At an Iowa City kitchen table, Moineddin enjoys a smoke and a beer with Lou Renza, a graduate student then, who today is a recently retired English professor at Dartmouth College in Vermont.

This batch of letters is characterized by several packets of letters; for example, this was the cover letter for 3 copies of notes and letters, which included a letter dated April 12, 1978 to Taj, notes from an organizational meeting between Moineddin and Shabda dated April 11, 1978, and a letter to a mureed named Ahmad McCarty, dated April 4.

For more on Mansur's letter to the governor of Puerto Rico, alluded to in this letter, the reader is referred to Chapter 13 ("Building an OTEC plant in Puerto Rico") in Mansur's book Shamcher, a memoir of Bryn Beorse & his struggle to introduce ocean energy to the United States (www.shamcher.org/6.html).

 Hurkalya

April 13, 1978

My dear Mansur,

Beloved One of God, peace be with you!

Many thanks for your communications and enclosures of April 7 and 8. (Indeed, Daniel’s letter is just like old times.)

May I offer a personal view of your letter to the governor of Puerto Rico? This view has two poles, one which perceives your success in the spiritual realm, and the other which perceives a questionable success in dealings with people.

I must go back to the time when we both lived with Murshid at the Garden of Inayat. On one particular morning I was in a funk, and Murshid asked me to come into the office where he and you were doing some letters. When I entered the office, Murshid said, “Moineddin, I want you to look at Mansur—just look at him. See how he is Toward the One. Despite anything else you may say about Mansur, he has an excellent Toward the One.”

That teaching episode has stayed with me over the years.

But back to the personal view I mentioned above. Your Toward the One is indeed a means toward spiritual perfection, to say nothing of the inspiring direct and solar baraka it affords to your mureeds, family and friends. But I question the effectiveness of such a forthright Toward the One in your dealings with government officials and other career people who play the game of pressure and tension every moment of their lives. When one addresses high government officials or well-placed career people, one simultaneously addresses entire groups or even societies. In view of this I quote the following wisdom from Stephen Gaskin:

“I saw that society was a colloid solution and that if you tried to push it too fast it would tend to make the colloid get rigid. If you pushed it at just the right speed, the colloid would be fluid and malleable and you could actually move large pieces of society fairly easily as long as you didn’t override the nature of the colloid; that it was a matter of agreement, and that if you had agreement, the, as it says in the Bible, ‘If two of you agree…it shall be done.’ I saw all that stuff and it changed my life and I quit being the way I was before; I started being a whole new different way. I saw how everything worked. I saw that one person, if he was patient enough and if he really took the time, could change the world.”

Just want to share an impulse, and if this is too presumptive, albeit friendly, I ask your pardon.

Love and love,

Moineddin