Mystical Sufi Narrative and Personal Childhood Anecdote

speaks of the multiplicity of valid Ways to Deep Truth. The acceptability of many ways is supported in the tales from the millennial oral tradition of the Sufi Masters in their Teaching Stories. One of them, What Befell the Three, is attributed to the early 18" Century Sufi teacher, the Dervish Murad Shami. In it, an apparition is mobilized by the concentrated Truth seeking efforts of three Sufi Dervishes named Yak, one, Do, two and Se, three. When this “...white smoke head of the very old man...” was asked what he was, he answered “...| am what you think me to be...have you never heard the saying ‘There are as many ways to the Deep Truth as there hearts of man.” In the narratives about the lives of the Mevievi Islam dervishes called Munaquib el-Arafin (1353), Jalaludin Rumi, the Sufi saint, instructs his ill and troubled petitioner to ask forgiveness from the Christian he recently spat on saying “...whether a ruby or a pebble, there is a place on His hill, there is a place for all...” Cole Barks and Michael Green’s The Illuminated Prayer (2000) notes that the Rumi follower, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, a modern Sufi guru, was said to be keenly aware how quickly spiritual entheogenic systems can become amphetamine-like and “...develop rigid marching orders ...which turn into a dumb obsession with other people’s behavior...” It appears that entheogenic and amphetamine spiritualities can coexist contemporaneously, in Islam as well as in all the other of the world’s great religions. One day, sneaking home from school, taking the long way around via Troost, | was spotted and chased up some stairs into an apartment building’s dark hall. Terrified, | swung hard and hit the leading angry and noisy head with a propitiously found snow shovel that had been left near the apartment’s entrance. An ambulance was called to tend to the twelve-year-old, transiently unconscious, Lutheran boy. He recovered completely within a day and the chases after school and my desperate escapes stopped suddenly, never to reappear. After several months, our family crossed the socioeconomic divide in Kansas City to a more tolerant, upper middle class, Southside neighborhood near Rockhill Road, to a suburban home, one block from Missouri’s border with Kansas. There, persecution for my Jewishness took more subtle forms such as not being permitted to play teen-age golf with my friends, though invited, on their Blue Hills and Kansas City Country Club’s golf courses. It 149 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013649