Practices, Mind and Heart
Today’s issue features bits from some interviews, a letter to SAM, and quotes from Every Willing Hand.
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Shamcher showed me the magazine article about himself called “In Search of Mystic Balance”. He joked around, solemnly reading one of his own quotes aloud, then carefully taking off his glasses, putting the paper down and closing his eyes. With his head held high and slightly back, like a pious Sufi leader he murmured, “What comes is…”
On spiritual practices:
When Inayat Khan first instructed me in some practices, it was in a railway station where he was waiting to take the next train. Everyone sat there and looked at us as if they didn’t even notice. There was no secrecy.
At that time there was a big superstition among people: The more practices you got, the more important they thought you were. I never thought that. I thought practices were given because there was something wrong with you that you had to correct. So I did the practices conscientiously, but I didn’t feel the least bit proud of them.
On initiation:
Initiation is as much as the initiated one accepts of the initiation, nothing less and nothing more. Some are afraid that initiation will oblige one to acknowledge one’s membership in a certain order. Initiators may think so, but in that case I feel sorry for them. The only thing that initiation makes is a contact, which may be very important or may be rather unimportant – it all depends. For instance, anyone can get in touch with lnayat Khan or his teacher or any of the spiritual beings, but if you are initiated, it is easier, because you have been reminded to them, your name has been told. It may be easier the more sincere you were at the moment of initiation. But once you have had that initiation, no one can take it away from you. It goes beyond lifetimes.
OTEC?
Since COP26 just ended, here’s something on OTEC from Every Willing Hand. This technology was available in the 1920s, tested and adapted in the 50s, almost accepted in the 70s but the oil, coal and nuclear interests were always ready to defeat it. Brought to the US by Shamcher in the late 1940s.
The difficulty is luring the twentieth-century distressed and despairing minds into action. …
There is a world out there, millions hungry, other millions freezing, and eight million "rich" Americans sitting idly before our television sets, worrying where the groceries will be coming from tomorrow; and about the thousands of tasks that must be done but aren't done here at home: more careful farming to preserve and develop the price-less soil, so it may yield good food rather than overgrown, energy-wasting, chemically loaded questionables; pollution-free energy sources, such as from ocean thermal differences, the sun, wind, geothermal.
I brought the French research results on the Ocean Thermal Difference system to this country in 1947 and after years of continued research here, we were ready for full-blown plants in the fifties, but we had to wait for the stunning blow of quadrupling oil prices before the National Science Foundation became serious, in the seventies. Now, finally, decisive reports have come from grantees all over the nation. On behalf of the University of Massachusetts, a principal investigator, Professor William E. Heronemus, writes in his 1975 spring report:
Any competent man with a broad-gauge industrial sense of what can be achieved by 1975 US industry using materials, energy and financial base, available for the next 3 decades, will agree that OTECS (Ocean Thermal Difference Energy Conversion Systems) is that which could be done best. The results of this study can be summarized as follows:
Enough has been done now by many to guarantee that OTECS is technically feasible. There are clear-cut pathways to make OTECS economically preferable, not just feasible or competitive.
Large-scale development, acquisition and deployment of OTECS would be almost identical to the World War II shipbuilding effort. The World has never seen another industrial effort so easy to get started and so capable of producing prodigious numbers of high-class products. (Underlined in the original report) This economy could flood the world with OTECS if there were simply a desire to do so, and the effort would spread from the waterfront back into every portion of the industrialized hinterland like the wildfire of prosperity, if we so desire.
Direct the powers of the mind with the heart
(from an interview)
It is only when the mind and heart are in balance that one can go about the real process of self-investigation. Then you can develop the powers of the mind and direct them with the heart to the area that you want.
If you want to use the mind to understand yourself, then you express it as a desire of the heart. You say “Yes, I want understanding.” But you do it gently, you don’t ask in a fury, that’s not the right way. Anything that your mind wants legitimately, that is, directed by the heart, and which it has a right to want, will come. Either this same second, or perhaps a week later, or even a thousand years later sometimes. You don’t know when… but this doesn’t mean you postpone it by saying, “Oh, it may not come for a thousand years…” You simply say “I want it”. Just say that.
A Letter to SAM - 1967
I was catapulted into my incongruous position without my knowledge and now has this enormous power which, also, I shall surrender to you if Vilayat so chooseth. Actually I was appointed by Allah, God, the Unfathomable at the age of 8 to revolutionize the religious temper of the world and I hoped to do it on my own terms, that is, God’s terms. I have temporarily lent a hand to the Sufis because they are less errant than many other groups. They are not perfect, not one of them, not the greatest or smallest of their masters and I proposed to Hazrat Inayat we might drop the Sufi name. And one day, if no accident interferes, I shall again cut loose and set the world aflame. Posterity will dig up my past and all influences and say I was this and a that. Actually only God exists. The man in a black bag who attended the student meetings in Corvallis, Oregon had the right idea. The black robes of the Universal Worship is basically the same idea. We are all black bags, if we only knew.
Trondheim Photo by Simon Williams on Unsplash,
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So packed full of good stuff, as usual. My enduring gratitude.