The Work, Mantra, Song, and Cultural Borrowing

[iamthatis]

I thought to open up this thread based on a brief email exchange I recently had with William Chittick.

When I first started on this path, I met a guy who held an introductory course is esoterica. Although it sounds like New Age COINTELPRO, he's the guy who introduced me to Gurdjieff, SOTT and, by association, the C's. At that stage in my life, it was mind-blowing. However, as I'm learning, a little bit of false knowledge is worse than no knowledge at all.

In light of recent events, as I've written about elsewhere, I have come to distrust his guidance in my early days (long story), and I've undertaken some lateral research about what he instructed in this course.

One thing in particular he shared with us group of youngsters was his Sufi mantra practice. Mantra (translated as 'mind protection') he claimed was a very powerful tool for Working on honing the attention; preventing the formatory apparatus or sub-vocalizing mind from overtaking the machine and draining energy; stimulating the vagus nerve, with numerous benefits; all wrapped in an act of prayer and supplication.

He instructed us in the creation of 'malas', or bead necklaces, of 99 beads, one for each of the Beautiful Names of God according to the Sufi understanding. The physical action of moving the fingers from bead to bead assures that the body does not go to sleep when engaged in this practice. The mantra he shared was, 'la illaha illallah', which translates roughly into 'There is no God but God'.

I still have the mala, and last winter I made use of this practice. This year I decided to email William C. Chittick about his understanding of this practice, as he is perhaps the most knowledgable and accessible person I could think of on the topic.

I gave him a brief background, and then asked what 'la illaha illallah' means, and also if he thought this mantra practice was safe for someone who is not educated in the tradition. I framed in a way that would be familiar to many people on the forum - it's imperative to research any form of medicine before taking it. With any kind of healing, there is a lot to learn, whether it is following a specific protocol, watching out for side effects, and all of that.

Here is Dr. Chittick's reply:

Dear [iamthatis],
The word-by-word translation is "no god but God." People add "there is" in English because it needs a verb (in Arabic the verb is understood).
The sentence is known as "the words asserting God's unity" and is taken as the first principle of Islamic faith. The second principle is prophecy (summarized by the sentence "Muhammad is God's messenger").
I attach a couple of things I have written about dhikr, that is, "remembrance" or "mention," the practice of reciting this formula or a divine name.
As for being safe, no, it is not safe, unless you have two preconditions: First, you must be a practicing Muslim (regular prayers, fasting, etc.--faithful observance of the "Five Pillars"). Second, you must be given permission to recite the formula by a qualified shaykh (teacher, spiritual guide), his qualification having to do with his affiliation with a line of teachers going back to Muhammad. If you do not have the two preconditions, you are playing with fire, as we say in English (and Satan, according to the Quran, was created from fire, as was the ego, which wants to aggrandize itself). This is about the best I can do in brief. For background, see Murata & Chittick, The Vision of Islam.
Sincerely,
William C. Chittick

So from this perspective it could be that my first teacher wasn't following these instructions. Although much more educated in the Islamic tradition than I am, he was not a Muslim. And my guess is that he had never been given permission to recite the formula. He had a sort of 'smorgasbord' approach to esoteric practices - one spoonful from here, a dollop from there, some garnish from another place altogether. This kind of spirituality is common, and I think few really know what the consequences are for the Soul for this kind of plate-heaping.

So what are the implications here? I want to borrow from Laura's research on Tom Lethbridge:

In Cambridge, Lethbridge and wife moved into Hole House, an old Tudor mansion on the south coast of Devon. Next door to him lived a little old white-haired lady who assured Lethbridge that she could put spells on people who annoyed her and that she was able to travel out of her body at night and wander around the district. She explained that if she wanted to discourage unwanted visitors, she had only to visualize a five-pointed star in the path of the individual and they would stay away. Lethbridge, of course, was skeptical.

But, being an experimenter, Lethbridge was trying the visualization one evening while lying in bed. That night, his wife awakened with the feeling that somebody else was in the room. She could see a faint glow of light at the foot of the bed, which slowly faded. The next day the old lady came to see them and told them that she had come to “visit” them the previous night and had found the bed surrounded by triangles of fire.

Leaving aside whether or not we can prove this story to be anything more than a subjective experience, there are two important points we would like to make. The first one is that somehow, this practice of “visualizing pentagrams” seems to have a causal relationship to the appearance of the old woman in Lethbridge’s bedroom. It was almost as though the practice “attracted” the visitor, possibly even inspiring the wish or compulsion to visit. The second is that the visualized pentagrams appeared as triangles of fire. Theories of how of hyperdimensional objects might appear in fourth dimensional space-time, or how four dimensional objects might appear in three dimensional space time, in mathematical terms, lends a modicum of credibility to this story. If the old woman had seen fiery pentagrams, we would not take such notice of the event. That a pentagon in our world might appear as a triangle in another realm suggests something very mysterious here.

So, from this I learn that (1) visualizing can call in unwanted attention. Does mantra practices do the same? I would say yes - there's no reason to assume that visualizing (light) would call in attention and mantra (sound) would not. Both are modes of carrying vibrational information, and it's hard to think that 4D STS would be somehow deaf to mantra. The other thing I can learn is (2) What appears on this 3D plane will not look the same as what it truly is.

In that sense, Chittick's warning about Satan and ego make all the more sense. As one attempts to 'find God [Allah]' in this way, without the proper foundational groundwork, you become somewhat of a magnet for the 'Shaitans', 'Satan' [STS forces] who move to engage you. For instance, they appear in the guise of encouraging angels, setting off some nice neuro-chemical sparks, and subtly bid you to pray with the egoic Aim of 'I will do this practice to hone my attention', all the while leaving out the primary esoteric Aim of, for instance 'I will do this practice to hone my attention so I can learn to be of service to All and Everything.' The practice becomes STS.

So this is one of the dangers of cultural borrowing, or the 'smorgasbord' approach to certain kinds of Work. It's like, "Whoa! Those Sufis sure seem exotic and mystical. I think I'll try some of that spicy stuff myself." And then you spend the next three days clutching the toilet bowl. Or, sadly, a lifetime. Without a spiritual support network that has strove to understand the 'medicine' being taken, how to take it, and the side effects (ie. various kinds of attack) this is plain dangerous. Perhaps in the Sufi tradition there are certain checks and balances (or supplements, to continue with the metaphor) that allow one to call on God in this way that can bring healing and not harm.

Now, some caveats. I do realize that even belonging to such a cultural context doesn't offer 100% protection, given the way culture is mostly distorted as a STS-program-installation station, tailored to each people and their history. Also, I don't know how to think about Chittick's warning in relation to Islam - his warning could be an expression of the jurist's 'exoteric face' of Islam preventing undue exploration into its 'esoteric heart', via a series of rules and regulations that must be followed in order to be received as an initiate, with good ol' Satan as the threat of disobedience. And finally, I also note that Gurdjieff ran around the world collecting his 'fragments of a lost teaching', so the 'smorgasbord' approach in itself isn't necessarily bad.

Suffice to say, this warning of Chittick's really hit home for me as I begin to look back at what I've been doing these past three years - looking back and cringing. It's kind of like how I look back on my high school drinking-and-driving days. What a nightmare. But - live and learn. So I thought this line of thinking would be useful to share, and Chittick's warning can probably be applied to mantra work in general - not as a 'halt Work' order, but as an invitation to be very careful about what medicine we use to clean our machines.

How wrong it is to assume that I know what I'm doing.

 

[seek10]

Why don't try EE - Prayer of the Soul(POTS)? If you want, you can use a beed necklace as a counter. POTS comes with words and visualization of the meaning of it which is much more universal.