my life that I would consider to be the Dark Night. It was a time when pain followed me everywhere. It was the apparent fact that there did not seem to be any precipitating situations which could trigger this. It was a deep emotional vacuum, that colored all of my relationships, but did not hinder my functioning in the world. Slowly, I began to accept the ache as an opportunity to go deeper, to live more fully, by experiencing a new level of wakefulness. In fact, I remember having missed the experience, whenever the blanket lifted, however briefly.

I began to see this as a gift, in fact. This was not my pain, but my share of the condition of Humanity in that time. This was then a blessing bestowed by the Divine Being, calling me to awaken. It was some time during this experience when I discovered the Sufi's.

Love, Ramana