Desert of Wandering

In the Zensufi worldview, we speak of the Origin as the moment when the divine, playfully exploring his Thusness, expressed a momentary forgetfulness. In that moment of forgetfulness, all things that he was, all things that he manifested came to be.

The sense of separation, the sense of longing for connectedness the familiarity of the path as we walk it, the moments of dejavu, are all echos of this moment of divine forgetfulness. We are not separate, but part of the playful moment of distraction of the divine. Within the medative state we come to see this.

Zensufism speaks of the Desert of Wandering. All of us are in the Desert of Wandering. It is no more real than this world, but it is no less real. There are places where we meet in the Desert. The Great Temple is one such place.

I want to stress that the Desert of Wandering is actually there. It is not myth, or metaphor. It is, by its own standards, utterly real. I want to stress also that it is not real at all. These are contradictions, and words will lead us astray. It is the place where our souls meet. It is not subject to time, or to space. To say it is a spiritual realm is correct, but misleads us to believe it is not interwoven with our own realm. It completely co-exists with our own realm. You exist there. I exist there. I go there, or rather, I activate my awareness of it, to sit on the dunes, to watch the light play over the distant mountains, blue purple in the haze. I go there to watch the sparrows dart in and out of the scrubby trees that cling for life in the harsh landscape. I meet those who are distant from me in this world, but who come to me in that world. I go not to escape but to restore, renew, and to do what I have been called to do.

This is where the Great Temple comes in. It is a meeting place where souls gather, where the Net of Indra is manifest. This is where I meet my master, where my students meet me, and where we gather in brotherhood. Here is where healing happens, where empowerment occurs, where all manner of prosperity have their well spring. In Zen they say "this very body is the body of the buddha, this very land, the Pure Land." Zensufism supports this completely.

When I go to the Great Temple and press my head to the feet of My Master, I know that we have transcended time and place, and I see all the bodies of buddha, all the features of the Pure Land. The work done in the Desert of Wandering has unbelievably positive effect on others.

When I first came to awareness of the Desert of Wandering and came to the Temple, under the guidance of a Tibetan Lama, I did not think that this place was anything more than a vivd visualization. As I continued my practice, and specific work began to be carried out in the Great Temple, lives of people around me began to change. The people I specifically was dealing with in the Desert of Wandering began to have uncharacteristically positive changes in their lives. Only one of them ever knew I was doing anything. Another had been lost to me for over a decade, and then, out of the blue, appeared. This was a person I thought had died. Had it been an up turn for one or two of those I was working with in the Temple, I might have not noticed, but it was an up turn for every one of them. There is no magic here. It's just an illustration of the Net of Indra — the web of interconnection, the Desert of Wandering.