Life
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Lewis was born to Jewish parents. Lewis' father Jacob Lewis was a vice president of the Levi Strauss jeans manufacturing company. His mother was Harriett Rosenthal, the daughter of Lenore Rothschild of the international banking family.
To his parents' dismay Lewis showed a keen interest in religion and spirituality from an early age and later rejected their attempts at as business career for him. Lewis studied mathematics at Columbia University in 1916.
In 1919 Lewis entered a Sufi community in Fairfax, California where he met and was influenced by the teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan an Indian Sufi teacher and musician . A year later he began Zen study with Sogaku Shaku, a disciple of the Rinzai Zen Buddhist Abbot Soyen Shaku. The twin spiritual influences of Sufism and Zen were to remain central throughout his life.
Lewis remained in the Fairfax Sufi community through the early 1920s. In 1926 he collaborated with Nyogen Senzaki, a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk, in opening the first official Zen meditation hall (zendo) in San Francisco.
Lewis continued to study Sufism and Zen, as well as yoga. He developed an interest in horticulture and promoted seed exchanges internationally.
In 1956, he visited Japan, India, Pakistan and Egypt, seeking the company of other mystics and teachers. In 1960, while visiting Pakistan, he claimed he was publicly recognized as a Murshid by Pir Barkat Ali of the combined Chisti-Qadiri-Sabri orders, founder of Dar ul Ehsan. In 1966, he was ordained a "Zen-Shi" (Zen Master) by Korean Zen master Dr. Kyung-Bo Seo.
In 1967, whilst recovering from a heart attack in a hospital Lewis claimed that he heard the voice of god say, "I make you spiritual leader of the hippies." For the remainder of his life Lewis traveled around California developing and teaching the Dances of Universal Peace, which draw on all the spiritual traditions he had encountered. The movement he created continues today in a formal way as Sufi Ruhaniat International, as well as informally through the wide adoption of the Dances of Universal Peace by many other Sufi and non-Sufi groups.
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