By Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, adapted from a new preface to ‘The Return of the Feminine and World Soul’

“Like many of my generation I grew up in a soulless, materialistic world. But when the bleak post-war years of the fifties turned into the sixties a new color entered the spectrum of consciousness, as spiritual traditions came from the East. With these traditions arrived different spiritual practices: meditation, chanting, hatha yoga and Sufi whirling. These practices and their teachings have an inward, soul-oriented dimension, and are often accompanied by feminine qualities and a holistic consciousness very different to the reductive consciousness of the prevalent masculine mindset. They often cultivate a way of “being” that give us access to a different way of living more in harmony with our soul or inner self. “