learn about Sufism

DERVISHES!

I’m a religion major, I’m currently reading a book about Suffism that I picked up at after seeing the whirling dervishes perform at Duke University in North Carolina last month. It was absolutely amazing. Absolutely worth doing! It’s tiny, but there is a dervish hanging out in the background.

i am about to finish the book on Roomi and his poems.

Roomi does not appear as deep as i thought .May be i am mistaken.

True;but though trust be our mainstay,Yet the Prophet teaches us to have regard to means.
The Prophet cried with a loud voice,
“Trust in God ,yet tie the camel’s leg”
Masnavi-Book 1:5

Today i have got three books on poetry of Roomi from the inspirer.

Let me go and buy a book by Roomi.Any help to choose book?

Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, idolator, worshipper of fire,
come even though you have
broken your vows a thousand times,
Come, and come yet again.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Rumi

This is one of my favourite pieces from Rumi’s work and in a way the best way to describe Islam as far as I am concern.

The difficulties in following the path or obstacles to getting closer to God derive primarily from one’s self or ego (nafs). In other words, it can be said that if one is not recognizing or experiencing God’s “closeness” or presence, the responsibility for this condition lies with one’s own self.

Some of the gross effects of the dominance of the nafs are that one may become overwhelmed by the need to gratify desires such as anger, lust, and the many addictions that afflict us. Other gross effects are that one may become dominated by states of consciousness such as anxiety, boredom, regret, depression, and self-pity—so that one feels like a powerless victim or prisoner tortured within one’s own mind.

Given that the Sufi regards every thought, feeling, and perception that he or she has (including his or her sense of self) as a manifestation of God or as a particular view of God’s face (“Wherever you turn there is God’s face”—Qur’an), a more subtle effect of the dominance of the nafs than those expressed earlier (but still a devastating effect) is to imagine that God is absent from one’s experience or to imagine that one does not have the choice to embrace the way in which God appears at this moment. Such mistaken imaginings often cause one to cease to surrender gratefully and lovingly into God’s embrace. In fact, being overcome by these subtle effects opens the door for the gross effects mentioned earlier.

The question for an intelligent mind remains how does one conquers ones’ nafs. meditation? dhikar? prayer? practice?
Hence, one of the emphases of Sufism is upon the struggle to overcome the dominance that one’s nafs has over one, a struggle that first and foremost involves choosing at each moment to remember and surrender actively to God—irrespective of whether the form in which God becomes manifest is one of absence or presence, benevolence or severity. As Rumi said:

I am a lover of both his benevolence and severity!
Amazing it is that I’m in love with these opposites!

Something to think and ponder over:

Where is the wellspring of joy and grieving, of being and non-being? Does anything satisfy without a contrary pull the other way, toward deprivation? We want what we do not have. From the region of nonentity comes a cure for our longings for eternity, enlightenment, long life, the beauty of women, recognition, and dignity.

You are there in nothingness, I annihilate myself in your qualities. Consciousness dissolves beyond time and space. I watch growing and the decay. In this glory of emptiness, where will I live? There’s nowhere to land.

Bahauddin

Heres an excellent site (add below) which helps give further guidance on the true path of Sufism.
Sufism is not just the glamourous mystiscm which many perceive as the goal, it is merely a means to the goal.

http://www.abc.se/~m9783/index.html