funny, i was just reading about the yezidis the other day in a book called Secret Societies by Arkon Daraul (Idries Shah).
seems Shah tracked down an offshoot of the sect in London, back in the 1950’s.
what i found interesting was an altered state of consciousness which was induced in Shah at one of their rituals. “Daraul” describes it like this:
“One did not lose consciousness, I found. The mind became more and more awake, while the body seemed to recede in some way into complete unimportance. The sensation as it grew was one of the most ineffable relief of joy or happiness, such as one had only felt before in moments of exceptional fulfillment. Time had no meaning. There was nothing in the mind except the desire to allow this blissful state to continue for it seemed to pour fresh strength into me. I was able at the same time to take some note of what was going on around me, and also to think, if I wished, of other things.
“The first extraordinary development within my thinking was that, when I let myself think about a certain problem, the solution suddenly flashed into my mind. This had the same quality of certainty that exists when one dreams that one has settled one’s worries. The difference this time was that the solution was in fact correct and I was able to act upon it later.
“The second phenomenon was a vast expansion of memory. Trying to recall a time about which my memory was slight, I fixed upon a moment many years ago when I was carrying out a study of symbols used in ancient culutres. Anyone who has had the difficulty of absorbing and correlating masses of almost meaningless designs would understand how I felt when I suddenly realized that these shapes were whirling past my mind like an unreeling film. There was all the material available whenever I wanted to see it, stop it, reel it back… “
This seem like a very useful “altered state”.
-----
Posted by j.l. burton on 04/02 at 11:51 AM
Yezidis
Just discovered an excellent travelog piece on the Iraqi Yezidis at Michael J Totten’s excellent Middle East Journal.
The whole site is always well worth a read but this article is particularly excellent and there are some awesome photos. I have long had an affection for the Yezidis since first encountering them in Gurdjieff and later studying Sufism with Professor Kreyenbroek of Goettingen University who is probably the foremost authority on the Yezidis.
Although they have a bad reputation and have long been reputed to be ‘Devil worshippers’ their philosophical system is essentially a Sufic derivation and derives from the teaching of Sheikh Adi Ibn Musafir. They are a very interesting area of study, there are many in Syria also.