Murshid Samuel L. Lewis

June 2 Bowl of Saki Commentary

Words are but the shadows of thoughts and feelings.
~Pir-o-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan

Commentary
The nature of feeling is light; the nature of thought is the tenor and tuning. Words are means for objectifying these thoughts and feelings in the material world. Thoughts and feelings are therefore materializations and are of the nature of shadow. So are words, only words come in the form of vibrations, which affect the ears and brains and do not appear as sense-objects. Yet for this sphere and for the cosmos, they are of the nature of shadow.
~Murshid Samuel L. Lewis (Sufi Ahmed Murad Chisti)

'One can always tell the true teacher from the false. The false expect, even demand, superior moral conduct from other people. Demanded respect is not respect at all. Unless it flows freely from the heart it is not respect at all. Or, following the precepts of Messenger Mohammed,
“Act as if in the presence of Allah, and remember, though we do not see Him, verily He sees us.'
'A Sufi has said, “Perception is the sign of the wise, and quotation of the ignorant.” We should see that endless words of themselves do not change human character. It is heart consideration that produces this change. We are held to account for saying: “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”
The practice of this precept will determine worthiness in cosmic evolution.
Lord Buddha taught against self-consideration as being the basis of merit. He taught, there is no self to accumulate merit (punya). In other words, the goodness or evil that man does affects the whole universe, and this is the real nature of karma. Jesus taught, “Only God is good.” It is time that mankind became consciously aware of the simple but beautiful teachings of Jesus, Buddha and all the divine messengers. The New Age will manifest persons who will not separate their words from their acts. This is a Sufi ideal.'
~Murshid SAM

May 21 Bowl of Saki Commentary

The realization that the whole of life must be “give and take” is the realization of the spiritual truth and fact of true democracy; not until this spirit is formed in the individual can the whole world be elevated to the higher grade.
– Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Commentary ~Murshid Samuel L. Lewis (Sufi Ahmed Murad Chisti):
This is a realization; and how can this realization be obtained? It is the spiritual practices which free one from the sway of nufs. It is the nufs which takes. Christ has said, “Freely give, freely receive.” This is the spiritual condition, and it is the attainment of this condition which spiritualizes the self and the collective humanity. Not the philosophy, not the moral, not the thought, not the belief, but the realization alone will elevate the human and the universe.

What follows is a description of the Zen teacher Sokei-an Sasaki in the words of Samuel Lewis in one of his spiritual autobiographies, “Dharma Transmission.”
Mohammed said, “I am an ordinary man like you.” God made the ordinary man in His Image. Sometimes this is manifested. Sokei-an was not a Swami Ramdas or Sufi, whose love-vibrations permeate the atmosphere. Neither did he show power or beauty or repose; he was, in one sense, the most ordinary person one could meet and, in another sense, the most complete.
Nyogen Sensaki
Nyogen Senzaki was born on the Kamchatka Peninsula in northeastern Siberia. Little is known about his parents except that his mother was Japanese and his father was either Russian or Chinese. A traveling Japanese Buddhist monk found the infant Nyogen beside the frozen body of his mother. The monk brought the orphaned baby back to Japan where he was adopted and raised by a ship carpenter named Senzaki whose family lived in Aamori Prefecture in the northern part of the country.
Even as a youth Nyogen Senzaki felt somehow deeply connected with Buddha-Dharma. By the age of nineteen he had read the entire Tripitaka (the sacred canon of Mahayana Buddhism) in the original Chinese. He also had a keen interest in Chinese classical poetry and eventually began to compose his own. During his lifetime, he was able to write using various styles of Chinese and Japanese poetical forms. He especially excelled in the “shichigon zekku,” a poem consisting of four lines, each line composed of seven Chinese characters.In 1905, when Nyogen Senzaki came to live in America and learned English, he not only translated his own poetry but also the poetry of Zen masters like Jakush*tsu and his own teacher Soyen Shaku. The following poem, originally written in the shichigon zekku form, was composed one year after the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor when Nyogen was interned in a relocation camp for Japanese nationals in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. World War II was raging in Europe and the Pacific.
Some mystery surrounds the teacher-student relationship between Soyen Shaku and Nyogen Senzaki. But we do know from Nyogen’s writings that he considered Soyen Shaku, a Rinzai Zen master, to be his one true teacher. He was extremely devoted to Soyen Shaku’s memory, and had nothing but praise for this great Zen master who brought Zen to the West in 1893. Here are two poems by Nyogen commemorating his teacher:
November 3, 1935
How can I forget his angry face?
How can I forget the blows of his strong fist?
Thirty years in America,
I worked my way to answer him—
Cultivating a Buddhist field in this strange land.
This autumn, the same as in the past,
I have no crop but the growth of my white hair.
The wind whistles like his scolding voice,
And the rain hits me,
Each drop like his whip.
Hey!
******************************
November 1, 1936
Every autumn I see his penetrating eyes in the moonlight.
Every spring I hear his kind words among the beautiful flowers.
Toward winter, as the days near his commemoration,
I light the longing lamp for him while the night rain patters my window.
At last, the day has come—the first day of November.
All my friends in Dharma are gathered here.
Now I can burn incense to pay homage
To his whole body.
Having devoted his entire adult life to Buddha-Dharma, Nyogen carried his “floating Zendo” with him first to San Francisco and later to Los Angeles, where after many years he passed away on May 7, 1958. He foresaw his death, and prepared a taped message to be played at his funeral. The assembled mourners heard his living voice: “Remember the Dharma! Remember the Dharma!! Remember the Dharma!!!”
When we carefully observe the life of Nyogen Senzaki, his style of teaching and his personality, we cannot help but be impressed with how different he was from both the ancient masters and the modern teachers of Zen. He was not a hermit, nor did he choose to involve himself with traditional temple life. He emphasized the fact that he was in no way attempting to establish an institution, for he sought no permanent dwelling. How well he understood that all existence is “like a dream, like a fantasy.” In this respect, Nyogen—whose name means “no such person”—resembles Shakyamuni Buddha who himself was neither a hermit nor the head of a large congregation in a fixed abode.
Murshid Samuel Lewis, the American Sufi master, said of Nyogen’s passing, “I don’t usually cry, but when ‘Old Fatso’ died I couldn’t help myself. He was the last of the Patriarchs.”
(The above sketch of Nyogen Senzaki’s life is based on Eido Shimano Roshi’s Introduction to his 1978 book, Like A Dream, Like A Fantasy: The Zen Writings and Translations of Nyogen Senzaki. Incidental comments are from Murshid Samuel Lewis, who regarded Nyogen Senzaki as his Zen mentor and friend. Lewis named his San Francisco home “Mentorgarten” in honor of Senzaki who established the first Mentorgarten at 1988 Bush Street, San Francisco, in 1928.)

"Don't tell me about your spiritual experiences." Show me your students! If you do these practices and become like me you flunk. If you do these practices and become yourself you pass. God is your lover NOT your jailer."
~Murshid Samuel Lewis
An American Sufi and Zen master.

April 22 Bowl of Saki Commentary
To learn the lesson of how to live is more important than any psychic or occult knowledge.
~Pir-o-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
Commentary:
Murshid SAM (Sufi Ahmed Murad Chisti, Samuel L. Lewis):
Transcendental knowledge which is confined to the universe of limitation is subject to limitation. The knowledge of the psychic realm may take one beyond earth, but it does not take one to God. The knowledge of the mental and psychic and physical may seem to be without limit, yet it is nothing compared to the knowledge which transcends these spheres. Even all the heart can give as heart alone, separated from the pure stream of life, even that, which appears unlimited to the intellectual, even that is nothing to the comprehension of life itself which comes through self-sacrifice, through union with the source of all things and thoughts.

“Another thing, we don’t try to reach into your pocket for money. We’re not commercial. It’s one of the only organizations that I know of in the non-profit field that isn’t a religion and has endured since 1875. The motto under our symbol out there on the wall says, ‘There is no religion higher than Truth.’ Of course, we in this particular lodge have added another line to that, ‘And no power greater than love.’ Because love is what makes it all go around. That’s what Theosophy is all about — wisdom and love. There is a place in The Secret Doctrine where it states very clearly that Theosophy isn’t the ‘love of wisdom,’ but rather ‘the wisdom of love.’ If each one of you thinks back over your life, you will see that it is always feeling that moves you, the feeling of love. Now there are those who are ambitious and figure that someday they’re going to be able to do a lot of magical things like the things they read in a flock of books. Maybe they will. But it will be a hell of a long time. It takes time to learn about these things. You don’t learn them in your mind. It’s when you come to the reality itself and start feeling it and living it. It’s when you turn out to be givers and not takers. Sure, I’ve done a lot of learning. l’ve whacked my head against the wall a few times until I realized that this illusion was fairly solid if I try to get through it in that manner. It won’t work. As you live, even in this lifetime, sow what you reap. If you’re a giver, not a taker, there will always be more for you to give. But what you’re giving in one form or another by helping someone else is a form of pure love coming from that inside of you. We’re never out of pure love, we’re never out of the love that takes us to that higher ecstasy ... Hell, if I can do it, any of you can do it. I’m nobody. I don’t have any titles hanging out of my ears. I don’t belong to any hierarchy. THE ONLY HIERARCHY THERE IS, IS REALITY! That’s the very Oneness itself. And we all belong to that. Each one of us is IMMORTAL.”
~Joe Miller, Murshid SAM's dear spiritual friend
Legendary American Sage Joe Miller, “Great Song: Life & Teachings of Joe Miller”


Joe Miller. Golden Gate Park. Circa late 1980s.

Candidates(for initiation) are informed that there is no absolute base of judging human personalities or even forms of life according to any rigid rules. No doubt rules are needed, laws are needed for certain conformities in the outer world. Without them we could not have governments and regulations and even education. But these are not the goals of life, they are means toward, and not only do codes and regulations differ, they seldom avail to elevate mankind to the attainment either of outer desires or inner aspirations.
Words and thoughts are at best droplets from an ocean. Qur’an has taught: “Even if all the seas were ink and all the pens were one great pen, this would not suffice to describe the majesty of God.” So it is very difficult to verbalize, and the more we verbalize the more we are apt to get away from feeling, which alone can describe and understand the universal heart.
~ Murshid SAM

SAM and Wali Ali

April 9 Bowl of Saki Commentary

Things are worthwhile when we seek them; only then do we know their value.
– Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Commentary ~Murshid Samuel L. Lewis (Sufi Ahmed Murad Chisti):
But the real value is in the search, not in the things. In the story of “Sir Launfal” by the poet Lowell, the cup of Christ was as a cup of pure running water. It was not magical, but the search and the suffering brought the awakening. Actually no thing has great spiritual value, but to cease to search—to be unwilling to attain, not to look or strive—all these prevent God from manifesting and prevent us from returning to God’s Source.

NOTE: The Vision of Sir Launfal, long verse parable by James Russell Lowell, published in 1848. Lowell, who was influenced by the works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Thomas Malory, offers his version of the Grail story in this tale of a knight who decides not to take a journey in search of the Holy Grail after he learns, during the course of a long dream, that the real meaning of the Grail is charity.

Urs Mubarak! Murshida Vera Corda
January 7, 1913 — April 7, 2002

Murshida Vera on Fana
"The Sufis set their glance at the infinity of the sea or the infinity of the sky beyond the horizon in order to surrender the ego. In surrendering the ego, we have to give in to a transforming action of the overall consciousness of the vastness of the sky. The eye has to sweep that whole sky and see the great vastness which comes into your consciousness to make you understand that you are such a tiny filter."
~Murshida Vera Corda

March 22
There is one teacher, God; we are all God’s pupils.
~Pir-o-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
Commentary~Murshid Samuel L. Lewis (Sufi Ahmed Murad Chisti):
Knowledge is not the fruit of the mind; knowledge comes when mind itself is the fruit of the tree of knowledge. It is not particular names and forms that constitute knowledge; it is the successful grasping of affairs through the living intelligence, which is the very essence of our self.
And what is this intelligence? It is the Spirit of Guidance within us, that is to say the reflection of God which is the one thing that gives us strength and inspiration. Beyond even that is God in Essence Who is continually pouring forth love and knowledge. When we are receptive we become God’s disciples.

A double Hu (the Arabic pronoun of Divine Presence), symbolizing the reciprocal reflection of the Divine in the human, the human in the Divine.

March 16 Bowl of Saki Commentary

At every step of evolution, one’s realization of God changes.
– Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Commentary ~Murshid Samuel L. Lewis (Sufi Ahmed Murad Chisti):
For the nature of mind is to seek, to move, to change. It may endeavor to enlarge its scope, and this brings change in realization. But Baqa is most wonderful for it includes both the changing and changeless condition at the same time. It brings the celestial music which is one note and all notes. Even discovery of God does not confer divinity. This is never possible in our sense of the term even though we may speak of Parinirvana. For the mind to dwell on such matters is senseless; for the mind to discover itself is all value.

Beloved Family,
Nearly 20 years ago I began requesting our dear and accomplished Murshid Wali Ali to write a proper biography of our teacher, Murshid Samuel Lewis. At the time he said he wasn’t ready.
Then he became the chief editor for Physicians of the Heart and did an amazing job.
Shortly after that his wife, Sabura Rose Meyer, said to me, “Ask him to write a biography again, I think he will say yes this time”. And he did.
~Pir Shabda Kahn, spiritual director of the Sufi Ruhaniat International

Now, after Murshid Wali Ali’s passing on Thanksgiving 2022,
SUNRISE IN THE WEST,
THE LIFE OF AMERICAN MYSTIC
SAMUEL L. LEWIS
a 752-page book with 160 pictures is printed and available

Order your special edition Hard cover copy today while supplies last.

Here is the link to the order form directly from the Sufi Ruhaniat International

https://conta.cc/42K7a0c