Between the physical world and the spiritual world there is a middle world. The philosophers call it the World of the Image. Spiritual realities become images there before manifesting as bodies, and bodies become images there while ascending toward spirit. The World of the Image has an earth and a heaven. The Heaven of the World of the Image is a place of awe and wonder. The mystics call it Hurqalya.
What is
Hurqalya Center?
Hurqalya Center is a spiritual learning community. We exist to serve humanity as it awakens to its divinity, and to spread the recognition of the unity of all of life.
Hurqalya was established in 1975, in California, by Taj Inayat and Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, as a branch of the Sufi Order. The Sufi Order (now known as the Inayatiyya), was founded in 1917 by Hazrat Inayat Khan, who brought universal Sufism to the Western world from India.
Our Offerings
Drawing upon Sufi teachings, poetry and music, as well as the world’s wisdom traditions and modern psychology, we offer a variety of experiential programs and retreats.
Aspiration for the Path
Humanity is being called to awaken from the slumber of eons into the Great Possibility: the realization of the eternal, uncreated depths of our existence, while consciously participating in the present emergence of Life becoming.
We seek to actualize this divine impulse through three aspirations:
Becoming a Real Person.
Discovering our unique authentic self
Realizing our belonging to the Community of Life.
Participating in, and celebrating, the sacred connectivity of all creation.
Awakening beyond our mortal identity.
Living as/in Divine Presence
…It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible.
Hurqalya refers to the placeless place where the soul, so to say, leaves its homeland by taking on a body of time and space. After some time as death comes to the physical body, the soul, undressed, returns impressed and enriched by the world of the senses.