Exploring the Sufi Mystical Tradition in the Contemporary
World
Three Day Workshops from 10.30am to 4pm (£25 per workshop)
With Sara Sviri
Wednesday 10th June 2015
at the Rose Window Hermitage, Kilburn, NW6 7XF
Polarity and Oneness:
How to Live the Mysterium
Coniunctionis?
The workshops on 10th and 12th
June will hover around the paradox of living within the embrace of the mystery
of oneness – a mystery that has bewildered for millennia the hearts and minds
of seekers on the paths to the divine. At this workshop, we shall ponder the
divine mystery as it reveals itself within us in life: in the fluctuating
states and circumstances of our lives; in our unsteady moods vis-a-vis our
unceasing longing; in the depth of our aloneness and in the lively association
with others. The material for observation and discussion, which I shall present
at these two workshops, will be based on the Sufi tradition.
Friday 12th June 2015
at the Rose Window Hermitage, Kilburn, NW67XF
At the Edge of
Knowledge:
The Meeting of the
Two Seas.
At this second
workshop, will shall look into the limitations and limits of our knowledge and
understanding and how to transcend them: what can we say about the mystery of
oneness in view of our attachment to our comfort zones, to the familiarity of
our notions, feelings, values and belief systems, and to our behavioral
patterns. Participants are encouraged to bring materials and observations from
any tradition they are familiar with and inspired by and - most importantly -
from their own experiences of search, longing, and bewilderment.
Saturday 13th June 2015
at the Association of Jungian Analysts, 7 Eton
Avenue, NW3 3EL
(Bookings – phone Sandy on 0207 7948711 or emailaja@dircon.co.uk)
In Pursuit of the
Shadow: Reading Sufi Texts with Jung in Mind
One of the major problems of monotheistic religions has been how to
reconcile God’s infinite goodness with the experiential awareness of the
negative, not to say evil, aspects of existence. Struggling with the
psychological and theological implications of this problem, Jung came by the
understanding of the archetypal shadow. “The
shadow”, he writes, “is a moral problem that challenges the whole
ego-personality” (Aion,
CW 9ii, p. 8). Ideas concerning the ‘shadow’, the
other side of the luminous aspect of God and Man, are prevalent also in the
Sufi lore. Sufism has tirelessly searched for the mysterium conjunctionis, the ultimate union of the
opposites within the divine mystery and the hearts of men and women. Union of
opposites entails the union of good and evil, light and shadow. “When light moves into manifestation,” write
the 13th-century mystic Ibn al-‘Arabi, “its shadow extends and
inhabits the place from which light had separated.” In this day workshop, I
shall try to pursue the topic of light and shadow in some Sufi texts. Not a
Jungian scholar or analyst myself, I hope that this will open up a fertile
discussion bringing together Islamic mystical perspectives with Jungian ones.
Prof. Sara Sviri
Since 2002,
Sara Sviri has been affiliated as a distinguished visiting professor to the
Department of Arabic and the Department of Comparative Religions at The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. Her fields of study are Islamic mysticism (Sufism),
mystical philosophy and psychology, comparative and phenomenological aspects of
Islam, the formative period of Islamic mysticism, and related topics. Papers on
these topics were published in many academic publications and can be viewed on
www.academia.edu. Her book The Taste of Hidden Things: Images on the Sufi Path was published in 1997 in the USA. In 2008,
Tel-Aviv University Press published Sara’s extensive Sufi Anthology in Hebrew. She is
currently preparing an Arabic version of this anthology, as well as a monograph
on Aspects of the Formative Period of Islamic Mysticism. In 2012, Sara retired
from academic teaching and has since been engaged in lecturing and teaching
Sufism outside of academiain Israel and elsewhere. Formerly, while residing in
England, she was teaching at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at
University College London and at the University of Oxford. She also spoke
several times to the Guild of Pastoral Psychology as well as to the Analytical
Psychology Club.
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