SPAIN 2022 | Be Community

BePeriod Gathering in Spain

28 March – 3 April 2022

BePeriod is inviting its members to an international gathering in Spain. The event will begin and end in Madrid. From there, we will travel to Granada and Córdoba. We will focus our visit on the Christian and Islamic cultures that thrived at different times in the Iberian Peninsula, taking advantage of the well-preserved Islamic art and architecture in Southern Spain to open a door into the world of Sufism. Read more about some of the highlights below.

The seed of Sufism, that was gathered in the time of Egypt, was sown in the time of Adam, germinated in the time of Noah, budded in the time of Abraham, developed in the time of Moses, reached maturity in the time of Jesus, and produced pure wine in the time of Muhammad.

Sufi Saying

Granada

Alhambra Palace

Islam forbade the depiction of human likenesses. Its artists were forced to restrict their expressions to geometry and calligraphy, and brought these mediums to a remarkable height in the palace and fortress complex of Alhambra. Here we will walk through halls of columns, arches, beautified by lattice and calligraphy of the finest level. At its heart, Alhambra’s Court of the Lions is an ambitious attempt to execute the Garden of Paradise on earth. We will examine the structure of this inner courtyard, the esoteric principles it aspires to embody, and their inner meaning.

The word Paradise is of Old Iranian origin and literally means a walled enclosure. To keep nature from growing chaotically, a gardener (or farmer) must enclose his crops within walls. Then, inside, he can bend nature to suit his higher aims. Consequently, the image of a walled garden brings us back to the Labors of the Month, offering a refreshing view at this teaching’s methods and aims.

Inner Garden | Alhambra Palace

You must remember God in the midst of those who are heedless of God in such a way that they are not aware of you.

Ibn Arabi

Detail from The Annunciation by Fra Angelico | Prado Museum

Madrid

Museo del Prado

The Museo del Prado is the main Spanish national art museum. It houses an extensive collection of paintings relevant to our teaching by Fra Angelico, Van Eyck, Bosch, Durer, and Rembrandt, to name a few. We will tour this museum and study a selection of these paintings, taking unique advantage to witness physically some of the works we know so well from our digital workshops.

Fra Angelico’s Annunciation

One painting we periodically feature is Fra Angelico’s Annunciation. Mary represents the receptive heart able to conceive by a higher power, the way a leaf transforms solar energy into cellular matter. Angelico’s renditions of Mary are useful studies on how the heart may achieve this miracle. The facial expression, posture, and action all instruct how to bring our emotional centers to the point of receptivity needed to connect with higher centers. In this painting, we will again witness the walled garden (or ‘Paradise’) and its role in inner transformation.

The word zikr literally means ‘remembering,’ which in Gurdjieff’s presentation is the means to ‘remembering oneself.’ The special characteristic of the Sufi zikr is the invocation of the Name of God. It is a directing of the intention and the will toward the Deity within.

John Godolphine Bennett

Córdoba

Great Mosque of Córdoba

Each tradition has its own particular house of worship, which teaches a lot about how that tradition functions. The Great Mosque of Córdoba will afford us the opportunity of exploring a relatively early mosque and studying some of the fundamentals of Islam. Here, again, we will see a walled garden, repeating the theme of ‘Paradise’ threaded throughout our visit.

Every mosque has a niche in one of its walls that designates the direction of prayer, called a mihrab. The mihrab indicates the location of the Kaaba in Mecca. Thus, the Muslim is commanded to first turn to the Kaaba before beginning to pray. A wrongly-oriented prayer is useless, just like an aimless effort is worthless. This religious practice originally had an inner meaning known to the Sufis. “The meaning of turning your face towards the Kaaba,” explained Al-Ghzali, “is to turn your mind towards God after taking it off from all directions and thoughts.” Likewise, Ibn Arabi confirmed: “The heart of the believer is the real Kaaba.”

Mosque | Cordoba

The majority of religions breathe, act, and live according to holy writ, commandments, and precepts. At the same time, a teaching existed of wise men who tried to realize for themselves every religion, and all legends and all doctrines dispassionately. They did not blindly submit. Before accepting anything, they beforehand realized it for themselves. Whatever they could realize for themselves, they accepted. What they could not, they rejected. In this way a new religion was formed… the teaching of the Sufi.

George Gurdjieff

Scene from The Conference of the Birds | Persian miniature

Theater

Conference of the Birds

The myths we study were almost always originally performed. Performance forces the knowledge on all centers because it combines text, movement, and emotion. In this spirit, we will perform excerpts from a new version of The Conference of the Birds by Attar of Nishapur, in which the journey to God-realization is portrayed as a pilgrimage of birds traveling towards a godlike phoenix. The journey is fraught with difficulty. Most find excuses to quit; only few birds reach the journey’s end.

Throughout the gathering, our evenings and nights will be spent in rehearsal. The endeavor of staging this play will put us under creative pressure and make our exploration of Sufism more relevant, intimate, and memorable. And who knows; if we are lucky, we might find a walled garden in which to perform our play on the last evening of our event.

I wonder why the Sufi experiment managed to hit such a pure ecstatic note? It seems to me that something went very right, and at a certain point negative emotions were transmuted into love on a very big scale.

Rodney Collin