An Unholy Vision, from Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt

“Some want to turn the clock back, harkening back to some golden age of nostalgia, when women, children, the lower class, parishioners, and people of other races and creeds knew their place; not back to the 1950s, but further back: to Dickensian times and to (corporate) feudal fiefdom. They want to wind the clock back to a time before the hard-won battles for civil rights, social reforms, and worker representation. A time long, long before the ‘woke virus’, ‘illegal immigrants’, and gender identity, when life was more conservative and white lives mattered; though with a new, fundamentalist, Christian nationalist (or Islamist, or ultra-Zionist, or even atheist) and isolationist twist. And some will go to any lengths – and I do mean any desperate, violent, draconian lengths – to bring this vile and unholy vision about.”

~ H.M. Forester, Preface to Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt.

Story of resistance only, WITHOUT additional study materials.

Availability ...

Bloggers: A pox on Googlebot

Technical stuff

For a while now, GoogleBot, via the Google Search Console, has been crawling and indexing sites "mobile first": that is, they crawl a web page as if they were a smartphone user. Only much later, if at all, do they come back and carry out a "desktop" crawl.

The issue for users of Blogger / Blogspot is that these sites detect the simulated mobile device and redirect GoogleBot, adding "?m=1" onto the end of the URL (web address).

Societal Collapse by Design: MAGA’s Big Plan

Creating distrust, division, confusion, and chaos, leading to massive societal dysfunction and collapse, is not a bug in the MAGA plan due to incompetence in personnel picks and policy: it’s a very deliberate design feature, and it will have dire global consequences.

And for accelerationists, evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Christian nationalists, it’s all a part of the big plan for the End Times.

Tariffs are imposed and tax cuts are extended yet again to the wealthy; markets crash, the dollar plummets; the US defaults on the national debt; the rich make an unhealthy profit on the downward spiral, from bitcoin and from bailouts; the natives become restless, and for “reasons of national security”, the authorities declare martial law. And “before you can say Jack Robinson”, it's fait accompli.

The Esoteric Meaning of Noah, the Ark, and the Flood: Maurice Nicoll

“There is the literal level of understanding sacred writings and there is also the psychological level of understanding them.” ... “The esoteric or inner—that is, the psychological—meaning is quite different. Esoteric teaching is always about [Humanity's] inner evolution. It is about Man's higher development and his relation to what is higher than he is.” ...

The legend of the stone soup

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, and in a land not a million miles from here, there were two hungry dervishes, who are seekers, people of the 'poor'. 

One evening in their travels, they came across a small village and decided to stay for the night. There was an inn there, just by the side of the village green. But because they had no money, the two dervishes could not afford to stay there. Sometimes the pair would take out their musical instruments and play and entertain the inhabitants with jokes and news, in exchange for a few coppers for food and lodgings. But not tonight, for it had been a long haul up into the foothills of the mountains that day, and they were both too dog-tired to play, or even raise a smile. 

So it was that the two dervishes set their scant belongings down by the side of the village green, right in front of the inn. While one of them set about stacking up the sticks of wood he had scavenged along the way, the other arranged the stones which he'd collected in his travels, into a small circle around the wood. 

Sufis Say “Put Your Hands on Your Head”

It strikes me that there’s a game that Idries Shah used to play, and encourage us to play. It’s called “Sufis say ...” which has been handed down since time immemorial from murshid to murid (master to disciple). A contemporary form still exists in elite circles, where it is called “Shah says ...”

We may know it in a lesser, degenerate form, so we are told, by the name “Simon says ...”, a game now played by small children and fools.

Habit and improvisation, and Sufi Necessity

One of the early aims of the Sufi teachings is to regain the flexibility of mind that is lost as we grow out of childhood. Almost inevitably in this abode of decay, we humans become creatures of habit. But it needn't be this way.

To quote Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine in a chapter on Habit and Improvisation:

“[Regarding] Lindauer's study of the honey-bee. Under normal conditions, there is a rigid division of labour in the hive, so that each worker is occupied on different jobs in different periods of her life.

Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt, by H. M. Forester

The second corrected draft of Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt: “A crash course in psi-fi, Romantic idealism, depth psychology, the daemonic, and Resistance”, by H.M. Forester is now available for free download. It is alternatively titled “Making a Lasting Impression”.

Note that this edition contains a fictional psi-fi story of resistance only, without additional study materials.

You can preview or download it at The Internet Archive

or download it at the Sher Point Publications, UK web site (just scroll down the page).

There’s also an entry at Goodreads.

Second (corrected) draft edition, 21 August 2024, 315 pages.

Now available also at:

• Amazon UK

and

• Amazon US

Enjoy!

The Legend of the Cake-Baking Islanders

or "The king who divined his fortune"

A king who was also an astrologer read in his stars that on a certain day and at a particular hour a calamity would overtake him. He therefore began to stockpile all manner of raw ingredients such as flour and eggs and milk and posted numerous guardians outside, stacking the materials from floor to ceiling until he could no longer leave the warehouse he had built-up. By this time he was beginning to have second thoughts about the whole matter, but he could no longer conceive of any means of escape.

Then one day a Sufi, passing by, looked in through one of the remaining small openings, took in the situation and called to the King:

'Friend, if you wish to escape, you must first of all use some of these provisions to bake me a cake.'

Andrea Wulf's Magnificent Rebels, The First Romantics: Book Review

★★★★★ Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf is a fabulous book.

In the late 18th century, what we now call Germany consisted of a great many large and small self-governing principalities and fiefdoms, and the authorities rigidly controlled a great many aspects of their subjects' lives, not least ruling on who could marry whom, or divorce, and requiring permission to travel.

The book is about the lives and works of the first Germanic Romantics, a group of philosophers, poets, artists and thinkers, who gathered for a number of years in the small and relatively free town of Jena, 150 miles south-west of Berlin, around the turn of the 18th century, and whom the author terms the Jena Set. These were people like Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling and her daughter Auguste; Johann Gottlieb Fichte; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; Alexander, Caroline, and Wilhelm von Humboldt; Novalis; Friedrich Schelling; Friedrich Schiller; August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel; Friedrich Schleiermacher; Ludwig Tieck, and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel.

If there's one takeaway from this compelling and well-rounded history that tells it “warts and all”,  it is that the wonders the German Romantics of the Jena Set wrought so energetically perfectly illustrate that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” – in their case far greater – when creative folk come together to chat and discuss a wide, inter-disciplinary range of topics, and collaborate in producing literary or artistic works. All the more so when such meetings of minds are facilitated by someone as intelligent, perceptive, informed and energising as the Jena Set's muse, Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling.

Be Still My Beating Heart: Cultivating Sakina

Well, what do I know, but it seems to me that what the writer, thinker and Sufi mystical exponent Idries Shah was doing was conducting an innovative (or should I say relatively unknown?) experiment in long-distance learning, knowing that most would have no physical contact with a Teacher, knowing that most would not convert to Islam. To re-hash what I've written about in the past, I think that working with the materials (both didactic materials and the teaching stories, which some ignore) works on the commanding self and delinquent or depraved nafs, and the self-accusatory nafs. And I sense that there is then sporadic, but increasingly reliable, activation of the inspired nafs.

However, there comes a point when looking back on the depraved nafs and self-accusatory nafs becomes counter-productive. Even at the stage of the inspired nafs, there is an element of pride involved in what one sees as ones own accomplishments, when in reality these are things which one is gifted. There needs to be a turn around.

The question is (and I think this is a gamble that Shah took) is whether working with the materials, and on ones self is sufficient to induce a self-sustaining reaction and open up the heart, the heart and other lataif, (latent organs of subtle perception), and allow one to come in contact with, and work with, something outside ones limited self; an inner guide, if you like, with whom one may engage in inner dialogue (and here there is common ground with Western esoterica, contemporary depth psychology (eg active imagination), and illuminationism (eg imaginal world, 'al am al-mithal)).

Nile Green’s “Fantastical” Hatchet Job About Ikbal and Idries Shah: Book Review

★☆☆☆☆ Nile Green's “fantastical” book, Empire's Son, Empire's Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah, about Ikbal Ali Shah and his son, the writer and thinker Idries Shah who helped establish the Sufi mystical tradition in the West, comes in the same ignoble tradition as James Moore and L.P. Elwell-Sutton's hatchet jobs, and they will hardly get a footnote in history. Had the author taken a less adversarial and scornful stance and been able to gain the confidence and cooperation of members of the Shah family that he evidently desired and sought, the work, and its sources, might have been greatly improved.

According to a recent and uninspiring review in the New York Times by Robyn Creswell, “Ikbal and Idries are tricky subjects for biography. They kept no diaries and left only scattered correspondence”. And yet Tahir Shah managed to collect and publish an 8-volume set of information to coincide with the centenary of his father, Idries Shah's birth, on 16 June 2024. So a great deal of interesting and useful material has been left out of this work.

The evidence appears very damning. However, with the sparse use of citations, it's difficult to tell where Nile Green's imaginative re-enactment and speculation delivered as statements of fact leave off and where hard evidence begins. This gives the illusion of intimate acquaintance.