The World Today

Dear family,

As we hear of the tremendous suffering which is affecting so much of humanity – from North Africa to Japan, and from Wisconsin to Washington, D.C. – please let us remember that we have been given tools to help alleviate and lessen such natural and human catastrophes.

To all Center Leaders: Please support the performance of the Absent Healing Ritual in your area. We have found that a regular Absent Healing Service adds baraka to the area, as well as to the people who are participating. It can also create zones of ‘peace’ and ‘tranquility’ where it is performed.

If there is no one initiated to lead it, than please consider sending a representative from your center to our DHO gatherings for training. The meetings do cost, but the training and initiations are without cost. If money for our meetings is a problem, then perhaps your local center can raise funds to send a representative to be trained and initiated as a healing conductor. Remember, that our staff receives neither payment nor reimbursement, and pays full fees and transportation. Our next gathering will be on Mt. Shasta (Northern California) from June 19 to 24. Please contact Jude Sargent for registration information. (judesargent@yahoo.com)

Once again, in all that we do, let us not forget our “root transmission,” which has highly spiritualized tools for us to use. Just to mention a few of these ‘tools,’ in addition to the Absent Healing Ritual:

1) the wonderful Buddhist practice of dedicating the ‘benifit’ of one’s practice to all sentient beings, with a special focus on Japan (for example).

2) holding one’s concentration on “Cancel” while watching (or listening) to the ‘news’ about horrific situations, and feeling the impact the negativity has on regular folks being lessened. This one was thru Ray Fetterman.

3) holding the suffering humanity in one’s heart during the “known and unknown” portion of the Absent Healing Ritual, as well as doing the Ritual specifically for those suffering in North Africa (as an example).

4) doing your healing-purification breaths for an area or situation.

There is no reason to feel helpless in these terrible times. We can interface with others of ‘good will’ on the inner planes, and Inshallah! make a difference.

Yours in Service to the Real

Hakim Sauluddin

Ritual in India

Hi Saul,

I hope all is well with you. We’re back, and there really IS no place like home

Besides me being a pilgrim on this voyage, and being with our Sangha (there were 74 of us plus) it fell to me to be Musician, Physician and Technician — and I tried to see these roles in that order.

And in addition it seems to be one of my roles to make sure the Healing Ray is not absent from our gatherings. So during the Urs celebration — on the 6th, which was the final day of public Urs events at the Dargah, I scheduled and conducted the ritual, with the support of the other DHO folks present. Neshamah assisted and Rajaji (Roger) sat to my left. Right in his burial chamber.

I had great joy in doing this, and also in the thought that we were bringing it back home to Papa (along with the Dances, the Zikrs, the UW, and the Ruhaniat’s special energy).

I made a variation on the script, which was only for that exceptional day, and I announced that I was doing so.

As I say, I’ve done this before, introduced the Healing Ritual into a large gathering; and it hasn’t felt right to me to limit ourselves to ten names on the list and exclude everyone else’s names. So as I sat at the Dargah it came up within me to do a slight variation. Before the actual service, while we were chanting “Allah Shaffee, Allah Kaffee” I brought the voices down soft and then invited the forty-odd participants (many brown faces as well as white) to call out the name of anyone who wants healing, to put all those names into the energized space.

Then during the ritual itself, instead of ten names I had my assistant name ten CONDITIONS which I had written down, and we had the usual silence for each.

I’m going to write them down here …

  1. All those afflicted with the pain and suffering of illness, injury and aging
  2. All those afflicted with the pain and suffering of stress and disease of the mind.
  3. All those afflicted with the pain and suffering of anger and hatred.
  4. All those afflicted with the pain and suffering of poverty gone wrong.
  5. All those afflicted with the pain and suffering of wealth gone wrong.
  6. All those afflicted with the pain and suffering of violence and the threat of violence.
  7. All those afflicted with the pain and suffering of social upheaval and displacement.
  8. All those afflicted with the pain and suffering of abusing or of being abused in any form.
  9. All those afflicted with the pain and suffering of attachment to who we think we are, and of trying to defend the ego above all.
  10. All those afflicted with the pain and suffering of separation from the Truth.

It was a most fulfilling day for this one, and I believe an excellent manifestation of the initiation with which I have been entrusted.

All love and light to you — Abdul Shaffee

Visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau, 3/2005

When lights went out ………….all over Europe

Visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau, Palm Sunday 20 March 2005

In early March this year I offered to go with my friend Jo to Poland, specifically to visit the concentration camps near Krakow.  Jo, a non-Sufi non-DUP yet like-minded friend of many years, had recently been inspired to create some artwork on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz/Birkenau and now wanted to visit there in person.

We flew to Krakow on a Saturday, and that evening Jo and I prepared for our visit with the healing ritual, adapted for places of great suffering as recommended by Saul.  During our bus journey the next day, and throughout our time at the camps, the Sufi Invocation was constantly on my breath, and I felt an increasing gratitude for this constant sense of support as, entering beneath “Arbeit maketh frei”, we were surrounded and immersed and had no choice but to look, see, imagine.  I was aware of my face becoming more and more drawn, I avoided looking at others, and noticed that most people were responding similarly.

That evening, back at our hotel in Krakow, having showered and changed our clothes, Jo and I found our own ways of beginning to process some of what we’d experienced. She wrote and wrote whereas I sang and danced, sang and danced.  First, all the Dances of Universal Peace honoring the Jewish tradition, again and again.  Then the first line of the Aramaic Prayer, closing with saying the whole prayer.  Finally the spoken Fateha, switching my focus of concentration to peace in the Middle East.

Some days later, back home again in Edinburgh, I opened my computer and began to write about my experiences – and this is what I’d now like to share with you …………

Aware of my feet as I walked along Edinburgh’s streets, it seemed incredible that these same shoes had, only a few days previously, walked along stony paths, along concrete corridors, through mud and across rubber matting, up stairs, along railway sleepers, across grass.  They had taken me to Poland.  They had taken me to Auschwitz and Birkenau (known also as Auschwitz II).  They had followed our Polish guide as she expertly swept us along in the allotted time from room to room, building to building, all the while delivering a clear and factual account of what was before us.  And today, before walking out in them again in my home town of Edinburgh, I had stopped to recall where these shoes had last walked before brushing the dust of Auschwitz from them.

Shoes, shoes, shoes.  A mountain of shoes behind glass, footwear of all kinds, heavy shoes and light shoes, expensive, cheap, tatty, new, adult’s, children’s, sandals, clogs.  Colored shoes were there for sure, yet somehow the memory is of grayness, dust-covered, worn-down.  Where had these shoes been worn for the last time?  Did they walk to the gas chambers, the solitary cells, the execution yard?  Were they scrabbling for footing at the sides of ditches being dug for the corpses?  With respect, human security, even self-respect and hope of every kind completely gone, did they in fact carry their owners willingly to their demise?  Was that final walk, for some, made in dignity and knowingness, a voluntary giving up of life when the life left to them was no life at all?

Shoes were not the only items on display behind glass walls.  Women’s hair filled another huge display area; pots and pans and various kitchen items; walking sticks, crutches and artificial limbs; hair and shaving brushes; dentures; spectacles; clothing, even from babies.  Everything that could be salvaged from the human body was salvaged.  Taken from the despised, nevertheless it was all destined for recycling to help support German soldiers wounded in battle – also providing a double bind for the SS themselves, double binds being needed to keep them in thrall to an insane regime.  A terrible symbiosis underpinned by fear on both sides.

Our introduction to Auschwitz had been by means of a video in a room full of people, many standing.  Some scenes were familiar, but what was new was that many of these photos were not stills – sudden movements of the emaciated and hollow-eyed somehow seemed shocking, a timely reminder that, in spite of their appearance, these people had indeed been alive when the photos were taken; a reminder of the endurance of the human spirit, with body wasted and frail beyond imagination; a reminder of the strength of the will to live, perhaps seen here in its last resort.

In Auschwitz we saw cells for solitary confinement, the suffocation cell, an enclosed yard where executions by firing took place.  We saw improved quarters for camp informers and the superior rooms used by the SS.  We also stood inside the old gas chambers beneath the holes from which cyanide had been dropped.  Bodies had been crammed into the space to provide sufficient natural heat to vaporize the cyanide pellets.  We saw the ovens.  But extermination at Auschwitz was not efficient enough.  With 700 bodies per day to dispose of and the crematoria only able to cope with half that number, the gas chambers and ovens were closed down in preference to the more extensive and efficient procedures being built at Birkenau, a huge concentration camp intended to take in men, women and children.  Whereas the buildings at Auschwitz were brick-built, having previously been an army barracks, those at Birkenau were wooden pre-fab constructions, supplied from Germany.  Originally intended as stables for 50-plus horses, at Birkenau each hut provided sleeping space for 700, sometimes increasing to 1,000.  Night-time space would be a better description than ‘sleeping’, the wooden-slatted bunks being in tiers of 3, each wide enough for 10 bodies, provided all turned at the same moment.  Space between the bunks was minimal, so the scene as one looked down the length of the room was of almost continuous wooden slating interspersed by upright supports.  It was the fittest who were able to climb into the preferred top bunks, knowing at least they would not be covered by dripping excrement from bodies exhausted with diarrhea lying in the bunk above. A few burning coals in a bucket were provided when the temperature dropped sufficiently below freezing, and this in Silesia, a coal-mining area of Poland.  Ironically these rooms provided jobs in which people were most likely to survive – cleaning the latrines, the battery of holes barely giving shoulder-to-shoulder space and which in-mates were allowed to use twice a day.  Cleaning these was preferable in terms of life-expectation, in spite of the stench and risk of infection, to having to walk in all weathers to hard manual work in the labor camps.  Running water was laid on after Birkenau had been functioning two years – prior to that prisoners had no alternative but to drink supposedly purified recycled water from latrines and primitive washing facilities.

Birkenau is enclosed by deep ditches inside double perimeter fences of wire and barbed wire, interspersed by watch towers.  I stood between these double fences, attempting to imagine escaping through one in darkness only to be caught by searchlight before the second. The tallest tower above the entrance gate, with rail tracks passing beneath, provides a view of the whole camp.  I stood here also, this time attempting to imagine myself in SS shoes, hearing the rumble and clanking of the next trainload to arrive. Gazing across the huge area of the camp I imagined it filled again with the wooden huts that once occupied this space.  Complete huts only occupy the foreground now, the SS having burned down the majority in the last days of January 1945, before liberation.  Only the brick chimneys survived, two to each hut, neat rows of twin chimneys now covering the ground to the far perimeter fence.  Beyond the fences the land between Auschwitz and Birkenau had been kept free of buildings and trees, so that escaping prisoners could be better seen, and this was also where ash from the crematoria was spread, as fertilizer.

Eric Berne taught that, under stress, we regress to either a childish part of ourselves or a part that we involuntarily absorbed from our parents, depending on who we are currently communicating with and the context.  Thus, under the conditions of a concentration camp, in-mates would be likely to react from their Conditioned Child ego-state towards the very real (rather than subjectively perceived) Authoritarian Parent ego-state of their aggressors.  The Games People Play (Eric Berne, 1964) would be played out at the ‘nth’ degree, with destructive or self-destructive endings.  Further, if the SS were to function effectively, they needed to be kept in bondage to their insane regime – and that was carried out not only from the threat of death they themselves faced if they failed in their duties, but from believing they were morally right to do what they had to do.  In a wider context, perhaps one needs to remember that the so-called science of eugenics had been interesting Western intellectuals for some time.  Any humane feelings that might begin to surface in an individual Nazi were therefore a threat to their own life and had to be squashed; any feelings of compassion and the whole house of cards could start to come down.  Unlike the ‘Games’ that people usually ‘play’ (ibid), the whole set-up was self-perpetuating with no likelihood of an end being brought about by the ‘role’ change normal in human social interactions.  Only intervention from outside could do that – and contemplation of that raised questions in my mind of the outside world, of not only Poles, not only Germans but the whole of the Western world. Where was the country that really opened its doors to Jews and Gypsies?

The words of a children’s song ask: “When I needed a neighbor were you there, were you there?  When I needed a neighbor, were you there?”

Knowing, feeling, accepting that the darkness of the concentration camps, of victims and perpetrators both, is shadow residing within myself, since Palm Sunday this year I’ve found myself changing the words to: When you needed a neighbor, where, oh where, was I?

Lights indeed went out all over Europe.

Alice Fateah Saunders
March 2005

Absent Healing Ritual in New York City

Dear all,

Please join us in a moment of prayer and remembrance for all those who have been harmed by the horrific events of September 11th.

And, for all those who do the Absent Healing Ritual, please tune into us at this time (6:00 p.m.) on Saturday, November 24th. We will be in New York City to do a meeting for the new Ruhaniat-Sufi Movement Center there, and shall take this opportunity to perform the ritual in a Place of Great Suffering.

Your participation is welcome and encouraged.

All love and Blessings
Hakim Saul

Peace to Suffering Humanity… post 9/11/2001

Beloved ones of God,

As a response to the tumult and hostility that resulted from the horrors of September 11th, the Sufi Healing Order has called upon the Dervish Healing Order, and the Healing Activity of the Sufi Movement, to join with them in prayers so as to bring Peace to Suffering Humanity.

They intend to use the Healing Ritual to do this.

I am very much in favor of working with our brothers and sisters in the other streams of Hazrat Inayat Khan’s barakka.  This cooperation has the potential of being a living manifestation of the ideals of the Federation of the Sufi Message, and I hope and pray that this step is only the beginning of many co operative efforts in the future. May the Message of God reach far and wide!

The prayers in the service itself give us the direction we have chosen to take when we take the ritual to Places of Great Human Suffering:
“and that we may impart to them, Thy Light, Thy Love, Thy Joy, and Thy PEACE.” 

However, and in addition, Hazrat Inayat Khan has also given us a Prayer for the Peace of the World, which I actually feel, is a more appropriate focus for the general concentration of world peace. 

“Prayer for the Peace of the World”
through Hazrat Inayat Khan:

‘O Thou, the Almighty Sun, whose light cleareth away all clouds.
We take refuge in Thee. King of all men, God of all deities. Lord of all angels.
We pray Thee, dispel the mists of illusion from the hearts of the nations,
and lift their lives by Thy all-sufficient power.
Pour upon them Thy limitless love, Thy everlasting life,
Thy heavenly joy, and Thy perfect peace.”  — Amin

We shall do this prayer at 11:00 p.m. on the 3rd Sunday of each month, just prior to our regular Healing Ritual, and invite you all to join with us in attempting to manifest our hearts desire for Peace through the recitation of this prayer.

As to the heinous crimes committed against us all on September 11th:

This coming November 24th (Saturday), I shall be in New York to do a previously scheduled meeting, and shall take this opportunity to offer the Healing Ritual at (or very close by) the World Trade Center.  This shall be performed for the souls of all those who perished in this horror, and also for the hopeful alleviation of suffering for their families  and loved ones. 

This later activity is being organized by our brother in New York, Jean Pierre David (who also manages our web site).  For those who wish to join us in prayer, we shall meet  for practices at 5:30 p.m., and walk to the site and perform the Ritual at 6:00 p.m. This is all Eastern Standard Time. 

To those of you who wish to join us at the site itself: Please do.  All are welcome.   

After the ritual we shall walk to the near by Sufi Book Store and begin our meeting.  As Murshid SAM used to say, “It’s always a plus to have some ‘old timers’ in the crowd.”

For additional data: Please contact Jean Pierre – jeanpierredavid@hotmail.com.

I send you all my love and blessings and my prayer that we be permitted to Serve God in the Real Work.

Yours in Service,

Hakim Saul
Charlottesville, Virginia
October 15, 2001 

A Report on the Performance of the Absent Healing Ritual at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp

 

Dear Family –

The following is a full report from our Shafayette – Kalipha Brita von Kugelgen inBerlin.  You might remember that I included a mention of her preliminary report in my recounting of the Lama Pilgrimage.

May the Message of God Reach Far & Wide.

Yours in Service
Hakim Sauluddin

——————————————

On June 30, 2001, about 20 of us “Berliners” came together in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, which is nearBerlin, to perform the Healing Ritual there. This was on the next day to the last of the DHO pilgrimage to Murshid SAM at the Lama Foundation. We all felt the strong connection and support of our brothers and sisters, who joined us in the service, bringing thankfully our gift for Murshid SAM.

Remembering the teaching of Hakim Saul before the first Healing Ritual in Places of Great Human Suffering in the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, we prepared ourselves for three weeks: We practiced at our regular Thursday night meeting of the Healing circle special wazifas which we held in concentration during the following week, as: Allah ho Akbar, Ya Nuri, Ya Tawwab, Ya Ghafur.

And when the day had come, we went – mostly in silence – concentrating on these wazifas upon the earth of the camp until we reached the place where the Ritual would be done. Some of us visited Sachsenhausen for the first time. We were walking very slowly, looking and standing at the different sites of violence and inhumanity: the gas chamber, the crematorium, the execution place, we looked at the big Soviet monument, the gray dry earth, the flower-bed with red roses…, imagining what had happened, telling us in few words what we knew about this place and what we felt now – again and again remembering our breath: Allah Ya Nuri, Allah Ya Ghafur…

Sachsenhausen is a concentration camp with a change in the historical scene. Between 1936 – 1945 it was seen by the SS as the ideal model of a concentration camp. More than 200,000 people were imprisoned there, firstly political, and later, because of biological or racial reasons, and, then later, it became the jail for inhabitants of all the occupied European nations.

Not being aware of the multinational nature of the camp, one of us – a young Greek woman – became suddenly alarmed when she saw the wordGREECEon the memorial… Of course only a few people had survived.  At the end of the war, the Russian and Polish soldiers found only 3,000 patients, nurses and doctors left alive.

Between 1945-1950 Sachsenhausen was a special –  the biggest with 60,000 prisoners – Soviet camp, where NS-functionaries were imprisoned, and also people with discriminated political opinions, or others got there just by happenstance – as for instance the grandfather of one of us. He died there with 12,000 others by starvation or illness.

We had entered the large deserted camp through the gate with the well-known words “Arbeit macht frei” and together with us flew a dove with a straw in the bill – a comforting symbol of all new beginnings – and soon we heard a little group singing hymns, showing us that we are not alone there. Looking for an adequate place for the Ritual we felt doubtless drawn to a big tree, a plane – older than the camp and its historical changes. The tree shadowed us at this hot day and whispered to us with the leaves, till the moment when we called to God to heal all those who had been harmed in this area of all the different reasons, which had been mentioned loudly – everything got very quiet, even the leaves. We all felt a deep peace, some had strong images of beings resurrected in the light of love and healing.

After the prayer Khatum we sang “Shalom” and hugged each other. I looked in all these shining faces in our circle and was very thankful about our walking and working together on this path. There was the One heart in our hearts, there was a lot of love and even happiness.

Later, when we shared our impressions, I noticed that some of us had felt an impulse to dance after the Ritual – I had the vision of a long row in a snake dance along the whole area, touching the earth with loving and joyful feet. Maybe next time: we have decided that our next Healing Ritual at places of great suffering will be in Ravensbrück – a concentration camp for women and children.

But – as you can imagine – there are a lot of places inBerlinto perform the Ritual – for instance the train station from where the Jewish people were deported to the concentration camps or at the wall… It is a good work to do together – healing and strengthening, outside and inside. And the interest in doing this work is increasing. Alhamdulliah!

Two years ago Pir Moineddin wrote a comment to Sauluddin’s St. Petersburg Healing Ritual report. His words express my experience:

 

“To infuse these places of human suffering with the forces of love and healing is to transmute the vibration of helplessness and hopelessness into one of spiritual bravery. Through these efforts…

(we)… are helping to restore the human soul.”

Thank you for reading this,

 

Yours in Service
Brita von Kuegelgen


Concentration Camp Ritual – June 30th – North Germany

Dear all,

Our sister in Berlin (Shafayette Brita Kugegelgen) and the Berlin healing circle, will be offering the Absent Healing Ritual at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp on Saturday, June 30th at 11 a.m. German time.

We shall be joining them in Prayer from our Pilgrimage at Lama, and invite you all to “tune in” with us.

I send you all my love and blessings,
Hakim Sauluddin

A Report on Doing the Healing Ritual in Places of Great Suffering

Dear friends and family,

This report comes from Jo Ann Dalley of Charlottesville, Virginia, who performed the Absent Healing Ritual of Hazrat Inayat Khan at a Prisoner of War Camp from the American Civil War on April 19th, 2001. She was assisted by her two daughters, Heather (14) and Elizabeth (11). Her report follows.

______________________________________________

Andersonville was a Confederate military prison established during the American Civil War. Today it is a National Historic Site, and a memorial to all United States prisoners of war, as well as being a National Cemetery.

Acres and acres of lush rolling pasture, and hundreds of rows of bright white headstones mark the landscape. There is a visitors center with literature and a movie of the sites history. One out of every three Union soldiers who arrived at Andersonville died there amidst horrific conditions of confinement.

We did the Healing Ritual on a green hillock overlooking the prison site. As we began, we noticed that the impact of this places history, and the strong words and images we had experienced at the visitors center had already faded. All that remained was the inner peace and the deep sense of calm which the ritual brings forth. That and the wind and a few wild flowers amidst the State Memorial Gardens. All this plus our prayers for God’s Peace to abide with all those who have passed through that place.

Yours in Service,
Jo Ann Dalley