The Pir Vilayat Center For Meditation and Retreat
Mission and Vision
I
n founding the Abode of the Message, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan sought to establish a project “with great relevance to our times.” He wrote of replacing competitiveness with cooperation, and “integrating … higher ideals into everyday living, as a model for a better world to come.” Pir Vilayat offered guidance that supports the Center’s purpose, and the call to a new purpose for a new age:
“Meditation needs to give us the means to reduce stress, improve decision-making, and overcome resentment and poor self-image. We need in meditation to honor our concerns about the environment, the population explosion, political oppression and social justice.”
Pir Vilayat
The Pir Vilayat Center, formerly known as Inayat Manzil, was home to the families of Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan and his son, Pir Zia Inayat Khan, and is a sanctified space. In keeping with this Baraka, it is intended to become the heart of Interspiritual and Interdisciplinary practice and study at the Abode, a place where a broad spectrum of individuals and entities can find sanctuary and kinship.
Within its walls, it will be a home for:
- Meditation practice and education
- Retreat activities
- Visiting Teachers/Educators/Guides
- Study and Archives
- Kinship activities
- Exploration of spirituality, science and the arts
- Interspiritual dialogue
“…Divine consciousness — and this is the basic motto of Sufism — it’s all one. I mean, we don’t think of God as other than ourselves, but as the totality of which we are not a fraction, but rather according to the holistic paradigm, every so-called fraction includes the whole, potentially the whole. So it’s a whole new way of thinking of God, instead of thinking of God as other than oneself and up there somewhere and kind of projecting a personality upon God that’s anthropomorphic. Actually, one of the Sufi dervishes said, “Why do you look for God up there? He is here.”
– Pir Vilayat
The conditions of the world in the 1970s were not dissimilar to those of today – social unrest, economic tension and growing inequality, and environmental crisis. Pir Vilayat believed that spiritual activities, particularly meditation and retreat, could provide a practical path for individuals seeking to manifest change in them selves and the world.
“I see humans destroying themselves out of despair for having lost contact with the reality of their own being, like a system working within itself out of hatred, despondency. I see the rescue operation of those who share that compassion and in whom the Divine magnanimity has responded by acts of compassion. That’s much more important than awakening; it is the ultimate expression of awakening. The issue is not the waking of consciousness; it is the awakening of conscience. That’s not the awakening of the mind; it’s the awakening of the emotion of the heart.”
Join us at the Abode, in the Pir Vilayat Center, and awaken your consciousness as well as your conscience.