Мемуары дервиша. Memoirs of a Dervish: Sufis, mystics and the sixties

[wayter]

Автобиография человека, который учился в 60-ые годы в Оксфорде и захотел стать "мусульманским святым". В Алжире получил посвящение в суфийский орден.


Like many others at the time, he looked for meaning in exotic religions, but it was not Zen or Vedanta that attracted him. Weeks after arriving as an undergraduate in Oxford in 1964 he joined the Buddhist Society, only to find that most of its members were "much more interested in anarchism, drugs and Sufism than they were in Buddhism".

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...few of those who have written about the spiritual life have noted how boring it can be. During many of Irwin's long days of prayer in Mostaganem, nothing happened at all. Then, sometimes for days or weeks at a time, sometimes for minutes, ecstasy came. This was nothing like drunkenness (to which many Sufi poets have compared it): it was a hollowing out of the soul - "like being eaten out from the inside"

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