The Cosmic Caravan
The Shamcher Bulletin normally brings you snippets from Shamcher’s writings that might help frame and context our experience of the world we live in today.
This brief selection from Shamcher’s book, Fairy Tales are True, was included in the introduction to A Sufi Went to War. Shamcher’s description of returning to the dunes of Oceano reveals the coarse and insouciant post-war attitude as the two Army Intelligence buddies rename an artist’s paintings after the war. (The character, Dreamwood, was based on the Dunite artist Elwood Decker.)
But finally, the War was finished and I was free to return to the dunes. I invited a friend and fellow from Army Intelligence, Rene, and the both of us hurried across the Atlantic and across the country to the dunes. Never, in my thoughts during the years I was away, had I considered the possibility of change. I had gone on assuming that the same people would still be there when I returned, in the same setting. Only as we were leaving Oceano and beginning the walk across the dunes, did the fear and the realization of the possibility of change strike me.
But the same cranes and storks were still selecting their menus with majestic disdain from the shallow creek which still wandered coolly among the tall reeds and pussy willows between banks covered with bursts of brightly-colored flowers. A shimmering, subtropic haze hung overhead and beyond the expanse of yellow sand was the sapphire-blue ocean.
This was my return. I looked aside at Rene. The beauty was not all in my own eyes. There was an urgency about him and, when we turned south along the beach, he rushed along the wet sand, past the serenely-staring pelicans. Then, when we turned back inland, his long legs outran me completely. He turned and gave me a grateful look from the point where the greenery sprang up from the sand and then he hurried on, heading right for Dreamwood’s cabin as if he had known this path all his life.
Dreamwood was not at home, but before he left, he had put his paintings out to take the sun and I found Rene admiring them as I came panting up.
“These are fabulous,” he said. “But, of course, the titles must be changed.”
“Of course,” I said, looking once more at the crimson splotch entitled All beauty begins at the vanishing point of the seeming-self.
“The man’s a great artist, except with words,” said Rene. “It’s our duty as officers and gentlemen to help him.”
We set about writing out new titles on little bits of paper which we fastened with pins above the old so that our changes were not irreversible. The crimson blotch we called, Atom bombs play baseball. A monumental canvas featuring dark, amorphous bodies entangled in a bitter struggle was titled by Dreamwood, Astral studies from the Atman plane. We retitled it, The Battle of the Bulges.
[...Dreamwood returned...]
When he reached his cabin, his meditation did not prevent him from seeing the new names we had put on his paintings. He looked at them, one by one, and then fixed Rene with a look so fixed and angry that it made my stomach feel hollow. Rene answered him with a grin which just intensified the look on Dreamwood’s face.
“Don’t be angry,” I said to Dreamwood. “It was all in fun. They can be taken off.”
I knelt and pulled off a couple of the scraps of paper. Dreamwood looked at me with a look which was almost friendly and then turned his fixed, hurt look back on Rene.
Two excerpts from Shamcher’s Man and This Mysterious Universe (1948)
An overall picture of life is the greatest need of our time
I remembered a recent scientific treatise about the SUN. Years of study by physicists could be condensed and explained in this short treatise because processes known from the tiniest things on earth are also operating in that vast celestial body which, vice-versa, provides clues for our earthly phenomena. Plain, simple principles repeat themselves everywhere, in the smallest cells and in the giants of the spaces; in the materials providing us with cars and gadgets as well as in the tissues of human bodies; in physical “realities” and in our subtlest dreams and thoughts. We like to think of ourselves as free and independent kings as we work or play with due regard to the powers and principles of the universe within which we function. When we don’t, we are gently or urgently pushed back on our trail like any erring planet trying boldly to defy the forces we call gravitation, or the rules we call relativity. Man is part of a cosmic caravan.
I had followed its trail in many capacities and places, as sailor, longshoreman, sheep station hand, civil engineer, builder of roads and dams, in the laboratories of science, in newspaper work. I had watched the strong teams and closed shops of nationalities, working with determined Britishers, thrifty Frenchmen, dreaming Turks, singing Russians and sentimental Germans. Tartars, Malays and Maoris had taught me the secrets of their tribes. Africans had drummed me into their maddening ecstasy. Australians and New Zealanders had showered on me their hospitality. Learned Chinese and holy Hindus had talked to me of heaven and earth, and South Americans had made me part of their subtle art of living. I had learned to work and play with these teams of limited scope, obeying their rules, mindful of their codes. But in respect to that greater, timeless caravan comprising humanity, I was still a wild and untamed steed, shunning captivity, yet curious about its secrets.
What matters is not who we are, but what we are able to become.
To Inayat Khan.. a friendship meant a lifelong engagement with unending obligations as well as a source of deep satisfaction. Casual acquaintances, owners of hotels where he stayed, bellhops, waiters, delivery boys, glowed under the warmth of his glance, his handshake, his words. Listeners at his concerts would forget the melodies he played or sang for something greater they could not explain. From a purely physical point of view, his voice was not unusual, but its effects were. The words he sang or spoke were like birds winging their way into the listeners’ minds and nestling there, living and growing, years after he had passed away. His words to close friends might cause opposition or resentment at first, but the final result was always harmony and beauty because, perhaps, they were inspired by love—the gentle love which is felt between man and woman or between a mother and her child, or the fierce and unyielding love which holds the atom together, keeps the electrons to their curved course and guides the planets on their flights. This is the power which binds men and women into communities and nations of such strength that members may wish to sacrifice even their own lives to secure the continued independent existence of their community. This is the spirit which determined to create this whole universe with its myriads of details and set out to do it, and which keeps it running and evolving.
The clue to knowing and consciously living in this spirit, he would say, is not a particular brand or amount of learning, not mastery of certain philosophies, nor “goodness”— meaning too often a miserly accumulation of barren virtues. What matters is range of perception of mind and heart or, in the terminology of physics: range and intensity of vibration. In everyday language, this means people who can respond, who are “very much alive.” Their hearts and minds are like running water, fresh and sweet, always covering new ground, while he who allows his thoughts, feelings and habits to freeze to solid ice, limits his own vision and hampers the progress of his community, however “good” he may be. What matters is not who we are, but what we are able to become.
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Loved the writing by Inayat Khan wrote, It matters not what we are, but what we can become.