Welcome to Wonder Cabinet.
I'm Anne Strainchamps.
And I'm Steve Paulson.
Some people say the modern world is disenchanted.
Stripped of a kind of magic and mystery that used to be part of life.
But it's all still pretty miraculous.
The hummingbird at my feeder can fly faster than the space shuttle.
The flower it's sipping from can turn sunlight into food.
The rays of sunlight hitting that flower carry light particles that began their journey during the last ice age.
So there's still plenty to be enchanted about.
And yet, we often have a hard time feeling it.
One of the things that makes me so sad is this world we live in that we say is life now.
We've said it doesn't have magic.
It's devoid of magic.
And there is so much magic.
There is magic in the birdsong.
There is magic in our dreams.
There is magic in our breath.
There is so much magic.
And we want to say, no, we are the magicians.
This is Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee.
He's the founder of Emergence Magazine and somebody I've admired for a long time for the way he has nurtured and given a voice to the spiritual ecology movement.
Now, if you're not familiar with Emergence, it's a publication, a film production studio, and also a podcast, which Emmanuel hosts.
And for nearly a decade, it has been the hub for the same kind of environmentally-based, spiritually-infused writing that Anne and I have been bringing to Wonder Cabinet.
There's some differences, but there is definitely a lot of synergy.
Deep time, animism, the mythic imagination.
Indigenous wisdom, Buddhist philosophy, and mysticism.
And Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee grew up in a mystical family.
He's the son of the Sufi mystic Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, the lineage successor in the Naqshbandiya Sufi order.
And Emmanuel is a Sufi teacher himself and the authorized successor to his father.
You wouldn't necessarily know any of this just from listening to Emergence, but I wanted to know how that Sufi practice informs Emmanuel's life and work.
And since he has a brand new book out called Remembering Earth, it seemed like a good time to talk.
Okay, let's listen.
Emmanuel, I wanted to start by talking a bit about how you grew up, because that was a pretty remarkable spiritual atmosphere.
Oh, it was definitely a unique way to grow up.
I mean, the story really begins with my parents, who were disciples of a Sufi teacher, a Russian Sufi mystic named Irina Tweedie, who went to India in the late 50s, met a Sufi master and spent several years with him.
And upon his death, he
She was made his successor, and she took this particular lineage of Naqshbandiya Sufism to England.
She had given up everything through the course of her training, given all her money away, and was surviving on a war widow's pension and living in a tiny little flat by a train track, meeting with a few disciples, my parents being one of the early ones.
This is the early 70s.
And a few years later, my father bought a house in a residential area of North London and invited Irina Tweedie to live in the ground floor flat.
And so I grew up with a guru living downstairs.
She was an extraordinary person too.
When you think she was born, I think I looked her up.
She was born in like 1907 or something like that.
So she's one of that generation who lived through both World War I and World War II.
And then she goes off to India and she has this spiritual quest.
And this is before the flower children discover the Eastern religions.
And she's
The first Western woman trained in this particular Sufi lineage.
And then she writes a spiritual memoir.
And that becomes huge.
And all these people begin trekking to your house.
But it's really a remarkable story of a woman with a, I don't know, kind of spiritual passion that was incredibly rare then, still rare today.
She was a formidable character in every sense.
She loved fiercely, like really fiercely, and she would do anything for the sake of the truth.
She also was somebody who would, remember when we were young, you know, you'd wake up one morning and there'd be a note on the table downstairs that would be like, gone, if I'm not back in three months, consider me dead.
You know?
And she would have gone off to somewhere because she had had a dream the night before that said she had to seek out a teacher in, you know, it's a true story, in Morocco who had to do something to her heart.
She lived...
you know, on the razor's edge, if you will, you know, they speak of in mysticism.
And, you know, she permeated the house.
As you said, she wrote this spiritual memoir, which was so unique because it was a diary of the personal journey into her own darkness that this mystical path took her on.
And so it was very intimate, very personal, and nothing held back.
There really hadn't been anything like that published in the West.
And it drew seekers from all over the world to our door.
Word got out that she was just open.
And this was the address.
And people would ring up and say, you know, I've just read the book.
I must come see Tweedie.
Or they would just show up on the door at all hours in states of often distress.
So, you know, it was not dull.
I'll just say that.
Growing up with a guru downstairs, you know, and also my father, you know, was, you know, I would say I lived with two masters, a master downstairs and then a master upstairs.
It was a potent energetic pot.
Well, the one thing I wonder about also, though, is it is such an extraordinary and rare experience to have grown up with a spiritual leader, a guru, in a sense, who is a woman.
Yeah.
I mean, we are not used to seeing in any way, shape, or form the face of the divine through the face of a woman.
No, you're absolutely right.
You know, and I don't think I even thought about it growing up.
It was just Tweedie.
I don't think I ever even thought that other people didn't meditate and pray for hours every day until I, you know, went to other kids' house after school when I was, you know, seven or eight years old.
You know how it is.
You just take it all for face value.
This is what life is.
It's kind of beautiful.
So, Sufism, that's the mystical side of Islam.
In the U.S., I am guessing that most people associate it with Rumi, the 13th century mystic and poet, still best-selling poet in the U.S. How similar or dissimilar is Sufi mysticism to the other mystical traditions, Christian, Jewish, Hindu?
What sets Sufi mysticism apart?
Well, in some ways, nothing.
In some ways, they're all the same perennial stream of divine love manifesting in the world through different prophets and experiences in different times and places.
And yes, Sufism is considered the mystical heart of Islam, but there is also a tradition among Sufis who say Sufism is much older and just had different names in the past.
And within Sufism, there are so many different forms as well, just like within Buddhism and Christianity.
It's like Baskin and Robbins.
There's 31 flavors for whether you like music or dance or silence or chanting.
But in the end, it's that famous story that it really is one river.
And yet, as it flows from the source to the sea, all the countries that are on the banks of the river try to claim it as theirs.
And you can't.
It really is an essence.
And Sufism is about taking you into that essence through love.
And what about the concept of God, the divine, the beloved?
I have friends and family members who are kind of allergic to those words.
They bring a lot of baggage with them.
Who or what are you talking about when you talk about God?
You know, it's a very good question.
It's also a deeply personal one.
There are many names, and the names, you know, Sufism we say beloved because there is this desire to come to experience this personal side of God.
They say in Sufism, the beloved is closer to you than your jugular vein.
Hallelujah.
You want to come to know that side of God.
And of course, there is the other side, the unknowable side of God.
And there is also this knowing beyond the form of, in quote, God, there is what they refer to as absolute truth, which is this undifferentiated essence.
You know, traditionally in Sufism, they say the first form that emerged from that undifferentiated essence, that was the beginning of God.
But I do have the sense that for you, this is not and has never been...
an anthropomorphic vision.
No.
You know, Dhu'l-Nun, who's a very famous early Sufi, said, whatever you think God is, it is the opposite of that.
And this idea that God is this and not that is, to me, one of the saddest stories that has emerged through religious and spiritual forms and has led to tremendous, you know, horrific, not just in our past, but very much as part of our present story of separation.
When we say the divine exists in heaven and what lies beneath our feet is not that, to me that lies at the root in many ways of whether you want to call it the Garden of Eden, I think it's the opposite.
We have not been exiled, we exiled the divine.
Yeah, we left.
We exiled the divine and said it is this and it is only for people who have access to this particular religion in this form and if you do this and that and the other and
Which I think is part of the story of how, you know, in mainstream culture we don't talk about the divine.
I remember people saying to me, I would be more comfortable asking my best friends how much money they make than whether they believe in God or not.
I said, it should be the opposite.
I know.
It's become taboo.
And I think that is also deeply sad that nowadays if you believe in God in America, then you're a certain political affiliation of this or that or the other.
So we have to rediscover what it means to be in relationship to the divine, not through this place of dualism and conflict and owning.
an image of what we think God is.
So I was trying to imagine what it must have been like to imbibe some of these really beautiful Sufi concepts, you know, like the oneness of being from young childhood.
And I was thinking, oh, in some ways it's maybe not that different from the way children perceive the world anyway.
You know, it sounds like it's a vision of imminence, all the world alive.
Yeah.
Well, you know, we say in Sufism there are really three main parts of the journey.
The journey from God, the journey to God, and the journey in God.
And the journey from God begins when we are actually born, and we are actually much more in tune with our divine nature.
We have yet to be formed around an ego consciousness, and we represent this kind of boundless experience, and that is encapsulated through the ways that children naturally talk to God.
whether it's fairies or trees or spirits.
I mean, watching my children grow up, you know, seeing other children grow up, naturally they are just in this state of wonder and connection.
And it is as we grow up that falls away.
But, you know, what was interesting growing up with Irina Tweedie and my father is my father never once put a book in my hand and said, read this, learn this about Sufism.
My whole experience growing up there was through osmosis.
You know, later I actually came to know that this particular Naqshbandi path that I'm a part of, it's got parallels to Zen, you could say.
It's about practice.
It's about silence.
But it isn't about words on a page.
So you said it's about practice.
From the little bit I've read, I have the feeling that meditation practices are incredibly simple.
Is that right?
Well, I started meditating properly when I was about six years old.
And one day I wanted to go downstairs because my father never –
I saw him meditating and I saw lots of people meditating.
And it was actually a thing, you know, growing up it was, you know, I often say to myself one of the first words I remember hearing was, shh, they're meditating.
It was because, you know, we lived upstairs and every afternoon we had to be quiet.
It was a lot of actually be quiet because people are meditating.
And it wasn't until I was six that one day I even vividly remember it.
I came home from school and
And I wanted to go downstairs, and I wanted to meditate.
There was just this desire that took over.
And I went downstairs, and I stepped over the sea of shoes.
Imagine 100 pairs of shoes outside this front door.
I even remember the smell.
I remember the smell of going into the room, 100 people in a small room.
And my father was there, and they cleared a space for me to sit.
And I closed my eyes.
And then two hours later, my father said they had to wake me up.
Two hours wait.
So did you fall asleep or were you actually in meditation?
So what was that experience like?
I was sitting in lotus position, which kids can comfortably do.
I sadly can't do it anymore.
And I have no memory of what I experienced in meditation.
All I remember is that I just stepped into a space that was bigger than myself, and then I stepped out of it.
And then after that day, I came downstairs every afternoon and meditated.
And my father was very nonchalant about it.
He said, oh, no, you've done this before.
And he was referring to in previous lives.
And you're just, you know, you're doing what you know.
Did not make a big deal about it at all.
And, you know, I did this for a while, I think a year or two.
And then eventually I think kids on my street would be riding bikes or skateboarding or whatever.
And I wanted to go and do that after school.
And I stopped.
At its most profound...
Are there mystical experiences that you have had that have been utterly transformative?
Yes, many.
And some of them have been deep in meditation and deep in prayer.
Many have been in my dreams, actually.
I've had very powerful experiences in my dreams.
And many in waking consciousness.
And as the years go by, the delineations between what is meditation, what is prayer, what is breath, what is getting up and going about my day have shifted and become more porous and connected and less determined.
I used to have experiences in meditation where you would see things, whether it be certain patterns.
It's a remarkable world, this inner world that we've denied.
So, we should switch to talking about emergence and spiritual ecology.
So, your family moved to Northern California, where you live now, and work now, when you were, I think, 11, 12, something like that?
Yeah, 11 years old.
Huge change to go from urban London to the coastal Northern California.
And I know you kind of had one of those classic experiences of falling in love with the landscape.
Can you tell me about that?
Yeah, I mean, as I said, I grew up in a very nondescript residential part of North London, you know.
I loved nature as a child and went to parks, you know.
Occasionally we'd go to the countryside or, you know, once a year maybe a camping trip to the Swiss Alps.
But we moved to this very small town right on the Pacific Ocean.
We had no direct neighbors.
We were in the middle of a forest overlooking the wetlands and the bay.
And there weren't enough bedrooms in the house.
So they put me in this little cabin on the property that had been built in the 60s in the shape of a ship.
And it had a ladder that went up to the little sleeping loft.
And they had even, you know, it was made of redwood planks and all the knots had pictures of stars.
Rock stars, Dylan, the Stones, the Beatles, Janis Joplin.
You know, it was like a creation out of the 60s.
It had a little wood stove, lots of mice, bats.
It was cold and dead.
But you're out there by yourself at age 11?
Yeah.
I mean, it was across the courtyard from the house.
It wasn't so far.
So, you know, I could, it was a little intercom, dinner's ready, you know, but, but it was, you know, it was in the midst of this forest and transitioning from life in London to Northern California was really rough.
I went to this little school where everybody had been together since kindergarten, pretty much.
There weren't a lot of new kids.
I was brutally bullied.
Sixth and seventh grade were very, very hard.
And I think I found solace in nature.
And I spent a lot of time on the trails near our home.
And I discovered things that I had never experienced before, like that mushrooms grew in the fall that you could eat.
And I learned all about mushrooms and I would spend a lot of time hunting mushrooms and foraging.
And the ocean was nearby and spent a lot of time there and eventually started surfing.
And it was just being in a space that was so expansive, nurtured something in me.
Being in the ocean, I always remember it reminded me of meditation.
Every wave was different.
You were immersed in something that was so great, you could feel that it was...
Beyond what you can see to the horizon, there is this energy there, and it is kind and unkind at the same time.
It is welcoming, and it is saying, I'm in control.
It is so many things, and I love that.
Were you ever afraid?
No.
When the waves got big enough, yeah, sure.
But I loved it.
I loved the aliveness of it.
You know, I remember when I was 14, we had a very, very destructive fire that tore through the region.
Almost came to our house.
We had that note on the door when you come back from being evacuated that says, we were able to save your home.
And just up the road, it had burned.
And I remember...
sneaking past the firefighters to go and see what had burned and walking the trail towards where the fire had started.
And it burned all the way to the ocean by then.
It was still smoldering in a few places.
And I shouldn't have been there.
But the ground was littered with pinecone seeds from the Bishop Pines on this charred landscape.
I remember the image.
It's clear as day to me now.
And I've then watched that forest regrow over the last 30 years.
And I was been reflecting on this recently that it's like I was part of that regrowth that was birthed by the serotiny of those pine cones seeding themselves in that fire.
And so my relationship to this place, this home where I've lived my whole life other than going back east for college for a few years,
You know, it has shaped me in so many ways, and it helped bring to the surface what had been primarily an interior experience.
And even though growing up, you know, it was always understood, wherever you turn, there is the face of God.
But to feel it in the body and to experience it in relationship to a place that nurtured me was a whole other journey.
Very different.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a line in your book.
I had to stop and think about it for a minute because it did strike me as a very different way of thinking about the divine than the Judeo-Christian tradition.
You said the creator wasn't better than the creation.
Rather, creation was a form of the creator, which opens the door to having...
a spiritual relationship with earth.
If earth is a face of the divine, it's not.
That's a very different vision of what the earth is than I grew up with.
You know, you mentioned the oneness of being earlier, which is this philosophy that is connected to this great, great early Sufi, Ibn Arabi.
And he developed this metaphysical system, this ontology, to understand how the beloved reveals themselves.
You know, and there's this wonderful Hadith Qudsi, which is...
A saying of the Prophet attributed to God that, I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known so I created the world so that I could be known.
And of course the Sufis, they changed it slightly to say, I longed to be loved.
I long to be loved, because it is through love that we really come to know something.
And so, for me, one of the sad things about the emphasis on transcendent forms of the divine is the disclusion of the imminent.
The desacralization, you know, we were speaking earlier about exile, the desacralization of earth.
And here we find ourselves at a time where that story of separation, that story of desacralization, has led us to treat the earth as a resource for us to exist in a human-centric reality that denies the holy ground we walk upon.
Well, I'm not sure where this is going to go.
This is sort of unformed.
But I'm thinking that many of us have wanted to fall back in love with the world.
And to a certain extent, it now feels like a moral agenda, too.
Like, that's what we should be doing.
I definitely should be walking in the woods rather than making a target run.
But I think often our first default...
you know, position is to try to learn.
So we're like, we're going to memorize the names of the trees and we're going to learn how to identify insects and plants.
And we're just going to try to learn a whole lot.
And so we have seen this like incredible explosion in the life sciences.
It's, it's amazing.
It's one of the most kind of wonder filled things that's happened in, in my lifetime, how much we know about the natural world now.
Yeah.
But I'm guessing that you would say that knowing is not the same as loving.
I don't know.
Do you have any comment there?
You know, I think that it's wonderful that there has been this resurgence of wanting to come to know the names of trees and come to know birdsong.
And I think it is in response to a deep hunger.
I don't think it's just the environmental movement.
There are a lot of birders out there who might not associate themselves as
environmentalist necessarily.
So I think going out, whether it's on a long walk or to know the names of trees and watch birds, is a beginning.
And if we follow that, it will change us.
But I'm also very interested in what happens if we intentionally try to engage with the living earth.
Because, you know, what is spiritual practice?
It's an intentional engagement with whether it's the divine or whether it's consciousness or whether it's love or whether it's emptiness.
There are these tremendous, I call them spiritual technologies, developed from many traditions, Sufism just being one.
Yeah, I mean, describe them.
We're jumping ahead a little bit, but the practice section is probably my favorite section in the book.
So talk a little bit more about those.
Well, my own experience over the years was that my own spiritual practice in meditation and zikr, which means recollection, and in my tradition, the primary practice is to be in constant remembrance of God.
So every breath you take breathes like a mantra, the name of God.
And what I discovered is that these practices naturally made me more porous to experience
the divine and the earth.
Again, I think a lot of people have experiences of God in nature more than anything else these days.
I always think that often when we walk through a forest or we walk through a landscape, we're not actually walking in the landscape.
We are walking in a forest, thinking about walking in a forest.
We may even be thinking about how wonderful it makes me feel that I'm walking in a forest.
But are we actually walking in a forest?
Oh, I feel so busted.
Right.
And part of me feels that that's extractive, to be perfectly honest, because it's taking and not giving.
But if we are focused on our breath, we can actually go beyond that space rather easily.
And we're not in this projected self-image of our own self.
We actually have an experience of that landscape.
Let's give folks a taste.
I mean, just take me on a virtual walk.
Like a guided practice, if you will.
Yeah.
A shortened version.
Short.
Well, the first thing I would do is before I would leave, I would actually try to put myself in the space of where I am going and why.
Often we begin something without putting ourselves in the space to begin.
And I would say it very simply, just close your eyes.
And bring your attention to your breath, following your out-breath as it leaves your body, enters the sphere and space around you, and then returns back to your body, making you both more aware of where you are and who you are.
As I walk and leave my door, I think also of the relationship between my step and my breath.
And I want to align my breath with my step at a pace that is comfortable to walk
Perhaps it is three steps per out-breath, one, two, three, and three steps per in-breath, one, two, three.
And the rhythm of my breath becomes aligned with the rhythm of my step.
And each time that my mind
is taken over by thoughts, I return to my breath and my step.
And the more we walk and the quieter the mind becomes, the more we perceive, the more we feel, the more we hear,
Let's pause there for just a second.
My guest is Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, founder of Emergence Magazine.
His new book is called Remembering Earth.
He's also a filmmaker and a former jazz musician and a Sufi teacher in the Naqshbandi tradition.
And we'll talk about music, birdsong, and listening into silence after this.
Hey, it's Steve.
I am so glad you're with us.
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One of the connections Emmanuel and I discovered is that we are both huge fans of the British folk singer Sam Lee and his Singing with Nightingales project.
Nightingales have a famously beautiful song, and every spring Sam takes small groups of people into the woods at night to listen to them and to hear Sam and some of his musician friends improvise duets with the birds.
Emmanuel was so enchanted by this, he wound up making a short film about it called The Nightingale's Song.
What was that like, being there in the woods with Sam?
Well, thank you for asking about that.
Sam's a remarkable fellow.
We met on a panel for Cambridge University, and he was talking about his relationship with the nightingale, which, you know, in Sufism has tremendous symbolism.
Oh, no, really?
The nightingale is big in Sufism, too?
Oh, it's huge.
I mean, God, this is a bird that makes their home throughout Middle East.
Oh, yes.
I mean, that sings all night to its lover, to its beloved.
I mean, that gives itself, you know.
Oh, yes.
Could there be a more spiritual bird?
Oh, and you listen to this bird, and then you have a spiritual experience there with Sam.
And he does this thing, you know, he leads people from the campfire at midnight into the woods, and in silence, you know, 30, 40 people at a time, half an hour to find the tree that the nightingale is singing, and it's a different tree, different night.
You know, so he creates this space where people leave behind the busyness of their lives and step into the wonder of the night.
And then they step into this space where they hear not just a nightingale, which is this very loud bird.
I mean, it is not subtle.
I've never heard it.
We don't have them in North America.
Oh, they're very loud.
They sing very loudly, beautifully but loudly.
And so you hear them as you step deeper into the woods.
And so you're first overtaken by their song and then his song in response.
And so, you know, the film is also a profile of Sam and it's about the relationship between Song and Birdsong and, you know, the epigenetic imprint that we all carry within us as human beings from the thousand years of actually being the recipient of Birdsong.
Because I do feel like this kind of ancestral memory is like an epigenetic imprint.
And also in the context of the reality of the times we're in, which is that in southern England, the nightingale,
is disappearing.
There are 5,000 pairs left.
And in our lifetime, most likely, they will not nest in England again.
What happens to a place when the birdsong that enveloped it for millennia, or much longer than millennia, really, maybe a million years, is silent?
We were talking about that longing to be in a deeper relationship with the earth.
Figuring out how to reconnect and not be gutted by the anguish.
That's the challenge.
Well, human beings are paradoxical creatures, you know.
We live in a constant state of contradiction.
We hold many realities at once, you know.
We can experience love and joy and pain and longing and heartbreak all at once.
What I have found in my own self, Anne, is that the earth is this incredible outpouring of abundance and compassion.
You know, she gives and she gives and she gives regardless of how we treat her.
In the midst of how we are destroying this incredible gift, she gives, she holds, she invites us.
And the more I've stepped into that, the more I am able to feel contained as I hold these paradoxical realities of feeling this grief and then wanting to step more and more into the love.
And the more I step into the love, the more I can actually feel grief sometimes.
And the love also helps me hold the grief, but it doesn't deny it.
It's messy.
But we're not alone.
I'm curious, why is Earth her to you?
Because that's how I've experienced her.
Of course, I'm not alone here.
She's been referred to as Mother Earth since the beginning, this great outpouring of creation, of birth.
And for me, actually, the divine has not been gendered, not been a he or a she.
No, that's why I was curious.
But my experience in this reality is different with her.
And I also feel it's important to acknowledge the feminine nature of Earth because we have denied that.
There is a very patriarchal component to the transcendent experience of religion and spiritual life that is very much central to the problems that we're experiencing now and the roots of the crisis.
And I think there needs to be a reclaiming of that, you know.
You mentioned earlier that you started out as a teenager to become a jazz musician, riffing still a little bit more on listening.
And I'm thinking about, I'm curious about what you might have learned as a jazz musician
about listening, about sound.
A little backdrop, my dad was a jazz musician.
He played in the late 50s and early 60s in New York City clubs, and he quit when I was very little, so I don't remember hearing him play.
But from what he's described, it's always sounded like an ecstatic experience, certainly an altered state.
What was your experience like, and what do you feel like you learned from those years of playing jazz?
I think it was hugely influential, actually.
You know, I fell in love with jazz when I was 14.
Like many people, I was given a record by Miles Davis.
Which one?
Kind of blue.
You know, it's the cliche beginning.
But that record is a masterpiece.
And something just came alive in me.
I had played bass before that, electric bass and cello.
I was a musician.
And I immediately traded my electric bass for an acoustic bass.
And overnight, I had been bitten by the jazz bug, as they say, and just immersed myself in that world.
I eventually dropped out of high school when I was 16 so I could play.
Oh, wow.
As a bass player, you were often the youngest and least accomplished musician on the bandstand because everyone needed a bass player so you could start working before you even knew how to play.
And that was my experience in many ways, was actually learning jazz on the bandstand
And they'd be like, no kid play it like this.
If they were nice, they would say that.
And if the piano player was nice, he'd play the roots in his left hand with his pinky.
But often they wouldn't do that, because they wanted you to learn the hard way, which is by opening your ears.
They would always say, oh, you know this tune?
OK, well, let's play it in D flat then.
Do you know it then?
So it was a great training.
And I was lucky enough to play with really good jazz musicians from when I was really young.
And they would often be like, listen to the space between the notes.
They have more power than the notes themselves.
The shaping of a melody, the shaping of a phrase, it is the space around the notes that gives that phrase its potency and its meaning.
It's not just the notes.
They're long traditions.
I don't know enough about them, but I'm thinking of music as a foundational, almost divine element of the world, the universe, the music of the spheres.
Did you feel connections between playing jazz and your spiritual path?
I did have transcendent experiences playing music.
Did you?
Yeah, many.
Not as many as I would have liked, honestly, because I found that jazz is an improvisational art form, but it is also a highly technical one in which you have this mastery of your instrument and music theory and the last canon of the great American songbook and all the standards that emerged from greats like Miles and Coltrane.
All of a sudden, you know a thousand songs, and you've got this great kind of meeting ground that you can play with other players.
But the real improvisation happened when the egos had to be left behind on the bandstand.
The technical mastery and your attachment to it had to be left behind on the bandstand.
And then something else would happen where you would step into the space of access to the imaginal, you know, the mundus imaginalis, you know, where the real creative force would actually reveal itself.
And, you know, the great ones, whether that be Coltrane, you know, or Miles or...
In more modern times, you know, players like Keith Jarrett, they knew how to do that.
They would put themselves in that space of openness and vulnerability.
Actually, there was a singer I played with who taught me this.
Her name was Rhiannon.
Wonderful singer.
Used to play Bobby McFerrin.
And for a while, I played just with her, like she had a...
It was just duets of bass and voice.
And she would never tell me what we were gonna play.
And you'd go out and you'd be on a stage with a thousand people, whatever it was, and you wouldn't know what you were going to play.
And bass and voice is very naked.
There's no harmony except the ones we create.
I learned a lot through that, through this nakedness of listening to the voice and responding to it.
But I didn't grow up with a lot of music in my house.
And my particular Sufi path actually emphasizes silence, not song or music, because I wasn't exposed to...
When I was young, two forms of praise and worship and trance-like experiences that come through music.
Later, as a teenager, when I was 14 to 16, I lived two years at an ashram my father sent me to for high school.
And there they chanted.
And there they sang devotional songs.
Did you like it?
The music?
The chanting, that practice?
I appreciated it, but it didn't feel authentic to my nature.
It was a place where people would stay up all night and fast and sing.
I did things like I swallowed 20 yards of cloth down into my system to pull it out to clean out your inside because it was a yogic practice that they would do.
They had pranayams where they would bend rebar around their arms and you would lie on beds of nails with boulders on your chest and they would break them open with...
With hammers, using the power of the breath.
It was like an exposure to a very different physical, spiritual reality kind of all in one.
And I tried all this stuff.
I was really intrigued.
It sounds amazing.
Yeah.
It was great.
Anyone could go and stay there as long as you did 35 hours of karma yoga.
So you had all sorts of people.
You had recovering alcoholics and drug addicts who had gotten clean and wanted to find a place to find meaning.
And they would be washing dishes next to you, next to the person who'd been there for 35 years, who was one of the founding members of the community.
And behind it all was this kind, silent yogi who wrote on a chalkboard and whistled.
He would whistle.
He would whistle to get your attention.
And you would ask him a question.
He'd write on a chalkboard.
And I loved it.
It brought many worlds together for me.
Well, so I was curious about, you mentioned dream work earlier.
And I know that's another part of your practice.
I mean, you mentioned the imaginal world, that there is this other reality.
Do you have a theory of dreams?
I mean, what do you believe dreams are?
Dreams are a very traditional part of the Sufi path.
And in our tradition, dream work has always played a central role.
You know, my father used to say, when we dream, the king is not in his castle, the prisoner is not in his cell.
You know, it's like, it's the closest place we often have where ego consciousness falls away and we step into this most vast reality.
And also in Sufism, it was part of the tradition of learning to catch the divine hint.
Oh, I love that line, the divine hint.
Yeah, that there are these hints that are given to us and that learning to listen to our dreams is a training so that when it happens, then we catch the moment.
And so to me, dreams were, I mean, they were such a central part of my childhood.
I remember as a child, I actually used to get quite upset because every breakfast, my father and mother would be talking about the dreams that they had or the dreams that other people had.
And it was like, oh, can we just have a break?
You know, people's dreams, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, when I asked you about theory, there's a whole school of thought that the dream is your psyche.
It's all from inside you.
And then there's another way of thinking that, no, it's not just interior.
The dream is coming from out there.
Yes, completely.
I mean, the world of our psyche is like, let's say that's the first room.
that we enter when we enter the dream world, but there are many other rooms.
I mean, I've experienced many teachings coming through dreams.
I've been from people, people I know who are alive, people who are dead.
I've experienced the divine speaking to me in my dreams, and so have you, and so have so many other people.
We just don't listen to it enough.
Can I ask you about a dream, then?
Sure.
No, I'm going to ask.
First, can I ask you about one of mine?
Oh, gosh, sure.
Well, let's see.
And then I'll ask you about one of yours.
Okay.
Okay, there's a recurrent dream, and it's always along a body of water.
It could be the ocean.
It could be a very clear river.
And I'm wading in it.
And there are these incredible shells, seashells like I've never seen before.
Just the most beautiful.
And once it was little golden statues, figurines in the water.
It's treasure.
But I can never have it, get it.
Sometimes I'll try to pick things up.
Always something happens.
And then the dream takes a turn and I have to leave.
But it's the most magical place I've ever been.
What do I do with that?
You know, what's interesting to me is that it plays out along the shoreline.
And I always think like a shoreline or a riverbank is a meeting of worlds.
You know, this vast unknown space, the sea, which is often a symbol of the divine in Sufism, or the river, you know, this river of the divine that flows.
The source.
The source, and at the shore is often where we interface with it, and there are many treasures that exist there.
The question I have is, is that a bad thing that you can't take them with you, or is it just that you experience something in that space, in that dream, where these worlds come together along the shore, and that you have access to something there?
And what about for you?
Well, since I just shared before my time in this ashram,
The backdrop is, you know, like most teenagers, I was rebelling.
There was tremendous resentment about my life and my family and this and that and being in this small town and not being understood, you know, all the things that come to the surface, right?
Yeah.
And I rebelled, and that was my, you know, I've only done drugs a few times in my life, and it was when I was, you know, 12, 13 that I did.
And I lived in a small hippie town where the kids, you get high with your parents.
They'd be like, here's a joint, go play.
You know, I had my first experience of mushrooms at a birthday party when I was 13.
And in the midst of that, of course, my father was insisting that I meditate with him twice a day at 6 a.m. and at 5 p.m.,
But when I went to Mount Madonna, all that fell away, which is the name of the school, this ashram.
And I started to have very, very powerful mystical experiences, different than the ones I had before, very different dreams.
And I had this dream that there was this field below the—sorry, I'm getting emotional sharing it with you—
below the main gathering hall on the property, and it was foggy, and I was walking towards these figures on the other side of the field.
And on the left side, I saw my father, and I saw Irina Tweedie standing next to him.
And on the right side, I saw Baba Hari Dass, which was this yogi who was there, and to his right, an older Indian teacher.
And they all said together in one voice, come, join us.
And it unleashed something in me.
It was like something in me felt validated and something in me changed in that moment.
My life really changed after that.
My spiritual life, my everything really.
And it came in a dream.
Getting ready to talk with you, I was curious about what your father's been writing lately.
There's an essay, Preparing for the Dark and Holding the Light.
This was a hard essay for me to read.
He talked about, you know, we're in an era where the light of the sacred is receding.
And he goes on to talk about how...
As the future unfolds, there will be small little outposts of light that will remain, little hidden enclaves where the seeds of the future can be planted.
That's kind of terrifying.
It's like a vision of entering a new dark ages.
I don't know.
What's your reading of that?
Yes, my father's teachings, especially the last few years, he wrote a whole book about that called The Darkening of the Light a while ago.
It's not a new, yes.
No, and this was after he wrote many, many books about human consciousness evolving, you know, and he felt there was a missed opportunity.
and a window that was closed.
And so I think that there is a darkness about what we have done.
You can call the climate catastrophe, you can call the ecocide, you can call the reality of our modern capitalistic system completely run rampant.
It has set certain things in motion.
And our response is,
are completely going the other direction away from what we could have been doing.
You know, if we think even just now about how much money is being invested in AI and data centers, what could be done with that?
You know, you can pick things apart.
I mean, and that is maybe we want to take this conversation, but there is a darkness that is present and a darkness that will only grow
And yet, in the midst of that, there is, of course, light.
And there is our own engagement with what is unfolding.
It would be nice if we knew in advance what was coming.
It's funny that what I'm thinking about is my experience of being pregnant.
I have two children, and they're grown now.
But...
You know, the experience of pregnancy, it is a kind of death.
You're no longer ever the person that you were.
And for the period that you're pregnant, you are two bodies in one.
You have to die to a certain extent to who you've been and what you've been before.
An old period of life ends, but something amazing comes out of it.
So I kind of like to think, well, maybe we're all pregnant with the next world.
Oh, I think we are.
Taking it back to Sufism, one of the most fundamental sayings is to die before you die.
The death of the ego, the death of the self.
And here I think we see also the death of a culture that denied the divine and the birth of something new.
And I am trying to put all of my attention, all of my focus, all of my gaze, the full capacity of my heart and my ears on what is being born.
That's the work now.
That's the midwifery.
But it is indeed a birthing.
That's how I think of it.
It is.
And it has been a privilege to be part of it.
Privileged to talk with you, too.
And thank you so much on behalf of all your other readers and listeners for the gift and the jewel that Emergence has been for all these years.
You have really opened a space in our culture for the next thing to come through.
Thank you.
And it's been really such a pleasure to speak with you.
Thank you for the invitation.
Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee is the founder, executive editor, and podcast host of Emergence Magazine.
He's a documentary filmmaker and former jazz musician and a Sufi teacher in the Naqshbandi tradition.
His new book of essays and spiritual ecology practices is called Remembering Earth.
And if you want to explore any more, you'll find links on our website.
at wondercabinetproductions.com.
I'm Anne Strainchamps.
And I'm Steve Paulson.
And this would be a good time to catch up on any episodes you missed because Wonder Cabinet is going on vacation.
Our audio engineer, Steve Gotcher, is heading out on a month-long bike trip.
Our digital producer, Mark Riechers, has some Midwest travel plans.
And Anne and I are making our annual summer migration to Vermont.
We will be back with new episodes in August.
Whether you are staying home or traveling this summer, I hope you have a chance to spend a lot of blissful time outdoors.
We'll be thinking of you.