Dervish Coffee with Carol Sill - Transcript Part 2

If you missed the video and part 1 of the transcript, find them HERE.

Prayers, words, translations, and more!

The Conversation Continues from Part 1

Nirtan: I could add something to that. I remember Shamcher speaking about the prayers in particular, saying that they had really been cobbled together, created by a group of many people who had worked very hard on these prayers. That gives us a slightly different view of what the prayers are: that they were constructions that were created by many people, and in some ways that’s a beautiful thing, that they were perfected in some ways. But in other ways, maybe that shows there’s an opportunity for other people at other times to also reconstruct them. I just thought I would share that.

Rani: Does that mean Murshid Inayat Khan was not inspired to create these prayers? Is that what it meant?

Nirtan: No, it didn’t mean that. I don’t think so. I never got that impression. But just, for me, Shamcher was very always - as Carol has mentioned, and in fact these were his last words, was to say: don’t think that because it’s in the book, because it’s in the Message volumes, always use the filter of your own intuition to ask whether this is really what Pir-o-Murshid might have meant, because the texts we receive are filtered through other personalities.

If you’ve studied the work done at the Nekbakht Foundation, I’m looking through the ones on the Gayan right now, you see the corrections that were made to Murshid’s words. It was a process, and I think Shamcher was suggesting that these prayers were also a process that many mureeds contributed to.

Anyhow, I’m just sharing what I remember him saying, but I don’t think he meant they weren’t derived from Inayat Khan or inspired by him. Just that several people really put a lot of energy, and beyond energy, intuition, in creating these prayers so that they would resonate on so many levels. I think Shamcher respected that. But then at the same time, we know that he personalized, like let’s say, the healing morning prayer, in his own way: to “beloved, beloved, through the rays of the sun,” making it work for him.

Carol: I think that’s true. He said it many times: question what you’re reading. “History is the story of things that didn’t happen, told by people who weren’t there.” And when somebody meets somebody and says, “I’m going to look him up right away,” he was very against that.

Always: find your own way. He himself found his own way, and he wasn’t part of that organization: he was part of it, but he didn’t support the way things were going, and he did chime in. I won’t go into all the Sufi history right now, but he did that and yet always participated in hopes of connecting with souls of light and making more happen.

It was, remember, back in the day, Pir Vilayat, had said to him he was the Esoteric Head of the Sufi Order, and at a time in a talk which Shamcher was present at. Shamcher had closed his eyes and was sort of drifted into a dreaming state, and he said he’d had exactly the same thought while Pir Vilayat was giving his talk out there. Which was, of course, one of Vilayat’s great abilities: to connect with each person who was present in the group individually, just as the Message connects individually with each of us. Certainly, any rote prayer said over and over again doesn’t do the trick, it’s ridiculous.

Speaker: I find it interesting that the words of the prayers have been changed; from “Lord” to “Sovereign” because people wanted something not gender-connected but they still wanted something that indicated a hierarchy. I’d heard that Shamcher had once said “hierarchy rots”, and with those changes having been made, I feel like: okay, the door is open now. So in my own practice I’ve simply substituted the word “Love,” with a capital L, for “Lord.” Same two letters, same number of syllables, same rhythm.

“Send Thy peace, O Love” and translating it to Spanish, it works perfectly too: instead of “mándanos tu paz, Señor,” we can say “mándanos tu paz, Amor” which is Love, it is the same number of syllables, so it rhymes. It’s interesting that the teachings were given a hundred years ago and they were taken down by people a hundred years ago, which isn’t to say people are necessarily stuck in the prejudices of a time period, because they’re not. You can always find people who weren’t. Nevertheless, I like being able to feel … it just feels closer to say “Love.”

Carol: That’s very beautiful

Speaker: Beloved Love.

Carol: In fact, why say the prayer at all, just “Love”?

Speaker: Well, no, I know that. I heard the part about the rays of the sun and feeling that, and I thought, oh, I’ve got to start doing that. They’re all valuable, as we understand them. And I’m also very grateful to have learned that Shamcher said he didn’t get it until he was in his seventies, because I’m 78, and I feel like I’m just starting to, after, how many years? 46 years since I took bayat. This is beautiful, thank you.

Carol: I think it’s good that as our different topics come up and we start to reflect on them, they’re going to go in and do their work. When you were saying it in Spanish, I felt something beautiful, because it made me realize Shamcher viewed almost every word through its various translations. He spoke many languages, and in fact had a translation company in Germany in the 1930s. He was a translator, and I think that means when you read his writing, sometimes you think, “What the hell?” and that’s the same feeling some people had when Inayat Khan would give a word or two in English and someone would say, “No, what he really means is this”, erasing whatever might have been meant and bringing in something else that is their own personal hobby-horse instead.

I flashed on a kind of Joycean way of seeing all the world’s languages together, layering one on another in a single stream that helps us get over this word problem about saying it correctly, having the right words, needing something solid so we know what we are standing on.

Certainly, reading any ancient text, you can find layers of translation, layers of depth, and yet somehow something opens anyway; it’s contained there anyway. Not so veiled, but the contact has to happen through intuition, not through layers of translation, unless your intuition calls you to go deep in there and find something out.

Any of us here who are writers or editors, and there are several in this group now, understand that it’s not even about nuance or connotation, but about the root truth coming through, and then, add on to that, rhythm.

It was very beautiful, what you shared, Moinuddin, that ended with music. Because we can listen more, hear what’s actually being said in the mathematics of music, the perfection. And isn’t it a pity Inayat Khan couldn’t continue with his music? Nobody could hear.

What next, what else? Rani, did you want to say something?

Rani: This may just be my personal neurotic pattern, and I realize that I’ve turned out to be more conservative than I thought I was. But I have concerns that when people are changing the words, and what I hear is “I don’t like this word” and not an investigation of what that word means to me that I don’t like, just changing it, that the essence will be lost. That’s my worry, that’s my concern: that the essence, which I love and connect with completely, received through intuition, beyond words, if we focus so much on changing everything on the surface level, the depth is lost. That’s my worry.

Carol: You’re right to worry. It’s true. The depth gets lost, and then it gets refound again, and something else happens. We have to let the process happen.

Speaker: Fair enough. I wasn’t going to change the word “Lord” until other people didn’t like it and changed it to “Sovereign”. Then I didn’t like that either. So, what do I like? What does speak to me, what does open my heart, what works there? Not just because it sounds similar or has the same rhythm, although that’s important. I think the rhythm in which Inayat Khan spoke was very important, because he was both tuning people, bringing them into a certain rhythm. It’s interesting about the conservatism, because I’m that way with practices too. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If people have done the purification breaths every morning the same way for thousands and thousands of years, I have no problem with that.

Carol: I have to interrupt. I’m just remembering something Shamcher said in a letter to somebody. He was writing a letter to someone who was very angry with him. He wrote: “Don’t pour acid on me about this and that until you take those early, basic practices you’re not doing, do those, and then come back. But until then, don’t pour acid on me.” Imagine!

Speaker: Interesting, fiery. But I’ll just say this: doing the same practices, those basic practices, every single day, they are never the same twice. So why say, “I need to distract myself from thoughts of my morning coffee by changing up the practice”? No. Have the damn coffee, do the practice the way it’s done, and see how that works, because I find it’s never the same two days running, even the most basic practices.

Carol: You’re right, we think we’re so advanced. “Oh, I did that before.”

Speaker: No, I didn’t.

Carol: Does anyone else have something? Kenan, you haven’t spoken yet. Nirtan first, then Kenan.

Kenan: I only knew Shamcher for a year, it was the last year of his life, and I spent as much time with him as I could. It was an amazing time. I had funny attitude. I’d go to his apartment and bang on the door really hard, and he’d answer, “What’s wrong?” And I’d say, “You’ve got to help me, my initiations ran out!” And he’d start laughing and say, “Oh, you know I don’t do that.” “Well, why not?” “Well, just between you and me, they all turned out bad.” Then he’d say, “What do you really want?” And I said, “I want to carry you in my heart forever.” He said, “That I could give you,” and he opened up many of the other worlds to me in that brief time. It was an amazing experience to me. I was young, in my thirties or so; he was eighty-two, or whatever it was. Does anybody remember how old he was when he met Murshid?

Carol; He was in his twenties. I always think of him as being in his twenties in the twenties, his thirties in the thirties, his forties in the forties, and so on. That’s a ballpark for me, I’d have to look it up.

Kenan: Murshid was in his thirties at that point, and Shamcher was in his twenties, so there was a close connection between them. I think the connection was very mystical, from that engineering point of view. Shamcher was invited to translate at the Norwegian Theosophical Society (Oslo, then Christiania) for this Indian mystic who’d come to talk to them. He agrees, and, this is a famous story, but I heard it firsthand, so it was novel to me at the time.

He finds himself in a reception line to talk with Murshid over the details of translation, and somebody he dislikes attaches himself to him, and they end up the last two in to see Murshid before the lecture. Shamcher thinks, “This man talks incessantly, I’ll never get a word in edgewise.” They walk in, and Murshid greets them and says, “Ah, shall we have silence?” So they sit together. Five minutes. The bell rings, they go into the hall, and he’s got a chair next to Murshid on a podium, in front of all of his elders, the old Theosophists, right? He’s in a sense, concerned about how the translation is going to work. And Murshid says to him, “Don’t worry, it’ll be all right.” You know there are details in translation, right? How are you going to handle this? And so Inayat Khan gets up and talks for half an hour without giving him any chance to translate at all, then gives the floor to Shamcher, who stands up and finds the whole talk come pouring through him.

He says to Inayat Khan afterwards, “That was amazing, but I can’t be your student because I’m a student of Krishnamurti’s.” Another mystic of the day. And Murshid says, “Well, you should always keep your commitments.” But after Shamcher leaves, he thinks about it, he goes back to Inayat Khan and says, “Krishnamurti has got thousands of disciples, and you don’t have any. You need more help than he does, so I’ll be your student.”

That’s how he became a Sufi. So in many ways his relationship was a bit different. He came to help, and he obviously had this heart connection from the very start. He had many adventures in his life.

Speaker: What language was Murshid speaking — Hindi, Urdu, what? What language was he speaking that Shamcher translated?

Kenan: English.

Speaker: Who was speaking English?

Kenan: Inayat Khan was speaking English, and Shamcher was translating into Norwegian?

Speaker: Did Shamcher already speak English at that point?

Kenan: Oh yeah, yeah. That’s why the older Theosophists had asked him to do the translation, because he was at least bilingual, at that point. Polylingual beyond that.

Carol: He’d said he had travelled all through the East looking for a teacher and ended up coming back to what is now Oslo, and then got the call, right into his own backyard. Nirtan, did you still want to say something?

Nirtan: Just a couple of things. That’s a great story and I love the way you told that. It’s one of our favourites, and I remember Shamcher telling me that as well. I’ll just mention, I don’t think he was a Theosophist at the time, and Krishnamurti was not at that point the leader of the Theosophists. Krishnamurti being much younger. But he did say he was already a Theosophist, and them he thought: the Theosophists have thousands, they don’t need me.

Kenan: They’d found this kid Krishnamurti in India and, actually stolen or bought him from…

Nirtan: I just don’t think he was the leader yet.

Kenan: He was still a child. He and Shamcher were actually friends throughout their lives. There’s a charming bit: when Shamcher managed to enlist in British intelligence in World War II, Krishnamurti called him the night before and said, “Why are you doing this? We’re pacifists. You know better than this.” And Shamcher said to him, “I’m saving the world for people like you.”

Nirtan: That’s a good one.

Carol: He was in tune with all kinds of people. This brings us to the idea of silent reach, into the concept of non-physical calling and connecting, how Shamcher would do things guided by intuition and inner voice, and managing himself to not be too much of a nut.

Nirtan: I was just going to mention when we were talking about languages and translation. Shamcher very rarely told anybody to do anything very directly, I don’t think, but he did once tell me that if I wanted to study sacred texts, mystical texts, it was really impossible to read them unless one studied Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit, and that I should learn Hebrew, Arabic and Sanskrit in order to go further. I can’t say I got very far with that, though I’ve studied a little Hebrew now, but you never know! Still working on it.

[Audio/connection difficulties with Mansur — unable to unmute]

Moinuddin: In that tape we played, I hadn’t listened to it in a long long time, I have a very distinct impression that at the end, when he was encouraging Mary, he said, “Next time you send me a tape, put some music in it,” and then something like, “I’ll sing you a song next time I see you.” I think he was giving a teaching to Mary at the end of the tape, he was definitely communicating a teaching to her. Something he wanted her to pay attention to, and I think that I’m digesting what that might be — the importance of music.

Carol: He always said he didn’t exist, and he meant it. He also said “I’m a mind on sticks.” He described himself as a mind on sticks. This awareness of self was way out there, and he saw others that way, too He saw great hearts. That’s why at the beginning of that tape, when he said something like, “I have to distract myself from your consciousness,” from being so much in your presence to actually tell you the thing, that was true. He was bowled over by everybody who had anything open, any real contact, and managed very well to remain in balance while all of this was going on. This is somebody who was not sequestered in a monastery or living in a cave, much as he would have wanted that at certain times, but exposed.

Forest just said goodbye in the chat, he had to leave. We can only touch the surface of what Shamcher brought, but it’s great to talk and think about him a little. .. Does anyone else have something to say or share right now?

Fazalunissa: I do actually. Yeah, I never met Shamcher, but I know several people that did, and the stories are really important, like the personal recollections. That’s how I’ve gotten to know him. I’ve read the books. I’ve heard, you know, the theories and stuff like that. But what has really resonated with me is people’s personal experiences with him. That’s how we keep people alive. And one of the ways we understand them, I think, is - touching back into the discussion about changing words - is when we can tune into the person as they were, as they spoke. That it’s pure, it’s clearer than when we get layers of change in between.

So, as much as I love the idea of using “love” instead of another word, I always love trying to open my own mind to take in what was being said by that person. Like, what was the essence of what they were trying to do at the time when they were doing that, which is then transmitted through the years to us? And that’s maybe how we keep things going is by, you know, using intuition, but to tap into the person. I’m starting to get muddled, so I’m going to turn it over to someone else.

But yes, I do really appreciate people’s remembrances of Shamcher, and thank you for today and for all the work you’ve done, bringing his words to other generations and his wisdom, continuing his wisdom in the world. …

Speaker: That kind of brings up the essence of translation, which is we don’t translate the words, we translate the meaning. And when I translate, I try to translate not only the meaning but also convey the feeling. So it’s different. It’s not the words. It’s the meaning. So I’m actually engaged in translating teachings into Spanish with a friend. Sometimes I’ve done the rough drafts. Sometimes he’s done the rough drafts. And we’re starting. I said, just try to… I use in my own heart the story of Shamcher interpreting for Murshid when it was an interpreter’s nightmare, and there was no pause, and he wasn’t interpreting simultaneously. How would this be if Murshid spoke Spanish?

Carol: Well, this is the fana immersing into the consciousness, of course, and any opening into that is the way we find our way. I want to know, Moinuddin, how long are we going on?

Moinuddin: We usually end up in just about an hour? So we’re a little over time, but it’s okay. You know, yeah, having conversation. …

Kenan: Shamcher called up one day and asked me to take him to a Universal Worship, and so my wife and I did. Actually, we weren’t married then, and it was at a woman named Hayat Stadlinger’s house in Oakland, California, and the guest of honor was Hidayat Khan. So there we were in a small room with three people who had actually known Inayat Khan, and I thought, this is, 45 years ago or something now. It is never going to happen to me again, and it was so beautiful and so wonderful. And Hidayat, you know, played his Message Symphony on a recording or something.

Carol: It’s beautiful memory, and I do have to get a little Shamcherian now, and just say that this gathering is exactly the same. This gathering is exactly the same thing.

Speaker: It is. It is.

Carol: You know, someone was traveling through, going to see the Dalai Lama, and Shamcher said, “Why don’t they just stay here and talk to Sabira? She’s good enough.” And Sabira Scott was his friend and secretary at the time.

Kenan: Oh, there’s a certain drama to the Dalai Lama.

Carol: Drama to the Lama. Sabira was just fine. They could have circled around her three times and received the same thing. So we do our best to try and remember what’s precious, but what you mentioned about non-hierarchy is the main message that Shamcher had through all of his teachings: that it’s not shown on Earth, rarely shown on Earth. And that’s why he didn’t ever really do the thing as much as he could have, and he let others do those things, not him, and he was free of that. He said he heard from Pir Vilayat how terrible it was. He couldn’t even pee sometimes because he was always seeing people over and over and over again, and nothing was happening. It’s like being bound to an organization, meaning that you can’t, you know, be as free. And Shamcher was always as free as possible.

Kenan: Shamcher told me to go visit this other person. He knew a friend whose name was Atiya. I met Atiya. One of the wild, wild children of our tradition. Yeah. So then I sat with her for 10 years after he died, good. Yeah.

Carol: How beautiful you remember her name and mention her here.

Kenan: Yeah. I still talk every week with the woman who’s in the sense her successor, who is the President of the Board of the Universel, which I spent my time helping create here in Seattle or Bothell, Washington.

Carol: Now, Mansur, did you meet Atiya when you went .. to visit? You went with Murshid Sam on your trip, and you were with Saul. Is that right? And did you meet her in Bothell? Did you go there?

Kenan: I heard Atiya said that she was playing cards with Sam and Shamcher and Paul Reps, and she said, “It’s really hell playing with four mind readers.”

And she also said about Sam that he wouldn’t leave. And so she called up Shamcher, who was working in Bremerton, the Navy place there, and he said, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. And he left work, you know, got in his car, took a ferry, drove to Bothell, showed up a couple of hours later, and walked into the kitchen and said, “Sam, you’re being obnoxious. You’ve got to leave.” And Atiya said, “I didn’t mean for you to insult him.” And Shamcher said, “Well, he wouldn’t have understood it any other way.”

Carol: Well, when we hear these stories, and like you’ve said, Carole (Fazalunissa), about the stories bringing people to life, the whole totality of the human being is present. It’s not merely the esoteric zond out there in far space, it is actually in the human being, and that sometimes those of us who are spiritually inclined sometimes have a bit of a hard time doing this.

Kenan: I was thinking of Atiya the other day, and because of Coleman Barks. We were listening to a Coleman Barks tape, you know, and I remember him coming to Seattle with Shahabuddin, and you know he was reciting his poesy, and Shahabuddin was doing zikr, and I took Atiya, you know, drove to Bothell, picked her up, drove into the city, and we were listening to this, and I said, “Atiya, what’d you think?” And she said, “You know, they produced a lot of energy,” but then she said, “but they didn’t seem to know what to do with it, so I took it. I have lots of projects.”

Carol: Right. Well, she was definitely a force and a very good friend with Shamcher for many many years.

Moinuddin: Sounds like a real dervish.

Carol: Well, you know, I’m getting the feeling that we’re good, and that this is plenty to deal with and to think about. I so appreciate being able to just think about Shamcher with you all, and hopefully we’ll find another time to do this again. And if you subscribe to the Shamcher Bulletin, every once in a while I put things out about it, you know, left over from the archives, and I make things visible. I look through it a lot. It’s a teaching tool for myself as well as a way of sharing. I’d suggest you just go in there sometime and take a look. Even if you’re not subscribed, don’t worry; it doesn’t cost anything. I’m just going to put the link in the chat. It’s a Substack, and you can go there. I think you’ll be able to see it and take a look and see some of his writings. And maybe there’s one thing that’ll just pop out that’ll say, “Oh, that must be something for me to contemplate a little bit.”

Nirtan: Just before we leave. Thank you, first of all, Carol, for a lovely gathering and words. Let’s not forget Shamcher’s extraordinary work in the world and developing OTEC, and just you know, I mean, what a gift that was to humanity that is still not realized. But think of the different world we would be living in right now if his work had been adopted, and I’m sure it will at some point. But I mean, we could have had, 40-50, years of unlimited, very reasonable, benign energy production, and such a huge contribution, and how needed, and still needed. I just think we need to remember that, and remember the kind of service he gave to humanity in that respect. And still, you know, do what we can somehow to try to, at least on some level, help create that. It’s kind of like building the Universel, I think, in the thought form at least. So I just wanted to remind us about that.

Carol: That’s so beautiful because he predicted everything that’s happening now. Back then, and what he said, “I am crying myself hoarse trying to reach others and make this happen.” I think his vision was really vast, and it doesn’t mean that each of us is to then go and champion OTEC. Each of us is to go and champion what we’re to do, as you said in your song for him long ago. “Don’t ask me what I’m supposed to do. Ask yourself.” That would be Shamcher speaking through you.

Nirtan: Yeah, “you alone can know. So why be asking me?” Yeah, right now that’s what came through.

Carol: Totally true, and that’s what we need. I think Mansur is just signing off with a lovely signal, or else he’s signing on with “I’m here.” But it’s very beautiful to see Mansur, one way or the other.

And you know, I think it would be beautiful if we could try and say that morning prayer together. It just is something that’s a nice way to end. And Moinuddin, would you lead us in that prayer?

Moinuddin: Most gracious Lord, you mean Saum?

Carol: No, I mean beloved, beloved, through the rays of the sun.

Moinuddin (and all): Beloved Lord, Almighty God, through the rays of the sun, the waves of the air, through the all-pervading life in space, purify and revivify me, and I pray, heal my body, heart, and soul. Amen.

Carol: Oh, beautiful! Thank you so much, darlings. It’s wonderful sharing space with you.

Moinuddin: That’s wonderful. We’ll do it again, and we’ll do it next month. Rani will be sharing with us an attunement next month, and anybody who can come, please do. Your gift of your presence is a great joy, and it’s a real blessing to be sitting together, even though it’s remote, it’s not really remote. I feel everybody’s heart. Your presence. Somebody once said, “Your presence is speaking so loudly, I can’t hear what you say.”

Thank yous and goodbyes to and from all

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This issue is dedicated to the recorded talk on Shamcher with dear friends over at Dervish Coffee. How wonderful to connect with so many who had known Shamcher, or who are interested in discovering his viewpoint. The discussion went in many directions, and it was a surprise treat that Moinuddin Clarke had brought an audio recording of Shamcher speaking! The whole event was amplified by the loving hearts remembering Shamcher’s presence and influence, and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to speak about him and his work.

The full video recording is inserted below, and a transcript of the first third of the session is also included here.

Play the full video recording here

Transcript - Part 1

Carol: … It’s a clue to follow, like the improvisation of life. When Rani asked me to do this, what came in was that Shamcher was about the vehicle of intuition and silent reach, and I made that as the title, because everybody here has had contact and is involved deeply in the message, one way or the other. All that Shamcher did with anybody was try and point out: go into the vehicle of intuition, which is not a practice.

I remember that in his correspondence with Moinuddin Jablonski, he was very clear. He said, don’t necessarily believe everything that’s in the papers. If you happen to have the right whatever it is (I can’t remember now), you will be able to enter the vehicle of intuition, and when that happens for you, this and that. So he was talking to somebody who had received all kinds of communications, and blessings, all kinds of responsibilities, and within that Shamcher was saying: enter the vehicle of intuition. I try to remember that as I go through my daily life, though I don’t always, and that’s why Zikar is called remembrance. You’ve got to go there.

Shamcher also did the other thing, which he mentioned many times. Silent reach: entering beyond anything, beyond the physical, going as far as possible within silent reach. He named it that. He also had a word infeeling, meaning sensing within yourself.

I’ll just read a little something that came, popping out of a very old piece he wrote a long time ago. I have to thank Vakil Forest Shomer for gathering so many of Shamcher’s archives long ago and pulling it together so we would have this material available. It’s online and accessible, but the situation is it’s so much that you actually do need to follow your intuition to find what you need in there. It’s not really fully archived.

He talks about meditation here: “Meditation may develop to be not only cognitive but creative. What is at first imagination may be turned into reality, or into non-physical, or even physical systems.” I’ll read that again:”What is at first imagination may be turned into reality, or into non-physical, or even physical systems. Was this the way the whole world was once created, and is being maintained? Find out. Practice meditation until you know.”

I think about this in relation to the fires everywhere, (I was just reading about the fires in Spain) aware that there is a shamanistic quality to the meditation that Shamcher was discussing. There’s an activity in it, so this is the activity of silent reach. But first it has to be taken into us, and it’s very involved with the morning prayer. The simplest morning prayer, the early prayer that we always have learned. It’s elementary in a way, but it is the elements, and it’s the beginning of a profound depth and relationship, where if you stand and face the sun, or the direction of the sun, which has been done by peoples all over the world early early early peoples, to renew the diurnal system. That’s our responsibility. If we think we’re standing there to say our prayers so that we get attuned, that’s great, we need that, we need the balance, we need the internal justice, we need to know what the hell, where are we. We have to have that. But the other part, which is the responsibility part, comes when that intuition vehicle opens, and there’s just the potential that is it possible to affect something. Shamcher was doing that. I won’t go on and on, because everybody here has so many connections with Shamcher and understandings of their own.

I remember there was a time when he was still alive and people in San Francisco were really worried, because psychics were saying that there were going to be terrible earthquakes and everything would be destroyed, so many Sufis were moving to Santa Fe thinking that they’d be safer there. He said nothing will happen because I’m here. He wasn’t being ridiculous, he wasn’t making a joke, there was no hubris involve. He just knew. It wouldn’t happen when he was there. Just imagine if everyone who is a Sufi or non-sufi or whatever we are, started plugging in like that, there could be a difference.

Because he said, when he was in Suresnes, they would do the Healing sessions every Thursday, and someone said at the hospital near Suresnes, (this was at the Summerschool time) showed marked progression, everybody felt better when they were doing that healing. We know it affects things, and we still think somebody is to tell us how to do it. And like he said in that piece I just read: find out, practice meditation until you know. He wrote this, I think, in the 1960s, and he wasn’t fully cooked. He said he didn’t fully understand until he was in his 70s. So look around at this lovely zoom group here. And it’s time to ask for the next step. Climb up the stairs to the next potential. It’s always going on. It’s never going to stop. Might as well go for the full ride.

So many people here knew Shamcher, so it would be great to have a little back and forth around that. I don’t want to go on and on with some of these things. I did want to touch on his shamanistic relationship, because often we’re tuned, I am, anyway, thinking, oh, these are holy things that happen in this (particular) discipline. But if the message tells us anything, it’s that it’s all one discipline, and we discover whatever is open. Shamcher always said a Sufi is a seeker after truth, and wherever that brings you, that’s where you have to go. A Sufi is never bound to any man, woman, or being, any rule, dogma, or credo. Or any organization. You might have signed up, you might have a card, you might be committed, you might be donating, you might have received something, you’re not bound by anything. That’s what it is. He also liked to quote (and I think it’s terrific) that the message seeks out each separate individual and coaxes you to develop according to your own light, not to the patterns you’re receiving from whatever the teaching might be. It’s the unlearning so that starts to unfold. A Sufi, as he says, doesn’t teach dogma, theories, or philosophies, either in religion, science, or politics. There is a total freedom of consciousness.

So, should we listen to that recording that popped up in your world, Moinuddin? Moinuddin just had something come up that dovetails nicely. We can listen to Shamcher talk about the Essenes.

Moinuddin Clarke: Yeah, that sounds great. This is one of my teachers, call her Mother Mary. She knew Shamcher quite well and he would visit her from time to time. In this particular four-and-a-half-minute sound bite we get to hear Shamcher’s voice talking to Mary, whom he called Josephine (her given name, her spiritual name was Mary). He’s talking to her and answering a question she asked. Let’s play it. Raise your hand if you don’t hear it, but here we go.

Shamcher - from recording: “Dear Josephine, you graciously asked me to tell you about the Essenes and what they did, and what others did in ancient Palestine. I find it difficult to do this without looking at your gracious being, but now I am among friends, and I have the same feeling as when I look at you, so maybe we can go ahead. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan told us about the Essenes. What were they? They were Sufis. The Essenes stand for S, and at various periods in history the Sufis were persecuted. They stood for the truth, and truth is not always welcome, so they called themselves S, or Essenes. Practically all the great prophets of the Hebrews were Essenes: John the Baptist, Jesus, the disciples. The Essenes were great healers. They knew all the secrets of the herbs. They knew the secret of training your moral and physical stamina to become better healers.

Now the story I’m going to tell is, as I said, partly from Inayat Khan, partly from what people told me in the foothills and higher regions of the Himalayas, in the plains of India, in Turkey, in Syria, in Egypt, in Algeria and Tunisia, in China and Japan. When Jesus had his ordeal on the cross, people eventually left, and the Essenes took him down and nursed him and healed him. After he had healed, some of them travelled with him to the Himalayas, and he lived in the Himalayas in yogi ashrams. So he knew the Far Eastern tradition, the yoga tradition, just as well as the Near Eastern tradition, the Sufi tradition; the two, perhaps only, religious traditions we have on Earth, which may have been one, but that most of us don’t know. After having lived, and trained, and taught in the Himalayas, he went north to China and to Japan. And what do we have there? An American missionary chaplain discovered a tribe of Japanese in one of the islands who had a completely Christian education and belief, and faith, long before any missionaries from the West came there. Jesus lived until he was 105 years old, happily among the Japanese, and taught them.

Josephine, this is all I have to say now. I’m so sorry about the rest of the beautiful tape you sent me. Put some music in it, I’ll play some music for you when I see you next, I must remember to take a tape with me. That will make up for the lack in my presentation, dear Josephine.”

Carol: Well, isn’t it lovely to hear Shamcher’s voice? And isn’t it lovely to hear him speaking directly to somebody, in their own language? It’s very poetic and very timeless. He always integrated everything. We’ve just had a vision of the whole world, or a good part of the East, and we’ve had a vision of understandings that have come through various people. It reminds me of Abe Burnstick, a Cree elder who was in Edmonton, in northern Alberta, in Canada, who told a story of a man who came to their people, who travelled across the country of Canada, giving them wisdom. And the story was the people could fly before this man came, and he came and everybody settled down to their places and lived based on his teachings. He said it was like Jesus. Abe told this story and it seemed a little far-fetched. Was it? What’s the mythopoesis of everything? What’s the wisdom of everything? We do not look it up in words. I think Vakil, you understand that from the touching of nature. When Shamcher was on his way out, lying in state as he said, on his couch, and Nirtan, you’ll remember this — he said, “Everybody’s trying to bamboozle you about what is the truth. Nature is the only holy book.”

Does anybody else have something sparked, just for a couple of minutes, or should I go back into my notes? What’s next? Don’t be shy. All right, I have some notes. They were just this brief outpouring, I’ll just read them, riff on them.

Connecting with Shamcher helps you understand directly that this isn’t a group process that we’re involved in. The group comes after. It’s an individual awakening, and then from there you take it into the group, or out of the group, as needed. But the group will attune you to a sense, a process, where then may or may not take you to the next aspect. We imagine that there’s the group vehicle: like let’s say we’re doing the zikr and we’re all up, we’re going, that’s true. What about our lives? It’s fine when you’re in the hothouse and the flowers are blooming and everything. But when you’re outside of that greenhouse dome, beautiful dome that it is? What about the personal temple, and how that functions? That’s where we do the work also. So there’s that note.

In the world of mythopoetics - I’m doing a lot of study of Platonism right now - it came to me that Shamcher is my Socrates. Shamcher was just like Socrates: he did everything for free, he even paid sometimes rather than accept. He kept the balance. He believed in the laws of the world even though he didn’t always follow the conventions of the world. He did respect what was going on and used it for his play. In his connection with people he would see somebody, connect with them, and pour out as much as they could stand, just like Socrates, just like the Platonic dialogues.

When he did the morning prayer, first he did a kasab: just a basic breath, in the left, out the mouth, in the mouth, out the left, in the right, back and forth, and then he did the element breaths. They weren’t fancy, they weren’t with “high attunement.” They were just the element breaths. He did when he was walking from his apartment in Berkeley over to where he was to pick up his car or get the bus to the Richmond Field Station, where he was still working on OTEC late, late in life. He would just do it that way. It was always happening simultaneously. Then, when he said the prayer, first he would think of a personal beloved. So he wouldn’t start with “beloved Lord Almighty God,” he’d start with the personal beloved, the beloved of nature all around, and then he went to to Almighty God. So he moved through a three-step process: opening the heart, opening the being, and then opening a greater consciousness. That’s some of my notes.

He said that practices were medicine. If there’s something wrong, you give a practice, you receive a practice and you do it. Otherwise you just keep yourself in tune, and then the relationship starts. It’s fun to do these things and to get high, and we need that - we need to sustain our soul-being in this vehicle. We can illuminate the temple, but it doesn’t replace our life on Earth. Just like with OTEC; he was so keen on it, he carried the idea with him from France and tried to establish it in North America. Mansur was very involved, and you were very involved with Shamcher in helping make OTEC a reality. It’s a very yogic thing, a very Taoist thing as well. The heat of the air and the cold of the undersea turn to make a turbine, extremely balanced, this is our yoga as well - left and right, up and down. Nirtan was quite involved in the ADEE organization — Alternative Directions in Energy and Economics — that coalesced around Shamcher for a little while.

A friend gave me some notes and minutes from that organization to put into the archives just last week. So, where am I going with this? Everything he did was integrated into the system and the yogic system within himself was being expressed outwardly. He also did a lot of yoga based on the Self-Realization Fellowship, the SRF, Yogananda’s teaching. He was keen on Yogananda, understood the Kriya Yoga. It was a practice that he also followed for a period of time.

So — questions, answers? I don’t want to go through all my notes right now. Anything? …

Rani: Oh, thank you. He didn’t want to be bound by doctrine and dogma — so what was his attitude, as you might know or intuit, toward the prayers, and towards the teaching that we’ve often heard, don’t change the words of the prayers?

Carol: I’m hearing some music. Speaker 6: Yeah. Carol: Well, he said he’d complete his talk with music, so I guess that’s the answer.

Rani: Okay, but what do you think?

Carol: What do I think? I’ll tell you, though I know everybody here has other thoughts. …

I think he went right into the prayers himself. In one of the first letters I had from him, he said that Paul Reps had shocked the Ruhaniyat Sufis of the time by telling them they didn’t need the prayers. And Shamcher said they had been trained with the prayers, they believed in the prayers, and Reps shouldn’t have done that. There’s no reason to break the faith of anybody. Reps was right for himself. He went off to Zen, and that’s fine, that’s cool. But as far as changing the words of the prayers: let’s say there’s delight in going deeply into what the prayers actually are, why change them?

He spoke many languages. I took him to the airport at one time, when he visited, in Edmonton (where everything in Canada is in English and French) he said, “Oh, the prayers in French are so beautiful,” and then he said one of the prayers in French, and it was like music. It’s so beautiful. We don’t know the rhythms that have been embedded in those prayers, the rhythms of the words themselves. We can say any prayer we want, I don’t think that’s a problem. If we’re teaching a prayer, we say, this is based on this, and now we do it this way, no problem. But if the steamroller comes through and removes whatever was archival, whatever had been known? Back to my Platonist studies, it says: do not change the names of the gods. In other words, if you’re translating and there’s a word you can’t understand, don’t give your own translation to it, because you don’t know what’s carried in that package. Everything is to be carried, opened, and given in a code that may or may not be transmitted.

In my notes, there’s something that he had written about the morning prayer, which I’ll read to you. You know some people don’t like the word “Lord,” “beloved Lord,” “Master,” they think it’s archaic. Yes, it is archaic, and yet it’s in there. He wrote: “A typical example is the morning prayer some people use (he always couched it this way) Addressing the creative force field that creates and maintains the world (that’s huge, right?) You pray through the rays of the sun, through the waves of the air, through the all-pervading life in space, purify and revivify me. If, while saying this, you just picture a moderately warm ball the size of the sun as you see it from here, you don’t really meditate. But if your own creative force rushes into the center of the sun and helps create a huge flaming body, so hot it nearly burns you — though in the non-physical force field, heat doesn’t really burn you, but your vivid imagination, sustained by physical experience, may make you feel slightly burned — then you know you are meditating, and so effectively that it may stretch your consciousness beyond what we have usually called mind.” It’s a long sentence, hard to read, but the point that he’s making quite clear: what’s in you meets what’s in the prayer, and it’s not a physical experience. So at that point, translation? I don’t know. We do our own translation, and then understand who we’re talking to, in our own understanding. … (Transcript Part 2 coming next issue.)

The AI transcript removed and changed some emphasis, so some of the words and details it had taken out had to be added back in. (Transcribed through https://otter.ai — reformatted into paragraph form, speaker attributions retained.) Interestingly, the transcribing process echoed some of the topics on translation mentioned in the discussion.

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At the end of April, the Bulletin always celebrates Shamcher Week, with Shamcher’s birthday (April 26, 1896) and his passing (April 29, 1980). Let’s take a moment to reflect on his wide-ranging presence and influence.

In this issue: First is my illustrated overview remembrance, followed by a reflection for today. We end by sharing the commemorative issue of SCC Chronicles, Remembering Shamcher Beorse,

Mystic, Author, Engineer

My first connection with Shamcher was because he was a mystic, and I soon found he was a yogic Sufi who was able to open space for the soul to engage in the greater spheres of being. I was drawn to find him under the wing of the great Sufi Inayat Khan, whose words awakened in me the necessity of further expansion. Personal circumstances made this connection a powerful imperative, but when I met Shamcher I had no idea he had been a pupil of Inayat Khan, whose books I’d read so avidly.

In the connection to the divine mind, for decades (lifetimes?) Shamcher had been following the inner instructions from his Himalayan contacts as well as the being of Inayat Khan. In a way, he was always Inayat Khan’s translator, from that first time of meeting him to translate the lecture in Norway. Here the lasting contact was first made. And Shamcher said that from that time he was able to share mind with Inayat but no others until very late in his life.

Perhaps it expanded even more after he had his near death experience in a road accident, where he saw and talked with his parents and met with Inayat Khan, who explained to him so much, and told him about how he had to leave after he became tired of enabling the vibrations of others.

Well, Shamcher was never in that boat, he was always pushing people out, into their own world, where the awakening rooted in the soul of each was to find its way, not only in the spiritual world but to find the soul’s purpose here on earth.

Shamcher himself lived his purpose to its utmost within the constraints of the times in which he operated. His intuition was fully activated and by following those instructions he entered all the fields of endeavour that were significant and influential at the time. He was first an engineer, a designer of the bridge-building, earth moving, dam-making and all that early 20th century infrastructure for the benefit of humanity. It led him around the world, and then to OTEC. It brought him to see how these ideals, and lofty inventions from the souls of so many inspired scientists were blocked or held back by the influences of economics and geopolitics. Asked if he was angry at the opposition, he replied, “They give me the opportunity to work.”

While he was still young he entered the economic field too, as an ad hoc economist, writing an overview of different economic theories of the day, looking for new ways of approach in economy and employment. He achieved some notice in that field and connection to other prominent economists. As well as helping to found and encourage the pre-war GiroCredit system called Nordic Clearing, he was nominated to help Norway’s economy recover from the devastation of WWII.

The braided fields of energy, economics and employment activated in him a vision of a new world and evolution for humanity, and in that vision, all other aspects such as education, mysticism, love, social sciences and the arts were fostered in harmony with one another. This utopian vision was possible, he posited, once humanity would be in a position to evolve without the constraints from the forces that had been in the way for so long.

For this purpose he became an author, and wrote books for the “everyman” on these topics, bringing all into play at once, as a generalist, but always with the interconnection of these forces in mind. Sometimes geopolitics took the foreground, as with A State of Almost Happiness on China, or A Sufi Went to War, his book on his wartime experiences. Also the unpublished book on the Norwegian Underground, based on his experiences and those of others. And don’t forget, he was a driver for the plot to kidnap Hitler, which he proposed to Roosevelt who rejected it, saying, “I want the Germans to be beaten so they know it.”

“What? Why didn’t he write Sufi books?” you might ask. Well, he tucks in this teaching in all the books, but Fairy Tales are True is probably the most Sufi since it does go into the Khumba Mela and the meeting with a great sage. Here it is the great sage who in his simple presence unites the seemingly varied disciplines, embodied by characters who represent diverse areas of knowledge, led by a Shamcher-like nobody figure to meet the sage who unifies their quest. (Along with a side-trip to life in the California Dunes.)

It was in wartime that he first felt the message from Inayat to write a book not an economics, but something else. So he put together episodically his own impression of the popular This Mysterious Universe by James Jeans (who was one of the models later for a character in Fairy Tales are True) and wrote Man and this Mysterious Universe. By including humanity in the physics of all being, Shamcher inserted a variable that physicists can decode, using all their esoteric data based not only on averages but on the working of a single particle to transform the whole.

He brought so much to the 20th century situation that there are few words to express it, or too many? Being a generalist, he didn’t ever achieve any one goal, but spread his net wide - some who didn’t understand said too wide. Was he really a good Sufi? Not to many. He was too much his own man.

And yet, at a gathering, Pir Vilayat named him the Esoteric Head of the Sufi Order, something that Shamcher didn’t deny. For at just before Vilayat spoke, Shamcher had fallen into a contemplative reverie that told him the same thing, without words.

He operated in the subtle bodies at all times. So when he founded the Sufi group in Edmonton, his full net was expanded and a node of it landed on this little place nowhere in northern Canada. This place was where the Social Credit system had been operating (and he had studied social credit, as part of his girocredit plan and economic surveys.) He found us few who became his vehicles to express something that the Sufis needed to also have in their being. For he had not been an adherent of any one religion, and was keen not to put all that beautiful opening into any one box. He gave us all permission to be, to become, to explore, to expand, to seek and perhaps to find.

Shamcher was a strong advocate for Universal Worship, and performed it wherever he could, in all the countries he visited. I recall him in the airport seeing signs in French and English, and saying how beautiful Inayat Khan’s prayers are in French, where he began to very quietly recite the first prayer, Saum, like singing a song. Like the singer in A State of Almost Happiness.

Something small can hold the monumental in its core, just as a symbol is an ocean in a drop. Shamcher’s range and actions may have appeared small. At heart they were an active manifestation of our connected evolution - the human endeavour. He desperately wanted the human experiment to survive. “I am a mind on sticks,” he would say. “I am nobody,” he would say.

So why do we remember him, and how do we remember him?

I remember how I felt when I was with him, in the vastness of being. It wasn’t always vast, often mundane or particular, but the capacity for the vastness was immanent and made all around him also in that field. And when I asked him how I could feel the same way I do when he wasn’t there he said, “Well you could do the zikar,” and then demonstrated a couple of zikars, with different melodies for different purposes. Later he was to emphasize the English zikar practice- this is not my body, this is the temple of God, this is not my mind, it is the mind of God, this is not my heart it is the altar of God.

“I am shouting myself hoarse,” he would say of his efforts to make the powers that be understand their dangerous directions. He was and is a strong influence in the current world, and more than ever now Sufis, yogis and spiritually-minded people are seeing the reality in which our divine souls have become enmeshed. He advocated that we each take the action that the integrity of our soul perceives, working to the best of our ability, but not to the detriment of others.

Someone asked Shamcher, “What do you think of the New Age?” and he replied, “It may be new to you!”

He was active and engaged in the coexistent reality base of flexible power waves - sometimes wave and sometimes particle, but never for long, always in the flow. Only a cultivated intuition can engage to perhaps manage and direct this flow.

Shamcher was like an engineer of consciousness, like an economist of the give and take of providence, like an enlightened master of the powers and beauties of the unseen life. He saw it all, and to his best, he embodied what he could. Not directly in his physicality in this dimension, which was only a pinpoint for the “mind on sticks” but in all the nodes in his expanding luminous net of being. And each of these nodes he activated as needed, like a true Brahmin. He travelled electrically in this vast subtle body which the divine universe then enabled to act as it landed in various fields of endeavour, individuals he was in touch with, locations on earth, or simple ideas planted like seeds to be fostered over the vastness of time.

I’m reminded of a quote, and I wonder who said it. Perhaps Yogananda? “It isn’t a question of who you are, but of who you may become.”

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Today

Many people are asking what Shamcher would be thinking about our global situation these days, and from time to time he may give a response if we ask within. But it may not be what we think or hope he might say to affirm our particular bias. All I know is that it is up to us to find our own intuition and understanding of the rapidly shifting changes and event points that drive our current geopolitics.

Don’t rob God of his options, he would say.

He often said that God’s mind changes, and Shamcher exemplified that himself, also changing his mind as circumstances and new information came to him. A good example of that is his relationship to nuclear power, which at first he wholeheartedly endorsed, even basing his book The Future is Ours on this premise of free electric power for the world. Then, later on, as he adapted and changed, Shamcher supported anti-nuclear approaches as he advocated for OTEC and solar power alternatives.

Now, how would he react?

What does it matter what Shamcher would say? We should ask the ancient question, “What is up to us?” For Shamcher is no longer here bound on earth with all the ebb and flow, shift and re-shift of circumstances and conditions. It is here in our earthly life that we imagine God is defining all this. In the current of events, we humans have an influence - both physically and metaphysically. We do have a say in the play.

Shamcher quoted his teacher Inayat Khan often, and in conversation it seemed he was translating the Message into the moment for today. This was his ability and attainment. Shamcher could absorb the conditions, and relay the message for their evolution and development, as an agent for good. But only for that moment, and only for that particular circumstance. Not as a blanket statement of fact forevermore. That is why he agreed with Inayat that a book is a dead teacher, for when words are frozen in time on the page they cannot be corrected to adapt to the new circumstances. And life is all about new circumstances. The manifestation of creation.

Shamcher asked us all to get into our lives as they are and give them all we have. This is the devotion and the challenge. In this way he was as much engaged as Arjuna on the chariot with Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. He didn’t hold back but went forward into the battle of life. He dared, in wartime, to join the Norwegian Underground, and he dared to work with British Intelligence. He dared to face Nazi interrogation, and he dared to plan to kidnap Hitler. He was a hunter of truth, and a gatherer of beauty, and a meditator in action. So his life went forward from one unfoldment to the next.

And if we wonder what to do?

His story of first meeting Inayat Khan in the hotel in Oslo before translating his lecture is a good example. “Gentlemen, let us have silence.” Shamcher and an interloper, sitting on either side of Inayat Khan, in silence together, then dismissed. He still didn’t have his answer to how the translation would happen - sentence by sentence or…? but somehow, without forethought, after Inayat had spoken to the audience in English, Shamcher stood and gave Inayat’s lecture in full, in his native Norwegian.

And again, he thought he wouldn’t be joining with Inayat, since he was already part of another organization, yet he changed his mind and asked for initiation, which Inayat gave to him, in a train car.

What changed his mind was not more information, but less. Not more ideas but fewer. With that came a beam of communication, something we could call a message. An instruction. For action.

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More for you to read today

Tuck in to the Shamcher-featured issue of Sufi Circle Canada Chronicles: an article and new song by Nirtan Sokoloff, news clippings and a quote sourced by David Murray, gathered together by Carol Sill. Link through the image to read.

Images in this issue were made with NotebookLM

Thanks for subscribing! Feel free to reply to this post if you have any Shamcher stories, photos or correspondence to share.

The Shamcher Bulletin is edited by Carol Sill, whose newsletter, “Personal Papers”, is HERE.

If you like this post, please click the heart. And your comments are always welcome.

Last month I wrote to you about the legacy of Shamcher, and how this legacy (like a seed) resides in all the people who were/are connected to him. This contact with him made such a remarkable difference in so many of our lives and our life endeavours through the years. People tell of a greater scope for expression, new confidence or blessings in life, or even some dreams coming true. This wasn’t just meeting an interesting person or remarkable man. Such a meeting was closer to catalytic transformation.

Shamcher understood all that. He was a cultivator of intuition in all its many aspects for others, since he operated from the intuitive reality throughout his own life. He described it as “that other vehicle”, the vehicle of intuition. He encouraged all who would listen to develop intuition, and to put all ideas and perceptions into their rightful places. (Or, as a philosopher might say, moving from doxa and social opinion into apprehension of truth.)

Direct Communication

In this excerpt from his correspondence in the 1970s, Shamcher goes into some of the main ideas that he often repeated to those who were in his sphere of contact. It wasn’t teaching, per se, but advice from an elder. I’ve added expanded quote images to highlight key points. These are not just for illustration, but also to slow down the reading process and give us time to reflect on what is being said.

Shamcher wrote:

All titles or hierarchies expressed in this world, while pretending to be functions, are not true functions but dilettantic games. You have a very good mind. Why do you still worry about these things?

Now as to direct communication: That happens in a world for which the language we use, such as English, French, or Arab or Russian — has no words. Therefore any explanation would be entirely faulty. I knew, not always but often, people’s feelings or thoughts when I was a child. I could communicate directly with Inayat Khan at age 26-29 but not with others at that time. By simple meditations I gradually regained lost talents — though not until I was in the seventies. Patient meditation did it.

Often you write to me about your feelings and views that I already know. But it seems to me you are more angry with me than you express in your gracious letters. Your ideas on this would be appreciated.

Can I teach you to thus communicate? No, and I believe nobody can. But I can tell you how I achieved a half-way ability and you might try the same: Meditation at definite hours each day. For example from 4:20 a.m. on in the morning. That suits me. And the breathing I taught you before that, in fresh air. Now, what kind of meditation? For you I would think: No object: no person, no picture but simply void your mind of appetites — for food, sex, possessions, progress, money, wealth, fame.

In the emptiness a third part of yourself peeps forth: Intuition. After many or few years. After months or centuries. That is all I can say.

There are psychics. They are called, in my book, distorted. They tell you they can predict events with 80% accuracy. Phooey on them. God has not even decided on those issues and they try to rob God of his options. So many astrologers do the same. You may call the psychic talents “gifts”. Mostly they are gifts produced by a misdirected urge, another appetite. An appetite for being different, able to do what most others cannot do. Not bad in itself, perhaps, but bad when predicting happenings — instead of creating those happenings by our actions.

Not merely mystics but doctors, economists, senators play the stupid game of forecasts. Forecasts become excuses for inaction. They are based on past follies rather than the future we should create. In that sense psychics are undesirable. You may reach a stage where you see patterns, but you know or should know that these patterns may not necessarily occur. You try to change what ought to be changed, rather than advertising your wonderful sixth or fourteenth sense.

Shamcher was always giving out this sage advice, directing attention away from the things of the world, and into the greater view. As all the sages have said, it cannot be taught. But he did recommend contact with any people who had made the leap into this vehicle.

After he had gone to a retreat taught by an accomplished yogi, a friend reported to Shamcher that he felt nothing from the experience. Referring to connecting to the yogi, Shamcher commented:

On the other hand, after those three days with his environment, you might have established contact, which you seem not to have done. This is a matter of spontaneity. Maybe you reason too long and somewhat ineffectually instead of taking the leap.

He was referring to the communication via the other vehicle, and being in presence of one who has made the leap. It doesn’t necessarily mean he was to talk with the yogi or meet him in a private interview face to face, but rather to open to the kind of contact that would bring about the beam of the vibration he called “Silent Reach.”

Quote images and infographic in this issue were made with NotebookLM

Thanks for subscribing to these excerpts from the archives of Shamcher Bryn Beorse. Feel free to reply to this post if you have any Shamcher stories, photos or correspondence to share.

The Shamcher Bulletin is edited by Carol Sill, whose newsletter, “Personal Papers”, is HERE.

If you like this post, please click the heart. And your comments are always welcome.

People and Papers, Love and Letters

For a time I wasn’t sure how to proceed with this Shamcher Bulletin. It’s been going since 2020, and I confess I took a hiatus for many months as I found my way to these pages again. For the Bulletin, I relied on Shamcher’s words to draw you into his worldview, perhaps interest you in some of his books, consider Shamcher as a beacon in your path as a seeker.

He has appeared to some in dreams, or thought. And to me, he stopped my sorting through papers and posting to you without really being as present as I could have been. In a way, it was like Shams throwing Rumi’s papers into the well, but in this case, it was Shamcher himself throwing his own papers into the well. Sufis can do that.

Shamcher always warned against looking into papers for the answers to your questions, and reminded us to guard against believing everything that was written. In his own letters and writings he addressed people of varied views each in their own language. What he wrote to them was not necessarily to everyone. He quoted Inayat Khan, “The Sufi has two points of view: his own and that of the other.”

He chastised Moinuddin about believing without question the esoteric papers on breath, mostly to prod him to question the veracity of words as conveyors of the ineffable. And he often told the story of someone at Summer School in Suresnes, quoting Inayat Khan, saying, “It is in the papers,” and Inayat’s reply, “Believe it when you hear it from my own lips, dear Sheikha!” People always get it wrong even when they write it down. Now this quote I’m remembering, and the whole story also, is this something I should be looking up to get the exact words? Shamcher often paraphrased, embellished, made saga-mountains out of little molehills for our elucidation. But even molehills are homes to trolls, and since “Fairy Tales are True”, we must consider everything for ourselves, in order to come to our own conclusions.

So if it isn’t in the papers, what is his legacy, and how do I honour it?

Lifting off from the earth, leaving behind the jail of concepts and preconceived ideas, finding another education, discovering that voice inside, receiving instructions to be followed.

Following the ideas to their creative expression in whatever field they may be. Doing what happens beyond my perceived limitations, and learning from my own mistakes, and from the realities of the world as they impede upon this relationship between the ideal, the voice of guidance that impels me to action or understanding, and my own experience within this triangle of active awareness.

For the legacy of Shamcher is not simply inner, but also outer. He knew the need of humanity for evolution and offered himself for this. Throughout the 20th century he was a presence without being overly well-known as such, and in this way he involved himself in the fields of economics and energy, espionage, science, and (in an advisory capacity) politics. He applied the lessons of meditation and the inner life to the outer life. An esoteric technology that he felt was our human birthright and responsibility.

He had few pupils, for he declared he was not a teacher. Some knew him more than I did, and some are only meeting him now. He emphasized the give and take, the reversal of roles, the play of God together. He was always his own man. He didn’t believe anything unless he experienced it for himself, and never parroted ideas he had not known and felt within his own life.

His life trajectory took him all over the world, before travel was commonplace. From the Dayaks of New Guinea, to the border of Russia and China, from the Himalayas to the Alps, from Christiania (now Oslo) to New York, from the dunes of California to the outback of Australia, he criss-crossed the globe as a travelling economist, engineer, spy, Sufi and Yogi. From the Norwegian underground to restless Chinese guerrillas in Western China, testing torpedoes in the Pacific Northwest of the US, interviewing movie stars in California, meeting yogis and sufis and esoteric leaders of all stripes and conditions, looking always for the honest reality, whether found in high or low places. Search for truth.

A man of many languages, and of many hats. His radical economic overview tumbled into a world not ready to understand the coming changes that the new century would bring, and maybe now, with the glut of goods from China we may be able to see his prescience. After WWII he did work on a high level to restore the Norwegian economy, but soon left it to persuade the US and other countries to adopt the benign solar energy from the sea, OTEC, first tested in Cuba and brought into the world by Claude and the French.

Do you get the idea? This man, who had been an original pupil of the great mystic, Hazrat Inayat Khan, was a living participant in the main arenas of global awakening and development. Some called him a “gadfly” much as Socrates had been called by the same name.

And in my honouring of him, and his life work, I chose to work with his Sufi papers and correspondence, hoping to reach other Sufis who may be inspired to carry these ideas on.

I recognize now that by focusing on that side of things, I missed the mark. The intention of my inspiration had been to show his subtle mind and heart, to share his world-view and spark a new way of seeing all this stuff of the world that he had been working with for decades. He knew how important it was to get your hands dirty, and to go into the field of intention with the thought of God in your heart and the guidance that comes through intuition.

This is how he lived, using the mind afterwards to engage in the meaning of whatever the message may have been or become. He often said that each person had their own version of Inayat Khan who came to them in life or in meditation with guidance. I didn’t pick up that he meant also each person would have their own version of him, of Shamcher - whose name given by Inayat means “Tongue of Flame” or “Sword of the Message”.

My mistake, a common one in organized traditions, and in all fields actually, was to take the papers as the reality, the words as the voice, the account as the event. When in actuality, these descriptors only point the way. The papers I collected and preserved in the Shamcher Archives are like a mummification of his body, which he left far behind. He donated his body to science, you know. He has no location on earth or tomb to revere. He wasn’t to be held in a pyramid temple to live an afterlife of a pharoah of his domain forever. Not like that.

He was living, is living, and gives his living presence in a natural way. Just by thinking of him, that contact comes to life.

Of course he wrote books and wanted them to be known and read. He kept carbon copies of all his correspondence, for the future, for biographers and seekers. He sent me all the letters I had ever written to him along with carbon copies of his replies, urging me over and over again to publish them for the world, which I finally did despite my reluctance.

So knowing this, how do I navigate to the next points? Where can we find his beacon already shining ahead on the path?

He believed formal initiation was no longer the thing, and that every being he was in contact with was therefore initiated to the extent possible. Wherever he cast his eyes, or his focus of attention, received that possibility of uplift, awakening. That was his way of operating on earth, and also in his meditation awareness.

He had travelled the globe, and could touch parts of the globe with this awareness. Even little old Edmonton, Alberta, which he reached both physically and metaphysically, where he then incubated his experimental Sufi group. This was done by his contact with people. Not only me, but all the people of that early Sufi group, who are now following their own directions as he had so wished, many as Sufis along with their other worldly soul-gifts, seeding his approach in various ways. Also he reached and influenced the people who attended Sufi Camp Canada in the late ‘70s, who he connected with deeply, along with his friends and colleagues Shahabuddin Less and Mansur Johnson, who were teaching and facilitating there. He left his legacy of Lake O’Hara camp to all of us, with facilitation first to Shahabuddin Less, but soon after Hidayat Inayat Khan had the opportunity of the incubation, for a renewal of the Sufi Movement.

By the time Shamcher passed away in 1980, he had left most official Sufi activities (if he had ever really taken them on, actually) and was in touch with Pir Vilayat and others only in advice and friendship, not directly in the Sufi Order or the Ruhaniat at that time. I like to think that he still wore the unseen mantle of the “esoteric head of the Sufi Order” as Pir Vilayat had named him. He firmly supported Hidayat’s work and the Federation. He rarely mentioned the Sufi Movement, only to tell of Vilayat’s rejection by Ali Khan, and his own involvement in the effort to have Vilayat named successor - and to regret the direction the Movement had taken since that time.

When there came any mention of successors, he would just laugh, seeing the folly of the world as reflected in the holiest of orders. What did any of this matter to someone operating on the level of higher realities than the children’s games on earth?

We know now that anyone in the vicinity of Hazrat Inayat Khan was near a vortex of blessing. Shamcher said that the hospital near Fazal Manzil, reported that “inexplicably” patients became considerably better every Thursday. This was when the Healing Ceremony was performed during Summer School.

The way Shamcher and other mureeds were called to Suresnes to receive together the news of Inayat Khan’s passing is part of the mysterious working of this thing called “the message” - an activation of intuition.

More than idea or hunch or impulse, the cultivated intuition gives anyone in touch with its influence an open door to all that is, was, or is to come. And surprisingly it comes in our own language, ways only we can activate and implement.

Shamcher called it silent reach.

Shamcher was very involved in engineering and technology, the application of science to make a better world. Linking these to economics, he saw clearly that these levers work the world, along with employment, education, culture and more. These can be the active result of esoteric knowledge, of wisdom understanding, where a human soul is a bridge between the inner knowledge and the outer offering as benefit to the evolution of humanity. This is what he did, but it is up to us to find our specific work. Each of us is to do it in our own soul’s activation or purpose.

An “initiation” from Shamcher was just that, to deepen each of us in our engagement with the world as it is given to us, and to offer that as an expanding refinement in perpetuity.

Our quest for Truth is not to be found in the papers. It is to be found in a person. Inayat said, “A book is a dead teacher.” (Yes, I read that, haha.) And Plato said the same thing. For a book can’t reply, it never answers your questions. Luckily, those who have crossed the bridge are present with us now, ready to engage in the conversation. An evangelist approached Shamcher at an airport, asking if he was ready for Jesus to return. Shamcher laughed and said, “For me, he never left.”

So back to the direction of the Shamcher Bulletin. More than bits from correspondence, you can expect longer excerpts from his books, with commentary, images, and personal articles that link back to the material in the Bulletin so far.

Your comments and discussion are always welcome.

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Speaking of people and friends of Shamcher, take a deep dive into the Sufi Circle Canada website, which is as filled with rich treasures as Ali Baba’s cave!

One of these resources, the newsletter Heart to Heart, has been going strong under the editorial guidance of Shamcher’s friend, Nirtan Carol Sokoloff. Selected articles are now being reposted on a new Substack: Sufi Circle Canada Chronicles. Enjoy the first issue. Subscription is free.

Sufi Circle Canada Chronicles

l’Universel in the Garden of Fazal Manzil

Welcome to the first issue of Sufi Circle Canada Chronicles, featuring new articles, and revisiting earlier pieces published in the Heart to Heart Newsletter…

Read more

9 months ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · David Murray

Thanks for subscribing to these excerpts from the archives of Shamcher Bryn Beorse.

• Feel free to reply to this post if you have any Shamcher stories, photos or correspondence to share.

• The Shamcher Bulletin is edited by Carol Sill, whose newsletter, “Personal Papers”, is HERE.

If you like this post, please click the heart. And your comments are always welcome.

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In these last weeks in April, with Earth Day, Shamcher’s birthday (April 26, 1896) and his passing (April 29, 1980), we can take a moment to reflect on his wide-ranging presence in the world as a yogi and sufi, and as an engineer and economist. All his interests and actions were related to the aspects of the world today that are so impactful in our daily lives. Energy, economics, employment, war and peace, scarcity and plenty were all within his concern, whether in activity, writing, speaking or meditation. The Shamcher Bulletin shares some of the archives of his work. Here’s the post from last year at this time:

This winter I’ve been working on preparing Shamcher’s book, A State of Almost Happiness, for republication. He’d published it over half a century ago, with this cover by his daughter, Daphne.

Finally near completion, I’ll have publication info coming soon. Also added to this edition is Mansur Johnson’s screenplay adaptation of the book! Now the book itself, like most of Shamcher’s writing, is many-layered, visually active and uncategorizable. Follow along as the wise Taoist-magician Yung Lee transports our protagonist into the heart of China, where he tours villages and factories as a singer, bursting into the great Padmasambhava’s Hymn as the mainstay of his repertoire. It is a vision of China as it had been in the time of Mao, and our singer-protagonist visits underground enclaves, Tibetan monks, and even the Great One, Mao himself.

It is a joy to work on this material. I first digitized the book by dictating it aloud in speech to text. But I changed my workflow: iphone photo of each page opened in google docs gave me a text version to work from. When I went back to proof/copy edit the first part, I had an immediate joke/connection with Shamcher. Any of you who may have received letters from him will know what I’m talking about here, how his typos could be hilariously apt and sometimes meaningful, in a Joycean way. I’d read aloud: “Are they not one, the knower and the known?” But LOL the text in my document playfully said, “Are they not one, the knower and the gnome?” This little joke was definitely from Shamcher - who often referred to himself as “Norwegian Troll.”

Then another echo: the Norwegian Embassy in Nepal, with windows designed to reflect the Himalayas. In his book, Shamcher surveys China from both sides of the border.

From A State of Almost Happiness:

Yung Lee’s ecstatic face told me that I had always possessed the solution…To explain, one must presume to know. But does one know a thing only because he is able to clothe it in familiar-sounding terms? And how can one even begin to explain a totally new experience, which cannot be touched by any recognizable word or thought? But does one really have to? This drive we have to dissect, to describe, to analyze - does it not stem from our pitiful ignorance of the nature and scope of our minds? And is it not wiser, then, to accept the answers we find in our hearts? This, I suddenly realized, was Yung Lee's message to me.

Past Remembrance week posts can be found here:

Thanks for responding, sharing, and subscribing to these excerpts from the archives of Shamcher Bryn Beorse.

• Feel free to reply to this post if you have any Shamcher stories, photos or correspondence to share.

• The Shamcher Bulletin is edited by Carol Sill, whose newsletter, “Personal Papers”, is HERE.

If you like this post, please click the heart. And your comments are always welcome.

Inside:

• Audio recollection from Shahabuddin

• Introduction to Shamcher’s Every Willing Hand

In some of the next issues of the Bulletin we’ll focus on Shamcher’s books, written over 50+ years ago. In each book, whether he’s looking at economics, employment or energy, he emphasizes “infeeling” and “silent reach” as the ways our minds access and express the unseen guidance.

His approach was vast and global, and the ideas behind his dynamic drive were all intended to help the human experiment survive.

Everyone Shamcher ever met played a part in his loving universe. How? There are clues in this short recollection on practice. The audio is from Shamcher Stories told by Shahabuddin Less, (collected by Amir O’Loughlin).

Discovering Shamcher Bryn Beorse’s Every Willing Hand

By Carol Sill

This intro was published in the later edition of the book “Every Willing Hand”, which is available on Amazon, or direct at Shamcher.com.

Through Every Willing Hand we can receive a glimpse of an extraordinary worldview, a simultaneous multiverse of intimate interconnection, fueled by love, aligned by wisdom, creatively expressing God’s love for this delicate and persistent human experiment. This is the world of Shamcher Bryn Beorse.

With this book Beorse views this vast scene through a lens of economics and full employment.  He reveals artfully interwoven themes that all work together to show a complex picture of the forces and influences at play, both at the time of writing in the mid-1970’s and today.  Shamcher had great compassion for those who are “half awake in the body of humanity,” and he worked tirelessly to expand the horizons of all individuals and communities.

In one glance the book reflects innumerable facets of our social communities and individual aspirations, all in the context of the need for social reform. Where does he suggest this reform comes from? Not from a revolution in the streets to restore or establish fair and equal opportunity, but from an implemented program ensuring full employment for all who want it. A program that had already been outlined back in 1946 by noted economist, John H. G. Pierson.

An economist himself, Beorse adds his voice to Pierson’s concept in his own inimitable way: by providing this swirling overview of the issues at hand, ranging from the personal to the cosmic.

A key to discovering the meaning of this book is to approach it visually. I invite you to see the whole book as a Diego Rivera-style mural. As in a mural, at one view all the major public figures and social influences can be seen interacting together symbolically on a wall in a public place. Time past, present and future are all represented. Such a mural can be understood by anyone. It is always a call to action, a statement of deep participation in life in our community, an acknowledgement of roots in the past, the reality of present problems and hope for the future.

Like any great muralist, Beorse includes specific significant details: some informational for future reference, some symbolic for contemplation. While reading this book, visualizing is key to comprehensive understanding. Taking the time to think and contemplate may open catalysts to insight and give inspiration for action. Let’s take a look at the vast mural that is Every Willing Hand.

The first chapter, Every Single Willing Hand, introduces the book’s purpose, touching on economics, full employment, and OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion). Beorse introduces the influential figures whose ideas form a basis for this discussion, including thinkers and economists who by now may have faded from the world stage.  We can’t ignore the fact that this book began with a memory: the suicide of a talented man, whose enthusiasm and gifts were suppressed by his involuntary unemployment.

Children’s Hour uses the future generation as an inspiration for action, asking “what do the children of unemployed workers feel and think?” then leading directly into correspondence that reveals the efforts to create new initiatives. Moving from child to youth, in The Unsettled, he first asks the question, “How can youth build a viable society when unsettled?” His response includes the work of the esteemed Dr. Ménétrier in his Paris clinic, and touches on inner guidance and the “unseen friend”.

Generation Bridge, written at the time of the “generation gap” offers new approaches to gaps in understanding between any groups whose concepts and theories differ. While touching on teachings of the Sufis, including yoga and meditation, a great deal of this chapter is devoted to Dr. Simonton’s work using visualization with cancer patients. If visualization is proven to help in individuals, can it not also be a clue to helping our communities, and our future?

The next chapter, Vendettas and Morality, takes another look at our society, from marriage to long-term social planning, and the negative influence of unemployment. Here Beorse posits employment based on enthusiasm and skills, not merely abilities in reading and writing.  The Good Samaritan and Computers outlines a very interesting juxtaposition. He states, “Computers, lie detectors and good Samaritans sway people, their communities, economics.” Here he shows us how the help of a caring human being restores the humanity in others, for in many ways we are being “beaten up” by the media and our dependence on the external. Incidentally, Beorse saw lie detectors as machines that measured feeling, and as such creating a whole new category of social influence that will emerge in the future.

Like his teacher, the Sufi Hazrat Inayat Khan, Shamcher had an intuitive awareness of the power and meaning of symbols. In A Symbol is an Ocean in a Drop, he examines the Cross, the Trinity, the Waters of the Sea, Bread, and Wine. This chapter is an entrance to the world of the spirit. It looks at concentration, prayer, and most important: developing an understanding of the physical aspects of thoughts and feelings. Stepping further into the mystic world, Communicators introduces examples of those who could operate beyond the limitations of body and mind. The figures of Inayat Khan, Samuel Lewis, Rabindranath Tagore, Dag Hammarskjold, and Al Ghazali appear to our view.

And then, War. Seeing from the economic viewpoint, Beorse gives a global overview, mentioning how economic despair opened the door to Hitler. He offers the choice of full employment and its related economic stability as a potential deterrent to future wars. In Riots: A Challenge? Shamcher  significantly asks if riots come from ourselves, from “a mysteriously expanded multimind.” Invoking history, he describes riots and demonstrations as warnings to communities to take stock of assets and potentialities.

From war and riots, to we turn to love, and in Love, How Real? love is shown as a realization, as the basis for a society and its economics. From the human cycle of love to the love of God, this chapter reveals the stream of love in its many forms. Then from such a Bhakti yoga approach, the next chapter flows to a more Jnana approach. “I Am Just An Accident” takes a scientific view, contrasting “a” and “b” in a conversational dialogue between two characters, Ralph and Fred, a biologist and an astrophysicist.

Is there a way out? Freedom’s Gate begins with a well-known Sufi story, then goes right into the main teaching this story reveals: die before death. Shamcher shows the path of forgetting the self,  losing the self in the wonder of Creation. All clashes and differences can be united in prayer. The chapter Clashing Minds decodes prayers with concentrations for each line of the Lord’s Prayer, and two Sufi prayers, including this healing prayer:

Beloved Lord, Almighty God
Through the Rays of the Sun
Through the Waves of the Air
Through the All-Pervading Life in Space
Purify and revivify us, and we pray,
Heal our bodies, hearts and souls.

Looking at states and stages of realization, this chapter shows prayer, meditation and contemplation as essential tools of education.

In Silent Reach Shamcher goes much further, into breath, yoga, Sufism, inner training and practice. He defines the seeker as an astronaut, stepping outside narrow mind, feelings and body into wide open space. This approach gives access to the solutions to all our social, economic, international and personal problems and ambitions.

Those solutions remain unfulfilled until they are applied, and that is where the work needs to be done. So from meditation and inner life it is back to That Unfinished Business where the book first began. Back to economics, and to the ideas of inventory, surveys and analysis to lay the groundwork for full employment. Here Beorse mentions the comprehensive 1963 meeting that had been planned to hammer out such basics for the US, a meeting that was tragically cancelled due to the assassination of President Kennedy.  However, further correspondence included here indicates that the ideas behind this meeting were still in play.

This business is still unfinished, which is why Beorse wrote this book.  For those who want further details, the Appendix contains the full statement Completing the Employment Act by John H.G. Pierson, as presented to the US House of Representatives in 1972.

This book is not only historical but completely in the present. Perhaps now could be the time to look back at the 1946 proposal for full employment. It is certainly not too late to examine the work of the economists Beorse so emphatically recommends. Nor is it too late to advocate the implementation of OTEC technology for the good of our planet, climate and our economy.  And it is always the right time to develop the inner life. As outlined in Silent Reach, we can all expand ourselves to become explorers who step outside narrow mind and concepts, and enter wide open space.

For your interest, and for fun, I’m including an AI audio podcast overview of this article. Not bad for AI, even if Shamcher’s name, Beorse, is mispronounced in various ways.

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Intro to Every Willing Hand continued…

With Every Willing Hand we see a way to all work together for the survival of humanity. The answers, as Shamcher has indicated, will arise through insight and our human intuition. With yoga and Sufi pathways that develop and evolve the inexhaustible resource of intuition, we become more able to discern, invent and create the world that is waiting in the wings – all implemented through the connected work of “every willing hand.”

Do we dare to imagine an international coordinated effort, similar to the full-scale mobilization of allies at war, that would employ everyone at every level to prevent further environmental destruction, encourage the nurturing of the planet locally and globally, and apply new technologies for the good of all? Many efforts in this regard have occurred independently outside most governments, which have been seen at best as slow moving, at worst as obstructive or in opposition to the facts at hand. Do we dare to imagine these efforts linking together as one, while providing employment for all who wish to join in? This can be accomplished now through the distributed intelligence of our current communication technologies.

Shamcher saw the human community stretched out over the generations, encompassing the enormous emotions of life, death, love, birth, hope and aspiration, despair, anger, forgiveness and joy. The protection of this fragile human experiment is the goal of the wise, and in no other time has this been more essential. Our prayers and hopes to sustain love over the thin ice that covers hell are needed now more than ever.

It is up to those who can bear the painful exposure of the world to step forward and give whatever they can for the good of humanity. We know our climate is in crisis, our economy ever teetering in a fragile equipoise, the pollution of the world’s air and waters unprecedented. The warnings of scientists have not been heard soon enough and it is more difficult to play catch-up in the accelerating conditions which build up upon one another, creating further dangers. We have heard these warnings for decades and many positive changes have been implemented. We sense and know that this is not enough.

Meditation and intuition help, but we also need a large-scale integration of forces and resources to battle this threat to human survival. This is where we can implement the full employment work of John H.G. Pierson which Shamcher so enthusiastically advocated.  In Every Willing Hand his idea is presented not only as history, but as a means to action, which is why it is included in the appendix. It is a program to draw from so all can help.

Every Willing Hand is available on Amazon, or direct at Shamcher.com.

In 1979, Hu Press, produced a limited paperback edition, transcribed from Shamcher’s previous version of the book. Shamcher was most grateful to see this returned into public view, the year before he passed away.

Thanks for subscribing to these excerpts from the archives of Shamcher Bryn Beorse.

• Feel free to reply to this post if you have any Shamcher stories, photos or correspondence to share.

• The Shamcher Bulletin is edited by Carol Sill, whose newsletter, “Personal Papers”, is HERE.

If you like this post, please click the heart. And your comments are always welcome.

Inside:

• Some Fragments - Shamcher’s passport, Sri Yukeswar connection

• D’Annunzio recollection of Inayat Khan’s singing

• Video recording of “Shamcher as I knew him” talk & discussion

Some Fragments

Yes, Shamcher was an International Man of Mystery! He travelled the world. Here’s his old Norwegian passport, from before he became a US citizen.

After joining with Inayat Khan, Shamcher also furthered his studies in yoga through Paramahansa Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship. In meditation, he felt a strong communication with the yogis in the Himalayas and their guidance. This is his well-worn copy of The Holy Science.

Magical Music

Shamcher was so fortunate to have been a pupil of the great mystic, Inayat Khan. At a Sufi gathering, he shared this account from the elite aesthete Gabriele D’Annunzio, who described hearing Inayat sing.

Shamcher said: This is a meeting from a time when Inayat Khan was operating as a singer. It was a meeting with Gabriele D'Annunzio in Italy where he describes his impression. He [D’Annunzio] was sitting at a party which was a little fin de siecle as the French say--the end of the century, a little bit fake. Everybody was appearing to be somebody they weren't and then came this

"...fragile man, he was a wisp of a slender man, and his singing seemed to rise from the depths of the temple, to come from beneath the rocks, from beyond the inner caverns of the earth, and it seemed to gather in its sweep the longings of all generations of man, and the labour of all beginnings.

"There were no walls, no narrow chimney; there were no more phantoms, no masquerades, no lies. There was the smoke of the wood and sweat-like jewels on the brow of the holy singer. In the interval no one dared speak or say a word. Inayat Khan looked at me at the beginning of every song. He wanted to let me know that he sang for me alone. For me alone he sang the chant from before the light, the song of the time before dawn, mysterious, as the message of the wind sent over the Sorrow of the earth by Him, Who is destined to let the Light grow."

- words of Gabriele D’Annunzio

Shamcher as I knew him….

Here’s the recording from the Shamcher feature at West Coast Dervish Coffee, hosted by Rani Kathleen McLaughlin and Moinuddin Christopher Clarke. It’s informal and off-the-cuff, so please bear with spot (7:05 - 7:38) where the zoom glitched and froze a bit before continuing. The presentation was followed by many interesting comments and questions. Your fact-checks and comments are most welcome here.

“This podcast with Sufia Carol Sill, a student of Shamcher, provides a brief account of her relationship with her Sufi teacher. Carol delves into Shamcher’s life, his work, and his teachings through stories and anecdotes, focusing on his unconventional approach to Sufism, which included a strong emphasis on personal experience and intuition, as well as an open-minded perspective towards other spiritual traditions. Carol highlights Shamcher's unique blend of spirituality, activism, and scientific inquiry, illustrating his profound impact on her life and the Sufi community. She also reflects on the enduring legacy of Shamcher and the challenges and rewards of carrying on his work in the modern world.”

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If you’re intrigued and want a little more of this type of open conversation, join in on the 4th Saturday of each month. Link here for all West Coast Dervish Coffee events - everyone is welcome.

Thanks for subscribing to these excerpts from the archives of Shamcher Bryn Beorse.

• Feel free to reply to this post if you have any Shamcher stories, photos or correspondence to share.

• The Shamcher Bulletin is edited by Carol Sill, whose newsletter, “Personal Papers”, is HERE.

If you like this post, please click the heart. And your comments are always welcome.

I’ll be talking about Shamcher tomorrow on zoom at West Coast Dervish Coffee. Short notice, since it is 9AM PST Saturday September 28th. The link is here: https://sufiawakening.org/events/online-gatherings. Hope to see you there!

love, Carol

PS - More posts will be coming soon. It has been too long since the last Shamcher Bulletin. If you miss this event but would like a zoom forum to talk about Shamcher together, let me know in the comments or reply to this email.

Inside:

• Remembering Shamcher in late April (April 26, 1896-April 29, 1980)

• Shamcher’s article from the late 1960’s on Sufis and the Sufi Order

• OTEC aspirational images

• Past remembrance links

Late April always brings with it the significant dates of Shamcher’s birthday and the anniversary of his passing. For those of us who knew him, or are just coming to know him now, it can be a time to reflect on his work and influence. And this time of reflection is prefaced annually by the celebration of Earth Day, something he would have smiled about - isn’t every day Earth Day? Would he smile about his birthday and death day also, since he so often said, “I don’t exist.”

In some Sufi traditions, they put a stop to the saffron harvest to honour the saint.

Yet Shamcher, who didn’t exist, would encourage the opposite: redouble the efforts to offer all you can for the survival of humanity.

Shamcher often recommended what he called an “Englishified” zikar - This is not my body, this is the temple of God; this is not my mind, it is the mind of God; this is not my heart, it is the altar of God….

It is in this way that he didn’t exist. We can follow his example.

In correspondence he said:

Sufis are seekers after truth, whether they call themselves Sufis or not. A Sufi is accepted as such as soon as he wants to call himself so, or even if he won’t. To me, everyone in the whole wide world may be called a Sufi, or, if not, then I may not be one either. A Sufi may know all the jokes and tricks of a magician but he is more serious than any saint or government economist or garbage collector. And he loves them all with a love so fierce, so bitter, and so sweet that in comparison with this love, the magnitude of it, he himself disappears, and no longer exists.

He invited us to meet his work on its own terms, leaving it as a gift for us to apply to the present moment, not for us to preserve it in our preconceived ideas of what is past. Shamcher often taught that the Sufis were holders of ancient knowledge long before Islam. He emphasized freedom, and said:

A Sufi, as you know, is a seeker after truth, and wherever your seeking brings you, that is where you have to go. No one among Sufis is bound to any man, any rule, any organization.

Sufis and the Sufi Order

By Shamcher in Sufis Speak (est. written in the late 1960’s)

A Sufi is any seeker after truth, whether he calls himself a Sufi or not, and particularly one who knows that others, from their different points of view, are yet seeking that same truth. “A Sufi has two points of view, his own and that of the other.” [Inayat Khan]

Some persons, throughout history have called themselves Sufis: Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Jelaluddin Rumi,  Al Ghazal,  Omar Kayyam, Padmakrishnan first president of independent India, Dag Hammarskjold, Inayat Khan, Vilayat Khan, Idries Shah. It has been estimated that forty millions adhere to the Sufi name and many hundreds of millions have the same trend of thought. There has never in any period of history, been a “founder” of Sufism yet Sufism has existed at all times. 

The Sufi Order is a particular association of Sufis, forming a vehicle for the Sufi Message. 

Message? What about? From whom? To whom?

The Sufi Message is a message from man to man and through man to all his religions, his sciences, his nations and all organisations through which men function.

It is called a message of Love, Harmony and Beauty. It is a message of confidence, encouraging every one to have faith and confidence in himself, in others, particularly in those inner, often hidden powers within us which we have called, in the beautiful metaphor of the past and present: Rays of God, the Spirit, Lord, the Unfathomable!

An old message? Yes, and a new one. Old in essence, new in expression so it may match the new concepts and experiences presently enjoyed by searching man.

The word Sufi?

The word is related to the Greek word Sophia, meaning wisdom, and to the Arab word Saf, meaning pure.

A Sufi is a seeker of wisdom and he tries to keep his reasoning pure. The word (Sufi) has disturbed this author because many connect it with a specific religion. The founder (Hazrat Inayat Khan) chose this word since to him it represented a very old tradition, perhaps the oldest we know about, from which he saw the Hebrew, the Zoroastrian, the Christian and the Moslem religions originate. Sufis have for millennia harmonised all religions of the world, all nations, all races; also religion and science. The founder, Hazrat Inayat Khan, gratefully recognised the debt he owed his Sufi training. He was a musician and was raised in the music-oriented Moinuddin Chisti Order of Sufis originating in Ajmer, India. 

The Sufi sees all men as equally respected children of GOD, but different in character, temperament. No two are alike.

The Sufi message seeks out each separate individual, coaxes him to develop according to his own light. The Sufi does not teach dogma, theories, philosophies, either in religion, science or politics.

Many Sufis are spreading knowledge of ancient Sufi literature. This is not the only or main purpose of the Sufi Order. Its “Message” is based, in part, on the perceptivity of its founder, Hazrat Inayat Khan. Some of his pupils stop right there and consider Inayat’s personal contribution complete and sufficient. Inayat himself said, “I have learned more from my pupils than they from me.” All aspects of his Message were worked out in cooperation with his associates. He encouraged his co-workers to speak freely in expressing the Message and envisioned a continuing stream of living exponents who would carry on and enlarge upon this living message. 

—-

Ten Sufi Thoughts have been prepared as guidelines for interested students though they should not be considered beliefs or dogma, for Sufis are first of all free to think and develop according to their own light. Some Sufis would not ascribe to all of these “thoughts”.

The need for a Message and the essence of that message may be eminently focused by an outsider. Jawaharal Nehru, one-time Premier of the world’s largest democracy, told the Associated Press in New Delhi, September 9, 1958: “We have to give a new direction to education and evolve a new type of humanity. Essentially our problems are of civilisation itself. Religion gave a certain moral and spiritual discipline, it also tried to perpetuate superstition and social usages. Indeed, those superstitions and social usages enmeshed and overwhelmed the real spirit of religion. Disillusionment followed.”

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Energy Conversion

As Shamcher spent decades working to bring OTEC into reality, his archives include several leading designs and plans. The Lockheed diagram below illustrates an article estimating that power from the first commercial OTEC plant was expected by 1986. (This image could look a bit like a heart.)

Let’s take this time to remember Shamcher in intuition, in meditation, and in daily life.

Below is last year’s remembrance issue, that includes links to past remembrances as well.

Thanks for responding, sharing, and subscribing to these excerpts from the archives of Shamcher Bryn Beorse.

• Feel free to reply to this post if you have any Shamcher stories, photos or correspondence to share.

• The Shamcher Bulletin is edited by Carol Sill, whose newsletter, “Personal Papers”, is HERE.

If you like this post, please click the heart. And your comments are always welcome.

It was quiet on the Shamcher Bulletin front over the winter, but some things have been cooking along in the Shamcher Archives - so it’s time for an update. As I compile this, I realize there’s lots more to come - this is just a brief digest featuring a few of the archival treasures coming to light.

Back in the late 1970s, Shamcher presented at one of the sessions for the All Species Council in San Francisco - listed here “Emergency Energy Problem - Bryn Beorse”

New Website

At the end of last year, I redid the website for Shamcher.com, streamlining and consolidating older material about the books currently published and available. Here’s what it looks like now:

Still a work in progress, but you can check it all out at SHAMCHER.COM.

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More from the Archives

I was glad to help contribute to Wali Ali’s comprehensive book, Sunrise in the West, which is now finally released. I’d been in touch with Wali Ali early on with info and details on the Dunes, Luther Whiteman, Gavin Arthur, and OTEC (of course). It feels good to see Shamcher’s photo with the OTEC model, and it was interesting to read that Shamcher had articles published in the San Francisco Oracle. (Now I must look those up…)

Sorting and Surprises

Back at the archives, I’ve been sorting through some older papers that hadn’t been looked at for a time. Boxes of old papers that someone had roughly sorted in the past - OTEC details from the 1950s onward to the 1970s, along with articles and writing exercises.

So many such old treasures of miscellany popping up here and there. Most of these boxes will be going back into storage until the next pass, unless they are called for somehow. I’m not sure exactly what should be done with the old OTEC Sea Water Conversion information. The correspondence is of interest, but many of the calculations and reports have been superceded by new technologies, and much of what had been saved were working documents and published reports.

Wow, surprise! This note from Pir Vilayat slipped out from a pile of papers from the 1950s on Sea Water Conversion. Written in 1957, before the founding of the Sufi Order as an organization separate from the Sufi Movement.

Location Location Location

Yes, Shamcher was in Geneva for a time. An interesting biographical thread emerged when I was looking at the inside addresses of Shamcher’s correspondence in the late 1940’s, early ‘50s and ‘60s. It was fun to follow from place to place and retrace his approximate locations using google maps, across space and time. Places have changed. Some weren’t easily found, or were PO boxes, eg. from Straatsburg NY; Sea Water letters were sent from the Dunes in Oceano, and try as I might, I couldn’t find an online trace of Hill House, Gavin Arthur’s home there.

Here are a few of Shamcher’s return addresses:

Some of Shamcher's return addresses: 115 Missouri Ave - Washington DC, rue de la Grenade - Geneva, 621 Esplanade - Redondo Beach, 532 Rustic Road - Santa Monica; UCLA; 218 E. 60th St - New York

The Shamcher Institute: is it real?

If you’ve been reading my personal substack you’ll have seen this already, but I thought I’d let you know about it here, too.

For a long time now, I’ve played in the idea of the Liminal Shamcher Institute. If you’ve been following along in past years, you’ve seen me mention this as an imaginary location from which to launch various ideas and researches. I made AI dream images of it, and even had an imagined residency there.

Well, last week it came to me that I can give it even more of a physical reality boost by just putting a sign on the door, giving it a name. Now when I go into my office for writing, research, zoom calls or meditation, I walk through this portal and enter the Shamcher Institute. It is both real and not-real.

Yes, now I work in my office, the Writing and Communications Department of the Shamcher Institute. Still an ideal, an iteration of potential thought, a fun interplay.

Soon after this, I found myself sorting out more boxes of Shamcher’s papers. Coincidence? haha

If you like this post, please click the heart. And your comments are always welcome.

From an audio interview

Question: What does it mean for the Sufi to understand that nothing is valuable in his spiritual quest except the presence and the attainment of the presence, being one with God attainment of the presence? 

Shamcher: Well, in a sense it's the same as the physicists say now, that there is no past or future: there is only present. It approaches the problem of time and space and the physicists don't have a final answer on it, but they know that the feeling of a running of time from the past to the present and to the future is not the real picture, it's a concept of a mind. 

And the Sufis, like other mystics, have the same concept, except some of them go even further and they can see, they think, in a vision, the fourth dimension or this time-space continuum. And so, that is one reason why a Sufi may say there is only the present and everything that happens, happens now. Is it something else you mean? 

Q. I really meant by presence I mean the feeling of God, not the intellectual understanding of God, but the presence in the sense of a being that you are, that you are becoming. 

S. Yes. 

Q. But that was very good too. 

S. It would be very good if it wasn't an answer. 

Q. That's right. It would have been another question. 

S.Yes. You know, in the chief practice of the Sufi, this is not my body, it's the temple of God, La ilaha il allah hu. This is not my mind, this is the thought of God. This is not my heart, this is the shrine of God. 

That is affirming the ancient belief or conviction of the Sufis that this is what we are, the presence of God. And so they deny that which most people think of that this is my body. I am this body even. They deny that because they feel that that is not the case.
They see it as the presence of God. So this is the basic feeling of Sufis. 

And it's also the basic feeling of all the physicists, they say, You are not really a person, you are a process. You are something. What is a process? 

A process is something that goes on in the stream of things, in the stream of the universal activity. Everything in a modern physicist view is activity. There is no such thing as a dead body or a firm body or a material body. Everything is constant movement and they can't predict the individual movements they can only predict averages, statistics. They can say in this atom there is a probability that 50 million nuclei will move this way and 50 other million will move this way, but they can't point on one and say this one will move this way.

And so this explains why you are not really the person you think you are, you are a process of nature And this process is very important because it is part of this whole universe. Without that process, something would go wrong. So you are a very important being. 

Everybody is, whatever they do, even if they are jobless, because it's a crime, of course, for society to keep people jobless, but even so, they are part of this. 

Q. Once a person has attained this sense of presence, would you say that it doesn't really matter what they do, that everything is significant? 

S. Yes, yes, everything is significant. And in a sense, everything is significant, even for persons who don't realize that.

Shamcher Projects a Double

from one of Atiya’s students:

Apparently Atiya and Shamcher were having a discussion about the ability to project a double.

Some time after that, Shamcher did project one to where Atiya was - at least his head, and Atiya grabbed and pulled on his hair, at which point the double disappeared.

The next time they met in person, Shamcher asked her why she pulled on his hair. Her response was, "I had to see if it was real." His response was, "Well - you didn't have to pull so hard!"

Yogis and Mystics

Shamcher’s novel, Fairy Tales are True, begins with a meeting of prominent scientists and thinkers of the day. Excerpts here discuss science fiction, the existence of Sages and their hiding, along with a short version of a well-known teaching tale.

“What particularly interests me about science fiction,” said Dr. Jacques in his melodious voice, “is that it has made acceptable to a large segment facts and feats long realized — not necessarily by aliens from other planets, but by hermits, sages, Yogis, Sufis and other simple geniuses here on earth. What Americans and Europeans would not believe of their own species, they readily accept when applied to interstellar beings.”

Sir James nodded. “I have often thought that our dreams of mastery of life and death, psychic powers, invulnerability and so forth, expressed in our science fiction may stem from memories of past achievements of our own race, or from half-conscious communications with adepts existing here on earth.”

[…]

Jane Weiner shook her head in consternation. “You amaze me. Edward suggested that our common ambition was to break into each other’s minds and I agreed. I came here with sufficient respect for you gentlemen to want to share your knowledge. But now, I’m not so sure. [… ]Sir James and Dr. Jacques both come out for the yogis and mystics – charlatans living off the credulity of uneducated people – phonies who have been debunked a thousand times over.”

Dr. Jacques looked at Jane as only a Frenchman can. “Our charming mathematician is right,” he said. “Yogis and mystics have been found wanting time and again and thousands more will fail the test. But there is one point to consider,” he paused for emphasis, “A counterfeit is, after all, made from a pattern.”

“Your point, of course, is that phony mystics prove that genuine ones exist,” said Jane. “But if they do, where do they keep themselves? Have you ever seen one?”

“Where would you keep yourself if you were one?” asked Dr. Jacques.

“Available,” said Jane passionately. “Available to the sick and needy, available to science, so that my faculties could be registered and investigated and repeated, if possible.”

“In that sense,” said Dr. Jacques, “I’d say that they are available. They are available to the sick and needy who do not need to see them in order to benefit. They are available to the people who are willing to give their whole lives to studying them and repeating their feats.

“But they are not available to lightweight scientists who thoughtlessly invade their intricate worlds with inadequate theories and instruments, leaving a trail of confusion. They are not available to the curious who would mob them, to the show people who would first exploit them and then destroy them or to the envious who would strangle them. For people with such talents, there is little choice but to hide.”

“Hide?” said Jane. “Where?”

“There are two ways of hiding,” replied Dr. Jacques. “A simple way and a subtle way. (A geographical way and a personal way.) Some of my friends have, in remote areas, stumbled onto hermits who can almost stop their hearts, who take no food, who communicate with friends without words. Near the Gangotri Glaciers, for example, in the upper Himalayas, beyond the shrines of Badrinath and Kedernath, in places untenable to any human needing food and shelter.”

“But why should they hide in such outrageous places?” asked Jane.

“Why not?” said Dr Jacques, shrugging. “If they communicate freely at any distance, they have no need of close company. If they do not eat, except for, perhaps, a pinch of crushed rock for mineral supply, they have no need for farm land. They have no craving or need for palaces or huts or any shelter at all.

“But a more subtle way to hide is in a crowd. Such people hide, not their bodies, but their powers. There is the story of an Indian peasant, for example, known to others in his village as a pious, humble, simple soul. He had a son with vision and ambition who went far away to Tibet and came home, after many years of study, a man of many talents.

“Among other things, he had learned how to walk on water. Proudly, he started to show his simple, ignorant father how he could walk across the foaming river which passed near the village. He was halfway across when the swirling water frightened him. He fell and would have drowned had not his father calmly walked out and picked him out of the water and carried him to shore.”

Dr Jacques looked around the group, smiling. “The young man was amazed. ‘Father!’ he exclaimed. ‘I did not know you could do that.’

“The old man replied, ‘My son, that is the difference between us. You know many things and I know nothing at all, except what is required of me.’”

Thanks for responding, sharing, and subscribing to these excerpts from the archives of Shamcher Bryn Beorse.

• Feel free to reply to this post if you have any Shamcher stories, photos or correspondence to share.

• The Shamcher Bulletin is edited by Carol Sill, whose newsletter, “Personal Papers”, is HERE.

  

If you like this post, please click the heart. And your comments are always welcome.

INSIDE:

• Continuing from last issue, a bit more from the intro to Distribute or Destroy, introducing the open atmosphere of the California dunes.

• Was Shamcher a member of the Ziraat in Suresnes?

• Shamcher’s telling of the classic Sufi teaching story: That is Why

Glory Roads and a bit of Dune History

Luther Whiteman and Samuel L. Lewis quoted Shamcher’s book, Distribute or Destroy, in their own overview book, Glory Roads: The Psychological State of California, published by Thomas Y. Crowell Company in1936. Written during the Great Depression, it was prefaced as “an attempt to record only some of the better known crusades of the depression years, and to picture only some of the more important of recent messiahs.” In the book they reported on the new economic groups based on the ideas sweeping through the consciousness of Californians.

From Shamcher’s Distribute or Destroy they included the example of the ruined coal mining village, Schwanenkirchen in Bavaria, and the adoption of Wäras system that brought it back into activity - a system much like giro-credit.

They may have read this book as part of the background to their endeavour. It is more likely that they added the example as an afterthought, after Distribute or Destroy had been released in English in the US. Later, they met the Norwegian Björset in person when he came to California in the late 1930s.

Beorse and Samuel L. Lewis found they shared another connection: both had been pupils of the great mystic, Inayat Khan. They had studied with him in the mid-1920s, Lewis in San Francisco, and Beorse attending the Sufi Summer Schools in Suresnes, just outside of Paris. Retaining their close relationship in the decades to follow, they continued discussing and implementing socioeconomic theories and ideals for the betterment of humanity.

It was Whiteman who first told Beorse about the dunes in Oceano, California, and the naturally curious Beorse was drawn to discover more. The Dunites had not been given a very positive assessment in their book, yet Whiteman and Lewis had both spent time in that open community. Frequently visited by California intelligensia, the community in the dunes was fostered by Gavin Arthur (grandson of Chester Arthur, former US President) and the Irish Folklorist, Ella Young. Gavin became known as one of the fathers of the New Age.

Beorse’s book, Fairy Tales are True, dedicates a long section to this bohemian shangri-la, which was home to eccentric characters ranging from hobos to yogis, writers and artists. In Gavin’s magazine, The Dune Forum, each issue featured an article on some aspect or approach to new economics, along with poetry and other ideas of the times that were looking toward a New Age. The covers were photos taken in the dunes by Edward Weston. At Gavin’s cabin in the dunes differing viewpoints on arts, culture and economic directives were hotly argued, and The Dune Forum reflects the atmosphere of the Dunites’ passionate discussions.

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Esoteric Secret Society

The Ziraat was a secret for many decades before it became more openly known. In the early days of Summer Schools in Suresnes, Shamcher was a member, as seen here in this list of participants. Those of you who are involved in the work of Ziraat today may be interested to see the name Bjorset here - shared with permission from Nekbakht Foundation. The grades EF and F represent Experienced Farmer and Farmer.

That is Why

In Planet Earth Demands, Shamcher takes liberties with the classic Sufi tale, “That is Why”, giving the sage in the story the name of the great Saadi, and ending with a new tag to the old story.

For mind is ageless.
And mind is not toothless, and is anything but uniform.
Saadi, a sage who lived in the Middle East some time ago, once placed himself in the middle of a busy road, which was a good place from which to advertise one’s wares or wisdom at that time, even though it would not be so convenient on Interstate 5 today. He was surrounded by the usual crowd of admiring pupils. Galloping horse-hoofs drummed in their ears and soon a formation of riders appeared. They shouted, peremptorily, “Out of the way, old man, the KING is coming!” As Saadi and his flock moved hurriedly off the road, the sage said, “That’s why.”

When the riders had passed, the sage went back and sat down in the same spot with his pupils around. Now distinguished courtiers came riding, slowly, stopped their horses and said to the sage, “We think you better move aside, for the king is coming this way.” The sage and his flock moved again, less hurriedly than the first time. When the courtiers had passed they moved back to the same spot in the road. The sage said, “That’s why.”

Now a radiant person came riding along, at a dignified pace and when he saw the sage and his pupils he made a big detour around them, bowed as he passed and saluted the sage courteously. This was the King himself. “That is why,” said the sage.

“What did you mean by ‘that’s why’?” asked a pupil.

“I wanted to point out to you the differences of minds and the subsequent differences of behavior and action,” explained the sage. “The fore-riders talked or shouted and acted the best way they knew. They acted as their minds directed. That’s why. The suave and polished courtiers with a gentler type of mind acted as was natural to them. The king who knew a brother soul when he met one, acted like a king. That’s why. Never judge people from or by your own standards. They act as they must. Never judge at all.”

“That namby-pamby!” thought some onlookers, “When he starts serenading, we’ll have some fun with him.”

Then, as they had rightly presumed, the sage began singing his poems, particularly one about how he saw GOD in every creature, “And whoever comes along, I shall know that it is you!” he hummed and an irreverent bystander interrupted, “But suppose it was an ass?”

“Then,” said the sage, bowing serenely to the heckler, “I would know it was YOU.”

Thanks for responding, sharing, and subscribing to these excerpts from the archives of Shamcher Bryn Beorse.

• Feel free to reply to this post if you have any Shamcher stories, photos or correspondence to share.

• The Shamcher Bulletin is edited by Carol Sill, whose newsletter, “Personal Papers”, is HERE.

If you like this post, please click the heart. And your comments are always welcome.

This issue of the Shamcher Bulletin includes:

1. An excerpt from the introduction to Shamcher’s early book on economics, Distribute or Destroy

2. Three links of interest:

   Re-posting Shamcher’s article and re-introduction of Giro-credit in 1979

   How Giro-credit worked (link to undated document from the archives)

   PDF from appendix to Distribute or Destroy

3. Crowdsource requests:

   Does anyone have any more info on Nordic Clearing?

   Do you know if the current implementation of the term Giro-credit in Europe connects at all with the earlier Nordic Clearing approach?

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Intro to “Distribute or Destroy”

Combining the work of various “heretical” economists into one accessible volume, this book by Brynjolf Björset (later known as Bryn Beorse) leads up to a tested Scandinavian economic experiment. Nordic Clearing was established as a bridge to a new applied economy. Behind it was a radical overview dedicated to rethinking the nature of money, particularly in the climate after WWI.

In the early 1930s Björset was asked to outline the basic work of the best known new economists of the day, offering an assessment of the situation of poverty in the midst of plenty. He produced Efter Oss Kommer Overfloden (After Us the Glut), his world economic survey published by Aschehoug in Oslo, Norway in 1934. It was immediately translated into English, and released in Britain and the US as Distribute or Destroy.

This book brought the young civil engineer, Brynjolf Björset, on to the world stage as a firebrand economic thinker who applied radical theories for the greater good.

His engagement with Nordic Clearing was reprised after WWII when he was selected to participate in the group that rebuilt the economy of Norway.

Pushed by the dire global depression, the need for a new approach to distribution of goods and services sparked a variety of innovative thoughts on the economy. Redefining wealth, re-examining the gold standard, placing the new theories into historical contexts, this book gives a great deal of information for further discussion and exploration. It is a start in building a bridge from the old worldview to the new.

Each chapter is dedicated to one economic approach that had received reasonable traction in the thinking of the times. Some had been applied, others remained theoretical, so far untested in the world.

Now almost a hundred years since some of these theories were first drafted we can look with fresh eyes at the ideas that were emerging in those tumultuous times after WWI.

Rapidly increasing production power, expanding industrial output and the revolution in electric power met both left- and right-wing political ideologies in an arena of war debt and post-war shock.

The Great Depression caused economists the world over to re-examine the economic cycles of the century past. New fermenting ideas were everywhere, but were often dismissed by the status quo as merely the wacky fringe activities of marginal cranks and quacks. Each of the systems in this book has been so vilified, yet each has a merit that brings to the fore a new approach for the future.

Björset foregrounds many of the new economists of the day, offering digests of their main tenets, with an invitation for interested parties to examine their work further. He personally met with many of these distinguished economic thinkers, and worked closely with them, not only in creating Nordic Clearing but after WWII in rebuilding the economy of Norway. Applying these concepts, the Nordic Clearing Company’s regulations are listed in the appendix, for those who may wish to also create new non-gold based exchanges.

The re-thinking of money as a means of exchange, of wealth as use and distribution of goods, of the health of a community based not simply on stores of gold but on useful enterprise is a noble ideal to strive toward.

Beorse met and worked with many varied distinguished economic thinkers, and was more concerned with uplifting humanity than with the distinctions and differences that divide our communities.

Widely varied views were brought together in Distribute or Destroy. The book introduced an everyday reader to the principles behind some of the more prominent new economic approaches being discussed in the early 1930s.

(Abridged - from the Introduction to Distribute or Destroy by Carol Sill)

Three links of interest

1. In a past issue, we featured Shamcher’s article on Giro-credit following a few brief Sufi pieces on silence, healing and participation in the world.

2. This post offers some detail on how it worked:

3. If you have further interest, attached is a pdf of the appendix of Distribute or Destroy.

Nordic Clearing, Appendix, Distribute Or Destroy, Bryn Beorse

138KB ∙ PDF file

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A reader’s request

A reader is researching Nordic Clearing as an existent Giro-credit system. He notes that the Swiss Giro-credit system WIR (which is still existing) mentions the Nordic Clearing in some of its newsletters to participants in the beginning of 1935. If you have any more leads, please reply!

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Shamcher’s overview of Giro-credit is based on his personal experience as an economist. His book, Distribute or Destroy, subtitled “A Survey of the World’s Glut of Goods with a Description of Various Proposals and Practical Experiments for its Distribution” can be ordered directly by replying to this email, or from Amazon.

Thanks for responding, sharing, and subscribing to these excerpts from the archives of Shamcher Bryn Beorse.

• Feel free to reply to this post if you have Shamcher stories, photos or correspondence to share.

• The Shamcher Bulletin is edited by Carol Sill, whose newsletter, “Personal Papers”, is HERE.

If you like this post, please click the heart. And your comments are always welcome.

(Undated, from Shamcher’s archives)

INFORMATION FOR RECEIVERS OF GIRO-ORDERS (TRANSFER ORDERS)
Transfer-orders or giro-orders are national and international means of payment. Like crossed checks they are orders to a clearing-office acting as a bank or book-keeping central for the customers to transfer the amount from the buyer’s to the seller’s account. The amounts cannot be claimed in cash.

Giro-orders received in payment for good or services should be sent to the nearest giro-office, where the amount is credited to the seller’s account (less the charge, ½% of which the part not used for office expenses and funds is redistributed at the end of the year.) the amount can be used for any purchases either on the home market or on any foreign market, whether the giro-order originally comes from a customer at home or abroad. There is for instance no need to buy from the same party or from the same country to which the goods were sold. The giro-transactions are not to be confused with the bilateral clearing arrangements of some European countries.

In case no proper giro-office exists in a country where a giro-order is received, special arrangements will have to be made. In New York, for instance, the Norwegian American Chamber of Commerce will attend to such cases, and eventually arrange for discounting of giro-orders with American financial institutions, when conditions have been discussed in advance.

The object of giro-transactions is to increase the volume of trade by means of the special giro-credits, amortized and paid by a charge per item transferred instead of by a time unit interest and amortization. This form of credit will be stimulating to many kinds of businesses, and not susceptible to cause inflation. It will draw new businesses and new people into the trade volume, and increase the volume of trade for businesses already established. It will adjust consumption to production by increasing consumption instead of cutting down production.

GIRO-INSTITUTIONS
Giro-Institutions are executive offices for groups of businesses and individuals mutually exchanging goods, services and credits by clearing the amounts in books, mainly without recourse to cash.

Object: To increase consumption and production by drawing new people into business, and increasing the volume of already established businesses.

Start: Any group of businesses of different branches can start a common clearing office, serving as a credit pool for the associated businesses. Through this pool the members can trade mutually, as well as extend credits to customers. For the mutual trade it may be profitable to agree upon a certain initial credit which the pool, through a chosen board of directors, extends to the partaking businesses. Thus accounts have been opened, and mutual sales and purchases can take place. As for outside customers, the credits are granted on the same basis as ordinarily.

Method of Operation: The pool may run an office of its own, or operate through a bank or other financial institution. The operation through a bank would offer the advantages of handling joint giro and cash businesses under one administration.

All giro-credits, whether mutual pool credits or customer’s credits, can only be used for purchasing goods or services. They cannot be exacted in cash. (Though available cash will be at the disposal of members or customers). The pool, or company, then will have no cash obligations towards its members and customers, and can arrange its credit policy accordingly. The company does not lend out its own funds, or the savings of depositors. The company lends command of production before it has reached the stage of consumption or savings. This credit system is thereby capable of a great extension of credits and business activity without increasing the interest burden. As no one has given away his savings to the debtors there is no ordinary interest per time unit to pay. The producers, who have given their goods to the debtors, are immediately credited with the amount so that they can buy goods and services the moment they have sold their products.

Instead of a time unit interest, a charge is made for each item debited or credited. This charge will cover expenses and general funds and is also intended to cover the amortization of the credits. In some cases this charge will be sufficient to cover the whole amortization (in the case of many transactions per time unit). But in general each debtor will be obligated to amortize his credit in the course of a time fixed for each case. If in the course of this time the credit is not amortized through the fixed charge per transaction, nor through delivery of goods and services, the remainder will have to be paid in cash. This cash is not the property of the company, but serves as security toward the customer’s temporary credit with the company. The cash can be lent to customers against securities as in ordinary banking, but on the same conditions as the clearing credit: No time interest charge, but a charge per transaction.

The operation of the ordinary transaction charge is as follows: A charge of say ½% is made on each item debited or credited (this charge is used in Norway). At the end of the year, after deduction of the costs of administration, reserve funds, general funds and dividend to shareholders, the surplus is credited to the participants in proportion to the extent of their business through the company. For debtors this goes to amortization. For creditors, it goes to a savings fund.

To get an idea of the working of this system we may take an example the Postal Giro or postal check system as operated by the post offices in Sweden, in 1935. The year’s turnover was 14,000,000,000 kroner (3.5 Billion Dollars). The charge per transaction, at ½%, would amount to 70,000,000 Kroner. The expenses of the office, including all funds etc., were ca. 7,000,000 Kroner. There would be 63,000,000 Kroner to credit to the participants. In proportion to their capital deposited with the postal giro on an average during the year this would mean about 50%. The actual cost of the transaction would be about one per thousand of the turnover one way.

Risks: Like any other business this company would suffer loss by the failures of some debtors to pay their amortization. The losses would however in general be far easier to carry, and far less dangerous than by ordinary banking. As long as the credits extended are not too big in proportion to the company’s total turnover (and that the manager must see to) the consequences of a debtor failure would be as follows: The single participants who had delivered goods to the debtor would be credited at once with the corresponding amount and suffer no more loss than the other participants. Even if the loss were greater than the surplus, the making up of the loss might go on for years without vitally affecting any participant. No one could lose more than the charge he had paid in of ½% per transaction so long as the company continues to function. The company would never have to fear any depositors' rush on the cash reserve, it would have no interest obligations towards depositors, it would, practically speaking, be independent of time. Therefore, the company would also be in a position to render very valuable service to customers in difficulties, by postponing their payments, thus avoiding much mischief.

A risk of a special kind for this company is an insufficiency of goods and services against clearing-orders at the start. The undertaking ought therefore to be started by businesses of a sufficient power and magnitude to ensure a continuous circulation, and each participant should cooperate with the pool office in determining exactly the extent to which they should trade through the pool. Excessive sales or purchases through the pool by any individual member may hurt both member and the whole pool.

The smooth circulation will be facilitated by cooperation with banks, municipalities or governments.

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE NORWEGIAN COMPANY

Norsk Forening fo Giro-omsetning was formed as an independent association in December 1936. The president of the Board was the well known lawyer, Mr. Olaf Dahll, the vice-president the lawyer and financier, Mr. Eivind Eckbo, a man of great wealth and very extensive business activities. He is also known as a great philanthropist, who has given millions to humanitarian and social institutions. The other members of the Board were Mr. Jorgen Dahl, Lawyer; Mr. Finn Jacobsen, coal merchant; Mrs. Amalie Overgard, a business woman and president of the Haasewives Association of Norway; and Mr. B. Bjorset. Later Mr. K. F. Oppegard joined, owner of one of our leading electrical firms, and Mr. Rolf Stenersen, broker and director of a Dutch bank, a man of great means, a philanthropist and author.

According to the wish of the Board the organization started on a very modest scale, the capital being only 15,000 kr. at the start, increased to 50,000 inclusive of guarantees in the course of the year. The credits awarded were limited to about 45,000 kr. Because of this very modest start some participants found difficulty in obtaining the goods and services required, and it is now thought that it would have been better to start on a larger scale at once. In spite of this, the organization grew from some 40 participants at the start to 400 in the course of the year, and the turnover doubled from month to month at first, while the volume of credit was purposely kept constant.

In 1938 it was agreed to increase the activity, the volume of credit was gradually extended, and the public was informed through publicity and social arrangements, for instance through a dinner given by Mr. Eckbo, where politicians, bankers and leading business men were present.

The association has the valuable cooperation of some prominent individual bankers. A closer cooperation between banks and the association is being considered on both sides, but has not as yet been established. However, bankers individually are helping our work and in the application of our system.

In March 1938 the Norwegian Finance Minister was approached. He put the question before the other members of the cabinet, and it was decided to appoint a governmental committee to make proposals on the application of clearing transactions in the public business. It is for instance being considered to make a trial with 2 millions credit to farmers for completing their buildings and stocks.

Besides, a special committee for the farmers economic organizations is already at work on the application of clearing credits to the general transactions of farming. This committee consists of Mr. Andresen Reier, member of the Board of Ostlandske Melkecentral, our greatest milk producers' organization, who is at the same time president of the Board of Meieribrukets Innkjop, an organization for buying dairy machines, etc. for all the dairies - then Mr. Sollied, Managing Director of Norges Kjott og Fleskecentrall (The meat and pork central of Norway), then Mr. Ivarson, the Managing Director of Meierienes Exportlag, the sales organization of all dairies, and the Mr. Rolf Stenerson, for the Giro-organization. The purpose of the committee is gradually to apply clearing credits to the general transactions of farming.

In connection with the governmental committee some large purchases of state-supplies have been considered, especially for military purposes. The goods furnished to the military depots through clearing transactions would not otherwise have been ordered, and they are not sold in the market, so for this purpose eventual surplus\goods which the state would otherwise have destroyed, could be used. Negotiations are under way between American firms and the Norwegian Government concerning delivery of goods on this basis.

The Norwegian association has had practically no credit loss till now. The danger that some one might overdraw his account has often been suggested, but there seems to be no greater danger of this kind with the clearing organization than with ordinary banks. When properly developed, the clearing organization can give credits on very long terms. This fact, in connection with the absence of time unit interest, makes it specially well fit for farming, small handicraft, public works and other undertakings where there are now only small returns, or where there are factors of great uncertainty.

Through a proper credit arrangement for these branches of economic life other branches too will benefit, e.g. through larger and more stable purchasing power. The clearing organization would thereby form a very appropriate supplement to the existing credit organizations.

SIMILAR COMPANIES IN OTHER COUNTRIES
In Sweden (Stockholm and Eskilstuna) there is an organization of the same kind and about the same size as in Norway, which, cooperates with our company. For instance, Swedish firms have bought cheese and fish in Norway, and Norwegian firms have bought hardware in Sweden. These transactions are not of the same kind as the two-sided clearing f.inst. (sic.) between Germany and some countries. The selling firms need not wait for a corresponding purchase in the other country; it gets an account for buying at home or abroad the moment it has delivered its goods. So it is practically the same as cash payments.

Also in Sweden the government and the banks have been approached, and a member of the Board of the Riksbank is promoting the idea. Two of the largest banks have for some time been considering establishing clearing branches.

In Switzerland a similar organization exists since 1935 but this organization seems to be working in a direction not quite conforming with the ideas of the Scandinavian organizations, both as regards propaganda and technical organization. The same can be said about some American enterprises. 

In France a very successful bank partly operating along these lines exists since 1847 - then called “Banque Bonnard” now: Comptoir Centrale de Credit. Its proprietor is now one of the directors of “Banque de France” and a very influential man.

In the course of history proper clearing-organizations have been working alongside with the ordinary banks at different intervals right from the time of Babylonia and ancient Greece. They seem to have furthered the balance and even functioning of the economic life - whereas in the countries and epochs where such organizations did not exist (as for instance in the later part of the Roman Empire) the economic life suffered from lack of purchasing power and severe economic crisis.

THE PREPARATORY WORK IN SCANDINAVIA
An inter-Scandinavian committee was formed in 1934, consisting of Minister Eric Ehrstrom (Finland) as president, Mr. Runnquist (Sweden, counselor at law, Lodens Advokatbyra), Mr. Skovboll (Denmark, counselor at law) and Mr. Olaf Dahll (Norway, counselor at law, the president of the present Norwegian organization). The Committee had constant, support and advice from such business and banking men as Dir. Dahlander, Stockholm, Dir. Dr. Fredrik Jahn, Stockholm, Dir. Utterstrom, Stockholm, some Oslo bankers and business men, and economists such as Mr. Myrdal, Stockholm and Mr. Frisoh, Oslo, who has written a treatise on similar organizations. Besides, Mr. H. H. Grell, an American citizen but for long years working in the steel and mining business in France has been constantly helping the organizations both in Sweden and Norway with his valuable advice.

This issue:

• Begins with thoughts to ponder from correspondence (1974 and 1977)

• All about books. Normally we don’t promote sales here, but just this once, this issue is an exception.

• Ends with an excerpt from a talk in the late 1970s. Shamcher tells how he first got into OTEC

3 thoughts from varied correspondence

I was asked by the present leader of the Khankah in Seattle to inaugurate the season with a talk. I said one thing initiations may do is clean up one’s spiritual companionship - seen and unseen beings who flock around one. But an exchange of glances can do the same.

“Does one need a teacher?” No, except that some want one. But you need company, association, and I mentioned some examples I had seen of people who tried complete solitude - how very talkative they became because. . .

I talked about the five ships, the five vehicles of Sufi line and that one of them, the Order, was the most important for many of us because it provides training: Practices, that change mind, personality, the only thing that can change it beside love. I rambled around worse than ever and they sat there in their perfect yoga postures and pretended there was nothing wrong.

First part of your last letter seemed a little angry because you didn’t know where or what you were. What builds the wings on the butterfly, and what does the butterfly think about it? Man was supplied with reason to be able to follow the beautiful creative process. Instead, man has leaned on reason, believing it something else than it is.

If there is anything in religion, yoga, sufism or whatever it is to free man again from this illusion, and never try the idiotic experiment trying to understand what, who he is or if he makes “progress”. In the beginning this unlearning is painful if it is not understood. You are right that I never look back to judge or learn. I look back sometimes to see what I did which would have turned out so differently if I had the insight then.

What happens after a while of understanding the limitation of reasoning is that you get insight. But not before you have thoroughly rejected reasoning or any effort to “see” where you stand, what you are, or who. That is why the saints say, “I do not exist.” We don’t. Really. So why worry about our status? Progress? Whatnot? But to the man not seeking, this sounds crazy. So don’t try to explain this to outsiders; they may put you in a mental institution…. please don’t think that you can “know yourself,” please be patient and look with appreciation at life around you. That is you.

You indicate that I am stirring things up. Not for the stirring, but for truth, and sometimes truth is stirring but that part is not my concern. Don’t worry about the stirrings. If someone bawls you out because you have followed your conscience, enjoy his confusion. You cannot help smile. Your clearer vision may eventually reach him.

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Book News

Complete your library of Shamcher books!

If you want to have a whole set of the currently available books from Shamcher Archives, please order direct by replying to this email.

Special Book Sale! Until June 15th, all Shamcher Archive books are on sale for $15 each including shipping (and tax). Just reply to this email with your mailing address, and the titles you wish to order, and I’ll send you the details to arrange payment.

Titles included are:

• EVERY WILLING HAND

• FAIRY TALES ARE TRUE

• PLANET EARTH DEMANDS

• DISTRIBUTE OR DESTROY

• MAN AND THIS MYSTERIOUS UNIVERSE

• A SUFI WENT TO WAR

• AN INTERVIEW WITH SHAMCHER BRYN BEORSE

• LETTERS: SHAMCHER BEORSE AND CAROL SILL

I should tell you that Amazon.com sometimes offers sudden super-discounts. If you are in the US, it may be worth your while to check and compare the cost. (For example, as I write this, Fairy Tales Are True is only $6.96, and Every Willing Hand is $5.71!)

Still available for listening

Part 1 of the interview and reading on Writers Radio of Shamcher’s A Sufi Went to War is still available as a podcast here, along with Part 2, on his earlier book, Man and This Mysterious Universe, which features varied readings by the Writers Radio team, and a continued interview.

Listen to archived podcasts - the Writers Radio features on two of Shamcher’s books:

Part I - A Sufi Went to War. Part 2 - Man and This Mysterious Universe

Letters to Mansur from Moineddin

Shamcher’s friend, Mansur Johnson, recently published this 440 page book, now available on Amazon.

The author, Moineddin Jablonski, wrote the editor and annotator, Mansur Johnson, a number of letters between 1975 and 1980. When Moineddin and Mansur met Samuel L. Lewis in the late 1960s, Lewis was beginning to receive the transmission of Sufi Dances. This expression of devotion and joy spread around the world and became known as the Dances of Universal Peace (DUP). For 30 years, Moineddin guided this expression with wisdom and compassion while facing severe physical health challenges. The intimate sharing between two friends, Moineddin and Mansur, forms the basis of this book. The importance of this collection is that Moineddin Jablonski was the designated successor of Samuel L. Lewis, who was the recipient of the baraka, or blessing, of Hazrat Inayat Khan. Link here for more info or to buy on Amazon.

Very late in my life, in 1948 when I was 52 years old… I had chosen engineering before I knew Inayat Khan. In fact, I didn’t know what I wanted to study. My father asked me and I said, “Well, something in the line of physics, medicine, geology, jusrisprudence, the whole lot.” And finally I had to concentrate on one thing so I took engineering because then you can travel and see things in various countries, and I wanted to travel, I wanted to see if the world was round.

So one time, when I was the managing director of a small company, and I was in Paris I saw in the National Science Foundation of France a story about energy from the ocean. There were tides, waves, but especially the temperature difference between surface water and deep water. You put in a steam engine there. The warm water of the surface near the tropics evaporates, boils in a boiler, when you lower the pressure, when you pump air out. That steam that develops from this boiling runs a turbine, the turbine runs a generator. And after the turbine, the steam is condensed and this steam apart from being condensed is then fresh water. So you do two things with this machine: you produce energy and water.

In California we had a great water shortage at that time. We still have but we have forgotten that, now we have a power shortage. Our power and water government agencies cannot cooperate, they have nothing to do with each other. That is one reason why it is so difficult to promote OTEC.

Anyway, I dropped everything else when I found out about this, I said to myself, “This is what the world needs. This is what California needs, the United States, Canada, the world.”

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Thanks for responding, sharing, and subscribing to these excerpts from the archives of Shamcher Bryn Beorse.

• Feel free to reply to this post if you have Shamcher stories, photos or correspondence to share.

• The Shamcher Bulletin is edited by Carol Sill, whose newsletter, “Personal Papers”, is HERE.

• If you’re a friend of Shamcher, and have a book or something you’d like us to share here, please get in touch!

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The end of April is marked by the dates of Shamcher’s birth (April 26, 1896) and his passing (April 29, 1980).

In years past, the remembrance has been both formal and informal. Some with just a reminder reiterating the call to take some of his approach into our own life paths. That is the impulse behind The Shamcher Bulletin - to share his approach and world-view with those who can see that formal activity, though helpful for some, or for a certain time, is no longer the thing. Just as he donated his body to science, it looks like he has dissolved into the marvelous mysterious universe, leaving us to solve our problems by ourselves. As he told Sabira, “When I die, Sabira, I will not reincarnate. I will have become dissolved in the Universe.”

Yet how do we explain the equally mysterious communication that continues on, active and living? Could it be that he never left? Or was he never here in the first place? There is paradox and mysticism in this reality: in life he often said, “I don’t exist,” yet somehow we may feel that he exists more than ever.

Past issues of the Bulletin have featured articles and memories at this time of year. Here’s last year’s Birthday note:

Shamcher Bulletin

Happy Birthday Shamcher!

The Shamcher Bulletin brings you snippets from Shamcher’s writings that might help frame and context our experience of the world we live in today. This issue features some of Shamcher’s writings, along with memories from Sabira Scott. April 26th and 29th…

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4 years ago · 10 likes · 6 comments · Carol Sill

This week is also a good time to reread this 40th anniversary Remembrance issue with memories from his son, and other close Sufis.

Shamcher Bulletin

Remembrance

Welcome to the remembrance issue! Today is the 40th anniversary of Shamcher’s passing, a time to take some of his ideas and approach into our own life paths. Let’s share our gratitude for all that Shamcher did in his lifetime, and his mystic contact through the Sufis that brought him deeply into the world of economics, energy, employment and more. He b…

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6 years ago · 16 likes · Carol Sill

Last April, we honoured his Urs with a virtual meditation time together on the 29th, the day of his Urs. This year, the remembrance opens to each of us depending entirely upon our receptivity. Informal and free-form “intuition meetings” such as this need not be rare, or based in the calendar. Yet still, in this last week of April, each year we find our own way to remember him, think of his work, and be in touch in intuition. We remember Shamcher, with ineffable gratitude.

Inayat Khan in Norway

Hazrat Inayat Khan wrote in his diary (1923-1926):

I gave some lectures in the University of Christiania and for the Theosophical Society there. Destiny brought me together with a soul who belonged to us; I only had to go to Christiania in order to find her. It was Fröken Susanna Kjösterud, a soul whose heart was open to the Message. The Message only had to reach there in order to find response in her. Those who became interested in my teaching, including Herr Björset1, formed a group in Oslo, which was carried by Fröken Susanna Kjösterud. I found a different atmosphere in Norway from that I had felt in Stockholm. People there seemed to be of democratic spirit and they responded more readily to the Message. I went from there to Bergen, a beautiful place near mountains. The atmosphere in that place helped my lectures to make a greater and deeper impression upon the people there. Fröken Thistle and some others became mureeds, and the work has been continued there since then.

Inayat in Bergen

A fascinating extensive article Guest Room : Inayat in Bergen sheds more light on these early days.

One day, while exploring the closed stacks of the University in Bergen, where she works as a conservator, Nirtan Pasnak made an astonishing discovery : a well used German edition of “The Soul Whence and Whither” by Hazrat Inayat Khan. Tucked in an envelope at the back of the book was a photo of Pir-o-Murshid, such as were sometimes given to mureeds when they were initiated. …. Read the full article in The Inner Call

Shamcher’s Early Writing

(The article in The Inner Call goes on to mention Shamcher’s early writing….)

In the early 1920’s Shamcher was very active in the Theosophical society, travelling around Norway and giving lectures, and his book Klodens Sang [Song of the Globe] was published in 1923, before he met Inayat. Miraculously, this book is also in the University Library in Bergen.

Here is an excerpt that explains the closeness of thinking and feeling Bjørset had with that of Murshid and why this connection was so immediately established:

Do you have a garden, where you are a gardener or a priest? Where fruits and roots grow and thrive under the care of your hands, where the branches of trees bend down to you in happiness? Do you believe that they are longing only for the earth and water? Don’t you know that they have a strong longing to be enveloped by the warmth of your personality, to bathe themselves in the rays of sympathy that radiates from you? 

(translation from Norwegian from Brynjolf Bjørset, Klodens Sang, Olaf Norlis Forlag, Kristiania 1923, p.15)

Shamcher interviewed by Wali Ali

A few brief excerpts from - Interview with Shamcher Bryn Beorse—12/14/75

Let me first mention that there was something we called "Suresnes Sickness," and that was a feeling some people had when they had been there for awhile, and they felt very insignificant and they felt they didn't know anything, and they had come there in great expectations of expanding their ego. And, instead of that, their ego was negated.

****

When a disciple feels that he is fulfilling the mission given to him by his teacher, then he feels a successor; and in that sense every teacher has had successors, in plural. And sometimes in his enthusiasm, and perhaps to simplify things, such a disciple writes that he is the successor—and he is right in that sense—but if he refuses another who also feels that he's a successor, he may be wrong. There are successors; some of them may be, from the eternal point of view, even greater than a teacher, who knows? But they are not the same as the teacher; they don't represent him in all spheres and in all senses. And in that sense there is a succession. But if any one of these claims to be the One Successor, then he repudiates a great amount of disciples— perhaps in some cases, everybody but himself. The great world teachers, Jesus—who was his successor? John, Peter, Paul? Of course none of them, but all of them. Buddha, who was his successors? The Hinayanists? the Mahayanists? the Zens? Not any one of them, not any one disciple, but all of them, and yet none of them in the full sense of the consciousness and the characteristics of the Buddha. Who was the successor of Mohammed? Immediately after his death there were two entirely different sects, hostile sects. And today there are many more. So the matter of succession is a personal thing; it is, as the Sufis say, "The disciples make the teacher, and when the disciple feels that he has made the teacher, he is in his own consciousness the successor, and to some extent in the outer world, a successor."

Thanks for responding, sharing, and subscribing to these excerpts from the archives of Shamcher Bryn Beorse.

• Feel free to reply to this post if you have any Shamcher stories, photos or correspondence to share.

• The Shamcher Bulletin is edited by Carol Sill, whose newsletter, “Personal Papers”, is HERE.

If you like this post, please click the heart. And your comments are always welcome.

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Welcome to the latest issue of The Shamcher Bulletin, bringing you snippets from Shamcher’s writings that might help frame and context our experience of the world we live in today. Special greeting to new subscribers!

This issue:

• Begins with two key messages from correspondence.

• Includes excerpts around his book on China (coming soon), along with a special download of Mansur’s OTEC memoir.

• Ends with Shamcher’s strong statement on earthly hierarchies.

  ---

A Sufi, as you know, is a seeker after truth, and wherever your seeking brings you, that is where you have to go. No one among Sufis is bound to any man, any rule, any organization.

How did Shamcher do it all? In correspondence he gave this simple key for protection:

After I joined my teacher I marched into other professions until I became a generalist, knowing more about money, psychology, than my original subject of engineering, being chosen by our prime minister to restore Norway’s economy after WW II crush, being sent by the United Nations to Tunisia, head of economic mission... but protect yourself against depletion by simply asking for and consciously accepting protection from GOD in your heart.

China on my Mind

With increasing geopolitical interest in China today, Shamcher wrote of his impressions of China in his 1972 novel, A State of Almost Happiness. This book is in prep for re-release in early summer. A bit of background on his real-life Chinese journey after WWII is in the section Spy? Secret Russian Gold in this past issue.

Here’s a little taste from the upcoming edition of Shamcher’s novel, along with blurbs from the original cover as published 50 years ago. It was described in the introduction by Charles Angoff as a factual novel, oscillating between fantasy and realism.

From the front cover flap:

China the inscrutable sheds its veil of secrecy and springs to exhilarating life in the pages of Bryn Beorse’s fascinating novel. An American singer has been mysteriously catapulted deep into the Chinese mainland. How did he get there? And why? Seeking the answer he becomes caught up in a series of breathtaking adventures which bring him face-to-face with the many factions of Mao Tse-tung’s China and which are climaxed by an audience with the poet-statesman himself.

The panorama that unfolds beneath the author’s skilful pen reveals a nation in painful transition: an emerging world power whose roots are still deeply entrenched in the wisdom of the past. The problems which confront it are sensitively presented by Mr. Beorse, whose long years of studying oriental culture and mysticism make him more than qualified for the task. The solutions, he suggests, cannot be provided by mere politics or economics, but must be sought within man himself. A State of Almost Happiness is, in the last analysis, a state of the mind.

Interrogation

The first thing he asked was what I was doing in China.

"Let me demonstrate," I replied; and, before he had time to collect his wits, I launched into the strains of Padmasambhava’s Hymn. The captain listened for a few minutes in pleased astonishment; then he held up his hand for me to stop.

Nonetheless, I was glad that I had managed to find even this slight opportunity to sing for him, because the next thing he wanted to know was my nationality. I replied that I was an American citizen, born and raised in Chungking, so that in effect I carried the cultures of both nations in my blood and in my voice.

"I'm very glad to be back in the land of my birth, "I added.

 "Well, then why were you so anxious to get away?"

"I wasn't at first. Your own men can vouch for it. But I suddenly remembered that China was no longer America’s friend."

The captain smiled a little at this; but then his features hardened and he launched into a lengthy tirade against America: America in Korea, America in the Taiwan straits, America in the United Nations, America—China’s arch-enemy. For a moment he seemed to have forgotten about me altogether.

“Now tell me again, what you were planning to do in China?" he asked when he finally came back down to earth.

"Well, to sing for one thing. And perhaps…" 

"Have you arranged any concerts?" 

"I am not very good in such matters, I'm afraid. And it would have taken forever to get a reply if I had written ahead; so I've just been singing for fellow workers and fellow monks.”

"What about this monk’s robe you're wearing? If you're an American, you can't very well be able to be a Buddhist monk, can you?" 

"Many of us are these days." 

"I suppose we can always check on it. Now, you started telling me that there was something else you wanted to do here. What's that?" 

"Well, I was hoping to talk with someone who could explain what the China of today is and what it wants. To the First One for instance." … to be continued.

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Mansur’s OTEC Memoir

Mansur Johnson’s memoir of Shamcher’s struggle to introduce ocean energy to the US is available for download here at no cost.

In his introduction, Mansur said: What follows is how I was guided and directed by Shamcher, who took me under his wing and worked with me and hundreds of others, to bring OTEC to the attention of the nation.

Shamcher Memoir by Mansur Johnson

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A Memoir of Bryn Beorse and His Struggle to Introduce Ocean Energy to the United States by Mansur Johnson

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I have little respect for hierarchies, for example, those represented on earth, worldly or clerical. … You understand, when I call my thought on hierarchies “idiosyncrasies” that is a play on words. I believe I am more than right. I may not know the exact degree to which this should be reduced or revised, but an awful lot has to be done. In heaven there may be a sort of hierarchy but this is never expressed on earth, not even in the most holy “orders”. You find a ditch-digger half hidden in his ditch, I see his heart miles above the bishops and yogacharies.

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Welcome to the latest issue of The Shamcher Bulletin, bringing you snippets from Shamcher’s writings that might help frame and context our experience of the world we live in today.

This issue features translation from a Norwegian book that mentions Shamcher’s wartime work. I take the liberty also of repeating here Shamcher’s autobiographical info, which he wrote for the book compiling bios of the original mureeds of Hazrat Inayat Khan. In that piece, he wrote:

When mureeds asked if Sufis should not be pacifists, Inayat replied: “If people of goodwill lay down their arms today, they will still fight: they will be forced to fight, and not in defence of their ideals any longer, but against them.”

Tally-ho

Kjersti Opstad in Oslo has kindly sent over translations of mentions of Shamcher’s wartime efforts, in the book, Tally-ho: Norwegian Fighter Pilots in Battle by Oddmund Ljone. The book also features a rare photo of him, taken while he was working with the Belgians at Grimbergen.

In the book he is described as “The Anything Man” because he could do anything, get or find anything. Kjersti said it could translate as “Jack of all Trades” - true, but that doesn’t entirely do him justice. I thought perhaps, “Renaissance Man” - fine, but that doesn’t cover the real down to earth action he was involved in. So it is back to “anything man” - a direct translation from the Norwegian.

Tally-ho! : norske jagerflygere i kamp (nb.no)

Shamcher can be seen in this photo, second from left. (from page 117)

Belgian civil workers were of great assistance at Grimbergen, when the place was being fixed and set up. Half-hidden behind Weapons Officer Hassel (with his back towards us) we can partly see Captain Brynjolf Bjørset, the anything man who could truly achieve anything. (translation from Norwegian)

Shamcher is further mentioned 2 times in this book. First at page 150-151:

But their everyday life was the war. Everything besides that was just a random glimpse of an occasional nice break. The war was always waiting for them afterwards. And the spitfire machine was standing there with its wide stripes in black and white around the tail and wings, reminding the pilots that the moments of joy always are the shortest ones in life. 

Such memories one officer remembers nearly 40 years later. He says: We were operational from the 7^th of October, I recall. It was at B60, just beside Brussels. We were quartered in a house that reminded us of a castle, with an eating space and a lounge. The only things we had of our own were our beds. The weather was starting to be cold and wet, and stone castles are not a pleasant place to stay in under such conditions. 

But we had with us one man, Bjørset was his name, and he was a phenomenal engineer, right to the tips of his fingers. The whole way up north he had found the most incredible ways to lighten our burdens. He had put down flooring in the tents and had built small campsite fireplaces, beside building landing strips and parking spaces, besides helping the technicians so they could work. 

We named him unofficial warden (vollmester) and made him Captain. It was also he who found our barracks (lemmebrakker) – only God himself knows where he got them, but he stole with an eager mind, drove out with trucks in the mornings and came back with the most incredible nice things, whether he had stolen them or used threats to get them, or if they were freely given to him we do not know.

Before the war, the “warden” had built roads and railroads in Persia, and he was extremely resourceful in crises. He learned to speak fluent Flemish in about a weeks time and that opened all the Flemish hearts and doors for him… and Wingen (an officer) went in with him.

We find another mention of Shamcher at page 214. They have now left Belgium for Holland and have just taken a short trip into an airstrip in Germany. This is in April 1945. 

The airfield had been used by the Germans and was well-equipped, with barracks, offices and repair spaces, even if Allied bombs had put the buildings to ruins, so the camp looked to be in a rather horrible state. But the Norwegians made it into a cosy camp anyhow. “The warden”, Captain Bjørset, was delighted to find so many fabulous ruins to work with.

Unorganized?

Shamcher often wrote about his recollections of this effort, particularly as the experience related to hierarchies:

During World War II in liberated Belgium a crowd of civilians came to our air field and wanted to help. As an Officer of the Royal Air Force I was singled out to receive and accept them.

My commanding officer shook his head as he looked over the sorry lot, starved, almost skeletons, dressed in rags, rheumy eyes and noses, all looking sullenly down at the snow.

I told them I was sure they counted among them men who knew more than any of us in the armed forces about the things needed to be done and that I would form no organization, no hierarchy of supervisors and supervised. They went to work immediately without forming any hierarchy among themselves either.

When barracks were built the carpenters among them guided the work. When a plumbing job came along the plumbers came forward while the carpenters dropped back into the pool of general helpers.

Once a fully-organized engineering unit arrived from Britain and became impressed and dismayed by seeing this unorganized group work both faster and better, even though in addition to their work they prepared their own food and attended to all the housekeeping chores that the soldiers had had done for them by others.

From Autobiographical Information of the early mureeds of Hazrat Inayat Khan:

Bryn Beorse (Bjørset) (Shamcher) 
In October 1923 when I was 27 years old and had traveled all over India looking for a teacher of Yoga, which I had studied from when eight years old, Sirkar van Stolk telephoned to me in Oslo: Would I translate a lecture to be given at the Oslo University by the World’s greatest mystic? “We know that you have traveled in India …”

A Theosophist friend insisted on going to the Grand Hotel together, where Inayat Khan was staying. I was irritated: this friend, too talkative, would ball up my serious interview about how to proceed with the translation – sentence by sentence or a script? Wondering how I would be able to get in my practical questions amid the heavy spiritual artillery fire I expected from my friend, I entered the room a worried man. – Inayat Khan looked up at us with laughing eyes. “Shall we have silence?” The gentle, sincere, almost apologetic tone of his voice contrasted the startling sense of his words. With a graceful bow he asked us to sit down. We seated ourselves in opposite corners of a sofa and he sat down between us and closed his eyes. So did we…I woke up, refreshed, when a bell rang. The interview was over, not a word was exchanged.

Next evening Inayat Khan gave his lecture and I translated it, after it had been given in full, without taking notes. People said I did not miss a word. I don’t know how.

I told him I liked his Message but I was already a member of the Theosophical Society and the Order of the Star in the East, so of course I could not join him. “No, of course not.” Four days later he came back from a trip. I said: “I think my membership in those other organizations was a preparation for something to come. I believe this may have come now. May I join you?” “With great pleasure.” Then he gave me practices and initiated me in a railway compartment. The people around us seemed unaware of what was going on.

I had played with God as a lusty playmate from early childhood, so could never be quite as serious and awed as some other mureeds and once, in the middle of the first Summer School in Paris, I suggested to Inayat Khan that perhaps I was not really fit for this life. He reassured me smilingly that I was, and protected me against assaults by other mureeds, in very subtle ways.

Murshida Green had asked us “What does Murshid mean to you?” “Well,” said I, “a friend, an example.” “Oh you don’t understand at all. Murshid is so much more than all that.” That same evening Murshid gave a talk but before he started he looked thoughtful, then said: “Before I start my talk I want to mention that sometimes a teacher’s best friends become his worst enemies – by lifting him up onto a pedestal and making of him an inhuman monster instead of what he is and wants to be: Just a friend, an example …”

Nevertheless, I want to ask forgiveness for my lack of respect. I even once asked Inayat whether we could give up the “Sufi” name on the Message since people misunderstood it for some Muslim sect. He said: “It could happen. But for the time being the name seems right to me, and if we did not put a name on ourselves, others would put a name on us and it might be worse.” More important is that Inayat pushed into my mind worlds of impulses that will take me eons to unravel and use.

When mureeds asked if Sufis should not be pacifists, Inayat replied: “If people of goodwill lay down their arms today, they will still fight: they will be forced to fight, and not in defence of their ideals any longer, but against them.”

In September 1926 I saw Inayat for the last time. I said: “I look forward to seeing you next summer.” “From now on,” he replied, “you will meet me in your intuition.” Then, during the first days of February 1927 I had a strange urge to travel to Suresnes, a three-four day trip by boat and rail from Norway. When I arrived others had had the same urge. Early on fifth February came the answer to why we had come. Now the Message was with us.

Inayat Khan often said “Mureeds who have never met me, never seen me, will often be closer to me than you, who know me as a person”. I am meeting such mureeds, closer to him, every day.

Berkeley, CA. U.S.A. From Shamcher’s autobiographical data. 27th July 1977.

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Thanks for responding, sharing, and subscribing to these excerpts from the archives of Shamcher Bryn Beorse.

• Feel free to reply to this post if you have any Shamcher stories, photos or correspondence to share.

• The Shamcher Bulletin is edited by Carol Sill, whose newsletter, “Personal Papers”, is HERE.

If you like this post, please click the heart. And your comments are always welcome.