Note: This is Chapter 15 Continued of Spiritus Mundi the Occupy Wall Street Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Weekly Free Online for the Movement. Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved--Licensed for Personal Viewing Only




2



Sir Endymion Needham had been working flat out for over two weeks, sometimes sleeping in his special secure office in the bowels of Vauxhall Cross, where on the hard drive of his computer the combined accumulated three year work product of the Political Diary of Chinese Politburo member Luo Chunwang awaited his translation and annotation. Despite his efforts he had only just begun to get the most recent entries translated and to scan the folders of the past entries for any significant or sensitive entries to expedite.

His superior “C,’ the chief of operations for the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), known popularly as MI6, or the British CIA, awaited his briefing on the nature, content, value and significance of the take from this intelligence coup. Sir Endymion greeted him with a cordial handshake, saying “Good Morning Alistair, we’ve been quite busy with all this.”

Sir Endymion would normally be more formal, but C was his old classmate from Queen’s College in Cambridge and they were on a first name basis for decades. C picked up the briefing folder with its red cover indicating its secret status and began to thumb through the contents. “All right Endymion, what can you tell me?” he started off.

“Well what we have is the entire hard disc of discrete files from the computer of the executive secretary of Minister Luo Chunwang of the Chinese Politburo. Of course there is a good deal that is trivial office work and I have isolated the materials that are most significant and potentially valuable. Of greatest importance is the so-called Political Diary of the Minister, which he dictates to his secretary at the end of every couple of days or so, whenever anything significant happens. I’ve skimmed about fifty percent and read, summarized or translated only about ten percent of that so far, mostly the more recent materials—the older ones will wait a bit longer. He records the discussions within the Politburo, the views expressed, his own contributions and positions on issues and those of the principal interlocutors. We might call them aides memoirs, or a personal political or professional journal, probably kept for purposes of reference to defend himself in case he is challenged or blamed at critical moments---as the Americans say ‘to cover his ass.’ He records the private consultations and communications as well as the discussions in open meetings. The first issue is the genuineness of the documents themselves. Of course you have the confidential details of the end source by which to judge that matter better than I.

Could the MSS have broken the operation and fed us false disinformation to lead us astray?-----The trouble is that this source is so far inside the Politburo that it is unique and we don’t have any ready way to confirm or contradict what we are looking at. Normally we would not rely absolutely on it unless there was a source of corroboration, which for a lot of the most sensitive content we don’t have. Nonetheless, I would say from what we have it checks pretty well with what open and alternative sources we have available, plus a number of the details are clearly so embarrassing or sensitive to the Chinese that, from a view to their own interests, it is unlikely that they are feeding us a false flag, though there is never any one-hundred percent certainty. From the flow of the conversations and records I would say it feels right----It sounds like private and small group confidential conversations---I mean the give and take is unguarded and it is not diplomatic or political doublespeak or even inside-minister-speak but boils down to some level of candor. So it sounds like it purports to be, the personal notes of a private internal and informal policy discussion between senior colleagues who have some degree of---well I won’t say trust, but of confidence in their relationship and comfort in their ability to manage their interactions from long adaptation to each other. We will have to watch the material over time and test its authenticity as best we can to come to a working conclusion and adjust accordingly, observing the caveats.” rattled off Sir Endymion, qualifying his opinion, which he would be sure to back up with confidential memoranda in the file hedging his interpretations on the caveats and assumptions about the genuineness of the documents, etc.----in short, covering his own ass in case something blew up, as might well happen.

“Quite,” said C, who tended to be laconic regarding the obvious with his underlings, “Now to get back to the question, what can you tell me?”

“In that case, what we have here is pure nitro glycerin. We see an aggressive nationalist frame of mind expressed over and over in debates over foreign policy to a much higher degree than we might have suspected from open sources. Here in Section 2 of the written report you can see a list of off-the-books military build-up projects they are undertaking. Several secret transactions with the Russians and a lot of clandestine activity throughout Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America that we have been unaware of. They’ve been backing the Iranians in their nuclear program while denying it publicly, while giving them a tacit green light along with black assistance in their efforts to destabilize our undertakings in Iraq. They are playing a double game with the Russians, cooperating with them to strengthen their mutual economic and military capabilities and using them as an oil and energy source, while at the same time coveting their natural resources and looking for signs of weakness and a chance to make a grab for them. Within Russia they are intriguing with the Old Guard ‘Siloviki’ or KGB/SVR/Military Complex Apparatchiks around Putin against the Russian liberals around Medvedev. Significantly, about a quarter of their new Politburo men have a background in the petroleum industry and they seem fixated on their looming energy shortfall. Already private car sales in China are at a higher level than that in the USA with the impact of the World Financial Crisis, and the Chinese in their discussions are hypersensitive to their present and future oil and energy shortfall and external dependency---soon to be pushing up to 60-70% import dependent.

They are exploring ways to exploit the weakness of the West mired in its Financial Crisis and means to secure greater influence in Central Asia and the Middle East with respect to oil, gas and energy. They are also building up their navy to these ends with an off-the-books project to develop aircraft carriers that will be revealed shortly. To them the Great Game is on and the Left Nationalist faction is pushing to play hardball. They see China as the great rising Great Power of the 21st Century, just as Germany and Japan were in the 20th and they aim to win the geopolitical Olympic golds. At the same time they feel time is on their side and they are playing a game of dissimulation, patience, and delay until they build-up and marshal their strength and discover a weakness in their opponent to exploit at a critical moment or turning point. This is their classic strategy of Sun Bin from the Art of War, known as 稻光养晦 Tao Guang Yang Hui----artfully concealing one’s strength as one builds capability towards striking unsuspectedly at the critical moment of the opponent’s vulnerability a la Pearl Harbor. All of this information is invaluable. As one might expect there are different camps and frames of mind in their higher echelons, though the level of disagreement is often less openly expressed than in our own government reflecting the cultural bias towards consensus and the politics of conformity and loyalty in the inner-party circles. You can see in the written report I have pulled out and flagged any specifics that might require more immediate action and attention, and included them in Section 7, under the suggested Action Plan for suggested follow-up.” he responded.

“Is there any way to cross-check it?” C cautioned.

“No, unfortunately not at the moment. We don’t have much in the way of other sources at this level of penetration. It tallies with what our outside sources tell us, but we can’t be absolutely sure about anything.” he added.

“Well, I’m not going to let the Americans in on it just yet, but I will try to pump Joel Barlow to see if they have any sources at that level and if they can independently confirm some of the specifics. The first rule of the game is to protect your sources. If we let the information leak too widely there are holes and moles everywhere and it may get back to the Chinese and they will turn off the tap. We have got to keep this ultra-secret and absolutely ‘need to know.’ This is on the level of Ultra and Enigma in its possible future ramifications and impact. If anything develops we can consider letting them in on it at a later date.” detailed C to his former classmate.

“It’s your call, Alistair, but I appreciate the confidence.” said Sir Endymion.

“Quite. -----So who exactly is this Luo character and what is your take on how he fits into the bigger picture. I will ultimately have to explain this to the Prime Minister, though I won’t reveal even to him the precise source, so you had better give me your best estimate.” probed C.

“From reading through the discussions, we see the existence of two camps, the so-called Chinese Left or Nationalist camp, which tends to coalesce around a group of sons of inner-party last generation leaders, what we call in Chinese the ‘Tai Zi Dang’ 太子黨or the ‘Princeling Party,’ sometimes referred to as the ‘Crown Prince Party,’ and which is more aggressive towards the West and the rest of the world, and the ‘Right’ or paradoxically the ‘Liberal’ camp in our Western terminology, which tends to be more sympathetic to adapting to and harmonizing with the West and the outside world, reform of the power structure, more sensitive to human rights and democratic considerations, and so forth. This Hard Left/Nationalist/Princeling faction are reactionaries or quasi-fundamentalists in the sense that they are unhappy with the changes of modernization and globalization that have diluted their powers of the past and want to go back to that imagined pristine omnipotent world of their fathers, even if it was those very changes that gave the Chinese the comprehensive strength they now so fetishize.

The hard Left, or Communist/Nationalist/Princeling faction seems to have the upper hand of the balance at the moment, with their influence growing more than we had suspected with leadership forming around the Vice-President and heir apparent Xi Jinping and our man Luo, with President Hu Jintao fundamentally more sympathetic to them but playing a balancing role to maintain his authority overall. And then you have the Liberals coalescing around Premier Wen Jiabao, who is very popular with the people but weakening and coming under fire and pressure from the more conservative inner-party apparatchiks who may want to squeeze him out for someone less appeasing of the West and more forceful in asserting China’s newfound strength.

Luo officially is a Minister without Portfolio, a member but without full voting rights on the Politburo, so we know he is junior on the hierarchy at the top but has the confidence of all the top players----so they move him in as a troubleshooter or utility man to fill gaps or deal with emerging situations—he is probably slated for higher positions of power. His base is the intelligence community and he rose within the MSS, their CIA, to head its international department there before moving on into the Politburo. There he exercises oversight of the Chinese intelligence community and its military and police attachments. He is very well educated, MBA at the London School of Economics, fluent in English, and internationally savvy, but a bit Neanderthal in his sympathies and ambitions, sort of like an old British Tory Imperialist trying to build and maintain the glory of a New Chinese Empire, and eager to get a seat at the High Table of the Great Game, confident that he and China will be Olympic gold winners. One side of his brain and his core sympathies are nationalist and tribalist, while on the other side of his brain he has adapted to the modern world and its demands of realism. From the discussions he emerges in the Politburo dynamic as an instigator who tries to push the consensus further and further towards taking greater and greater risks for greater and greater glories. Up to now the intrinsic conservatism and caution of the ruling consensus has held him back, but with the new weakness of the West and China’s recent successes, he and his ilk are feeling their oats and becoming more and more successful in pushing the leadership into more and more aggressive, self-assertive and risky postures.” summarized Sir Endymion.

“Quite. Well keep up the hard work and let me know if you come up with a solution for some assistance in the translation---but remember we have to keep these cards close to the vest so we cannot risk anyone not one-hundred percent loyal and reliable having any access, so you will be short handed for a while. As we discussed we hope for an update via the same source every few days, so be sure to translate that in real time and get it to me without delay, and then in your spare time you can work backward through the older material and periodically summarize what is of importance. There is to be absolutely no disclosure to anyone I have not personally authorized---absolutely zero tolerance on this one. We will periodically change the official codeword on this to keep the tracks covered----now we’ll refer to it as codeword “Nightingale.” So chop chop Endymion, I know you realize how invaluable your contribution is. I will be available to you whenever needed…… Good Morning.” summarized C picking up his briefcase and umbrella as he exited the door.




3



Andreas’ Blog Journal:

What a preponderance of energy in my life I have expended escaping from women! Even my army service was motivated in no small part by the desire to avoid being prodded and bundled off to our town church and incipient domestic slavery by my high school sweetheart in South Africa. Looking back though, my first true affair was Marlene Sorensen, the Swedish film actress I took up with and who so to speak adopted me in Berlin after I emigrated from South Africa. I was at that time a penniless student and she was already internationally famous. She was twice my age.

I am not sure if she was “in love” with me. A furious mutual desire for possession dominated the whole affair. At one stage she desperately wanted to marry me while I never had the slightest intention of having her, except for enjoying the rush and attention and the money she ladled out on me---and, oh Yes, the sex. In the end I ran away even from that. Later, after I had left her and she came after me to get me back I discovered the invisible wounds and hooks which she had in her cunning and female way left inside my body and soul. I had left my wounds inside of her undoubtedly as well. If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound but it is my wound as well.

For a long time, she being an international actress and myself a raw youth, I imagined her quite deep. Then I saw that I was mistaking confusion with depth. Like the canvas that gives the illusion of depth but is made up of painted layers patently shallow. She can’t concentrate, unless forced, on anything more than a day. Her egotism was so complete that she could see nothing beyond her next romantic adventure. She was living on borrowed time.

At the beginning of course I found her irresistible, that was before I lost much time learning the rule that desire always fades. Her irresistibility filled the day, leaving little time for thought. No sooner would one of us be over the doorstep than she was lifting her skirts, or reaching for my penis or simply lying back, eyes steely and wet, holding my gaze in a grip I knew no way out of, while she caressed herself, until, without needing to decide I came to her, Always me to her, I noted to myself, that was the pattern, best to keep that in mind………..Another broken-hearted amateur was left to founder in the erotic swamp.

One day she had given me the silent treatment for a whole weekend and I walked into her bedroom to find her staring into blank space, ignoring me.

“What are you thinking of?” I asked, with an edge of provocative sarcasm.

“You haven’t the vaguest idea of what I am thinking of.” she retorted.

“You mean who you are thinking of-------You’re utterly incapable of thinking of a What--------your mind, if you may call it that can only reach so far as a Who.”

“Shut up---You’re horrid!”

As we went on in the next years we shared those wounds, hooks and taughtened fishlines of incipient possession with a tortured intimacy. We knew now that we would never marry and we knew that we could most assuredly make each other suffer, yet beyond that we each in our own distinct way schemed for our happiness, we used our joint intelligence on that problem. I was a little cruel to her always, cutting her off for younger women and keeping her “on the bounce.”----Perhaps in self-defence. Perhaps after the novelty and rush of her and her public persona wore itself off I was afraid of “being swallowed.”

I left her again and again and yet allowed myself to come back to her. Perhaps I never really revealed to her how much she really meant to me. In a way she made a man of me---at least as far as women are concerned. If we had been closer in age it might have been different and our affections or even possible love evolved in a different turn. Perhaps in that way it was fated. As her body dried up with oncreeping age a sense of repulsion began to arise in me and an increasing distance intervened as we drifted apart in mind and soul. I think as we were together we came to love each other in some true but bent sense, but as much as she clung to me in a desperate attempt to fend off her increasingly depressive feelings of age and decline, so desperately did I struggle away with the innate energy of my youth and freedom. I was her hobby and plaything. She kept me because of her sense of possession and prideful refusal to give me up, however much she might come to not love or even any longer want me.

Love you say?---what was that compared to a woman’s sense of ownership of a man!---a woman’s pride of ownership and fear of loss, her sense of innate superiority to those other women who did not own! A man’s body, dependence and soul becomes her most treasured property, in which she trades, hoards and speculates as any stock market manipulator or monopolist. In her tangling to keep and control me she proved as much a bitch as a reptile, using her womanhood to lay one bare then leaving her wounds and poison at one’s vulnerable moments. Like a narcotics pusher she got you hooked and then drew you up cold turkey to exact her most ferocious price. When I had become addicted to her and the public spotlight and the petty luxuries that came with her and she sensed my moment of weakness she left me for another “pretty boy,” reveling in my torment. I quickly got over my boyish innocent disbelief that such a hot little bosom couldn’t play such a cold-blooded trick.

Envy and Schadenfreude and invidiousness—these were Marlene. They arose from poor character but also from vulnerability----the fear of desertion and humiliation. Ours was an ecumenical communion of pain, pain of all faiths and denominations. She preyed on weakness, being herself weak. Weakness will get you where you are weakest. Weakness will be strong and bold and leap on your weak spot with bared fangs. If in the head then in the head. If in the groin then in the groin. If in the face then in the face. If in the loins then in the loins. If in the eyes then in the eyes. If in the mouth then in the mouth. The laws of sexual engagement were as savage and atavistic as the laws of jungle survival, retribution and of war: an I for an I. Then somehow we would find our ways back to each other. It went on and on in its dreary, sometimes delightful way yet each of us in our different ways wanted a showdown, a dénouement.

We both wanted an end to the situation which would relieve our minds----which would release our minds from the pain of indirection in which we hopelessly wallowed. Yes, I said she made a man of me, especially in the early days—adopting me as a raw youth, nurturing my tentative masculinity and sexual presence, building and supporting my self confidence as a man, especially as a man with women, but then so addicting and then tormenting me, playing me like a hooked fish on a line, cutting me off at the knees when she wanted to reassert her power and control over me----she made me a man, but by no means a better man---the inevitable failure and final betrayal ruined me morally. When I turned my back on her I also turned my back on the good and the true in my relations with the women I sought and met, and on any but a meretricious beauty.

I buried myself in my more important work for the world and took a superficial solace in the titillations of a string of shallow and cheap affairs. Ever since I have limped on in too much love of freedom and too much fear of pain, sublimating any better self I might have into my work, pretending there at least to some shreds of idealism and self-respect. Possibly this is why I have shied away from marriage or other too deep attachments. With Eva I find myself again a stylus stuck in a broken groove of a scratched record, endlessly and mindlessly repeating old wounds and old pains. I feel trapped. Damn! Sex always comes with strings attached.

There is no such thing as free sex, free love or safe sex. You always will have to pay for it, one way or the other, sooner or later. ---In truth, in my inner self even as I complain I have a great deal of unspoken sympathy for Eva’s concerns. Intellectually, it does occur to me that because it touches the core of our being and the core of our human relatedness sex is never free of consequences. Life and its very energy itself is its principal cause as well as consequence.

As for women, I have to sheepishly thank God for not making me one. Any fool can see that women, because of their bearing the direct burden of bodily reproduction, and the burden of care for the infant thereafter, their vulnerability and dependence must needs be all the greater, and the number of strings attached necessarily greater than with us of the “slam-bam-and-thank-you-ma’am” sex. I can take all of that in intellectually, but in real life and emotionally I find it impossible to hand over my freedom. She makes me want to be a better man—to recover something good and true but lost inside, but I am so far unable to be so. Video meliora proboque, deteriora seqor, as Ovid would have it. Every human life is marked with the chasms of might-have-beens—arising from choices made, largely blindly, which leave lasting consequences, lasting scars, lasting barriers. Freedom is exile, and I am condemned to be free.


After Marlene I had the pleasure of the open road and the open future, sexually speaking until my engagement with my ex-fiancée Simone. She was in love with me and I fond of her, though more fond of my freedom. Both of our families pressured us to marry and to them it seemed but a matter of course that we should. The element that rescued her from a mere saccharine and youth-dependent prettiness and perhaps attracted me was the appetite for dissoluteness and disobedience that came from being rich and spoiled. It put depth in her eyes and made them humorous, it complicated her mouth, her teeth and the lay of her hair. She was hurt, she was sorry. That was how she was. Her voice was arrestingly lovely---her voice was full of money.

I have to be honest in saying that the key factor that converted this possibility into a strong temptation was not merely the pleasure of her devotion and of her lovely body but the fact that she was, or would be immensely rich, the heiress of a world-class auto manufacturer in Bavaria. Thus I yielded to the pressures from her and from all around me and my own ulterior acquisitive instincts to pop the question on Corfu one summer and we became “a thing.” I was however Byronic enough of a hero to persist in my many other sexual playmates and bedfriends of those “liberated” years, much to her annoyance and suffering. She, however was raised with the instinct of her family, an sort of German incarnation of the “Forsyte spirit,” to get and hold inexorably the thing she set out to possess, and the more she sought to tighten her grip on me the more my instincts of male liberty recoiled and we grew apart……Beware that grip!..... I escaped happily into the world-roving work of the UN Parliamentary Assembly, happy to repeatedly get away from her stifling presence and the re-posting to London was a blessing. Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness. Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.

I would go out regularly with Simone---at first quite happily. Then little by little I felt the growing weight of her eyes upon me. And by eyes, I mean the possessive eyes of a fiancée rather than the eyes of a lover. In every café or restaurant I could feel her eyes ever following mine, never leaving even a tenth of a second of freedom for my own to rove about the faces and bodies of the women surrounding us. Men hunt foxes by aid of dogs and are aware they do so by aid of the canine organ of smell, though they have little comprehension of how such a sense may work with such uncanny acuteness. But God! The organ by which women instinctively, as it were, know and instantaneously feel how other women are regarded by men is equally strong and equally inescapable on the spoor!

Finally, too much being too much, I paid her a visit breaking it all off and turned my back on an outbreak of tears and pleading. Inwardly I hurt myself also by hurting her in the leaving. In some ways she was a good girl. Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get love, or if we did we were sure to do our perverse best to destroy it. That was the way of the world and she was of this world. Her grief proved short-lived, however as I learned from friends that she married on the rebound five months later to another of the industrial princelings in Munich, and the wedding photos made a loud splash on the cover of “Stern” Magazine. Later she and her new husband visited London and I had a lunch with her for old times’ sake. Later, Eva and I discussed her over dinner:

“What does she think of her marriage?” she asked.

“She doesn’t think anything. She’s brainwashed.” I retorted.

“Marriage is brainwashing….” Eva shot back, “…..Not necessarily a bad thing. Some brains need washing. Some are filthy with grime and some are musty from never being used.” I laughed out loud as the glare of her eyes fell on me in mock accusation.

“Is that a personal reference?” I teased her back.

“As you lawyers put it, Res Ipsa Loquitur----the thing speaks for itself!” and we both burst out laughing, she having scored a point against me, but good it was as we ended up in bed tickling and kidding and reconciling to each other in good sport.



.

Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

Note: This is Chapter 15 Continued of Spiritus Mundi the Occupy Wall Street Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Weekly Free Online for the Movement. Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved--Licensed for Personal Viewing Only



XV. London Deceits and Revelations




4




Mohammad Ala Rushdie was just back from Cairo. He had done a teach-in on the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly Campaign together with his countryman and CUNPA sponsor former United Nations Secretary General Boutros Butros-Ghali, visited his parents, attended a high-school class reunion and seen some old friends before returning to London. Though his parents were moderately wealthy he preferred to be independent and since he left Cambridge he did not ask them for money, though he had his own small independent trust fund settled on him by his late grandfather that provided him with a small but comfortable base-level income in British pounds, which he supplemented by his work with the Committee, odd jobs and some writing. His father was disappointed in him and thought he was going to seed after leaving university, not climbing the ladder to success and wealth as he had mapped-out and imagined. His mother was more understanding and said he would find his own path when the time is right. Unlike his friend and CUNPA Co-coordinator for the Middle-East, Mustafa bin Salaman al Khalifa he did not manage hundreds of millions of pounds and live in the classiest neighborhoods and playgrounds of London, but had a downscale rented flat on the unfashionable south side, though Mustafa would often let him stay in his posh Georgian townhouse on Berkeley Square for extended periods. When he left Cambridge and came down to London he used to revel at partying and playing with Mustafa and his expensive girls and toys. For the past year Mohammad preferred not to go to Berkeley Square but withdrew more and more to himself when not required by work to associate with others. He did not know if this was running away from something or running towards something but he withdrew deeper and deeper into himself and sloughed off his old habits like a snake sloughing off a skin too tight to breathe in.

After finishing work in his cubicle at the Committee headquarters and shutting down his computer Mohammad headed neither for his home nor for Mustafa’s townhouse but rather for the neighborhood of Maida Hill and Maida Vale in West London, to the north of its more famous cousin Notting Hill and to the northwest of Hyde Park. His destination was the Zikr at the Naqshbandi Tasawuuf Center at Maida Hill----translated into English this was the ‘Sufi Meditation Centre,’ which Muhammad had been attending regularly for many months and at which during Ramadan he had become a Murid, or novice disciple under the guidance of his Pir, or master, Shayk Nazim al-Qubrushi, the worldwide master of the Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi Order, who had initiated him on his yearly London Ramadan visit to the London Centre which he had established twenty years before.

The Sufi tradition was a centuries old mystic tradition of Islam that attracted Mohammad from an early age in middle-school. His father was a strict Salafi of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Salafi’s, like their better known Wahaabi cousins in Saudi Arabia were staunch reactionaries and disciplinarians. His father as a leading member of the leading Salafi mosque in Cairo and activist in the Muslim Brotherhood spoke out against Bidah----any innovation from the time of the Prophet, which was assumed to be a golden age of spiritual purity ever to be passively imitated rather than built upon or evolved from; He spoke out against Kalaam----any discourse or debate of philosophizing with regards to theology or religious precepts beyond the blindly accepted catechism; He spoke out against any deviation from the inspired examples of the Koran and the Hadith, which were to be religiously and painstakingly followed. The spirit was austere and Puritan, but unlike Western Puritans who broke with a corrupt religious church and authority to reinstate the purer practices of the past, the Salafi Puritanism embraced the unthinking acceptance and veneration of an ages old authority which was not to be questioned. Holiness was to be attained by unthinking and unquestioning conformity to the practices of the past and the rituals and authority passed on for generations. To Mohammad’s youthful sensitivity he found his father’s religion repulsive in that it emphasized the mere conformist mouthing of the formulas, rituals and shibboleths of the past without any concern for the living heart, mind or spirit of the believer, or his heart-to-heart relationship to Allah his God. Mohammad could not believe that Allah cared only that the lips and bending bodies of his adherants moved in the proper ritual patterns and cared nothing for what was in their hearts and minds.

To Mohammad his father’s reactionary ideas along with his repressive personal controls and restrictions of his personal freedom plus his father’s personal philistine fixation on earning money and obtaining the icons of social status grew increasingly distasteful, and in his middle-school years he took in Western-oriented liberal and humanistic values which led him to rebel and chafe under his father’s whip. Though his mother was conservative in religious sentiment and ideology she sympathized with her son and with his interest in Sufism, and they made common cause in discontent with his father’s abrasiveness after she discovered his father had had affairs and after he took a second and then a third wife. He escaped into hard work and studies in the high school and then when the opportunity to attend Cambridge came up, Mohammad saw his opportunity to get out from under his father’s clutches. At university he was briefly a communist and atheist, then threw himself into fast living with his friend Mustafa, then returned to social conscience and social spirituality with work with several NGO’s such as Greenpeace and the Committee for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, finally returning to his religious roots in Sufism. Gradually he returned to religious searching and began to explore the Sufi tradition, which combined an intrinsic faithfulness to his heritage of Islam with a continued rejection of the empty unthinking and unfeeling authoritarianism of his father’s Salafi inclination.

At Cambridge Mohammad asked himself where Islam had gone wrong----he knew that he came from one of the great civilizations of world history-----that the inventors of algebra, alchemy, and transmitters of much of the world’s literature fueling the Renaissance when Europeans were lost in the dark ages, the high civilization of the Abyssid Caliphate, of Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Al Ghazali, of Ibn Battuta, of architectural wonders like the mosques and Taj Majal and of Islam and its empires from Africa to Indonesia were amoung the great flowers of human civilization---but that his people had fallen behind somehow. He felt it was because the religion had petrified into unthinking and stultifying authority and ritual while the civilization had lost its living heart----just like his father’s stultifying Salafism-----maybe the Sufi tradition was a path back towards reopening contact with that lost living heart.

Mohammad had met his Pir three years before at an address he gave at the Minhaj-ul-Quran International London Centre, and had accompanied him to the Maida Hill Sufi Meditation Centre during that year’s Ramadan. Though they talked extensively, there was a wordless bond of spirit between the two men---the one at the end of life’s journey with his flowing white beard and sparkling ancient eyes and the other beginning his spiritual search at the beginning of his youthful life. They kept in touch by e-mail and telephone over two years and Mohammad’s devotion and spiritual attraction grew stronger each time the Pir visited him in London. Through his Pir Mohammad also met leading Sufis active in contemporary Britain, including Abdal Hakim Nurad at Cambridge, born as Tom Denver before his Sufi conversion, and who conducted classes on Sufism at Cambridge and set Mohammad on a course of self-education regarding the Sufi tradition and emphasized its universal spiritual mission and compatibility with all faiths. Nurad, as had the Pir, emphasized that Sufism could not be learned from books, nor even from words or concepts but was, like Zen Buddhism something which could only be transmitted from heart-to-heart and spirit-to-spirit between the brothers of the order and from Pir to Murid, an opening of the inner dimension of the spirit under the catalyst of the heart-to-heart interactions of the Master of the Way.

Though Nurad emphasized that enlightenment and spiritual unification with the heart of Allah could not be obtained by mere cultural knowledge, nevertheless he emphasized the social value of such knowledge and set Mohammed on a course of study while at Cambridge which included general familiarization with Al Ghazali and his explications of Sufi wisdom in the Alchemy of Happiness; He gave him texts in Arabic and English including Hujwiri’s Kashf al-Mahjub, and Qushayri’s Risala; He set him to finding the parallels with the Western spiritual traditions in Islamic literature, such as the affinities of Dante’s world view with the Sufi Neoplatonist Ibn Arabi, and of Dante’s Divina Commedia with the Isra and Mi’ra, or Night Journey of Mohammad, the Kitab al Mi’ra, and the Epistle of Forgiveness, the Raslaat Al-Gufran, of Al-Mi’arri: He introduced him to the various Sufi sects and sub-orders, the Mevlevi, Chishti, Qadiriyah, Naqshbandiyah, Deobandis and Suhrawardiyya; He introduced him to several visiting contemporary Sufi masters such as Emir Abd al-Qadir of Algeria, Amadou Bamba of Senegal, and Sheik Mansur of the Caucasas region; He met westerners who had embraced Sufism such as the Swedish-born Abd al-hadi Aqhili, Dr. Alan Godlas or the University of Georgia, and Nuh Ha Min Keller and met Sheik Hishan Kabbani of the United States; He introduced him to related traditions such as the works of the mystic G.I. Gurdjieff and the Gnostic tradition of Christianity; He read books by Mohammad Emin Er of Turkey on the compatibility of Islam and Christianity and the works of Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, and Muzaffer Ozak. Gradually he was initiated into the beginning spiritual meditation and exploration practices, rituals and techniques of the Sufi mystical tradition. Finally on his Pir’s last Ramadan visit Mohammad announced his intention to become a Murid novice and the Pir accepted and initiated him.

Together with his Pir, Mohammad struggled through many of his doubts and quandaries concerning religion in general and Islam and Sufism. Expecting the older man to be rather traditionalist and dogmatic, Mohammad was surprised to hear from him that he himself had wrestled with the same questions in his own youth, and that he had come from his struggles by no means a dogmatist. “All religions are true, and all are false----true in the spirit of what they seek to represent; false in the letter of their so representing.” his Pir told him, deep in a philosophical conversation one day.

“We need to have a proper humility about our knowledge of God, Allah. How we think about God is not what God is. Because our knowing capacity is limited and God is inexhaustible, we can never know directly more than a distorted fraction of His nature. Thus, I have come to feel more and more, that Theology and Dogma, as a conceptual grappling with God, Allah as an idea, actually gets in the way of true religion, which is the living experience of God within, through righteousness and love. Yes, think, Mohammad, by all means think----but do not become merely a Thinker. Passion should be trusted even through its mistakes, because of its shear depth and power of life-----it alone takes a person into those experiences where alone genuine change can happen---where a genuine recasting of the relationship between the inner life of a person and God, Allah, can occur.”

At the same time his Pir warned him of the danger of the other extreme, that of intellectual quietism, or the unthinking acceptance of an arbitrary authority, clerical or mundane. “The claim that religion is simply the truth, above and beyond human reason, while tempting is not in accord with the faculty of mind endowed by God, Allah himself upon us. This abdication of the human mind can all too easily leave believers unthinking, and thinkers unbelieving, neither of which is sustainable.”

He also warned Mohammad against religious elitism, and cautioned him to seek God, Allah within every person, and not merely amoung the mullahs and scholars. He insisted that everyone was part of God, and religious in some latent sense. Active religion was merely the coming forward---into the foreground---of that which is the Universal Background of all human existence.

His Pir insisted that Mohammad wrestle with all the important questions of religion, and have a principled foundation for rejecting atheism, materialsm or the scientific challenges to religion. At first Mohammad thought this must be like the Jesuit practice of “inoculating” their novices with weakened pathogens to strengthen the antibodies of their own faith. But after many months he found that his Pir genuinely delighted in the free play of the mind, and he was concerned that if Mohammad dedicated his life to Sufism that he should do so in all intellectual honesty. Mohammad thus grappled with the scientific objections to his faith, such as Darwinian theories of evolution. Mohammad, having studied the question, found that he could not simply discard the evolutionary science in favor of a literalist Koranic account of the Creation, and he was increasingly plagued by his intellectual unbelief. Finally, he came to look on lthe two bases of human origins as not incompatible. Trying to explain this conclusion to his Pir, who to his surprise questioned him on his doubts and unbelief on several occasions, he responded: “I believe it is just as noble a conception of Allah, the Deity, to believe he created primal forms capable of self-development, into all forms needful, in time and place, as to beliee he requires a fresh act of intervention to supply the lucanas which he himself had made. It is not necessary to take a pre-human, non-human system in human terms. God’s Intelligence may equally manifest itself in the energies of eternal processes, as in the poetic description of their result as a momentary act of cosmic creation.”

“Good! Excellent!” exclaimed the Pir, clapping his hands when Mohammad had finished his thought. “Yes, Yes! I came to the same conclusion when I was young. Thus do things change. What yesterday was still religion, is no longer such today; and what today is atheism, tomorrow will be religion. But God is in all, both in belief and in unbelief, and he will write the greater story of both. If Nature does, how much more does God abhor a vacuum. God will fill it out of some dimension, whether knowable or not.” This had a deep effect on Mohammad, and he was no longer afraid of his doubts or his thoughts of unbelief. For him, thereafter, there occurred a radical shift in the relation between his belief and his unbelief, by which unbelief itself became a religious phenomenon, in its unwillingness to be unbelief, in its intensity, its need, and its own intrinsic searching for a meaning other.

Under the practice of the Order, a newly initiated Murid novice proceeded through two stages prior to dedicating his life to the Sufi Order. The spiritual ideal of the Sufi order was the abandonment of Ego and the breaking down of the separation between Self and God enabling attainment of the mystical state of Fitra, or unification with Allah. This involved the process of Fana Baqa, or the Annihilation of Self in the Presence of God. This process in the common case would not take place instantaneously but would follow a pattern of gradual refinement of the spirit and its purification, a gradual sloughing off of the world and turning towards the spirit, and also an atonement and purification of the “Twisted Love” of this world. Mohammad’s Pir insisted that just as God, Allah loved his creation with all of his heart, no Sufi could regard his unification with God as a mere or veiled means of escape from God’s world and God-given life. He insisted that spiritual growth required the completion of the circle before any union with God, a necedssity of returning to the world rather than merely escaping from it. Thus the new novice Murid would first undergo the Mavlevi practice of 1001 days of atonement and purification through social service in which the goal was to attain Humility and overcome the Self through service to humanity. Thereafter, another period of 1001 days would be dedicated to spiritual devotion and monastic dedication, training and spiritual exploration and purification under the direct heart-to-heart spiritual guidance of the Pir. Thereafter, upon attaining transformation and enlightenment, the Sufi Murid would be received into the Order as a full brother and master. Mohammad was now nearly 100 days into his social service tenure, much of which was fulfilled through his work at the CUNPA Committee and some at the Sufi Meditation Centre and other NGO social service activities.

Today, at the Sufi Meditation Centre, he would greet his Pir, who was visiting for the Ashura festival and participate in the Zikr, or Sufi service of common meditation and prayer, then celebrate Ashura together by taking a Ghusl, sharing a Noah’s Pudding and listening to the discourses of the Pir on spiritual practice. Muhammad entered the Center doors at Maida Hill and saw a large crowd filling the foyer of the hall, where they removed their shoes and moved into the large hall. Within the inner hall was a large meeting room without elaborate decoration in which gathered a mixed audience, some in western clothing and some in traditional Sufi garb. There was an energizing buzz of spirited talk that centered on the presence of two glorious-looking octogenarians with flowing white beards. The one on the right in a green turban was the Shaik Hishan Kabbani, and the on the left was the Shaik Nazim al-Qubrushi al-Haqqani, Mohammad’s Pir.

Mohammad’s Pir, Mehmet Nâzım Adil, also known as Sultan-al Awliya Shaykh Mawlana as-Sayyid Khwaja Muhammad Nazim Adil al-Haqqani al-Rabbani al-Qubrusi al-Firdausi an-Naqshbandi (born April 23, 1922 (CE) (IC) (Shaban 26, 1340) was the acknowledged leader of the Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi Order.

He was born in Larnaca, Cyprus, hence the title “Qubrusi” which means Cypriot. He traced his lineage to the 11th Century Sufi Abdul Quadir Jilani and the 13th Century Anatolian mystic Jalaluddin Rumi. His maternal and paternal grandfathers were sheiks in the Qadiri and Mevlevi orders respectively. As a child, the young Nazim showed a propensity towards spirituality. His father sent him to school to study secular knowledge during the day and in the evening he studied Islam at the local maktab, where he learned the basics of Islamic law, jurisprudence, the Hadith and Qur’anic exegesis.. Shaykh Nazim was a revered spiritual leader of the Naqshbandi golden chain. He was also head of the Naqshbandi Haqqani Sufi Order. His permanent home was in Cyprus though as Pir he spent much of his life in travel.

At the age of 18 the young Nazim moved to Istanbul where two brothers and a sister were living. He studied chemical engineering at Istanbul University. While advancing in his non-religious studies, Nazim continued his education in Islamic theology and the Arabic language under the tutelage of Shaykh Cemalettin Elassoni. Nazim received a degree in chemical engineering and he excelled amoung his colleagues. Yet he would later state, “I felt no attraction to modern science. My heart was always drawn to the spiritual sciences.” He later came to master not only his native tongue Turkish, but Arabic, English, and Greek as well.

At some point during his first year of life in Istanbul, Nazim met his first spiritual guide, Shaykh Suleyman Erzurmi, who was a murshid in the Naqshbandi Order. Sheikh Nazim attended the gatherings of this particular shaykh which were held in the Sultan Ahmed Mosque.

Here he learned the basic spiritual methods of the Naqshbandi Order, in addition to those of the Qadiri and the Mevlevi. His focus on spirituality was further reinforced by the unexpected death of an elder brother. Shortly after attaining his degree Sheikh Nazim received inspiration to go to Damascus in order to find the famed Naqshbandi master, Shaykh Abdullah al-Fa’izi ad-Daghestani. He obtained permission from Shaykh Erzurumi to leave Istanbul and in 1944 he arrived in Syria, although the unrest caused by the Vichy French government prevented his entry into Damascus until 1945. Upon meeting with the master, whose tekke is located on the slopes of the Jabal Qasyoun, Sheikh Nazim took his hand in bay’ah, or initiation. The young Sheikh Nazim’s mystical faculties were self=evident and he advanced along the Sufi path with great speed.

Shortly thereafter Shaykh Abdullah Daghestani ordered Shaykh Nazim to return to his native Cyprus to deliver spiritual guidance. Shaykh Abdullah also conferred the title of “Shaykh” to Shaykh Nazim thus giving him the legitimacy to speak on behalf of the Naqshbndi Order.

While in Cyprus, Shaykh Nazim came into conflict with the pro-Attaturk governing body of the Turkish community on the island. His repeated act of making the adhan in Arabic rather than the prescribed Turkish brought several lawsuits against him and there were some 114 cases lodged against him for crimes against the secular order. Nevertheless all these were dropped shortly thereafter with the coming to power of Adnan Menderes in Turkey, whose government opted for a more tolerant approach to Islamic traditions.

Shaykh Nazim moved back to Damascus in 1952, when he was wed to the daughter of one of the murids of Shaykh Abdullah Dagestani, Amina Adil, whose family came to settle in Syria after fleeing Soviet rule of their native Kazan. From that time, Shaykh Nazim took up residence in Damascus, and every year he would visit Cyprus for at least three months. The couple have two daughters and two sons.

In the year following the passing of his murshid in 1973, Shaykh Nazim began visiting Western Europe, traveling every year from the Middle East to London. On his return trips to Damascus, he would often drive by car through the former Yugoslavia, spending time visiting the Muslim communities there. It became his practice to spend the month of Ramadan in the large centre established in London, and visit at other times occasionally. This began his mission of worldwide missionary and educational work, taking him to the United States, South Africa, India and Western and Eastern Europe, where he established many Centres for Sufi study and practice globally.

Mohammad advanced towards the Shaykh, his Pir, and greeted him with a respectful and formal low bow. Thereafter the Shaykh embraced him as father to son and spoke informally and warmly, and included him in the spirited conversation with the brothers gathered around him, sometimes about the spiritual and sometimes about the trivial.
Amoung those gathered talking, alone and aloof in the back of the room, Mohammad caught sight of a young man, hardly more than a boy, seemingly deeply sunk within his own thoughts. Mohammad regarded the youth whom he recognized as Falik Yusuf with some concern as he had previously met with and counseled him many times as part of his volunteer service work with the Young Muslims Organization at the East London Mosque. He had a high regard for him as a serious and upright youth, though conflicted and troubled in the period of his life passing from adolescence into adulthood. Mohammad approached him in welcome and asked how he was, and then ventured to introduce him to his Pir.

After an interval they engaged in the Zikr, a meeting and service focused on prayer, meditation and spiritual communion. Eight adepts in Dervish costume, resembling elaborate white dresses, and high black boots, engaged in the commonly termed ‘Whirling Dervish’ practices of meditation aimed at erasing the self and unifying the consciousness with the world and cosmos and Allah. The men and women sat on the floor in stocking feet watching them, while enjoying the Noah’s Pudding of Ashura with its famous nuts, raisins, rice, honey, hazelnuts, fruit and assorted delicacies, along with tea. Chairs were also arrayed around the walls for those who found the floor uncomfortable. Video cameras recorded the gathering and especially the sermon and discourse of the Pir.

The Pir opened with some general comments on the celebration of Ashura and on the members of the congregation. The Pir led in Nafl Salat for Ashurah offering fiyr rakats Nafl Salat: In every rakat after Surah al-Fateha he recited "Ayatul Kursi" once and Surah Ikhlas three times. After completing this Prayer (Namaz/Salat) he recited Surah Ikhlas 100 times, reciting that, Inshallah, Allah Almighty will purify such a person from all their sins and grant them endless bounties and blessings in paradise. He led the congregation in remembering the Shahid (Martyrs) and all the family and Sahabah who were martyred at Karbala, especially the grandson of the Holy Prophet Sayyidina al-Husayn. Special Duas, or prayers, were made for all suffering in Gaza and in oppressed areas around the world.

Then the Pir shared happier news with a New Marriage Announcement! Congratulations to both Alauddin and his new wife Amina! Brother Sajad conducted the marriage ceremony. And the Pir announced the new ‘Zikr Online’ services that all could partake of via the Internet, and the ‘SufiBlog’ where all could share their thoughts and concerns online, and see videos of the Whirling Dervishes and the wedding ceremony!

He welcomed Brother Suhail, his first time in a Zikr association, who drove from Hertfordshire and looked forward to seeing him again. Thank you to also sister Gulnaz who attended before and hope you found the Zikr beneficial. Jazakhallah to everyone that manages to attend regularly. Jazakhallah to Uncle Amjudgul for his lovely rice, chicken and bean curry and the delicious chocolate chip brownies were made by sister Sarah Chowdury. Mashallah the group is always spoiled with both brother Rahil's and Yamin's generosity with either outstanding cooking from Rahil and Auntie Farida or Yamin's 'bakery' treats of deserts, so jazakhallah to them both and may Allah Almighty reward you all here and hereafter. And welcome back Hadji Uncle Saheen who returned from the Hadjj and a trip to the old country!

The Pir then said he would give a discourse or sermon on two topics: Dua, or Prayer and secondly, Zikr, or Meditation. The Pir offered a ‘Prayer for All:’

“Allah Almighty always has three possible replies to our Dua/Prayers
1) 'Yes'
2) 'Yes, but not now,' or
3) 'I have a better plan for you'

There's never a 'NO'....just have faith and keep praying.
This is an awesome prayer .

Believe it and you shall be blessed even more.

The problem with many of us is that we don't believe that God will open a window and pour out blessings that we won't have room to receive them. I dare anyone to try God. He is true to His word. God does not lie and His promises are sure. Three things will happen to you this coming week, Insha'Allah:

(1) You will find favour with someone you don't expect;
(2) You will be too relevant to be ignored; or
(3) You will encounter God and you will never remain the same again.


Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

Note: This is Chapter 15 Continued of Spiritus Mundi the Occupy Wall Street Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Weekly Free Online for the Movement. Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved
I Offer a Prayer for you today:

The eyes beholding this Dua shall not behold evil, the hands that send this message to others shall not labor in vain, the mouth saying 'Ameen' to this prayer shall know laughter. Remain in God's love as you repeat this prayer to everybody in your heart. Have a lovely journey of life! Trust in Allah with all your heart and He will never fail you because He is the Greatest, Most Generous, Most Merciful!

Allah Huma Salle Ala Muhammdin Wa-Ale Alihi Wa Sahibihi Wa Sal-lam

Repeat in your Heart:

Ya Allah, most Gracious and Loving God, I pray to You that You abundantly bless my family and me. I know that you recognize, that a family is more than just a mother, father, sister, brother, husband and wife, but all who believe and trust in you. Oh Allah, I send up a prayer request for Your blessings not only on the person who sent this message to me, but for all those whom I have forwarded this message on to, by the whisperings of my heart and myself. I am also aware that the power of joint prayers by those who believe and trust in You is more powerful than anything. I thank you always for Your blessings.

Almighty Allah, deliver the person whispering from his heart to your ear now from sickness both in spiritual and physical being, oppression, from wickedness and any evil plotted against them, anxiety, debt and debt's burdens. Release Your Godly wisdom that we may be good stewards over all that You have given us. Ya Allah, for I know how wonderful and Almighty You are.

Ya Rabbul Alameen, I am also fully conscious of the fact that if we just obey You and walk in Your way, that You have shown to us, you will pour out your endless blessings on us. I thank you now Allah for the recent blessings I have received and for the blessings yet to come because I know you have not closed your favours to me. In your name I pray,

Innaka Alaa Kulle Shay-in Kadeer. Ameen .

Now everyone join in a circle of hands silently for sixty seconds and send this prayer on quickly whispering from heart to heart and from heart to the ear of Allah ---you will have caused a multitude of people to pray to God for each other. Then sit back and watch the power of Allah work in your life for doing the thing that you know He loves.”

The Pir then addressed a small sermon or discourse to the assembled brothers, on the topic of Zikr:
“Zikr is mentioned in many places in the Holy Qur'an, and in most verses, what was meant by the word Zikr is tasbih, glorifying; takbir, exalting; tahmid, praising; and praising and praying upon the Prophet. According to Bukhari, Abu Musa al-Ashcari related that the Prophet said, ‘The difference between the one who makes Zikr and the one who doesn't make Zikr is like the difference between the living and the dead.’

Tirmidhi narrated from Anas that the Prophet said, "If you pass by the Paradises of Heaven stay there." They asked, "Ya Rasul-Allah, what are the Paradises of Heaven?" He said, "The associations of Zikr!"

Bukhari narrated in his book from Abu Huraira that the Prophet said, "Allah, Almighty and Exalted, has angels who seek the People of Zikr. If they find the people of Zikr they encompass and embrace them until they reach the first heaven. And Allah asks his angels, 'What are my servants doing?' The angels say, 'O Allah, they are praising You and glorifying You and they are making Zikr.' Allah says, 'Did they see Me?' The angels answer, 'No, they didn't see You.' Then Allah asks, 'How would it be if they were to see Me?' The angels reply, 'O Allah, if they were to see You, they would be making more praise of You and more glorification of You and more Zikr of You.' And Allah asks 'What are they asking for?' The angels say, 'They are asking for Your Paradise.' Allah asks, 'Did they see My Paradise?' The angels answer, 'No, Our Lord.' Allah continues, 'How would it be if they saw My Paradise?' The angels reply, 'They would be more attracted and more eager to reach it.' Then Allah asks them, 'Of what are they afraid?' And the angels say, 'They are afraid of hellfire.' and Allah asks, 'How would it be if they saw my Hellfire?' and they reply, 'They would be running more and more away from it and asking more and more protection from it.' Then Allah said,' I am making you all My witnesses: that I am forgiving them of all their sins.' Then one angel asked, 'O our Lord, there is among these people one who is not from them, he came only to ask a favor for something from one of them.' Allah said, 'Those are my beloved ones who are making My Zikr. Anyone who comes into their circle will be forgiven, and I am forgiving him.'"

In Bukhari and throughout Islam it is narrated from Abu Huraira that the Prophet said, "As my servant thinks about Me so will I be for him. I am with him if he will remember Me. If he calls on Me in himself I will call him in Myself, and if he calls on Me in a group of people, I mention him in a better group in My presence. If he approaches Me one handspan, I will approach him one arm's length; if he approaches Me one arm's length, I will approach him by a cubit; if he comes to Me walking, I will come to him running."

“Now I will speak on the types of Zikr and the importance of the Zikr of the heart to the life of the Sufi.” announced the Pir. “Zikr can be can be done both silently or aloud. The Prophet encouraged people to do both kinds. Among the scholars of Shari'ah and the Sufi Sheikhs, some preferred the loud Zikr and some preferred the silent Zikr.

Imam Ahmad narrated, "Abu Huraira reported that the Prophet said that Allah says, 'I am with my servant when he remembers Me and by his remembrance of Me his lips move." Commenting on this hadith, Imam Nawawi said, "Allah is with the one who remembers Him and calls Him in his heart, and calls Him on his tongue, but we must realize that the Zikr of the heart is more perfect. The rememberer made Zikr of the tongue in order to reflect the occurrence of the Zikr in his heart. When the love of Allah and His Remembrance overwhelms the heart and the spirit, the tongue is moved and the seeker brought near."

Sheikh Amin al-Kurdi said in The Enlightenment of Hearts (Tanwir al-Qulub) p. 522: "The Zikr by tongue, which combines sounds and letters, is not easy to perform at all times, because buying and selling and other such activities altogether divert one's attention from such Zikr. The contrary is true of the Zikr by heart, which is named that way in order to signify its freedom from letters and sounds. In that way nothing distracts one from his Zikr, as the poet says:

‘With the heart remember Allah, secretly from creation, wordlessly and speechlessly.

That remembrance is best of all: out of it flowed the sayings of the saints.’

"That is why our Naqshbandi masters have chosen the Zikr of the heart. Moreover, the heart is the place where the Forgiver casts his gaze, and the seat of belief, and the receptacle of secrets, and the source of lights. If it is sound, the whole body is sound, and if it is unsound, the whole body is unsound, as was made clear for us by the chosen Prophet.

"Something that confirms this was narrated on the authority of A'isha (r): 'Allah favors Zikr above Zikr seventy fold (meaning, silent Zikr of the Heart over loud Zikr of the Tongue).

On the Day of Resurrection, God will bring back human beings to His Account, and the Recording Angels will bring what they have recorded and written, and Allah Almighty will say: See if something that belongs to my servant was left out? The angels will say: We left nothing out concerning what we have learnt and recorded, except that we have assessed it and written it. Allah will say: O my servant, I have something good of yours for which I alone will reward you, it is your hidden remembrance of Me.' Bayhaqi narrated it.

"Also on the authority of A'isha: 'The Zikr not heard by the Recording Angels equals seventy times the one they hear.' Bayhaqi narrates it. Inshallah."

After the Pir gave his sermon, Mohammad joined with the others in congratulating him and thanking him, and in small groups the congregation exited the Sufi Center and made their way in many directions towards their various homes. Mohammad departed, intent on walking homewards with the young Falik Yusuf, who lived in the same neighborhood as he.

Two listeners to the sermon, however did not immediately leave their places. The two listeners were unknown to Mohammad or to the Sufi Pir, but listened intently on two sets of recording headphones in a British Telecom van parked discretely down the block from the Centre’s entrance. The occupants were Ernest Huxley and Peter Townsend, who had planted the microphones and hidden cameras inside the Centre several months ago pursuant to court authorization on behalf of the British Security Service of Thames House, MI5. They remained in their van making backup copies and operating the video camera in the van recording the participants exiting the Centre.
“Damn it all” shouted out Peter Townsend, “……………I guess we are Allah’s Recording Angels for the moment and I hope it all goes into the right files in Heaven.-----at least it will go as far as Thames House and Langley, but I wouldn’t bet on it reaching the ears of God or Allah from there----more likely his nemesis is following those files a lot more closely….. Damn, I don’t know what we are recording all this for, it seems to be just a lot of God’s good people trying to lead good lives. But it isn’t our call to make, we just do our jobs, ay what------What did the old man say---what is left out of the recording is worth seventy times what is recorded?-----Well that sounds about right----we are wasting our time sixty-nine times out of seventy and on the seventy-first we’re not there to record it-----they haven’t invented a microphone that can listen inside the human heart yet.”

“Fuck” droned out Ernest Huxley, “Let’s wrap this up and get back to Thames House and check in and out and have a bloody pint on the way home.”

“You’re on.” replied Peter, starting up the van’s engine.







5





Jack Sartorius’s role as Jack McKinsey of Jung Communications was becoming more and more second nature to him now. In the London headquarters office of Jung Communications when the secretaries called ‘Mr. McKinsey’ to him he no longer flinched inwardly but accepted it all unthinkingly and as naturally as putting on his tie in the morning. He had been hard at work in London for several weeks, assigned to the Task Force planning the Global Campaign for the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly. After the central planning was accomplished in London then he would divide his time on the project between Washington and New York, where he would oversee the North American implementation, and London, where he would participate in ongoing global oversight as a member of the Global Coordinating Committee.

On the Public Relations and organizational side this was a bit of a stretch for Jack as he was somewhat new to those duties, though he had some prior experience from lobby work in Washington. His path was smoothed, however, in that the CIA had arranged a full time executive assistant as understudy for him in the Washington office of Jung Communications who had ten more years of experience on the PR side than Jack, and overstaffed his office with extra secretaries and administrative help to whom he could delegate much of the technical work and call at any time for practical advice. His boss at the Jung Communications Washington office, Joel Mentes, who was also a covered CIA officer, oversaw both his Jung Communications work and his CIA work, and was available to sort out any conflicts or difficulties, and above all Jack was a ‘quick study’ and picked things up rapidly, so things fell into place smoothly over time.

This morning he would run over to Thames House and meet with some of the MI5/BSS officers working some of the same files that he was involved with. First though, he would take in some fresh air and amble with delicious freedom through the streets of London. He walked with the morning sun aslant, lighting up the faces of the crowds bustling their way towards their offices---bankers in bowler hats and umbrellas used as walking sticks, shoppers clutching their prized packages, and clutches of young secretaries on their way to their morning work. He found himself walking in an unbounded sea of bosoms, breasts, thighs, undulating backsides and the glancing eyes precariously balanced between attraction and repulsion, each and every one of which were invitingly and endlessly pulsating with possibility. He was twenty-nine and it was spring in London.

Then he took a large black oversized London cab to the vicinity and walked to the Thames House, located near the Houses of Parliament on the Thames River, where he cleared security and was escorted by a pretty girl in her twenties in a blouse and skirt which revealed the shapely athletic body beneath---the Liaison Officer---and waited in a comfortable conference room with a couch and armchairs as well as a conference table, waiting for his counterparts on the British side. After five minutes she returned bringing a tray with coffee and some pastries, saying they would come shortly. He tried hard not to look too long up the cleavage between her breasts as she leaned over to pour cream into his cup of coffee.

After about ten more minutes two well built Britishers who looked like college athletes came in carrying their laptops and a pile of administrative files.

“Good Morning Jack! How is the posh life at the Ritz Hotel treating you? Some buggers seem to have all the luck! We’ve been spending our nights curled up inside a bloody British Telecoms van while you enjoy tea at the bloody Palm Court!” groused Peter Townsend.

“Well come up and see me-----let’s have these conferences over Afternoon Tea at the Palm Court and I will put it all on the company credit card for your benefit” joked back Jack, as he also greeted Ernest Huxley, who was busy setting up his laptop.




Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

Note: This is Chapter 15 Continued of Spiritus Mundi the Occupy Wall Street Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Weekly Free Online for the Movement. Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved
I Offer a Prayer for you today:

The eyes beholding this Dua shall not behold evil, the hands that send this message to others shall not labor in vain, the mouth saying 'Ameen' to this prayer shall know laughter. Remain in God's love as you repeat this prayer to everybody in your heart. Have a lovely journey of life! Trust in Allah with all your heart and He will never fail you because He is the Greatest, Most Generous, Most Merciful!

Allah Huma Salle Ala Muhammdin Wa-Ale Alihi Wa Sahibihi Wa Sal-lam

Repeat in your Heart:

Ya Allah, most Gracious and Loving God, I pray to You that You abundantly bless my family and me. I know that you recognize, that a family is more than just a mother, father, sister, brother, husband and wife, but all who believe and trust in you. Oh Allah, I send up a prayer request for Your blessings not only on the person who sent this message to me, but for all those whom I have forwarded this message on to, by the whisperings of my heart and myself. I am also aware that the power of joint prayers by those who believe and trust in You is more powerful than anything. I thank you always for Your blessings.

Almighty Allah, deliver the person whispering from his heart to your ear now from sickness both in spiritual and physical being, oppression, from wickedness and any evil plotted against them, anxiety, debt and debt's burdens. Release Your Godly wisdom that we may be good stewards over all that You have given us. Ya Allah, for I know how wonderful and Almighty You are.

Ya Rabbul Alameen, I am also fully conscious of the fact that if we just obey You and walk in Your way, that You have shown to us, you will pour out your endless blessings on us. I thank you now Allah for the recent blessings I have received and for the blessings yet to come because I know you have not closed your favours to me. In your name I pray,

Innaka Alaa Kulle Shay-in Kadeer. Ameen .

Now everyone join in a circle of hands silently for sixty seconds and send this prayer on quickly whispering from heart to heart and from heart to the ear of Allah ---you will have caused a multitude of people to pray to God for each other. Then sit back and watch the power of Allah work in your life for doing the thing that you know He loves.”

The Pir then addressed a small sermon or discourse to the assembled brothers, on the topic of Zikr:
“Zikr is mentioned in many places in the Holy Qur'an, and in most verses, what was meant by the word Zikr is tasbih, glorifying; takbir, exalting; tahmid, praising; and praising and praying upon the Prophet. According to Bukhari, Abu Musa al-Ashcari related that the Prophet said, ‘The difference between the one who makes Zikr and the one who doesn't make Zikr is like the difference between the living and the dead.’

Tirmidhi narrated from Anas that the Prophet said, "If you pass by the Paradises of Heaven stay there." They asked, "Ya Rasul-Allah, what are the Paradises of Heaven?" He said, "The associations of Zikr!"

Bukhari narrated in his book from Abu Huraira that the Prophet said, "Allah, Almighty and Exalted, has angels who seek the People of Zikr. If they find the people of Zikr they encompass and embrace them until they reach the first heaven. And Allah asks his angels, 'What are my servants doing?' The angels say, 'O Allah, they are praising You and glorifying You and they are making Zikr.' Allah says, 'Did they see Me?' The angels answer, 'No, they didn't see You.' Then Allah asks, 'How would it be if they were to see Me?' The angels reply, 'O Allah, if they were to see You, they would be making more praise of You and more glorification of You and more Zikr of You.' And Allah asks 'What are they asking for?' The angels say, 'They are asking for Your Paradise.' Allah asks, 'Did they see My Paradise?' The angels answer, 'No, Our Lord.' Allah continues, 'How would it be if they saw My Paradise?' The angels reply, 'They would be more attracted and more eager to reach it.' Then Allah asks them, 'Of what are they afraid?' And the angels say, 'They are afraid of hellfire.' and Allah asks, 'How would it be if they saw my Hellfire?' and they reply, 'They would be running more and more away from it and asking more and more protection from it.' Then Allah said,' I am making you all My witnesses: that I am forgiving them of all their sins.' Then one angel asked, 'O our Lord, there is among these people one who is not from them, he came only to ask a favor for something from one of them.' Allah said, 'Those are my beloved ones who are making My Zikr. Anyone who comes into their circle will be forgiven, and I am forgiving him.'"

In Bukhari and throughout Islam it is narrated from Abu Huraira that the Prophet said, "As my servant thinks about Me so will I be for him. I am with him if he will remember Me. If he calls on Me in himself I will call him in Myself, and if he calls on Me in a group of people, I mention him in a better group in My presence. If he approaches Me one handspan, I will approach him one arm's length; if he approaches Me one arm's length, I will approach him by a cubit; if he comes to Me walking, I will come to him running."

“Now I will speak on the types of Zikr and the importance of the Zikr of the heart to the life of the Sufi.” announced the Pir. “Zikr can be can be done both silently or aloud. The Prophet encouraged people to do both kinds. Among the scholars of Shari'ah and the Sufi Sheikhs, some preferred the loud Zikr and some preferred the silent Zikr.

Imam Ahmad narrated, "Abu Huraira reported that the Prophet said that Allah says, 'I am with my servant when he remembers Me and by his remembrance of Me his lips move." Commenting on this hadith, Imam Nawawi said, "Allah is with the one who remembers Him and calls Him in his heart, and calls Him on his tongue, but we must realize that the Zikr of the heart is more perfect. The rememberer made Zikr of the tongue in order to reflect the occurrence of the Zikr in his heart. When the love of Allah and His Remembrance overwhelms the heart and the spirit, the tongue is moved and the seeker brought near."

Sheikh Amin al-Kurdi said in The Enlightenment of Hearts (Tanwir al-Qulub) p. 522: "The Zikr by tongue, which combines sounds and letters, is not easy to perform at all times, because buying and selling and other such activities altogether divert one's attention from such Zikr. The contrary is true of the Zikr by heart, which is named that way in order to signify its freedom from letters and sounds. In that way nothing distracts one from his Zikr, as the poet says:

‘With the heart remember Allah, secretly from creation, wordlessly and speechlessly.

That remembrance is best of all: out of it flowed the sayings of the saints.’

"That is why our Naqshbandi masters have chosen the Zikr of the heart. Moreover, the heart is the place where the Forgiver casts his gaze, and the seat of belief, and the receptacle of secrets, and the source of lights. If it is sound, the whole body is sound, and if it is unsound, the whole body is unsound, as was made clear for us by the chosen Prophet.

"Something that confirms this was narrated on the authority of A'isha (r): 'Allah favors Zikr above Zikr seventy fold (meaning, silent Zikr of the Heart over loud Zikr of the Tongue).

On the Day of Resurrection, God will bring back human beings to His Account, and the Recording Angels will bring what they have recorded and written, and Allah Almighty will say: See if something that belongs to my servant was left out? The angels will say: We left nothing out concerning what we have learnt and recorded, except that we have assessed it and written it. Allah will say: O my servant, I have something good of yours for which I alone will reward you, it is your hidden remembrance of Me.' Bayhaqi narrated it.

"Also on the authority of A'isha: 'The Zikr not heard by the Recording Angels equals seventy times the one they hear.' Bayhaqi narrates it. Inshallah."

After the Pir gave his sermon, Mohammad joined with the others in congratulating him and thanking him, and in small groups the congregation exited the Sufi Center and made their way in many directions towards their various homes. Mohammad departed, intent on walking homewards with the young Falik Yusuf, who lived in the same neighborhood as he.

Two listeners to the sermon, however did not immediately leave their places. The two listeners were unknown to Mohammad or to the Sufi Pir, but listened intently on two sets of recording headphones in a British Telecom van parked discretely down the block from the Centre’s entrance. The occupants were Ernest Huxley and Peter Townsend, who had planted the microphones and hidden cameras inside the Centre several months ago pursuant to court authorization on behalf of the British Security Service of Thames House, MI5. They remained in their van making backup copies and operating the video camera in the van recording the participants exiting the Centre.
“Damn it all” shouted out Peter Townsend, “……………I guess we are Allah’s Recording Angels for the moment and I hope it all goes into the right files in Heaven.-----at least it will go as far as Thames House and Langley, but I wouldn’t bet on it reaching the ears of God or Allah from there----more likely his nemesis is following those files a lot more closely….. Damn, I don’t know what we are recording all this for, it seems to be just a lot of God’s good people trying to lead good lives. But it isn’t our call to make, we just do our jobs, ay what------What did the old man say---what is left out of the recording is worth seventy times what is recorded?-----Well that sounds about right----we are wasting our time sixty-nine times out of seventy and on the seventy-first we’re not there to record it-----they haven’t invented a microphone that can listen inside the human heart yet.”

“Fuck” droned out Ernest Huxley, “Let’s wrap this up and get back to Thames House and check in and out and have a bloody pint on the way home.”

“You’re on.” replied Peter, starting up the van’s engine.







5





Jack Sartorius’s role as Jack McKinsey of Jung Communications was becoming more and more second nature to him now. In the London headquarters office of Jung Communications when the secretaries called ‘Mr. McKinsey’ to him he no longer flinched inwardly but accepted it all unthinkingly and as naturally as putting on his tie in the morning. He had been hard at work in London for several weeks, assigned to the Task Force planning the Global Campaign for the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly. After the central planning was accomplished in London then he would divide his time on the project between Washington and New York, where he would oversee the North American implementation, and London, where he would participate in ongoing global oversight as a member of the Global Coordinating Committee.

On the Public Relations and organizational side this was a bit of a stretch for Jack as he was somewhat new to those duties, though he had some prior experience from lobby work in Washington. His path was smoothed, however, in that the CIA had arranged a full time executive assistant as understudy for him in the Washington office of Jung Communications who had ten more years of experience on the PR side than Jack, and overstaffed his office with extra secretaries and administrative help to whom he could delegate much of the technical work and call at any time for practical advice. His boss at the Jung Communications Washington office, Joel Mentes, who was also a covered CIA officer, oversaw both his Jung Communications work and his CIA work, and was available to sort out any conflicts or difficulties, and above all Jack was a ‘quick study’ and picked things up rapidly, so things fell into place smoothly over time.

This morning he would run over to Thames House and meet with some of the MI5/BSS officers working some of the same files that he was involved with. First though, he would take in some fresh air and amble with delicious freedom through the streets of London. He walked with the morning sun aslant, lighting up the faces of the crowds bustling their way towards their offices---bankers in bowler hats and umbrellas used as walking sticks, shoppers clutching their prized packages, and clutches of young secretaries on their way to their morning work. He found himself walking in an unbounded sea of bosoms, breasts, thighs, undulating backsides and the glancing eyes precariously balanced between attraction and repulsion, each and every one of which were invitingly and endlessly pulsating with possibility. He was twenty-nine and it was spring in London.

Then he took a large black oversized London cab to the vicinity and walked to the Thames House, located near the Houses of Parliament on the Thames River, where he cleared security and was escorted by a pretty girl in her twenties in a blouse and skirt which revealed the shapely athletic body beneath---the Liaison Officer---and waited in a comfortable conference room with a couch and armchairs as well as a conference table, waiting for his counterparts on the British side. After five minutes she returned bringing a tray with coffee and some pastries, saying they would come shortly. He tried hard not to look too long up the cleavage between her breasts as she leaned over to pour cream into his cup of coffee.

After about ten more minutes two well built Britishers who looked like college athletes came in carrying their laptops and a pile of administrative files.

“Good Morning Jack! How is the posh life at the Ritz Hotel treating you? Some buggers seem to have all the luck! We’ve been spending our nights curled up inside a bloody British Telecoms van while you enjoy tea at the bloody Palm Court!” groused Peter Townsend.

“Well come up and see me-----let’s have these conferences over Afternoon Tea at the Palm Court and I will put it all on the company credit card for your benefit” joked back Jack, as he also greeted Ernest Huxley, who was busy setting up his laptop.




Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

Note: This is Chapter 15 Continued of Spiritus Mundi the Occupy Wall Street Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Weekly Free Online for the Movement. Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved--Licensed for Personal Viewing Only



XV. London Deceits and Revelations






5






“Well come up and see me-----let’s have these conferences over Afternoon Tea at the Palm Court and I will put it all on the company credit card for your benefit” joked back Jack, as he also greeted Ernest Huxley, who was busy setting up his laptop.

“I would certainly love to, but it is against regulations-----none of these files can leave the building-----but we’ll put on our thinking caps about your offer.” He quipped back.

Jack had met Peter Townsend and Ernest Huxley several weeks ago and they had met for consultations several times on about twelve case files which they shared. Jack felt comfortable around them as they seemed to be his own kind of people---men of service who could work for an organization and a cause greater than themselves, but with an independent edge that complemented his own American cowboy individualism.

That was not so surprising since Jack’s own family came from a British background. On his father’s side his family had come across from England to America at the time of the earliest Pilgrims, settling in both the Massachusetts Colony and the Virginia Colony. The ancestral home of the Sartorius family had been in Little Gidding, in Cambridgeshire, England, though one branch of the family had taken root in lowland Scotland, around Edinburgh. Two Sartorius brothers, twins, had accompanied their fellow Little Gidding townsman Nicolas Ferrar and Captain John Smith in the foundation of the Jamestown colony in Virginia and had traveled with Sir Walter Raleigh. One twin, Colonel Edmund Sartorius remained in Virginia, settling in Williamsburg and taking part in the first House of Burgesses there. The other twin, Edward Sartorius had sided with Nicholas Ferrar in his dispute with the London Virginia Company, then under the corrupt leadership of Sir Thomas Smith, accusing them of defrauding and enslaving Polish and African indentured servants by revoking their seven year term of indenture and turning them into chattel slaves, slavery at the earliest date of the colony having no basis in English law and thus initially unenforceable until a change in the laws had been brought about by the richer landholding faction.

Edward Sartorius returned to England and joined the Puritan side of the revolution, fighting with Cromwell and in Parliament leading the effort to have the London Virginia Company dissolved for its corruption and fraudulent initiation of practices of slavery. He protected Nicholas Ferrar, his old patron from mistreatment by the Puritan army when they occupied the religious settlement at their common ancestral family homes in Little Gidding, Ferrar, though a devout man of religious principle, remaining on the Anglican/Royalist side. Later Edward Sartorius returned to America, this time to settle his family in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where they were instrumental in founding and developing Harvard College. Later scions and members of the Massachusetts Sartorius family became leaders in the Transcendentalist Movement in Boston, then joined the settlement of the continent, helping to found Washington University in St. Louis.

One of the members of the Massachusetts Sartorius family, Richard Eliot Sartorius had served as a staff officer under General Grant in the Civil War, overseeing Union railroad communications, then transplanted out to California, heading a leading railroad company in the Central Valley, establishing a prominent family branch in San Francisco where the Sartorius name became the title of principal streets in many California cities. The Virginia branch of the Sartorius family, descended from Edmund, long prominent in Richmond society had members who served in the Confederate Army under Robert E. Lee. Some similarly settled after that war in numerous southern cities, including Charleston, Atlanta and a notable branch in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.

On his late mother’s side, his maternal Great-grandfather had been a serving officer in the British army in World War I before emigrating with his family after that horrific war to the New World. His Grandfather had been the first male child of the family and the first born in North America—Toronto, Canada to be precise----his older sisters had been born in London and retained something of their British accent. Jack’s maternal grandfather, in turn, had grown up in Canada and had spent the Second World War there building Lancaster bombers for shipment to Britain for the bombing of Germany. After WWII Jack’s maternal grandfather emigrated from Toronto to Detroit, across the lakes, where he married Jack’s grandmother, an American citizen who worked as a medical technologist and X-ray Technician, having also served during the war on the technical side of the Manhattan Project.

Jack’s mother was the first of the family born in the United States, in Michigan and moved with the family to New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan in New York. Jack was born in California where his father had lived prior to his parents’ divorce. At the time of the divorce his mother took Jack back to live with her family in the New Jersey/New York area so Jack had grown up mostly with his mother and had not seen his father for many years. Nonetheless, he felt a family attachment to his British family heritage and in heart felt part of the Great Anglo-Saxon Diaspora which had peopled the globe from Canada, to the USA, Australia, New Zealand and which had peppered expatriate families in cities from Hong Kong, Singapore, Bombay, South Africa, and virtually every corner of the globe. As such Jack felt the curious complex and divided identify of many Americans of all national backgrounds. If you ask an average American where their family is from, few will simply say ‘My family is American.’ Most will say ‘I am an American, but my family comes from Germany, England, Russia, Poland, China or Africa.’ Even un-hyphenated Americans feel the complexity of their origins, extended back in time and space across the globe. Not a few return to the country of their ancestors and origins and find themselves in a state of confusion and contradiction, belonging but never being able to completely belong to the culture of origin, perhaps being permanent fellow-travelers with that culture in time and space. Jack similarly felt in London that he was coming back home in some sense, but he knew he would always somehow be an outsider there as well.

The three intelligence officers discussed the details, personalities, and ins and outs of about a dozen cases, finally getting around to the files on Mohammad Ala Rushdie and Mustafa bin Salaman al Khalifa.
“So what is your take on Rushdie and Khalifa?” Jack asked Peter Townsend.

“Well, they were initially flagged to us by the Echelon system, which linked their e-mails and mobile phones to a number of known terrorist players in the Middle-East and here in Europe. That in and of itself could be incriminating or could be coincidental, we don’t know. We don’t have anything definite on either yet, but on Mustafa we see some suspicious transfers of funds to some suspect accounts accessed by known terrorist players in Switzerland, Lichtenstein and other havens. We have a close watch on Mustafa and he is into some pretty corrupt lifestyle practices and plays with hundreds of millions of pounds of his family money. I would say we are going to catch him with his hand in the cookie jar sooner or later. Even so nabbing him might be problematic.

His family is heavily invested in the powerful Maddox global media conglomerate Nous Corporation, and he is close to the Baroness, Lady Maddox who sits in the House of Lords and whom he meets and consorts with regularly. Those two are both pretty slippery in their movements and connections. We can’t tap her phones or subject her to direct surveillance since MP’s are out of bounds and the Baron and Baroness are close to the Prime Minister as well. Its an in-house joke that they are more likely to be tapping our phones than we are theirs! They are too big and too hot to touch. And even if we get the goods on Mustafa they might well protect him---put in a fix from the PM’s office------unless the matter were really big. Anyway, now that we have him hooked and we are giving him plenty of line to play on the line to see where and to whom he will lead us. We don’t want to pop him anyway until the right moment as he might lead us to further links in the whole network---even if we can’t get him the people he can lead us to are probably more important than he is. ---------As to Mohammad----there is a different story-----I would say he is probably clean, though nobody can know for sure. They both work with the NGO on this United Nations thing so they get a lot of travel in and contact a lot of people across the Middle-East, Europe and the whole world really. They may be using this as a cover for their illegal operations, or on the other hand they may be fully legitimate, we can’t know at this point. Mohammad seems to be taking a religious turn in his personal life, getting involved in the Sufi Order-----that could cut both ways, either showing that he is innocent and clean or perhaps the root of some sort of possible religious fanaticism that might get him involved on the illegitimate side. We don’t know.”

“This Mohammad---too much time alone, that one!—needs to get laid!-------jizzmatic juices backing up putting abnormal pressures on the brain!” quipped Ernest.

What is your take from the American side?” continued Peter, with a slightly admonitory smile sideways towards his joking partner.

“Well, we have a forensic accountant keeping a close watch on Mustafa’s money transfers. We picked up some suspicious transfers to Lichtenstein accounts linked to known players, probably the same ones you have been tracking, and we have confirmed that the funds followed a trail leading to some known players, who seem to be up to something-----what we haven’t a clue as of yet. I would concur in your assessment of the two so far, but what we don’t know is much more than what we do know. Now that you mention it I’ll put a tag on this Baroness connection------maybe we can get more on her from our side than you can from yours---I’ll look into it.” Jack answered.
“Right!----Brilliant” chirped out Peter Townsend, “…….Well, I guess that does it for the moment and we have to get back out into the field, so I will leave you to your Afternoon Tea at the Palm Court and get ready to hit the van.”
“Not Quite!” objected Jack, “You think I have it easy but you forget that I have to work two jobs, this one and the cover job—at least you two only have one job to worry about------I have to be back on the job at Jung Communications in the afternoon-----meeting after meeting planning out this United Nations Global Appeal Marathon---so no need to wallow too deeply in that self-pity now!”

“Good Luck, Jack” the two added, making their way out with a handshake.

“Likewise, Chaps” Jack retorted playfully.

After a quick duck-in at the fish-and-chips next to the Jung offices, Jack next went to his office and began to ready his PowerPoint presentation on his end of the planning for the Global Appeal Campaign Grand Telethon, due to take place New Years Day in about eight months time. At the meeting of the Global Appeal Steering Committee at Jung Communications’ offices later in the day he would have to report on the plans for the North American regional Caucus Conference and Regional Marathon Concert, set to coordinate with six other similar events on the several continents, calculated to build momentum and exposure prior to the all-out world-wide celebrity telethon event.

Jack was the first regional coordinator to lead off on his plans for the North American Caucus and Concert. It would be held in New York and would be linked to a month-long Online Appeal and Virtual Election and a week-long television Marathon on PBS designed to gain signatures for the Pledge of Support and to raise funds for the Global Appeal. The Caucus would involve representatives from the major regions of Canada, and the United States; an online election would select ‘VMWP’s’ Virtual Members of World Parliament for each state or Canadian province through the votes of the netizens based on profile pages for each candidate stating their views and plans for participation in a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly. Later VMWP’s would meet with their governmental representatives and lobby for the UNPA campaign and would in New York stage a demonstration to be televised with a high media profile at the United Nations building seeking the General Assembly’s vote to authorize and convene the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly. They would appear on the Marathon television program, sponsored by National Public Television along with numerous celebrities, educating the public about the program and generating support and interest for the great day of the worldwide Global Appeal which would link by live television and Internet video hook-ups Concerts and rallies in the major cities of the world in a grand day of unity in the style of Band Aid, Live 8 and the like.
“It’s a standard starburst launch to bring public awareness to the urgent need for the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly.-----We have our initial press break on Sunday morning talk shows and in the Sunday newspaper Supplements. They’ll be asking about the start of the conference Thursday and interviewing the major photogenic principals---Isis, Osiris and the stable of celebs who show well on TV. We’ve given enough lead time to get into all the major weekly newsbooks around the world---print, online and iPad App editions---Time, Newsweek, Der Spiegel, Paris Match, Oggi, The Economist. In all, over seventy news magazines to inform leading opinion makers. We’ve asked for cover stories from all the editors, accepting banner folds with a graphic. Anything less and they didn’t get us. We expect covers on at least twenty-five.” Jack started off.

“Okay,” Julian said, nodding in agreement, impressed with Jack’s evident professional ability to ride herd on the press.

“We start the Conference on Thursday. Well-known, charismatic activists, senior statesmen and major politicians, especially from EU allies who had previously worked on big projects like the Band Aid and Live 8 efforts are scheduled to appear. We have a long roll of delegates from around the world, so B-roll reaction shots of the audience will be satisfactorily color-mixed. Industrialized countries now include India, China, Korea and Japan, of course.
“Our three hundred invited television journalists will stay in the pre-booked hotels, and we will have interview facilities at the key hotels as well as in the conference halls, so our speakers can spread the message to video audiences around the world, both from the sound-bites from the speeches and the follow-up hallway interviews. And we will also have a number of print media people to carry the word to elite opinion makers in all the prime languages and markets, the ones that read but do not watch TV.”

“Good, Jack” Julian Jung said. He appeared pleased with his new American junior.

Each day’s theme---how a Parliamentary Assembly is vital for any progress in Global Warming, Terrorism, avoiding a renewed World Financial Crisis, North & South issues, Aids and epidemics, etc.-----will be identified by a distinctive Icon. Each day we have a fresh contingent of politicians and star celebrities from around the world coming to attend and give interviews explaining their high level of commitment to the creation of the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly and how it is absolutely vital to ever dealing with all of these completely globalized world problem areas. Each day we get fresh faces and a fresh wave of support on the screens of the world.”

“Good, good.” Jung nodded.

“Most of the A-Level politicians will stay for only one day----some only for a few hours-----and some of them will not have time to attend the conference and the workshops beyond the staged photo-op showing them in the audience, but they are all well briefed and will be effective. Then we will have local schoolchildren, grade-school, middle-school and high-school coming each day----and a meeting of the Model United Nations and the college organizations, and we have educational kits to go out to the schools so they can follow on cable, TV and the Internet as the conference progresses. It’s all part of any good starburst media plan. You arrange an event with good visuals that reinforce the point of the conference and campaign.” Jack wound up, clicking through his PowerPoint slides.
“Great Jack, I think we are on track on this one.” beamed Jung.

Jack’s report was well received and followed by the regional reports and working agendas for the other regions, Europe and Russia, Africa, South Asia the Middle-East, East Asia and Latin America. There was good input and feedback from the various sectors of involvement, government relations, media, celebrity recruitment, finance, technology, etc. On the side of celebrity recruitment, Jack was happy to get the warm support of the Chairwoman of the Celebrity Recruitment Working Group----Isis. She volunteered her own time and pledged that she and her colleagues would be sure to pack the venue in New York with megastars, both for the preparatory Regional Caucus and Concert and for the final push on the world-wide Telethon hook-up on the Final Day. She singled out Jack for special praise and Jack thanked her warmly for her support, impressing Julian Jung at Jack’s ability to motivate and handle the top stars. After that the meeting broke up into smaller working groups until the end of the day.
After the meeting finally broke up the various participants were making their way down through the lobby opening onto the street-level entrance to the Jung Building, forming a small crowd about the entranceway, with many waiting for taxis or for their cars to be brought round for them. Jack was about to walk to the corner for a taxi when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Isis.

“I noticed that we are both staying at the Ritz, Mr. McKinsey. I think we said hello at Tea in the Palm Court a few times. Can I offer you a ride home? I have my limousine waiting just outside if you find it convenient.” said Isis warmly and frankly.

“That would be very kind of you, ma’am. It would be my pleasure.” Jack returned with a warm tone.

“Please, don’t call me ma’dam, you will make me feel either like your grandmother or a brothel procuress……and away from the public you can dispense with the Isis as well, that is for the media-----just call me Christina, that’s the name my mother gave me and the one my friends call me in private.------And may I call you Jack, Mr. McKinsey?” she rolled off in good humour, evidently quite accustomed from playing her public persona to come on a bit forward.
“That would also be my pleasure…………Christina!” Jack smiled back, taking up the same tone of friendly good humour, despite his own feelings of a suppressed sense of awe that unsettled his sense of self-possession, not for the public persona, but for the intense and vital presence of the woman before him, he, looking into the warm sloe eyes agaze smiling back at him.

Isis was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus or in a pantheon in Egyptian Memphis or Babylon she would have done well with little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is those which make not quite a model woman. Perhaps it was for this very reason that her media and celluloid persona could have been so convincingly conjoured from the traditionally raised Nicaraguan girl before cameras and on sound stages from London to Los Angeles, a metamorphosis only ratifying an innate queenliness and divine potential felt by those about her to be already a latent force and presence within her soul. She had a kind of animal grace and beauty about her, like the slick and lithe movements of a jungle cat, and Jack reflected that it was this suppressed energy, this feral freedom coiled up somewhere within her, something untamed, that lent savour to the artificiality of her stage presence, and which she never completely lost or discarded offstage. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to be entirely in her grasp for a while, had she handled the Fates distaff, spindle and the shears at her own free will, and not withstanding her infatuation with radical Marxism derived from several lovers in her extreme youth, few in the world would have noticed the change in government. There would have been the same inequality of lot, the same heaping up of favors here, of reproach and chastisement there, the same generosity before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas, the same captious alternation of caresses and blows as we endure now. Though she had received communion and confirmation from a Cardinal in sight of the Virgin Mother, she had Pagan eyes full of nocturnal mysteries.

Assuming the souls of men and women were visible essences, as revealed in the auras and imprints of Kyrillian photography, you could fancy the colour of Isis’ soul to be flame-like. The sparks from it that rose inside her dark black pupils gave the same impression: certainly her essence was volatile. Her mouth, curved exquisitely in the sensual image of a double-reflex bow, seemed less formed to speak or eat than to kiss and allure, though it gained its greatest celebrity from its innate capacity to sing. Her voice had that element of indefinable expressivity which was the soul of music. Her skin, breasts and hips, though svelte, had the softness and fullness of a Latin and maternal warmth. Some intimates regarded her as rather a witch, some as the Queen of the Night; some regarded her as a sort of Persephone, doomed to a Sisyphusian alternation between the sun-drenched fertility of her Latin-American origins, and the nocturne Overworld-Underworld of her media Rock-Goddess presence across a billion screens, stages and magazine covers. Where did her dignity and vitality come from? It was a gift from heaven---a happy convergence of natural laws. To be loved to madness----such was her greatest desire. In this regard her husband and public consort Osiris, as was Zeus to Hera, proved a fateful disappointment. Though she told herself, at one in mind still with the communist boyfriend who took her virginity, that there was no God, yet raised to love Him in a traditional Catholic church and family, up to that time reveling in its rituals and sensual displays, she prayed often, though never in church, often thus: “O deliver my heart from this fearful Neon-tinted gloom and loneliness----send me a great love from somewhere, else I shall die.” Such views of life were to some extent the natural begetting of her situation upon her nature.

After riding back to the hotel the pair ordered a private dinner served in Isis’s rooms and they discussed some of the details about the Global Appeal and chatted about this and that, following a coded ritual minuet of sexual attraction and approach, to get to know one another, and to feel out the inevitable mutual possibilities of sexual involvement. It gradually emerged to Jack’s tentative understanding, rather incredibly, that one of the most photographed and idolized women in the world was isolated and lonely within her bubble world.

She talked a bit about her early life, where she studied at the Sorbonne after intensive preparation in French while staying with her uncle, an attaché at the Nicaraguan embassy in Paris. She related that for all her notoriety as a jet set fashionista she was raised a conservative Catholic with family values and for a while a scion of an intellectual family. Later she got into modeling and modern dance in Paris and New York and fell into music by accident. People took her interest in human rights and causes such as the UNPA as media affectation but they really grew out of a more serious former background she abandoned for but a while when she entered the world of the paparazzi and gloss magazines. For the last years of her life she has been trapped in the persona of Osiris’ wife consort, which she wouldn’t mind if it were a real marriage, but Osiris was a narcissistic self-destructive eternal adolescent-cum-infant with a love affair with his own face and penis who could be relied on to generate tabloid sales but could not be depended on as a husband, lover, father or mate. He was lost in an unending series of binges of addiction to drugs, alcohol, his own penis, fame and glitz, girls underage and otherwise, sexual titillation, and the biggest and most permanent addiction of all—to his own megalomaniacal ego. That left little time or motivation for concern, love and nurture for her as a woman or anything else other than a prop on the stage set of his own self-dramatization. Mea mea, mea mea---mea maxima mea! She over and over again scraped him up from the floor following innumerable narcotic and erotoleptic orgies and tried to put him back together in a Sysiphusian ritual.

She loved him but she didn’t love him. She was living on past spiritual capital and deteriorating rapidly into spiritual and emotional bankruptcy. She was trapped in a gilded cage that the whole world wanted to break into, but from which she, in her better self, wanted to break out. Why did she not leave him? True, she worried about the impact on her children and at root, before the media transformation she was raised a good Catholic girl, wife and mother. And there was the media and commercial ramification of it all---how would it play in the tabloids and trade papers? But all that reduced to nothing. Perhaps she stayed in her conflicted world out of a womanly pity. Pity if one may generalize is at the bottom of woman. When men like us it is for our better qualities, and however tender their liking, we dare not be unworthy of it, or they will quietly let us go. But unworthiness stimulates woman. It brings out her deeper nature, for good or for evil.

Had she had affairs with other men?-----Yes, of course, mostly on the rebound or in self-defense or out of desperation or momentary attraction in the topsy-turvey nomadic world of rock, pop and media crucifiction. What could you expect when your marriage was a public joke and an empty shell. Most men she might have serious relationships with were completely intimidated and afraid of her, or they were adventurers and exploiters seeking to use her, were pansies or sycophants, or they were blind to anything beyond her tabloid image. She had to hide from the world in remote spots or in private cocooned elite rooms like this one just to keep her sanity. Outwardly she was an iconic media image but inwardly she was dying as a woman without a real man and a real love in her life.


Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

Note: This is Chapter 15 Continued of Spiritus Mundi the Occupy Wall Street Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Weekly Free Online for the Movement. Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved--Licensed for Personal Viewing Only



XV. London Deceits and Revelations





Had she had affairs with other men?-----Yes, of course, mostly on the rebound or in self-defense or out of desperation or momentary attraction in the topsy-turvey nomadic world of rock, pop and media crucifiction. What could you expect when your marriage was a public joke and an empty shell. Most men she might have serious relationships with were completely intimidated and afraid of her, or they were adventurers and exploiters seeking to use her, were pansies or sycophants, or they were blind to anything beyond her tabloid image. She had to hide from the world in remote spots or in private cocooned elite rooms like this one just to keep her sanity. Outwardly she was an iconic media image but inwardly she was dying as a woman without a real man and a real love in her life.

As the evening played out Isis increasingly yielded to her alcoholic weakness and followed the two bottles of red wine shared at the dinner with a chain of gin and tonics and White Russians and as she came to know Jack more closely she let down her defenses and began to curl up to him, laying her head on his shoulder while they lounged on the deep sofa. Jack was caught anxiously in a slight dilemma. While he was physically very attracted to her, and as he got to know her better he was personally attracted to her as a friend and as a woman, he was non-plussed as to how to proceed. Jack was no virgin but he was no playboy either and essentially rather conservative in his inclinations, and, well, he was young and a bit on the inexperienced side---his professional life, contrary to the fantasized images of James Bond, hitherto having taken most of his energies away from his social and sexual life. He was also unsure how wise such an involvement would be in terms of his undercover mission, though there was nothing prohibitive about it. Thus Jack dangled in his dilemma and played with the possibilities while maintaining a distance unnatural to the situation as Isis sloshed more and more under the influence of alcohol.

As to Isis, she was extremely attracted to Jack physically, and acted out little skits to probe his intentions towards her, inviting his further approach and trying to gauge his reactions. At first she assumed that he was intimidated by her and tried to set him at ease, insisting that he call her Christina and talking about him rather than her. Jack himself was not intimidated by her public persona because he had hardly been affected by it, living in a completely different professional world and temperamentally averse to the world of tabloid and media attention. She was six years older than Jack, and in her world those six years might have multiplied to sixteen in terms of the intensity of sexual experience she had been exposed to, and she guessed that his reserve might relate to inexperience, which she found stimulating in itself in the role of a seductress, which she seldom got to play as the attempted seductions most often went in the opposite direction. And, damn! she had been corrupted by Osiris’ world to the extent that she was in most dimensions of her life used to getting what she wanted when and how she wanted it, Osiris excepted. That Jack didn’t immediately fall into her lap only turned up the level of her desire and intentness. And discovering after throwing herself at him she couldn’t control him and that he drew on a hidden strength from a world outside her own, only increased her respect for and desire for his strength as a man.

She was devastated when he returned to his own room, two doors from her own wishing her good-night. That had never happened to her when she had offered herself to a man like that. She lay down on the deep couch unable to sleep, staring into the night sky.

Then she heard a tapping at her door and shot up racing to the door knowing it was him. He entered, looking strongly into her eyes with his intense smiling eyes. They kissed. He picked her up in his arms and carried her wordlessly to her bed, and she turned off the light as they undid each other’s clothes, moaning and murring their pleasure as flesh called to flesh. They kissed silently long and long and he slowly massaged her neck and back, working his hands up and down her spine, vertebrae by vertebrae as his compassionate fingertips released the nervous tension and pain accumulated in her body. As they kissed he slowly moved his hips against her hips as her tensed nerves gradually relaxed yielding to her deeper passion. He pressed his fingertips against her fingertips then clasped her hands with his hands while they looked brightly and joyfully into each other’s clear eyes in a ritual enactment of a joining of their spirits as well as their bodies. He pressed his forehead against her forehead without kissing, in a kind of ritual merger of their minds, and rubbed his eyes against her eyes as a ritual merger of their vision. He closed her eyes and danced the tip of his tongue over the retina of her eye through her closed eyelid and she laughed and startled. They laughed together as they gradually explored more and more of each other’s bodies. He felt her put her arms across his back and pull his body tightly down to hers with her full strength.

He was slow and languorous and did not try to take her until he sensed their feelings were flowing in common and releasing themselves spontaneously through each other’s bodies. They moved deeper and deeper into the dark fullness of each other, releasing their clenched minds into each other’s warm flesh, he rising in his male strength and she yielding and giving of herself. He sucked strongly at both nipples and breasts, then delved his fingers exploringly across her pubic hair, thick, moist and warm, and then into the warm cleft between her legs, removing her silk panties as he kept his lips pressed to her own loosening lips. He slipped his tongue into her yielding mouth and played under her tongue, she responding with suppressed laughter. He overcame his own short anxiety about getting hard and how they would fit together as he ground his hardness into the softness of her hips and vulva.

She felt him harden and push against the lips of her vulva and she took him inside of her with a gasp and an arching of her back. She felt him strongly yet gently increase his thrusts, their lips first locked together then beginning to gasp for air. His muscular arms spread her legs as wide as they could stretch, then he slid his hands beneath her buttocks and lifted her slightly as he increased the driving beat of their coupling, her heart racing against his, his pounding hard in his chest, temples and eardrums, her feet bouncing against his ears and pointing up towards the high ceiling. Gasping for breath they heaved against eachother until he released himself hotly inside of her, the flowing body sweat dripping from his brow and temples onto her forehead and wetted hair, and mingling with hers across her soft skin.

As Isis released herself into her emotion she heard a heavy-throated tearing moan that seemed to come from someplace beyond her but still within herself, she herself dissolving in a vague, dark generalized sensation like being swirled in a warm whirlpool. From her own past experience Isis had experienced hundreds of thrills and sensations of pleasure in petting and in love making. But her own conviction was that there was only one real female orgasm, rooted in the womb and vagina that came when a man from the whole of his need and desire, takes a woman and wants all of her response as a full woman. The thrills and sensations of sexual play might build to an intensified release focused on the clitoris or nipples, but only the deep vaginal orgasm was deeply real and called forth the deep and inner being of a woman---everything else was a substitute and a fake. Even the most inexperienced woman knows this instinctively, she felt.

Isis had experienced such orgasms initially with Osiris and had loved him deeply in the first years. As time went on their love-making descended from deep vaginal release to a more mechanical and outward stimulation, a frotting of the clitoris and nipples and getting him off, and over time she realized that she was no longer having real orgasms with Osiris.

Isis at root was of a religious and conservative nature, though not at all in her intellectual ideas, and had a religious devotion towards true sexuality. To her the measure of a woman’s integrity was not conventional fidelity, though she respected that to a limited degree as conventional mutual trust and respect and as protection for the institution of the family and the children who issued from it. Instead the deeper measure of her own integrity was through her womanly orgasm, which made her whole and real unto herself, which she would share with a man of real manliness and maleness who touched and nurtured her womanly core unto blossoming, but which she would not share with the fakes and frauds of sexual titillation.

Though she did not have such thoughts immediately, during the first months of their involvement she came to realize that what set the seal on the fact that she was beginning to love him, and what made it possible for her to use that word towards Jack, was that she immediately experienced orgasm. Vaginal orgasm that is---deep and soul-engaging. And in her own mind she could not have experienced that if she did not love him so she did love him. It was with these inchoate and subliminal thoughts that Isis released herself from the burdens of consciousness, clinging tightly to Jack’s neck unconsciously in sleep, aided by an ample alcoholic sedation, into the tenderness of the night.



Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

Note: This is Chapter 15 Continued of Spiritus Mundi the Occupy Wall Street Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Weekly Free Online for the Movement. Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved--Licensed for Personal Viewing Only








6




Committee for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly NewsFEED

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Global Appeal Campaign Launch: Political Leaders, Celebrities and Civil Society Activists call for UNPA
Several hundred political leaders, among them 378 MPs from 70 countries, have joined to call for the establishment of a Parliamentary Assembly at the United Nations (UNPA). The joint appeal states that, in an age of globalization, citizens need to be vested with a stronger voice in global affairs. Participants in the Steering Committee for the Campaign included Julian Jung of Jung Communications, Isis from the Angels of Thoth, and Russian billionaire Alexander Abramovich Medvedev. The call is the core of an international campaign which is being launched through a series of events in more than ten countries.

Mayor of London Supports Appeal for UN Parliament

Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, supports the Appeal for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA). The appeal is the core document of an international campaign launched in April/May this year. The Secretariat of the Campaign was notified of Mr. Livingstone’s support today. The Mayor of London is the third top executive of a world metropolis endorsing the UNPA proposal: Among the supporters are also Cesar Maia, the Mayor of Rio de Janeiro, and Helen Zille, Mayor of Capetown. "An estimated 49 percent of the world population live in urban zones today, often under extremely bad conditions at least partly determined by international influences. Thus it is particularly important to include city authorities into our efforts", said Andreas Sarkozy who leads the Secretariat of the UNPA-Campaign. With a population of 12 million people, the metropolitan area of Rio, for example, has more inhabitants than Portugal.

Introducing Spiritus Mundi, a Novel by Robert Sheppard
Author’s E-mail: rsheppard99_2000@yahoo.com
Related Links and Websites: Spiritus Mundi, Novel by Robert Sheppard
For Introduction and Overview of the Novel: https://spiritusmundinovel.wordpress.com/
For Updates on the Upcoming Movie Version of the Novel, Spiritus Mundi & Casting of Actors and Actresses for Leading Roles See: http://robertalexandersheppard.wordpress.com/
For Author’s Blog: https://robertalexandersheppard.wordpress.com//
To Read Abut the Occupy Wall Street Movement in Spiritus Mundi: http://occupywallstreetnovel.wordpress.com/
To Read a Sample Chapter from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundisamplechapters.wordpress.com/
To Read Fantasy, Myth and Magical Realism Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundifantasymythandmagicalrealism.wordpress.com/
To Read Sexual Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: The Varieties of Sexul Experience: https://spiritusmundivarietiesofsexualexperience.wordpress.com/
To Read Spy, Espionage and Counter-terrorism Thriller Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: http://spiritusmundispyespionagecounterterrorism.wordpress.com/
To Read Geopolitical and World War Three Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundigeopoliticalworldwar3.wordpress.com/
To Read Spiritual and Religious Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundionspiritualityandreligion.wordpress.com/
To Read about the Global Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly in Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundiunitednationsparliamentaryassembly.wordpress.com/
To Read Poetry from Spiritus Mundi：https://spiritusmundipoetry.wordpress.com/
For Discussions on World Literature and Literary Criticism in Spiritus Mundi: http://worldliteratureandliterarycriticism.wordpress.com/
For Discussions of World History and World Civilization in Spiritus Mundi: https://worldhistoryandcivilizationspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Eva Strong from Spiritus Mundi: https://evasblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Andreas Sarkozy from Spiritus Mundi: http://andreasblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Yoriko Oe from Spiritus Mundi: http://yorikosblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Robert Sartorius from Spiritus Mundi: http://sartoriusblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
I write to introduce to your attention my double novel Spiritus Mundi, consisting of Spiritus Mundi, the Novel—Book I, and Spiritus Mundi, the Romance—Book II. Book I’s espionage-terror-political-religious thriller-action criss-crosses the globe from Beijing to London to Washington, Mexico City and Jerusalem presenting a vast panorama of the contemporary international world, including compelling action, deep and realistic characters and surreal adventures, while Book II dialates the setting and scope into a fantasy (though still rooted in the real) adventure where the protagonists embark on a quest to the realms of Middle Earth and its Crystal Bead Game and through a wormhole to the Council of the Immortals in the Amphitheater in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy in search of the crucial Silmaril Crystal, and to plead for the continuance of the human race in the face of threatened extinction from a nuclear World War III, all followed by a triple-somersault thriller ending in which a common garden-variety terrorist attack is first uncovered by MI6 and the CIA as the opening gambit a Greatpower Game of States threatening World War III and then, incredibly, as the nexus of a Time Travel conspiracy involving an attempt by fascist forces of the 23rd Century to alter a benign World History by a time-travelling raid on their past and our present to provoke that World War III, foiled by the heroic efforts of the democratic 23rd Century world government, the Senate of the United States of Earth, to hunt down the fascist interlopers before their history is irrevocably altered for evil.
When activist Robert Sartorius, leading a global campaign to create a European Parliament-style world-wide United Nations Parliamentary Assembly presses the proposal in New York on his old friend the UN Secretary-General and is rebuffed due to the hostile pressure of the conservative American administration, his Committee resolves to fight back by launching a celebrity-driven Bono-Geldof-Band Aid/Live 8-style “People Power” media campaign and telethon spearheaded by rock superstars Isis and Osiris and former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to mobilize global public support and pressure in alliance with the Occupy Wall Street Movements worldwide. The Blogs of Sartorius, activist Eva Strong and Committee Chairman Andreas Sarkozy reveal the campaign’s working struggle, their tangled love affairs, a loss of faith, attempted suicide, reconciliation of father and son after divorce, and recovery of personal love and faith.
Things fall apart as the idealists’ global crusade is infiltrated by a cell of jihadist terrorists using it as a cover, then counter-infiltrated by CIA agent Jack McKinsey and British MI6 agent Etienne Dearlove. A cat-and-mouse game of espionage and intrigue ensues pitting them against the Chinese MSS espionage network allied with the Iranian Quds Force crossing Beijing, London, Moscow, Washington and Jerusalem unleashing an uncontrollable series of events which sees the American Olympic Track and Field Team bombed on an airplane in London, uncovers a secret conspiracy of China, Russia and Iran to jointly seize the oil reserves of the Middle-East, and witnesses Presidents Clinton and Carter taken hostage with Sartorius, McKinsey, Eva and other activists at a Jerusalem telethon rally cut short by the explosion of a concealed atomic device in a loaned Chinese Terracotta Warrior, then flown by capturing terrorists to Qom, Iran as “human shields” to deter a retaliatory nuclear attack.
In Book II, Spiritus Mundi, the Romance they encounter Iran’s Supreme Leader in Qom as the world teeters on the brink of nuclear confrontation and World War III, while mysterious events unfold leading Sartorius and McKinsey from their captivity in the underground nuclear facilities of Qom into a hidden neo-mythic dimension that takes them to a vast ocean and land at the center of the world, Middle Earth, Inner Shambhala, and to involvement in a mysterious Castalian “Crystal Bead Game” linked to the destiny of the human race on earth. They then embark on a quest for the Silmaril, or Missing Seed Crystal to the central island of Omphalos in the Great Central Sea in the middle of the globe, aided by Goethe, the Chinese Monkey King, Captain Nemo, the African God-Hero Ogun, and a Sufi mystic they traverse a ‘wormhole’ at the center of the earth guarded by ‘The Mothers’ and the fallen angel tribe of the Grigori (Genesis 6:1-4) which leads the way to critical meeting of the “Council of the Immortals” at the Black Hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy to determine the final fate of the human species. The heroes battle and overcome the treacherous opposition of Mephisto and his satanic subaltern Mundus through their Underworld and Otherworld adventures and successfully plead the cause of the continuation of the human species before the Immortals, returning with the critical Silmaril Crystal. resolving the Crystal Bead Game and thereby inspiring through the Archangel Gabriel a dream in the mind of Iran’s Supreme Leader which brings a new Revelation causing him to release the hostages and an end the crisis. China and Russia stand down from aiding Iran in seizing the Mid-East oil reserves, but in a treacherous blow the Chinese instead utilize their forward-positioned armies to attack their former ally Russia and seize Siberia with its large oil and gas reserves instead. President Barret Osama, America’s newly-elected first black President then invites Russia, Japan and South Korea to join NATO and together they succeed in expelling the Chinese from Siberia and usher in a new Eurasian and global balance of power and a New World Order.
Rock Superstar Osiris meanwhile, after undertaking a narcissistic Messianic mission in the wake of the Jerusalem atomic blast is dramatically assassinated on live world-wide television on Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa by a disillusioned follower. His wife and rock-star partner Isis then leads a spiritual movement to reconcile and unite the clashing religions and catalyze a common global spiritual Renaissance through a Global Progressive Spiritual Alliance which seeks to construct an Inter-faith Temple on the ruins of the atomic blast in Jerusalem. In counter-reaction to the cataclysmic events the world finally implements Sartorius’ crusade for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, but not before Sartorius has himself has died, Moses-like of a heart attack while helping to foil a metaconspiracy mediated by Time Travel in which a fascist agent from the 23rd Century who has time-transited back to our time to alter a benign history by causing WWIII and thus preventing the evolution of a democratic world government, the United States of Earth, which follows him through time and nabs him just in the “nick of time” to prevent Aramgeddon. The book ends with the opening ceremony of the UN Parliamentary Assembly which is attended in Sartorius’ name by his widow Eva Strong, whom Sartorius had fallen in love with and married in the course of the novel, and by their son Euphy, newborn after Sartorius’ death. They are joined in cinematic climax at the ceremony by newly chosen UN Secretary-General Clinton, President Osama and UN Parliamentary Assembly Committee Chairman Andreas Sarkozy who have just received the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in creation of the world’s first world parliamentary assembly within the United Nations, bringing together the representative voices of the peoples of the world in face-to-face assembly and dialogue for the first time in world history.
Highlights:
All the Highlights of the novel cannot be contained in such a short Introduction, but a few of them would include:
1. Spiritus Mundi is the first novel in world history to portray the creation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assemblyon the working model, inter alia, of the European Parliament and the first novel to portray the Occupy Wall Street Movement and related movements worldwide;
2. Spiritus Mundi is a prophetic geo-political WWIII novel of the near future forseeing a conflict and conspiratorial surprise attack by a resurgent “Axis” of China, Russia and Iran seeking by a decisive blow in jointly seizing the Middle-East oil fields to radically alter the global balance of power vis-a-vis the West in the world and Eurasia. Like Clancy’s The Bear and the Dragon, it forsees the inclusion of Russia in NATO, and goes far beyond in forseeing the inclusion of South Korea and Japan, following a joint Chinese-Russian occupation of a collapsing North Korea and the Axis strike at the Middle-Eastern oil fields;
3. Spiritus Mundi is an exciting espionage thriller involving the American CIA. British MI6, the Chinese MSS, or Ministry of State Security and the Russian SVR contending in a deul of intrigue and espionage;
4. Spiritus Mundi is a Spellbinding Terrorism/Counterterrorism novel involving a global plot to conceal an atomic bomb in a Chinese Teracotta Warrior to be detonated in Jerusalem;
5. Features the romantic and sexual searching and encounters of dozens of idealist activists, rock-stars, CIA and MI6 agents, public-relations spinmeisters and billionaires with a detour into the bi-sexual and gay scenes of Beijing, New York, California, London and Tokyo:
6. Establishes and grounds the new genre of the Global Novel written in Global English, the international language of the world,
7. Spiritus Mundi is a novel of Spiritual Searching featuring the religious searching of Sufi mystic Mohammad ala Rushdie, as well as the loss of faith, depression, attempted suicide and recovery of faith in life of protagonist Sartorius. Follows bogus religious cult leaders and the Messiah-Complex megalomanic-narcissistic mission of rock superstar Osiris that leads to his dramatic assassination on worldwide television in Jerusalem, followed by the religious conversion of his wife and rock-star parner Isis;
8. Features the search for love and sexual fulfillment of Eva Strong, a deeply and realistically portrayed divorced single mother involved in the United Nations campaign, who reveals her tortured heart and soul in her Blog throughout several disastrous sexual affairs and ultimately through her final attainment of love and marriage to Sartorius;
9. Features Sartorius’ experience of a bitter divorce, alienation and reconciliation with his son, his loss of faith and attempted suicide, his battle against drugs and alcoholism, his surreal and sexual adventures in Mexico City, and his subsequent redeeming love and marriage to Eva Strong;
10. Contains the in–depth literary conversations of Sartorius and his best friend, Literature Nobel Laureate Günther Gross, as they conduct worldwide interviews and research for at book they are jointly writing on the emergence of the new institution of World Literature, building on Goethe’s original concept of “Weltliteratur” and its foundations and contributions from all the world’s traditions and cultures;
11. Predicts the emergence of the institution and quest of “The Great Global Novel” as a successor to the prior quest after “The Great American Novel” in the newer age of the globalization of literature in Global English and generally;
12. Features the cross-cultural experiences and search for roots, sexual and spiritual fulfillment and authenticity of Asian-American character Jennie Zheng, and Pari Kasiwar of India;
13. For the first time incorporates in the dramatic narrative flow of action the mythic traditions of all the cultures and literatures of the world, including such figures as Goethe, The Chinese Monkey King, the African God-Hero Ogun, surreal adventures in the ‘Theatro Magico’ in Mexico City bringing to life figures from the Mayan-Aztec Popul Vuh, Hanuman from the Indian classic the Ramayana, and many more;
14. Book Two, Spiritus Mundi, the Romance is a fantastic Fantasy, Myth and Magical Realism Rollercoaster Ride: The more mythic Book Two utilizes a Wellsian motif of Time Travel to explore the making of history and its attempted unmaking (a la Terminator) by a hositile raid from the future on the past, our present, and the foiling of the fascist attempt by an alliance of men and women of goodwill and courage from past, present and future generations united in a Commonwealth of Human Destiny; Like Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and Welles’ Journey to the Center of the Earth it involves a journey to an interior realm of the “Middle Earth;” it also contains a futuristic travel through a wormhole to the center of our Milky Way Galaxy for a meeting with the “Council of the Immortals” where the fate of the human race will be decided;
15. Is a fantastic read on a roller-coaster ride of high adventure and self-exploration!
C Copyright 2011 Robert Sheppard All Rights Reserved
Spiritus Mundi, Novel by Robert Sheppard: Table of Contents
Spiritus Mundi
Contents
Book One Spiritus Mundi: The Novel Chapters 1-33
1. Departure (Beijing)
2. A Failing Quest (New York)
3. War Council & Counteroffensive (Geneva)
4. New Beginnings (London)
5. Republic of Letters (Berlin)
6. Fathers and Sons (Washington,D.C.)
7. Ulysses: Blogo Ergo Sum (Beijing)
8. Frequently Asked Questions (London)
9. In the Middle Kingdom (Beijing)
10. Past and Present (London-South Africa)
11. Telemachus (Washington, D.C.)
12. The Everlasting Nay (Beijing)
13. My Brother’s Keeper (London)
14. In the Global Village (Beijing-Tokyo)
15. Deceits and Revelations (London)
16. Be Ready for Anything (Beijing)
17. The Obscure Object of Desire (London-Pyongyang)
18. Sufferings (Beijing)
19. Of the Yearnings of the Caged Spirit (London)
20. Cyclops (Washington, D.C.)
21. The Engines of Illusion (Beijing)
22. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (London)
23. The Temptation of the Sirens (Beijing)
24. Truth or Consequences (London)
25. Lazarus Laughed (Beijing)
26. Neptune’s Fury & The Perils of the Sea (The Maldive Islands)
Naval Diaries and Ship’s Logs of Admiral Sir George Rose Sartorius (1780-1875)
27. Penelope (London)
28. The Volcano’s Underworld (Mexico City)
Teatro Magico
29. The Everlasting Yea (London)
30. Paradise Regained (Little Gidding)
31. To the South of Eden (Kenya-to Midrand-Johannesburg South Africa)
32. In a Glass Darkly (London)
33. Spiritus Mundi
Book Two Spiritus Mundi: The Romance Chapters 1-21
1. Gerusalemme Liberata & Orlando Furioso (Jerusalem)
2. In a Glass Darkly (London)
3. Great Expectations (Jerusalem)
4. The Parable of the Cave (Qom, Iran)
5. The Xth Day of the Crisis (London)
6. The Supreme Leader & The Three Messiahs (Qom)
7. Going for the Jugular (London)
8. The Night Journey, Goethe & The Monkey King (Qom)
9. The Central Sea, The Crystal Bead Game & The Quest
10. The Island of Omphalos & The Mothers
11. The Council of the Immortals & The Trial By Ordeal
12. Nemesis
13. Armageddon (London)
14. The Fever Breaks
15. High Noon & Showdown at the OK Corral (Washington, D.C.)
16. Ecce Homo (Jerusalem)
17. Deliverance (London/Lhasa)
18. For Every Action…. (Moscow/Beijing)
19. The Burial of the Dead (London/Little Gidding)
20. Spiritus Mundi (London/Jerusalem)
21. In My End is My Beginning
—-The Convening of the First Meeting of the
United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (New York)
Appendix 1: A United Nations Parliamentary Assembly: Frequently Asked Questions
Appendix 2: Spiritus Mundi: Index of Principal Characters

C Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved
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