The next ten years were spent engaged in various activities - ranging from: spiritual practices, of one sort or another, to: serving the silsilah, speaking engagements, organizing projects, initiating mureeds, writing books, creating web pages, traveling, and helping people - both Muslim and non-Muslim.

Although I enjoyed ready and easy access to my new shaykh - whether through personal interaction, letters, phone calls, or e-mails - the fact of the matter was that, due to a variety of circumstances, I spent far less face-to-face time - by many orders of magnitude - with my new shaykh than I did with my previous spiritual guide.

Among other reasons, my new shaykh had far more mureeds or students than did my first shaykh. Secondly, my new shaykh tended to travel a lot more frequently than did my earlier teacher. Thirdly, my new shaykh lived in the United States, and, at the time, I was living in Canada, and, therefore, the opportunities for close, physical interaction were substantially reduced - except for those occasions when I would visit with him, or he would pay a visit to his students north of the border.

It is always easier for a spiritual charlatan to deceive and manipulate people when there are buffers which keep people at a distance or which limit the amount of time one has to spend with an individual in order to see what actually takes place on a day-to-day basis, and behind the scenes. This was one of the biggest surface differences between my relationship with my first shaykh and the second individual with whom I took initiation.

For a number of years during my association with my second 'teacher', I had had an increasingly disquieting feeling that, despite my allegedly central function and role within the silsilah, I was being moved to the fringe of silsilah activities. However, whenever I would address these feelings in a direct fashion and inquire about this or that set of circumstances, I would always be reassured with a variety of data, facts, and incidents that seemed to indicate my intuitions with respect to such matters were somehow faulty and misdirected.

I never kept anything from my shaykh, and, so, he always knew exactly where I stood about any issue. Little did I know that my so-called shaykh was a master manipulator concerning the flow of information and that because everyone else behaved in the same way I did - that is, they confided everything in the shaykh, he was at the hub of all incoming and outgoing bundles of information, and, consequently, could alter the nature and flow of that information as circumstances dictated and his needs required.

When people are transformed into isolated islands within a group setting, then, it becomes quite easy for an unscrupulous individual to take advantage of such isolation and exploit it to serve a hidden agenda. When people are encouraged to not speak to others in the group about certain matters, then, those individuals become vulnerable to being manipulated in very subtle, hard-to-detect, and even harder-to-verify, ways.

As with the vast majority of cases of sexual abuse and domestic abuse, one of the chief allies of the perpetuation of abusive spiritual behavior is the imposition, through one technique or another, of silence upon those who are being abused. When no one can hear the screams, then, philosophically speaking, no trees appear to be falling in the forest.

Despite everything which has been said in the foregoing comments, if not for the intervention of a strange twist of fate, I might still be trapped in the lair of a spiritual vampire. For reasons best known to Divinity, the entanglements which had begun to be woven more than ten years previously, were about to unravel.

The precise nature of that twist of fate is, for present purposes, largely irrelevant to the central issue. Suffice it to say, through the intervention of kismet, I became aware that the person whom, for nearly eleven years, I had been calling my 'shaykh' was engaged in an elaborate scheme of lying - the nature of the lie would vary with the identity of the individual being manipulated.

Among other things, I came to know - without any possibility of error or misunderstanding - that the so-called shaykh had been lying about me to many people for quite some time. Moreover, I discovered that, for years, he had been interfering in and manipulating my life, without my knowledge, in a number of different ways and that he has been soliciting the assistance - sometimes knowingly and sometimes unknowingly - of various people within the silsilah to accomplish his aims in this regard.

Why did he do these things? I don't know - and, quite possibly, I may never know.

Was he, himself, a victim of spiritual abuse, and as is the case with many other forms of abusive behavior, the abused becomes the abuser? Was he suffering from some personality disorder? Was he a sociopath? Had he been, at one point in his life, a legitimate wayfarer of the Path, only to succumb to the subtle machinations of nafs, Iblis, and dunya somewhere along the spiritual journey? Was he - to borrow a term from Alan Watts - a 'genuine fake' - that is, someone who is sincere in what they do but who, spiritually speaking, is not what he or she believes himself/herself to be - that is, an authentic guide or teacher? Was he a servant of evil - someone who knowingly seeks to misguide people spiritually for no other purpose than to corrupt their God-given himma or holy longing?

The answer to the foregoing queries may be quite complex since there is evidence to suggest that all of the above noted possibilities may have been at work to varying degrees. The situation is further complicated by the fact that aside from his extensive knowledge of Qur'an, Hadiths, Islamic history, and the mystical path, he may have possessed certain abilities in the realm of worldly kashf (unveiling) such as: the ability to read minds, project thoughts, induce trances, as well as not only to be able to see certain worldly events at a distance, along with a limited intuition concerning various future occurrences with respect to specific individuals.

Important to note in this respect is that not only do authentic shaykhs eschew the use of worldly kashf as much as possible, but, more importantly, mystical progress only takes place through the medium of spiritual kashf or unveiling, which is entirely unrelated to the foregoing form of unveiling, and concerns the purification of inward faculties such as: heart, sirr (mystery), ruh (spirit), kafi (hidden), and aqfah (the most hidden) through which one comes to realize various spiritual states and stations. Unfortunately, many people confuse and conflate the former phenomena with the latter stations and states.

There were very few indications with respect to my own interaction with the teacher that might have alerted me to the fact that while I was engaged in what I thought was a spiritually constructive and beneficial relationship with my so-called spiritual guide, that, in truth, another form of relationship was transpiring. The information which might have uncovered the so-called shaykh's stealth operations was either kept from me, re-framed to appear as something else, or manipulated in some fashion to make it appear innocuous or other than what it was.

One of the most pernicious of the ramifications which ensue from such an experience, is the deep sense of betrayal one feels. It is a phenomenology which is so deep, intense, and pervasive, that trusting others becomes an extremely difficult process - especially if such people purport to be spiritual guides and teachers - and, as such, recovery from spiritual betrayal is a wound that heals only very slowly, if at all, and this wound does not always resolve itself automatically as a function of becoming temporally distanced from the events and relationships of betrayal.

For the most part, and by the Grace of God, I have forgiven the individual in question for the havoc which he has wreaked upon my life. However, I would never again trust him with even the most insignificant of tasks.

There is a principle within Islamic law, or Shari'ah, which stipulates that once an individual has proven himself or herself to be a bearer of false witness, then, that person's credibility is forever suspect and unreliable. The relationship between a spiritual guide and her or his student - which is referred to as nisbath - is the channel-way through which trust, love, and spiritual transformation are established, and, consequently, once this spiritual umbilical cord is compromised or betrayed - whether by the 'teacher' or the 'seeker' - then, progress on the mystical path becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible.

There were a number of people within our silsilah who were sprouting tender, fragile tendrils of faith and trust concerning mystical possibilities, but, in the wake of the devastation left behind by the heartless, soulless creature who called himself a human being and a shaykh, many of these individuals have become exceedingly cynical about the idea of mysticism and alleged spiritual guides - a cynicism which I do not know if it will ever dissipate or attenuate in strength.

As a result, most of these people have, at least temporarily - but, God willing, not forever - lost interest in pursuing, in an active fashion, a mystical path of any description. This is one of the legacies which has been fashioned through the thoughtless, self-serving spiritual abuse which has been perpetrated by one human being on others - it is a legacy which has been bequeathed upon many people across many spiritual traditions and generations of history.

I 'happened' into a wonderful seventeen-year relationship with my first shaykh - a relationship which has been one of the essential shaping forces within my life. I 'happened' into a second relationship with someone whom I called my shaykh for eleven years - a relationship which, for very different reasons, also has become an essential shaping force within my life.

Many authentic Sufi shaykhs maintain that no one comes to fully realize the Divine Presence without experiencing both the jamali (e.g., love, compassion, kindness, ease, forgiveness, mercy, intimacy, friendship), as well as the jalali (e.g., severity, rigor, awesomeness, accountability, sacrifice, transcendence, majesty, independence) attributes of Divinity. With my first shaykh, I was introduced, for the most part, to the jamali side of things, and through the second 'teacher' discussed in the foregoing, I was introduced to another facet of Divine Presence altogether.

Divinity is present in both guises. But, the spiritual etiquette is to have gratitude toward the loci of manifestation through whom jamali attributes are permitted to be manifested due to, among other reasons, the sincerity of the niyat or intentions which characterize the compassionate service of such individual loci of spiritual manifestation, while condemning those loci of manifestation who, although serving God's rigorous, severe purposes, nonetheless, do so for entirely reprehensible reasons, intentions, motivations and purposes.