The Face Before I Was Born
A Spiritual Autobiography

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Forward by Irina Tweedie

Introduction

Chapter 1: Awakening

Chapter 2: Meeting the Teacher

Chapter 3: Madness and Bliss

Chapter 4: Romantic Love

Chapter 5: Life as a Householder

Chapter 6: The Archetypal World

Chapter 7: Dreamwork and the Group

Chapter 8: On the Road

Chapter 9: Coming Home

Appendix

Notes

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Don't be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others. Unfold
your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
We have opened you.
- Rûmî

When I visited my teacher in the late summer of 1995, she told me that I should write and lecture more about my own personal spiritual experiences. Until then I had been reluctant to talk too much about my experiences, fearing that the ego might get hold of them. But as her teacher said to her, "Orders are orders," and this book is a direct result of her instructions.

I was sixteen when the path was awakened within me, when the long journey Home began. Over the years I have recorded a few important dreams and visions, but I have never kept a diary or journal, because I loved the invisible, hidden nature of the path. This story of my journey comes from memory, from how I see the path as it unfolded within me. But spiritual experiences carry an intensity that impacts them into consciousness, and because they do not belong to the mind or the personality, they keep their original quality. Also, many experiences need time to reveal their real significance, to bring into consciousness the depth of their meaning. Only now do I begin to appreciate many of the experiences I have been given over the years.

The spiritual path is unique for each of us; in the words of a Sufi saying, "There are as many ways to God as human beings, as many as the breaths of the children of men." This story is how the path unfolded within me, the outline of a transformation whose real nature can never be put into words. Many things have been omitted, because they have been forgotten or are too personal. Also, on the Sufi path most of the transformation happens beyond the threshold of consciousness, deep in the unconscious and on the level of the soul. But what has always remained is the intensity, wonder, and majesty of this soul's journey, of the way my heart was opened.

When I first came upon the path, all I knew was my need, a hunger that drove me. It was a long and arduous journey which strained every fiber of my being. I have tried to recapture the rawness, the intensity, the desolation, and the fragility of those early years on the path, the sense of a life that was fragmentary, without any hint of wholeness, in which I was held together only by will power and an inborn desire for truth. But it is difficult to fully recall what it was like before love was present, before His companionship replaced the deep loneliness. Now I have drunk the wine for which I longed. I have been opened to the beyond and life has begun to show its deeper purpose. For so many years there was only a dream haunting me, an inner conviction that called me.

One of the many miracles of the path is that it is always just beginning; the horizon is always beckoning. The Sufi Dhû-l-Nûn once asked a woman whom he met on the seashore, "What is the end of love?" She replied, "Love has no end, because the Beloved has no end." Yet on this endless journey there comes a time when the wayfarer has come Home, "back to the dwelling place of his desires." Through the guidance of my teacher and the grace of my Sheikh I have been allowed to taste the feeling of coming Home, the knowing that I am where I belong. The spark that was planted within my heart has burnt away many of the veils between the two worlds, revealing much that was hidden. I have been taken beyond the boundaries of the known into the spinning center of my own self, and then further, into the unknown emptiness that is the real home of the mystic. My heart is filled with gratitude for all those who have gone before, and whose footsteps have guided me. For my teacher and my Sheikh there are no words to express my feelings, just an echo of an ancient song of belonging. In the circle of oneness the heart melts and everything is made empty.

The following is an excerpt of the first chapter of this book.

He travels with whoever looks for Him,
and having taken the seeker by the hand,
He arouses him to go in search of himself.
- Al-Ansârî

AWAKENING

The longest journey begins with a single step.
- Lao Tsu

AWAKENING TO WILD GEESE

My journey Home began in the London underground. In the summer when I was sixteen I was traveling back from boarding school for a weekend break with an American student who was, for a short time, a boyfriend of my sister. Sitting in the half-crowded tube train, I noticed that he was reading a book on Zen Buddhism. At this time in the late sixties Zen was becoming quite popular in certain hippie circles, and intrigued, I asked to look at the book. Turning the pages, I came across a Zen saying,

The wild geese do not intend to cast their
reflection,
The water has no mind to receive their
image.

Reading this saying was like lifting a curtain. There, in the morning tube train, I felt a joy I had never before experienced, a moment of intense exhilaration. Now I know that this was the moment of the heart's turning towards God, the moment the door to the journey Home opened.

This joy stayed with me for weeks. There was a sense of laughter, a feeling of seeing the joke within creation. A world that had seemed grey sparkled with a hidden light. I laughed at everything I saw. My boarding school was beside a river, and there was a beautifully tended garden on the riverbank where one could sit, away from the sports fields and any noise. Those summer afternoons, when schoolwork was over, I would come to this garden and watch the river, full of wonder, full of delight. The flowing water, the ripples in the current, the reflections sang to me. There was no desire in me to understand the reason for this sudden change, this inner opening. In such states of grace there is no questioning; the moment is too full.

Looking back, I realize that this deep joy came from the soul, which flooded my life with its sunlight. My soul knew that the journey Home had begun, the ancient quest that one carries from lifetime to lifetime. The Sufi says that there are three journeys, the Journey from God, the Journey to God, and the Journey in God. The Journey from God is the journey of the exile in which we come into this world and forget our real nature, our real Home. I had been traveling this journey of forgetfulness for sixteen years, not even knowing that there was a journey. Born into a middle-class English family, I had gone to church every Sunday and read the Bible. I had sung hymns and recited prayers. But nowhere was there the slightest suggestion of spiritual life, of any reality beyond the world of the senses.

Suddenly this Zen saying opened a doorway which I never even knew existed, and my heart rejoiced. Many years later I discovered that this same saying about the wild geese was a favorite of the Sufi master Bhai Sahib, the being whom I came to know as my Sheikh. He would often compare his line of Sufism with Zen Buddhism, and when asked to describe the path would point to wild birds in the sky, saying, "Can you trace the path of their flight?" The saying about the wild geese led me through an ancient doorway, back onto the path to which my soul belonged. Those summer weeks were like the taste of a first love; they were unexplained magic and I looked for no reason.

I borrowed the book on Zen and discovered a simple meditation technique, to sit with closed eyes and meditate on nothing. I practiced this meditation and immediately had inner experiences. The most powerful experience was of being enormously large, spreading into infinite space, and at the same time being very small, incredibly dense, with a feeling of great power and compactness. These absolute opposites were experienced simultaneously, and although it must have lasted for just a few moments, there was no sense of time. Outside of space and time the experience was very tangible and intensely real. There was also an exhilaration, the exhilaration of going beyond the limitations of the outer world, for the first time consciously knowing an inner dimension so different from the boarding-school world around me. I remembered that I had had this same experience a number of times as a young child just before falling asleep. As a child I was terrified and told no one. Now I welcomed it, for it was a taste of an inner reality which was very potent and deeply satisfying. Years later I asked about the meaning of this experience and was told that it was an experience of the Self, "larger than large and smaller than small...boundless power, source of every power." I had brought with me into this life this stamp of the Self, this inner consciousness of transcendence, and through meditation it was being awakened. To a child this reality was frightening; there was no context for an experience of this deeper being.1 But now it was a wonderful confirmation of what was waiting within.

In the evenings I would sit and meditate and find myself inwardly expanding beyond my physical self. Again there was no questioning of these experiences, which seemed both natural and miraculous. I just knew that I had found something very precious. Later I discovered that while the most common Zen meditation is to sit with open eyes, the meditation I had read and was practicing was very similar to the Sufi meditation that was to become my central spiritual practice. The door had opened onto the one spiritual path that was to take me Home, although it was more than three years before I made the outer connection.

Chapter One continues...

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