Interview
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Llewellyn Vaughan Lee is the founder of The Golden Sufi Center that is the vehicle for the work of the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Order of Sufism (the "Silent Sufis"). He is the author of several books including Spiritual Power, Light of Oneness, and Working With Oneness.

The interview was conducted on October 14, 2005 at The Power of Love Sufi Conference held at Omega Institute, Rhinebeck, New York.

Read it below or listen to this talk here
*note: low sound quality, turn up speakers!

JEP:  Today we have the great good fortune to be interviewing Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, a Sufi teacher. In recent years the focus of Mr. Vaughan-Lee’s writing and teaching has been on spiritual responsibility in this period of transition and the emerging global consciousness of oneness.  He has also specialized in the area of dream work, integrating the ancient Sufi approach to dreams with the insights of modern psychology.  Llewellyn is the founder of the Golden Sufi Center in California and his most recent books are Working with Oneness, Light of Oneness, and Spiritual Power. 

JEP:  Welcome Llewellyn.  Would you briefly tell us about your spiritual background and development.  How did you start on this path of Sufism?

LVL:  When I was 19 I met a Sufi teacher, Irina Tweedie, who was trained by a Sufi sheikh in India and at his death in 1966 she returned to England and started a meditation group. I met her a few years later and that was that.

JEP:  And could you tell us a little bit about Mrs. Tweedie?

LVL:  A little bit, that’s kind of an understatement, she was an extraordinary woman!  She was born in Russia and fled with her parents when she was young, at the time of the Revolution, and was then educated in Vienna and Paris.  She married an English naval officer and moved to England after the war.  After the death of her husband, she started on her spiritual quest that took her to India where she met a Sufi master who was called “Elder Brother” and he trained her according to his ancient Sufi tradition.

She was the first woman, and the first Westerner, to be given this particular training and then she brought it back to the West after the death of her sheikh in 1966. He asked her to write a diary of her spiritual training that became the book Daughter of Fire.  At that time she had a very small meditation group at the side of the railways lines of north London and we used to meet once a week. Later, when her book was published, she became very famous and many people came from all over the world to see her.  Daughter of Fire was published in America in 1987 and I came with her then to California to promote it and at that time she told me I was going to be her successor and continue the work after she died.  She actually retired in 1992, and together with my family, I moved to California in 1991 and started a small meditation center there. Then she officially retired in 1992 and I took over. She died in 1999.

JEP:  Would you please tell us a bit about the Sufi tradition, and if you feel comfortable, discuss its relationship with Islam?

LVL:  That’s a really big question to say something about the Sufi tradition.  All I would like to say is that Sufism is a path of love. It is the relationship with God as lover and beloved and one is taken back to God through love--through the love that is awakened within the heart.  There are many different Sufi orders, many different practices. The most famous order in the West are Mevlevis, the whirling dervishes established by Rumi. They use music and dance in their spiritual practice.  The Sufi order to which I belong, the Naqshbandi Sufi Order, are known as the Silent Sufis because we do all our practices in silence--a silent meditation, a silent dhikr (which is the repetition of the name of God), and we also have a very strong psychological orientation to the work that we do, the processes that happen within a human being.

In regards to the relationship between Sufism and Islam, there are two different schools of thought—some people say that Sufism is the esoteric branch of Islam and there is another school of Sufism, to which I and my teacher belong, that states that Sufism is older than Islam.  This tradition became known as Sufis under Islam, and flourished at that time, but there have always been lovers of God and they existed before Islam.

JEP:  Would you please tell us a little bit about your spiritual practices?

LVL:  Yes, the spiritual practices that we do are very simple.  We do a silent meditation called dhyana upon the heart chakra, the psychic center of the heart in which the energy of love is used to still the mind. In the first stage of dhyana the mind is stilled as the individual mind is merged into the universal mind.  There are seven levels to this process which lead to the state of samadhi, which is the superconscious state in which one becomes conscious on another level of reality, on the plane of the Self and beyond. And we also practice the silent dhikr, which is the silent repetition of the name of god and we try to live a good life in remembrance of God. There are certain other practices of awareness that we do; for example, solitude within the crowd, which is outwardly to be with the people and inwardly to be with God which is a practice that is done throughout the day; and awareness of breath which involves observation of the breath.  There are a number of other practices that we do.   We also give a lot of attention to dreams. We feel that dreams are guidance and we work with our dreams and the psychological processes that they point to.

JEP:  Could you tell us a little bit more about your technique of working with dreams, is it similar to the psycho-analytical approach to dreams?

LVL:  In a way it is.  We belong to a spiritual tradition that has been doing spiritual dream work for many hundreds of years and part of my work has been to make this accessible to people with a Western consciousness, with a Western background.  To that effect I have integrated the ancient Sufi technique of dreamwork with the insights of modern psychology, particularly the work of Carl Jung.  Irina Tweedie, my teacher, studied the works of Jung and she found that they had a strong spiritual dimension to them which makes Jung’s understanding of the psyche very helpful to Western practitioners. 

When I was 30 I had a dream telling me to read the works of Jung and I did a Ph.D. integrating Jungian psychology and Sufism and I’ve written a number of books about a Jungian spiritual approach to dream work, integrating Jungian psychology with the ancient approach.  Some people in dreams will have Sufi symbols, for example, grapes, wine, or a particular reference to the Sufi esoteric tradition.  So one needs an understanding of the  Sufi dimension of symbolism as well the symbols that belong to the Western psyche.

JEP:  You write of the need for inner purification as a preliminary step towards spiritual transformation.  How do you go about undertaking this psychological, inner work?

LVL:  The basis of this psychological inner work is that the meditation practice that we do energizes the unconscious, it is a bit like putting soap into water--it brings up the dirt and the darkness. When Mrs. Tweedie went to India to study with her sheikh she said, “I hoped for instruction in yoga, I expected wonderful teaching but what the teacher did was mainly to force me to face the darkness within me and it almost killed me.”   The energy of the path actually brings the darkness within oneself to the surface and then you have to confront it and accept it and integrate it and transform it, if possible. And this is an important preliminary process upon the path--confrontation with the shadow and the process of purification that accompanies it.

JEP:  I read a work by a Zen teacher and he spoke of that very point that you just brought up.  He said that in his experience of working with students, the biggest fault is the inability to face oneself.  Have you had that experience or have you experienced it in others?

LVL:  I think everybody has many patterns of avoidance with the ego and particularly the mind--working together they are masters of deception.  One tries to avoid certain things that one needs to confront, and hopefully through the grace of god and the energy of the path, one eventually confronts them.

JEP:  It’s a difficult challenge because the hardest thing to do is to face oneself.  Much of your writing stresses the importance of the divine feminine.  What do you believe to be the role of women in our world today and what is your vision of women’s role in the future?

LVL:  What is the role of women in our world today—that’s an enormous question and I think it has to be answered on different levels.  First, we have to redress a certain imbalance that has been created over the past 2,000 years of patriarchal culture which is to revalue the feminine--and not just women but the feminine within the psyche.  For example, the soul has a feminine quality and we need to revalue the soul and the qualities that it holds—qualities such as receptivity, which is an important quality to develop if you are trying to do inner work, or listening.  The ability to just listen is a feminine quality.   In our culture we focus very much on the masculine attitude of doing whereas there is the feminine quality of being that has to develop because that is an important relationship to life.  And only by being oneself in life and in the world can one really contribute to life. 

I have a strong sense that there is a certain spiritual work in the world today that can only be done by women and this has to do with a woman’s natural instinctual relationship to life, to creativity, which comes from the fact that women have the ability to give birth.  From an esoteric point of view, this means women have the ability to bring the light of the soul into matter—to bring matter alive in the spiritual sense.  Women have a spiritual sense, a spiritual substance, already present within their centers, their chakras, that is needed for this process and they can re-energize or make sacred the material world, the manifest world of matter, in a way that men can’t. 

Women also have a natural understanding of the inter-connectedness of all life and have a vital role to play in what I call “the reawakening of the world” which is vital for the survival and transformation of the world.  Women have a way of bringing a certain sacred energy into these connections in life that is vital for the transformation of the world. And I have a sense that many souls have chosen to come back in this life in the body of a woman in order to participate in this work because it’s much more difficult for a man to do it.   A man does not have this natural, instinctual connection to life or the ability to bring the sacred into matter in the same way that a woman does.

JEP:  But wouldn’t you agree that there seems to be a concerted effort aimed at devaluating the feminine principle at this time?   What is it that we can do as women and conscious men to change this situation?

LVL:  I think we’re coming to the end of 2,000 years of patriarchal culture and this has left certain attitudes in our collective consciousness. And there are two approaches that we can take to this:  either we can attack the prevalent patriarchal attitude or we can put our energy into a creative process of transforming the world, working with the spiritual substance of life. My view is that the patriarchal culture is actually dying, it’s coming to the end of its era and one doesn’t have to really speed up this process in any way or interact with it in any way—it’s already coming to the end of its time according to the natural rhythms of evolution.  It is much more important for women who carry a spiritual awareness to be shown the possibility of how to work with their own spiritual self and with their own relationship to what is sacred for the future and the culture and civilization that is coming into being.

 I often think of the line from Shakespeare’s play, The Winter’s Tale, when one of the character’s said, “Thou met’st with things dying, I with things new-born.”  And it is where are you going to focus your attention, are you going to focus it upon the dying culture and all of the antagonism that that creates, or are you going to focus on what is coming into being.  I think it is much more important that we give our undivided attention to giving birth to a new era and this is where the real work needs to be done.

JEP:  Thank you.  You write and speak about oneness—another big topic.  How do you define this term and distinguish it from the dualism that now controls?

LVL:  Oneness, well there is a mystical awareness that everything is one.  I call this Mysticism 101 because many, many people have this experience whether it’s just in a moment, in and out-of-time, glancing up at the night sky and suddenly being aware of this transcendent dimension within ourselves in which everything is included.  The poet Blake put it very beautifully when he wrote, “To see the world in a grain of sand.”  And there is this fundamental mystical awareness of the oneness of life, of the oneness of the divine, you exist in a state in which you experience the natural perception of the self, of the Atma, this spiritual dimension within, that sees everything as one and realizes the inherent oneness within everything. 

It is a very beautiful but also a very practical awareness because once you become aware of the oneness of life, you also become aware of its interconnectedness. And this intrinsic experience that life is one allows you to see all the interconnectedness within, for example, all the nerves and cells within a human being. And once you begin to appreciate life from the perspective of its inherent wholeness, you become awake to new possibilities within life. 

Yes, life can be perceived, and is often perceived, from the dimension of dualism, this is a natural part of our experience of life.  It is said, for example, that a child’s first experience of that is the good and the bad breast and a culture’s first experience of that, in the more primitive sense, is the dualism of life and death or of darkness and light, when the sun comes up and the darkness of night goes.  There is this inherent experience of dualism that will always belong to life in this plane of existence where the ego develops separately and has a separate sense of self.  But this attitude doesn’t have to dominate our collective consciousness and I think we are moving into an era of global awareness which is one expression of oneness. We have been given already the tools of global awareness, for example, the internet which allows anybody in the world who has a computer to connect into a network in which everything is instantaneously accessible.  This is a reflection on an ordinary human level of the experience of the self in which you have access to that plane of oneness.  The realization of the oneness is a kind of basic awareness because ecologically we realize that we have to regard the earth as one living organism, the image given to us very beautifully when the astronauts first left the world and looked back and saw the world as one living whole, without borders. 

We are moving into an era of global economy and everything that goes with it.  The challenge is not to be aware of the oneness of existence but how to work with it and how to bring it into daily practice and into all of the organs of our civilized life--from making sure that everybody in the world has enough food, to considerations related to a global economy, and everything that goes with that.  And in practical, simple ways we can apply the principles of oneness to our daily interactions with life by no longer regarding ourselves as separate individuals but as intrinsic parts of life. And you’ll find that once you put aside that focus upon your individual separativeness (which has its very dark shadow side with very many people feeling very isolated within our contemporary culture), and instead you step into the paradigm of oneness and the awareness that you are an intrinsic part of oneness, then you find there are ways to open up to life and to interact with life that until then had been quite hidden from you because you were caught in this fixated consciousness of duality.  This, of course, creates the antagonism of us against them and all the conflicts that arise from that consciousness.  Once you step into the arena of oneness you find that there are resonances and harmonies between you and other people that you weren’t aware of.  And people don’t realize that it is a two-way process which gives life the possibility to respond and to awaken in a level of oneness because human consciousness interacts with life in a very powerful way.  And there are many spiritual traditions that state that we actually, consciously, create our world--that it is not something fixed or static but more a reflection of consciousness.   So if you are living in a consciousness of duality, then life will present itself and interact with you in an antagonistic and dualistic way; but if you can awaken to a consciousness of oneness, you will find life will open in ways that are quite different to your present cultural view of life.

JEP:  You write of the need to unify spirit and matter and you relate this to the feminine principle.  How would you explain this?

LVL:  I suppose one can begin by taking a step back and asking why is it that we consider spirit and matter as separate?  This has to do with a whole patriarchal, religious, and spiritual conditioning that emphasizes the transcendent deity; the Deius Absconditus, the divine that is outside of life.  And although this awareness of the transcendent aspect of the divine was an important development within human consciousness, the step away from a world filled with many different gods--the gods of creation-- did create this rather shadow side which says that spirit no longer belongs to matter.  This attitude was propagated by certain patriarchal dimensions, particularly within the Christian Church, which were based apparently more upon the teachings of St. Paul than on the revelation of Christ.  And this misperception has grown and become the accepted attitude of our Western consciousness with the result that the world is no longer viewed as a sacred place and people have come to view the world as a place that we can desecrate, we can abuse, we can pollute--without any conscious feeling of responsibility.  During the last few centuries we have been living with the result of that desecration and pollution. 

What people don’t realize is that if you treat the world as something that has no soul, no spirit, you deny life it’s natural, magical, transformative qualities and abilities.  Many people, in many different eras, have realized that life and the forces of nature are very magical and very powerful and they don’t follow the laws of Newtonian physics.   If we can realign our conscious with the spiritual dimension of matter, we free matter from the imprisonment which we as a culture have placed upon it and allow life to awaken again and to become alive and to reveal its magical nature.  I think that we need that if we are going to survive as a species and also begin to undo some of the incredible pollution and abuse we have fostered onto our own ecosystem.  There is this lovely line by Leonard Cohen that says “God is alive, magic is afoot.”  And to return the divine to life, to our environment, is a necessary next step in our evolution.  I always say that the world belongs to God and once you recognize the divine in something it responds in a way that is quite different than if you treat it like a static object that has divinity, no life within itself.  In the same way as if you recognize the divine within another human being this has a very transformative effect upon the human being and allows him or her to come alive in ways that might not be possible otherwise.

JEP:  You speak of the livingness of the earth and you have mentioned that today, is there anything else you’d like to say about this?  I know you speak about the energy centers of the earth and the idea that at this particular time these centers are increasingly alive. Can you speak a little bit about this?

LVL:  There is the whole spiritual tradition that the Earth is a living, spiritual being.  This is called now the Gaia tradition.  And again, it was a natural part of the matriarchal culture that couldn’t imagine living upon an earth that was not sacred. And there is in Sufism, and also within alchemy as well as within other traditions, this idea of microcosm and macrocos--that the individual human being is a microcosm of the whole. In Sufism we talk about the lesser Adam and the greater Adam. The human being is the lesser Adam and the macrocosm is the greater Adam. Now once you really begin to look at that from the spiritual perspective you realize that just as an individual has spiritual centers and a spiritual body and a soul, then you can’t deny that for the world as a whole. And part of my work has been to re-explore the whole notion of the anima mundi, the soul of the world, which belonged very much to the Platonic tradition and came alive again in the Renaissance and at other times, particularly in the alchemical traditions they had an understanding of the anima mundi. 

This brings up the question of how we work with the world soul, how do we relate to the world soul and why we divorce the world soul from our own soul?  And there is, in fact, a contemporary movement within Jungian psychology which is attempting to take the psyche out of the consulting room and return it to the world.  They are saying, “Let’s take our psyche and our psychological interaction into the whole of life and realize that it is a continuing  and ongoing dynamic process, an interaction.”  As you do this you become open to a much bigger dimension of yourself and your own relationship to the whole and, in particular, your relationship to the anima mundi, the soul of the world.  That steps into another important area which has to do with the symbolic consciousness because as you work upon your own soul, you develop what’s called a symbolic relationship to yourself and to your life.  Many people are given symbols from dreams or the active imagination to work with, that help them develop a more meaningful relationship to life and to themselves. They begin to have access to their soul because the symbolic world and symbols are a mediator between the conscious self and  the inner dimension of the soul—stepping stones, if you like, to this numinous inner world. And this is why symbols are so important and why so much of our culture is poverty stricken, because we have lost contact with symbols or devalued symbols so that we can no longer can work with them.  We as individuals can recreate a symbolic consciousness within the world and develop the symbols that we need for the transformation of life.  Jung and people after him discovered the power of symbols and have begun to explore them as transformers of psychic energy. If you went into the depth of your psyche you would be overwhelmed by its raw power, which Jung felt had an amoral dimension.  Symbols help you access this inner power of life without being overwhelmed by it. So, for example, you can imbue the blood of Christ through the mass, and the symbols of the mass or the body of Christ in a symbolic form that you can digest as individual human beings.

Symbols are very important to the well-being of the individual and the well-being of the culture.  What people don’t seem to realize is that every new era needs new symbols because as one era comes to an end they go back into the unconscious and they no longer hold a transformative energy that they had in earlier centuries. And as many of us know, we are moving from one era into another era and we need to give birth to the symbols that are going to help the culture in the coming era.  Increasing numbers of people will be drawn into this dimension of symbolic work, of working with the soul of the world.  They will begin to form the symbols that belong to this next era and they might be quite different symbols than those we have seen in the past. For example, we might find they are closer to life, and no longer just enclosed within this separate and scared understanding.  We might think of the internet as a living symbol of the interconnectedness of all of humanity that enables us to communicate very quickly in ways that were inaccessible before.  And this actually has great symbolic meaning.  There is no reason that a symbol has to be something static, it can be something dynamic, something very much alive and we have to expand our consciousness into recognizing and incorporating such images or such symbols into the way we relate to life and, in particular, becoming open to their sacred dimension because once you treat something as sacred, it responds and opens itself in a very, very different way. And to take this a step further, once we respond to the world or life as a sacred and living being, it will respond to us and it will begin to reveal hidden parts of its sacred body and some of these hidden parts are what I call, power centers. 

There is an ancient tradition that the world has a whole grid of spiritual and earth energy within it—in England they are known as lay lines, in China they are known as dragon lines.  For example, you find a sacred site such as Stonehenge or Avebury in England that are built at a very powerful coming together of lay lines.  Many of the English parish churches are actually built on old lay lines that were built according to sacred principles. And this suggests that the Earth has a dimension of power that previous cultures knew how to work with and how to use to nourish themselves, both to help the crops grow and also to nourish their own soul and to have a more meaningful life.  Even if it appears that they live on a more materialistic level that is inferior to us, but maybe their life on a soul level was more nourished and more meaningful. And if we are going to become mature human beings, and if we are going to have a spiritual relationship to life, that opens the possibility of working with this energy structure within the earth.

And as much as there are these energy lines there are also places of power within the earth which we can learn to use once we take the first step of recognizing that the Earth is a living, spiritual being and allowing it to relate to us.  And again this is the feminine quality that we have overlooked very much in the past few centuries. We tend to have a patriarchal attitude that is imposing our vision onto life, while the more holistic view would be to be receptive and allow life to  tell us about its own inherent sacred nature.

One of the techniques you learn if you are working with symbols is to be receptive, allowing the symbol to mature and develop within you and in that way you develop a symbolic relationship to life and to your own consciousness.  And I have strong belief that we don’t have to go into the old sacred texts to discover these places or to discover how to work with them because those sacred texts describe places of power that belong to past eras.

We are moving into new eras and in each era there are new centers of power that are developed.  For example, in the Renaissance in Italy, Florence was obviously a place of spiritual energy.  Chartre cathedral, at the Gothic revival, was a center of tremendous spiritual energy that helped the whole Gothic movement.  And although you can go to Chartre and feel all of the beautiful harmonies of the Cathedral and sense the energy of the black Madonna you are also aware that this is an era that has passed and its energy is no longer vibrant. In the same way that you can go to Glastonbury in England and you have a similar experience—there is a beauty and a certain feeling of a past spiritual consciousness but it is no longer directly accessible, it is no longer vibrant.  We need to be open to life revealing to us how to work with it in a spiritual dimension and how to be sensitive to what is asked for us as spiritually awake human beings. I feel this has to do with this very important aspect of spiritual responsibility.  Once we have been awakened to the spiritual dimension of ourselves, the turning of the heart, this moment of grace that happens in the life when the light of the higher self suddenly floods our consciousness and we are given for a moment a glimpse of our own eternal nature.  This then begins the journey of the soul, the journey home, the journey of self-realization according to whatever spiritual path your soul is attracted to in order to help you on the journey.  Then that gives you a responsibility because in our Sufi tradition we are never given anything for ourselves. It is always for the sake of service and sadly this has been lost in much contemporary American spirituality in which, in my view, the focus has been far too much in our own individual spiritual development without recognizing the responsibility and the broader dimension of spiritual service that this involves.  Once you begin to have access to your own spiritual light, my sense is that the world needs this light.  The world as a living spiritual organism, needs the light of those who have been given a glimpse of the divine dimension within themselves and who are working in service of the whole.  We have to begin to take real responsibility for what we have been given as spiritual seekers. 

JEP:  In the talk that I heard you give in Washington D.C. a couple of years ago, you said you were very optimistic about the future of humanity because in your understanding, although there are many problems all around us, it doesn’t take that many people of a spiritual consciousness to really transform the planet.  I wonder if you could comment upon that?

LVL:  Yes, it has never taken many people to transform the planet.  If you think of the whole Christian era, it was one man and twelve disciples who brought a whole new level of consciousness into Western culture. The idea that change must be accomplished through the masses, through organizations, through hierarchies is, I think, missing the point which has to do with the divine nature of the human being.  My sense is that although I don’t think this is the era in which one individual or one enlightened Master can transform the whole world, I think this is the time for human beings to work together. I do think this work is being initiated by a network of spiritually awakened people who can work together for the benefit of the world and begin to awaken the world to its own divine nature. And I’m quite convinced that humanity has this opportunity and that there are Masters in the inner worlds who are helping humanity to make this step.  These Masters are allowed to participate a little bit more than they have in past eras, past centuries, because traditionally the Masters work behind the scenes rather than interacting directly in human affairs because human beings have free will. 

There is also a tradition that states that when the world reaches a point of crisis then the Masters are allowed to intervene more directly in human affairs.  There is also another tradition that states that we may be coming into an era when certain Masters will become more visible.  According to the Naksbandi tradition, there was a time in the 14th century in the Middle East when the Masters were much more involved in the outer affairs of the world and then they retired and became more hidden and almost invisible. And so there is this fascinating possibility that this inner spiritual guidance of the world will once more become visible with all the incredible effects that this will produce upon humanity.  Again, I don’t think it is enough for one individual savior to come and redeem the world because this seems to be a time when we’re moving towards human beings moving together. I think a network of individuals committed to the work of service to the whole is an important step in the world’s evolution.  That is why I recently released a book called Spiritual Power, a power that can be awakened in the world and also given to the world that can maybe have more of an effect than we realize.  We are so identified with worldly power but there is this line in the Lord’s prayer which I have meditated on for many years, “May thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” which suggests that there is an possibility for the divine will to interact directly in this world.   This relates to what the Sufis call the world of secondary causes, rather than the world of divine command which you might think of as heaven, where the divine will acts without resistance. 

There is a possibility for human beings, I don’t know if to channel is the right word, but it’s more to participate in bringing this dimension of divine consciousness into the world where it can have an effect that we have forgotten about for many, many centuries.  And I wonder whether it hasn’t been purposefully censored from our human consciousness in the same way that the Catholics repressed the Gnostics who had access to this dimension of spirituality.  And then we might think that we are living in a very different world altogether.  Again, this has to do with the fact that we associate power with control, with patterns of control, with imposing one’s will upon others which, from a spiritual point of view, is a very low level of power.  Real spiritual power has to do with freedom, with enabling other human beings to live their full potential--it has to do with giving, rather than taking, and those who have this power, necessarily, don’t want anything for themselves.  That degree of power, that level of power, can only be used by somebody who is offering themselves in service and whose ego has been transformed so they can no longer be in the grip of any negative desires.   Once you have reached that level of awareness, you don’t want to have power over anybody anyway, because to have power over somebody just gets in the way of the real freedom and the ability to really participate in the work of the divine in the world, which is the real grace, to be part of those who give themselves in service to the whole. In Sufism they say that after the state of union with god, is the station of servanthood, which I suppose is like the Boddhissatva motif of Buddhism in which you come back to be of service to the world. There comes a point in that service where, if it is allowed, you can be given access to real power that doesn’t work on the level of cause and effect but works from the dimension of oneness and I think that has the ability to change the world much more than people are aware.

JEP:  Thank you so much for everything and I’m sure that our audience will appreciate your words tremendously.

LVL: Thank you very much.