Sufis were Muslims who tried to connect with God through experiences such as dance, music, prayer, poetry, meditation, fasting, Their founder was Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, a poet and mystic who lived from 1207 - 1273. Sufis brought Islam to the common person in many of the areas that had been conquered or whose rulers had been converted. It was especially popular with both literate and illiterate people in Turkey, Persia, India, and North Africa. Sufis preached that there could be a personal and direct relationship with God, not just through studying of written works and through scholarship.

                The Cosmic Mandala

The Cosmic Mandala is encompassed by a flaming circle. At the Centre is a three-footed spiral symbolizing a first movement, surrounded by rotating wind which condenses into so-called basic elements, representing the states of aggregation: Wind or Air stands for the gaseous state; Fire is usually depicted as a red triangle and stands for transformation; Water for liquid, represented by a half-circle or circle; Earth for solid matter, symbolized by a yellow square or cube. The emerging forms of the elements are painted in the blue ring surrounding the Centre, in the lower sphere intimating the world-continents to be. The blue Ether represents the all pervading condition, the source of all elements filling the space of the Mandala. On it circles are drawn; looking like ellipses in their dynamic intersection, they portray the orbits of celestial bodies, painted in all the colours of the rainbow plus black and white and indicating the directions. These twelve astrological circles of the upper sphere demonstrate the movements of sun, moon and stars in the seasons.

Siddhartha Gautama (c. 563-483 BC), also called Shâkyamuni (the Sage of the Shakya Clan) and the Gautama Buddha (the "Enlightened One," from budh, "to wake up"), was born to a royal Ks.atriya family. At his birth there was a prophecy that either he would become a world conqueror, or he would "conquer" the world by renouncing it and becoming a Buddha. His father preferred the more tangible kind of conquest and tried to shield Siddhartha from all the evils of life that might tempt him into spiritual reflection. This strategy backfired; for when, about age thirty, Siddhartha finally did experience evils, by encountering a sick man, an old man, a dead man, and a wandering ascetic, he determined immediately to renounce the world and seek enlightenment like the ascetic. This violated Siddhartha's duty as a householder, since his wife had just given birth to their first child, but Vedic duties and the traditional four stages of life were no longer of interest to him.

After years of fasting and other ascetic practices, during which he supposedly subsisted on as little as one grain of rice a day, Siddhartha felt that he had achieved nothing. He ceased his fasting, but then sat down under a tree with the determination not to arise until he had achieved enlightenment. The tree became the Bodhi ("Enlightenment") Tree; for under it Siddhartha, resisting the attacks and temptations of Mâra, the king of the demons, became the Buddha, the one who "Woke Up." That was in about 527. The Buddha proceeded to Sarnath, near Benares, and delivered his first sermon in a place called the Deer Park. That set the "Wheel of the Law," the Dharmacakra, in motion.

The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism can help us move beyond earthly limitations and thereby reach Nirvana, a state of mind that is completely and permanently free of suffering.

Mindfulness is the key to a “spacious” practice of Buddhism. Spaciousness allows us to observe without reacting. To draw conclusions or interpretations is to step out of touch with the here and now. To recognize our interconnection with nature’s five elements — earth, water, fire, air and space — is to embrace their divinity, and thereby manifest our own divinity or inner joy, our very own “flow,” our vitality. Buddhists know that love is a verb, not a noun. The way of a Buddha is simply to stay present, and to be love.