08.01.07
Whitehouse on Shaykhs
Anab Whitehouse comments on my Shaykh post
Anab Whitehouse said,
August 1, 2007 at 9:33 am · Edit
Dear Darwiniana,
I believe that you may have misunderstood the nature of the posting at Sufi Amanesis concerning E.J. Gold and, in addition, through no fault of your own, do not understand the context in which the piece originally was written. While you are right to note — and as I clearly indicated in the posting to which you refer — I do not know anything about Mr. Gold based on direct experience. In fact, the posting to which you refer is actually taken from another posting which was advanced within a discussion group where some of the readers were big fans of Gold.
Not wishing to start an argument, one way or the other, about someone I did not know and, more importantly, wanting to use the situation to put forth what I considered to be an important point about issues of spiritual abuse, I put Gold in the best possible light for the purposes of discussion. I indicated that even if one were to assume that Gold were talented, intelligent, creative, a good business person, an astute observer of the human condition, someone who had lived an amazing life, and so on, none of this matters when it comes to the issue of being a spiritually authentic teacher.
Some people promote themselves as authentic mystical guides. Some people seek to promote the former sort of individual as authentic mystical guides.
Nevertheless, neither calling oneself a true spiritual guide nor having someone else call one a true spiritual guide gives expression to the necessary criterion for what constitutes being a spiritual guide. The necessary criterion is to be appointed as such by God.
All manner of people are running around today referring to themselves, or being referred to by others, as authentic Sufi teachers when nothing could be further from the truth. Such individuals are engaged in one form, or another, of spiritual abuse with respect to those who become their followers.
I would agree with some of your commentary about what has happened to so-called Sufism in the last several hundred years. Indeed, more than twelve hundred years ago someone said: “Once Sufism was a reality without a name and now it is a name without a reality.”
However, as far as some of your other comments are concerned which seek to denigrate Islam and/or authentic Sufism — for example, “So please spare us the crap about the divine voice, the transmission of baraka, and the rest of it. Flush the toilet please. Islam is a gnostic/sufi madhouse, a firetrap driven insane by a pack of devils.”– then, I would request that you listen to the very counsel which you directed my way concerning the value of commentary which is not based on direct experience — namely, it constitutes little more than not-so-courteous verbiage.
If you choose not to accept the idea of authentic spiritual guides, this is your choice, and, perhaps, this is because you have never encountered such individuals and, as a result, have no direct experience of the matter. I have spent time with both authentic guides and inauthentic guides, and although there are significant differences between the two, an understanding which is not forged through actual experience of the two might have considerable difficulty distinguishing between the two.
Anab Whitehouse