Irina Tweedie photo sourced from The Golden Sufi Center
Irina Tweedie was born in Russia and studied in Vienna and Paris. After the Second World War she married a British naval officer, whose early death in 1954 led her on a spiritual quest. Her trip to India in 1959, at the age of fifty-two, mysteriously led her to a Sufi Master, Radha Mohan Lal, whom she called Bhai Sahib (Elder Brother). This meeting set her upon a journey to the “heart of hearts,” the Sufi path of self-realization. Whilst training with him, and at his request, she kept a diary of what she calls:
‘…the slow grinding down of personality … I had hoped to get instruction in yoga … but found myself forced to face the darkness within myself … I was beaten down in every sense till I had come to terms with that in me which I’d been rejecting all my life …’
On first meeting with the Sufi Master, she tells him that she wants God:
“‘But not the Christian idea of an anthropomorphic deity. I want the Rootless Root, the Causeless Cause of the Upanishads”.
“Nothing less than that?” he lifted an eyebrow … He was silent … “He thinks I am full of pride,” flashed through my mind.’
And so the process of uncovering begins as the Master tells her that Sufism is a way of life. Neither a religion or a philosophy that can be attached to any religion: Hindu Sufis, Muslim Sufis, Christian Sufis. The way of life involves ‘throwing everything behind, as you go on’: including, as it turns out, all her money and possessions. The path requires absolute faith in the guru. Sitting in meditation, he explains you may feel nothing is happening:
‘… it is here where faith will help you. Feel deeply that you are in the presence of God; and wait for His Grace, full of alertness and surrender … one day His Grace will strike you.’
The process he suggests to Irina Tweedie will take a couple of years of constant training and giving everything up, but gradually the experience of true prayer which is perfect Unity with God will happen.
As the months pass, Tweedie begins to recognize a deep longing within her: ‘it is strong and even, constantly going on like a call from far away.’ She finds the treatment from Bhai Sahib is sometimes deeply troubling and humiliating, and indeed to a contemporary reader his treatment sometimes borders on the harsh and cruel. It seems it is not surrender so much as self-annihilation: ‘Self-annihilation in the Master.’ And Bhai Sahib becomes the focus for all her actions and thinking. She discovers that in the whole of the Universe:
‘… there is nothing else but the Lover and the Beloved. This is the Truth … the only reality is this. God and His Creation and the Creation loves God and God loves the Creation. Nothing else has a meaning but that alone.’
As she deepens her involvement with the Master, Tweedie sees that her past life seems empty, devoid of meaning and she begins to understand how:
‘once on the Spiritual Path, one can never go back; not simply because there are such secrets which cannot be revealed, but simply because there remains nothing to go back to …’