Books

My books are available at Carol’s Special Interest Bookstore. __________________________________________

DOCUMENTARY PRINT

I wrote Documentary Print in the mid-80′s, just as the computer revolution was beginning to take hold. Living in Banff at the time, I was studying media in the influence of Barrington Nevitt, a close associate of Marshall McLuhan.

I began to imagine a worldwide organization which I called The Social Research Foundation. This group had a vast headquarters which was a repository of information that was fed to it by innumerable researchers and reporters worldwide.

These reporters had been trained by the SRF (Social Research Foundation) to travel into the future and to report back. In a way, this was similar to “remote viewing.” However, the reports revealed that there was turmoil within the SRF and in fact there were many divergent views held by individuals in the organization, and these caused the eventual disintegration of the SRF. The disintegration seemed to occur at the same time as cataclysmic world events, and the version of the SRF documents included in the book Documentary Print were renegade reports that were not all corroborated by others in the organization. The book can be seen as a kind of social science fiction.

Many of the reports included in the book were in a way prescient and I’ve been surprised to see them come into reality. In the ABC of Prophecy, Barrington Nevitt indicates that it is very easy to be a prophet by simply examining the present from a certain point of view.

One way to examine the future is to observe the figure/ground relationship: once you see just what the ground is – what we take for granted while we are looking at the figure, then that observed ground becomes figure. Now in fact, when the ground becomes figure, then there must necessarily be a new ground that can be observed, so once again that ground becomes figure, and so on. The SRF reports which combined to become Documentary Print were created in that fashion, by examining the ground, and by the very process of that examination creating a new ground.

Download an excerpt: SRF Interim Report Document on Living in the Future (pdf).

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HUMAN ECOLOGY: NOTES ON THE SACRED ELEMENT WORK

This book is based on some of my early notes on the elements: earth, water, fire, air and ether.

It was written when I’d been working with the elements as a study and a practice in the mid-80′s. At that time I was very interested in this elementary alchemy, and in the balance of the elements as seen in each individual expressing physically, in the personality, and in interaction with others. My main source of study came from the work of the sufi Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan, and some of my notes on his papers are included in the book. In addition, my inspiration to undertake this study came from Hidayat Inayat Khan and the activities at Lake O’Hara Sufi Camp.

Inside :

An examination of the elements Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether as seen in direction, colour and breath.
A connection between the Greek Mysteries and the work of esoteric symbolical activities.
Reflections on the Element Ceremony and its value as a harmonizing influence in these times.
An awakening to the retrieval of element understanding that has been lost down through the ages.

An understanding of the elements as a foundation for mystical study can be seen in all major traditions around the world. In the Eastern yoga and sufi traditions and Western mysticism, the elements are key to knowledge of awareness of breath and the manifestations of life.

This book involves an examination of the elements as outlined in the sufi teachings of Pir-O-Murshid Inayat Khan, and in their relationships demonstrated through the Sacred Element Ceremony. It was written as an exploration and selfstudy.

A cohesive spiritual alchemy of the present times is expressed in the Sacred Element work and the depth understanding of the five elements. Presently, the yearning for spiritual understanding has shifted in North America to become a desire to go to the root of things. Sacred Element work reveals itself to be a mature western version of one such root teaching, through which the spiritual life of humanity can be renewed.

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Edited by Carol Sill.

Shamcher Beorse answers questions on obsession, mediums, Sufi teachings, and much more in this interview recorded in San Francisco in the late 1970s. Shamcher was a contemporary Western mystic, a pupil of the great Sufi Inayat Khan during the 1920′s. He lived in and travelled to over 65 countries as an engineer, economist, spy and spiritual guide.