Limamou Laye, an Islamic leader from present-day Senegal, has proclaimed himself the reincarnation of Muhammad, with his son later proclaiming himself to be a reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Limamou Laye established a tariqa, or Sufi organization, based upon his claims and the miracles attributed to him. This study analyzes Limamou Laye's goals for his community, his theology; as well as the various elements --- both local and global - that created him and helped him to emerge as a religious leader of significance. This book also explores how the growth of Islamic communities in Senegambia stems from an evolving conflict between the traditional governments and the emerging Islamic communities. Douglas H. Thomas demonstrates that Sufism was the obvious vehicle for the growth of Islam among West Africans, striking a chord with indigenous cultures through an engagement with the spirit world which pre-Islamic Senegambian religions were primarily concerned with.

With so much information readily available today, the educators role must go beyond simply transferring knowledge to students. Drawing from the deep wisdom found in the classic teachings and stories of Kabbalah and Chassidut, The Art of Education focuses the educator on creating a lasting impression on students by opening their spirits to their own higher realms of consciousness and by helping them integrate newly found energy, will, and insights into everyday life.

The Art of Education surveys the seven skills of the accomplished educator: communication, self-criticism, recognition, flexibility, attention to details, prioritization, and the correct use of reward and punishment. Together, these seven skills form a Kabbalistic structural model that when properly understood functions like a neurological key unlocking the inner educator in each of us.

The profound and ancient teachings of Jewish mysticism - Kabbalah - speak of the urgent need to rectify the world, instructing us how to pick up the pieces of our shattered dreams and mend the tattered fabric of our lives, both as individuals and as active contributors to humanity's destiny. Today, the need for rectification is felt most acutely in Israel, where the dream of Jewish security and cultural revival seems to be threatened as never before. The Kabbalistic model that helps us understand what is happening in Israel is known as the "breaking of the vessels." Secular Zionism has succeeded in creating material vessels - constructing buildings and roads, developing industry, and creating institutions of higher, secular education. But it has willfully neglected or even rejected the inner, spiritual dimension of the vessels themselves - the conscious intention that they serve God's puropose in creation. Every day, the vessels that have been created by the secular Zionist dream of the Jewish people returning to the land of Israel and establishing a safe haven from the perils of the diaspora in the form of a secular Jewish state, whose ultimate goal is to live in peace and harmony with its Arab neighbors, are shattering before our eyes. In this book, Rabbi Ginsburgh presents a conceptual and practical program for healing the ills of the state of Israel. These proposals are borne of intimate acquaintance with the pulse of the people as well as the failings of Isralei politics, and permeated with Chassidic optimism and love for the Jewish people and all of humanity.

This study of Galilee in modern times reaches back to the region's Biblical roots and points to future challenges in the Arab-Jewish conflict, Israel's development, and inter-faith relations. This volume covers an array of subjects, including Kabbalah, the rise of Palestinian nationalism, modern Christian approaches to Galilee's past and present, Zionist pioneering, the roots of the Arab-Jewish dispute, and the conflict's eruption in Galilee in 1948. The book shows how the modernization of Galilee intertwined with mystical belief and practice, developing in its own grassroots way among Palestinians, Orthodox Jews, Christians, and Druze, rather than being a byproduct of Western intervention. In doing so, The History of Galilee, 1538-1949: Mysticism, Modernization, and War offers fresh, challenging perspectives for scholars in the history of religion, military history, theology, world politics, middle eastern studies, and other disciplines.

Finding your soulmate and living happily together are at one and the same time one of life's greatest challenges and prospects. Together with its companion volume "The Mystery of Marriage," this book gives some of the deepest and particularly revealing insights into the nature of couplehood. This book approaches dating from the fresh perspective of a journey that both men and women enter in hope of uncovering their deepest creatives forces. With sensitivity to the essential differences between men and women, this book will help you appreciate the underlying motivations that move each to seek compansionship and matrimony. It also presents the first rigorous analysis of how the development of consciousness and the ability to make the right choices in life go hand-in-hand, stressing that your ability to appreciate the Divine nature of reality is a key factor in doing so. As such, the principles expounded can be applied to all areas of importance in life that involves difficult choices. Consciousness & Choice includes a detailed Kabbalistic study of the ancient courtship custom known as "the Dance of the Maindens." From this ancient ritual and its intricacies, Rabbi Ginsburgh uncovers the spiritual value of every motivating factor in searching for a spouse.

Mirigavati or The Magic Doe is the work of Shaikh Qutban Suhravardi, an Indian Sufi master who was also an expert poet and storyteller attached to the glittering court-in-exile of Sultan Husain Shah Sharqi of Jaunpur. Composed in 1503 as an introduction to mystical practice for disciples, this powerful Hindavi or early Hindi Sufi romance is a richly layered and sophisticated text, simultaneously a spiritual enigma and an exciting love-story full of adventures. The Mirigavati is both an excellent introduction to Sufism and one of the true literary classics of pre-modern India, a story that draws freely on the large pool of Indian, Islamic, and European narrative motifs in its distinctive telling of a mystical quest and its resolution. Adventures from the Odyssey and the voyages of Sindbad the Sailor-sea voyages, encounters with monstrous serpents, damsels in distress, flying demons and cannibals in caves, among others-surface in Suhravardi's rollicking tale, marking it as first-rate entertainment for its time and, in private sessions in Sufi shrines, a narrative that shaped the interior journey for novices. Before his untimely death in 2009, Aditya Behl had completed this complete blank verse translation of the critical edition of the Mirigavati, which reveals the precise mechanism and workings of spiritual signification and use in a major tradition of world and Indian literature.

We may smile to be told that, in some cultures, the eating of timid or ugly animals is believed to make the eater timid or ugly. Yet, equally fundamental misunderstandings of the relations between things, words and ideas are rife among Western thinkers. In this provocative essay, G.A. Wells identifies some influential mistakes about language embedded in the empiricist philosophical tradition of Locke, Russell and Ayer. Wells shows how these errors stimulated a religious backlash, in which faith became coupled with commonsense realism, in such writers as Keith Ward, Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Altizer. Similar misconceptions gave rise both to the behaviourism of Watson and Ryle, and to the anti-behaviourist Chomskyan reaction with its chimera of a "universal grammar". Magical thinking, the writer claims, derives from plausible errors concerning the efficacy of gestures and words, and survives even though these errors have been refuted. Wells illustrates the influence of misconceptions about language as they manifest themselves in contemporary religious apologetics.

A first-of-its-kind combination of the legendary wisdom stories of Islam's great comic foil with spiritual insights for seekers of all traditions or none.

"We would do well to heed the Mulla's wisdom. One day, inevitably, our personal storms will not abate before causing destruction. Something will break our hearts and cause us to ask deeper questions. At that point we will become spiritual seekers, each in our own way.... We will begin to hear deep inside the mysterious calling of our soul to ful ll the purpose for which we were created." from the chapter The Storms in Our Lives

The mythical Mulla Nasruddin is a village simpleton and sage rolled into one. His wisdom stories, timeless and placeless, emanate from a source beyond book learning, and contain several layers of meaning.

In this unique presentation, Imam Jamal Rahman weaves together spiritual insights with the Mulla s humorous teaching stories and connects them to the issues at the heart of the spiritual quest. Addressing such topics as human vulnerability, the rigors of inner and outer spiritual work, the hazards of the ego and more, he roots the Mulla s stories in Islamic spirituality by pairing them with sayings from the Qur an, the Prophet Muhammad, Rumi, Hafiz and other Islamic sages.

Together, these sources combined with spiritual practices will awaken your spirit with laughter and inspire you to transform yourself and the world around you."

The greatest spiritual achievement is not transcending the body but joining body and spirit together. To do this, you must break through assumptions that draw boundaries around the Infinite and wake up to the body as the site of holiness itself. This groundbreaking guidebook is the first comprehensive treatment of the body in Jewish spiritual practice and an essential guide to the sacred. With this indispensable resource to embodied spirituality, readers will learn how to experience God rather than just engage God as an idea. And, through physical exercises, meditation practices, and visualization activities, readers will unite the sacred with the secular, the mystical with the mundane, by using their bodies as vehicles for prayer. Tapping the wisdom of Kabbalah, traditional Judaism, and Western Buddhism, readers will defy the myths that religion is only practiced in the sanctuary and that spiritual bodywork is only performed on a yoga mat. By cultivating an embodied spiritual practice, everyday activities?eating, walking, breathing, washing?will be transformed into moments of spiritual realization.

A groundbreaking exposition of Islamic mysticism The Essence of Reality was written over the course of just three days in 514/1120, by a scholar who was just twenty-four. The text, like its author 'Ayn al-Qudat, is remarkable for many reasons, not least of which that it is in all likelihood the earliest philosophical exposition of mysticism in the Islamic intellectual tradition. This important work would go on to exert significant influence on both classical Islamic philosophy and philosophical mysticism. Written in a terse yet beautiful style, The Essence of Reality consists of one hundred brief chapters interspersed with Qur'anic verses, prophetic sayings, Sufi maxims, and poetry. In conversation with the work of the philosophers Avicenna and al-Ghazali, the book takes readers on a philosophical journey, with lucid expositions of questions including the problem of the eternity of the world; the nature of God's essence and attributes; the concepts of "before" and "after"; and the soul's relationship to the body. All these discussions are seamlessly tied into 'Ayn al-Qudat's foundational argument-that mystical knowledge lies beyond the realm of the intellect. A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Human enlightenment and liberation, mystics have long advised, require spiritual awakening from the hypnotic sleep of everyday life. This book explores the life and ideas of the enigmatic twentieth century philosopher, mystic, and teacher of esoteric dances George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1872?-1949), performing a hermeneutic textual analysis of all his published writings to illuminate the place of hypnosis in his teaching. The hermeneutic approach captures both the aim for an in-depth textual analysis, and the notion that the intent is to interpret the text using its own symbolic and meaning structures.

Systematically explored for the first time is Gurdjieff's "objective art" of literary hypnotism intended as a major conduit for the transmission of his teachings on the philosophy, theory, and practice of personal self-knowledge and harmonious human development. In the process, the nature and function of the 'mystical' shell hiding the rational kernel of Gurdjieff's teaching are explained--shedding new light on why his mysticism is "mystical," and Gurdjieff so "enigmatic," in the first place.

The book includes a Foreword by J. Walter Driscoll, a major bibliographer and scholar of Gurdjieff studies.

An accessible introduction to the concepts of Jewish mysticism, their religious
and spiritual significance, and how they relate to our lives.

"The Way Into Jewish Mystical Tradition" allows us to experience and understand mysticism s inexpressible reverence before the awe and mystery of creation, and celebrate this rich tradition s quest to transform our ordinary reality into holiness.

Abu cAbd al-Rahman Muhammad b. al-Husayn al-Sulami (d.412/1021) lived in the 3rd and 4th century AH / 9th and 10th century CE. He was born in the city of Nishapur, one of the most renowned cities in the Islamic world. He was part of a line of earlier Sufi figures who attempted to defend the cardinal tenets of Sufism from accusations of heresy. However al-Sulami's surpassed his predecessors by amassing a corpus of antecedent mystical dicta from the architects of Islamic mysticism and substantiating them with transmission channels (isnad) or grounding them in a core teaching of the Prophet Muhammad. This study demonstrates that al-Sulami was an accomplished mystic. It outlines his life and times and surveys in full all his works as far as they can be identified. Moreover, the important sources that shaped the development and impression of his thinking and modality of transforming the ego-self (nafs) are presented in detail bringing together earlier and current academic scholarship on him.

The body-mind connection is a well-documented fact in today's medical paradigm. Yet, long before recent scientific research uncovered this natural linkage, it was described in Kabbalistic healing manuals, with one important difference--there it was understood to be a link between the body, mind, and soul of kabbalah and healing.

This healing manual explains Kabbalah's centuries-old perception of human physiology, its view on how to maintain overall health, and how this is dependent on our spiritual well-being.

"The phenomenon of disease is one of spiritual] separation or estrangement," the rabbi writes pertaining to kabbalah and healing. When disconnected from our innermost self, and our spiritual Source, illness manifests. Were we to understand the true source of our ailments, and give full expression to our yearning to connect with our life Source, we would have no need for external remedies.

Whether you rely on today's holistic healing or on more traditional medicine, you'll benefit from the Kabbalistic prescriptions for healing and understanding of human physiology laid out in this valuable book.

Body, Mind, Soul: Kabbalah and Healing includes:
- A reference guide to the body-soul interaction
- A detailed description of Kabbalah's understanding of disease and its root causes
- Contemporary healing methods seen from a mystical point of view
- A discussion of the healing power of prayer and teshuvah (return to G-d)

Kabbalistic healing is a complete system of belief and practice. Of interest to anyone seeking true holism.

This book analyzes and describes the development and aspects of imagery techniques, a primary mode of mystical experience, in twentieth century Jewish mysticism. These techniques, in contrast to linguistic techniques in medieval Kabbalah and in contrast to early Hasidism, have all the characteristics of a full screenplay, a long and complicated plot woven together from many scenes, a kind of a feature film. Research on this development and nature of the imagery experience is carried out through comparison to similar developments in philosophy and psychology and is fruitfully contextualized within broader trends of western and eastern mysticism.