There is a little known mystic who deserves our attention: Murshid Sam Lewis.
A new book has come out about him that puts him in the evolutionary context of the time period from 1896 to 1971 which then sparks the evolution of his work through the inspiration he initiated.
“Gardens of Vision and Initiation: The Life Journey of Samuel L. Lewis” by Neil Douglas-Klotz.
I’m reading this right now so it’s exciting to talk about it.
Here is a book that explores a mystic who traveled his journey through many countries of the earth, exploring mysticism through authentic sources (chasing it even), during a time period when east was meeting west in an explosion. He had an amazing idea that might just change everything.
Sam said “It is easy to bring East and West together. Only nobody does it. Everybody is trying to remake the other like himself.”
We’re still doing that with most of our popular spirituality.
Sam had a lot of problems with the new age “mystical elite” of his time. Reading this book, it’s kind of discouraging to realize that our spiritual movements today suffer from the same misconceptions and power struggles that were there during Sam’s life. In fact, we’re really a lot worse today because blatant narcissism is now seen as spirituality. But then again, we haven’t really tried his program, so maybe things are easier to turn around than we think.
When exploring Sam it’s important to remember that everything he did was in the context of his world wide peace program. He says the first step to universal peace is to eat, dance and pray together.
What he did was to take spiritualty and put movement and sound vibration to it, and then (of course) we need to eat! Me? Of course, I always add one more thing to it because I’m a Sannyasin: Laughter!
Evolutionary Enlightenment takes our spiritual search from a static experience and adds the movement of time. We’re moving towards the one! Spiritual dance and walk adds our full body to it. Laughter takes away our rut. Mix the three together and suddenly our whole aliveness is moving through time, creating as we go. Turning our attention towards our aliveness immediately lights it up. Move your body and you can feel your molecules waking up. Add sound to it and the awakened molecules vibrate.
This is a practice that can’t be thought about. It has to be experienced. Where ever you are right now add this song to your experience and see what happens.
Sri Ram Jai Ram
That’s just a simple mantra from the Hindu tradition singing to Ram. It’s an easy way to add a vibration of devotion and joy to your molecules in this very moment.
Here’s an interesting thing to think about. Sam’s life work was the inspiration behind the Dances of Universal Peace, a world wide movement to spread eating, dancing and praying together. It’s Sam’s peace program in practice. When we think about this in normal terms we’d think that Sam inspired a bunch of people who then went off and created a thing.
Put it in the realm of Evolutionary Spirituality, though, and you could say that Sam sparked inspiration itself.
Think about inspiration as a field, like a field of energy that runs through the universe and can be moved and pushed. One person’s inspiration is like a windmill adding to an electrical current. It’s a field that we are always moving in and through. We can choose to join it, bathe in it, take a rest from it, grow it… or even ignore it.
Spiritual dance is an energy in process that we can join from anywhere. It can be done by ourselves privately. These days we can jump right in through Youtube. It’s better with other people together; lots of other people. As the pandemic eases we’ll be able to join groups in person.
Music and movement are natural ways to join this dynamic field of energy.
Looked at one way, Sam Lewis’s story would show us that we can all create something new. But he can also be a lesson of how we can join a field of inspiration that’s already blooming. That’s a very exciting way to move the creativity of the universe forward.
In a real sense it’s impossible create anything completely new. Everything comes from something.
Even Sam didn’t create a new thing. He just had the opportunity to experience amazing stuff all over the world throughout his life and came to some interesting conclusions because of it. He also walked through a field of inspiration created by others and brought many different paths to fruition.
I’m inspired to add music, movement and laugher into the blooming field of evolutionary enlightenment, and to add evolutionary enlightenment to the world of song and dance. That’s a mystery for sure.
And a treat… Enjoy a dance with a hundred people: