Sufi Studies Today (IV)

Sufi Studies

THE KERNEL OF the human development called 'Sufism' is the

basic human unit: the members who meet together and carry on

the studies prescribed for them by a contemporary teacher.

This is necessary to the realisation which comes from being

a Sufi. It may be called community, communion, meeting. It is

unimportant what it is called, what is important is to see how

every form of human search which later becomes a system, a

'religion', or an enterprise of any kind, originally depends upon

this coming-together. It is often called the Jam—coming together.

Meeting for worship, teamwork of all kinds, learning in

groups, all are derivations and diluted ones, of this basic factor.

It is the Sufis, the real Sufis, who preserve the original means

of operating in this Jam. As time passes, in ordinary communities

without special safeguards, the working of this coming-together

becomes less and less effective, more and more formalised or

generalised, until the Jam no longer exists. What takes its place

is social 'togetherness', or emotional enthusiasm, or conditioned

response to being in a collection of people.

No higher attainment is possible to man unless the circumstances

of the coming-together are correct; unless it is a communion

including the right people, at the right time, in the

right place. Impatience, ignorance, sentimentality, intellectualism

tend to cause people to convert the true Jam situation until it

becomes something else.

This essential knowledge has always existed amongst men, and

continues to exist. But superficial and other kinds of popularised

thinking have obscured the real working of this coming-together,

until people can only see innumerable forms of deteriorated Jam—which they accept or reject according to whether they seem attractive, plausible or 'true'.

It may often be impossible to re-form a degenerated comingtogether

community. It will then be possible to regenerate it

only by breaking old habit-patterns and regrouping people who

can really be harmonised. This may cause a very different

appearance of the whole effort to those who have become ac-

customed to a false situation. The selection of participants on

the basis of their capacity and not their assumed importance

always causes discontent in those who have lost the power to

adapt. This kind of lack of flexibility is, in turn, an inevitable

characteristic of people and groups which have been running on

automatistic patterns and which need revivifying.

It is a historical fact that true communities 'run down' and

develop peculiarities other than were present in their origins.

They may do this because of the ascendancy of undesirable

characteristics in the participants, or because there is a widespread

tendency for people and groups to attempt to stablise

themselves., irrespective of whether this kind of stablisation loses

more than it gains.

This is the major perennial reason for the cyclic emergence

of living teachers. It is they alone who can restore harmony and

balance in circles and individuals which have sacrificed these

things in the search for continuity and reassurance in the hope

of stabilisation.

Were it possible to attain the object in a systematised way the

means to do so would have been enunciated and recorded many

thousands of years ago: just as the laws of ordinary material

stability and performance are recorded and applied in physics

or in applied arts.

The reactions of an audience to the efforts of a real teacher

to redress the balance of an organisation are always predictable.

They will include despair, confusion, desire for stimulus., fear

that something might be taken away, rejection, desire to accept

in order to profit by the 'new phase'.

Mulla Nasrudin objected to the captain of a ship tieing up the

sails aloft, when, as he said: 'Can't you see that the trouble is

at sea-level!'

The teacher, however much he may regret it, can never escape

the necessity of saying that it is he who has the technical knowledge:

who decides whether the sails or the hull have to be tied

up.

If he calms the 'Mulla' by passing ropes around the hull, the

ship may never reach port: though the 'Mulla's' death in the

storm may take place in the circumstances of the utmost tranquility,

sure in the knowledge that his desires have been fulfilled.

There are two kinds of community: one, the community

produced and maintained by what is today called indoctrination;

the other, the one accumulated and harmonised by starting with

the right materials and the right knowledge.


Octagon Press, 1968.