Sufis, poet-knappers, Shah’s poppycock on Shakespeare
Charles Upton’s case is recognizable for anyone who lived through the New Age seventies, and I give a somewhat indirect or riddling discussion here, linking to Darwiniana, Rumi, sufism, poets….
The Tibetans and Sufis were lustful in their hearts to kidnap poets for their causes, to bestow celebrity glitz and social legitimation. Upton’s fate in that regard is the standard game: turn him into a promoter of anti-modernism. To the term ‘pandit-knapper’ we should add that of ‘poet-knapper’.
They tried that with me (I was a very good poet, maybe, or else no celebrity) and I found them out.
After all the talk of sufi love the tactics of hatred in the ‘anti-modern jihad’, fully evident in Upton’s junky System of Antichrist, are breathtakingly disingenuous.
The loss of autonomy is also tragic.
We aren’t kidding here if we are indulging in warnings about sufistic quicksand paths, keeping in mind that we can’t judge a whole movement by its behind the scenes operators. But in the final analysis we need to call a spade a spade and warn a new generation to be wary of the exploitations of spiritual paths. These issues can’t be lumped together the usual analysis of cults, although that is a relevant additional discourse.
We are so conditioned to spiritual reverence in a false mode that the history of sufism appears to us only as some museum worship of the Rumis and their sagas. The question of poets in sufism is especially ancient, and it seems as though the ‘sufis-come-lately’ of later times are predatory operators trying to imitate that ancient world, unable to do so.
I note in passing Idries Shah’s absurd attempt at another variant of poet-knapping in his claim that Shakespeare was a sufi. Proof?
Nonsense.
The Gurdjieff Con 