How spiritual psychology 
can lead us on a journey deep into ourselves

An interview with Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee  
By Ravi Dykema

        Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, PhD, a sheikh of the Naqshbandi Sufi Order, has followed the Naqshbandi Sufi path since the 1970s, when he met Irina Tweedie, author of Daughter of Fire: A Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master (Golden Sufi Center, 1995). His own spiritual journey, chronicled in his autobiographical The Face Before I Was Born (Golden Sufi Center, 1997), began when he was 16 and for more than two decades followed a course of tremendous love, psychological breakdown, craziness, bliss and the slow work of balancing the two worlds: the inner world of the spirit and the outer demands of everyday family.

      Currently, Vaughan-Lee specializes in Sufi dreamwork, integrating the ancient Sufi approach to dreams with the insights of modern psychology. He lectures in Europe and in the United States, and has written a number of books on Sufism, including Love Is a Fire: A Sufi's Mystical Journey Home (Golden Sufi Center, 2000), Sufism: The Transformation of the Heart (Golden Sufi Center, 2001) and his newest book, Working with Oneness (Golden Sufi Center, 2002). Here, he shares his thoughts on spiritual psychology with Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema.

RD: In your work, you bring together Sufi approaches and modern psychology. Could you contrast the Western concept of psychology with the Eastern view of psychology or spirituality?

 

LVL: When I was 30, I had a dream telling me to study the work of Carl Jung. So I did, and went on to do a PhD in Jungian psychology and Shakespeare. At the time, Jungian psychology was one of the few schools of Western psychology that had a spiritual dimension. I continued studying, then wrote my first book 13 years ago on spiritual dream work and spiritual psychology within the Sufi tradition. When I came to America in '89, I began to lecture on spiritual psychology and dream work, and the need to ground spiritual work within a Western psychological tradition. One of the things Jung stressed is that if you just take an Eastern spiritual discipline that isn't grounded in your own cultural psychology, you can create a lot of problems.

 

RD: Could you contrast the Western concept of psychology with the Eastern view of psychology or spirituality?

 

LVL: That's a big question. Psychology is the study of the psyche, the unconscious, and what is beneath the threshold of consciousness has an affect on our conscious life more than we can imagine. There are different levels of the unconscious. For example, Freudian psychology focuses on the personal unconscious, which are repressed desires-for example, repressed sexuality-and also the behavior patterns that underline our consciousness. And Carl Jung actually went deeper than that into the archetypal charter of psyche, and suggested that collective archetypes could decide the fate of mankind. For example, the warrior archetype took over the German people in World War II. You can also see it now in Afghanistan, where a whole culture is being taken over by a warrior archetype.

      Early gods and goddesses, especially Greek gods and goddesses, were personifications of the archetype. Much of our understanding of archetypal psychology goes back to gods and goddesses. For example, in the East, the goddess Kali represents the very powerful feminine archetypal energy, both creative and destructive. And much of Jung's work was understanding how those powerful unconscious forces imaged as gods and goddesses affect our own personal psyche, and  how many of our problems come from being cut off from understanding these archetypal forces.

 

RD: As I understand it, when people are in what they call emotional pain, when they can't accomplish what they need to accomplish, they seek psychology.

 

LVL: You have beautifully illustrated a watershed dilemma. People can't accomplish what they want to accomplish because they have inner pain that's driving them crazy, so they seek a psychologist. Here, you immediately encounter two different approaches. The psychology one is, "I've got a problem that stops me from getting on with my life, so I want to seek a psychologist to fix it, to help me to get on with my life." And that is one approach to psychology. The other is, "I've got a pain. I need to understand where this pain comes from." This is the beginning of the inner journey. And this is when psychology, particularly in the spiritual tradition to which I belong, is also an opening to the unconscious, to the inner world.

      There's a beautiful saying that is, "God enters through a wound." Often, in the West, it's psychological problems that first draw people inward, maybe initially just to fix them. But then they discover they have deeper and deeper dimensions. And this can take them on the inner journey. For many people, the psychological journey is a stepping stone into the very depths of themselves, where they discover their un-wholeness. Then you get a much deeper well being, than just getting on with what you feel is your life's agenda. Sometimes you get taken into the false agenda, or the ego's agenda.

 

RD: Let's look at an example. Say I'm a 45-year-old woman with healthy kids, a loving husband, a decent job and a fair amount of money. But I'm unhappy. So I go to see a psychologist, who happens to be a spiritual psychologist, trained like you are. What might my journey entail?

 

LVL: There is a beautiful Christian saying called "divine discontent." This belongs to the whole image of the journey home. There comes a point in life when the soul begins to call to the personality, to the ego. The soul, or God, begins to draw that person's attention away from their outer life and all their involvement with the outer life into the journey of the soul. This is what some people would say is the greatest purpose a human being can have, to reclaim their own soul, to go deeply into themselves. Often, it begins with a feeling of discontent. The Sufis have a word for it: They call it "longing," or "the cry of the soul."

      This ancient cry of the soul that wants to go home begins to influence the person by creating a feeling of unhappiness or discontent with their outer surroundings. If this person comes to a good spiritual psychologist, they will create a container in which the inner journey can begin to unfold. Often it is in dreams that the inner world speaks to us, because dreams often have the most access to our non-rational self. So we may begin to have dreams of wanting to make a journey or of these archetypes of the self, and this ancient mysterious process begins to take place. This begins the spiritual journey, or the journey of the soul or journey back to God.

 

RD: This person who came to the psychologist wants to feel satisfaction and contentment that she thinks is normal for a human in her circumstances, and she thinks there's something wrong with her that she's unhappy. What would you say to her?

 

LVL: I would listen to what her inner self is trying to say to her. This has to do with the feminine quality of listening, being receptive and creating a space that's so necessary for process. Then the inner self begins to respond. Something deep within the individual is acknowledged, something below the surface. Often in our busy lives, where we're so focused on outer activity, we don't have time for this interior, feminine dimension of ourselves. If it's given space, it responds, with feelings or with dreams or with images. Then you begin to listen, and the inner journey begins to unwind itself.

 

RD: Would you expect that this woman would feel some relief from the discomfort right away in the process?

 

LVL: Often in the beginning there is an enormous relief that, finally, the soul is being listened to. And it can bring what I call the honeymoon period, when the soul begins to relax and be aware that it's being listened to. It often brings up deep feelings of joy and peace and enormous well-being. This has to do with the need to create a space in which the soul feels it is being received and acknowledged.

      Often, this initial period can last six months or so, and then one begins the more difficult encounter with what Jung called "the shadow," the darkness within oneself that has been repressed. This is the gateway to the deeper recesses of the human.

 

RD: Will the woman we're imagining need to spend hours every day doing inner sensing practices? Would she have to hire someone to take her kids to the soccer game instead of taking them herself?

 

LVL: Not in the tradition to which I belong. Sufis have always lived very much within life. Because so much of this process happens in the unconscious, what is necessary at first is to acknowledge this other dimension and give it a little time alone. For example, if you have a dream at night, give it five or 10 minutes of space during the day. After a while, some sort of meditation practice is very helpful, but it's often difficult at first to set aside that kind of time. At some point, however, 15 to 20 minutes a day to give precedence to one's own inner being is not asking too much.

      It's important just to be able to have time quietly to oneself. Many people do this by going for a walk, or just by sitting quietly and maybe, eventually, developing a meditation practice. But it is very important to remain grounded in outer everyday activities, because you are entering a whole different dimension to yourself. Everyday activities are an important balance, otherwise you can get unbalanced and become a bit obsessed with the inner process.

 

RD: Give me an example of how one might become out of balance with the inner process.

 

LVL: You can get addicted to everything that is happening within yourself. It can become an obsession. The consciousness can get drawn too deep within the unconscious. And there may come a certain period when this needs to happen, but initially it's certainly not advisable.

 

RD: How would a person know if that's happening?

 

LVL: They get too spaced out. It's not uncommon to encounter people who have done too many spiritual practices without being grounded in everyday reality. There's a slightly glazed look in their eyes, and they can no longer function in everyday life. It's important to be able to do the shopping, to take the kids to school, to be there for your partner, even while this other, very different process is taking place within yourself.

 

RD: So if a person were in this state, might they also be very blissful or serene?

 

LVL: It can happen for a certain period of time. But, unfortunately, it for a certain type of person who likes to escape the responsibilities of everyday life, the inner journey or the spiritual journey can become a crutch, or an escape route to not have to deal with the business of making a living, of looking after the kids, of putting food on the table, all the demands of everyday life.

      Different spiritual traditions have different protocols. For example, there are Buddhist traditions that say you need to make a three-year retreat, and there are certain practices that will take you deep within yourself within the protection of a monastery. There are also other Hindu traditions that say you need to go to the ashram, that you can't continue a worldly life. I think in the West it's much more difficult to do this, just by the very physical nature of life. You need car insurance. You need certain physical things to function in the West. That's why a good grounding is very important to be able to contain the inner process.

      Jung actually said, in some of his writings, that the process of individuation shouldn't start until middle age. Until then, you are very involved in your outer activities-raising a family, making a career, all of that. It does seem that in the past 20 or 30 years something has changed in that many people are not prepared to wait that long.

 

RD: Doesn't the Sufi culture encourage encountering the world while doing your spiritual work?

 

LVL: Yes, that's always been part of the Sufi culture. There's no monasticism in Sufi. There are no ashrams-in fact, the maximum you get is a 40-day retreat at any one time. And Sufis have often had crafts or trades. The founder of my order, for example, was a potter. Another famous Sufi, Ata, was a perfumer. And they would support themselves with their crafts while training disciples, who were often also apprentices. And everyday life would continue. It's one of the hallmarks of Sufi. It's always integrated into everyday life.

 

RD: Let me take you back to your comment about how, upon entering a spiritual path, one will encounter the shadow.

 

LVL: This is very important, and this is where there is a real need for spiritually based psychology. You do begin to hit this darkness within yourself, what Jung called the shadow. Everything you have repressed, the dark side of you, the cruelty and violence-part of this is your own personal psychology, part may come from your parents, part may even belong to the collective. But if you don't have a psychological container or guideline to help you through this, you can use spiritual practices to escape, to take you into what you think are spiritual states, which are really just patterns of avoidance, of dealing with the darkness within yourself.

 

RD: Let's go back to the 45-year-old woman who's now on a spiritual path, and she's encountering her shadow. What might she be experiencing?

 

LVL: A similar person I know had a dream in which she was driving a Volvo, and was feeling very secure, and then the Volvo turned into this cruel monster. The grill from the front of the car became like the grimace of a monster. And she suddenly became aware that under the surface of her caring persona, there was a cruelty inside of herself that she'd never really faced. It would erupt in moments of stress. Suddenly, she'd get really mean with the kids or be really unpleasant to her husband. And she called it her bad temper.

      You see, what happens is, for most people, there is not just a veil between the conscious and the unconscious, there's a barrier that protects them from the unconscious world erupting too dangerously into their daily life. When you begin the inner journey, you begin to penetrate that barrier. It weakens. You need this to happen. But when it does, you are no longer protected from these dark forces within yourself. You have to go into the unconscious and begin the often-painful work of what Jung called encountering the shadow and transforming the shadow.

      One of the paradoxes is that the shadow, when transformed, becomes your own inner divinity. This is what the alchemists called turning lead into gold-taking a base metal, like lead, and through inner work transforming it into gold, the gold of what Jung called one's higher self. This is also imaged in Zen in the stages of finding the bull, taking the bull home and taming the bull, during which the black bull eventually becomes a white bull with a little black tail. It is then this bull that takes you home. Without this primal energy, this darkness, you cannot make the spiritual journey. But you need to have a psychological container to encounter these forces and to work with them.

 

RD: Define for us psychological container.

 

LVL: For many people, it is a relationship with a spiritual psychologist. That hour you spend is a container. Other people may find it within a spiritual group that is grounded in psychological work. You need to have a place that validates the inner process, in which there are some guidelines as to how to work with the inner world.

 

RD: Tell us a little more about how you work with the shadow.

 

LVL: In Sufism, it's very simple. First of all, you encounter it. You actually become aware that you're not the pleasant person you thought you were. You pay attention to these feelings of rage, or feelings of empty, hollow uselessness. The first thing is not to blame somebody else. You realize that this is the whole dynamic of projection, that you project your shadow onto somebody else. It's always somebody else's fault. It's somebody else who gets you angry.

      For example, there's always a co-worker you really don't like. If you begin to work on yourself, you realize the reason you don't like this person is because they exhibit qualities you don't like about yourself. This is when you begin to take responsibility for yourself, both spiritually and psychologically. If somebody really irritates you, more than the external situation warrants, you're projecting your shadow onto them. It is a very good tool.

      First of all, you withdraw the projection and just become aware of that part of yourself. Then, in Sufism, we just love that-accept it with love or, if you like, offer it to God. It's the same. And then you begin to have access to more energy within yourself, and you begin to discover deeper parts of yourself. Now, those who just want a nice spiritual fix won't bother to encounter the shadow. They won't want to deal with all of their own darkness. And that's fine. But they will never really have access to their own spiritual dimensions.

 

RD: Are there other, more positive aspects that may be encountered in the shadow?

 

LVL: Yes-in the shadow you can find repressed creativity. For example, if your parents never allowed you to be creative, if you always wanted to be a dancer or a poet, and your parents said, "No, you need a proper, sensible career," you may find repressed creativity in the shadow that has never been allowed. It's not just negative qualities, although that's how most people initially encounter it.

 

RD: It seems as if people have a governor on their pleasure meter, and after a certain point, they will turn it off. Is that part of this journey or encounter with this deeper layer of self?

 

LVL: I think it is difficult for people to just allow themselves to enjoy the simple things in life. Parental influences are a factor-for example, you may have had parents who didn't allow that element of just having fun. And there are cultural influences that say you should be working hard and getting on with your life. You can face up to these cultural forces if you say, "Well, I don't want to live like that. I want a more ordinary, adequate life that gives me time to listen to beautiful music or play football with my kids."

 

RD: Is  sexuality one arena where people can work with their avoidance of pleasure?

 

LVL: How you address sexuality really depends on what field of psychology you're working in. For example, in Sufism, we focus on the heart chakra, rather than the lower chakras, and the intent is to move any blocks. But there is a danger of focusing too much on the sex chakra. It can become obsessive. You can actually get stuck in that energy center. My teacher said orgasm is the one experience of bliss on the level of the soul which is given to humanity for the sake of procreation-there is a bliss in orgasm that belongs to the level of the soul.

      On a spiritual path, one actually wants to go higher, and focus on higher energies in the body, not repressing the lower energies but also not becoming obsessed with them. Instead, they should be used in conjunction with the higher spiritual senses. Otherwise, they use too much energy, and the focus of attention just remains in the base chakra within the human being. So, on the Sufi path, we work mainly with the heart chakra, which is the energy of love. One of the mysterious qualities of the heart chakra is that it includes within it all the other chakras in the human being.

 

RD: You said that spiritual psychology draws on traditions. And you mentioned that at times, using a spiritual tradition that's distant from your culture is problematic.

 

LVL: This is very important, because it has to do with the psychological structure of individuals within the culture to which they belong. What is not generally understood is that, for example, people in the West are structured differently psychologically from people in the East. You can be much nearer to the collective, for example, in India. The ego is not so differentiated. Often the person identifies himself through the family, and so they're much nearer to the collective.

      In the West, we stress individuality. The ego is much more developed. So if one is going to work with a psychological model on the spiritual path, one needs to have a model that is grounded in the Western psyche. Jung re-discovered this Western tradition called individual self-development, and that has a spiritual dimension. It is imaged in this process of turning lead into gold, which is working with the contents of your psyche to produce the purity of the self.

 

RD: So in the East, what might be a process of spiritual psychology for a person, compared to the West?

 

LVL: There's a whole process of self-development they don't have to get involved with, because the ego is not so defined, so they can work much more directly with the archetypes, with the gods and goddesses. For example, in Tibetan Buddhism you have these practices of encountering and imaging bodhisattvas and deities, which is the individual working directly with the forces of the collective, with the gods and goddesses.

      In the West, there's no point in going straight to encounter Kali or something like that because you have to encounter your personal shadow. And you also have to realize your own personal identity, your own personal self-worth. There aren't the same ego problems in the East. A friend of mine who lives in China said that until recently, there were no psychologists in China because the focus on personal self-development is not part of that culture. Instead, the focus was on spiritual techniques, not resolving personal problems. She didn't understand all this obsession in the West with personal identity as a problem. She said, "Life is life. You just live it as it comes."

 

RD: Where would you place Sufism in this band between Eastern collective and Western ego development?

 

LVL: Sufism was born in the Middle East, and practical Sufi psychology has not been Westernized. Part of my work, in the initial books I wrote, was actually to develop a Western model of Sufi psychology that is appropriate for people in the West. And certain Sufi terms and concepts may be challenging. For example, the "nafs" refer to both the lower nature and the ego, which Sufis say you really have to get rid of. Now for us in the West, our lower nature is often repressed by the ego. And we can't just purify the naf. The whole idea of just purification without integration is not healthy.

      Instead of trying to conquer our lower nature, we need to accept it much more. Part of our whole instinctual nature has been repressed to such a degree that we need to learn to accept it, not just conquer it-our sexuality, our negative emotions. We need to see where they come from, to understand them, not just purify them or drive them out. Otherwise it becomes a psychological imbalance.

 

RD: Is all this looking and exploring with the ultimate intent of purifying?

 

LVL:  No, it's with the intent of becoming a whole human being. This is the next step that we need to take-moving away from a dualistic view of good and bad, and towards integration, wholeness, including the masculine and feminine in a balanced way. One needs the energy of the shadow for inner work. Part of it does get purified, but part of it also remains.

      For example, if you're an angry person, you may do all this inner work and find you still have anger. Then, you need to learn how to use your anger creatively rather than say, "I shouldn't be an angry person." Sometimes anger can be useful, to invigorate, to draw lines, to draw boundaries. Too much purification and you lose that. We have a heritage in the West of a drive toward perfection, which can be unhealthy.

      Some Western Christian traditions look towards perfection, which usually means somebody else needs to carry the shadow. For the last thousand years or so women, the feminine, have had to carry the shadow of the masculine drive for perfection.

 

RD: And how did they carry the shadow?

 

LVL: They got persecuted. And it's not just women, but also the feminine values of patience, listening, being receptive, letting things happen in their own way.

      By contrast, masculine in our culture is goal-driven, dominating, dynamic. I think it needs to be used in harmony with the feminine. The traditional ideal of courtly love is that the masculine should be in service to the feminine, and that came from the Sufi tradition. A lot of Sufi poetry describes the relationship of lover and beloved, with a whole symbolism of describing the beloved as this beautiful woman.

 

RD:  What about Westerners who adopt Eastern traditions, like Zen or Yoga or Buddhism or Sufism?

 

LVL: I think a lot of very valuable work is being done within these spiritual traditions to give them a psychological grounding in Western psychology. I think this integration of Eastern spirituality and Western psychology is invaluable work, and it's helping those spiritual traditions to be brought to the West in a more grounded sense. It's also helping them to be more effective for the individual. Within Buddhism, for example, a lot of work is being done to provide a Western psychological model and integrate it within a Buddhist framework, and there are other people doing that work in Sufism.

 

RD: And if someone encounters the tradition without the integration of psychology, what would be the downside?

 

LVL: They would do spiritual practices that would awaken energies that aren't psychologically integrated. For example, some practices awaken the kundalini energy and other forces within the psyche that cross the barrier between the conscious and the unconscious world, without a container to integrate them. A lot of people did spiritual practices in the '70s that were not grounded in the everyday reality of life, and they often became either unbalanced or disappointed.

      In general, I think the journey towards perfection and purification has been, through a psychological understanding, replaced by a journey towards wholeness, which integrates everyday life and grounded spiritual practice, that enables the human being to find their own spiritual center while they are in the midst of life as it is each day.