Sufism is the practice of remaining aware of the real presence of God in every circumstance, until Certainty is reached. The dizzying complexity of Sufi metaphysics, the passionate beauty of Sufi poetry, and the profound Sufi science of spiritual psychology, are all based on this. The Sufi Path is the process of spiritual transformation, ultimately resulting (God willing) in self-transcendence, produced by the Certainty of Gods presence.

In traditional Muslim society, many different moral, intellectual and spiritual functions were performed by those estates responsible for maintaining them....

The Traditionalist or Perennialist School of metaphysics, esoterism, and comparative religion, 'founded' by Rene Guenon and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, and carried on by such figures as Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt, and Martin Lings, produced a body doctrine of rare depth and comprehension, effectively re-introducing to the modern and postmodern West the perennial wisdom of the human race. For the past twenty years, the author has immersed himself in these teachings, and made his own modest contribution to them. The three fundamental pillars of 'classical' Traditionalism / Perennialism are,...

The spiritual life must obviously take psychology into account; if we want to do good and know truth, we will have to understand what in us supports this intent, and what stands in the way of it. But after Jungian Psychology, Humanistic Psychology, Transpersonal Psychology, and Ken Wilbers Integral Psychology, the reader may wonder what remains to be said vis-à-vis psychology and the Spiritual Path. In the authors opinion, what remains is to present a psychology rooted in traditional metaphysics, one that he has termed "Principial Psychology". This psychology is not essentially new; elements...

When poet Jack Gilbert, some time in the 1970's in San Francisco, asked his poetry class, "Who here aspires to write a masterpiece?," not one hand was raised. I, on the other hand, wanted to do just that; after reading Blake's Prophetic Books for the first time, as a naive youth, I said to myself: "Wow I'd like to write one of those " So I tried my best; it took me thirty-three years. The idol of "street language" that entered my art in the 1970's was of no interest to me; I wanted to write in a dense, heightened, magical, poetic language such as ear of cabbie or bar-fly had never heard. I...

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French philosopher René Guénon (1886-1951), who spent many years searching for a true esoteric Way, crossed paths with many false and subversive spiritualities before arriving at the threshold of Islamic Sufism. In his prophetic masterpiece The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times he classed the worst of these spiritualities as examples of the Counter-Initiation. Anti-Tradition-secularism and materialism-opposes religion; Counter-Tradition inverts it; and the esoteric essence of Counter-Tradition is the Counter-Initiation. The author expands on this concept,...

It is a blessing, a warning, and a sign that these Six Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of His Time have resurfaced at this particular moment in history. Renewed by caliphs and sultans, supported by scores of fatwas, and accepted as law for nearly 1400 years, these documents were common knowledge to educated Muslims and Christians until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, after which they virtually disappeared from collective consciousness. Their rediscovery will certainly open a new field in both Islamic Studies and interfaith relations. As the written words of the...