I found this so very interesting and hope you will too



   Sufism has come to mean a wide range of beliefs that center on the quest for personal enlightenment in the union with God. Sufis are sometimes described as the mystics of Islam, but Sufism fits awkwardly in the categories of religions. Technically Sufism is a denomination of Islam, however there are many Sufis that are not Muslims and there are many Muslims that are reluctant to consider Sufism part of Islam. One of the few concepts that Sufis seem to agree on is that all religions offer a path to salvation or enlightenment and that true God realization, no matter how it is achieved, transcends the limitations and classification of any religion. Basically, a saint in any religion is equal to a saint in any other religion because they are inspired by the same Divine source. Initially the term Sufi referred only to those who had achieved God realization, but it has since come to be applied to anyone who follows that particular spiritual path. The name Sufi comes from “suf,” the Arabic word for wool or “saf,” the Persian word for pure. The dervishes or advanced students of Sufism wore inexpensive wool clothes as part of their life of renunciation.
   
Sufism and Islam

   Sufism began as religious teachers in the Middle East came to learn the Truth of Islam directly from Mohammad. Masters who were “ordained” directly by Mohammad founded three major Sufi schools or orders. The most essential mystical knowledge was then passed down from each master to a disciple selected to follow as the leader of the school. Other disciples were sent out as masters to establish new schools. A Sufi school (ashram or convent) is often a community center that may include a residence for the students and master, a school, hospital, orphanage or any number of community services. Some of these services may be very modest and others may be very extensive, but they are often a vital part of the local community. Schools are sometimes set up near the tomb of a Sufi saint in order to maintain the shrine and provide services to pilgrims, including places to retreat and meditate. While mainstream Islam promotes community service, mosques rarely umbrella such services beyond theological schools since mainstream Islam distinguishes the needs of the spirit from the needs of the body.
   
    There is no firm historical source for Sufism. Many of the early orders were considered an integrated part of Islam, but as teachings were codified and the elements of Shi’i and Sunni Islam became more distinct, Sufism emerged with an identity. One of the basic ideas of Sufism is to minimize the self or individual identity. Belonging to a particular group with a unique name is contradictory to this effort. It is said, “a Sufi is one who is not,” and with a philosophy that seeks the destruction of self-identity it is thought that Sufi’s received their name from outsiders. Initially the term Sufi referred only to those who had achieved God realization, but it has since come to be applied to anyone who follows that particular spiritual path.
   
    While Sufism did not exist prior to Islam, Sufi doctrine contains many elements that go beyond the teaching of Mohammad. Islam is an external structure in which the individual exists while the internal quest for enlightenment belongs to a realm of Sufi knowledge. This knowledge integrates Islam and ancient doctrine that resembles elements of Greek Philosophy, Zoroastrianism and Hinduism that are part of the Sufi path to God-realization. The most sacred knowledge of the Sufi masters is not written and is passed to each generation orally, which makes it somewhat difficult to historically trace the evolution of Sufi doctrine. Nonetheless, it seems reasonable that the Sufi doctrine that differs the most from the rest of Islam had its beginnings much earlier (although this is a very non-Muslim view of Sufism). For many years these extra qualities created a great deal of friction between mainstream Islam and the Muslim mystics. After centuries of falling in and out of favor, Sufis became integrated and an important central part of Islamic culture and society.
   
    A cornerstone of mysticism is that true knowledge of God is achieved directly and not through an intermediary like a prophet, saint or priest. Over the centuries this has led to a great deal of political conflict between mystics and non-mystics. If a cleric or Priest behaves or commands something that seems in conflict with dogma, the individual is not in a position to disagree as long as there is no direct relationship between God and the individual.
   
    Many Sufi orders encourage honoring Saints and Prophets by visiting them if the are alive or their tombs if they have passed on. Pilgrims often will go to ask for favors in the form of miracles or prosperity. In many communities the pilgrims are people from other religions who come to the tombs in hopes of finding favor or receiving miracles.
   
    The high status afforded saints in communities influenced by Sufism implies an alternative means to communicate with God other than through the Imam, the Islamic clerics. In a fundamentalist Islamic community the highest-ranking Imam is the supreme authority, both politically and religiously, and Sufism presents a potential conflict to this authority that has over the centuries led to persecution of Sufis in several Arab countries. Saudi Arabia and Iran are two countries where the tombs of Sufi saints have been destroyed. In some areas teachings of the Sufi masters are held in high regard practicing Sufism is discouraged or even criminalized.

Sufism Outside of Islam

   The difference between Sufis and Islam is sometimes as extreme as the difference between Mormons and Catholics, depending on the particular order. Some Western Sufi orders have even completely divorced themselves from Islam altogether. Yet, Sufism is integrated in Islam. The mystical aspects of Sufism may have ancient influences, but these traditions center on what goes on within a individual. Islam stresses service, virtue, honesty and charity, the essence of Sufism and a foundation that is necessary for the inner spirituallity of Sufism. It may seem that either Sufism influenced Islam or the other way around, but there is little surviving recorded history that sheds light on this. Even when an order does not incorperate Islam for the laws and practice of daily life, there are disciplines and doctrine to the place of Islam.
   
   Islam recognizes Abraham, Moses and Jesus, but they credit Mohammad for reintroducing the true religion without contamination. Sufis extend this, believing that all prophets and saints of all religions are inspired by the same source and the rejection of any one is a rejection of the essential Truth behind them all - the one God. That one God is absolute, extending beyond time or space, and all that is within the universe is of God, including good and evil.

Tenants of Sufism
   
   The basic Sufi tenants are slightly different from order to order with some variations, additions and/or subtractions, but generally they include the following.
• There is only one God, and that God possesses everything. In some orders God is everything and nothing; all that we can perceive and all that we cannot.

• Since God is in your Heart, God is always very close even when humanity is very far from God. Some Sufis believe that since God is in all of us. To truly love God we must love every human and every component of creation, which are considered to be aspects of God.

• There are four Holy Scriptures including the Torah, the Psalms of David, the Gospels of Jesus and the Qu'ran (this is aligned with Islam so it may differ in some orders). There are also hundreds of other works revealed by prophets including books by Sufi saints.

• Nothing happens without God’s will, and Human will is very critical, but it exists within the context of Divine will.

• Because of God’s will, all things, good and bad, are from God.

• Life as we know it is an illusion, and the true life revealed when we reach in the hereafter. Some orders go as far as to describe this process of reality beyond illusion as reincarnation, which is a distinct departure from mainstream Islam.  

isnt a sufi a judism thing relating to the sufis of the tree of life?

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BismillahirRahmanirRahim [PH Pro]

An Article from: Peter Lamborn Wilson

Of all the strands of thought, tradition, and belief that make up the Islamic universe, Sufism in its doctrinal aspect stands out as the most intact, the most purely Islamic: the central strand. Opponents of Sufism often charge it with having originated outside Islam, but a close study of the various schools of philosophy and theology, and a comparison with "primordial" Islam as revealed in the Koran and hadith (authentic sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), will vindicate the Sufis' claim of centrality, of strict adherence to the original purity of the Revelation.

In the context of the history of thought, in fact, Sufism --always insisting on a return to the sources of the Tradition -can be seen to have functioned at times as a positive and healthy reaction to the overly rational activity of the philosophers and theologians. For the Sufis, the road to spiritual knowledge - to Certainty - could never be confined to the process of rational or purely intellectual activity, without sapiential knowledge (zawq, "taste") and the direct, immediate experience of the Heart. Truth, they believed, can be sought and found only with one's entire being; nor were they satisfied merely to know this Truth. They insisted on a total identification with it: a "passing away" of the knower in the Known, of subject in the Object of knowledge. Thus, when the fourth/tenth century Sufi Hallaj proclaimed "I am the Truth" (and was martyred for it by the exoteric authorities), he was not violating the "First Pillar" of Islam, the belief in Unity (tawhid), but simply stating the truth from the mouth of the Truth. So the Sufis believe.

This insistence of total involvement in "mystical" realisation, and on a participative understanding of religious doctrine, sharply distinguished Sufism from other Islamic schools of thought. In fact, considering themselves the true core of Islam, Sufis appeared as outsiders not only to the philosophers and theologians, but even to "ordinary" Moslems. Their peculiarity, their distinctness, manifested itself in every aspect of their lives: their daily activities, their worship, social relations, and even style or means of expression. Like mystics in all Traditions, they tended to remake language and form for their own purposes, and as in all Traditional civilisations, the potency and directness of their expression tended to flow out and permeate other areas not directly related to mysticism in the narrow sense: literature, the arts and crafts, etc. Leaving This World Behind.

Buddha founded his Path on the human fact of suffering. Islam gives the basic situation in which we find ourselves a slightly different interpretation: man in his ordinary state of consciousness is literally asleep ("and when he dies he wakes," as Mohammad said). He lives in a dream, whether of enjoyment or suffering - a phenomenal, illusory existence. Only his lower self is awake, his "carnal soul." Whether he feels so or not, he is miserable. But potentially the situation can be changed, for ultimately man is not identical with his lower self. (The Prince of Balkh, Ibrahim Adham, lost in the desert while hunting, chased a magic stag, which turned on him and asked, "Were you born for this?") Man's authentic existence is in the Divine; he has a higher Self, which is true; he can attain felicity, even before death ("Die before you die," said the Prophet). The call comes: to flight, migration, a journey beyond the limitations of world and self.

Awakening

Imprisoned in the cage of the world (the world in its negative, "worldly" sense, not in the positive sense of the world-as-icon or Divine Manifestation), man is exiled and forgetful of his true home. To keep his part of the Covenant, to be faithful to his promise, he must set out on the Path from sleep to awakening. It is only the blessed few for whom this Path lasts no longer than a single step, although in theory all that is needed is to "turn around" or "inside out" and be what one is. For most seekers the Path is long; one Sufi speaks of "a thousand and one" different stages.

"Everything perishes save His Face"; the first step on the Path is to begin to contemplate the futility of the world of dust, the world in which one's lower self is doomed. The seeker must renounce it all, including his own self, and seek that which is Everlasting. He must travel from things to Nothing, from existence to Nonexistence. How does one get lost on purpose? Our present state is one of forgetfulness toward the Divine - the true Self - and remembrance of worldly affairs and the lower self. The cure for this is a reversal: remembrance of the true Self, the Divine within, and forgetfulness toward everything else.

In Sufism the basic technique for this is invocation or "remembrance" (zikr) of the Divine Name, which is mysteriously identical with the Divine Being. Through this discipline the fragments of our directionless minds are regathered, our outward impulse turned inward and concentrated. This is the act of a lover who thinks of nothing but his beloved.

posted on the Ismaili.List
reposted on the Donmeh List Wed, 10 Mar 1999



"The thickest veils between man and Allah are the wisdom of the wise,
the worship of the religious, and the piety of the pious."
- As-Shaykh Bayazid Bistami qs

in James Fadiman & Robert Frager Essential Sufism
(Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1997), p. 111


"When we heal the earth, we heal ourselves."
- David Orr


"Let the beauty of what you love, be what you do."
- As-Shaykh Mawlana Jalal'uddin al-Rumi qs


(selected posting from Ali Basyah Suryo