Transcript for Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee: The Emerging Consciousness of Oneness

globaloneness project The Emerging Consciousness of Oneness For many years the focus of my teaching and writing was on the traditional stages of the Sufi path. The journey of the soul back to the source. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Inverness, California, Naqshbandiyya Mujaddidiyya: Sufi Teacher From separation back to union with God with all of the traditional experiences, such of longing, that belong to Sufism, and I am by nature a kind of traditional mystic that the new age spritual teaching, so to speak, didn't mean very much to me. My focus was on the inner experiences of the individual, the inner mystical experiences that really belong to classical Sufism. And then a strange thing happened in the spring of the year 2000. Suddenly my attention was shifted. It's like somebody turned my head from here to there and then I saw what I have called this emerging consciousness of oneness. That there is something awakening in the world that hasn't been here before. You can trace it back to the mystical understanding of oneness because oneness is a basic mystical experience. Many, many, many people have had experiences of oneness. They've woken up for a moment, and like the poet William Blake said, "To see the world in a grain of sand." They have had those momentary experiences. They see that everything is one. They see the universe as one dynamic whole. But the idea that this might become part of our collective human experience, not just an individual mystical experience, which it has been traditionally in the past, the unio mystica of the mystics. That somehow the whole of humanity is taking a step to a different level of awareness. This really began to interest me, and then I began to see signs of it around. Signs in this global consciousness and how quickly we have developed global communication. The internet and other examples. Also ecology, the realizing that we're all one part of one interdependent whole, and that the only way for humanity to survive is to take responsibility for ourselves as one living planet and as one race that is responsible for that planet. And then I began to think, what role does the mystic have to play in this new emerging global consciousness? And that is kind of the direction my work has taken me. www.globalonenessproject.org