Hi Segovius!

I found TPOTS a rather strange book. On the one hand, though it contains some nuggets of information, it might have been used to filter out sensation seekers from amongst those who considered themselves serious students. On the other, perhaps for those engaged in such fields as the New Age, it might have represented an outreach program, leading some of them on to more useful works by Idries Shah?

Given the current interest in such books as Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the da Vinci Code (and even worse books cashing-in on the conspiracy trend), it might be have been useful to place such a book on the same shelf?

As regards the likes of Edward Campbell. One by one all of us—and not least those who spent time with Shah—are getting older and heading toward popping our clogs. It would have been useful, perhaps, if they’d shared something of their times with Shah, rather than giving us (in the net) such
a wide berth, as if we were suffering from some incurable, leprous disease [sniffs armpits and breathes on hand]?

Best wishes to you,
EricT.
-----

Hi Eric

good to hear from you - how’s the programming going? I am up to my (smelly?) armpits in Ruby and Rails at the mo.

Yes, I think it is a shame that that the net has not (so far) realized its potential in so many areas. I guess there is an element of elitism in those that avoid it - and this is also a charge often leveled at Shah’s cohorts. I am not qualified to judge in that area but certainly in the academic field there is an attitude that ‘no serious research occurs on the web’.

Of course, it will not with that attitude but it does anyway. All such a view does is hold things back for years or decades although it cannot stop progress. But how is such a view real learning - or living - whether in academia or ‘spiritual’ matters.

I don’t know. Sometimes seems like we are squandering the best opportunities humanity has had for centuries, perhaps ever. Taking it all for granted. I think they call it information overload.

Hi,

I found TPOTS to be, like Eric mentioned, a filtering process that both dampened attention seekers yet managed to direct their attention towards modern projections of.....the Tradition (or does Segovius prefer to call it ‘The Method’?).

TPOTS also seemed to preamble Shah’s ‘The Sufis’ in a way that has led many people to wonder if Ernest Scott was not another Rafeal LeFort - ‘Real Effort’…

It also -for me - echoes some of Rodney Collin’s ‘Theory of Celestial Influence’.

Shah’s projection did end abruptly...yet I have no understanding of the cosmic wind at that time or this…

As for the Net - I do 90% of my academic research on the Net: for me, it is the culmination of the intellectual occult heritage, the manifestation of de Chardin’s ‘noosphere’.... the Net is inherently occult in its vision and potential…

Yet inherently containing its own potentiality for information overload…

Cheers