Practice, Politics & Advice
Welcome to the April 15, 2020 issue of weekly excerpts from the archives of Shamcher Bryn Beorse. Warm greetings to new subscribers! If this was forwarded to you and you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do it here.
The Shamcher Bulletin brings you snippets from Shamcher’s writings that might help frame and context our experience of the world we live in today. This issue includes messages from correspondence, encouraging advice to a young seeker, a yogic practice, and Shamcher’s take on politics.
Lost?
You know your feeling of being lost, of no longer knowing yourself is just a sign of welcome development. For actually, you don’t exist. The prevalent idea that each person is a separate unit, a so-and-so, different from and separated from anyone else is just an illusion. All minds are connected with the Universal Mind and interconnected, and when you begin to realize this it is at first confusing. “Who am I? Where am I?” You are in everybody.
A Practice
Space has all the qualities, all the treasures you need. Figure the sweet life of space (which is yourself) rush from the farthest end of space toward and through the length of your body, from toes to head and then off again to the farthest end of space in the other direction. This a line or slender body. Then repeat, then have your whole body shrink to just a point, stay there awhile and then expand to the entire reach of the universe in all directions. You are a mighty ball, beyond all dimensions. Contract again. You will have absorbed all the powers and wisdom and grace of the universe. Many details of knowledge will still escape you, but that does not matter any longer. You are free — and noble. Our so-called civilization imagines that we know or ought to know, and should run to some “teacher” who is supposed to know if we don’t. All wrong. Wisdom (not knowledge) is pressing in from all sides and we ignore it seeking fabled, non-existing “knowledge” from imagined (dangerous) teachers.
When I met Inayat Khan in Oslo in October 1923, I had never heard of Sufis. The word somehow conveyed to me an impression of birds, flying between Heaven and Earth bringing messages, and I fancied they had done so from the beginning of time.
"The Concourse of the Birds", Mantiq al-tair, Painting by Habiballah of Sava. (image from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Advice
My advice: First find what you want to do in the world, always with spiritual ideals softly in the background. Then note and see how much time or energy you can spend on your own or others’ spiritual development. Or turn around and join spiritual movements first: That’s what some would say, though not I. You are now in the physical world. Meet that one first.
So your questions:
1. Find out what is happening? Only through your physical money-giving work first.
2. Relationship with other humans? No, not always peaceful. Better blazing war if they are resisting what you feel is advance.
3. Control the mind? That is the object of a million years. You do live at least a million years. Yoga and Sufi can teach you, through breathing and concentration.
4. Retain, hold down a steady job? Steady is not the criterion, but useful.
5. Fight off despair, depression? The previous items will take care of that. No need for any despair, depression.
6. Find joy, love? Yes, mainly through the above measures.
7. Become a complete man? In a sense you are already. In another sense that is the ultimate goal.
Politics
Politically I am more active than ever and more than in any other field. I keep up a never-ending correspondence. Our most horrendous blunder nowadays is unemployment. Not only is this a curse to everybody seeking a job and everybody who has one and is afraid to speak his mind lest he be fired (into unemployment) but unemployment is also the cause of inflation. Also we have available energy sources that would make oil, coal, nucleonics superfluous. I brought one such source to this country from France in the forties: the Ocean Thermal Difference Energy System. Free. Unpolluting. In the seventies the National Science Foundation finally caught up, now it is boosted by industry and universities...
I feel my Sufi work has helped me see what I am convinced is the truth about these things, and given me strength to pursue it. To “keep out of politics” is not my view of what a Sufi should do. Politics is the application of Sufism to earthlife. Without it we have got nothing. To refuse to act politically is to starve your children, destroy civilization.
Government as such is not a plot, but any organization possesses possibilities of being ugly plots … private businesses, cartels, federal, state and county governments, civil service. The point is turning these organizations to beneficial servants rather than monsters.
Gail Russell’s photo of Shamcher at Canada Camp, late 1970s, at Anna’s Farm.
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The Shamcher Bulletin is edited by Carol Sill, whose newsletter, Personal Papers, is HERE.
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