Table of Contents
Foreword
PART ONE - ACROSS THE CHASM OF FIRE
Perplexities and Premonitions
Doubts
More Doubts
A Sign
One of the Hierarchy
Echoes from the Past
Effortless Path
The Mystical Sound
Love is Produced
Benares and Adyar
Flight Into The Unknown
The Challenge
The Four Doors
The Dweller on the Threshold
Curriculum Vitae of Sins
Circulation of Light
A Blank Check
A Flaming Row
Our People are Tested with Fire and Spirit
The Stages of Love
Casting out of a Spirit
The Sun Cannot Harm Me Either”
Who Will Remember?
Drunk
Those who are Dead do not Remember
The Terror of Love
The Turning of the Heart
We Have Two Hearts
Dhyana is the First Step
The Last Belief Must Go
Is It God??
Serious Illness
The Most Difficult Year of my Life
The Dream
“You Have to Go”
“Time and Space are Nothing to Us”
“And the Grace of God Will Be with You”
There is No Luck, but only the Divine Grace
Living with God
The Great Separation
Sitting Outside: A Self-discipline
Suicide?
Faith without Understanding
Quite Poor, Nothing is Left
Bandhara
Took Some of His Hair
A Saint has always a Light over his Head
The Pain of Love
Forebodings: The Killer Instinct
“Never Hurt Anybody’s Feelings”
To Become like Him
“Try to be Absorbed”
One Must Be Able to Sleep in the Street
Mounting Irritation
PART TWO
Return
The First Cloud
What is Nearer -the Source or the Delta?
Faith and Love are One
The Story of a Wali
Rebuff to a Bore
Training of the Jinn World
Tawadje
Time Runs Short
People Judge by Appearances
The Divine Thread
Testing Period
Renal Colic
Blessing of a School
Dhyana?
A bithday present
The Test of Hunger
Another Heart Attack
The Test of Acceptance of Death
Resigned to Die
His Anger
Born of the Spirit
To Endure and to Endure
Hard Times Are Passing Away
The Pressure Increases
Nothing but Nothingness
Death
Freedom
Love and Faith Become One
Himalayan Retreat
Scorpion and Caterpillar
The Snows and the Sound
Seven Colors of the Rainbow
Chorus of Voices
Samarpan (Surrender)
Meditation
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 ago—we read in books about it. This book will be a proof that such things do happen today as they happened yesterday and will happen tomorrow—to 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 psy
chological 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 Upanishads—I don’t remember which one—there 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 India—the 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 firms—large 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 space—passing 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.
It was just one more Indian city, such as I had seen many a time before; and still… and still, this glorious feeling of coming home, there was no earthly reason for it… it seemed crazy.
True, I came to meet a great Yogi, a Guru, and I expected much from this encounter. But surely this was no reason to feel so light, so childishly happy. I even caught myself laughing aloud and thinking: For the rest of my life it will be… and immediately I was amazed at this idea. You are getting potty, old girl, I said to myself; that’s it: potty. But never mind, life was so good—it was such fun to be alive, to breathe, to move, to be a bit mad and… to have arrived!!
We were just passing a large cotton mill, then a railway crossing. I noticed the time on a tower clock; it was half past five. We still went on and on. How slow the horse was, and so thin—all the ribs were sticking out from under a dry parchment—like skin. The driver was very thin, too; he must be tired also, and he looked hungry like his horse. I had a sudden feeling of guilt, for my suitcases were heavy they nearly filled out all the space in the precariously wobbling two-wheel vehicle. I sat sideways, rather uncomfortable, clasping the handle of one of the suitcases to prevent it from falling off at every jerk. The fact that I was tired and felt very hot were details—they mattered little, for I was coming home….
After many repeated inquiries from the street-vendors and shopkeepers on our way, my tonga driver delivered me at last to my destination. It was a low, sprawling terracotta-red bungalow set in the midst of a large open garden, with flower beds in front, and plenty of trees in the back, and trees spaced here and there all around. The street was fairly wide, a tiny post office standing in a garden amongst palm trees was just opposite, and next to it I noticed a bakery. After a hot, dusty journey it looked like heaven, all so fresh and peaceful.
But my joy was short-lived. Mrs. Ghose, the proprietor, told me that she had no accommodation free. She said that she wrote to Miss L. about it and seemed surprised that I knew nothing about it. “But I will take you to Miss L.‘s friend, Pushpa; there you are sure to find a place to stay for the time being.”
She climbed into the tonga beside me and, seated practically on top of my suitcases, was already giving rapid instructions to the driver in Hindi. This time the horse needed plenty of encouragement, and we started off again. Mrs. Ghose, stout and middle-aged, gathering her voluminous sari around her, kept talking rapidly, something about tenants and some letters, but I hardly listened. Was worried. L. had given me to understand that the place for my stay was assured, and here I was, not knowing where I would spend the night. There were no hotels in the vicinity, so much I knew from what she had told me.
After a day’s and a night’s journey, I badly needed a rest.
I was still occupied with my thoughts when she suddenly ordered the driver to stop. “Here lives Miss L. ‘s Guruji.” She turned to me, “Would you like to meet him?”
I did not like meeting anybody at this particular moment; my dress was covered with dust, my hair sticky with perspiration—all I wanted was a cold shower and a cup of tea. It was the most unsuitable moment to meet anyone, least of all an important personage like a Guru! But my protests were of no avail; she was already disappearing through a wide wooden gate leading into a rather dry-looking garden with several shrubs and a few trees. In the background stood a long white bungalow—a door was at each end of it, and a large, tall doorway with wooden shutters in the middle, leading presumably into an inner courtyard.
Before I even had time to recollect my thoughts, three bearded Indians emerged from the door opposite the gate and were advancing towards me followed by Mrs. Ghose. All three were elderly; all three were dressed in white. I stood up, jumped down from the tonga and, joining my palms in the Indian way of greeting, looked at each of them in turn, not being sure which one was the Guru. The oldest and the tallest of the three, who looked exactly like a prophet in a nativity play-long, grey beard, blazing dark eyes—walked ahead of the other two, and, as if in answer to my thoughts, pointed to the one walking closely behind him. This was the Guru.
Next moment he stood in front of me, quietly looking at me with a smile. He was tall, had a kindly face and strange eyes-dark pools of
stillness they were, with a sort of liquid light in them, like golden sparks.
I just had time to notice that he was the only one to wear wide trousers and a very long kurta (a collarless Indian-style shirt) of immaculate whiteness; the other two were clad in rather worn kurtas and longhi, (a straight piece of usually cotton material tight around the waist and reaching to the ankles).
My mind had hardly time to register it—then it was as if it turned a somersault, my heart stood still for a split second. I caught my breath… wild cartwheels were turning inside my brain and then my mind went completely blank.
And then it was—it was as if something in me stood to attention and saluted…. I was in the presence of a Great Man….
“There is no accommodation for me with Mrs. Ghose,” I said quickly, looking at him confused and insecure. I was aware that I was saying it just to say something, anything, for I felt helpless, completely lost. Deep down in me there was a sort of complete terror, a kind of excitement, and at the same time I felt annoyed with myself for feeling shy and confused like a child.
“Miss L. wrote to me that you will be coming,” he said, and his smile deepened. It was a pleasant, baritonal voice; it suited well the general aura of peace which seemed to surround him.
Mrs. Ghose stepped forward and began to tell her story all over again, that she wrote to Miss L., that she had nothing free, but perhaps the letter went astray, etc., etc. He nodded slowly: “You will be able to stay with Pushpa, and,” he added, “I expect you tomorrow at 7 a.m.”
Some more polite words were exchanged; he asked me about my journey, but I hardly had any recollection of it, could not think, hardly understood anything.
Shortly afterwards we arrived at Pushpa’s place. It was a large twostory house with a very small garden. She herself was pleasant looking, plump with a pretty face. She came to meet us, her father-in-law following her, an impressive figure, dignified, all in white, with a large Alsatian dog at his heels. Mrs. Ghose once more began her explanations.
Soon I found myself installed in the guest room on the ground floor; it had a bathroom attached to it and a ceiling fan. In front of the two windows was a high brick wall covered with a luscious flowering creeper, and the light filtering through the leaves covering the windows made the room look green and cool.
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