"We are the egg and it is us"
The Shamcher Bulletin features weekly selections from the Archives of Shamcher Bryn Beorse, and memories of those who knew him. Welcome new subscribers! If this was forwarded to you and you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do it here.
Health is Natural, but Healing is Required
A few excerpts from correspondence on health and healing:
Health is natural, people will say. Oh yes, but when we-all compete in living un-naturally, what have you? So healing is required, but don’t give people the idea that you will or can heal them. You might add a little lift to his/her own efforts. Follow the script, the rules and put your soul in it and you will do all that is possible.
Inayat Khan and his cousin Ali used breath. Inayat for everything, Ali especially for healing. He would breathe on his fingers, hand held (right hand) with thumb toward mouth and nose, then as he breathed, he would cut the hand like an axe toward the sick limb or point. It comes natural when you have done much regular breathing. Inayat Khan never did this. You had a feeling he synchronized his breath with you when he communicated. As to myself, I don’t think of breath when I communicate. But I have the feeling that when contact is likely, for being established by love and insight and moral purity, breath takes its line, smoothes itself to your requirements. No technique, no separate effort or arrangement is involved in this for me. I sometimes wonder if those who use technique do not thereby limit themselves to technology. I think I see many “professionals” who thus limit themselves, lacking the deeper reality.
I am not in the healing business which to me is a slight interference in God’s plans, but automatically my breath goes out to every living thing and, I hope, may do what some call heal, but not to my humble knowledge. Sitara said I was the only one who completely raised her from the dead - when she was dead from a heart attack five years ago. But actually it was herself. My own health? Thank you, seems on top, excellent just now, never was better. Love, the only thing that lasts and lasts, Shamcher.
All who can sense the fragile structure of our Mother Earth know that disturbances in the Earth structure are closely related to the passions, sentiments and desires and predictions of her sons and daughters — us. In Washington State a friend was warning me to get off the pad where I stayed because of a disaster she predicted. This was easy. She was one person, not as mighty as myself. It was no trouble bucking her. Now she has learned, and does no longer “predict”. But the California disaster-predictors, though individually weak, are so numerous that we have a whale of a time bucking their stunts. I recall with great pleasure Pir-O-Murshid Inayat Khan joined forces with Norwegian troll at a summer school in Suresnes in 1925, telling us how our own sentiments influenced earthquakes and other violent incidents in Earth’s behavior. Isn’t it time we all join forces in maintaining and healing rather than breaking down?
If I have a cold or something I won’t come, won’t communicate it to the crowd at SF, nor should anyone else if they have a cold I feel. But who?
The Egg and I? No, I Am The Egg
From the newsletter, Sufis Speak
A beautiful Sufi in the prime of youth complained, “The world is bleeding to death while we Sufis are wallowing in self-praise, boasting of achievements, power, force, ignoring children starving…”
So true to the egg and I, but we are in the egg, it in us; we are the egg and it is us, so why not stop, look, and listen?
If you see children starving and if you aren’t sure the latest charity begging letter that just came through the mail will solve that matter entirely, would it be wrong, heartless, to pause for a moment and think? Use the grey matter in your nubbin to sort out the threads and figure what to do? You may call it thinking. You may fancy bigger words, call it meditation, which may not make it bigger, really, nor smaller. If you feel the need of force to carry out that meditation, you may squirm seeing how little of the Power of the Universe (which is all yours) you have been able to partake of and use, so you cannot wallow in self-praise to the disgust of this precious young Sufi who, on her part, failed to see the striving GOD-embryo trying to charge itself.
As you plod along thus you may see several plots at once, confusing you, so you end up asking half in despair: Why doesn’t the President do something? We elected him for that, didn’t we? You may have voted for him but also a few millions did. His task is not to follow your ideas exclusively but all the ideas of his voters as far as he can, and with due regard to the accumulated experience and ideas of his bureaucracy. What are those many ideas? Why don’t you find out? And after having found out, nudge the whole system and nation in the direction you think it ought to be nudged, without hurting or antagonizing anyone too seriously?
It’s becoming a bit complicated now, isn’t it? You feel not quite up to it? In that case, is it not your obvious duty to elevate yourself into feeling and knowing you are up to it, at least partially? Here then, you have arrived at or are back at analysis — analysis of yourself as well as the egg around you — to enable yourself to tackle the burning problems. It does not mean you wait until you are perfectly prepared before you act, but while acting, you go to school, a mundane school or religious training or even a yoga or Sufi training, all with the same intent: To equip yourself to act efficiently.
Among all these training trips, what characterizes the Sufi trip? Many things, first that all religions, sciences and efforts are expressions of the same universal drive, the arms and tools and thoughts of GOD. What help is that? It helps you not to waste your time and effort on useless criticism, but to see, understand, encourage and gently lead all sincere efforts. Religion may have lost much of its hold but religious bigotry still has a firm grip and is to blame for much of the starving of children, for the very same bigotry expresses itself in color, race, social strata. A New York Corporation lawyer, my uncle, told me too many of the important company executives he knew thought they, the executives, were a special kind of people, chosen by God or somebody to lead men and that the opinions and needs of the men they were leading did not matter much. With such ideas a society is bound to suffer tension, malnutrition, even possibly destruction. Such dangerous sentiments are thwarted by such groups as Sufis, yogis, and all who see the spirit permeating all life.
The Sufi training or simply the Sufi attitude also makes you see the stirrings and movements of thoughts and feelings that make up and move society and the nation. You learn to see why and how the richest nations in the world develop desperate poverty pockets, health hazards, foul air and water and how to correct these things and you can also see which public servants ably perform and who do not …
Why do Americans go beyond their borders to accept Sufi and Yogi methods? First, because a thousand sects of Christianity, the Hebrew religion and Islam are already with us. It behooves us to acquaint ourselves with the origin and pure aspect of all this, which is Sufism for the Western and Near-Eastern traditions and Yoga for the Far Eastern ones. Apart from that, the same truths were already honored by great Americans of the past, by practically all the nation’s fathers: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin who were not narrow sectarians but ‘deists’ which is much the same as Sufis. And the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman is essentially the Sufi line.
Whitman’s friend and physician Richard Maurice Bucke wrote:
“…with the flux of cosmic consciousness all religions known and named today will be melted down [into an essence that] will absolutely dominate the race. It will not be [just] part of life [limited to] sacred books, mouths of priests or Bibles. It will not ‘save’ men from sins or secure entrance to heaven, will not teach future immortality or glory, for immortality and glory will be in the here and now, the evidence of it in every heart as sight in every eye. Each soul will feel and know itself to be immortal, and that the entire universe with all its good, all its beauty belongs to it forever…”
The same elements are found in the Maya culture, born in the heart of the Americas.
Far afield we find this same spirit in the ancient Chinese culture, claimed by some to be the origin of Sufism. The best known evidence today is perhaps The I Ching, The Book of Changes, that recently captured the fancy of Carl Jung, the prestigious psychiatrist who seeks to combine the wisdom of all cultures. He sees in The I Ching an approach to understand life different from Western Science’s Causal idea, the theory of cause and effect. In contrast he calls the Chinese idea the synchronistic approach and wonders if it isn’t more true. He sees modern Western physicists now approaching this synchronistic concept, realizing that to satisfy the more current Western idea of cause and effect you had to go to a laboratory, with artificial restrictions, to reproduce the desired results, to make the experiments ‘obey’ the ‘laws’ we thought we had ‘discovered’. The findings of these modern physicists have been with us for millennia, hidden behind the contempted term ‘mysticism’. Great scientists and artists of all ages have always known.
THE UNIVERSE: A MEDITATION
“Your body is the whole universe. You ARE THE WHOLE UNIVERSE. You expand and contract as the universe – absorb all of the qualities of the universe; absorb and counter any negativity. Become the eyes and ears of every sentient being – feel the compassion, the sorrow, the pain, the joy, the bereavement, the hope, the despair …”From Sabira Scott’s Memories of Shamcher
An Homage to Shamcher
from Julia Balter
My work with artists is devoted to an understanding that exquisite artistry, profound healing of oneself and others, and True Spiritual Presence can all arise as one phenomenon. This on-going understanding has grown from knowing Shamcher Bryn Beorse.
In the late 1970′s, a friend invited me to meet a spiritual master with whom he was friendly. I was not at all looking forward to this, as the “spiritual teachers” I had met up until then seemed to often just mirror back one’s foibles and inadequacies. Shamcher Bryn Beorse was the exact opposite. I remember walking into a simple living room, sitting down and chatting with him. Within a few moments, I suddenly knew for the first time in this life who I am. I knew this because I could feel the truth of my eternal being profoundly and palpably in and around me.
The tender-hearted love and wisdom of his presence was the most powerful and moving experience I had ever had.
Shamcher was able to silently speak to the deepest yearnings and ideals in one’s heart in such a way that one comes to both know and forever trust those secrets.
Where does this power to transform lives come from?
Shamcher was always in profound and playful communion with God. The key to the depth and power of this was, I believe, his humility, his purity of motivation. He had no need for anyone to know that he was the source of the Grace they experienced. Yet he profoundly touched lives near and far.
From him I learned the limitless transformational power of an unspeakably pure and tender heart in communion with God. This is something for us all to discover – in ever finer ways. My work would not be possible without him.
As artists we can ask in each and every moment: what do we want to bring to this world? Is it possible that our most loving intention, devoid of all sentimentality, can be effortlessly made manifest?
Julia Balter’s work is primarily with artists in dance and music.
Images in this issue:
Movie Poster: In the late 1940s and ‘50s, everyone knew about The Egg and I, a popular book published in 1945, followed by the 1947 film.
Also well-known in the day, Walt Kelly’s Pogo cartoons, with the most quoted being: We have met the enemy and he is us.
Book Cover: Richard Maurice Bucke, Medical Mystic. Close friend of Whitman and author of Cosmic Consciousness, Maurice Bucke was a prominent Canadian psychiatrist in the late 19th century. An adventurer during his youth, he later headed the provincial Asylum for the Insane in London, Ontario.
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The Shamcher Bulletin is lightly edited by Carol Sill, whose newsletter, Personal Papers, is HERE.