When Idries Shah was alive I attended many of his Saturday evening dinner meetings where he would speak on diverse topics including many raised in his published works. On one such occasion, in August 1981, the subject of the true nature of reality came up during a discussion about people who seem to have insights: richer perceptions and powers of telepathy and precognition. “Reality as we normally think we experience it is not Reality at all,” he said. “It is an illusory approximation of Reality, a secondary world of constructs; the ancients were right about this.” He then referred to the well-known ‘Allegory of the Cave’ used by Greek philosophers, Plato and Socrates. He went on to say that, “Our world is illusory like the image on the cave wall in the allegory or like that thrown up on the inside wall of a camera obscura. The moving image, when you approach and try to grasp it, leaves you only experiencing the flat wall from which it’s reflected … the real world lies outside.”
He then said, “We become emotionally attached to the reflections, to the constructs, and it is this attachment that prevents us from making contact with Reality. We are mesmerised by secondary phenomena and it is emotion that keeps us mesmerised. This mesmerisation is also known by the Sufi term ‘sleep’. In this sense, humanity is asleep.”
At that point I asked him how should we go about connecting to the ‘Reality’ beyond the constructs? He replied very directly, “It is not difficult. It has to do with time. You can practise techniques that develop the ability to step out of time – to connect with Reality. But these techniques must not be carried out with anything to which emotion is connected. Emotion blocks the path to Reality. When such exercises are successful, try to remember the feeling you had, divorce it from the particular events and objects, and, as it were, store up this feeling so you can come to recognise it.” I wrote these words down in bed that night. (They were the most pertinent about the nature of our relationship with time I had heard up until then. The mystery of the arrow of time is something that had disturbed me since childhood.)
The next morning I picked up Shabistari’s book, Secret Garden, opened it at random and read the phrase, “In an instant, rise from time and space. Set the world aside and become a world within yourself.”
This site will grow a collection of quotations showing that individuals whilst in specific mystical states have done precisely that. To appreciate them it is necessary to have information to help you organize your thoughts. Joe Griffin and I laid out information about this in, Godhead: the brain’s big bang, an exploration of the explosive origin of creativity, mysticism and mental illness.
In a section of our book called ‘How Time is Created’ we explained, as near we could in words, how it is possible “in an instant” to rise above time and space. We described how the Universe continually oscillates in an eternal moment, materializing from nothing to make manifest the next possibility and then collapsing back to a nothing state that contains all information, and so on. We showed how it is a quality of memory we have that creates the illusion of time as an arrow going in one direction as we pass through each manifestation of matter whilst we are alive in the material realm. People who have absorbed the Oscillating Universe organizing idea, despite its seeming unlikeliness, are invited to collect quotations and submit them for inclusion.
Ivan Tyrrell
