Some typos, but not the first one, in Shamcher’s letter have been corrected for ease of readership. Shamcher’s first paragraph needs reading and re-reading to plumb the depths of his communication to Moineddin. Shamcher’s most mystical and abstract words demand study to extract his meaning. I’m still re-reading.

2 December 1978

Dear Moineddin,

You know about the faces [sic, left uncorrected because Moineddin comments on it, acknowledging that Shamcher could mean “phases” as well as “faces”] one goes through: After enthusiastically accepting sublime mental and heart teachings there comes a time when all that dissolves into an at first amorphous nothing, then gradually to be perceived in an entirely different form or rather in no form whatever, and one even conceives how one’s original teacher had gone through all that and taught, with a grin of apology, the words he emanated and which he knew would be eventually dissolved. In his last year on earth Inayat Khan chose to show exactly this, and well remembered and noted by his son Hidayat and by the unhumble undersigned, but only recently digested or experienced.

At such a phase one has no or little right to talk or even appear at meetings where attendants expect the straight teachings of the faith. Except if one is extremely careful in the choice of words—more than most of us can muster. So I have been often wrong in accepting invitations and even more wrong in speaking at these occasions, and thus all became very clear to me at the occasion of your last invitation to your November bash. But when opportunity occurs I would be delighted to see you and yours.

It seems to me that you, like myself, are diffident, non-elective about life or “death” and that you are extremely well suited to take care of the choice yourself, without any interfering or “healing” from any one except the unseen agencies always at your site or side. As for myself, always ready to go, it seems I have to defer, to renounce any personal wish and let agencies more conversant with the development of the world (Energy, economics, these being vital expressions of humanities spiritual state)—make the decisions for me. I don’t know if this also be the case with you. Somehow I tend to think so.

All the good things to you in the coming year and all coming years—and to your family

Shamcher