The Path, the Duties and Techniques (II)

excerpts from "The Path and the Duties and Techniques"

by Idries Shah

THE STATIONS AND THE STATES

 Now we may turn to the exercises and the concepts which
surround them. First of all there is the Station, called Maqam. This
is the word for the quality which, at any given moment, the student
is cultivating, under the instructions of his director. He may be
expected to stabilise himself on, say, Taubat (turning back,
repentance) until his teacher assigns him to another developmental
exercise. It is a posture, and so is termed `an act'. In one sense it is a
`stage', a word which has also been used for it.

  But a Stage is not a State. `States' are episodes of altered
consciousness which come upon the individual without his being
able to control them. The `State' is also known as a'gift'. The main
objective of Sufis experiencing these flashes is to get beyond them.
The eminent teacher Junaid of Baghdad emphasises that `States are
like flashes of lightning: their permanence is merely a suggestion of
the lower self'.[Quoted by Hujwiri, in the Revelation of the Veiled]

 This means that their filtering through the
unaltered ego causes delusions. If they can be felt, and are valued

instead of conducting to the stage of perceptual breakthrough, the
student is in a rut.

 Being in one or other `Station' is seen as a sort of necessary
bondage, part of the training of the Commanding Self, and a time
comes when this is no longer necessary. Similarly, the `States'
indicate a contaminant in the person, who should instead (and
eventually will, it is hoped) experience knowledge instead of
intoxication or dazzle. The passage in Hujwiri's book, the first one
in Persian on Sufism, goes like this:

 `All the Teachers of this Path are agreed that when a man has
escaped from the captivity of Stations, and got away from the
contamination of States, and is liberated from the abode of change
and decay [dependence upon time and place] and becomes
endowed with praiseworthy qualities, he is disjoined from all
qualities. That is to say, he is not held in bondage by any
praiseworthy quality of his own, nor does he care about it, nor does
it make him conceited. His state is hidden from the perception of
intelligence, and his time is exempt from the influence of
thoughts.'*

The Sufi director knows by the behaviour of the student what
the condition of his secondary, `commanding' self is at any given
time.

 In countries where Sufi studies are full of prestige, and yet where
only the `circuses' take on almost all comers as members, there is
some pressure on real Sufis to accept disciples.

    TALE OF THE AMAZING EXPERIENCES

 One joke about this is that of the would-be disciple who, full of
what he had read in books and heard from the members of
excitatory `orders', went to talk of his experiences to a real Sufi.

 `Master', he cried, `I have had amazing experiences of a spiritual
sort, which prove to me that I am destined to become an
illuminated Sufi, and you must therefore take me on as a pupil - in
fact I already have students of my own!'

 The Sufi smiled, and said: `Brother, forget all this talk of
"amazing experiences". The real candidates for self-realization are

those who have felt nothing at all or who do so no longer. Now what
was amazing about your experiences?'

 `The amazing thing is', said the dauntless applicant, `that these
were experiences in which I experienced absolutely nothing at
all.'

 This is the unaltered, commanding self, in action, though such
behaviour usually takes place silently, within the person, and we
don't often get opportunities of seeing it externalized as beautifully
as this.

 Let us look at this part-conditioned, part-uncontrolled self in its
various stages:

   THE CONDITIONS OF THE HUMAN SELF:

 The Self, called the Nafs, goes through certain stages in Sufi
development, first existing as a mixture of physical reactions,
conditioned behaviour and various subjective aspirations.

 The seven stages of the Self constitute the transformation
process, ending with the stage of perfection and clarification. Some
have called this process the 'refinement of the Ego'.

 The stages are:

 The Commanding Self
 The Accusing Self
 The Inspired Self
 The Tranquil Self
 The Satisfied Self
 The Satisfying Self
 The Purified and Completed Self

 Each one of the words given above signifies. a major characteris-
tic of the Self in its upward ascent, hence, in Sufi eyes, most people
in all cultures are generally familiar only with the first stage of the
self as represented in their ethical systems as something which
seeks only its own interests. The ordinary person, staying at the
level of ordinary religious and moral teaching, is at the stage which
the Sufis would regard as only struggling with the Commanding
Self, with, in action, the Accusing Self reproaching itself for its
shortcomings. It is because of this scheme that observers have
 styled Sufi development as going five stages beyond that known to
the ordinarily `Moral' person.

 It cannot be denied that in Sufi eyes the stages of human service,
for instance, and concern for others, are regarded as not very great
achievements, though lauded to the skies in moralistic-centred
systems as almost impossible of attainment. Hence when Saadi
says in the 13th century:

 All Adam's sons are limbs of one another,
 Each of the self-same substance as his brothers,
 So, while one member suffers ache and grief,
 The other members cannot win relief.
 Thou, who are heedless of thy brother's pain,
 It is not right at all to name thee man ...
                    (Gulistan, tr. Browne)

he means that the Sufis, though recognizing its vital importance,
still keep the door open for many stages of greater function for
humankind. They maintain that to regard human well-being,
though essential, as the highest possible, the sublime, achievement
of humanity, is to limit oneself so much that it is, effectively, a
pessimistic and unacceptably limited stance. Again, the desire for
human well-being is the minimum, not the maximum, duty of
humanity.

 The Commanding Self is the origin of the individual controlled
by a composite consciousness, which is a mixture of hopes and
fears, of training and imagination, of emotional and other factors,
which make up the person in his or her `normal' state, as one would
ordinarily call it. It is the state of most of the people who have
not undergone the clarification process.

 The Accusing Self is the state of the Self when it is able to
monitor its behaviour and perceive the secondary nature of so
many things formerly imagined to be primary, the actual relativity
of assumed absolutes, and so on. This part of the man or woman is
both the check on imperfect action and also the area through which
the legitimate reproach of others or of the environment gets
through to the individual. This is the stage of ordinary conscience.
Most people stop and mill around here.

 When the depraved or commanding self and the reproaching or
accusing selves have done their work, the organ of perception and
action becomes susceptible to the entry of perceptions formerly
blocked. For this reason it is termed the Inspired Self. In this stage
come the first indications, albeit imperfect ones, of the existence
and operation of a reliable higher element, force, power or
communications system.

 Although people have often translated the word Nafs, which we
call `Self' here, as `soul', it is in fact not such at all, but what might
be called the real personality of the individual. The word for soul is
`rouh', spirit.

 The so-called lower self, the Nafs, passes through the stages in
which it is said to `die', and be transformed. Since it also is held to
die on physical death, the phrase for this process is `dying before
you die'. Hence the death and rebirth cycle takes place in this life
instead of being assigned, as in the Hindu model, to supposed
literal reincarnation births and deaths.

 Attempts to cause the self to operate out of sequence; that is, to
receive perceptions when the third stage has not been reached, or
to provoke and benefit from mystical experience before the fifth
stage, produces the sort of confusion - and sometimes worse -
which is reflected in some current literature of experimenters who
choose their own sequence of events, and may cause developments
which they cannot handle.

 It also makes people crazy or nearly so. Many of these imagine
themselves to be spiritual teachers, and some of them convince
others that they are, too.

 The inner psychological problems of people who try to force
developments in their psychic life are a matter for clinical, or even
experimental, psychology. But there are many who stop short of
this, who have not even got to the stage where they realize that their
superficial interest in metaphysics bars them from something
deeper, and who try exercises mechanically or spasmodically. No
wonder they try to store up with emotion.

 Some of these are often otherwise quite nice people. They get
superficial delusions, because of a rationalizing tendency.

       THE INVISIBLE TEACHER
 

I remember one such, whose supposed mystical career was
attributed by him to `fate' for just this kind of reason.

 I lived quite near to him, and began to hear that he was passing
on messages from an `invisible teacher'.

 One evening, however, he confessed to me that the teacher did
not really exist.

 I said: `How could you plot such a deception? Lots of people
believe you. You must be very unprincipled.'

 `No,' he said, `It is Fate. I have been chosen by a strange and
mysterious method. This is how it happened.'

 He had written to someone he called a `Holy Dervish' (presum-
ably as distinct from an unholy one) and asked him to come for a
visit, to speak to a group of people in his town. He had already
informed everyone he could that the great man was coming, when
the appointed date arrived with no answer and no dervish. The
people collected, and my friend sat on a platform before them, in
silence, waiting. When everyone had been there some time, one of
the local people stood up and said: `I have understood your
meaning. The Holy Dervish has not come because he is invisible
and you are his representative. We accept you!'

 `Well,' continued my friend, `if that was not me being chosen as a
teacher, through the inner working of fate, what is? I could never
have planned such a thing!'



From A Perfumed Scorpion (1978) by Idries Shah