Rules for Walking

Sufis practice a form of "intentional and symbolic wandering" called siyaha. In his book Sacred Drift, Peter Lamborn Wilson describes siyaha as a "game with rules", highlighting how the structure siyaha imposes on an ordinary activity like walking provokes extraordinary leaps of imagination and mindfulness. The rules provide a focus that enables the walker to perceive what they may habitually ignore: the fine grain interrelationships of the objects, processes, sensations of a particular place. Simple, specific commands like "watch your feet" reveal details that may go unnoticed, but are nevertheless present and affective, like the impressions one's feet make in wet grass, the plodding rhythm of walking in dry sand, and furthermore, the memories, sensations, and desires prompted by these interactions.

via Wilson...

"There have existed various styles of Sufi walking; presumably dervishes of earlier and more "golden" eras practiced a sort of freestyle wandering, but by the medieval period siyaha had become a game with rules. For example, some orders defined the permissible amount of time a dervish could rest in any one place--forty nights for instance, or only one night--while others demanded such ascetic practices (which may still be seen in India today) as the wearing of heavy chains or women's garments--or that one watch one's feet while walking. The overall purpose of such precision must be to induce a state of permanent awareness and concentration on every detail, till it becomes luminous detail.

With such practice, the walker achieves a state of mind (or soul) similar to that of the lucid dreamer, or intelligent dreamer, who knows "that in the sensory world of fixed engendered existence there are transmutations at every instant, even though the eyes and the senses do not perceive them, except in speech and movement"

Sufi scholar W.C. Chittick comments:

"People know that dreams need interpretation (ta'bir). The word ta'bir derives from the root 'b.r., which signifies 'crossing over,' hence, to traverse, to ford, to pass. The interpreter (mu'abbir) is he who passes from the sensory form of the dream to the meaning which has put on the clothing of form. From the same root we have 'ibara' or 'verbal expression,' which is the passage from understanding to exposition.

When the nature of the cosmos is truly 'verified', the knower sees it to be a form of imagination, in need of interpretation like a dream" (Chittick, The Sufi Path)

The Walker is he who travels with his reflection in search of the signs and proofs of the existence of his Maker. In his walking he finds no proof for that other than his own possibility. The physical world and the imaginal world here coincide with the precise "fit" of total identification."

imagination serves an essential function in someone's engagement with place. It is to be navigated and interpreted in correlation with space.



William S Burroughs developed a walking game similar to siyaha, "walking on colors":

“Another exercise that is very effective is walking on colors. Pick out all the reds on a street, focusing only on red objects–brick, lights, sweaters, signs. Shift to green, blue, orange, yellow. Notice how the colors begin to stand out more sharply of their own accord. I was walking on yellow when I saw a yellow amphibious jeep near the corner of 94th Street and Central Park West. It was called the Thing. This reminded me of the Thing I knew in Mexico. He was nearly seven feet tall and had played the Thing in a horror movie of the same name, and everybody called him the Thing, though his name was James Arness.  I hadn’t thought about the Thing in twenty years, and would not have thought about him except walking on yellow at that particular moment.”