How the Light Gets In: An Interview with Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

At the age of 16, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee had a spiritual experience that propelled him on a lifelong spiritual path. For three years he delved into any spiritual teaching he could find. Then at the age of 19, he met an elderly Russian woman named Irina Tweedie. Tweedie was a Sufi teacher in the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Sufi Order and later wrote the classic Daughter of Fire: A Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master. He had found his teacher.

When Vaughan-Lee was 36 years old, Tweedie appointed him her successor. Soon after that he felt called to bring the teaching to the United States. Vaughan-Lee settled with his wife and two children in a community north of San Francisco and established the Golden Sufi Center www.goldensufi.org. He continued to teach around the world. His order now has a following of about 800 people worldwide in the U.S., Canada, England, Germany, Switzerland, South Africa, Spain, South America and Australia. Groups meet at private homes to meditate and engage in dream discussions.

In November 2012, Pat MacEnulty sat down with him for a lengthy interview, in which Vaughan-Lee discusses the teacher-disciple relationship, his own spiritual practice, Jungian connections to Sufism, and his hopes and fears for the future.