THE ISLANDERS - A Fable

PINK FLOYD - Is There Anybody Out There?

"When the student is ready, the teacher will come."

In 1973, the year of my CREATION EXPERIENCE - a year whose digits add up to "20," which in Numerology signifies "The Awakening," a great spiritual teacher, Sufi Mystic Nawab-Zada Sayed Idries Shah el-Hashimi, the Sufi Teacher of the Age, revealed himself as such to me in a mystical manner not understood by the "Uninitiated," to pass on to me the secret traditions behind all religious and philosophical systems.

Superficially, this fable, which I am retelling to you, appears to be about swimmers and builders of ships. However, it is a cryptic message, a parable if you will, designed to convey meaning to those whom Jesus referred to as, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear!"

Freemasons, Sufis, Templars, Gnostics, and others who are possessed of "Double Knowledge," will see that the name of the original community in the fable, "El Ar," is an anagram for "Real," and that the name adopted by the revolutionaries of the fable is "Please," which can be arranged to form the word "Asleep."

The fable is not complete, because there are still people left here on the Island.

This is an attempt to find the "Others." Thus far, in my 43 year Quest, I have found two others.

Steve Savage "King of the Beasts"
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THE ISLANDERS - A Fable
By Nawab-Zada Sayed Idries Shah el-Hashimi
[Idries Shah was born at Simla in the Himalayas and is Grand Sheikh of the Sufis and the eldest son of the Nawab (the Mohammedan equivalent of Maharaja) of Sardana, near Delhi in India. His family originates from the principality of Pagham in the Hindu Khoosh, where his ancestors have reigned since 1221, and claims senior descent from Mohammed in Islam.]

Once upon a time, there lived an ideal community in a far-off land. Its members had no fears as we now know them. Instead of uncertainty and vacillation, they had a purposefulness and a fuller means of expressing themselves.

Although there were none of its stresses and tensions which mankind now considers essential to its progress, their lives were richer, because other, better elements replaced these things.

Theirs, therefore, was a slightly different mode of existence. We could almost say that our present perceptions are a crude, makeshift version of the real ones that this community possessed.

They had real lives, not semi-lives.

They had a leader, who discovered that their country was to become uninhabitable for a period of, shall we say, 20,000 years. He planned their escape, realizing that their descendants would be able to return home successfully, only after many trials.

He found for them a place of refuge, an island whose features were only roughly similar to those of the original homeland.

Because of the difference in climate and situation, the immigrants had to undergo a transformation.

This made them more physically and mentally adapted to the new circumstances: coarse perceptions, for instance, were substituted for finer ones, as when the manual laborer becomes toughened in response to the needs of his calling.

In order to reduce the pain which a comparison between the old and new states would bring, they were made to forget the past almost entirely.

Only the most shadowy recollection of it remained, yet it was sufficient to be awakened when the time came.

The system was very complicated but well arranged. The organs by means of which the people survived on the island were also made the organs of enjoyment, physical and mental. The organs which were really constructive in the old homeland were placed in a special form of abeyance and linked with the shadowy memory, in preparation for its eventual activation.

Slowly and painfully the immigrants settled down, adjusting themselves to the local conditions. The resources of the island were such that, coupled with effort and a certain form of guidance, people would be able to escape to a further island on the way back to their original home. This was the first of a succession of islands upon which gradual acclimatization took place.

The responsibility of this “evolution” was vested in those individuals who could sustain it. These were necessarily only a few because for the mass of the people the effort of keeping both sets of knowledge in their consciousness was virtually impossible. One of them seemed to conflict with the other. Certain specialists guarded the “special science.”

This “secret,” the method of effecting the transition, was nothing more or less than the knowledge of maritime skills and their application. The escape needed an instructor, raw materials, people, effort, and understanding. Given these, people could learn to swim, and also to build ships.

The people who were originally in charge of the escape operation made it clear to everyone that a certain preparation was necessary before anyone could learn to swim or even take part in building a ship. For a time the process continued satisfactorily.

Then a man who had been found, for the time being, lacking in the necessary qualities rebelled against this order and managed to develop a masterly idea. He had observed that the effort to escape placed a heavy and often seemingly unwelcome burden upon the people. At the same time, they were disposed to believe things which they were told about the escape operation. He realized that he could acquire power, and also revenge himself upon those who had undervalued him, as he thought, by simple exploitation of these two sets of facts.

He would merely offer to take away the burden, by affirming that there was no burden.

He made his announcement: “There is no need for man to integrate his mind and train it in the way which has been described to you. The human mind is already a stable and continuous, consistent thing. You have been told that you have to become a craftsman in order to build a ship. I say, not only do you not need to be a craftsman – you do not need a ship at all!

"An islander needs only to observe a few simple rules to survive and remain integrated into society. By the exercise of common sense, born into everyone, he can attain anything upon this island, our home, the common property and heritage of all.”

The tonguester, having gained a great deal of interest among the people, now proved his message by saying: “If there is any reality in ships and swimming, show us ships which have made the journey, and swimmers who have come back!”

This was a challenge to the instructors which they could not meet. It was based upon an assumption of which the bemused herd could not now see the fallacy. You see, ships never returned from the other land. Swimmers, when they did come back, had undergone a fresh adaptation which made them invisible to the crowd.

The mob pressed for demonstrative proof.

“Shipbuilding,” said the escapers, in an attempt to reason with the revolt, “is an art and a craft. The learning and the exercise of this lore depend upon special techniques. These together make up a total activity, which cannot be examined piecemeal, as you demand. This activity has an impalpable element, called ‘Baraka,’ from which the word ‘barque’ – a ship – is derived. This word means ‘the Subtlety,’ and cannot be shown to you.”

“Art, craft, total, Baraka, nonsense!” shouted the revolutionaries.

And so they hanged as many shipbuilding craftsmen as they could find.

The new gospel was welcomed on all sides as one of liberation. Man had discovered that he was already mature! He felt, for the time at least, as if he had been released from responsibility.

Most other ways of thinking were soon swamped by the simplicity and comfort of the revolutionary concept. Soon it was considered to be a basic fact, which had never been challenged by any rational person. Rational, of course, meant anyone who harmonized with the general theory itself, upon which society was now based.

Ideas that opposed the new one were easily called irrational. Anything irrational was bad. Thereafter, even if he had doubts, the individual had to suppress them or divert them, because he must at all costs be thought rational.

It was not very difficult to be rational. One had only to adhere to the values of society. Further, evidence of the truth of rationality abounded—providing that one did not think beyond the life of the island.

Society had now temporarily equilibrated itself within the island and seemed to provide plausible completeness if viewed by means of itself. It was based upon reason plus emotion, making both seem plausible. Cannibalism, for instance, was permitted on rational grounds. The human body was found to be edible. Edibility was a characteristic of food. Therefore the human body was food.

In order to compensate for the shortcomings of this reasoning, a makeshift was arranged. Cannibalism was controlled, in the interests of society. Compromise was the trademark of temporary balance. Every now and again someone pointed out a new compromise, and the struggle between reason, ambition, and community produced some fresh social norms.

Since the skills of boatbuilding had no obvious application within this society, the effort could easily be considered absurd. Boats were not needed—there was nowhere to go. The consequences of certain assumptions can be made to “prove” those assumptions. This is what is called a pseudo certainty, the substitute for real certainty. It is what we deal in every day when we assume that we will live another day. But our islanders applied it to everything.

The words “displeasing” and “unpleasant” were used on the island to indicate anything which conflicted with the new gospel, which was itself known as “Please.” The idea behind this was that people would now please themselves, within the general need to please the State. The State was taken to mean all the people.

It is hardly surprising that from quite early times the very thought of leaving the island filled most people with terror. Similarly, very real fear is to be seen in long-term prisoners who are about to be released. “Outside” the place of captivity is a vague, unknown, threatening world.

The island was not a prison. But it was a cage with invisible bars, more effective than obvious ones ever could be.

The insular society became more and more complex, and we can look at only a few of its outstanding features. Its literature was a rich one. In addition to cultural compositions, there were numerous books that explained the values and achievements of the nation. There was also a system of allegorical fiction, which portrayed how terrible life might have been, had society not arranged itself in the present reassuring pattern.

From time to time instructors tried to help the whole community to escape. Captains sacrificed themselves for the reestablishment of a climate in which the now concealed shipbuilders could continue their work. All these efforts were interpreted by historians and sociologists with reference to conditions on the island, without thought for any contact outside this closed society.

Plausible explanations of almost anything were comparatively easy to produce. No principle of ethics was involved because scholars continued to study with genuine dedication what seemed to be true. “What more can we do?” they asked, implying by the word “more” that the alternative might be an effort of quantity.

Or they asked each other, “What else can we do?” assuming that the answer might be “else”—something different. Their real problem was that they assumed themselves able to formulate the questions, and ignored the fact that the questions were every bit as important as the answers.

Of course, the islanders had plenty of scope for thought and action within their own small domain. The variations of ideas and differences of opinion gave the impression of freedom of thought. Thought was encouraged, providing that it was not “absurd.”

Freedom of speech was allowed. It was of little use without the development of understanding, which was not pursued.

The work and the emphasis of the navigators had to take on different aspects in accordance with the changes in the community. This made their reality even more baffling to the students who tried to follow them from the island point of view.

Amid all the confusion, even the capacity to remember the possibility of escape could at times become an obstacle.

The stirring consciousness of escape potential was not very discriminating.

More often than not the eager would-be escapers settled for any kind of substitute.

A vague concept of navigation cannot become useful without orientation. Even the most eager potential shipbuilders had been trained to believe that they already had that orientation. They were already mature. They hated anyone who pointed out that they might need preparation.

Bizarre versions of swimming or shipbuilding often crowded out possibilities of real progress. Very much to blame were the advocates of pseudo-swimming or allegorical ships, mere hucksters, who offered lessons to those as yet too weak to swim, or passages on ships which they could not build.

The needs of the society had originally made necessary certain forms of efficiency and thinking which developed into what was known as science. This admirable approach, so essential in the fields where it had application, finally outran its real meaning. The approach called “scientific,” soon after the “Please” revolution, became stretched until it covered all manner of ideas.

Eventually, things that could not be brought within its bounds became known as “unscientific,” another convenient synonym for “bad.” Words were unknowingly taken prisoner and then automatically enslaved.

In the absence of a suitable attitude, like people who, thrown upon their own resources in a waiting room, feverishly read magazines, the islanders absorbed themselves in finding substitutes for the fulfillment which was the original (and indeed the final) purpose of this community’s exile.

Some were able to divert their attention more or less successfully into mainly emotional commitments. There were different ranges of emotion, but no adequate scale for measuring them. All emotion was considered to be “deep” or “profound”—at any rate more profound than non-emotion. Emotion, which was seen to move people to the most extreme physical and mental acts known, was automatically termed “deep.”

The majority of people set themselves targets or allowed others to set them for them. They might pursue one cult after another, or money, or social prominence. Some worshiped some things and felt superior to all the rest. Some, by repudiating what they thought worship was, thought that they had no idols, and could therefore safely sneer at all the rest.

As the centuries passed, the island was littered with the debris of these cults. Worse than ordinary debris, it was self-perpetuating. Well-meaning and other people combined the cults and recombined them, and they spread anew. For the amateur and intellectual, this constituted a mine of academic or “initiatory” material, giving a comforting sense of variety.

Magnificent facilities for the indulging of limited “satisfactions” proliferated. Palaces and monuments, museums and universities, institutes of learning, theater, and sports stadiums almost filled the island. The people naturally prided themselves on these endowments, many of which they considered to be linked in a general way with ultimate truth, though exactly how this was so escaped almost all of them.

Shipbuilding was connected with some dimensions of this activity but in a way unknown to almost everyone.

Clandestinely the ships raised their sails, the swimmers continued to teach swimming…

The conditions on the island did not entirely fill these dedicated people with dismay. After all, they too had originated in the very same community, and had indissoluble bonds with it, and with its destiny.

But they very often had to preserve themselves from the attentions of their fellow citizens. Some “normal” islanders tried to save them from themselves. Others tried to kill them, for an equally sublime reason. Some even sought their help eagerly, but could not find them.

All these reactions to the existence of the swimmers were the result of the same cause, filtered through different kinds of minds. This cause was that hardly anyone now knew what a swimmer really was, what he was doing, or where he could be found.

As the life of the island became more and more civilized, a strange but logical industry grew up. It was devoted to ascribing doubts about the validity of the system under which the society lived. It succeeded in absorbing doubts about social values by laughing at them or satirizing them. The activity could wear a sad or happy face, but it really became a repetitious ritual. A potentially valuable industry, it was often prevented from exercising its really creative function.

People felt that having allowed their doubts to have temporary expression, they would in some way assuage them, exorcise them, almost propitiate them. Satire passed for meaningful allegory; allegory was accepted but not digested. Plays, books, films, poems, lampoons were the usual media for this development, though there was a strong section of it in more academic fields.

For many islanders it seemed more emancipated, more modern or progressive, to follows this cult rather than the older ones.

Here and there a candidate still represented himself to a swimming instructor, to make his bargain. Usually what amounted to a stereotyped conversation took place.

“I want to learn to swim.”

“Do you want to make a bargain about it?”

“No. I only have to take my ton of cabbage.”

“What cabbage?”

“The food which I will need on the other island.”

“There is better food there.”

“I don’t know what you mean. I cannot be sure. I must take my cabbage.”

“You cannot swim, for one thing, with a ton of cabbage.”

“Then I cannot go. You call it a load. I call it my essential nutrition.”

“Suppose, as an allegory, we say not ‘cabbage’ but ‘assumptions,’ or ‘destructive ideas’?”

“I am going to take my cabbage to some instructor who understands my needs.”

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WE WILL ALL BE TOGETHER AS ONE - AGAIN! by Steve Savage "King of the Beasts"

We're all fractionated parts of the One, like separate cups, each filled with water (Spirit, Life) from the same source. When the cup is broken (Death), the water returns to the source from which it came, drops returning to the Ocean, the One True Consciousness.

The Universe (Existence) is a Hologram, a Projection. Break it into tiny pieces and each piece retains the image of the Whole. Each one of us is everyone and everything. There are no others, only ourselves in different forms. That's why Jesus said, "I am in the Father and the Father is in Me, because I and my Father are One."

We should make every effort to see ourselves in others and to understand why, when you forgive, you are forgiven; why when you judge others, you, yourself are judged; why we were given the Golden Rule and the Two Great Commandments.

So many have tried to explain Existence in such complex technical terms, that it's no wonder there is confusion and lack of understanding. Science is now spending billions of dollars searching for the God Particle, the Higgs Boson, from which it is believed all matter originated, i.e., the "Nothingness" from which everything came by dividing itself over and over again.

Two-thousand years ago, St. Paul did his best to explain this most elusive of all mysteries to an audience of lower calibrated awareness, by saying, "By One Spirit are we all baptized into one Body, whether we bond or free, Jews or Gentiles."

We're like a string of multi-colored Christmas lights on the Tree of Life. When one bulb (body) goes out (dies), the Electricity (life) completes the circuit and returns to the Source (God) from which it came. Electricity (Life) never dies. When the burnt bulb (body) is replaced on the string with a new bulb (body), it lights up, sometimes with parts of the same electricity (Life) that once illuminated other Bulbs, accounting for prodigies, genius, talent, and belief in Reincarnation.

When all the bulbs are finally extinguished (the End Time, Kali Yuga, End of the Age, etc.), the Electricity (Life) gathers back into itself as One again (the Big Sleep, the Night of Brahman, Absolute Potentiality).

The Law of Conservation states that the sum total of energy and matter is constant; it can neither be created nor destroyed. This applies to Life, as well. The Three are a Trinity; three aspects of the One; One and the Same.



TOGETHER AGAIN
My tears have stopped falling
The long lonely nights are now at an end
The key to my heart you hold in your hand
And nothing else matters now we're together again
[ steel guitar ]
Together again the grey skies're gone
You're back in my arms now where you belong
The love that I knew is living again
And nothing else matters now we're together again
And nothing else matters now we're together again

WE MUST NEVER FORGET! REMEMBERING 911.

"WE ARE THE EAGLE"
by Steve Savage "King of the Beasts"

When you killed the Gentle Children you broke our Father’s Heart;
We cannot bear His Grief and Hurt, the tears that dare not start.
He commanded us very clearly “Thou Shall Not Kill!”
How could you harm His Loved Ones and make their voices still?
Are we really Brothers, evil as you are?
You’ve revealed yourself not of our Sun but of some Eastern Star.
When first you murdered in the Distant Past,
Our blinding rage was fierce and we reached for stones to cast.
But that Protective Mark He gave you was a shield against our Wrath;
“Do him no harm,” He said. “He’s on a different Path.”
Then among the Men of Peace you hid preaching your Scriptural Lie:
“Kill yourselves and God’s Children and you’ll be in Heaven when you die.”
O’, you evil deluded Slime beyond the most corrupt;
You foolishly attacked our Mountain a volcano long ready to erupt.
How dare you defile our Kingdom the very Land We Love!
You’re an Evil Serpent among us cloaked in the guise of a Dove.
O’, rejoice aloud of your treachery; sing songs of it in your streets;
Beat the Drums of Joy and Laughter to applaud your sinful feats.
The Eagle will soon be coming; He’s spread His Wings to fly;
He’s sharpening His Beak and Talons; His mission to make you Die.
We are the Eagle, God’s Own Bird;
Majestic in our position, Obedient to His Word.
We shall be the Witnesses at the Judgment of your Soul,
To erase your name forever from the Father’s Living Scroll.

THE SUNSPOT ENIGMA: THE SUN IS "DEAD." by Steve Savage "King of the Beasts"

The Sunspot Enigma: The Sun is “Dead”

Dark spots, some as large as 50,000 miles in diameter, typically move across the surface of the sun, contracting and expanding as they go. These strange and powerful phenomena are known as sunspots, but now they are all gone. Not even solar physicists know why it’s happening and what this odd solar silence might be indicating for our future.

Although periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, this current period has gone on much longer than usual and scientists are starting to worry—at least a little bit. Recently 100 scientists from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa, and North America gathered to discuss the issue at an international solar conference at Montana State University. Today's sun is as inactive as it was two years ago, and solar physicists don’t have a clue as to why.

"It continues to be dead," said Saku Tsuneta with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, program manager for the Hinode solar mission, noting that it is at least a little bit worrisome for scientists.

Dana Longcope, a solar physicist at MSU, said the sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, Longcope said. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. But so far nothing is happening.

"It's a dead face," Tsuneta said of the sun's appearance.

Tsuneta said solar physicists aren't weather forecasters and they can't predict the future. They do have the ability to observe, however, and they have observed a longer-than-normal period of solar inactivity. In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700. Coincidence? Some scientists say it was, but many worry that it wasn’t.

Geophysicist Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA, said pictures from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory also show that there are currently no spots on the sun. He also noted that the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C.

"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930," Dr. Chapman noted in The Australian today.

If the world does face another mini Ice Age, it could come without warning. Evidence for abrupt climate change is readily found in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. One of the best-known examples of such an event is the Younger Dryas cooling, which occurred about 12,000 years ago, named after the arctic wildflower found in northern European sediments. This event began and ended rather abruptly, and for its entire 1000 year duration the North Atlantic region was about 5°C colder. Could something like this happen again? There’s no way to tell, and because the changes can happen all within one decade—we might not even see it coming.

The Younger Dryas occurred at a time when orbital forcing should have continued to drive climate to the present warm state. The unexplained phenomenon has been the topic of much intense scientific debate, as well as other millennial-scale events.

Now, this 11-year low in Sunspot activity has raised fears among a small but growing number of scientists that rather than getting warmer, the Earth could possibly be about to return to another cooling period. The idea is especially intriguing considering that most of the world is in preparation for global warming.

Canadian scientist Kenneth Tapping of the National Research Council has also noted that solar activity has entered into an unusually inactive phase, but what that means—if anything—is still anyone’s guess. Another solar scientist, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, however, is certain that it’s an indication of a coming cooling period.

Sorokhtin believes that a lack of sunspots does indicate a coming cooling period based on certain past trends and early records. In fact, he calls man-made climate change "a drop in the bucket" compared to the fierce and abrupt cold that can potentially be brought on by inactive solar phases.

Sorokhtin’s advice: "Stock up on fur coats"…just in case.

THE SUN AWAKENS by Steve Savage "King of the Beasts"

Several years ago, for greater strength and flexibility, I added an expanded, much more advanced, Surya Namaskar, Sun Salutation as a prelude to my otherwise daily morning routine of T'ai Chi, Kung Fu, and Hatha Yoga, in that order. The asanas, i.e., poses, of the Sun Salutation, begin and end, significantly enough, in the Tadasana, the Mountain Pose. Through this very prayerful ("let Thy thoughts, be my thoughts"), personal relationship with the Giver of All Life, I have come to understand the Mind of the Sun through my 36-year quest to discover the meaning of my CREATION EXPERIENCE .

In the Beginning, the fusion reaction explosion of the Big Bang, the Awakening, the beginning of Self-Awareness, sent its matter hurtling at great speed outward in every direction in all sizes and speeds, both gases and molten solids.

Within my Creation Experience post, I wrote: "There was nothing else (but me, the Sun). No light. No darkness. Nothing! Suddenly, the Nothingness began to separate into shapes and forms. I was witnessing (creating, imagining?) Creation. What was assembling before me was a scene separated from me by a Great Abyss (the vast 93 million mile space that separates the Sun from the Earth). Across that Abyss was a Mountain (Earth) and a Sea (infinite space) off in the distance. On that Mountain, seated on a Rock, in the nearly identical pose of Rodin's "The Thinker," was a God-like Bearded Man of unimaginable anatomical perfection in Left Profile (the Sun was looking in a Mirror, i.e., Reality was observing it's Virtual Image). Nothing seemed real; the perfectly round Disc (Moon) in the "Canvas" sky appeared stage-like as well (no radiance) (♫"It's only a Paper Moon hanging over a Cardboard Sea"♪). I was observing all this as a Being of Pure Consciousness; the Life observing the Clay, as it were. The thoughts of the Man on the Mountain were my thoughts. He ("I") was asking him ("My") self the Eternal Questions. "I" the Observer, the Man the Observed, yet One and the same. He never looked toward me. It was "I" who was aware of him, he unaware of me. He stood up, walked toward the Peak of the Mountain, his back towards me. He walked around, then down, the right (East) side of the Mountain and disappeared from my view." (This is a metaphor for the Earth's rotation.) Because the Sun does not shine on the Dark Side it cannot see the Dark Side.

Although at the time, I didn't understand the true meaning of the words of the song, "It's Only A Paper Moon," which defined my Experience; that we are created in the Image and Likeness of God, that is to say, His Virtual Image, His Avatar, I see now, as this song reveals, that

"It wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me."


It's Only A Paper Moon

It's only a paper moon
Hanging over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me

It is only a canvas sky
Hanging over a muslin tree
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me

Without your love
It's a honky-tonk parade
Without your love
It's a melody played at a penny arcade

It's a Barnum and Bailey world
Just as phony as it can be
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me