Living Presence: The Sufi path to mindfulness and the essential self, by Kabir Helminski

Author: Kabir Helminski. Review by Angela Greenwood

Over the years I have heard a number of Quakers comment that, while we are passionate about valuing and sharing silence, there is little substantial teaching on how to use and go deeply into it. There are of course various ‘enlightened’ spiritual teachers around, ancient and modern, who offer teaching and guided meditations on this. But, like other Quakers, while I appreciate our Quaker openness to Truth, I also value our lack of a proscribed creed and practice. It is perhaps however The Most Important Thing1, this quest for Truth.

In the spirit therefore of opening to truth ‘from wherever it may come’(2) I would like to share some thoughts about Living Presence by Kabir Edmund Helminski.

I was introduced to Living Presence quite recently by a Friend from our Meeting. For some years this Friend and I have been meeting regularly to share ‘in the things that are eternal’(3) as we Quakers say, by following the teachings, and particularly the guided meditations, of the American spiritual teacher Adyashanti.

One day this Friend suggested I might like Living Presence. I have come to a stage in life when I don’t just want to ‘dip into’ practices and teachings, and even as a ‘mystic’ I have become reluctant to explore new teachings just out of interest. But I respect my Friend, and as soon as I opened a page I was captivated.

I read, for example: ‘Presence is the space around our inner and outer experiences. In a sense, we are that space.’

Then, on another page: ‘When we come into Presence we enter speechlessness, silence.’

I soon saw that Helminski’s detailed, comprehensive and practical teachings on how to be open to Presence in everyday life – and how to allow it to flow through our words, our relating and our actions –was just what I needed. Here’s another example: ‘If we can be at that point where the horizontal force of active choice meets the vertical force of Being, a certain “something” larger than life, will be activated. This “something” can be felt in anything produced by the hands and heart of an (awake) human being – in works of art, in a well-tended garden, and in food prepared with love.’

Then, ‘When we listen to and express our (true) Self, we will find what is needed to meet life’s demands. Having brought the conscious mind into resonance with a dimensionless point within [TS Eliot’s ‘still point in the turning world’(4) I wondered]… we will be able to embrace life and those we need to love. This dimensionless point within is our point of contact with the qualities of Spirit. If we can regularly silence the mind and become “aware” at the core of our Being, we will receive help from Source of life. Presence is the empty centre that attracts and manifests the qualities of Spirit.’

I have now read Living Presence three times and come to value it a lot – such that I have written comments and responses on most pages, and I often take it with me when I go on solitary walks.

So these days when my Friend and I meet, after our meditation we will read one or two of Helminski’s short chapters slowly and reflectively together, pausing and commenting as we go, and relating passages to our experience.

It’s not that we necessarily or immediately go along with everything he writes. Some of it is beyond our experience, and challenges abound. But I think we both feel motivated to take them in and take them seriously.

It’s not that there aren’t other spiritual teachers saying similar things, but I really like Helminski’s clarity, his comprehensiveness, inclusivity and his emphasis on the unity of Being. Try this: ‘We are One. We are not separate from the Divine.’

Or ‘There is something non-existent, something that cannot be touched, seen or even thought, and yet this something is more important than anything else, the fathomless source of all qualities and possibilities.’

Then ‘The awakening to Being requires emptying oneself.’

Something I particularly like is his including of a ‘non-dual’ way of understanding deep reality, with an acceptance and valuing of our human opportunity to live consciously in our (passing and Spirit-filled) material world.

This is both: ‘Consciousness is knowing that you are’ and ‘Through conscious presence we begin to live differently – to be more fully in the present moment, attending to whatever arises.’
I also like his inclusion of the importance of the ‘path of service’: ‘Becoming a human being is learning how to give even more than learning how to meditate or exercise the will… we practice these to decondition ourselves and undermine our self-centredness and greed.’ ‘Service is the “Beloved” loving through us’, he says ‘and the “Generous” giving through us’.
The book is threaded with poetry and wisdom from Rumi – which is infused with beauty but at times very challenging:

‘Whoever is more awake has greater pain.’(5)
‘Seek pain, pain, pain!’(6)
‘Pain is a treasure, for it contains mercies;
The kernel is soft when the rind is scraped off’.(7)
‘The ignorant first wipes the tablet and then writes the letters on it.
God turns the heart into blood and desperate tears; then He writes the spiritual mysteries on it.’(8)

So many aspects are covered both from the deep experience of Helminski himself, and springing from the great Rumi – like a treasure chest of the soul. I have just highlighted a few here to give interested readers a flavour.

Kabir Edmund Helminski is a Jesuit-educated US citizen turned Sufi Sheik in the Mevlevi order founded by Rumi. Although I had heard of Sufism before, and I knew it to be a mystical expression of Islam, I did not know much about it. I have been amazed and inspired to find in Islam such a mystical path, which I could resonate with so strongly, and through which I could learn and grow. Interestingly it has also quite shifted my view of Islam that it should include a path with such depth. 

(1) The Most Important Thing: Discovering truth at the heart of life, by Adyashanti (2019)
(2) Quaker faith & practice 26.20
(3) Quaker faith & practice 3.02
(4) In ‘Burnt Norton’, the first of the Four Quartets
(5) Masnavi Book 1, 629
(6) Masnavi Book 6, 4302
(7) Masnavi Book 2, 2261
(8) Masnavi Book 2, 1827

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