Science and Religion: A Sufi Perspective

In the attached far-ranging interview, Sufi teacher and author, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee ("Love Is a Fire: The Sufi's Mystical Journey Home") discusses, in part, the relationship between science and religion from a Sufi perspective.

"Science and religion will become one," says Vaughan-Lee. "It is part of the next stage of human evolution. It has to do with the speeding up of the planet. It is actually very exact. It has to do with the question of speed. Spiritual things are a question of speed. The more spiritual, the quicker the vibration."

"And if you look at the life around us," he asks rhetorically, "why is it speeding up so much? What is the underlying reason? Because, as a mystic, you always look to the underlying reason. What is the underlying reason for our life speeding up to such a degree?"

"It is," Vaughan-Lee asserts, "so it can get near to the spiritual vibrations, so that the spiritual and everyday become one. Part of the science of the future will be to understand how the spiritual and the physical interrelate."

"As a mystic," Vaughan-Lee observes, "you see how things change first in the 'inner.' There is a law that everything that happens in life first constellates on the inner planes. If you do mystical practices, you will begin to see how things come into being.  And the world as we know it inwardly has already ended. It is already over. . . . Somebody once said, "It is like the last dance on the Titanic.""

"There is," he notes, "a whole other level of evolution which I call evolution of 'Oneness' or 'global awareness.' . . . It is already setting the scenes for the next level of human evolution. . . . The Internet," he points out, "is a direct example of how 'Oneness' works, and how it is incredibly efficient and it is everywhere at the same time, and anybody (or anybody who has a computer) can have access to it. And it was just given to humanity, and it works. So the world as we know it has somewhere already ended."

"But it is our work," Vaughan-Lee cautions, "to bring this next evolution into being, because it needs human beings who can see beyond the debris of the civilization that is around us."

"If you look around with open eyes," he points out, "you see the debris of a dying or dead civilization."