Welcome to the world in which fairy tales are true, where the prominent scientists of the day join together to seek wisdom from a great sage of the Himalayas at the fabled Kumbha Mela.

Guided by a trusted myth-spinning storyteller, their journey and its preparation are peppered with tales of metaphysical adventures. From the bohemian Shangri-La of the Oceano Dunes to the ancient Ganges flowing from Himalayan heights, the group travels and discovers the realm of “silent reach”. In the tradition of metaphysical fiction that was popular in the 1920’s and 30s, Fairy Tales are True sweeps the reader into a vortex of yogis, scientists, spies and fools. Unlike most of those forgotten novels of secret universal Buddhist brotherhoods and mystical Tibetan quests, this book is more than partly true. Bryn Beorse, who was known to the Sufis as Shamcher, was the real deal: an actual world-travelling yogi-sufi who also was an esteemed economist and engineer. Here he has created a fantastical autobiographical allegory in a book that defies categorization. As one long teaching story comprised of nested teaching stories, Beorse’s book may take liberties with facts to illustrate truths, but not as often as you might think. It is not only autobiographical, it is also a novelized or storified account of concepts that cannot be easily grasped by the literal mind. Many-faceted, the book can be seen as a comic or as an allegory, as a novel or as a collection of stories like 1001 Nights, as an autobiography or as a metaphysical encryption, all depending on your viewpoint. Some of the astonishing tales are completely true, other more prosaic events may be literary fabrication. Some facts are condensed and seen as averages. Other events resonate a mythic dimension or parallel in which they become more than true. Shamcher often said that we need to create new myths and he shows the way here by generating myths from real- life experiences. The myth of the union of the sciences, the myth of the free-living dunites, the myth of mystic Indian sages beaming integrating love-wisdom. These new myths become outlines for humanity to decode. This book is a cycle of words and letters set to run as a sort of intuition-machine – generating insights in the reader who can approach it from the right angle, at the right time. Our story begins in a shattering of the separation between disciplines and points of view. With a gunshot, the “burglars” break the barriers and enter one another’s realms of exploration. Breaking the sound barrier naturally causes a sonic boom. In one big Bang! the action begins, and characters, events and social/political situations all combine to seek the whereabouts of a secret being who draws them together. As science writer Brian Clegg states, “Every point in the universe, including where you are right now, is where the big bang happened.” The book’s characters and situations could be seen as cliché, but just as McLuhan observed, cliché expands into archetype. Shamcher sketches a series of event patterns that demonstrate the action and effect of what he calls “silent reach.” In these narrative examples of communication without words, silent reach shows in the mental concentration shared by three yogis to save the life of a foolhardy swimmer in the Ganges. It is seen in a last-minute intervention in a drama of international relationships played out as a personal conflict in the Tale of Fu Kieng. Silent reach, throughout the book, leads up to an inspired integration of the disciplines in the presence of a mysterious sage. Ranging from the highest physics to the social sciences, Beorse has created exemplars, characters partly based on actual scientists. These are the noble knights setting forth upon their quest, with the guidance of the troubadour, our storytelling narrator. Dr. Jacques and his Institute – all true, except his last name was not Miel but Ménétrier. He figures in several of Shamcher’s other books, including Planet Earth Demands and Every Willing Hand. Edmund Fitzgerald seems to be a composite character based on prominent social scientists and innovative economists of the day. Sir James Oss is patterned on Sir James Jeans the eminent physicist, astronomer and mathematician. By creating a confluence of these great minds of the early and mid-20th century, Beorse is working a little bit of magic. Shamcher gives the blind boy who could see without eyes the name of one of India’s greatest poets, a man who learned the inner secret of the shared mind of all. When Rabindranath (the blind and simple seer) tells of future wonders, our engineer/narrator asks for hard facts on how to achieve the wonders on earth. The response shows delicate awareness of the process of humanity’s evolution on earth and the fulfillment of such prophesy that comes slowly, over time. As an engineer, Shamcher had an intimate understanding of technology, its inspiration and application for the good of all. For decades he worked to develop and promote OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion) as a benign source of power from the sea, a system he outlined in his book, Planet Earth Demands. He refers to it again in his book on full employment, Every Willing Hand. Interweaving teaching stories with personal accounts, Beorse brings life to ephemeral concepts. He allegorically illustrates world events, such as the influence of Chinese expansion into India in the Tale of Fu Kieng. Putting himself directly into the center of the most dramatic action in the book, he once again weaves in his own life experience with that of the field he wishes to illustrate. Is it factual or is it true? The book’s poetic introductory note symbolically reveals the entire work and its premise. First is the Magi: the wise one, perhaps rassoul, spirit of guidance, source of all beauty, creator of harmony. He travels, not only from place to place but from body to body, being to being, and time to time. It is said that he sleeps – for in all places and persons he is present, both dormant and emergent. He is the master who brings the lions and the lambs to lay down together. Who are these lions? They are no more the kings and queens of the animals, lords of the realm, symbolically referring to the rulers of this world in which we live and have our being. Today, to Shamcher, they are the physicists, who understand that there is no longer such a hierarchial world-view. The world, its meaning and scientific understanding, is in their hands to determine, decode, and interpret. Yet these ones do not know it all, no matter how advanced their “knowledge”. They do not devour the lambs, but lie down now with them. These lambs represent the gentle ones, the innocents, traditionally sacrificed, tender, pure, simple. Easy targets - but in the presence of the Magi they are able to be with the lions and not be eaten or sacrificed. To Shamcher, these are the sages, the wise of all time. The innocent wise whose wisdom teaches them that they, too, do not “know”. For both physicists and sages there is a great unknowing which is in fact the presence of the Magi - a vast field of super-intelligence and super-wisdom beyond all human endeavor, whether secular or spiritual. This is unknowable from both points of view. For the physicist it is incalculable. For the sage it is unknowable. Shamcher refers to this state as completely “undetermined” in the sense of the word as immeasurable or incalculable. When the Magi sleeps with the lions and the lambs there is a fertilization and from the joyful womb springs creation itself. Manifestation. Perhaps the Magi does more than remain dormant in the process. Perhaps “sleeping” with the lions and the lambs is an activation, a catalyst, a love-making, a life-giving magic force. Creation springs from this communion. And what is this joyful womb? Like the Taoist womb, out of which comes the ten thousand things, it is an unending fountain or spring continuously pouring forth, in joy, the entire created universe. Emergent, ever- growing, source of all. Sages dedicate their lives to knowing it. It cannot be known. Physicists dedicate their lives to determining it. It cannot be determined. Yet as the outpouring is never- ending, it can be perceived, and over time, “seen” in a way – by “averages” – sensed mathematically in an overview. Words from other times refer to these “averages” as correspondences or harmonies. Simply taking parts of the puzzle picture, putting them together and determining their average can yield the closest thing to “knowing” this creation. The Magi in the union of the lion and the lamb creates a new harmony, a new “average”, an inclusive ideal that unifies all endeavours toward the one. This book can be seen as an explication of this premise. Hot points or moments of intensity all share the common awareness or reference to the presence of the Magi, the unseen one, through the silent reach of unknowable communication which some sages have achieved. After gathering together, the sciences are led to the greatest of the sages in a journey that catalyzes them to greater realization in their fields through interdisciplinary dialogue in a very high place, guided by an unknowable presence. This is all stimulated along the way with true tales of adventures or mystery, pointing always to the silent communication of the wise. This book is also an allegory of the life of the seeker, who gathers all forces together, with the help of a guide, to seek the truth, much like Attar’s classic Su tale, The Conference of the Birds. It could be said that the whole tale occurs within each of us – the sciences, the events, the guide (our narrator) and the great one whose appearance inspires and unifies, while daily we are engaged with the surging crowds of humanity within - our own personal Kumbha Mela. It is also significant that Fairy Tales are True features one of the rare accounts of life in the Dunes of Oceano, where Shamcher lived on and off during the late 1930’s. Here mystics, free-thinkers, poets, painters and photographers mingled freely with drifters and others on the fringes of society, in a place so pure and beautiful it was photographed over and over again by Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and many others. Those iconic American images were not inspired simply by sand dunes alone, but by the remarkable community there, many of whose members were very engaged in silent reach and fairy tales. The loosely connected group called the “dunites” was expanded and stimulated by the astrologer Gavin Arthur (grandson of US President Chester Arthur). Here the Irish mystical folklorist and friend of the Faeries, Ella Young, named Gavin’s cabin Moy Mell (after the poets’ Pasture of Honey in the Gaelic afterlife). From that center, and many dinner parties later, was birthed the Dune Journal, a short-lived radical magazine discussing art, nature, economics, astrology, nudism, architecture, and mysticism. All this and more were created in this atmosphere of Bohemia and Shangri-la in the Dunes of California. Much of Shamcher’s description of the Dunes is true, with only a few names changed and situations condensed. “Irma” was actually the dunite Dixie Paul. “Dreamwood” also really existed: he was the artist and dunite Elwood Decker. “Hugo” is the poet Hugo Seelig, Moon Mullins, and many more are mentioned here by name. Bringing with him the legacy of Whitman and Carpenter, Gavin Arthur openly embraced life in loving compassion, nurturing an independent, inspiring and stimulating environment for all who wished to participate. Later, in San Francisco, he helped nurture counterculture through the decades of both the beat and hippie movements. During the Great Depression, economic theories were hotly debated in the dunes, forging a new way of thinking. Not con ned to only socialism and communism, active discussion of new concepts ranged through Social Credit, barter and Shamcher’s giro-credit, and other economic innovations. In the early-mid 1930’s Shamcher’s well-received economic book, Distribute or Destroy, had been published, rst in Norway and then in the US. It was quoted in a book by sometime dunites Luther Whiteman and Samuel L. Lewis, Glory Roads: The Psychological State of California. Contact with Whiteman brought the Dunes into Shamcher’s awareness and he soon showed up there and settled in. Whiteman’s satirical book, The Face of the Clam, was a simplistic look at the phenomenon of dune living that didn’t positively reflect the Dune community. In Fairy Tales are True, Shamcher corrects the balance, diffusing reactions to this book and how the community felt about it. In the late 1920’s and 30s the coast of California was dotted with spiritual communities, temples and metaphysical groups, each dedicated to alternative lifestyles and usually devoted to the founder. Devotees worked, dowagers donated, and a network of nodes for the coming “Age of Aquarius” was begun. But none was more radical and free than the Oceano Dunes, which required nothing at all from anyone who wished to join in the dunite way of life. The dunes were a place of total independence and self suf ciency. Some dunites were social, others were hermits, never seen for weeks or months, either meditating or hiding from the law. It was the perfect place to disappear from the world. This utopian community of radical individuals was a decentralized independent association of hermits and hermeticists, of yogis and boogeymen. The dunes hosted gaelic rituals, nudism, visiting dignitaries, artists, writers, meditatiors, curiosity seekers. At sunrise, some dunites stood at the edge of the sea chanting “Lemuria, Lemuria,” willing the mythic island continent to rise again. It might seem to be a fabrication that narrow-minded spiritual seekers in the dunes received inner mis-guidance to burn away evil by burning down someone’s cabin, but in fact this is a part of dune history. In Fairy Tales are True, the cabin is saved. But in reality, it was burnt to the ground. Nearby Halcyon had been a Theosophical community, while, closer to the dunes, the little town of Oceano later boasted Gavin Arthur’s Hill House, where he lived when not at Moy Mell in the dunes. Here many parties with the intellectual and artistic elite of the day left dunites wandering home under the stars, a little (or a lot) tipsy and drunk with ideas. In fog or when no moon reflected from the clamshells placed on roofs and the old pavilion pylons, a dunite could easily be lost in the dark of night with only the sounds of the sea or the frogs to follow. The extensive section Tale of the Sanyassin and the Dunes is a further expansion of Beorse’s technique – taking his own life experience, adding a bit of history and a layer of myth to deepen the scope. Naming Ménétrier “Miel” gives him a home in Moy Mell, the Pasture of Honey in the dunes, which itself is a name for the poet’s heaven “where the spirits dwell.” Does the tale take over from the facts? It is up to each of us to see, like blind Rabindranath, not with the eyes but with intuition. “What do you think of the New Age?” someone once asked Shamcher. “It might be new to you,” he quipped in reply. Over and over again Shamcher emphasizes the power of communicating without words. His ability to do just that was one of his remarkable qualities. His being was a locus of energies and forces which urged, emerged and converged within him. Not only did he have access to the minds of others, and areas of interest created through merged minds of scientists, and engineers, and economists, he had access to the great mind of the entire being of humanity, the earth and our whole human experiment. Through Sufi yoga he attained awareness and flexibility to play in this vast God-mind, and through his loving heart he connected with other souls who could, perhaps, understand. As a servant of this great mind Shamcher did its bidding without hesitation. Remaining in communication at all times toward the end of his life, this inner urge and direct guidance was for him a force of great loving action. He said that the further you go in this way, the greater the minds you swing with. He was not only referring to remarkable people with ne gifts and abilities, but he also meant elds of awareness – physics, cosmologies, religions, beings of all life – animals and plants and unseen life. All “minds,” all aware and communicating silently. This deceptively simple and slim volume could be seen as a blueprint for experience, for the book invokes a natural participation from the universe. It can amplify our awareness of quantum entanglement, what Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance.” There are mythic tropes that Beorse expands upon, such as the effects of yogic concentration or the sacred unifcation of the sciences. Intuition stimulated through the lens of this book may awaken a recognition of such event templates as quantum patterns, living symbols that could seem to leap off the page and into everyday reality. The Tale of Trailanga is echoed in Dreamwood’s arrest, but it is not con ned to this novel. It is also echoed in the story of Big Bear, an aboriginal shaman arrested in Winnipeg during the Metis rebellion in Canada. He too could not be con ned; his story is one of several that mirror Trailanga’s despite separation in both time and place. When Shamcher wrote this book in the 1970s, he placed the action back in the 1930s and ‘40s. The original book description read: From California pre-hippy communes of forty years ago, to the mysterious convening of the sages in modern-day India, this story sweeps the reader along following the secret thread whose strands have held mankind together for the last few thousand years. Visits to simple villagers with amazing powers alternate with the adventures of an expedition of the world’s most important scientists, as Bryn Beorse takes us into the “inner sanctums” of our own everyday world. The inner journey is re ected here as outer. The signs along the path all point to the silent way. We sense and discover it through stories that map the way and help encourage faith in the unseen. As Shamcher said in the book, “If the great one wished to see us, he would somehow arrange it.” Reading this book intuitively can reveal a deeper symbolic truth - something ultimately even more direct than a tale of scientists and sages working together to understand the truth of our existence and the meaning of the cosmos. As this compendium of nested teaching tales was intuitively written, it can speak to the heart of each reader in the silent reach of communication beyond words.