An Interview with Irving Karchmar

Irving Karchmar is a poet, writer, editor, and a darvish of the Nimatullahi Sufi Order. He is also the author of the book Master of the Jinn: A Sufi Novel, a mystical adventure tale on the Sufi path of Love. Visit his blog at darvish.wordpress.com.

For those who aren’t familiar with your blog, where can they find it and what is it about?

The Darvish blog is primarily focused on the Sufi path of Love, but contains writing on all mystical paths. The link is: http://darvish.wordpress.com

Some people are afraid of meditation because they think that it opens them up to bad spirits. Is this true?

There are no such things as bad spirits. They are simply the byproduct of an overactive imagination, or, in the most extreme cases, a psychosis that needs medical help. That said, I assure you that there is nothing more occult than human beings, who have within them the power to accomplish the miraculous. This comes from life itself, and the evolution of human consciousness. Meditation is one of the keys to opening up the miracle of yourself to yourself, that is, of your essential spiritual nature to your everyday life.

Women in particular are juggling a lot of things these days. How can mediation help them?

Women are the creative force in the universe, and meditation can certainly help them in channeling that force in positive ways, especially with all the paternalistic nonsense and unequal treatment they have to put up with on a daily basis because of the obsessive emphasis on physical beauty in modern culture, and the fragility of the male ego.

How can one use the law of attraction to get what they want in their life?

The so called law of attraction is a misnomer. It is not a physical law, since like does not necessarily attract like. This is another highly successful money making scheme in the self-help industry that takes advantage of hopeful and desperate people susceptible to such gimmicks. The truth of the matter is that if you put the thought of everything you love into everything you do, you will achieve your destiny as a human being, and all that is allotted to you will be laid before your feet. A more accurate way to describe it, which was the title of a book to, I believe, is “do what you love, the money will follow.”