Q & A with Idries Shah, from Learning How To Learn
register and study, which will help to progress on the Sufi path?
A : If you are not a viable unit in the ordinary world, you will
not become one elsewhere. If you have a poor capacity for making
human contacts, we cannot offer you the substitute of a community
where `we understand one another'. That belongs to play-life,
what some, of course, generally call real life.
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If you are accustomed to being supported and kept going by
social, psychological and other pressures in the everyday world,
there is a sense in which you do not really exist at all. The people
who collapse in the often unpressured-dervish atmosphere and who
slack, become tiresome to others, or seek to attract or obtain
attention: they will fall to pieces and one cannot help them.
**************
Try to remember; and, if you cannot remember, try to become
familiar with this idea:
Lots of people who imagine that they are with us because they
are physically present, or because by the ordinary tests (feelings
of loyalty, indoctrination) are ostensibly present, lots of those
people are not effectively here at all. If you are one of those
people, there is nothing we can do for you. If you are like an
ordinary person: that is, if you have the tendency to `be here'
only for limited and primitive amusement, but have it only as a
tendency and not a way of life: then we can perhaps make some
progress.
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Remember that the human being is so intensely standardised
that an outside observer, noting his reactions to various stimuli,
need not infer an individual controlling brain in each person. He
would be more likely to infer the existence of a separate, outside
brain, and the people as mere manifesters of its will.
**************
Register the fact that:
Virtually all organisations known to you work largely by means
of your greed. They attract you because what they say or do
appeals to your greed. This is concealed only by their appear-
ance. If you stop listening to their words and look at the effect,
you will soon see it.
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Remember that greed includes greed for being not greedy. So,
if someone says: `Do not be greedy, be generous', you may in-
wardly interpret this in such a manner that you will develop a
greed for generosity. This, however, remains greed.
*****************
There are some things which you have to do for yourself.
These include familiarising yourself with study-materials given to
you. You can only really do this - and thus acquire real qualities
- if you suspend the indulgence of desire for immediate satis-
factions.
******************
All members of contemporary societies, with few exceptions,
are in need of graduating from primitive morality to a higher one.
The primitive one is the one which tells you, like a child, that
honesty will make you happy, make you successful, get you to
higher things. Honesty, you may now be informed, is essential as
an instrument, not to be worshipped as a seldom-attained
emotion-loaded ideal.
******************
Sufis have their own methods of deterring unsuitable people.
You may only know one or two ways. Pay attention to the tech-
niques which, for instance, deter by compelling people to conclude that they are worthless.
****************
What you may take to be attractive, or even spread out by us
to be attractive to you, may well not be intended in this manner at
all. That which attracts you, or others, about us may be that
which is laid down by us as a tool which enables us to regard
you (or others) as unsuitable.
******************
One can give or withhold in a manner far more effective,
sophisticated, useful, which is quite invisible to people who think
that giving or withholding is done by external assessment. If you
seek some mark of favour or `promotion', know that you are not
ready for it. Progress comes through capacity to learn, and is
irresistible. Nobody can stand between you and knowledge if you
are fit for it.
****************
Anybody or anything may stand between you and knowledge if
you are unfit for it.
*****************
You can learn more in half an hour's direct contact with a
source of knowledge (no matter the apparent reason for the con-
tact or the subject of the transaction) than you can in years of
formal effort.
******************
You can learn and equip yourself with latent knowledge, whose
development comes at a later stage. Only those who insist upon
instant attention want anything else.
******************
The role of the teacher is to provoke capacity in the student, to
provide what there is when it will be useful, to guide him towards
progress. It is not to impress, to give an impression of virtue,
power, importance, general information, knowledge or anything
else.
****************
Systematic study or behaviour is valuable when it is of use.
When it is not, it can be poisonous.
*****************
Those who seek consistency as a major factor, in people or in
study materials, are seeking system at a stage where it is not indicated. Children and savages do this, when they ask for in-
formation which will explain or make possible `everything'. Con-
sistency is, however, on offer from those people whose business it
is to offer comfort and reassurance as objectives.
******************
If you seek illumination or understanding when what you really
need is information or rest from pressures, you will get none of
these things. If you know what you want, you should go and get it.
****************
If you carry the habit of judging things into an area where it does not apply, you will judge in a manner which will not
correspond with your needs.
*****************
You cannot work on a higher level entirely with the concepts,
language and experiences of a lower level. Higher level work is in
a combination of manners and relationships.
******************
The ultimate absurdity, incapacitating from real learning beyond the stage you have reached, is to imagine that one thing is an-
other. If you think that a book is a sandwich, you may try to eat
it, and will not be able to learn what a book can teach. If, too,
you imagine that you are being `open' or `working' or eager to
learn when you are only playing a social game, you will learn
nothing. The people who refuse to play that game with you will
also, of course, sooner or later annoy you.
*****************
Human organisations can take two forms: entities which are
set up to express or attain the aspirations of their members; and
those which exist in order to acquire or provide something which
is needed. Wants and needs are not the same. The difference is in
information. If people know what they need, they do not have to
confuse wants with needs.
******************
If you do not know already the difference between opinion and
fact, you can study it in the daily and weekly newspapers.
from Learning How To Learn (1978) by Idries Shah, pgs 157-161.
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