Daughter of Fire
a Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master

by Irina Tweedie

FOREWARD

This book is an account of a 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 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 psychological reaction leading to the next experience, and so forth.

I hoped to get instruction 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 til 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 realise it in a split second."

But who wants the 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 til 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.

"...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."

I.T.

Description | Table of Contents | Chapter One