Real Juice

“Sam planted a lot of seeds, and he’s had a lot of marvelous results… if you had seen him on the street, you would have said, “I don’t know exactly what to make of this guy. He’s a crackpot or fanatic or he’s nuts.” Actually he was a combination of all three, because in Sufism he’d be called a Madzub. Madzubs will not conform to any particular pattern, and will continue to be eclectic in what they give to people and what they put out to help people live. And Sam was such a person.

He struck a note that was not Sufism from some other land, but Sufism became the flavor of the good earth here in the United States itself. It’s an important thing. The important thing is that it’s the flavor of what the people are here, what they’ll put up with, what they won’t put up with. And it’s honest, straight-forward, and if it was necessary to kick ‘em and push ‘em around, he’d kick ‘em and push ‘em around. But he was for real…

I remember Sam came to the Theosophical Society one day, and he was gonna do one of his new dances, see he was gonna do a fancy dance. The lady who was running the society at that time said, “You know I didn’t know if I’d better let dear Sam do the dance or not, because I was afraid he was gonna lose his pants.” Sam didn’t care what he lost or when he lost it, as long as he was pushing the fact of love, harmony and beauty.

He was a true Sufi. I don’t care what they think… someone asked, “What would you be happy about if you were going to leave this life?” And he said, “If just two or three of my disciples Got It and started Living It.” So this person asked, “Well, how would you know?” He says, “You couldn’t help but know because they would shine.” Isn’t that beautiful? It’s so simple and right to the point.

He was a down to earth person. He wouldn’t give you any fancy trip on a nice pink cloud. No, rather than do that, he would kick you and say, Now what’s the matter with you? Come off your high horse and look at things the way they really are. See things around you as they are. And realize your at-one-ment with the One. And radiate love to everybody. But no hooks on that love. Nothing taken back. Just let it flow out.

The thing is that it’s so wonderful and so simple, the work that the Sufis do, that other people won’t believe it. You see, there’s nothing to enslave you. You don’t need to spend the next twenty years of your life contemplating your navel til it gets as big as a washtub, or facing a wall and trying to go blank. Nothing like that, just Love.”
~ Joe Miller from ‘In The Garden with Murshid Sam’

“Banefsha, having known Isa earlier in San Fran and now flirting with him on and off amidst much laughter and sharing about Murshid Sam, now told us of the coming of a really bona-fide guy named Murshid Hassan:

She's on a dusty bus in dusty Israel somewhere… in walks this old guy in white, with a green turban-like agal or band over his white kaffiyeh – as we'd know him later and as you see in pics of him for example, doing the zikr-of-blessing with Joe Miller. He walks onto this bus, with his walking stick and grinning like Murshid Sam and darting his eyes about from face to face with the Krishna Glance, greeting everyone with as-salaamu-aleikum, as-salaamu-aleikum. And he stops dead at Banefsha, sits with her, demands to see a photo of her Teacher, of her Murshid. So she goes through all these pics... and then he sees Murshid Sam's mug and stops there – that one! Evidently those two Murshids had seen plenty of each other where they'd met on the non-material plane(s) and he knew right away who his buddy was and told Banefsha as much…

Murshid Hassan seemed hardly in his physical body, very funny-spacy, while at the same time totally present, but he had to be shown his way up the stairs and such. Isa told us then or later, Murshid Hassan was doing a healing work on the House and was so in other spheres that he wasn't much on the ground… The simple charisma of his Being, the electric feel of him, the sitting around after the hadhrats, or standing zikrs, were indelibly impressed on us all as on me. Sitting around with him till all hours it was cigarettes one after another, yacking, breathing, sitting together, sharing…

There was also an infant brought by, and Murshid Hassan stopped teaching, he clammed up and smoked, he wouldn't give out Teaching for the moment. He explained why: he said, every child under seven is a Sheikh, and every child under three is a Murshid, so I cannot teach in their presence, I am their Mureed. That is what he said and that is what I remember to this day. And I remember once him saying, cigarette in hand and making a tiny gesture with his fingertips, Hassan is verry verrry small – and God is verry verrry big... We all had a good chuckle over this rendition of allahu-akbar.

Just as Murshid Sam explained that zikr brings atoms together and holds them in concentrated space, Murshid Hassan had us understand that hadhrat produced heat, plenty of heat to burn the psyche, into which bonfire we should cast all of our good qualities as well as our bad qualities. There was heat, there was light, there was sweat, there was energy crawling out of your skull, through every pore, it was a most exquisitely rich and grounded ecstasy. Here yet gone…

In July of 1976 I left for the Jerusalem Camp, at Neve Shalom, a fine plot of land smack in the boondocks exactly between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv… Now we were building (the camp itself), eating, praying, dancing and worshipping together as Jews, Christians, Muslims, Sufi-mureeds, as a plan to plant Murshid Sam's seeds (Halleluja-The-Three-Rings) on Israeli soil… the three major figures planned to lead the Camp were to be Banefsha herself, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi of Temple University and of Naropa (and a former "partner-in-crime" with Murshid Sam) – and Murshid Hassan…

It's the third inning, I mean visit. Murshid Hassan is definitely not spacy this time, he is very much in his body, very powerful – certainly for his age. I believe Michael is accompanying him, or maybe someone else out of San Fran where they've just come from. I don't quite remember now, but for the telling it hardly matters. I'll give what does matter. Some of it is amusing. He had come with a young American woman in tow, they had actually married… Now Murshid Hassan never ever told or even implied to us that Islam is any big deal or that we should be Muslims or even pray like the Muslims – he dispensed with all of this crap, he was there to give the real stuff. So he probably really was the maverick renegade befitting a Sufi. His juice was real, his light was real, his God-madness was real and thoroughly infectious, may I never ever recover.”
~ Posted by Samuel Inayat-Chisti