All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (30 page)

We sat down at the edge of the room, Hakan’s friends greeting us both warmly. Tea was fetched, cigarette packets proffered from all angles. English was tentatively employed; we talked of Rumi, of course, and they seemed pleased and gently moved that someone should share in their love of the ancient dervish.

Like an ashram that many Hindu men may visit annually or merely in times of difficulty, this place, I felt, had a function as a place of refuge, a neutral zone which gave perspective on the vicissitudes of life without. In Islam, there are no monks or monasteries: the Prophet himself lived
in
the world, worked and had a family. His emphasis was on the need to be ‘in the world but not of it’. These
tekkes
, too, provided order and a framework for the transmission of the great gems of cultural life: transcendent chants, literature, the Persian language. Once they also provided refuge for travellers, medical services, food for the poor, mediation for family or tribal disputes.

After an hour of tea drinking, the atmosphere changed abruptly, the laughter dwindled and we stood up for prayers. Knowing neither the prayers nor the bows and prostrations, this was difficult for me but I followed as best as I could. Something about it moved me, and I recollected a first yoga class taken years past: the solace of moving in unison with other people, sounds of chanting, homage to something higher than ourselves.

The prayers went on for a long time; by the time the final vowel sounded I was on the verge of some kind of insurrection. My knees felt weak, my throat was hoarse and my back ached from all the prostrations. If nothing else, I mused insubordinately, the Muslim prayers are a punishing callisthenics regimen.

At last, the prayers finished. ‘Now the
zikr
will begin,’ whispered the man next to me. ‘Musicians will come in now.’

Zikr
is the principal Sufi practice. It means ‘remembrance’ and its liturgy differs vastly across different Sufi orders. For some,
zikr
is recitation of holy texts, in others chanting, music, meditation. In the
dargah
of Hazrat Nizammudin in Delhi, the
zikr
comes in the form of
qawwali
music. Here amongst the Mevlevi (as well as others like the Qadiri and Rifai), it comes as whirling, but all, it seems evident, function as a method of inducing trance, an altered state of consciousness not entirely dissimilar, perhaps, from what William James discovered in his laboratory.

Clad in black and wearing their tall fez, the musicians lined up solemnly on one side of the room. I tried to make out the instruments: a pear-shaped lute held vertically on the knees), a
tanbur
(long-necked lute with frets), an
ûd
(short-necked, fretless, plucked lute) and a
kudüm
(a pair of small kettledrums). There was also a
kanun
, a type of zither, and of course the
ney
, the reed flute once played by Rumi himself.

From here, things proceeded much as they had done in the Galata Mevlevihanesi in Istanbul. But with Hakan beside me, the rituals became a little more comprehensible. First, there was a recitation of
Ya Hazreti Mevlana
– meaning ‘presence of our master’. In Istanbul, I had taken this to refer to Rumi, but in fact, explained Hakan, it was the Holy Prophet. After this opening the
ney
sounded, and though I had been struck by its sound before, here it seemed to take on a palpable shimmer of longing and regret. Perhaps it was the acoustics of the room, or the circumstances of my being here. But from the moment of its first trembling note it sent shivers down my spine, as if I were hearing the voice of a child, lost in a dark wood, crying out. It spoke to that longing deep within me, which had first impelled me on this journey, a longing for connection and return.

The dervishes walked round in a circle three times, bowing to each other, then to the dervish master.

‘They are recognising in each other the divine spark,’ whispered Hakan.

Finally, there came a recitation from the Holy Koran: ‘Whichever way you turn, there is the face of God,’ Hakan translated.

The whirling began. The atmosphere in the room was absolutely still. It was as if those who weren’t dancing were completely frozen; nothing moved except the central space, where spectral figures, apparently between worlds, moved in graceful arcs. For a moment I half closed my eyes. I could see skeins of ghosts, white blurs, gliding through space. Their dance has been practised over many years, and yet it seemed artless, as natural as a leaf falling.

‘Everything on this earth revolves,’ whispered Hakan. ‘Electrons, protons, atoms. The blood in our own bodies. The Sufi does not whirl himself into unconsciousness, but into
consciousness
! He is moving with the earth, with all things in nature. He is aligning himself with the revolutions of all beings.’

This thought stayed with me for hours afterwards, days and weeks. I thought of how children are fascinated by roundabouts, spinning tops, merry-go-rounds. I watched footage of the earth spinning on its axis, planets orbiting each other. To see the whirling dervishes is to sense these things, to move towards them. It’s a simple aligning of energies, a moving with the flow of things. But in this very simplicity there comes the power of mountains.

Within half an hour, the ceremony was over, and I was walking back through the deserted streets. Hakan had offered me a lift but, despite the cold, I wanted air around me, the space to breathe. One by one the Sufis, with much hand-shaking and good wishes, vanished in their rusty vehicles, and the streets reverted to night sounds: a far-off dog’s bark, the wind in tall trees. Behind us, the lights in the
tekke
went out, and a chain was drawn across the door.

What I had seen had moved me deeply, and yet it was also very clear that, in itself, there was nothing particularly esoteric about it. There’s a romance about Sufism, fanned by the secrecy, the sense of it being underground, that it’s easy to get lost in. Beyond that, however, there is merely a group, like the
sadhus
in India, determined to move beyond the surface of things, to inhabit a more satisfying level of reality.

The philosopher Colin Wilson speaks of our normal waking consciousness as a ‘robot’, a creature which goes through the motions of life with only occasional glimpses of the intelligence within. For the Sufis, that ‘intelligence’ is God, and in their rituals they find ways to reconnect with it, to stay alive to it. Rumi’s poetry is so important precisely
because
of its ability to convey the essence of that experience, the sheer exuberance of connectedness.

On that walk back through the sleeping streets of Konya, I could feel every breath, every air particle, moving in and out of my lungs. I was completely conscious of every stride, every sound, beads of cold dew on the tulips, cloud formations spread across the sky. Inwardly, I could even feel myself spinning, atoms churning, moving ever closer towards the truth.

Yet another thread had tied itself off. What seemed essential from here on was that it was time to cease
observing
these mystical practices and to take part in them myself. I had gone as far, on an intellectual level, as perhaps I could. If the Sufis had taught me anything it was to begin to see with the heart: a metaphor that I took to be about entering into life with those faculties which lay beyond the mind. If higher consciousness, or
sunyata
, or even God – to use a word which still rested uneasily with me – were the goal, then the mind could be of little use from this point on.

In the final part of my quest, I would turn to shamanism, that most ancient magico-religious phenomenon in which the individual learns to enter trance states and gain direct experience of expanded states of consciousness. It would be a journey that, once and for all, would transform my notions of ‘reality’. On the far side I would emerge anew.

The Way of the Shaman

Millennia before Christ, Buddha or Mohammed ever walked the earth, humans were already engaged in elaborate sacred rituals. Perhaps as many as 25,000 years ago, during Palaeolithic times, the hunting cultures of Siberia and Central Asia coined a word,
saman
, defined as a technique of ecstasy. From this came the word ‘shaman’, meaning religious leader, priest or healer, but more specifically describing someone with the ability to enter trance states in order to gather knowledge in the non-human realms.

At this point in my quest, the subject of shamanism had come up too often to ignore. The oracles I had seen in Ladakh were a direct link with a shamanic tradition predating Tibetan Buddhism, while Mata-ji was also enacting methods passed down from a shamanic past. Even Sufism, according to some scholars, springs from a belief system far older than Islam itself, one which believed in healing, ecstasy, the preparation of charms.

Shamanism, then, is the mother of all religions. But what made it so particularly relevant to my own journey was in its emphasis on ‘spirit worlds’ – other realms of consciousness in which the shaman can meet and ‘master’ spirits. Several years before, I might have baulked at the word ‘spirits’, for its connotations of the supernatural. But now, I saw things differently. Western science traces our ailments to the body: a virus, faulty wiring or bacteria, behind our problems. For a Ladakhi oracle, a spirit may be responsible, for a Sufi
pir
there may be a djinn. Each group gives the problem a name, and for each group that problem becomes real and visceral, something which may be killed with antibiotics, or driven away by a more powerful awareness than its own.

What I had come to believe was not that one answer was right and the others outdated superstition, but that
all
were right. No one who has ever experienced a serious migraine can fail to see how someone might interpret that seemingly malevolent pain as ‘other’ than oneself, give it a name perhaps, see it as an invading force to be driven away. Part of the task of anthropology, and simply being a traveller in the world, is to learn how these other interpretations can also have validity, not just how they work within a cultural framework but how they are ‘true’.

What is also true on the level of healing is that many of the shamanic methods
work
. This, too, is not merely lucky coincidence, as some scientists suggest, but an aspect of a healing system that incorporates far more than the merely physical: it includes energy fields, mind states, awareness of the surrounding biosphere. Shamans spend years in the most arduous training in order to explore and penetrate layers of consciousness. They are the masters of expanded awareness, with infinitely subtler, more penetrating understanding than our own.

For the flower power generation, already turned on by Kerouac and LSD, the term ‘shaman’ arrived first in the books of Carlos Castaneda. Castaneda was a Peruvian-born American author who wrote a series of books that describe his purported training under the tutelage of a Yaqui shaman named Don Juan. His books sold more than eight million copies and their effect on popular culture was enormous.
Time
magazine would later call him ‘the godfather of the New Age’, a fitting moniker for someone who brought, for the first time, the shamanic world-view into popular culture. I read the books myself at university, but only on the level of psychedelically inspired adventure stories rather than anything which might have a bearing on my own life. Picking them up again a decade later, I read them as if for the first time. They were about changing the ways one perceived reality and about some of the primary techniques which shamans had invented to do so.

For readers of the Don Juan books, a strange new universe unfolds. The mysterious shaman leads Castaneda through a peculiar series of teachings and initiations in order to train him as a ‘sorcerer’. He learns how to turn off his inner dialogue completely, control and interact with his dreams, to behave in a manner Don Juan labels ‘impeccability’. On occasion he imbibes powerful hallucinogenic plants, and at the end of Castaneda’s fourth book, both shaman and student deliberately cross over into another plane of existence.

History doesn’t relate whether Don Juan really existed or not, or whether Castaneda conjured the entire oeuvre from his imagination. But what is certainly true is that much of the teaching and world-view evoked by Carlos Castaneda is concurrent with that of shamanism. William James’ discoveries about consciousness in the nineteenth century were predated by probably twenty or thirty
thousand
years by indigenous peoples, who used plant substances, drumming and dance to leave their rational consciousness behind.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the general revivals of mysticism that are under way, interest in shamanism has exploded in recent years. Even as deforestation and development are forcing indigenous peoples to the cities, scores of Western seekers visit Central and South America in the hope of finding raw spiritual knowledge. Implicit in this search is the notion that shamans are the repositories of a deeper spiritual wisdom than our own, possessing techniques that can radically improve the quality of our lives.