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In the Company of Friends: Dreamwork Within a Sufi Group

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"In our extrovert culture the spiritual ways of the heart have been forgotten. Love's intimacy has come to refer only to sexual passion, and the idea of a divine lover is found only in myth or the fantasies of romance novels... We give ourselves to a love that does not belong to the world, to a longing that will take us to our real home."

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee is telling us with these words about the sacred space within the heart where the real love affair is consummated, the love affair of which the relationship with another human being is but the dimmest reflection. So often the energy of our love is subverted by our culture, its debased values making us forget the real love we have always secretly been looking for. The author reminds us of what we truly hunger for, even if in that hunger we've been sent looking in every wrong direction.

This is a book for love and for lovers. Each one of our souls is made in a particular way and has a particular relationship with its Lord. For some of us the common thread is that this relationship is a love affair; that's the only thing that makes sense to us in the end. The author uses dreams and teaching stories from spiritual tradition to mirror the soul's journeying to and within the sacred space of the heart, so that how this takes place in an individual's life becomes visible for an instant.

In the Company of Friends shows the importance of a spiritual group, not as another collective to supplant the collective we already belong to, but as a container where that sacred space, created and kept empty for the real love affair is nurtured to maturity. The author gives us a way of looking at our life, not as something just to use for ourselves, but as that ever-deepening mystery where our soul's love affair with God unfolds.