Tweedie - Daughter of Fire - A Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master - Unabrigded

A Diary of a Spiritual Training

Daughter of Fire

A Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master

IRINA TWEEDIE

THE COMPLETE UNABRIDGED EDITION

The Golden Sufi Center Publishing

Published in the United States by The Golden Sufi Center

P.O. Box 428, Inverness, California 94937-0428.

(Previously published by Blue Dolphin Publishing, Inc.) 1986 The Golden Sufi Center UK Charitable Trust All rights reserved. Portions of this book not exceeding a total of 5,000 words can be freely quoted or reprinted without written permission, provided credit is given in the following form:

Reprinted from Daughter of Fire:

A Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master by Irina Tweedie.

Published by The Golden Sufi Center, P.O. Box 428, Inverness, California 94937-0428.

ISBN : 0-9634574-5-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data for the Blue Dolphin Publishing, Inc. edition, as follows: Tweedie, Irina, 1907-Daughter of Fire

Previously published in abridged edition as: The Chasm of Fire 1979 l. Tweedie, Irina, 1907 - - Diaries. 2. Sufism - Diaries. I. Title. BP80.T92A33 1986 297 .42[B) 86-72368

Abridged edition: The Chasm of Fire

_____________

To the Lotus Feet of my Revered Teacher

The Path of Love
Is like a Bridge of Hair
Across a Chasm of Fire

-an early Christian mystic

_____________

Give me freedom to sing without an echo,
Give me freedom to fly without a shadow,
And to love without leaving traces.

We must shut our eyes and turn them inwards, we must look far down into that split between night and day in ourselves until our head reels with the depth of it, and then we must ask: How can I bridge this self? How cross from one side to the other? A gulf bridged makes a cross; a split defeated is a cross. A longing for wholeness presupposes a cross, at the foundations of our being, in the heart of our quivering, throbbing, tender, lovely, love-born flesh and blood, and we carry it with us wherever we journey on, on unto all the dimensions of space, time, unfulfilled love, and being-to-be.

That is sign enough . The beating and troubled heart can rest. In the midnight hour of the crashing darkness, on the other side of the night behind the cross of stars, noon is being born.

-Laurens van der Post - Venture to the Interior

Foreword

THIS BOOK IS AN ACCOUNT of spiritual training according to the ancient Yogic tradition.

Keep a diary, said my Teacher, one day it will become a book.

But you must write it in such a way that it should help others.

People say, such things did happen thousands of years agowe read in books about it. This book will be a proof that such things do happen today as they happened yesterday and will happen tomorrowto the right people, in the right time, and in the right place.

I preserved the diary form. I found it conveys better the immediacy of experience, and for the same reason I use throughout the first person singular: it happened to me, I am involved in it day by day.

When I tried to write it in an impersonal way, rather like a story, I found that it lost its impact.

The first draft of the manuscript was begun in September 1971, in Tongue, Sutherland, Scotland, nearly ten years after having met my Revered Teacher. I could not face it before, could not even look at the entries. It was like a panic; I dreaded it. Too much suffering is involved in it; it is written with the blood of my heart. A slow grinding down of the personality is a painful process.

Man cannot remake himself without suffering.
For he is both the marble and the sculptor.

-Alexis Carrell, Man the Unknown

Suffering has a redeeming quality. Pain and repetition are fixative agents.

The reader will find it very repetitive. Naturally so. For it is the story of a teaching. And teaching is constant repetition. The pupil has to learn the lesson again and again in order to be able to master it, and the teacher must repeat the lesson, present it in a different light, sometimes in a different form, so that the pupil should understand and remember. Each situation is repeated many a time, but each time it triggers off a slightly different psychological reaction leading to the next experience, and so forth.

I hoped to get instructions in Yoga, expected wonderful teachings, but what the Teacher did was mainly to force me to face the darkness within myself, and it almost killed me.

In other words he made me descend into hell, the cosmic drama enacted in every soul as soon as it dares to lift its face to the Light.

It was done very simply, by using violent reproof and even aggression. My mind was kept in a state of confusion to the extent of being switched off. I was beaten down in every sense till I had to come to terms with that in me which I kept rejecting all my life. It is surprising how the classical method of training, devised perhaps thousands of years ago, is similar to the modern psychological techniques; even dream analysis has a place in it.

Somewhere in one of the UpanishadsI dont remember which onethere is a sentence which puts our quest for spirituality in a nutshell: If you want Truth as badly as a drowning man wants air, you will realize it in a splitsecond.

But who wants Truth as badly as that? It is the task of the Teacher to set the heart aflame with the unquenchable flame of longing, and it is his duty to keep it burning till it is reduced to ashes. For only a heart which has burned itself empty is capable of love. Only a heart which has become non-existent can resurrect, pulsate to the rhythm of a new life.

Ye have to die before ye can live again.

It is my sincere and ardent desire that this work should be a pointer on the Way, at least for some of us. For as a well-known saying goes: We are both the Pilgrim and the Way.

IT.

Whenever the pronoun He or Him is used in the text with a capital letter, it always refers to God and never to the Teacher.

ACROSS THE CHASM OF FIRE

1 Second Birth

*According to a very ancient Eastern tradition, the disciple is born, when for the first time the glance of the Teacher falls on him.

2nd October, 1961

COMING HOME MY HEART WAS SINGING. This feeling of joy seized me as soon as I left the train.

The large railway station was like so many others I happened to see during my travels in Indiathe steel rafters, the roof blackened by smoke, the deafening noise of hissing railway engines, one train just pulling out with much heaving and clatter, the usual crowd of squatting figures surrounded by their belongings, patiently waiting for the departure of some local train, coolies fighting for my luggage, the flies, the heat. I was tired and very hot, but somehow, and I did not know why, I loved this station; just the feeling of having arrived made me feel glad.

Drawn by an old horse, the tonga (a two wheeled carriage) was plodding along for already more than forty minutes, on the way to Aryanangar, the district of my destination. This part of the town seemed fairly clean, even at this time of the day; it was nearly 5 p.m., and still very hot.

I felt light, free and happy, as one would feel when coming home after a long absence. Strange this wonderful sensation of coming home, of arriving at last. Why? It seemed crazy. I wondered, how long am I destined to stay here? Years? All my life? It mattered not; it felt good. That was all I knew for the moment.

We were trotting along a wide avenue flanked with trees. Large bungalows, gleaming white, set well in the gardens behind stone walls and iron fences, announced in large letters the names of banks, insurance companies, engineering firmslarge concerns known all the world over. A main post office to the right, a large hospital to the left, then a large bazaar covering a wide open spacepassing glimpses into the side-streets lined with shops and barrows, goods displayed on the pavements, and all the noise, all the typical smells composed of fried oil and garlic, spices and incense of the bazaar. I sniffed the air it was good.