Lessons in Love: Essays and Spiritual Exercises for Modern Life

By Irving Karchmar

These spiritual exercises and essays offer real Lessons in Love for anyone following a spiritual path. Based on the Sufi Path of Love, they enhance the journey, and offer a new idea of spiritual evolution

• Language: English
• Publisher: Irving Karchmar
• Release date: Feb 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311913272

Irving Karchmar

Irving Karchmar has been a writer and editor for many years, and a darvish of the Nimatullahi Sufi Order since 1992. He lives near New York City.

Book preview

Lessons in Love

Spiritual exercises for modern life

by

Irving Karchmar

Smashwords Editions

Copyright © 2015 by Irving Karchmar. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For information contact the author at

[e-mail]

Cover photo by Jim Kosinski

Cover design by Elana Spieth

___________________

Dedicated to Dr. Alireza Nurbakhsh

Master of the Nimatullahi Sufi Order

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 My Out of Body Experience

Chapter 2 Origin of the Spiritual Species

Chapter 3 God First

Chapter 4 What Love Demands

Chapter 5 The Intention of Service

Chapter 6 Waiting for God

Chapter 7 Being Thought Full of God

Chapter 8 Generosity of Spirit

Chapter 9 The Upward Glance and the Lowest Bow

Chapter 10 Practicing Love

Chapter 11 Loving Quietly

Chapter 12 Healing Through Compassion

Chapter 13 The I Experiment

Chapter 14 Meditation on Death

Chapter 15 Last Word

Chapter One

My Out of Body Experience

This is a true story.

A few months after my 40th birthday, on January 14th 1986, I was rushed to the Emergency Room due to the devastating effects of a misdiagnosed illness. Had my sister not been visiting and seen my condition and insist I go to the hospital immediately, the doctors said I would not have lived through the night.

In the emergency room my heart stopped and the ER doctors had to revive it with those electric paddles you see in the movies. I remember it only vaguely, though I did have burn marks on my chest for a few days. Eventually they discovered that I had Cushing’s Disease, a benign tumor on the pituitary gland (which is in the middle of the forehead) that caused the hormones levels in my body to run wild. The natural steroid hormone ACTH, for example, has a normal level of 200. Mine was 6000.

And since the pituitary gland controls other glands and body