Insight, Stirring, and Books
Welcome to the latest issue of The Shamcher Bulletin, bringing you snippets from Shamcher’s writings that might help frame and context our experience of the world we live in today. Special greeting to new subscribers!
This issue:
Begins with thoughts to ponder from correspondence (1974 and 1977)
All about books. Normally we don’t promote sales here, but just this once, this issue is an exception.
Ends with an excerpt from a talk in the late 1970s. Shamcher tells how he first got into OTEC
3 thoughts from varied correspondence
I was asked by the present leader of the Khankah in Seattle to inaugurate the season with a talk. I said one thing initiations may do is clean up one’s spiritual companionship - seen and unseen beings who flock around one. But an exchange of glances can do the same.
“Does one need a teacher?” No, except that some want one. But you need company, association, and I mentioned some examples I had seen of people who tried complete solitude - how very talkative they became because. . .
I talked about the five ships, the five vehicles of Sufi line and that one of them, the Order, was the most important for many of us because it provides training: Practices, that change mind, personality, the only thing that can change it beside love. I rambled around worse than ever and they sat there in their perfect yoga postures and pretended there was nothing wrong.
First part of your last letter seemed a little angry because you didn’t know where or what you were. What builds the wings on the butterfly, and what does the butterfly think about it? Man was supplied with reason to be able to follow the beautiful creative process. Instead, man has leaned on reason, believing it something else than it is.
If there is anything in religion, yoga, sufism or whatever it is to free man again from this illusion, and never try the idiotic experiment trying to understand what, who he is or if he makes “progress”. In the beginning this unlearning is painful if it is not understood. You are right that I never look back to judge or learn. I look back sometimes to see what I did which would have turned out so differently if I had the insight then.
What happens after a while of understanding the limitation of reasoning is that you get insight. But not before you have thoroughly rejected reasoning or any effort to “see” where you stand, what you are, or who. That is why the saints say, “I do not exist.” We don’t. Really. So why worry about our status? Progress? Whatnot? But to the man not seeking, this sounds crazy. So don’t try to explain this to outsiders; they may put you in a mental institution…. please don’t think that you can “know yourself,” please be patient and look with appreciation at life around you. That is you.
You indicate that I am stirring things up. Not for the stirring, but for truth, and sometimes truth is stirring but that part is not my concern. Don’t worry about the stirrings. If someone bawls you out because you have followed your conscience, enjoy his confusion. You cannot help smile. Your clearer vision may eventually reach him.
Book News
Complete your library of Shamcher books!
If you want to have a whole set of the currently available books from Shamcher Archives, please order direct by replying to this email.
Special Book Sale! Until June 15th, all Shamcher Archive books are on sale for $15 each including shipping (and tax). Just reply to this email with your mailing address, and the titles you wish to order, and I’ll send you the details to arrange payment.
Titles included are:
EVERY WILLING HAND
FAIRY TALES ARE TRUE
PLANET EARTH DEMANDS
DISTRIBUTE OR DESTROY
MAN AND THIS MYSTERIOUS UNIVERSE
A SUFI WENT TO WAR
AN INTERVIEW WITH SHAMCHER BRYN BEORSE
LETTERS: SHAMCHER BEORSE AND CAROL SILL
I should tell you that Amazon.com sometimes offers sudden super-discounts. If you are in the US, it may be worth your while to check and compare the cost. (For example, as I write this, Fairy Tales Are True is only $6.96, and Every Willing Hand is $5.71!)
Still available for listening
Part 1 of the interview and reading on Writers Radio of Shamcher’s A Sufi Went to War is still available as a podcast here, along with Part 2, on his earlier book, Man and This Mysterious Universe, which features varied readings by the Writers Radio team, and a continued interview.
Listen to archived podcasts - the Writers Radio features on two of Shamcher’s books:
Part I - A Sufi Went to War. Part 2 - Man and This Mysterious Universe
Letters to Mansur from Moineddin
Shamcher’s friend, Mansur Johnson, recently published this 440 page book, now available on Amazon.
The author, Moineddin Jablonski, wrote the editor and annotator, Mansur Johnson, a number of letters between 1975 and 1980. When Moineddin and Mansur met Samuel L. Lewis in the late 1960s, Lewis was beginning to receive the transmission of Sufi Dances. This expression of devotion and joy spread around the world and became known as the Dances of Universal Peace (DUP). For 30 years, Moineddin guided this expression with wisdom and compassion while facing severe physical health challenges. The intimate sharing between two friends, Moineddin and Mansur, forms the basis of this book. The importance of this collection is that Moineddin Jablonski was the designated successor of Samuel L. Lewis, who was the recipient of the baraka, or blessing, of Hazrat Inayat Khan. Link here for more info or to buy on Amazon.
Very late in my life, in 1948 when I was 52 years old… I had chosen engineering before I knew Inayat Khan. In fact, I didn’t know what I wanted to study. My father asked me and I said, “Well, something in the line of physics, medicine, geology, jusrisprudence, the whole lot.” And finally I had to concentrate on one thing so I took engineering because then you can travel and see things in various countries, and I wanted to travel, I wanted to see if the world was round.
So one time, when I was the managing director of a small company, and I was in Paris I saw in the National Science Foundation of France a story about energy from the ocean. There were tides, waves, but especially the temperature difference between surface water and deep water. You put in a steam engine there. The warm water of the surface near the tropics evaporates, boils in a boiler, when you lower the pressure, when you pump air out. That steam that develops from this boiling runs a turbine, the turbine runs a generator. And after the turbine, the steam is condensed and this steam apart from being condensed is then fresh water. So you do two things with this machine: you produce energy and water.
In California we had a great water shortage at that time. We still have but we have forgotten that, now we have a power shortage. Our power and water government agencies cannot cooperate, they have nothing to do with each other. That is one reason why it is so difficult to promote OTEC.
Anyway, I dropped everything else when I found out about this, I said to myself, “This is what the world needs. This is what California needs, the United States, Canada, the world.”
Thanks for responding, sharing, and subscribing to these excerpts from the archives of Shamcher Bryn Beorse.
Feel free to reply to this post if you have Shamcher stories, photos or correspondence to share.
The Shamcher Bulletin is edited by Carol Sill, whose newsletter, “Personal Papers”, is HERE.
If you’re a friend of Shamcher, and have a book or something you’d like us to share here, please get in touch!
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Any and all snippets like these, are nourishment for a sufi soul.
Thanks to all who have ordered book sets! They are on their way. And there is still time in the sale if you wish to order - before June 15th.