from The Human Givens Institute
We are all born with innate knowledge programmed into us from our genes. Throughout life we experience this knowledge as feelings of physical and emotional need.
These feelings evolved over millions of years and, whatever our cultural background, are our common biological inheritance. They are the driving force that motivates us to become fully human and succeed in whatever environment we find ourselves in. It is because they are incorporated into our biology at conception that we call them 'human givens'.
Given physical needs: As animals we are born into a material world where we need air to breathe, water, nutritious food and sufficient sleep. These are the paramount physical needs. Without them, we quickly die. In addition we also need the freedom to stimulate our senses and exercise our muscles. We instinctively seek sufficient and secure shelter where we can grow and reproduce ourselves and bring up our young. These physical needs are intimately bound up with our emotional needs — the main focus of human givens psychology.
Given emotional needs: Emotions create distinctive psychobiological states in us and drive us to take action. The emotional needs nature has programmed us with are there to connect us to the external world, particularly to other people, and survive in it. They seek their fulfillment through the way we interact with the environment. Consequently, when these needs are not met in the world, nature ensures we suffer considerable distress — anxiety, anger, depression etc. — and our expression of distress, in whatever form it takes, impacts on those around us.
People whose emotional needs are met in a balanced way do not suffer mental health problems. When psychotherapists and teachers pay attention to this they are at their most effective.
In short, it is by meeting our physical and emotional needs that we survive and develop as individuals and a species.
There is widespread agreement as to the nature of our emotional needs. The main ones are listed below.
Emotional needs include:
•Security — safe territory and an environment which allows us to develop fully
•Attention (to give and receive it) — a form of nutrition
•Sense of autonomy and control — having volition to make responsible choices
•Emotional intimacy — to know that at least one other person accepts us totally for who we are, “warts 'n' all”
•Feeling part of a wider community
•Privacy — opportunity to reflect and consolidate experience
•Sense of status within social groupings
•Sense of competence and achievement
•Meaning and purpose — which come from being stretched in what we do and think.Along with physical and emotional needs nature gave us guidance systems to help us meet them. We call these 'resources'.
The resources nature gave us to help us meet our needs include:
•The ability to develop complex long term memory, which enables us to add to our innate knowledge and learn
•The ability to build rapport, empathise and connect with others
•Imagination, which enables us to focus our attention away from our emotions, use language and problem solve more creatively and objectively
•Emotions and instincts
•A conscious, rational mind that can check out our emotions, question, analyse and plan
•The ability to 'know' — that is, understand the world unconsciously through metaphorical pattern matching
•An observing self — that part of us that can step back, be more objective and be aware of itself as a unique centre of awareness, apart from intellect, emotion and conditioning
•A dreaming brain that preserves the integrity of our genetic inheritance every night by metaphorically defusing expectations held in the autonomic arousal system because they were not acted out the previous day.
It is such needs and tools together that make up the human givens, nature's genetic endowment to humanity.
Over enormous stretches of time, they underwent continuous refinement as they drove our evolution on. They are best thought of as inbuilt patterns — biological templates — that continually interact with one another and (in undamaged people) seek their natural fulfilment in the world in ways that allow us to survive, live together as many-faceted individuals in a great variety of different social groupings, and flourish.
It is the way those needs are met, and the way we use the resources that nature has given us, that determine the physical, mental and moral health of an individual.
As such, the human givens are the benchmark position to which we must all refer — in education, mental and physical health and the way we organise and run our lives. When we feel emotionally fulfilled and are operating effectively within society, we are more likely to be mentally healthy and stable. But when too many innate physical and emotional needs are not being met in the environment, or when our resources are used incorrectly, unwittingly or otherwise, we suffer considerable distress. And so do those around us.
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THE HUMAN GIVENS APPROACH is a set of organising ideas that provides a holistic, scientific framework for understanding the way that individuals and society work. This framework encompasses the latest scientific understandings from neurobiology and psychology, as well as ancient wisdom and original new insights.
At its core is a highly empowering idea – that human beings, like all organic beings, come into this world with a set of needs. If those needs are met appropriately, it is not possible to be mentally ill. Perhaps no more powerful a statement could ever be made about the human condition: If human beings' needs are met, they won't get depressed; they cannot have psychosis; they cannot have manic depression; they cannot be in the grip of addictions. It is just not possible.
To get our physical and emotional needs met, nature has gifted us our very own internal 'guidance programme' – this, together with our needs, makes up what we call the human givens. We come into the world with an instinctive knowledge of what we need and with a set of inner resources that can help us get our needs met, provided we use them properly and are living in a healthy environment.
In terms of the history of where our knowledge about human needs comes from, there has been a distinguished cast of contributors, going right back to ancient times. More recently William James, Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler explored human needs, and there was an outstanding contribution by Abraham Maslow, the pioneer of humanistic psychology, who first talked about a hierarchy of needs.[1] It was Abraham Maslow who introduced the idea that, until basic needs are met, people can't engage with questions of meaning and spirituality – what he calls selfactualisation.
Another contributor was William Glasser, who put forward the idea that fulfilment of people's needs for control, power, achievement and intimacy depends on their ability to behave responsibly and conscientiously; he argued vehemently that mental illness springs from these needs not being met.[2] So the human givens approach belongs to no specific people, certainly not exclusively to its co-founders Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell, as Griffin states "although we may have named it; it belongs to the human species. We are just talking more precisely about what nature has gifted us, and there have been many great contributors down the millennia and the centuries, who have contributed to our understanding of the human givens.
"What we have started to do, in what has come to be called the human givens approach, is look at human needs in the light of increasing knowledge and recent discoveries that flesh them out, so that we can define them and concretise them and make them more real. We now know that having meaning and purpose, a sense of volition and control, being needed by others, having intimate connections and wider social connections, status, appropriate giving and receiving of attention etc, are crucial for health and well-being. (Attention needs weren't understood in Western psychology at all, before the contribution of Idries Shah.) So, on one side of the equation, we now have a much fuller understanding of human needs.
"And, on the other side, we have our human resources... the innate guidance system. We are learning much more about how that works and the more we understand, the more effective we will be, for sure."
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Friday, March 8, 2013
Transpersonal Psychology (V)
excerpt from The Mind Field by Robert Ornstein (1976):
Caveat Meditator
For many people, the first experiences of an extended consciousness have come from newly organized groups. Some of these groups are resolutely commercial, others clannish and secretive. In considering both types of groups, we encounter, again, the difficulties of understanding and conveying an advanced knowledge of human capacities. In observing how these "franchised mysticism groups" promote and maintain themselves, we can note how the original knowledge seems to shrink to fit commercial requirements.
Many people have been associated with both psychotherapy and parapsychology for many years. The advent of trademarked, franchised mystic cults, however, is a more recent development. Some people seize upon them as the latest stage in their own continual self-preoccupation and indulgence; others seek new "experiences" for themselves.
Such forms of meditation, and of awareness-training, have usually met with immediate and continued disdain from professional psychologists and educators, sometimes justified, sometimes for the wrong reasons. That these pop cults and organizations exist and thrive is in large part due to the same lag in mainstream awareness that has allowed the psychotherapeutic disciplines to extend their rightful role in our affairs. Along with our cultivation of intellectual skills, and the increasing prominence of those skills in education and professional life (with attendant specialization of function) there has been an almost complete abdication of teachings regarding the person and what could be called wisdom and self-knowledge. The trademarked awareness systems have, therefore, moved into an area of "applied psychology" in disuse within the academic and educational professions.
The systems offer either one special technique or a synthetic amalgam of techniques drawn from many sources. These techniques, in spite of the opinion of most academics, may not be entirely worthless. The "systems" do continue the fragmentation and degeneration of an authentic mystical tradition. Although the piecemeal benefits of these cults may be of scattered and transient use, such benefits are often perverted to the perpetration and dominance of the system, or to the personal service and material benefit of the leader. The process is similar to the bureaucratic encrustation of a new and perhaps useful government program: the original impetus is lost.
If quite important traditional teachings about the person and conscious evolution have fallen into the hands of the contemporary guru-superstar industry, then both the organizers of this industry and those responsible for our education share responsibility. After all, if one is denied normal food one will search out alternatives, even food that makes one sick.
In our society, where is one to learn how to calm one's mind in times of stress, how to improve personal relationships, attain a measure of responsibility for the direction of one's life, and come to terms with one's own creation of experience of the world, let alone an intuitive wisdom of the purpose of life? The existence of "instant-weekend" and simple-minded meditation-training systems tells us more about what is missing from contemporary education, even at a rudimentary level, than any amount of professional criticism could do - we are a society of spiritual illiterates, suckers for a quick answer. Many have turned to the showmen/salesmen and to the recycled Indian dropout to make up for the basic shortcomings of our education - and at great, and often unnecessary, cost.
We are lax in the training of personal knowledge. We may spend years perfecting our tennis stroke, yet precious little training is offered on the nature of our bodies or on the personal dimensions of our own experience. Much modern research, for instance, shows our ordinary consciousness to be a construction of the world, a "best guess" about the nature of reality. Yet rarely, if ever, in psychology or education classes is this fact brought home to students and made part of their experience. Rarely are students acquainted with procedures that might allow them to realize the benefits of this understanding. "Academic" learning is rather determinedly kept in one sphere, with its own professionals and hierarchy, "applied" training in another: rarely does the academic become involved in training people, and rarely does the "applied" psychologist or educator make any dent in mainstream academic thinking.
The new, franchised self-improvement courses are neither the instant self-transcendence-fantastic-enlightenment panaceas that their followers resolutely contend, nor are they, as most academics contend, entirely lacking any phenomena of interest. Most self-awareness programs provide some of the rudiments of a once-complete technology of consciousness. In the absence of anything more highly developed, such programs impress their followers, and yield great benefits to their leaders - after all, a simple tape recorder might be enough to convince a primitive tribe that the bearer was a representative of the deity. From one system, one can learn to relax; from a second, to relate; from a third, to respond. Converts are often attained by classic methods: program leaders offer either a minor service to the inexperienced in the meditation/relaxation system, for example, or they offer a severe initiation/conversion experience, as in the large-scale awareness-training systems. Particular systems come and go, inspired, perhaps by a given site or the particular style of a leader or a particular technique, yet their successes and excesses remain fairly constant.
Consider one such reduced example of a complete tradition: the practices of meditation as developed in various cultures of the world and in various cultural eras are quite diverse. The practice may involve whirling, chanting, singing, or concentration on the movement of the beat, on specially posed questions, or on an internal sound. It may consist solely of ordinary activities, imbued with "mindfulness"; it may involve prayer in the church, in quiescence, or in unison. There may be an attempt to deliberately separate two coexistent streams of consciousness. Other, more advanced techniques may involve the control of various "centers" in the body, as in early Christian mysticism, and receptivity to communications beyond the norm. Meditation practices have many, many diverse functions, depending on the nature of the students and of the society.
The primary function of the diverse techniques of meditation is to begin to answer the basic questions of life, such questions as go unanswered in ordinary social or educational interaction. For instance, one might ask, "What is the purpose of existence?" or "What is death?" in the same verbal analytic mode as one might ask, "What is the size of that building?" Most of us are trained to ask questions in this manner. But those of esoteric tradition contend that personal questions about the nature of existence cannot be answered in the same rational, verbal manner as can questions about the nature of the physical or even social environment. Meditation, then, is "a-logical," intended to defeat the ordinary sequential and analytic approach to problem-solving in situations where this approach is not appropriate.
Questions are sometimes given that have no answer, for the purpose of showing, simply, that not all questions that can be posed can be answered. A Zen Master might ask, "What is the size of the real you?" - then instruct a follower to return with the answer, an answer obviously impossible to express in words or in rational thought. On koan, as such questions are called, is the following: "If you say this stick is real, I will beat you with it. If you say this stick is not real, I will beat you with it. If you do not say anything at all, I will beat you with it." Obviously, this is a situation in which there is little one can say, since the appropriate response lies in another realm.
A Japanese academic who wished to "understand" Zen more fully went to a monastery to submit himself to the koans. He was asked "What is mu?" - to define, that is, a word which has no meaning in Japanese. As a good scholar, he proceeded to look up the syllable in Japanese and other Oriental dictionaries to determine a potential root meaning and habitual usage. He presented his findings to the Master, who repulsed him and immediately sent him away.
Our scholar next thought the question to be more subtle and tried to analyze the tonal component of the syllable in every language of the Chinese group. He again presented his findings to the Master, who now thought it was time to convince this poor scholar of the seriousness of his situation, that it was not a question of another academic excursion. "I will give you one more chance," he said, "and if you do not solve the riddle, I will cut off your leg."
Now, even in the most extreme arguments or thesis examinations of the academic world, thing usually don't become this rough. But the threat did frighten the scholar "out of his wits," so to speak. He completely concentrated upon the syllable itself, trying to puzzle out the meaning, and in the process of concentration itself he achieved the result. The question had a nonanalytic effect, and a nonverbal result as well. Those who are not privy to the extreme concentration brought about by the Zen Master's exercise, or the scholar's reply, might not realize that many of the most important and compelling questions that face us cannot be looked up in an encyclopedia or dictionary. There is no place where the meaning of one's life is "written up."
Chanting, whirling, and other exercises are concentration techniques, exercises whose primary effect is mental, not confined to mere relaxation or to a highly promoted "fourth state of consciousness" involving deep relaxation. That we become confused when considering meditation is partly due to the fact that many of the undeveloped esoteric traditions come to us mixed with their Indian, Japanese, and Middle Eastern backgrounds, with their particular medical and cosmological systems and other cultural trappings. It is again a problem of the container and the content - we cannot sufficiently distinguish those aspects of esoteric tradition which can be important for the development of our own consciousness from the less importable foreign aspects of cultural style.
Vegetarianism, for instance, is widespread and is functional in India due to the short supply of meat (which, when available, is often of poor quality, or even dangerous). Similarly, speaking Japanese, or using soy sauce (or, better, Tamari) is no more "spiritual" than consuming hot dogs, ketchup, or beer. Not useful either is the wholesale adaptation of a particular system of Indian medicine or cosmology, when in these areas the West has developed beyond the East. As we often encounter them today, the ancient esoteric traditions are accidental conglomerations of useful techniques and outmoded cultural trappings. In such an atmosphere, a reduced form of meditation can be mass-merchandised.
And for many, their entire association with the techniques of meditation has been with the most rudimentary and minor form, that of a concentrative repetition, divorced from any cultural background, and divorced from other techniques that are organically associated with it. It is like learning how to spell, without ever learning how to read.
Continual concentration upon any object produces certain biological results. Among them is a loss of contact with the external world - which may be interpreted differently by a person merely amusing himself by staring at a crack in the wall, or by a person in a psychological experiment, or by one who performs these actions at the beginning of serious practice in esoteric tradition.
One particular form of this concentrative meditation, known by its trademarked name as "Transcendental Meditation," is in fact the most elemental and least transcendent form of meditation of all. Indeed, Transcendental Meditation, quite popular in the United States and Western Europe, has offered many their first idea of what these traditions are about - unfortunately, too often in the form of a giggling, smiling guru and a highly developed program of scientific "validation." Descriptions of the efficacy of Transcendental Meditation are displayed in brochures and on posters stuck on laundromats and pizza parlors from Spokane to Boca Raton: "Improves levels or rest, aids natural changes in breath rate, cardiac output, relaxation, restful alertness, brain wave synchrony, faster reaction time, increased perceptual ability, learning ability, academic performance, productivity, job satisfaction, job performance, self-actualization, inner control, mental health, psychology," and so on.
Indeed, it is claimed by the proselytizers of "TM" that it is the "answer to all your problems." Nowhere do we see reference to the major mental purpose of meditation; we are given only the reduction. Common to many of the franchised systems are these commercial claims to improve every aspect of human life. This is a mark of a cult system. Participants believe they have in their grasp a technique good for everyone at all times - not one that might have selective benefits and detriments.
In the case of TM, the bulk of its claimed scientific "validations" are usually marked "submitted for publication" - or are published by the movement's own Maharishi International University Press. TM is promoted as a synthesis of East and West - which means, presumably, that Western science is at last considered able to investigate practices of the East. If there is a synthesis here, it is an unfortunately comic one - the lack of scientific rigor in the East joined with the lack of spiritual advancement of the West. Such claims constitute a debasement of both science and meditation. Here, science is employed to document improvements in personality, or bodily changes, with no consideration given to whether such changes are in fact due to meditation, and what the significance of the change really is.
For instance, the mere report of an alteration in the electroencephalogram means almost nothing by itself. The EEG alone is quite an unstable measure, and rigorous controls must be maintained to ensure that it actually relates to significant brain activity. Recording an EEG might be compared to placing a heat sensor over a computer and attempting thereby to determine the computer's program. The innumerable brochures and posters which promote the TM movement often go beyond scientific evidence. "Increased synchrony" of the brain, for example, which connotes to those versed neither in meditation nor in brain research a measure of the mind's "increased harmony," that both hemispheres are working together, is often claimed as a result of TM. In truth, such "synchrony" (a finding largely unrepeated) derives from the fact that the brain may produce more alpha rhythm in times of quiescence, and thus the correlation of the two hemispheres of the brain is increased.
Similarly, a time-displaced frequency (fourier) analysis is sometimes displayed. The implication here is that mind is "calm" during meditation, since the graphs have an appearance of regularity. This is merely the use of undigested technical vocabulary to impress the credulous. The pattern of an epileptic seizure might well look, to the uninitiated, as a coherent pattern on a frequency analysis. And thus with the relaxation measures, and the various additional studies. The fallacious and promotive scientism here seems to be: if any psychological or physiological measure alters during their practice of the concentrative "transcendental" meditation, then
a. it must be due, exclusively, to this wonderful practice; and
b. the change must be "good."
The studies continually barrage one with measures of increased Goodness and decreased Badness, during and after the practices.
Note how the process works. Herewith a proposed physiological experiment which will yield positive results, and which could be repeated (or, rather, performed for the first time) in any physiological laboratory in the world. I will also draw the same conclusions as do the TM merchandisers from their experiments (A and B). Suppose we assume that reading were not developed in our society. I might claim that reading "sacred" literature, such as the Bible, not only leads to increased Goodness, but that it actually causes physiological changes. Imagine the following experiment (C): physiological measures are taken on selected subjects before reading, while reading, and after reading: eye movement is chosen for the physiological validation of our experiment.
We could naturally conclude that before reading, physiological activity was at a low level, but during reading it dramatically increased, and returned to baseline afterwards. If we wanted to continue the research, we could undoubtedly record alterations in Regional Cerebral Blood Flow (RCBF) to the left hemisphere, changes in Galvanic Skin Resistance (GSR), etc. However, our experiment would not explain how an arbitrary measure, such as eye movement, relates to the supposed benefits of reading, or whether, for instance, other types of reading would show similar effects on the eye-movement measure.
Several points need to be raised about research attempting to validate meditation. This kind of research tends to be promotive and exploitative; it uses science to sell a product. This promotionalism is rather like drug-company television commercials that show one product entering the bloodstream faster than others. The essential question should be: what is the real effect of meditation? Popular forms of meditation are, most likely, a quite reduced and sanitized form of a more advanced exercise, no more useful than repeating the world "Coca-Cola" or "money" over and over for relaxation. This exercise is not at all useless in itself, especially in cases of stress, but as it is packaged it is no quicksand to someone seeking extended knowledge.
The problems of promotive hucksterism are to be expected when so few people are sufficiently acquainted with the intention, possibility, and range of esoteric traditions. Certainly, relaxation of habitual thought patterns, and internal control, as developed in esoteric tradition, can be of help to many people, especially those prone to anxiety and worry. It may even enable "normal" people to stabilize their health and achieve a more flexible repertoire of thought strategies, as a prelude to involvement in esoteric traditions. However, the primary purpose of meditation is not physiological. No one meditates to attain "synchrony of electrical activity of the brain hemispheres" or "a long period of pure, high-amplitude, single-frequency theta waves." Meditation is undertaken to increase one's capacity for experience and self-understanding.
The mental "emptiness" achieved by the concentrative forms of meditation is not a mere lapse in attention but an alteration in one's basic approach to the world, a glimpse of a potential consciousness. Other exercises, such as the "mindfulness" rituals in Zen, are intended to yield in the observer a notation of habitual sequential patterns of mental activity characteristic of the individual. There are a myriad of potential consciousness-alteration techniques. As our culture is opened up to the East, various immigrant have entered with techniques borrowed piecemeal across cultures.
However, although there are many techniques available, most people are not in a position to choose which technique is most appropriate for them. There is, after all, no indigenous cultural tradition to draw upon. "Experts" who have little experience of the unity and coherence of spiritual techniques offer instant-weekend self-improvement courses which promote the particular amalgam chose by the expert himself. They often involve a little meditation, a little indoctrination, a little scientology, and a little "validation," with the audience softened up (as in the best of brainwashing) by fatigue, fasting, and insults. Such courses bear the same relationship to a consistent, spiritual developed teaching as the techniques of a sex manual have to the experience of love. (* Note: I once received a form letter, with a computer address label, from one West Coast instant guru that ended with "I love you.")
The instant-enlightenment weekend approach can be produced by several means. One could duplicate the results by techniques as diverse as the proper use of jewelry, or by fasting, by dancing to exhaustion, by sensory deprivation or overload, or with drugs. Such an upset of ordinary activities and consciousness yields a "first experience" that the world is different from what one had thought. Yet, as a "first experience," we are likely to misinterpret its significance, just as people often overvalue their first sexual experience. We often find any real benefit to the student plowed back into service to the organization.
If, for instance, you had never heard of an automobile, you might be excited to be offered, for $50,000 a vehicle that actually ran on gasoline. Such a vehicle might be comprised of the fenders of a 1921 Ford, the engine of a 1926 Hispano-Suiza, the transmission of a contemporary Mercedes, seats from a Chevrolet pickup truck, the rear body from an Austin. You might be further impressed by the sacrifices and the submission you and many volunteers would need to keep such a vehicle on the road. If no one else of you acquaintance, however, had ever heard of an automobile, you might well become famous as the person "who gave it all up for the vehicle that could move itself." Yet even the most humble contemporary economy car would be an improvement.
The franchised weekends take just such an advantage of the gap in our education. Popular mysticism claims "converted" adherents for techniques which should be part of our basic education. Its enthusiasts take a partial aspect of esoteric tradition, such as an exercise meant for one community, and generalize it to everyone, and offer the same mass indoctrination or initiation to everyone. The initial "experience," then, is often channeled, not into the individual's personal development, but into the service of the system.
Since the systems are synthetic and artificial amalgams, they must be kept going with much infusion of effort and activity. Thus, social gratification begins to substitute for the development of consciousness, with parties, mixers, investment clubs, phone solicitation, uniform dress, and jargon designed to create an elite in-group. Continual reminders are given to stragglers, by mass mailings, letters and phone calls, Christmas gifts, solicitations of service to the head of the organization, all consequence of the artificial nature of the system. The question is not only whether the constellation of techniques has any effect, but also whether in the long run the usefulness of the experience of the technique is outweighed by the benefits of the system itself, whether people seeking to develop themselves are ultimately exploited by those who confuse the container with the content.
II.
The noncommercial, secretive, esoteric cults are unfortunately similar to the well-advertised consciousness systems. The degeneration of a true religious tradition in the West has left those high-minded "metaphysical people" prey to those who substitute an ancient fragmentary teaching for a unified whole. David Pendlebury describes the current situation:
'"Sobriety" and "intoxication" are of course not intended literally; nor are they merely flowery metaphors: these are technical terms denoting twin poles of human awareness, each in its own way indispensable to balanced development. A man has to see the true reality of his situation; he has to take a very sober look at him self. Equally, though, he needs a taste of another condition in which his latent possibilities are recognized. Taken on its own, either pole is sterile, developmentally speaking. There are plentiful examples all around us of such imbalances. Perhaps you too had a Calvinist great-uncle who died heartbroken, having succeeded in convincing himself, a) that "the grace of God" was essential, and b) that such "grace" had been withheld from him. Perhaps you, too, have friends whose Ouspensky-oriented understanding of Gurdjieff has left them eternally bewailing the (obvious facts that "man is asleep," "man cannot remember himself," "man cannot do," etc.) Or other friends who have chosen to "freak out," to "blow their minds"; and are astonished, in rare moments of lucidity, to find themselves inhabiting a "behavioral sink" or terminal sewer." Or other friends, perhaps, who inform you in and out of season that: "I was hopelessly at sea, until (name and address supplied) showed me the answer."'
Pendlebury mentions the Caucasian "mystic" George Gurdjieff, whose followers unfortunately have come to represent the fragmentation of much of contemporary esoteric studies. Although by many accounts Gurdjieff was a man who personally could awaken a sense of life and action in his associates, his work has become the captive of his most doctrinaire and severe followers, who seem to cherish their incompleteness and merely shout "I must wake up" while reading obsolete doctrines. A fragment of a coherent approach has become honored among those who look to each new teacher for the secret that will allow them to turn away from their morbid self-preoccupation and experience the wholeness of life.
This kind of esoteric school serves to promote the abnormality of those involved. Thus, the continuous search for "true teachers" of mysticism often leads enthusiasts to an examination and popularization of the past, of teachings inappropriate for our time and culture. Outmoded books on alchemy, ancient mysticism, commentaries on Gurdjieff and other mystics are all scoured by the devout in their hope of finding "the key" which will unite all. One of Gurdjieff's teachers describes this process to one who sought out the teachings of the East: "You are scrabbling about in the sands, looking for bits of mica to piece together to make a mirror, not realizing that the sand itself is capable of being transformed into the purest glass."
Here, then, is an essential distinction between the obscurantist esotericizers, who continually proclaim to "search the heavens" and the "depths of their souls" for isolated bits of knowledge, and a potentially viable contemporary spiritual teaching. Reductionism, or inflation, can exist on all levels, including the metaphysical. Merely writing in effulgent and self-denigratory terms about an outmoded cosmology is no more relevant to the real development of human knowledge than are psychiatric theorizing or the double-talk of commercial awareness-training groups. That the dead hand of a cold, sterile Metaphysical Inflationism should have touched the students of Gurdjieff - a man, for all his shortcomings, who always sought genuine development - is a great irony.
If there do exist so many difficulties in popularizing the fragmentary remains of esoteric tradition - a meditation technique that is sold for everybody, a man screaming for hours effectively brainwashing an audience, or a turgid "metaphysics" - then what might currently be useful in preparing the ground?
Most of the contemporary fragmentary systems suffer from a confusion of the essence of mystical tradition with the original system itself. They often confuse the system with the knowledge, mixing up mistranslated ancient descriptions of "sight" and what can be "seen" with the technical details of an operation designed, say, to remove occlusions.
A blind person accustomed to hearing inflated exaltations of the joys of sight may not be prepared when someone introduces technical procedures that are actually useful in an eye operation. "What are these cold hard things I touch?" he may exclaim of the surgical instruments. "What is their relationships to the grandeur of green grass, or to a sunset, of which I have heard so many wondrous descriptions?" Why many people of differing specializations may need to be involved in the task of surgery; why there is a need for antisepsis, for someone to have studied the physiology of the eye (or brain hemisphere, in the case of hemianopia), would entirely escape those who have become diverted from the attempt at seeing into a mere interest and expertise on "the dimensions of spiritual experience," "techniques of mysticism," "traditional approaches to the mind," or "the wisdom of the East." Such a person wishes for more availability of effulgent and high-minded descriptions of sight: the fragmentary substitute.
This is a continuous difficulty: the confusion of the vehicle with the objective, of the hard technical knowledge available in this area today with romantic descriptions of the universe, "spiritual experiences," "beings" of all orders, a "cosmic law." However, current literature, travel writings, and scientific facts all can serve a valid and reconstructive purpose: if properly presented, they can convey to the interest student the rudiments of "sight," and can aid in developing a more comprehensive awareness of himself and of life. This can occur even though the literature may not directly mention cosmology, God, mysticism, or any of the things most usually, romantically and traditionally, associated with mystical experience.
Many of the most important books, then, do not appear in "metaphysical" collections, nor are they used by mystical societies. They may not contain one word of reference to this area, or be labeled "metaphysical." They are present but are "invisible" to the hemianopic, or to the blind slave of tradition, or to the devotee of the current cults.
Yakoub of Somnan, explaining the function of the literature that he used, said:
"Literature is the means by which things which have been taken out of the community, such as knowledge, can be returned. The similitude is as of a seed, which may be returned to the earth long after the plant from which it grew is dead, with perhaps no trace of it remaining. The learned may be millers of the grain-seed, but those whom we call the Wise are the cultivators of the crop. Take heed of this parable, for it contains the explanation of much irreconcilability of attitudes in the two classes of students."
Saturday, February 23, 2013
The Observing Self
The Enigma of the Observing Self
a lecture by Dr. Arthur Deikman (1994)
a lecture by Dr. Arthur Deikman (1994)
also see http://www.deikman.com/index.html
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Among the Sarmouni
Excerpts from O.M. Burke's Among the Dervishes (published in 1973)
Kafiristan has never been properly explored. Until Victorian times it was a no-man’s land, unclaimed by anyone at all because it was so inaccessible. Extending through a mountainous area as wild as any on Earth’s surface, it was the home of the oldest people in Afghanistan; both in terms of years and history. It was thought, and it seems likely, that these people were there long before the Graeco-Buddhists who were displaced by the Moslem invasion. When the Arabs over-ran Afghanistan, some of the Buddhists and others fled into the truly inaccessible north-east, and settled among the Kafirs—the ‘infidels’.
The King of Kabul (Afghanistan was not a united state then) at the end of the last century invaded Kafiristan and brought the ‘light of Islam to the heathen’, after an incredibly hard winter campaign. And so it was renamed the Country of Light. Although some accessible parts of the country are open to visitors, the main part of it is almost never visited except by pilgrims and others who have business there. To the modern Afghan it is something of an enigma: and also, of course, a disgrace that such a ‘primitive’ people should exist within the borders of their progressive state.
My interest in Kafiristan was specific. I knew that Afghanistan had been a centre of Buddhist learning and pilgrimage long before there was such a thing as a Dalai or a Panchen Lama in Tibet. Indeed, Tibet took the place of Afghanistan after the latter country was Islamised and the huge sanctuary of Bamian was overwhelmed in the seventh century. According to tradition, the monks of Afghanistan fled to Kafiristan. Some took the road to Tibet, others remained and started their schools of meditation anew in the land of the infidels. The Buddhism of China and Japan today is derived from the Afghan Bamian monastery-complex as evidenced by sculptures still extant.
Some of this information I had obtained from Sufi mystics and others in India, where there were any number of Tibetan refugees. One could not go to Tibet to seek refugee Buddhists from the Kafir area—or their descendants. The country was under the Chinese communists. In any case there would be little left in the monasteries to study; and few lamas would be found there now. Before Kafiristan became Westernised, there was a chance that something might be found.
A friend in a Government department put me in touch with some of the Dalai Lama’s satellites, and after that the picture became a little clearer. Tibet, according to these experts, was not actually cut off from the ‘West’, even if only because refugees continued to arrive. There were Moslems living in Tibet, and had been for a great many years… These Buddhist gentlemen, with gratifying little sectarianism in their make-up, told me something about the Sufi practices which they had heard of in Tibet: but they told me nothing new. Jalu Kambo was my man, it seemed, for he was a ‘very mystical Momatan’ (Mohammedan) who knew Lhasa and other parts of Tibet.
… When I had to some extent convinced him that I was after Sufis, and studying practical mysticism of this particular school, [he said], “You do not want Tibet at all… the mother-house of the Soo-fee-aaa is not in Tibet. You find the mother-house because they will only send you to the mother-house if you go to Llhasa.” And where was the mother-house?
‘Hindu-killer mountains, eastwards, past the Khajakhel, in Afghanistan.’ Afghanistan was, if anything, as tricky as Tibet. Or perhaps it was because I now new something about the Afghans, and very little about the Tibetans.
Jalul’s geography might have been sketchy, but what he said did undoubtedly mean Kafiristan. So I headed for Pakistan again, to collect information as to how a one-man expedition might penetrate through two main screens: the official and non-official curiosity, and the mountains of Kafiristan itself. Not to mention the Kafirs, a completely unknown quantity….
Through my Sufi sources, I heard a great deal… There was not only a way into and out of Afghanistan—there were many ways. This system was called the rahi-gurez (escape route), used by smugglers of men and material of all kinds, including arms.
Kafiristan, according to the Sufis, was the home of the esoteric school called the Sarmoon, the occult branch of the Nakshibandi Order of Bokhara. This was a school which formerly had branches all over the Moslem world. Even today they are quite widespread, but the yoga-like practices which are the core of the teaching are known only to a few in the ‘foreign branches’. My friend… had been as far as the Paghman Range of the Hindu-Kush mountains, and had been present at the meetings of the secret Sarmoon, but could tell me little about their secrets. Fifty or so years ago, a party of Yunanis (this means ‘Ionians’) had been received by the Sheikh of the Azimia who lived in feudal splendour in Paghman; this was the only story of Western contact with the Azimia.
I looked up Kafiristan in the best map I could find. The place was virtually unmapped… Kafiristan might almost not have existed, though some glaciers and heights of the order of fourteen and twenty thousand feet were marked.
What about the people? And the language? My previous trips had started in a different way. At least one had had introductions for one stage of the journey. It was when I was pondering thus that I suddenly realised how very much early encouragement means. A little more traveling, more talking with people who knew Afghanistan, and I realised that I must have contacts of there were to be any real chance of success.
In talks with Sufi mystics in Pakistan, India and other countries, I had come to realise one curious fact about the way in which they were thinking.
In the first place, your average Sufi who was not a mere imitator of mystics, was deeply concerned about humanity as a whole. Those who were higher up than the average in the invisible hierarchy seemed to have another basic bent of thought. This was that it was necessary for the Sufis, and the Sufis alone could do it, to bridge the gap between the developing cultures of the East and West. Since I had joined their ranks, I, too, had a similar sensation. The reason seems clear enough: there was no other meeting-ground. All the cooperation in politics, in education and economics, between the Orient and Occident, was not bringing the two together at all. And deep down inside of us, most people knew this. We had accepted that there was no meeting-ground in religion: this had been established as early as the time of the Crusades. That there was no deep co-operation in material fields was clear to those who had seen the downfall of one attempt after another to bridge the gap.
Nationalism and independence in the East had not brought about widespread harmony between the firmer ruling countries and the formerly ruled. People had claimed that the granting of independence to the East would be a sort of panacea. All would be well and cordial relations would be bound to return when people were ruled by their own nationals. This had not happened. In some cases the reverse had taken place.
In orthodox philosophy the East and West had taken leave of one another centuries ago. There was no basic unity of ideas at all, partly because, deep down, there was disharmony between peoples of different cultures, different nations. We had diagnosed the problem as due to one disease. When the remedy fot he diagnosed ailment was applied, the illness did not cease, was not even ameliorated. The people who thought that the cure lay in granting independence, economic help and so on, refused to look at the instances of the countries in which these measures had not worked. Why? They were too busy looking for other countries to grant independence to. They had no time to see whether they were curing what they though they were curing.
I was no opponent of independence for anyone. But I could see that independence was not enough. As with many other things, the reformation had to start with the individual, had to start from within. The materialists continued to reassure us and themselves that ‘things would shake down’, that as soon as the first wave of patriotic fervour had passed, the East and the West would respect one another, and all would be well. But my travels and talks with people at all levels showed me that people in the Asian countries which had been independent for generations were still not reconciled with the West. What did this mean?
It meant the world was still waiting for a development within humanity which would make humanity one, one body, one heart. Plenty of people said that they had the answer. Nobody, as far as I could see, was applying it.
I had traveled and lived among the Sufis in Asia and Europe, in Africa and India. Sharing their lives and talking to them, becoming a member of their fraternities, I had found a group of people who were as worried about the future of the human race as I was. The difference between this group and those who talked a great deal about it in mass-communications media was, that the Sufis were trying to live that kind of life.
Their trusting me, as a member of another type of community, was to them a practical expression of that actual living of human unity. None of them, I am sure, thought that I wanted to associate with them for cheap sensationalism: although they were strongly resistant to the approaches of Western occultists and even anthropologists. They got to know me, decided that I wanted to be like them, and accepted me, in an amazingly short space of time.
… Did the Sufis as a whole want to project their message in the West as well as in the East? How did they think it would be done, if it were done? How could they avoid making themselves into just another ‘cult’ followed—for a time—by every crank intellectual and occultist at any given time or place?
Yunus [a Pakistani merchant who had been Abbot of a Sufi monastery in Iraq] understood me at once. ‘Your question is not as simple as it seems it might be. We can put a question, but we cannot always find the answer in a couple of words.
‘You will find out, I think, if you spend more time among the Sufis, for you have to absorb their characteristic "flavour". Once you have been with the Sufis, really of the Sufis, you cannot believe that their Way will ever become degenerated as you describe.’
**************
Sufi Abdul-Hamid Khan, Master of the Royal Afghan Mint and something of a polymath—military engineer, calligraphist, sage and expert on rhythmic exercises—must have been over ninety years of age. A follower of the Mir of Gazarga, he could remember in considerable detail the events which had taken place eighty or more years ago.
A frequent visitor to Kunji Zagh, he had spent many years in Bokhara, and it was there that he had come across the redoubtable Gurdjieff, whose studies of Eastern metaphysical systems were introduced into Europe about the time of the First World War.
Although the people of Kunji Zagh called Gurdjieff ‘The Russian Tatar’, Sufi Abdul-Hamid said that he was in reality partly Mongolian, part-Russian, part-Greek. According to the Sufi, this Jurjizada (Son of George) had once been a Theosophist, had also studied in an Orthodox seminary, and ‘was responsive’ to the Sufic ‘waves’—could, in other words, contact the mental activity which emanated from the ‘work’ of the dervishes. This, together with a curiosity about the occult, led him to the shrine of Bahauddin, the Naqshbandi teacher in Bokhara.
Here another Bahauddin, known as Dervish Baha, had taught him certain ‘secrets’. Among them were the ‘sacred dances’ or movements made by dervishes, the rules of the Order and the ‘inner interpretation’ of the Sufi texts. Then he sent him on a tour of the centres of the Sufis, some in Egypt, some in Syria, some in India.
Seeing the strange effects of the Sufi practices, Gurdjieff decided that he would find out how they worked. In order to do this, he and a number of friends collected as much of the material used by the Order as they could, and fled with it ‘to the West’.
Unfortunately, continued Abdul-Hamid, Jurjizada was at too early a stage to do anything final with the material. He had not yet learned, for instance, that the exercises and the music had to be carried out with special people at certain times in a special order of events. As a result he propounded the theory of the Complete Man without being able to take it into practice.
Further, Gurdjieff tried to make the method work by trying out the exercises on a large number of people. The result?
‘Here in Afghanistan we still receive, like faint radio messages, the influence of the minds of the pupils of Gurdjieff, coming from far away. They must still be carrying on the exercises, but they don’t know how, when or with whom to do them.’
As soon as I got back to Europe, I found that some at least of this information might be true. After the first War, the Russian and a disciple of his, the philosopher Ouspensky, settled in France and England respectively. They set up teaching groups, and – I was told—several of these still existed. But they remained fully secret. Probably, like the custodians of any secret knowledge which had become reduced in quality, they would continue to operate, perhaps for generations.
*************
Amu Daria is, of course, the name of the immense river which forms four hundred miles of the northern frontier of Afghanistan. Beyond it lies the Soviet Union and the lost territories of Turkestan, once the site of ancient Sufi strongholds.
Russian penetration into the Central Asian khanates is no new thing, and faced with the encroachment of the ‘West’ in the form of Czarist advance, and the need to develop Sufi teachings further in order to coincide in some way with modern technology—the Sufis started to move into the hinterland of Afghanistan during the early part of [the 20th] century. Some of the oldest foundations were already established in the Hindu Kush area. Those who migrated into Afghanistan began to use the name of Amu Daria, run into one word, as the designation of their teaching. Thus they perpetuated the crossing of the river and the tradition of their trans-Oxus origins in their name.
The River Amu (Amu Daria in Persian) appears on most maps as the Oxus. It will be convenient to refer to the émigré Sufi groups as Amudaria ones, because such a phrase as ‘the Oxus Sufis’ does not sound anything like as felicitous. They are also known as the Sarmoon (a code-word for ‘bee’, a reference to one of their exercises).
Although the Sufis do not like to engage in historical or geographical discussions of their cult, there seems little doubt that the Amudaria elements concentrate upon practices and ideas which differ from those found elsewhere, with the exception of the old Afghan Orders. In some ways their rituals and methods are quite like those of other Sufi Orders, but more organised. As an example, the habit of compiling multiple words taken from the syllables of other words is a fine art with them. The concentration upon the belief that the Sufi way is the only suitable one for propagation throughout the world is another characteristic. Then there is the teaching that it is from here that the Sufi message must be diffused, and that it will have to be naturalised in each community.
I spent one week in each of four Amudaria communities. The organisation of the monastery, according to this group, is ultimately a spiritual entity : the building or the location is secondary. Thus two of the ‘monasteries’ actually had no premises of their own. Meetings were held in the open, or in houses. In one village when the gun which marks noon was fired, virtually the whole population started repeating formulae under their breaths. This was a ‘meeting’ of the Amurdarists: no monastery, not even a physical meeting.
This principle is carried even further in Afghanistan. Although monasteries exist and halka meetings are held, and discipleship as I had seen it elsewhere was carried on, the whole community is considered to be in a special kind of rapport. This means that constant spiritual communication between the members is thought to continue, especially at designated times.
The four leaders of the trans-Oxus communities, Shiekh Jalal, Ahmad Baba, Ishan Ali and Pir Turki, all accepted the authority of the Naqshbandi chief of the Hindu Kush Sufis. This is the representative of the Studious King, who is the overall leader, and who may be ‘found in disguise, in almost any country in the world.’
Ahmad Baba showed me the method of sewing the patchwork cloak which some Sufis wear, and which was until quite recently the uniform of those who were going through a period of retreat from the world. It is not known when this custom started, but I was reminded of the ‘coat of many colours’ and wondered whether the robe originated in Syria. Ahmad was about seventy years of age, but might have been older. He was in astonishing health for a man who could clearly remember pre-Revolution Russia, and attributed this to his carrying out the longevity exercises which are a part of the Sufi training. ‘Nobody,’ he said, ‘would get feeble if he carried them out regularly. Certainly they would live, as the Sheikhs of our Order do, up to a hundred or twice as many years of age.’
In addition to most of the usual Sufi exercises, the Baba’s community practiced healing, and Sufis came from various places to receive this part of their ‘enlightenment’. ‘Of course,’ said the sage, ‘we can also send it out to those who are ready to receive it. You see, we only have a portion. It is like having a … (underground water channel) connected to the source. But we cannot transmit to those who are not ready. If they are only slightly developed in the requisite ways, then they must come here.’
I was interested to know what these Sufis felt about the possibility of making their cult known in the West. Ahmad was not to be drawn. ‘That is a matter for the Studious King.’
Ishan Ali was a Turk, and half the age of the Baba. His ministry extended through the wild north-east of Afghanistan, right up to the Chinese border in the thin tongue of land which sits astride the Pamir mountains. He was forthright, greatly loved, and yet difficult to approach. He received me in a Western-type suit, with a small karakul lambskin hat on his shaven head, something like a kalpak cap, but more stylish. ‘You must not force the pace,’ he told me so many times. ‘You are anxious to learn a great deal of things about us. But you must remember that if you allow yourself to be blinded by curiosity, by the collecting of facts and little snippets of information—you may write a good book, but you will slow down your spiritual progress. ‘
I saw him apply this teaching to a party of young men, not long out of the Army, who had come on a pilgrimage to meet him. ‘Remember what I say, ‘ he admonished them, ‘for you will not be told again but sent home. What you have learned in the Army will be of inestimable value to you, although you are still cursing the day the pishk (conscription) caught you, and blessing the day you were discharged. Both are wrong: but I cannot expect you to understand this yet. Pay attention to everything that you are told, and no not take an interest in things that you are not told or shown. At your stage your so-called human abilities can often be a curse to you. Plenty of time for changing back when you get to the outside world again.’
Pir Turki, who in spite of his name was not a Turk but of Indian extraction, ran the strangest school of all. Everything was based upon gymnastics. Pits had been dug in the circle which had been marked around his miniature castle. In these depressions, some twelve feet deep, disciples had to wield heavy clubs, often to music, sometimes accompanied by the voice of the teacher. They were reputed to develop occult powers; and I heard many tales about how they could make things float on water, see at a vast distance, and so on.
I was said by local villagers that one of Pir turki’s teachers had, by the power of his glance, held up an army for three days in the passes of the Khyber. Be that as it may, Pir turki the ascetic was a martinet. Shunning over-eating or loose talk like the plague, he provided plenty of food for his disciples, though nobody knew where the money came from. He did not make collections. There must have been a source of his income, of course, but it was never visible. One of the first things that he said to me was: ‘If you revere any man, forget him, for all that matters is the Work.’
I have never seen anyone who impressed me so much. When I told this, he took hold of a beautiful lamp which stood on his desk-table and smashed it. ‘I have destroyed a thing of beauty. Do you respect me less now? I hope so.’
Then he called a disciple, accused him of theft, and sent him to wash out the assembly-room. “Must he suffer so that I can see that you have defects?’ I asked him.
‘I hope that you think that I have been unjust in making him suffer, ‘ was the answer.
Unfortunately for the lesson’s permanency in my case, I learned later that the disciple who had been unjustly treated had committed some grave breach of regulations and merited punishment in any case. ‘You don’t understand, ‘ said a disciple, when I mentioned this; ‘the lesson has sunk in where it counts. That is all that counts.’
Yet punishment was something which seemed to happen very rarely among the Sufis. I would not say that they were immune to it, but as they had been taught that personal dignity was sometimes a grave disadvantage, they were not able to suffer much through being made fun of in front of each other. Manual labor on the three farms which the community owned gave many opportunities for exercises in self-development. All the income from the farms was collected by an administrator and sent to the women’s welfare association, for some reason, so the Sufis did not benefit directly. And yet the Sheikh, as I have said, did not seem short of cash.
Sheikh Jalal was a feudal-type chief, a man of towering personality within a slight and delicate frame. He lived in considerable style from the income of vast inherited flocks of some of the best sheep in the country. He smoked a little, but did not seem to eat much. He always wore similar clothes, the robbers and turban which old-fashioned judges assumed in Afghanistan.
He was about sixty-five years old. Although surrounded by servants and a great deal of luxury, he personally partook of it little. When, for instance, we went out shooting and brought down several hundred wild duck and grey geese, none was served at his table. The birds went as gifts to the surrounding villages.
Jalal, it was rumoured, could neither read nor write. This idea must have gained currency because he was never seen with a book or a pen. His teaching was done in the normal Sufi way: through short addresses, exercises, meditations. Going with him several times on long walks, which he embarked upon without any prior notice whatever, I realised that he spent a great deal of his time in silent communion and commemoration (called Zikr) and that this had become almost second nature to him. He had several sons, all of them, I believe, in the Army.
He often showed small signs of a sense of perception which is repeatedly mentioned in Sufi writings as a sign of ‘saintship’, but which would hot have been noted except by an attentive disiciple or someone else very close to him. One day, for instance, he picked up a cooking-pot and took it on a walk on which I accompanied him. Stopping at a poor small house he saluted the occupant and handed in the pot. The old woman was amazed. She said that she had just broken the earthen dish in which she cooked. Again, he handed me a box of matches when I had come out without any, in spite of the fact that I could not be sure he realised that I had left them at home. It should be mentioned that he could not have observed that I brought none with me, for I had met him in his garden, on the way from my quarters to his.
I mentioned these small indications to him. But he would not discuss them, merely saying: “Would you make me a saint, and rob me of the power of becoming?”
There were many of these little instances. Some were observed by me, others reported by disciples. It was interesting to note that among the disciples stories were never exaggerated; they would often hinge upon the smallest event. This indicated to me that many of the wilder tales current among the country-folk and others outside Sufism were elaborations of actual happenings.
It was Sheikh Jalal that I questioned on this subject in a more general way, when I referred to the tales my mother had told me about Scottish highland and country folk being ‘fey’ and having insights which others did not have.
‘These are normal, not abnormal developments,’ he said. ‘they are of no value in themselves, partly proved by the fact that the experiences seldom have practical value. For every happening of this kind that is a warning or can be turned to practical use, there are a hundred which are not of any use. Why is this? Materialists would say that it merely proves that the power is fitful, partial, something of little account. What they do not know is that these are signs. They are encouragements, they show that the recipient has a real chance of developing his ‘gifts’. They are signs that the time has come for self-work. Most people cannot use them, because they do not know that this is the alif (letter A) and that the be (letter B) follows, until there is a iaa (last letter of the alphabet).’
I entertained all the four Amu Daria sheikhs at one time or another by describing to them something of the life and thinking of Europe, even going back as far as I could to the days of the Middle Ages, when the East and the West had been closer together in so many ways.
Pir Turki’s reaction to this information was interesting, because it showed me that there was something in his mind on this subject. ‘A century and a quarter has passed,’ he said, ‘since the message of the Great Khan about this subject, but the work has gone on uninterruptedly.’ The Great Khan was Jan-Fishan, the chief of the Hindu Kush, who was a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, and in whose family the leadership of the Sufis is believed to reside.
‘The Great Khan was the first to be in touch with the West since the time of Sultan Yusef Saladin. He actually went to India and settled there for a time. His message, which was given out just before the War of Shah Shuja (1838) was concerned with the West. From what I have heard from you and otherwise, it is still as fresh today.’
He did not revert to the message of the Great Khan for some time, and we discussed other topics. Then he told me that the Khan had said that the West was material, had lost the force of religion. This materialism was not the materialism which we understood, but was acquisitiveness pure and simple. There would be a growth in sceptical philosophy. There would have to be a great deal of suffering in the West. ‘And the rule of logic and intellect will have to become so severe that there is almost nobody who will listen to truth.’
When that happened, he said, people would start to look for truth. Then the message of the Sufis would be heard.
‘But the people in the West are Christians,’ I objected.
‘So are we!’ He turned sharply to me. ‘In the West there are materialists, but of the worst possible kind. They are free, free to destroy themselves; but they should not be allowed to destroy themselves, any more than a child is allowed to do so. If I insult Jesus in a Moslem country I shall be punished by law and by the people. But you have told me that people use the name of Jesus lightly, even in swear-words in the West. Is it true?’
‘It is true. But I still think that there are good people, and well-meaning ones.’
‘No doubt. They will probably be considered stupid by the others. And many of them will be stupid; they will follow anyone and think that he is a prophet, because they will not be able to discriminate as to what a prophet is.’
‘They are very self-critical,’ I hazarded.
‘Self-criticism is useless without self-work. And who is to reach them?’
I tried to turn the conversation into more illuminating channels. ‘Can you apply the concentration to the problem, in the way which you were telling us yesterday,’ I said, ‘ and tell me, as one who has come from the West to learn, whether there will be a growth of a community of Sufis in Europe, strong enough to have any effect on the evolution of man?”
He did not seem to concentrate at all. ‘There will.’
‘And will it be led by anyone?’
‘It will.’
‘And will this be a Westerner?’
‘It will not. It will be one who is of the East, but he will make the teaching a part of the teaching of the West, as it once was, in ancient times.’
‘When will the activity start?’
‘It has started, slowly. Some will come and try to force another teaching into the shape of the original one, and many will follow.’
He cut the conversation short. ‘Only the Sheikhs can influence this development; it cannot be discussed. It is a matter of the contact of minds. Some who have fixed ideas may have to die to make way for someone who is younger by many years.’
In many ways my time with the Amudaria was the most interesting of all my life. There was something un-oriental about them; and they were so obviously intent upon some activity which was not the rarefied nature which characterises Indian and Far Eastern thought and makes it unacceptable to any but a small minority of Westerners. There was a very great deal that one could get hold of, as it were, and very obviously no attempt at mystification.
Kafiristan has never been properly explored. Until Victorian times it was a no-man’s land, unclaimed by anyone at all because it was so inaccessible. Extending through a mountainous area as wild as any on Earth’s surface, it was the home of the oldest people in Afghanistan; both in terms of years and history. It was thought, and it seems likely, that these people were there long before the Graeco-Buddhists who were displaced by the Moslem invasion. When the Arabs over-ran Afghanistan, some of the Buddhists and others fled into the truly inaccessible north-east, and settled among the Kafirs—the ‘infidels’.
The King of Kabul (Afghanistan was not a united state then) at the end of the last century invaded Kafiristan and brought the ‘light of Islam to the heathen’, after an incredibly hard winter campaign. And so it was renamed the Country of Light. Although some accessible parts of the country are open to visitors, the main part of it is almost never visited except by pilgrims and others who have business there. To the modern Afghan it is something of an enigma: and also, of course, a disgrace that such a ‘primitive’ people should exist within the borders of their progressive state.
My interest in Kafiristan was specific. I knew that Afghanistan had been a centre of Buddhist learning and pilgrimage long before there was such a thing as a Dalai or a Panchen Lama in Tibet. Indeed, Tibet took the place of Afghanistan after the latter country was Islamised and the huge sanctuary of Bamian was overwhelmed in the seventh century. According to tradition, the monks of Afghanistan fled to Kafiristan. Some took the road to Tibet, others remained and started their schools of meditation anew in the land of the infidels. The Buddhism of China and Japan today is derived from the Afghan Bamian monastery-complex as evidenced by sculptures still extant.
Some of this information I had obtained from Sufi mystics and others in India, where there were any number of Tibetan refugees. One could not go to Tibet to seek refugee Buddhists from the Kafir area—or their descendants. The country was under the Chinese communists. In any case there would be little left in the monasteries to study; and few lamas would be found there now. Before Kafiristan became Westernised, there was a chance that something might be found.
A friend in a Government department put me in touch with some of the Dalai Lama’s satellites, and after that the picture became a little clearer. Tibet, according to these experts, was not actually cut off from the ‘West’, even if only because refugees continued to arrive. There were Moslems living in Tibet, and had been for a great many years… These Buddhist gentlemen, with gratifying little sectarianism in their make-up, told me something about the Sufi practices which they had heard of in Tibet: but they told me nothing new. Jalu Kambo was my man, it seemed, for he was a ‘very mystical Momatan’ (Mohammedan) who knew Lhasa and other parts of Tibet.
… When I had to some extent convinced him that I was after Sufis, and studying practical mysticism of this particular school, [he said], “You do not want Tibet at all… the mother-house of the Soo-fee-aaa is not in Tibet. You find the mother-house because they will only send you to the mother-house if you go to Llhasa.” And where was the mother-house?
‘Hindu-killer mountains, eastwards, past the Khajakhel, in Afghanistan.’ Afghanistan was, if anything, as tricky as Tibet. Or perhaps it was because I now new something about the Afghans, and very little about the Tibetans.
Jalul’s geography might have been sketchy, but what he said did undoubtedly mean Kafiristan. So I headed for Pakistan again, to collect information as to how a one-man expedition might penetrate through two main screens: the official and non-official curiosity, and the mountains of Kafiristan itself. Not to mention the Kafirs, a completely unknown quantity….
Through my Sufi sources, I heard a great deal… There was not only a way into and out of Afghanistan—there were many ways. This system was called the rahi-gurez (escape route), used by smugglers of men and material of all kinds, including arms.
Kafiristan, according to the Sufis, was the home of the esoteric school called the Sarmoon, the occult branch of the Nakshibandi Order of Bokhara. This was a school which formerly had branches all over the Moslem world. Even today they are quite widespread, but the yoga-like practices which are the core of the teaching are known only to a few in the ‘foreign branches’. My friend… had been as far as the Paghman Range of the Hindu-Kush mountains, and had been present at the meetings of the secret Sarmoon, but could tell me little about their secrets. Fifty or so years ago, a party of Yunanis (this means ‘Ionians’) had been received by the Sheikh of the Azimia who lived in feudal splendour in Paghman; this was the only story of Western contact with the Azimia.
I looked up Kafiristan in the best map I could find. The place was virtually unmapped… Kafiristan might almost not have existed, though some glaciers and heights of the order of fourteen and twenty thousand feet were marked.
What about the people? And the language? My previous trips had started in a different way. At least one had had introductions for one stage of the journey. It was when I was pondering thus that I suddenly realised how very much early encouragement means. A little more traveling, more talking with people who knew Afghanistan, and I realised that I must have contacts of there were to be any real chance of success.
In talks with Sufi mystics in Pakistan, India and other countries, I had come to realise one curious fact about the way in which they were thinking.
In the first place, your average Sufi who was not a mere imitator of mystics, was deeply concerned about humanity as a whole. Those who were higher up than the average in the invisible hierarchy seemed to have another basic bent of thought. This was that it was necessary for the Sufis, and the Sufis alone could do it, to bridge the gap between the developing cultures of the East and West. Since I had joined their ranks, I, too, had a similar sensation. The reason seems clear enough: there was no other meeting-ground. All the cooperation in politics, in education and economics, between the Orient and Occident, was not bringing the two together at all. And deep down inside of us, most people knew this. We had accepted that there was no meeting-ground in religion: this had been established as early as the time of the Crusades. That there was no deep co-operation in material fields was clear to those who had seen the downfall of one attempt after another to bridge the gap.
Nationalism and independence in the East had not brought about widespread harmony between the firmer ruling countries and the formerly ruled. People had claimed that the granting of independence to the East would be a sort of panacea. All would be well and cordial relations would be bound to return when people were ruled by their own nationals. This had not happened. In some cases the reverse had taken place.
In orthodox philosophy the East and West had taken leave of one another centuries ago. There was no basic unity of ideas at all, partly because, deep down, there was disharmony between peoples of different cultures, different nations. We had diagnosed the problem as due to one disease. When the remedy fot he diagnosed ailment was applied, the illness did not cease, was not even ameliorated. The people who thought that the cure lay in granting independence, economic help and so on, refused to look at the instances of the countries in which these measures had not worked. Why? They were too busy looking for other countries to grant independence to. They had no time to see whether they were curing what they though they were curing.
I was no opponent of independence for anyone. But I could see that independence was not enough. As with many other things, the reformation had to start with the individual, had to start from within. The materialists continued to reassure us and themselves that ‘things would shake down’, that as soon as the first wave of patriotic fervour had passed, the East and the West would respect one another, and all would be well. But my travels and talks with people at all levels showed me that people in the Asian countries which had been independent for generations were still not reconciled with the West. What did this mean?
It meant the world was still waiting for a development within humanity which would make humanity one, one body, one heart. Plenty of people said that they had the answer. Nobody, as far as I could see, was applying it.
I had traveled and lived among the Sufis in Asia and Europe, in Africa and India. Sharing their lives and talking to them, becoming a member of their fraternities, I had found a group of people who were as worried about the future of the human race as I was. The difference between this group and those who talked a great deal about it in mass-communications media was, that the Sufis were trying to live that kind of life.
Their trusting me, as a member of another type of community, was to them a practical expression of that actual living of human unity. None of them, I am sure, thought that I wanted to associate with them for cheap sensationalism: although they were strongly resistant to the approaches of Western occultists and even anthropologists. They got to know me, decided that I wanted to be like them, and accepted me, in an amazingly short space of time.
… Did the Sufis as a whole want to project their message in the West as well as in the East? How did they think it would be done, if it were done? How could they avoid making themselves into just another ‘cult’ followed—for a time—by every crank intellectual and occultist at any given time or place?
Yunus [a Pakistani merchant who had been Abbot of a Sufi monastery in Iraq] understood me at once. ‘Your question is not as simple as it seems it might be. We can put a question, but we cannot always find the answer in a couple of words.
‘You will find out, I think, if you spend more time among the Sufis, for you have to absorb their characteristic "flavour". Once you have been with the Sufis, really of the Sufis, you cannot believe that their Way will ever become degenerated as you describe.’
**************
Sufi Abdul-Hamid Khan, Master of the Royal Afghan Mint and something of a polymath—military engineer, calligraphist, sage and expert on rhythmic exercises—must have been over ninety years of age. A follower of the Mir of Gazarga, he could remember in considerable detail the events which had taken place eighty or more years ago.
A frequent visitor to Kunji Zagh, he had spent many years in Bokhara, and it was there that he had come across the redoubtable Gurdjieff, whose studies of Eastern metaphysical systems were introduced into Europe about the time of the First World War.
Although the people of Kunji Zagh called Gurdjieff ‘The Russian Tatar’, Sufi Abdul-Hamid said that he was in reality partly Mongolian, part-Russian, part-Greek. According to the Sufi, this Jurjizada (Son of George) had once been a Theosophist, had also studied in an Orthodox seminary, and ‘was responsive’ to the Sufic ‘waves’—could, in other words, contact the mental activity which emanated from the ‘work’ of the dervishes. This, together with a curiosity about the occult, led him to the shrine of Bahauddin, the Naqshbandi teacher in Bokhara.
Here another Bahauddin, known as Dervish Baha, had taught him certain ‘secrets’. Among them were the ‘sacred dances’ or movements made by dervishes, the rules of the Order and the ‘inner interpretation’ of the Sufi texts. Then he sent him on a tour of the centres of the Sufis, some in Egypt, some in Syria, some in India.
Seeing the strange effects of the Sufi practices, Gurdjieff decided that he would find out how they worked. In order to do this, he and a number of friends collected as much of the material used by the Order as they could, and fled with it ‘to the West’.
Unfortunately, continued Abdul-Hamid, Jurjizada was at too early a stage to do anything final with the material. He had not yet learned, for instance, that the exercises and the music had to be carried out with special people at certain times in a special order of events. As a result he propounded the theory of the Complete Man without being able to take it into practice.
Further, Gurdjieff tried to make the method work by trying out the exercises on a large number of people. The result?
‘Here in Afghanistan we still receive, like faint radio messages, the influence of the minds of the pupils of Gurdjieff, coming from far away. They must still be carrying on the exercises, but they don’t know how, when or with whom to do them.’
As soon as I got back to Europe, I found that some at least of this information might be true. After the first War, the Russian and a disciple of his, the philosopher Ouspensky, settled in France and England respectively. They set up teaching groups, and – I was told—several of these still existed. But they remained fully secret. Probably, like the custodians of any secret knowledge which had become reduced in quality, they would continue to operate, perhaps for generations.
*************
Amu Daria is, of course, the name of the immense river which forms four hundred miles of the northern frontier of Afghanistan. Beyond it lies the Soviet Union and the lost territories of Turkestan, once the site of ancient Sufi strongholds.
Russian penetration into the Central Asian khanates is no new thing, and faced with the encroachment of the ‘West’ in the form of Czarist advance, and the need to develop Sufi teachings further in order to coincide in some way with modern technology—the Sufis started to move into the hinterland of Afghanistan during the early part of [the 20th] century. Some of the oldest foundations were already established in the Hindu Kush area. Those who migrated into Afghanistan began to use the name of Amu Daria, run into one word, as the designation of their teaching. Thus they perpetuated the crossing of the river and the tradition of their trans-Oxus origins in their name.
The River Amu (Amu Daria in Persian) appears on most maps as the Oxus. It will be convenient to refer to the émigré Sufi groups as Amudaria ones, because such a phrase as ‘the Oxus Sufis’ does not sound anything like as felicitous. They are also known as the Sarmoon (a code-word for ‘bee’, a reference to one of their exercises).
Although the Sufis do not like to engage in historical or geographical discussions of their cult, there seems little doubt that the Amudaria elements concentrate upon practices and ideas which differ from those found elsewhere, with the exception of the old Afghan Orders. In some ways their rituals and methods are quite like those of other Sufi Orders, but more organised. As an example, the habit of compiling multiple words taken from the syllables of other words is a fine art with them. The concentration upon the belief that the Sufi way is the only suitable one for propagation throughout the world is another characteristic. Then there is the teaching that it is from here that the Sufi message must be diffused, and that it will have to be naturalised in each community.
I spent one week in each of four Amudaria communities. The organisation of the monastery, according to this group, is ultimately a spiritual entity : the building or the location is secondary. Thus two of the ‘monasteries’ actually had no premises of their own. Meetings were held in the open, or in houses. In one village when the gun which marks noon was fired, virtually the whole population started repeating formulae under their breaths. This was a ‘meeting’ of the Amurdarists: no monastery, not even a physical meeting.
This principle is carried even further in Afghanistan. Although monasteries exist and halka meetings are held, and discipleship as I had seen it elsewhere was carried on, the whole community is considered to be in a special kind of rapport. This means that constant spiritual communication between the members is thought to continue, especially at designated times.
The four leaders of the trans-Oxus communities, Shiekh Jalal, Ahmad Baba, Ishan Ali and Pir Turki, all accepted the authority of the Naqshbandi chief of the Hindu Kush Sufis. This is the representative of the Studious King, who is the overall leader, and who may be ‘found in disguise, in almost any country in the world.’
Ahmad Baba showed me the method of sewing the patchwork cloak which some Sufis wear, and which was until quite recently the uniform of those who were going through a period of retreat from the world. It is not known when this custom started, but I was reminded of the ‘coat of many colours’ and wondered whether the robe originated in Syria. Ahmad was about seventy years of age, but might have been older. He was in astonishing health for a man who could clearly remember pre-Revolution Russia, and attributed this to his carrying out the longevity exercises which are a part of the Sufi training. ‘Nobody,’ he said, ‘would get feeble if he carried them out regularly. Certainly they would live, as the Sheikhs of our Order do, up to a hundred or twice as many years of age.’
In addition to most of the usual Sufi exercises, the Baba’s community practiced healing, and Sufis came from various places to receive this part of their ‘enlightenment’. ‘Of course,’ said the sage, ‘we can also send it out to those who are ready to receive it. You see, we only have a portion. It is like having a … (underground water channel) connected to the source. But we cannot transmit to those who are not ready. If they are only slightly developed in the requisite ways, then they must come here.’
I was interested to know what these Sufis felt about the possibility of making their cult known in the West. Ahmad was not to be drawn. ‘That is a matter for the Studious King.’
Ishan Ali was a Turk, and half the age of the Baba. His ministry extended through the wild north-east of Afghanistan, right up to the Chinese border in the thin tongue of land which sits astride the Pamir mountains. He was forthright, greatly loved, and yet difficult to approach. He received me in a Western-type suit, with a small karakul lambskin hat on his shaven head, something like a kalpak cap, but more stylish. ‘You must not force the pace,’ he told me so many times. ‘You are anxious to learn a great deal of things about us. But you must remember that if you allow yourself to be blinded by curiosity, by the collecting of facts and little snippets of information—you may write a good book, but you will slow down your spiritual progress. ‘
I saw him apply this teaching to a party of young men, not long out of the Army, who had come on a pilgrimage to meet him. ‘Remember what I say, ‘ he admonished them, ‘for you will not be told again but sent home. What you have learned in the Army will be of inestimable value to you, although you are still cursing the day the pishk (conscription) caught you, and blessing the day you were discharged. Both are wrong: but I cannot expect you to understand this yet. Pay attention to everything that you are told, and no not take an interest in things that you are not told or shown. At your stage your so-called human abilities can often be a curse to you. Plenty of time for changing back when you get to the outside world again.’
Pir Turki, who in spite of his name was not a Turk but of Indian extraction, ran the strangest school of all. Everything was based upon gymnastics. Pits had been dug in the circle which had been marked around his miniature castle. In these depressions, some twelve feet deep, disciples had to wield heavy clubs, often to music, sometimes accompanied by the voice of the teacher. They were reputed to develop occult powers; and I heard many tales about how they could make things float on water, see at a vast distance, and so on.
I was said by local villagers that one of Pir turki’s teachers had, by the power of his glance, held up an army for three days in the passes of the Khyber. Be that as it may, Pir turki the ascetic was a martinet. Shunning over-eating or loose talk like the plague, he provided plenty of food for his disciples, though nobody knew where the money came from. He did not make collections. There must have been a source of his income, of course, but it was never visible. One of the first things that he said to me was: ‘If you revere any man, forget him, for all that matters is the Work.’
I have never seen anyone who impressed me so much. When I told this, he took hold of a beautiful lamp which stood on his desk-table and smashed it. ‘I have destroyed a thing of beauty. Do you respect me less now? I hope so.’
Then he called a disciple, accused him of theft, and sent him to wash out the assembly-room. “Must he suffer so that I can see that you have defects?’ I asked him.
‘I hope that you think that I have been unjust in making him suffer, ‘ was the answer.
Unfortunately for the lesson’s permanency in my case, I learned later that the disciple who had been unjustly treated had committed some grave breach of regulations and merited punishment in any case. ‘You don’t understand, ‘ said a disciple, when I mentioned this; ‘the lesson has sunk in where it counts. That is all that counts.’
Yet punishment was something which seemed to happen very rarely among the Sufis. I would not say that they were immune to it, but as they had been taught that personal dignity was sometimes a grave disadvantage, they were not able to suffer much through being made fun of in front of each other. Manual labor on the three farms which the community owned gave many opportunities for exercises in self-development. All the income from the farms was collected by an administrator and sent to the women’s welfare association, for some reason, so the Sufis did not benefit directly. And yet the Sheikh, as I have said, did not seem short of cash.
Sheikh Jalal was a feudal-type chief, a man of towering personality within a slight and delicate frame. He lived in considerable style from the income of vast inherited flocks of some of the best sheep in the country. He smoked a little, but did not seem to eat much. He always wore similar clothes, the robbers and turban which old-fashioned judges assumed in Afghanistan.
He was about sixty-five years old. Although surrounded by servants and a great deal of luxury, he personally partook of it little. When, for instance, we went out shooting and brought down several hundred wild duck and grey geese, none was served at his table. The birds went as gifts to the surrounding villages.
Jalal, it was rumoured, could neither read nor write. This idea must have gained currency because he was never seen with a book or a pen. His teaching was done in the normal Sufi way: through short addresses, exercises, meditations. Going with him several times on long walks, which he embarked upon without any prior notice whatever, I realised that he spent a great deal of his time in silent communion and commemoration (called Zikr) and that this had become almost second nature to him. He had several sons, all of them, I believe, in the Army.
He often showed small signs of a sense of perception which is repeatedly mentioned in Sufi writings as a sign of ‘saintship’, but which would hot have been noted except by an attentive disiciple or someone else very close to him. One day, for instance, he picked up a cooking-pot and took it on a walk on which I accompanied him. Stopping at a poor small house he saluted the occupant and handed in the pot. The old woman was amazed. She said that she had just broken the earthen dish in which she cooked. Again, he handed me a box of matches when I had come out without any, in spite of the fact that I could not be sure he realised that I had left them at home. It should be mentioned that he could not have observed that I brought none with me, for I had met him in his garden, on the way from my quarters to his.
I mentioned these small indications to him. But he would not discuss them, merely saying: “Would you make me a saint, and rob me of the power of becoming?”
There were many of these little instances. Some were observed by me, others reported by disciples. It was interesting to note that among the disciples stories were never exaggerated; they would often hinge upon the smallest event. This indicated to me that many of the wilder tales current among the country-folk and others outside Sufism were elaborations of actual happenings.
It was Sheikh Jalal that I questioned on this subject in a more general way, when I referred to the tales my mother had told me about Scottish highland and country folk being ‘fey’ and having insights which others did not have.
‘These are normal, not abnormal developments,’ he said. ‘they are of no value in themselves, partly proved by the fact that the experiences seldom have practical value. For every happening of this kind that is a warning or can be turned to practical use, there are a hundred which are not of any use. Why is this? Materialists would say that it merely proves that the power is fitful, partial, something of little account. What they do not know is that these are signs. They are encouragements, they show that the recipient has a real chance of developing his ‘gifts’. They are signs that the time has come for self-work. Most people cannot use them, because they do not know that this is the alif (letter A) and that the be (letter B) follows, until there is a iaa (last letter of the alphabet).’
I entertained all the four Amu Daria sheikhs at one time or another by describing to them something of the life and thinking of Europe, even going back as far as I could to the days of the Middle Ages, when the East and the West had been closer together in so many ways.
Pir Turki’s reaction to this information was interesting, because it showed me that there was something in his mind on this subject. ‘A century and a quarter has passed,’ he said, ‘since the message of the Great Khan about this subject, but the work has gone on uninterruptedly.’ The Great Khan was Jan-Fishan, the chief of the Hindu Kush, who was a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, and in whose family the leadership of the Sufis is believed to reside.
‘The Great Khan was the first to be in touch with the West since the time of Sultan Yusef Saladin. He actually went to India and settled there for a time. His message, which was given out just before the War of Shah Shuja (1838) was concerned with the West. From what I have heard from you and otherwise, it is still as fresh today.’
He did not revert to the message of the Great Khan for some time, and we discussed other topics. Then he told me that the Khan had said that the West was material, had lost the force of religion. This materialism was not the materialism which we understood, but was acquisitiveness pure and simple. There would be a growth in sceptical philosophy. There would have to be a great deal of suffering in the West. ‘And the rule of logic and intellect will have to become so severe that there is almost nobody who will listen to truth.’
When that happened, he said, people would start to look for truth. Then the message of the Sufis would be heard.
‘But the people in the West are Christians,’ I objected.
‘So are we!’ He turned sharply to me. ‘In the West there are materialists, but of the worst possible kind. They are free, free to destroy themselves; but they should not be allowed to destroy themselves, any more than a child is allowed to do so. If I insult Jesus in a Moslem country I shall be punished by law and by the people. But you have told me that people use the name of Jesus lightly, even in swear-words in the West. Is it true?’
‘It is true. But I still think that there are good people, and well-meaning ones.’
‘No doubt. They will probably be considered stupid by the others. And many of them will be stupid; they will follow anyone and think that he is a prophet, because they will not be able to discriminate as to what a prophet is.’
‘They are very self-critical,’ I hazarded.
‘Self-criticism is useless without self-work. And who is to reach them?’
I tried to turn the conversation into more illuminating channels. ‘Can you apply the concentration to the problem, in the way which you were telling us yesterday,’ I said, ‘ and tell me, as one who has come from the West to learn, whether there will be a growth of a community of Sufis in Europe, strong enough to have any effect on the evolution of man?”
He did not seem to concentrate at all. ‘There will.’
‘And will it be led by anyone?’
‘It will.’
‘And will this be a Westerner?’
‘It will not. It will be one who is of the East, but he will make the teaching a part of the teaching of the West, as it once was, in ancient times.’
‘When will the activity start?’
‘It has started, slowly. Some will come and try to force another teaching into the shape of the original one, and many will follow.’
He cut the conversation short. ‘Only the Sheikhs can influence this development; it cannot be discussed. It is a matter of the contact of minds. Some who have fixed ideas may have to die to make way for someone who is younger by many years.’
In many ways my time with the Amudaria was the most interesting of all my life. There was something un-oriental about them; and they were so obviously intent upon some activity which was not the rarefied nature which characterises Indian and Far Eastern thought and makes it unacceptable to any but a small minority of Westerners. There was a very great deal that one could get hold of, as it were, and very obviously no attempt at mystification.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Legends
Do These Supermen Exist?
by Eddie Campbell (1969)
For many centuries there has been a strange legend in the East. It suggests that in a hidden centre-- perhaps in the highlands of Central Asia-- there exists a colony of men possessing exceptional powers. This centre acts, in some respects at least, as the secret government of the world. Some aspects of this legend came to the West during the Crusades; the idea was renewed in Rosicrucian guise in 1614; it was restated last century with variations by Mademoiselle Blavatsky and the French diplomat Jacolliot; was suggested again by the English author Talbot Mundy, and most recently by the Mongolian traveller Ossendowski in 1918.
In the mysterious Shangri-La of this legend, certain men, evolved beyond the ordinary human situation, act as the regent of powers beyond the planet.
Mysterious
Through lower echelons-- who mingle unsuspected in ordinary walks of life, both West and East-- they act at critical stages of history, contriving results necessary to keep the whole evolution of the Earth in step with events in the solar system. If in the West this seems like a very tall tale indeed, it is nevertheless one which has engaged serious thinkers behind the European scene for centuries.
In 1614, for example, when a mysterious document called the Fama appeared in Europe, some of the best intellects of the day spent a generation chasing clues to its origin and trying to get themselves enlisted. There is no historical record of anyone succeeding. A hoax? Maybe, but in 1961, an article appeared in a small magazine which to the ordinary reader seemed like a simple travel-documentary.
Influence
To others who knew-- or believed they knew-- how such things are arranged, it produced much the same effect as did the Fama on their forebears 350 years ago; though perhaps attempts to enlist were not this time quite so disastrously negative.
Since 1961, a further stream of hints seemingly connected with the same tradition have been appearing regularly. Among them are some privately circulated papers and The Sufis by Idries Shah; The Teachers of Gurdjieff by Rafael Lefort; Reflections; Special Problems (Society For Understanding Fundamental Ideas) and possibly some of the writings of Robert Graves. This list is by no means complete.
The latest publications to which it seems possible to detect the same influence are Wisdom of the Idiots and New Research on Current Philosophical Systems.
New Source
The former is a collection of Eastern tales, each pointing a fairly obvious moral but containing also the hint of a multi-IQ system by which the reader may profit-- and be prepared-- according to his understanding. The idea is not perhaps dissimilar to the structure which Dr. Maurice Nicoll claimed 20 years ago to have discovered in the Gospels.
New Research ... makes perhaps more appeal to modern attitudes. It consists of 13 brief articles by people with experience of Eastern metaphysical techniques and includes first-hand accounts of exercises from Sinkiang, Persian, Indian, and Afghan sources. Almost all of these will be new, even to students of such matters in the West.
Traditions
The tradition of which all this seems to be a part has been linked with such diverse phenomena as the restoration of culture after Ghengis Khan, Arabian poetry, the Joker in our playing cards, Freemasonry, the Templars, the Renaissance, the Saracen culture of Spain, and the Franciscan order of the Roman church. It has also been noted that some of the latest ideas in Freudian and Jungian psychology were outlined by members of this same tradition as long ago as the 11th century, when there was no western vocabulary capable of dealing with the ideas. In view of the extent of the claims which are implict in some of the literature now appearing in the West, it is remarkable that orthodox scholarship has not yet apparently responded with the interest which this material would seem to justify.
Evening News, 10th of February, 1969
by Eddie Campbell (1969)
For many centuries there has been a strange legend in the East. It suggests that in a hidden centre-- perhaps in the highlands of Central Asia-- there exists a colony of men possessing exceptional powers. This centre acts, in some respects at least, as the secret government of the world. Some aspects of this legend came to the West during the Crusades; the idea was renewed in Rosicrucian guise in 1614; it was restated last century with variations by Mademoiselle Blavatsky and the French diplomat Jacolliot; was suggested again by the English author Talbot Mundy, and most recently by the Mongolian traveller Ossendowski in 1918.
In the mysterious Shangri-La of this legend, certain men, evolved beyond the ordinary human situation, act as the regent of powers beyond the planet.
Mysterious
Through lower echelons-- who mingle unsuspected in ordinary walks of life, both West and East-- they act at critical stages of history, contriving results necessary to keep the whole evolution of the Earth in step with events in the solar system. If in the West this seems like a very tall tale indeed, it is nevertheless one which has engaged serious thinkers behind the European scene for centuries.
In 1614, for example, when a mysterious document called the Fama appeared in Europe, some of the best intellects of the day spent a generation chasing clues to its origin and trying to get themselves enlisted. There is no historical record of anyone succeeding. A hoax? Maybe, but in 1961, an article appeared in a small magazine which to the ordinary reader seemed like a simple travel-documentary.
Influence
To others who knew-- or believed they knew-- how such things are arranged, it produced much the same effect as did the Fama on their forebears 350 years ago; though perhaps attempts to enlist were not this time quite so disastrously negative.
Since 1961, a further stream of hints seemingly connected with the same tradition have been appearing regularly. Among them are some privately circulated papers and The Sufis by Idries Shah; The Teachers of Gurdjieff by Rafael Lefort; Reflections; Special Problems (Society For Understanding Fundamental Ideas) and possibly some of the writings of Robert Graves. This list is by no means complete.
The latest publications to which it seems possible to detect the same influence are Wisdom of the Idiots and New Research on Current Philosophical Systems.
New Source
The former is a collection of Eastern tales, each pointing a fairly obvious moral but containing also the hint of a multi-IQ system by which the reader may profit-- and be prepared-- according to his understanding. The idea is not perhaps dissimilar to the structure which Dr. Maurice Nicoll claimed 20 years ago to have discovered in the Gospels.
New Research ... makes perhaps more appeal to modern attitudes. It consists of 13 brief articles by people with experience of Eastern metaphysical techniques and includes first-hand accounts of exercises from Sinkiang, Persian, Indian, and Afghan sources. Almost all of these will be new, even to students of such matters in the West.
Traditions
The tradition of which all this seems to be a part has been linked with such diverse phenomena as the restoration of culture after Ghengis Khan, Arabian poetry, the Joker in our playing cards, Freemasonry, the Templars, the Renaissance, the Saracen culture of Spain, and the Franciscan order of the Roman church. It has also been noted that some of the latest ideas in Freudian and Jungian psychology were outlined by members of this same tradition as long ago as the 11th century, when there was no western vocabulary capable of dealing with the ideas. In view of the extent of the claims which are implict in some of the literature now appearing in the West, it is remarkable that orthodox scholarship has not yet apparently responded with the interest which this material would seem to justify.
Evening News, 10th of February, 1969
Thursday, November 8, 2012
The Human Race
WE ARE IN A RACE WITH OURSELVES
from The Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge
A brochure entitled "We Are in a Race With Ourselves" in the 1970s laid out some of the problems and issues facing the world today. Are the solutions to these problem issues within our grasp, or are we still in a race with ourselves?
Human beings are unique animals: all other animals live inside their original habitat, and they are adapted "by design" to it. We have created an unprecedented world for ourselves: the space age, computers and rockets, yet we remain biologically the same as we were in the stone age.
Solutions to modern crises are proposed constantly; they are political, social, administrative. They are each useful, but only to a point. There can be no complete solution or anything close to it, until enough people understand that most of the diverse problems facing us are of our own making and are so because of a lack of understanding of who we are, how we react, and what we might be able to accomplish, and to become. Therefore, an important part of the uniqueness of being human is that we must continually adapt to our own creations.
The most important thing we inherit is the ability to go beyond our inheritance.
The past few decades have witnessed on the one hand, a population explosion, but on the other, an explosion of new information about human nature: where we came from and why, how we develop, what we might become. There has been such a ferment in this area that this new and extraordinary "Human Knowledge" is still scattered: in different departments of different academic disciplines all over the world, in biological studies of molecular evolution, in neuroscience and cognitive science, in the writings of novelists and works of artists, in the experiences of journalists, filmmakers, and politicians. What is urgently needed, and now, is to assemble these pieces of the puzzle into a comprehensive picture of human nature and to apply this conception to current life.
For this we need a multi-university, multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural approach. This is what The Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge does--it works with educators, brain scientists, biologists, ecologists, physicians, sociologists, novelists and others to communicate and coordinate new insights, faster than would otherwise be possible. It tries to broaden the base of information available to our society: to our decision-makers, to our scientists...to our students.
Solutions to the significant problems facing modern society demand a widespread, qualitative improvement in thinking and understanding. We are slowly and painfully becoming aware that contemporary challenges such as the use of energy, the unchecked increases in population, problems of environment, employment, the health and psychological well-being of individuals and the meaningful education of our youth are not being met by the mere accumulation of more data or the expenditure of more time, energy, or money. In view of the increasing pressures imposed on our society by these problems, many responsible thinkers have realized that we cannot sit back and hope for some technological invention to cure our social ills. We need a breakthrough in the quality of thinking employed by both decision-makers at all levels of society and by each of us in our daily affairs.
The purpose of The Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge is to engage in research, public education, and the collection and dissemination of information related to:
- the nature, function and evolution of the human mind, consciousness, and learning capacity
- functional specialization of the human brain
- integrative approaches to medicine and
- human ecology
PSYCHOLOGY
There is a re-awakening of a concern with the mind within psychology: how it develops in the infant; how it can be educated; its capabilities in adulthood.
This concern has revolutionized psychology: cognition and consciousness are part of the course of study of many students. The Institute has encouraged this trend and may be in part responsible for it: its publications and symposia on consciousness, mind and brain, have stimulated researchers and teachers in this new field.
Now, there is a new recognition: many of the boldest insights of modern psychology--the stages of mental development, the errors we are prone to make--have been described in writings published about 1,000 years ago! The Institute is mounting a new program to discover and publish such anticipations of modern thought, because new insights on human development and capabilities may be available.
EDUCATION
Our education, science, and medicine do not deal with the whole mind and person--the full range of our capacities.
Observations such as this have often been made in the past, yet we are rarely informed: which of our capacities lie undeveloped? Are they useless or meaningful? What might be the methods for educating the whole mind? What might such increased mental ability mean, for individuals, for our society, and even for the future of civilization? Some of this information is available in contemporary research, some in the past, but it needs to be brought together.
When we attempt to educate our students, we are limited by the "lowest common denominator" concept of our mind and our capacities--"Reading, Writing and Arithmetic." The varieties of human intelligence are scarcely to be recognized in the standard range of "intelligence" tests. What has been considered "basic" in our schooling is but a small segment of our capacity.
We, our student, patients, and colleagues are not being prepared to understand the complex nature of the world we live in. Thus, the "environmental" problems, those of overpopulation, are related to the lack of an education of our ability to perceive things whole, to develop a comprehensive intelligence.
We are "designed" to analyze things only as they relate to ourselves. This analytic, sequential capacity is only one aspect of the mind. We also have the ability to consider whole systems simultaneously and perceive each element as it affects the others. This ability to "see things whole," to comprehend relationships between parts, to understand personally such concepts as "the welfare of all" can itself be trained as part of a more comprehensive education.
THE ENVIRONMENT
There is a saying in Greek philosophy, "You cannot step into the same river twice." We would propose a change to, "You cannot step into the same river once," for entering alters the flow, level, and perhaps temperature immediately. We must be able to perceive the effects of our actions in the world, immediately, perhaps "intuitively," for both our ability to intervene and our numbers exist on a scale unprecedented in human history. There are billions of people now in a world that, not too long ago, held a few millions. It is this rise in our numbers, coupled with the increased ability to manipulate the environment, that makes our situation so dangerous. The hand that was designed to hold a few spears now controls thousands of nuclear weapons.
So, what many people often consider purely "environmental" problems--the smog over many of the world's cities, the chemical pollution of the waters of industrial nations, the over-crowding and increasing growth of population--are problems of human choices and understanding. Since we are training to focus on splintered pieces of a whole situation, we have often take quite inappropriate actions: the increased safety and security of reproduction in the most recent 100 years has suddenly made large families unnecessary, yet we have been too slow to perceive this, and the explosive exponential growth of human population has been the result. Our increasingly brilliant analyses of the relation of mass to energy has brought with it the possibility of nuclear holocaust. On these important matters, human understanding and judgment has not developed to balance and evaluate the technical progress.
We are in a race with ourselves.
MEDICINE AND HEALTH
There is a new understanding the Health Sciences that the brain is a healthcare "system" in each person. The brain regulates every movement, every heartbeat, every gland's secretion and millions more microevents. All of them are to the purpose of keeping the organism healthy, some of which have only recently been discovered, such as the endorphin system.
Many of the mysteries of how social and emotional events influence health are found in the complex brain mechanisms which interpret the outside world, and direct the body to take appropriate action. Grief can affect he immune system; increased social support can influence health (friends can be good medicine); mental attitudes strongly affect health: those who think they are healthier live longer than the "objective record" would have it. This new understanding will, in the next decade, radically influence our idea of health and healing. It is founded on recent developments in brain sciences and increased cooperation between brain scientists, physicians, psychologists and sociologists.
The Institute invited you to help in developing this new and comprehensive understanding about being human: where we come from, what we might, in our own lives, become. The Institute supports the publication of books, public lectures and public information which will contribute to a permanent improvement in human abilities and comprehension. Your help is needed for its programs of research and communication in medicine, education, psychology and human ecology. In the end, we have to rely on our own resources as human beings. For the first time we may be able to know what they are.
from The Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge
A brochure entitled "We Are in a Race With Ourselves" in the 1970s laid out some of the problems and issues facing the world today. Are the solutions to these problem issues within our grasp, or are we still in a race with ourselves?
Human beings are unique animals: all other animals live inside their original habitat, and they are adapted "by design" to it. We have created an unprecedented world for ourselves: the space age, computers and rockets, yet we remain biologically the same as we were in the stone age.
Solutions to modern crises are proposed constantly; they are political, social, administrative. They are each useful, but only to a point. There can be no complete solution or anything close to it, until enough people understand that most of the diverse problems facing us are of our own making and are so because of a lack of understanding of who we are, how we react, and what we might be able to accomplish, and to become. Therefore, an important part of the uniqueness of being human is that we must continually adapt to our own creations.
The most important thing we inherit is the ability to go beyond our inheritance.
The past few decades have witnessed on the one hand, a population explosion, but on the other, an explosion of new information about human nature: where we came from and why, how we develop, what we might become. There has been such a ferment in this area that this new and extraordinary "Human Knowledge" is still scattered: in different departments of different academic disciplines all over the world, in biological studies of molecular evolution, in neuroscience and cognitive science, in the writings of novelists and works of artists, in the experiences of journalists, filmmakers, and politicians. What is urgently needed, and now, is to assemble these pieces of the puzzle into a comprehensive picture of human nature and to apply this conception to current life.
For this we need a multi-university, multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural approach. This is what The Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge does--it works with educators, brain scientists, biologists, ecologists, physicians, sociologists, novelists and others to communicate and coordinate new insights, faster than would otherwise be possible. It tries to broaden the base of information available to our society: to our decision-makers, to our scientists...to our students.
Solutions to the significant problems facing modern society demand a widespread, qualitative improvement in thinking and understanding. We are slowly and painfully becoming aware that contemporary challenges such as the use of energy, the unchecked increases in population, problems of environment, employment, the health and psychological well-being of individuals and the meaningful education of our youth are not being met by the mere accumulation of more data or the expenditure of more time, energy, or money. In view of the increasing pressures imposed on our society by these problems, many responsible thinkers have realized that we cannot sit back and hope for some technological invention to cure our social ills. We need a breakthrough in the quality of thinking employed by both decision-makers at all levels of society and by each of us in our daily affairs.
The purpose of The Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge is to engage in research, public education, and the collection and dissemination of information related to:
- the nature, function and evolution of the human mind, consciousness, and learning capacity
- functional specialization of the human brain
- integrative approaches to medicine and
- human ecology
PSYCHOLOGY
There is a re-awakening of a concern with the mind within psychology: how it develops in the infant; how it can be educated; its capabilities in adulthood.
This concern has revolutionized psychology: cognition and consciousness are part of the course of study of many students. The Institute has encouraged this trend and may be in part responsible for it: its publications and symposia on consciousness, mind and brain, have stimulated researchers and teachers in this new field.
Now, there is a new recognition: many of the boldest insights of modern psychology--the stages of mental development, the errors we are prone to make--have been described in writings published about 1,000 years ago! The Institute is mounting a new program to discover and publish such anticipations of modern thought, because new insights on human development and capabilities may be available.
EDUCATION
Our education, science, and medicine do not deal with the whole mind and person--the full range of our capacities.
Observations such as this have often been made in the past, yet we are rarely informed: which of our capacities lie undeveloped? Are they useless or meaningful? What might be the methods for educating the whole mind? What might such increased mental ability mean, for individuals, for our society, and even for the future of civilization? Some of this information is available in contemporary research, some in the past, but it needs to be brought together.
When we attempt to educate our students, we are limited by the "lowest common denominator" concept of our mind and our capacities--"Reading, Writing and Arithmetic." The varieties of human intelligence are scarcely to be recognized in the standard range of "intelligence" tests. What has been considered "basic" in our schooling is but a small segment of our capacity.
We, our student, patients, and colleagues are not being prepared to understand the complex nature of the world we live in. Thus, the "environmental" problems, those of overpopulation, are related to the lack of an education of our ability to perceive things whole, to develop a comprehensive intelligence.
We are "designed" to analyze things only as they relate to ourselves. This analytic, sequential capacity is only one aspect of the mind. We also have the ability to consider whole systems simultaneously and perceive each element as it affects the others. This ability to "see things whole," to comprehend relationships between parts, to understand personally such concepts as "the welfare of all" can itself be trained as part of a more comprehensive education.
THE ENVIRONMENT
There is a saying in Greek philosophy, "You cannot step into the same river twice." We would propose a change to, "You cannot step into the same river once," for entering alters the flow, level, and perhaps temperature immediately. We must be able to perceive the effects of our actions in the world, immediately, perhaps "intuitively," for both our ability to intervene and our numbers exist on a scale unprecedented in human history. There are billions of people now in a world that, not too long ago, held a few millions. It is this rise in our numbers, coupled with the increased ability to manipulate the environment, that makes our situation so dangerous. The hand that was designed to hold a few spears now controls thousands of nuclear weapons.
So, what many people often consider purely "environmental" problems--the smog over many of the world's cities, the chemical pollution of the waters of industrial nations, the over-crowding and increasing growth of population--are problems of human choices and understanding. Since we are training to focus on splintered pieces of a whole situation, we have often take quite inappropriate actions: the increased safety and security of reproduction in the most recent 100 years has suddenly made large families unnecessary, yet we have been too slow to perceive this, and the explosive exponential growth of human population has been the result. Our increasingly brilliant analyses of the relation of mass to energy has brought with it the possibility of nuclear holocaust. On these important matters, human understanding and judgment has not developed to balance and evaluate the technical progress.
We are in a race with ourselves.
MEDICINE AND HEALTH
There is a new understanding the Health Sciences that the brain is a healthcare "system" in each person. The brain regulates every movement, every heartbeat, every gland's secretion and millions more microevents. All of them are to the purpose of keeping the organism healthy, some of which have only recently been discovered, such as the endorphin system.
Many of the mysteries of how social and emotional events influence health are found in the complex brain mechanisms which interpret the outside world, and direct the body to take appropriate action. Grief can affect he immune system; increased social support can influence health (friends can be good medicine); mental attitudes strongly affect health: those who think they are healthier live longer than the "objective record" would have it. This new understanding will, in the next decade, radically influence our idea of health and healing. It is founded on recent developments in brain sciences and increased cooperation between brain scientists, physicians, psychologists and sociologists.
The Institute invited you to help in developing this new and comprehensive understanding about being human: where we come from, what we might, in our own lives, become. The Institute supports the publication of books, public lectures and public information which will contribute to a permanent improvement in human abilities and comprehension. Your help is needed for its programs of research and communication in medicine, education, psychology and human ecology. In the end, we have to rely on our own resources as human beings. For the first time we may be able to know what they are.
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