Addresses

Bulent Rauf

A classic of esoteric literature, which should be read, re-read and read again.

Peter Young, from the Foreword

This book could be called a fruit of the courses of the Beshara School, where hundreds of people have taken part in six month courses since 1975. Many of the twelve papers which it contains were given in response to a particular stage or difficulty faced by students on the course.

This lends them an immediacy and an enduring usefulness, since they help to relate experiences, which many people might share, to the goal that has been recognized and accepted.

Bulent Rauf did not leave a great deal of writing of his own. His great contributions, to do with Beshara and the establishment of the Beshara School, his introducing many people to the refined and sublime taste for Reality which Ottoman spirituality at its best inherited and cultivated, his support for the establishment of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society, and the translation into English of Ibn ‘Arabi’s Fusus al-Hikam with the commentary of Ismail Hakki Bursevi, a profound, subtle and beautiful rendition of the incomparable original, were accomplished without much formal writing on his part. But the papers in Addresses, occasioned by the particular needs of students for clarification and assistance, were selected and ordered by Bulent himself. He left the collection and publication of anything else he had written to others, one outcome of which was Addresses II.

The passage that follows gives an indication of what may be found in Addresses. The language and references will not be immediately familiar to everybody, but it arrives at a statement in the most direct English.

The two prayers, one before and one after the meditation, are the necessary adjuncts of such a situation because this meditation is also the mi’râj of the person, ‘the time when he or she is admitted into the divine Presence,’ the Presence far beyond the hadarat where even angels may not enter. This is the presence of ‘Or Less’, or ‘Or nearer’ (aw ednâ), where only man, made in His image and breathed into of His Spirit, – the Result, the Effect, the Cause, the Subject, the Object, the Prime Motive and the Only Reason, the Reality of Realities, that but for Whom there would have been no universes, the Cause of all Mercy and Compassion upon the universes, that which is in accordance with an Extremely Great Nature! – may enter.

There is no state higher than that which man can reach, and the only way to reach it is to reach out for Him and for Him alone.

From Chapter 5, Of Tahajjud.

Peter Young wrote in his Foreword to the book in 1986:

“The point of view from which these addresses are written and to which the reader is inexorably drawn is that of One and Only One Unique Existence… These addresses are for those who want to come to understand their relationship to Reality, what their purpose is and how consequently they should proceed. For in wanting to know these matters they have already begun to correspond to their raison d’etre; as God is reported to have said ‘I was like a hidden treasure; I loved to be known and I created the Universes…’

72 pp | Soft cover | £5.95 | ISBN 0 904975 12 6
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