Heart of Perfect Wisdom/Sufi Song

Musically Literate Pagan Says:
This is good stuff. The choir sing simply, letting the beauty of the chants themselves reign. The first part of Heart Of Perfect Wisdom starts fantastically with overtone chanting, bells, low tones creating a deeply atmospheric Buddhist temple atmosphere. Close your eyes and you could be there. Five minutes into the track, the music emphasis subtly shifts. The temple atmosphere fades though the bells remain and the male choir take over with their chant. A harp joins and it sounds like a fusion of Celtic sound with Buddhist peace !! The female choir then fade in around the ten minute mark and then take over with their "Heart Of Perfect Wisdom" sutra at counterpoint. The choir then basically fade in and out over each other every five minutes or so for the whole of the 25-30 minute track. This track captures the essence of the peace of meditation. The only thing that I could have wished for was that the temple "audioscape" of the first five minutes could have lasted longer before the choir introduction.
That said, if you liked the "temple" mix of the first five minutes, go to track two. At 12 minutes it is much shorter, but is all overtone chanting, bells, low notes with the choir voices very subtly fading in and out over the top, almost ghost-like. The choir never dominates on this track but enhances. As a little aside for you, Jonathan Goldman does the chanting and writes a little intro on the sleeve, endorsing the CDs ability to induce the alpha/theta waves which produce meditative states.
Track three is a different piece and can easily become a favourite. It begins with an almost ethereal church choir sound and at the 10 minute mark, an acoustic guitar joins, followed swiftly by what sounds like a tabla drum, some other ethnic stringed instruments and some tribal "ooh !" and "ah !" s as a rhythmic underscoring, the female choir continue their gentle singing throughout. This doesn't last long. By 16 minutes you're back into the choir again and at 20 the choir arrangements become more complex but still retain their beauty.
At 74 minutes, this CD represents good value for money for me as most CDs of this ilk seem to have difficulty extending beyond 45.
Get yourself somewhere warm and comfortable, light some candles, burn some beautiful essential oils for opening the heart and relax. This CD will be a perfect accompaniment to such moments. But only if you like choir singing, of course !

I first heard this in Australia and could hardly wait to get online to search for it. Hauntingly beautiful; the chants invoke a spirituality taking meditation to a transcendental level. Just close your eyes and drift into a total state of relaxation - perfect at the end of the day.

Heart of a Sufi
Review
It is truly refreshing to read a book that is actually about something. Heart of a Sufi contains the reflections - by some of his "heart Family" - on the work of Pir-o-Murshid Fazal Inayat Khan, who died in 1990 having been for over twenty years a teacher of the Sufi way of transcendence within the Chisti lineage. While that lineage is ancient and revered, there was, as one learns from this book, nothing old fashioned or portentous about Fazal's approach to his task.
In the early twentieth century his grandfather Hazrat Inayat Khan had brought the Sufi tradition to the West in a form accessible to non-Muslims. Fazal, as is clear from the fascinating, and often moving, accounts of the book's twenty-one contributors, did not simply repeat his grandfather's task; he carried it right into mundane Western culture piercing its egoic cultural armouring with shocks and shifts and practises that left his friends and followers deeply changed. Sometimes it was a simple action, word or phrase that worked inside a person for years, sometimes it was the communal environment of the Khankah (the Murshid's household), very often it was through tasks given to someone to reveal what would help them grow - usually, as these writers illustrate, it was all these things - and the magic could operate over many years and at a distance.
The book opens refreshingly with three accounts from people who were children when they met Fazal. From them one immediately senses the fiery, adventurous and uncompromising spirit of the man, and also an attentive inner caution and care for others that keeps showing through throughout the book, despite the many tales of interactions marked by a rare spiritual gusto, quite unlike the mawkishness of lush rainbows that so often characterizes the sentimentality and weirdness, now taken for spirituality in much of the "new age". From one account after another the reader learns how Fazal engaged his followers with remarkable courage, setting them tasks (chillas) that challenged their inner resources, not knowing what the outcome might be but trusting that their souls would work the thing through and grow from it.
One cannot really review a book like this for its content except to say that it is filled with personal experiences that ring true. It is a credit to Murshid Fazal's teaching that while the book is filled with deeply personal impressions it is only rarely that a contributor introduces some subtle and current ego agenda, and when it does happen, the authenticity of the rest of the content makes it stand out very clearly.
This was a tremendous read for this reviewer. I never knew Fazal, though some of his intimates are close friends, and this book reveals what it was that helped form the resilient soul-centredness that is a noticeable quality in them. By his fruits you know him.
The book is beautifully produced, has an informative glossary of Sufi terms and includes short (single paragraph) biographies of its contributors. Congratulations to the editing team that brought it together and to the Arch Ventures project that published it. It's great value is that it provides all the clues necessary for the reader to enter, even now, twenty years after Fazal's death, the transformative aura of his "heart Family".
Malcolm Stewart