THE ECSTATIC MUSIC of ONENESS


Beloved, it is three in the morning as you sing to me and I am ecstatic with love for you. This orgasmic sound penetrates our union as it undulates in the orgasmic song of your creation and flows into all of life. This music fills my soul and the note I sing is part of the symphony of life. Life is alive and I say yes to this ecstatic song in me that I give to life. I am but one note of love vibrating in the oneness of life. I am one note of this symphony of human beings connected together through the web of light that flows through creation and beyond. Beloved, this music I hear in the oneness of creation is an expression of you. I throw my heart into this ancient sacred symphony of life, always new and eternally old. I choose to live the dream that is being born, the song that is being composed. I say yes, yes, yes, yes, yes to this note of love, this spark flowing from me into life! Beloved, I pledge my note of love to life. Perhaps in so doing, the world can again remember Your Presence once again.

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you
Not knowing how blind I was.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.

Rumi

My whole life has been a search for my Beloved, not knowing we had been in each other all along. As a small child I knew that I was a part of the symphony of life and I sang my note very loud. My mother relates that at the age of two I would sing at the top of my lungs with my golden records. A particular favorite was the following song: “There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good and when she was bad she was horrid”. I am told that I placed particular emphasis on the word “horrid”. I was indeed a fiery child, but that passionate flame was squelched early on. As the years passed the note that I had come to sing in this world became muffled with layers of conditioning. My feelings of early emotional abandonment, the sexual, emotional and physical abuse I endured, the sexual assault, my inability to love myself, a belief system that said I needed to be good and perfect to deserve love, a culture that taught me to be competitive with other women and valued the masculine over the feminine, a myriad of addictions including unhealthy relationships, my constant search for love in all the wrong places, an eight year marriage that ended when my spouse left me for another woman while pregnant with my first child, a church that told me to try harder when I was being physically abused by my partner, depression and the desire to end my life, the anxiety of being a single parent, a second marriage with a loving, caring partner in which I didn’t realize that love was already present and continued to look for it elsewhere, all began to muffle the sound of my note. Eventually, I didn’t remember I had a note to sing.


My life continued to look happy and successful on the outside, but inside I had become despairing because my outer life did not match what I was feeling on the inside. I continued to make a mess of my life. In anguish one night, I cried out “God, where are you? I simply cannot do this alone anymore. Please help.” It was what the Sufis call “the moment of tauba”, that is, a turning of the heart to God. My call to Him was heard. The next day in my mailbox at my office was a flyer with an invitation to a lecture by Llewellyn Vaughn Lee, a Sufi teacher and the following poem:

I am calling to you from afar;
calling to you since the very beginning of days.
Calling to you across millennia,
For eons of time—
Calling-calling. Since always.
It is part of your being, my voice.
But it comes to you faintly,
And you only hear it sometimes;
“ I don’t know”, you may say
But somewhere you hear,
And deep down you know;
for I am that in you which will never end.
Even if you say, “Who is calling?’
Even if you think, “Who is that?”
Where will you run? Just tell me.
Can you run away from yourself?
For I am the only One for you;
There is no other,
Your Promise, your Reward am I alone
Your Punishment, your longing
And your God.

Anonymous

I cried as I read the poem because somewhere it touched me so deeply. I decided to attend the lecture. The moment I heard Llewellyn Vaughn Lee speak, I felt that my soul had been recognized for the first time. He spoke of everything my heart already knew but didn’t dare to sing. I knew clearly that the love I had been searching for all of my life had been there all along. My heart began to open to that love. I had found my teacher; someone who could reflect my Essence back to me and didn’t want anything from me.

The woman who hosted the lecture and I started meditating, sharing dreams and drinking tea together weekly. For an entire year we wondered when the Sufi group that Llewellyn had come to start in central Minnesota would be formed. People would occasionally come and go but no group formed. As we held the sacred space in our hearts, a container of Love was formed to hold the group. When the container of Love had been completed, a group did form. This group continues to meditate, share dreams and drink tea together weekly. We sit together for the Beloved.

The following is one of the first dreams I had when starting the Sufi path in 1992:

I am lying naked on a mountaintop. The sky is a vivid blue with fluffy white clouds and the sun warms me. As I lie there in peaceful silence, a bald eagle swoops down and hovers over me. I have the feeling he cares for me very deeply. As he hovers over me, my body becomes electric and my vagina begins to pulsate. The eagle then begins to peck gently at my vulva and I am aware that he is carefully placing white balls of semen inside my vagina. I am aware of my vagina pulsating and burning with desire and love for this beautiful bird. When he has finished and almost seems ready to leave me, he looks back and decides to carefully close the entrance to my vagina with my folds of skin, as if to sew it up so that the semen will not come out. The eagle then hovers over me. His wings spread wide and I am aware of flashes of red and white light as he bids me farewell. My right arm stretches out to reach him as he begins to take flight because I desire to go with him. I am left with great longing for him alone on this mountain, but aware of his presence within my vagina. I become aware of the sacredness of this moment and feel a sense of awe and wonder at having been chosen to be impregnated by Him, this majestic, divine bird and I feel great peace within.

The dream speaks of the gift of Grace that was given to me as I began this path of Love and how the path would eventually unfold within me. This path is effortless and everything that we need is given. The dream speaks of my ecstatic nature which I slowly began to remember as the path unfolded within me. In the dream, I was not allowed to go with the divine bird as desired. I had been impregnated with remembrance of Him which left me alone with great longing for Him. I needed to stay in the world so that I could give my ecstatic nature to Life. What is given to us on this Sufi path is not for us but to be used in service of others.

I began to turn inward. During this period of inner transformation, when all my shadow aspects revealed themselves in dreams, I felt that I could bear no more. The alchemical process continued to unfold and I was left with nothing to hold on to. My definition of myself was emptied. My familiar ways of responding in the world were taken away. Even my propensity to dwell on painful things from my past and my sensitive nature so prone to immediate tears was taken from me. I had nothing to cling to that was familiar. I had no crises to create. Each morning I would read the following poem which hung on the wall in my bathroom:

Love came
Flowed like blood
Beneath the skin through veins
Emptied me of myself
Filled me with the Beloved
Till every organ was seized
And occupied
Till only my name remains
The rest is It.

Abu Said Abo’l Khar

My Beloved began to meet with me in the night. He would make love to me. The experience of this love making was of an orgasmic proportion that I had never experienced in a human encounter. When He would not come for several nights, I would lay awake longing for Him to return. He indeed was the Lover that I had been longing for all of my life. Such sweetness I had never known and unbearable sadness when He was away.

As I continued to meditate and remember Him with each breath, a new substance of sweetness and joy came into my life. I began to laugh again and to sing my note. I could hear the song of creation all around me. I could hear the music behind the working of the whole universe. Music was in the depth of my being. I knew that life itself was music and that music was the divine. I remembered that music had held me through my life. I began to realize that what had always made me feel drawn to music was that my whole being was music, my mind, my body, the nature in which I lived, everything beneath and around me was music. Music was the beginning and the end of the universe. I had heard the phrase that Sufis lose themselves in sound and call it ecstasy. When I heard music, played piano or sang, my soul had often been moved to ecstasy. The reason my soul had entered this body of matter was to experience the music of life. It was during this period of time that I remembered the passion I had felt in college when I sang the lead role of Susanna in Mozart’s opera, The Marriage of Figaro. When I sang the recitative and aria entitled Beloved Don’t Delay, I felt ecstatic. I remembered that I had been singing to my Beloved during those college years. The words are as follows:

Beloved, Don’t Delay (The Marriage of Figaro - Mozart)
Recitative:
This at last is the moment, so divine and so cherished, I longingly awaited. Soon he will come here, with loving arms embrace me, and no worry or fear shall mar our rapture! Close to the heart of Nature’s friendly powers, delicate, fragrant flowers, the pine trees, the sky surround us. Aiding the lovers, night casts her veil around us.

Aria:
Beloved don’t delay, the night is falling. Hasten where love’s delight is sweetly calling. Until the stars grow pale, and night is waning, while the world is still and calm is reigning. The brooklet rustles on, the breeze is blowing, and the timorous heart with hope is glowing. The flowers all with shining dew are gleaming, while the world is long asleep and dreaming. Come, my Beloved, the starry sky above you. Come Beloved! Come my Beloved, with all my heart, I love you. Come, my Beloved, with all my heart, with all my heart I love you.

As the years passed and I had finally gotten comfortable with the fact that I was a mystic and would thus be playing the role of an observer as mystics have done for centuries, things shifted. We were told as a group that the world needed us to be visible in the marketplace. I liked the idea that no one would know I was a mystic, that I could be a silent Sufi and now we were going global! Horror of horrors for a person who is as an individualist, who doesn’t like groups, who hates being in the front line much less being seen globally. Everything in me resisted! That fiery child acted out!

Eventually I surrendered to the new form. I became His voice. When He chose, He sang His music through me. While recording music in 2003, I knew clearly that He was singing His psalms of the world through me. I had a dream in which I was given the title for the recording Heartpsalms of the World. I was told in the dream that my dream image would be the illustration for the cover of the CD that I was recording. The dream image was of a woman with no specific features who was clothed in a burnt red garment. The color of the garment reminded me of the color of the earth I had seen on a retreat in New Mexico. The woman was bathed in a radiant light. She cradled in her arms an ancient globe of the world from which a red heart pulsated. My interpretation of the dream is that it depicts the feminine path of the heart and the awakening of the heart of the world to Love. The color of the woman’s garment is earthen. She is grounded in the earth, while bathed in the radiant light of the Divine. The dream reminds us that we must stay grounded on earth so that this substance of Divine Light and Love which we carry can be given to the Oneness of Life. The woman in the dream cradles an ancient globe of the world from which love flows. It is She who as a mother cradles the world from which love flows. The dream image has no specific features but rather remains in an unknown form. The image reminds me of these words of Lynn Barron from chapter seven of The Unknown She by Hilary Hart (by permission of The Golden Sufi Center, www.goldensufi.org).

Enter Her Light
and Her light will
take you to the treasure.
Enter this luminous blackness
and She who is love itself
will take you deeper and deeper
into love.

Love flowed as I recorded Her psalms. This “Unknown She” was present, singing Her psalms of the world through me, taking me deeper into Love. As I continued to record the psalms, I began to notice a pattern which seemed to fit the chapter headings in Perfume of the Desert by Andrew Harvey (Wheaten, Il: Quest Books, 1999). The five psalm headings on Heartpsalms of the World depict the wayfarer’s individual journey back to the Source. In the final stage of the journey, the wayfarer is in joyous service to the Oneness of Life. This service involves returning the sacred to life through the feminine path of the heart. Through living more deeply within ourselves, we nourish ourselves and all of life. By learning to be attentive to Love from the center of our Self, the heart of the world awakens to Love and remembers the Beloved’s presence in the world.


In April 2004 I had a dream in which Llewellyn Vaughn Lee and his teacher, Mrs. Tweedie were present. In the dream, Mrs. Tweedie said to me sternly as she wagged her index finger at me, “You have a talent that isn’t being used and needs to be used. This talent will begin to be used on June 23, 2004”. I was scared beyond belief and shaking in the dream. Mrs. Tweedie had been standing at the top of the steps with me and a man who looked like Jimmy Hendrix from the back was sitting at the bottom of the stairs looking away from me. As he turned to look at me his face was that of Llewellyn and he glared at me as if to say “we mean business”. Both of the powerful figures in the dream scared me so much that I awoke from the dream trembling.

Llewellyn’s interpretation of the dream at the Omega Retreat held from June 21-25, 2004 was that I needed to live my ecstatic nature in the world and that women needed to hear about my ecstatic nature. He asked me how I would inform women of my ecstatic nature. Since I was dumbfounded he suggested that I might do it through song like Mirabai.

Mirabai was a 15th century ecstatic mystic from India. She was a princess and a learned woman. As was the custom, her marriage was arranged for her but she never slept with her husband stating she was married to Krishna. When she was 17, her husband was killed in a war. Mirabai refused to die on her husband’s funeral pyre, as was the custom. Instead, she left her family compound, wrote her poems to Krishna, the Dark One, and sang and danced them in the streets. One story says that a male guard would not allow her to enter a temple because she was a woman. She is said to have told him “are not all souls feminine before God?” and was allowed to enter.

At the Omega Retreat, participants kept asking how I planned to live my ecstatic nature in the world and inform other women of it. The pressure forced me to purchase a book of Mirabai’s poetry at the Omega bookstore. As I read her poetry, my heart began to sing. I could identify with Mirabai and her poetry became music to my ears. Her poems sing of ecstatic union and of the despair that ecstatic union, having once been tasted, can disappear. Her poems sing of what it is like to see through the colors of the world to their single source, and of what it is like to find that this seemingly infinite vision can vanish. Llewellyn asked me later in the week what I intended to do about my dream. I told him that I planned to compose music for Mirabai’s poetry. He said “good, and then we’ll have a concert”. I hadn’t planned on performing the music. My relationship with the Beloved has always been a private affair and I like to keep spiritual things to myself. Singing and dancing in the streets and acting like a mad woman, has never been my style! Again there was resistance in me but slowly I began composing music of Mirabai’s poetry without the intention of performing it!

A woman from the group asked me to perform the songs at a retreat. I immediately said “No”. That night I had a dream in which I was told, “The music is not yours and needs to be sung for the world. Your ecstatic nature must be lived in the world through song”. Indeed the music never was mine. It was sung by my Beloved through me. I again said “yes”. Yes, Beloved, I will be your voice in the world. When you chose, I will sing your song for the world to hear so that the world will remember Your presence. "I offer to Thee the only thing I have, my capacity to be filled with Thee."

In ONENESS everything is included and each person is allowed to sing their specific note which is their own true nature. Since we carry the heart of the world within our own heart, we nourish the world by singing our own note in this symphony of life. ONENESS needs each of our different notes. When we each sing our note and no one judges our note it breaks down the barriers of isolation. When each person sings their note in this new way, with their note connected to the notes of others than the beauty of music which is life itself comes alive. This new music can heal the life of the world and we will all begin to hear the song of life in a new way. Then His presence will sing throughout His creation and beyond.

My heart sings to yours dear reader with much love,
Diane M. Bösl

Diane M. Bösl is a licensed psychologist in private practice in central Minnesota. She is married. She has a grown son who is married and two grandchildren. Diane has followed the Naqshbandi Sufi Path since 1992.