Stories for a Living Future with Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Over the last three years Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee has written a number of stories about returning our consciousness to the living Earth, a numinous world alive in both matter and spirit. As we travel through the darkening days of the present time there is a primal need to find a pathway back to this landscape, experienced through our senses and our dreams. These stories are both simple and radical, simple because they describe what is already around us, the wind in the trees, water flowing over stones. Radical because they point to a fundamentally different quality of consciousness, which belongs to both our distant past and our possible future. Presented here as a series, these stories are an opportunity to become immersed in this landscape, physical and imaginal, and through this shift in awareness to be able to walk towards a living future. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee is a Sufi teacher who has specialized in dreamwork and Jungian psychology. He is author of numerous books on Sufism and spiritual responsibility in our present time of transition, including "For Love of the Real" and "Seasons of the Sacred," and editor of the anthology "Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth." His most recent book is "Seeding the Future: A Deep Ecology of Consciousness." For more information, or to read a transcript of each episode, please visit: https://workingwithoneness.org/podcast/
Episodes
37 episodes
My Own Story—Epilogue: The Nature of Divine Light
The nature of the light which I have described in these recent podcasts is that it comes direct from the Source, from the undifferentiated Essence. It awakens us to an awareness of the oneness and multiplicity of creation, and the primal need f...
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Season 4
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Episode 5
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23:10
Death
In this episode I talk about death, a subject central to the life of a mystic. The Sufi says that we should “die before we die,” die to the ego, and its illusory sense of a separate self, and awake to the truth of our eternal nature. Lifetime a...
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Season 4
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Episode 4
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28:19
The Song of the Heart of the World
The teachings of the Tao have always been a hidden influence in my own journey, its qualities of silence and stillness, and a relationship to the “natural order of things.” Here I explore the way the teachings of the two great masters, Lao Tzu ...
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Season 4
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Episode 3
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15:30
Walking Between Worlds
The path of the mystic has drawn me deep into the inner worlds. Returning to our fragile Earth and my own vulnerable self, I become a place where the worlds come together. In this meeting something comes alive; an unnamable, unknowable Essence ...
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Season 4
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Episode 2
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21:17
Series 4 - My Own Story: A Return to Love
My own story has been a journey of love. Sitting at the feet of my teacher I experienced a love that was all-embracing, and which took me on its path, back to the Beloved and also into life. Half a century later a new quality of love has return...
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Season 4
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Episode 1
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20:23
Into the Light and Back Again
A final piece that describes part of my own journey into the light and back again, a personal description of the landscape of light and love into which I was taken, and how this landscape has defined much of my later years. I also hope that the...
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Season 3
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Episode 4
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13:08
Angels and Devas
We are surrounded by many unseen worlds of angels and nature devas, spirit guides and elemental beings, and yet we have cut ourself off from these worlds, their wisdom and guidance. We are helped in so many mysterious ways about which our prese...
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Season 3
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Episode 3
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19:30
Love and Prayer
Praying for the Earth as a living being, I feel the love that runs through all things, every cell and every star. I sense that love is really all we have to give, and the meaning behind every experience that touches the soul. Love is life’s gre...
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Season 3
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Episode 2
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12:09
Listening to the Wind
In this time between stories, where are the visions to guide us, the dreams to follow? How can we understand the conflicting forces that define our world and our shared future without this deeper wisdom? We have to learn once again how to liste...
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Season 3
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Episode 1
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11:40
Trailer: Stories for a Living Future, Series 3: Stories of the Heart
In this third podcast series I return to familiar themes: living at the end of an era, in a time of great dying, and yet holding a thread to a living future—a thread woven in ancient memories as well as visions of a new way to live with the Ear...
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Season 3
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Episode 0
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1:25
Awakening
As an interlude between Series 2, From the Edge of the World, and Series 3, Stories of the Heart, I want to go back to the beginning, to a talk “Awakening” given in 2007. This talk explores the foundational question of the rel...
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56:09
Foundations for a New Era
The final podcast in this second series is the shortest, but in many ways the most essential. One morning I awoke long before dawn with the clear knowing of the seven foundational qualities that belong to the next era. I describe them in the wa...
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Season 2
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Episode 12
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8:33
Watching the Stars
Watching the stars, the Milky Way stretching across the sky, I sense how the changes happening within the Earth reach far into the cosmos. Our journey together with the Earth is taking us through the debris of a civilization causing ecocide, bu...
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Season 2
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Episode 11
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16:42
The Living Moment: Reflections of an Old Man
Getting older I find it easier to be more fully in the moment, a place without clocks or calendars. The present moment is all around us, though mostly hidden, covered by our thoughts and the patterns of the day. It contains both the outer physi...
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Season 2
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Episode 10
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11:47
Living Oneness
Oneness is a foundational principle for the new era, but in order to recognize how we are a part of this living wholeness we need a new quality of perception, less rigid and more fluid. We need to become more aware of the patterns of interconne...
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Season 2
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Episode 9
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14:42
Earth Changes
In order to understand more fully the changes taking place I try to let the Earth and my heart speak to me, tell me their story, how the threads of creation are being rewoven into a new pattern. What does it mean that a doorway between the worl...
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Season 2
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Episode 8
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11:58
A Dream of the Earth
Around us we can see the cascading crises of the end of an era, but we have little awareness of how the Earth Herself is changing. Even as the Earth is suffering, life is recreating itself. There are deep patterns of realignment taking place, p...
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Season 2
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Episode 7
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12:09
Colliding Forces
Collectively we are walking along a fault line where two eras meet, forces constellating deep within our psyche and within the Earth. And yet we have little understanding of these primal powers that are the great determining factors. How can we...
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Season 2
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Episode 6
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18:26
A New Note in the Axis of Love
The axis of love runs through all things, present in every grain of sand, every drop of rain, every laugh, every tear. And this axis is coming alive in a new way—our hearts are being turned back to the physical world and the wonder of div...
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Season 2
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Episode 5
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16:07
The Gift of a Garden
In this liminal landscape, a place between stories, it is more and more important to find a place of belonging. In my own journey this has been the gift of a garden, a place where the worlds come together, the spirits of the land and the beings...
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Season 2
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Episode 4
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8:24
Prayer of the Heart
As I experience our world becoming darker and more self-destructive, I am drawn more and more into prayer as a refuge and response. Prayer, like the first cry of a newborn baby or the final gasp of a dying person, is that most essential respons...
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Season 2
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Episode 3
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32:52
A Four-Point Plan Revisited
What should we do in response to the present time of darkening and cascading crises? Although there is much work to be done in the outer world, there are also simple steps taking us from witnessing to grief to love, so that we may participate i...
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Season 2
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Episode 2
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19:44
Watching at the Edge of the World
At the edge of the world one can see not only storms building far out to sea, but also forces forming across continents. If we are to walk through these transitioning times of radical uncertainty, we need an awareness of these patterns, which o...
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Season 2
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Episode 1
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13:29