Wisdom and common sense in the Sufi Way

In Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way, the writer, thinker and Sufi mystical teacher, Idries Shah wrote: "There is no wisdom where there is no common sense: it cannot under those conditions find any expression."

In response to this quote, in a recent on-line discussion, a friend wrote: "We are, as Al Ghazali points out in his Niche for Lights, surrounded by symbols and metaphors in our "everyday life" that potentially, if looked at carefully, can act as a bridge to higher realities i.e. "the metaphorical is the Bridge to the Real" but if we cannot understand those metaphors or symbols in their most ordinary sense and what they mean in commonsensical terms, it will do us little good to "fly" toward the "esoteric".

Whilst I agree with that up to a point, and agree with the need to first carry out the preliminary work of learning how to learn before moving on to higher things, I'd still like to take this further.

Shah's use of the term "common sense" might not be quite what we think it is. When people say that "you haven't got the sense you were born with", this perhaps comes a little closer?

The Heart's Code by Paul P. Pearsall: Book review

Product description

The Heart's Code: Tapping the Wisdom and Power of Our Heart Energy, by Dr. Paul P. Pearsall, is a fascinating synthesis of ancient wisdom, modern medicine, scientific research, and personal experiences that proves that the human heart, not the brain, holds the secrets that link body, mind, and spirit.

You know that the heart loves and feels, but did you know that the heart also thinks, remembers, communicates with other hearts, helps regulate immunity, and contains stored information that continually pulses through your body? In The Heart's Code, Dr. Paul Pearsall explains the theory and science behind energy cardiology, the emerging field that is uncovering one of the most significant medical, social, and spiritual discoveries of our time: The heart is more than just a pump; it conducts the cellular symphony that is the very essence of our being.

Full of amazing anecdotes and data, The Heart's Code presents the latest research on cellular memory and the power of the heart's energy and explores what these breakthroughs mean about how we should live our lives. By unlocking the heart's code we can discover new ways of understanding human healing and consciousness and create a new model for living that leads to better health, happiness, and self-knowledge.

Nasrudin, the Wise Fool: I think you are right!

There was a magical exchange across at the Facebook page of the Web Organization for Research into Knowledge (W.O.R.K.) the other day, and I feel that it is well worth reproducing here, for posterity, before it is lost in the labyrinthine archives. But first, a little more context.

Humour in the Sufi Way

At the Facebook Page for the writer, thinker and Sufi mystical teacher, Idries Shah, the page owner had been posting one quote from the works of Idries Shah each day and folk were commenting on those quotes. There were a couple of relevant quotes on the page, taken from the book Special Illumination, which also help explain the use of humour by the Sufi mystics:

"Jokes are structures, and in their Sufic usage they may fulfil many different functions. Just as we may get the humour nutrient out of a joke, we can also get several dimensions out of it on various occasions: there is no standard meaning of a joke."

"One of the characteristics of many truly metaphysical jokes (that is, tales and quips intended to jolt the consciousness) is that they are viable in several different ranges of meaning."

One of the commentators, B.D., thoughtfully explained that: "The Nasrudin tales are perhaps the best example of the 'metaphysical joke' genre. In any one tale it is difficult to tell, solely by looking at his external behavior whether the Mulla [Nasrudin] is 1) a wise man 2) a fool 3) a wise man who is acting the part of a fool as a mirror for his audience, or 4) a fool who is rationalizing his foolish behavior in order to make himself appear wise. All of these possibilities are present in the best Nasrudin jokes, and while we are on the topic, all of these possibilities (in so far as Nasrudin is a mirror) are present in our own behavior." [Nasrudin holds up a mirror to our faces, so that we can see our wayward self reflected in the jokes].

Scorpion Soup by Tahir Shah: Book review

Scorpion Soup: Dancing to a different drum
☆☆☆☆☆

Tahir Shah has been steeped in traditional storytelling, folklore, legend and creative mythology from an early age and he was brought up in a family gifted in the art and possessing vivid creative imagination. This shines through in the interlinked short stories which comprise Scorpion Soup: A story in a story, which was inspired by the One Thousand and One Nights.

As each tale is recounted and segues into the next -- as if hinting at and mimicking the world itself emerging and blossoming in a stream of consciousness -- the reader is tantalized by what he has read and drawn into and drawn along by what "moreish" tale might come next. Tales not only of creative imagination, but also -- as is the way of the world -- partly-cautionary tales about its wayward cousin, spurious imagination; at times recurring tales of wondrous destiny and also of less happy fate; tales whose apparently-opposing warp and weft are craftily and necessaily woven together to augment the rich tapestry of life.

(6) Time and Time Again (Shadowlands)

Time and Time Again tells the story of difficult decisions and hard times for the common people with the rise of a violent movement of religious fanatics, the Hujardi, sweeping through the land of Gilgamar.

"The culture that was to become so famed for its profound humanity, its immense treasury of learning, its paradisal gardens and its grand architecture hung onto life for so many long years with no more secure a purchase on life than a mountain flower clinging to a crevice in a sheer rock face, or an oasis in a desert. And now a gargantuan monster rears up, threatening to rock the very foundations of our own frail societies."

~ Tenzing Jangbu Rinchen.

Time and Time Again is a short novel, circa 50,000 words, in the genre of "mystical faction". It is book 6 in the Shadowlands series.

The book is available for the Kindle at Amazon UK, Amazon US and European web sites. ASIN: B00AWU9YPK. If you don't have a Kindle, simply google "free kindle reading apps".

You can also find the book at Goodreads.

• By Etienne de L'Amour ~ Google+

What would Idries Shah think of social media?

Someone across at Idries Shah's Facebook page recently asked what the late writer and thinker would have made of social media like Facebook.

I'm sure Shah would have had many things to say about on-line social networking: some rather positive about the way the internet can bring people together from far-flung places and help disseminate information (as well as misinformation and disinformation), and doubtless he'd also make some rather astute and less complimentary observations.

I wouldn't like to second guess the man, however, but there are some things in our own fields of expertise that we are perfectly capable of working out for ourselves. We don't need to be advanced Sufi mystics to ask ourselves why, for example, over 900,000 people at Facebook would fall for a scam like the R.I.P. Morgan Freeman Facebook page and not bother to check reliable sources elsewhere to find that the actor is in reality still very much alive; or – better still – why we might have fallen for such a patent falsehood. Or why, in their wisdom, Facebook has still not deleted the page, in spite of thousands of Facebook users reporting it as a distasteful scam. Perhaps because the inalienable constitutional right to free speech outweighs harm done or outweighs the simple common sense that we were once born with?

Anyhow, shortly after that question was posted, someone followed me across at Twitter, and rather than simply click to follow them back, I had a look at their public profile.

Etienne de L'Amour: An interview with myself

Q: What prompted you to write the books in the Shadowlands series?

Etienne: The roots of the idea go back a long way ... indeed such things perhaps go back further than we might imagine?

One early influence, which prompted the idea of the mystics and their mountain retreat at babs chu, was the 1937 film, Lost Horizon, which I watched as a child, much of which was set at a mythical place called Shangri-la in the valley of the Blue Moon. Another was reading the explorer Alexandra David-Neel's With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet. Much later, as a young adult, I studied the original 1933 novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton, as part of a creative writing course. By that time I'd also found an interest in esoteric traditions and spiritual ways such as Buddhism and Zen; and I was intrigued by the possibility that there might be more to the world than met the untutored eye. Something far more subtle, hidden and largely forgotten.

Another major influence was a nervous breakdown I experienced in the mid-1980s, which I'd describe as “blowing my mind on God”. It was a rememberance or awakening of sorts that went awry, and one for which I was at that time utterly ill-prepared.

In the age of information ...

“In the age of information, ignorance is a choice.”

~ Donny Miller.

• By Etienne de L'Amour ~ Google+

The Bridge Builder by Will Allen Dromgoole

An old man, going a lone highway,
Came, at the evening, cold and gray,
To a chasm, vast, and deep, and wide,
Through which was flowing a sullen tide.

The old man crossed in the twilight dim;
The sullen stream had no fear for him;
But he turned, when safe on the other side,
And built a bridge to span the tide.

“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim, near,
“You are wasting strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day;
You never again will pass this way;
You've crossed the chasm, deep and wide-
Why build you this bridge at the evening tide?”

The builder lifted his old gray head:
“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,
“There followeth after me today,
A youth, whose feet must pass this way.

This chasm, that has been naught to me,
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be.
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building this bridge for him.”

• By Etienne de L'Amour ~ Google+

Excerpt from Thank You, I Understand: First chapter

1. The morning after the night before

It was quite late in the morning by the time Rocky Rhodes finally made it into town, little knowing that he had a first appointment with destiny that day, and as yet still blissfully ignorant of the fact that his every move was being watched, recorded and later scrutinized, as it had been for quite some time.

Mother had insisted that he get some food in his churning stomach before he left and, bless her cotton socks, she had put on her pinny and busied herself in the kitchen to make him a bulging bacon and egg sandwich. He probably looked as bad as he felt, and she was no fool.

Looking up from the sports page of his daily snoozepaper, his father had quickly taken in and summed up the situation with a stereotypically grumpy “You look like warmed up bowel movements,” by way of greeting when Rocky had finally clambered out of the pit and made his way downstairs. Well, his words were a little more choice than that, but you get the picture.

“They're playing your song on the radio, I see ...” Rather too appropriate and timely for comfort, it was a twelve bar blues number about some drunken low-life ending up flat out on the tiles again. That kind of thing happened a lot in Rocky's life. He'd read somewhere, in one of the underground student magazines that it was called synchronicity.

Or wishful thinking, a wise voice inside his head corrected him, both denying and confirming his beliefs at one and the same time. That also happened a lot in his life.

“And a very good morning to you, too, Dad,” he'd lilted in return.

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,” his father had retorted. And he, of all people, should know that.

Quotes from Thank You, I Understand by Etienne de L'Amour

“You know, we worry about the Bomb, yet there are millions of people out there with their thumb on the self-destruct button.”

“He had been diagnosed as suffering from atypical schizophrenia. Lord, how he hated that awful-sounding label. It conjured up visions of some deranged maniac escaped from a secure mental hospital.”

“It suddenly hit Rocky what an utter shambles his life had become. Well, not become so much as been since he could first remember. He was a walking disaster area. Some people couldn't put a foot wrong and here he was with two left feet, pointing in opposite directions. One wave short of a bloody shipwreck.”

“God, how he loved that synchronicity, ever-patiently and non-judgementally restoring his wavering faith in destiny and the divine. And straight after that came another soulful favourite of his: Van Morrison singing Warm Love. That was Donna's favourite track of all time. He couldn't listen to that song now without making the connection and tears welling up in his eyes.”

If these quotes have whetted your appetite, you may enjoy Thank You, I Understand, a cautionary tale of sex, drugs, psychosis, love and redemption, by Etienne de L'Amour.

• By Etienne de L'Amour ~ Google+

Tips for writers #5: Getting citations

Getting noticed as an author

Like many authors, you may collect snippets from reviews in the media which heap praise on your books, and then post these on your web site. A typical snippet might read "... absolutely brilliant!" ~ The Times.

Give full publication details

This is fine for your own purposes and to woo your own readership, but if you would like to later have these reviews and interviews cited and used in a Wikipedia article about you or your book, then it would be beneficial to provide more information, including the name of the author, the publication, the article or column title, the date, the page range and, if the material is on-line, the web address. Avoid simply giving a web address, as on-line resources may well be moved or taken down at a later date, leaving a broken link, a process known as "link rot". This will make it far easier for editors and readers at Wikipedia to locate and verify the source and for editors to decide for themselves how to represent the review or interview in the Wikipedia article.