January 9^th, 2004 The Bullock, a London pub.

Soren: Thank you again Your Corpulence for agreeing to meet with me today. I am most very grateful.

WE: Tut, tut, my child. Are your arms rested today? But never mind. And yes, Luv… two Double Diamonds please at this table. Yes, two, thank-you. Yes, thanks. .But where were we?

Soren: I’m sorry Your Corpulence… but I am afraid that I do not drink alcohol…

WE: I know, my child. They’re for me.

Soren: (throat clearing) To continue our discussions of yesterday. We were discussing Idries Shah, I believe, prior to our… unpleasantness. And how Idries Shah did Sufism no favors. Can you speak further about that? As to what the Blaketashis see as his errors?

WE: Well, Shah kind of painted himself into a corner, when he claimed to be the emissary of the Eastern Masters whose arrival had been long awaited in Europe. He painted a hagiography around himself, and in the end was victimized by it.

Soren: Why would he do that, and how was he victimized?

WE: If one looks back at the late 1950s and 60s, the influence of Gurdjieff and his students was still quite strong in European esoteric circles, as was the influence of Blavatsky. Both Gurdjieff and Blavatsky had made reference to Eastern masters, and such references caught peoples’ imaginations, as it was intended to do. Shah recognized this imaginative longing in the west, and jumped on it, and rode it for all it was worth.

Soren: It is difficult to think of Shah being so base.

WE: I don’t know if it was base… he was a man with something to say, and he found a mechanism in human nature which he used to accelerate the speed and reach of that message.

Soren: But you are saying that it is untrue that he was the emissary of the Eastern Masters?

WE: Well, he may well have had master or masters in the East, but not the Eastern Masters as has become mythologized in the West.

Soren: So there are no Eastern Masters?

WE: Well, of course there are. And Western, and Southern, and Northern Masters as well. But they form no coherent organization, other than their grounding in God, Who is All Coherence.

Soren: It may still be hard for some to believe that Shah over-represented himself.

WE: Shah used to write numerous tracts, monographs, and articles, praising the work and mission of Idries Shah, which were published under the name of third parties, to give the veneer of broad world-wide support… while such support was in fact quite thin. He demonstrated quite a talent for over-representing his pedigree, actually. But his works stand on their own merits, which by the way are considerable, and it is perhaps best to let the dead rest in peace.

Soren: Yes, I suppose. But before we leave the subject of Shah, why did you say that he became a victim, and created victims of his assertions?

WE: Well, when you say that you are a special person, on a special mission, with a special mojo, which you will pass along to special people… then you have power. Having asserted this power, one cannot then say that the Truth is ubiquitous, and pops up in all places and times, as part of a Providence which is beyond the interference of men. So he trapped himself. Others have been victimized by, or conditioned by Shah’s assertion that the Absolute flows amongst men as a rarefied trickle. For these people, that trickle appears to have stopped with Shah’s death…