The Last Barrier
About This Book
The Last Barrier is Reshad Feild's extraordinary spiritual autobiography — the account of his encounters in England and Turkey with a Sufi master named Hamid who guided him through experiences of inner transformation that culminated in his formal initiation into a Sufi order in Istanbul. Feild was a musician, antique dealer, and genuine seeker in 1960s London when his path crossed Hamid's — and the encounters that followed, spread over several years and two countries, were of a quality that the reader of this book can sense through the writing itself: something genuinely extraordinary was happening, and Feild writes about it with the honest bewilderment of someone who knew he was in the presence of something far beyond his ordinary frame of reference.
What makes The Last Barrier one of the most valuable and authentic accounts of the Sufi path available is Feild's refusal to romanticise or systematise his experience. The teaching that comes through his encounters with Hamid is not a doctrine to be presented but a living transmission to be experienced, and Feild has the literary skill to convey the atmosphere of genuine transmission — the quality of presence that could dissolve a person's ordinary identity in a conversation, the specific challenges and confrontations through which the ego's defences were progressively dismantled, and the nature of the surrender that the tradition asks of its students. The book has been a beloved introduction to Sufism for many Western readers precisely because of this quality of genuineness.
What You'll Learn
• Understand the nature of the Sufi path as revealed through Feild's experience: not a doctrine to be studied but a transmission to be received — and why genuine Sufi teaching requires the personal presence of a qualified guide who has themselves received this transmission
• Grasp the teaching on the ego's dissolution: how Hamid's interventions in Feild's life — often unexpected, sometimes painful — consistently worked to dismantle the protective structures through which the ordinary self maintains its sense of control and identity
• Recognise the concept of surrender as the Sufi tradition understands it: not the passive giving up of the will but the active offering of the ego's agenda to a wisdom larger than the personal self — and how this differs from the submission to external authority that surrender is often mistaken for
• Learn how the Mevlevi tradition (the Whirling Dervishes) relates to the inner work Feild underwent: the use of music, movement, and the specific practices of the sema as vehicles for the states of consciousness that the inner teaching aims to produce
• Appreciate the experience of genuine spiritual transmission as Feild describes it: what it feels like from the inside to be in the presence of someone whose realisation is communicating itself through their ordinary actions and speech, and why this form of transmission cannot be replicated through any other means
Reader Reviews
No reviews yet. Be the first to share your thoughts on this book.
