Product Description

This classic work by Reshad Feild, one of today’s best-known Sufi teachers in the West, tells the compelling story of his journey into an ancient and powerful spiritual path. Starting as a London antique dealer, Feild comes into contact with the enigmatic Hamid, a Sufi teacher who leads him into a world of mystery, knowledge, and limitless love.

In this journey, which takes him to the mystical sites of Turkey, Feild is forced to confront his own inner weaknesses and falsehoods. Hamid and the events of his search take him again and again into confrontation with the limits of his own being, enabling him to shed the false conditioning that lies between himself and his true nature.

This hard-to-put-down adventure is a travelogue in more ways than one. It tells of Feild’s exhilarating explorations into mystical Turkey, a land of whirling dervishes and the tombs of great saints, but also a world that opens into the divine love that lies at the heart of all.

This twenty-fifth anniversary edition features a new foreword by Coleman Barks, the fore­most modern interpreter of the Sufi poet Rumi.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #591069 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Customer Reviews

Extraordinary Conversations
Finding this book in print is like finding an insider's multi-million dollar stock tip in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, or an original Rembrandt etching at a yard sale. Such things aren't supposed to happen. But when they do, the finder is perversely negligent not to take advantage of them.
We all know that the way to learn an art or a skill is to apprentice to a master, and this is truest of all in the case of the ultimate art - the art of becoming fully human, becoming what Jesus and St. Paul called "perfect", "completed". However, though it's easy to find a fine surgeon or an expert carpenter, it's not so easy to locate a reliable teacher in the realm of the spirit. The field is full of frauds since so few of us are equipped to judge true quality. And instruction in this art is usually private and secret, for good and sufficient reasons. The fate of those who go public can be unhappy.
Here is the autobiographical record of a young British pop musician who went east on a spiritual journey. So far not unusual. He found a capable teacher who was not a fraud and was willling to talk: less usual. And he took notes! He took copious notes, and put the record of his experiential learning into a book, and this book is available on the internet.
Only in these strange times, when, as Jesus said, there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, and nothing whispered in a private room that will not be shouted from the rooftops, could such a thing be possible.
Thank goodness that Reshad went looking, that Bulent was willing to teach, that Reshad took notes, and that Lindisfarne Press has brought the book out again. It contains instructions for learning to live, a skill most of us are still beginners at.

Entering a Strange, New World
I have read this book twice -- still remembering the mesmerizing effect this account of a seeker's discovery of Sufism had upon me when first I read it.

Sufism is the mystical side of Islam. With its emphasis on mystical experience, personal entrance into the divine presence, with its emotion, joy, its oft comparison of human love to divine love -- the main body of Islam has seen it as suspect, somewhat aberrant, and on the verge of heretical.

If you enjoy a spiritual "adventure" story filled with mysterious happenings and demanding of its main character, the author, Reshad Feild, his complete devotion and obedience --- you should appreciate this true account.

If you want to gain some inkling of the nature of the "other" Islam -- so different from mainstream Islam -- that it seems in feeling and practice more akin to Buddhism or Hinduism -- I think you will be more than satisfied.