Exercises and Techniques

THE ROLE OF EXERCISES AND TECHNIQUES
from Sufi Texts, 1969;1982

Religious, psychological and philosophical techniques, such as prayer, exercises, meditation, contemplation, physical movements, recitations and the rest, have an origin. That origin is a source of knowledge which knows what techniques, applied by whom, in what manner, may have what effect.

If this is true, and we say that it is, it will be seen that the random adoption of these techniques is not likely to cause the desired effect. 

But the facts are worse than these. Far from not causing the desired effect, the use of techniques in the wrong order for a certain community, out of correct timing, or by means of repetition, will actually condition, train people to behave in an automatic manner. 

If the first contention about sources of knowledge cannot be verified easily, the second, the one about automatism, certainly can. By subjecting any selection of people to exercises which are believed to have 'inevitable effects', you will engender in them a belief that this is taking place, and condition them to belief. 

The automatic application of study courses which are thought to be of universal application is a degeneration of a teaching system. People have copied things that they have been partly taught, or which they have seen done,  without remembering the need for the conscious direction of this work.

 The result is the litter of systems, all of them originally of value, none of them of universal application. An individual who knows about the original bases of exercises, etc., will be able to deduce at once the nature of the community for which the exercises  were originally prescribed, by observing what the exercises are. 

Only too often it turns out that people are following formulations which belong to another culture than their own, not having been transposed into their culture but imported, or they are studying techniques which would apply to their forebears or ancestors. In every epoch, it is the task of those who know the origin and function of exercises and other procedures to offer suitable formulations to those who are interested. 

They are hampered by the outworn shapes which always acquire
'sanctity' because of their age and habituation on the part of the practitioners.

There is a second misunderstanding, one which has traditionally reinforced the ignorance of the flexibility of exercises and techniques. This is the literal adoption of a relative truth. When a class or an individual is told, "This exercise is most important, essential, the only one" and so on, it is put in this manner in order to help fix the student's attention upon it, not for him to believe literally, nor for him to jump to the conclusion that he has found a magic key to something. One man's magic key is another man's millstone. 

It is the student's duty, therefore:

a. To register the argument about exercises being functional, not totally sacrosanct.

b. To realise that an activity may be absolutely true in the sense that it must be carried out as if it were the most important thing at the time.

c. To avoid mixing studies under direction with random studies of his own, until allowed to do so.

d. To remember that what may help him at one stage may hinder him at another.

e. To remember that what may help him may hinder others.

f. To remember that what may help or hinder others, at the same time, at a different place, at another time, and so on, may hinder or help him.

These are among the reasons why his studies must be directed.

Finally the direction of his studies will not always, sometimes not often, accord with his imagination of what it should be, or how he thinks it should appear.