Function of Books

by Idries Shah (1978)


I have before me a packet of dehydrated onions.


Let these dried onions stand for something which has been
written down. They are neither the original experience (the onion)
nor are they nothing at all. They possess a virtuality.


Add hot water, and this is absorbed by your dried material.
After a few minutes, we have something which we know to have
been dried onions, but which is not now the same. What we now
have is 'reconstituted onion'.


We do not have whole onions, it is true. Neither do we have
fresh onions. But we have something which will enable us to
recognise fresh onions when we see and taste them. This is an
advance upon dried onions.


The original experience was fresh onions. The water was the
addition made by the right circumstances of study. The result is
edible, and this is a suitable substitute for fresh onions. It contains
some nutrition, too.


Those who say: 'You cannot make anything out of dried
onions' - the equivalent of 'You cannot get anything from a book'
-are wrong. Those who say: 'I will wait (or search) until I find
fresh onions' are wrong. They are wrong because they do not
realise that they would not recognise 'fresh onions' if they saw
them. This has to be said, though reluctantly, because such statements
are usually taken as challenging, when they are more often
intended only to be descriptive.


Let us therefore postulate the statement: 'You can get something
from a book. That something may be so important as to
lead you to the recognition of the real thing. It is therefore in
many cases all-important.'



INGREDIENTS


But why should people imagine that there is nothing in a book
of the same order as 'fresh' experience? Simply because they do
not know that specific circumstances (such as water added to the
onion shreds) are needed before they can get anything. It is the
Sufic purpose to help towards the provision of the water as well as
the dried onion, so that in due time fresh onions may be presented.



HUMILITY


One of the real reasons for the attempted inculcation of a really
'humble' attitude towards life and learning in traditional teaching
techniques is to try to enable people to adopt a point of view
which will allow them to 'approach onions through whatever
condition of onion is available'.


Of course, such teachings in inept hands rapidly turn into
moralistic ones. Instead of saying the above, people cast around
for a logical prop to teach patience and humility. They soon find
it: 'Humility is good for society. It makes people good, pure,
etc' This, however, is the social level, not the metaphysical one.
If you are 'humble', it may help you in ordinary life. If you are
not, you will get nowhere in higher things.


If people cannot adopt a 'humble' attitude towards something
which they are being invited to study, they are not able to study it
at all. Therefore there is no such issue as is frequently supposed,
where people ask: 'Why should I obey something which I do not
know?' The question is invalid because whoever is at that stage
cannot obey or disobey: he can only remain a fairly querulous
enquirer. He is not master of the option, so there is neither any
validity in the question nor any need for an answer, other than a
description of his state. The hope lies in the possibility that he may
recognise his condition through a description of it, and adjust his
attitude accordingly.


People, however, more often than not adopt secondary indications
as primary, and Sufi teachers have to take into account this
tendency. Sometimes they provide deliberately contrived shocks
to display the limited nature of the would-be student's thinking,
to help him (or her) to gain a deeper understanding of themselves
and hence to liberate a wider perspective enabling them to learn.
Such a shock is contained in the tale told by Bayazid Bistami.




IDOLATRY


A man, he recounted, met him on the road and asked where he
was going. Bayazid told him that as he had two hundred dinars,
he was going on the Pilgrimage to Mecca.


The man said: 'Circumambulate me seven times, and let that
be your Pilgrimage, for I have dependents.'


So, continued Bayazid, he did what the man asked, and returned
to his own house.


More often than not, such an adjustment, because it involves
admitting that previous thinking-patterns are inadequate, is not
sufficiently welcome to him. He seeks something which will bolster
the desire to feel that he is significant.


He very easily finds such a creed, individual or institution:
because almost all of the current ones specialise - whether they
know it or not - in judicious flattery. Even if flattery is alternated
with disapproval, it remains flattery.


This is one reason why it is so important to understand one's
personal motivation.


An important aspect of this theme of the value of intermediary
materials as catalytic elements is to note that there is a form of
learning by direct and provoked perception. This is distinct from
learning through rote methods or by selective study where that
study is planned by the student or by someone else who does not
have a full perception of the student's needs.



APPEARANCE AND FUNCTION


We speak here of function, not appearance. There is an interesting
parallel in an event which I remember from a time when some
literalists were questioning Sidi Abu-Yusuf on Sufi teachers. His
answer both shows their mentality and how it fails to accord with
reality:


The questions covered the claims made by or on behalf of Sufi
exponents to be Supreme Chief of the Sufis.


Abu-Yusuf said: 'This is a metaphor only and does not imply
any rivalry. It does not encompass, either, any idea of hierarchy
in formal organisation. Furthermore, it does not mean that each
claims (or has claimed for him) to be Chief of All the Sufis. It
only means that, for those who are following their instructions,
Sufi teachers must be regarded as the chief and only source of
wisdom. This role is no greater than that of any teacher whose
pupils must maintain their concentration and learning ability by
not dividing their attention to other subjects, such as - in this case
-a hierarchy of teachers. The real chiefs of the Sufis exist and
operate in a generally non-perceived realm and are never known
in their higher functions; though these personages may present
themselves as mere Sufi masters from time to time - as they may
assume any other guise - to carry on their functions.'



--from 'You Can't Teach by Correspondence' in Learning How To Learn, p. 67-70

Unrecognised Conditioning

Q&A with Idries Shah, from Learning How To Learn (1978)


Q: According to the Sufis, is there any knowledge of the difference
between teaching and conditioning; and do people know what
they want when they set out to learn?


A: People are conditioned not only by deliberate indoctrination,
but also by systems whose proponents themselves are ignorant of
the need for safeguards to prevent conditioning. People are also
conditioned by a constellation of experiences. In most human
societies, unanimity of thought has been arrived at by an unrecognised
conditioning process in which virtually all the society's
institutions may be branches of the conditioning process.


This information is neither new nor necessarily exciting. But it
is essential. What is new about it is that it has been concisely and
effectively revealed in studies made in the West, notably since the
end of the Korean war. If you do not know or believe the foregoing,
you will either have to accept it as a working hypothesis, or
else leave all attempts at studying other matters aside until you
have caught up with this information in the generally available
sources on the subject. In such a case your basic information is
incomplete, and your prospects of progress are as limited in a
higher sense as if you were trying to become an academic but
were not yet literate.



Certain traditional teaching-systems have continuously maintained
the knowledge of this 'conditioning by environment' factor.
The essence of their systems has been twofold: (1) to stress the
fact of conditioning, in order to redress the imbalance produced
by it; and (2) to provide study-formats and human groupings in
which the conditioning cannot easily operate.



No such systems deny the value of conditioning for certain purposes, but they themselves do not use it. They are not trying to
destroy the conditioning mechanism, upon which, indeed, so much
of life depends. This is the first lesson: People who are shown for the first time how their views are the product of conditioning tend to assume, in the crudest possible manner, that whoever told them this is himself opposed to conditioning, or proposes to do something about it. What any legitimate system will do, however, is to point out that conditioning is a part of the social scene and is confused with 'higher' things only at the point when a teaching has become
deteriorated and has to 'train' its members.



The second lesson is that the majority of any group of people
can be conditioned, if the group is in effect a random one: nonconditioning-
prone groups can only be developed by selecting
people who harmonise in such a manner as to help defeat this
tendency.



People who hear this may tend automatically to assume that this
is a doctrine of the elite. But this assumption is only accepted
by them because they are ignorant of the process and the
bases. The primary object is to associate people together who
can avoid conditioning, so that a development can take place
among these people which in turn can be passed on to larger
numbers. It can never be applied to large numbers of people
directly.



Many people who hear for the first time that conditioning is
a powerful, unrecognised and spiritually ineffective development
react in another manner which is equally useless. They assume
that since conditioning is present in all the institutions known to
them (including any which they themselves esteem highly) that it
must always be essential. This is only due to the fact that they are
not willing to face the fact that any institution may become invaded
by a tendency which is dangerous to it. This is not the same
as saying that the institution is based upon it.



When people are collected together to be exposed to materials
which will defy or avoid conditioning, they will always tend to
become uncomfortable. This discomfort is due to the fact that they
are not receiving from these materials the stimuli to which they
have become accustomed as conditioned people. But, since they
generally lack the full perception of what is in the materials, (and
since it is a characteristic of conditioning materials that they may
masquerade as independently arrived-at facts), such people do not
know what to do. The solution to this problem which they will
tend to adopt is some kind of rationalisation. If they receive no
accustomed stimulus of an emotional sort, they will regard the
new or carefully selected materials as 'insipid'.



This is a further lesson. Everyone should realise that the vicious
circle must be broken somewhere and somehow. To substitute
one conditioning for another is sometimes ridiculous. To provide
people with a stimulus of a kind to which they have become
accustomed may be a public or social service: it is not teaching
activity of a higher sort.



Unfortunately people have been so trained as to imagine that
something which is hard to understand or hard to do, in a crude
sense, is a true exercise. Hence, people are often willing to sacrifice
money, physical effort, time, comfort. But if they are asked (say)
not to meet, or to sacrifice the attention of a teacher, this they find
nearly impossible to bear, simply because their training is such that
they are behaving as addicts. They may want sacrifice or effort,
but only the kind which they have been trained to believe is sacrifice or effort. 'Stylised effort', though, is no effort at all.



Most unfortunately, they do not know that the system to which
they have been trained has always (if they have developed such a
taste for it as we have just described) fulfilled its optimum possible
developmental function at a point long before we are likely to have
encountered them. It has now become a vice, ritual or habit which
they are unable to recognise as such.



The prerequisite of an advanced form of teaching is that the
participants shall be prepared to expose themselves to it, and not
only to some travesty which gives them a lower nutrition to which
they have become accustomed.



This is in itself a higher stage than any repetition or drilling or
rehashing of words or exercises or theories. And, in its way, it is a
challenge. Can the participants, or can they not, really enter an
area where their effectively cruder desires and automatic responses
are not pandered to?



If they cannot, they have excluded themselves from the Teaching.
In order to become eligible, it is the would-be students who have
to 'sort themselves out". They have to examine themselves and see
whether they have merely been using their studies to fulfill social
desires, or personal psychological aims, or to condition themselves.



They should also be told the simple fact that, for instance, if you
shout 'I must wake up!' often enough, it will put you to sleep. If
their sense of power, for instance, is being fed by means of the
suggestion that they are studying something that others do not
know, they will get no further. If they are deriving any personal
pleasure or other benefit from 'teaching' others, they will not learn
any more. If they depend upon their study-community alone or
mainly for friends or somewhere to go once or twice a week or
month, they will get no further.



There has been a confusion between teaching and the social or
human function. To help or to entertain someone else is a social,
not an esoteric, duty. As a human being you always have the
social and humanitarian duty. But you do not necessarily have the
therapeutic duty; indeed, you may be much less well qualified for it
than almost any conventional professional therapist.



It is impossible to spend time with virtually any religious,
philosophical and esotericist group, or even to read its literature,
without seeing that a large number of the people involved, perhaps
through no fault of their own, and because of ignorance of the
problems, are using these formats for sociological or psychological
purposes of a narrow kind. It is not that their spiritual life is right
in these groups. It is that their social life is inadequate.



'As above, so below'. Just as in ordinary worldly considerations
there can be inefficiency or confusion as to aims, so there may be
in approaching higher knowledge. You may be able, initially, to
pursue higher aims through lower mechanisms and theories, but
you cannot pursue them by indulging short-term personal interests.



You must follow your personality interests somewhere else. In an
advanced society there are more institutions catering for such outlets
than anyone could possibly need. Make sure that your professional,
commercial, social, psychological and family needs are fulfilled
in the society to which you belong. The rest of you is the
part which can be communicated with by means of the specialised
techniques available to those who have a comprehensive and
legitimate traditional learning: and who have the means of safeguarding
it.



This is what you have to study first of all. Most people are
trying to effect something else, no matter what they imagine that
they are doing. Fortunately, it is not hard to recognise this if
enough sincere effort is expended.



In ordinary life, if you think that your family is largely a
commercial proposition, people will point out that you are misguided.
If you thought that your profession was mainly for social
purposes, people would soon put you right. It is time that you
were correctly informed in this field as well. You must know, or
find out, the difference between meeting to learn and experience
something, and meeting in order to be emotionally stimulated or
intellectually tested or socially reassured.



There is no harm at all in a social ingredient in a human
relationship: far from it. But when this gets out of balance, and a
human contact becomes an excuse for a social contact, you are
not going to learn, no matter what materials you are working with.
'Due proportion' is a secret skill of the teacher.



The repeated upsurge of apparently different schools of higher
study in various epochs and cultures is due in large part to the
need to rescue genuine traditional teachings from the automatism
and social-psychological-entertainment functions which regularly
and deeply invade and, for the most part, eventually possess them.



Certain physical and mental exercises, as an example, are of
extremely significant importance for the furthering of higher
human functions. If these are practised by people who use things
for emotional, social or callisthenic purposes, they will not operate
on a higher level with such people. They become merely a means
of getting rid of surplus energy, or of assuaging a sense of frustration.



The practitioners, however, regularly and almost invariably
mistake their subjective experiences of them for 'something higher'.
It is for this reason that legitimate traditional higher teachings
are parsimonious with their materials and exercises. Nobody with
a task to perform can possibly (if he knows about his task) do so in
a manner which is not benefiting people on the level required.



The foregoing information should be read and studied and
understood as widely as possible. Without it there is little possibility
of serving any group of people, anywhere, otherwise than
socially or with shallow psychology, no matter what theories,
systems or exercises are employed.



Where there is ideology, conditioning and indoctrination, a
mechanical element is introduced which drives out the factor of
extradimensional reality perception which connects the higher
functions of the mind with the higher reality.



Sufi experiences are designed to maintain a harmony with and
nearness to this Reality, while mechanical systems effectively distance people from it.



WHO GUARDS THE COAT



Attar, in his Recitals of the Saints, tells a story of the great Sufi
Habib Ajami, when he went to a river to wash, leaving his coat
lying on the ground. Hasan of Basra was passing and saw it.
Thinking that someone should look after this property, he stood
guard over it until Habib returned.

Hasan then asked Habib whom he had left looking after the
coat.

'In the care' said Habib, 'of him who gave you the task of
looking after it!'



This anecdote, intended to indicate the way in which affairs
work out for Sufis, is often taken by raw imitators as something to
copy, so that they test 'destiny' by abandoning things and neglecting
duties: with results which correspond with their stage of
ignorance.




--from "Teaching Methods and Prerequisites" in Learning How to Learn (1978), pgs. 257-262

Niche for Lights

excerpts from Al-Ghazzali's Interpretation of the Light Verse from the Koran, The Niche For Lights:



(ii) THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE HUMAN SOUL: ITS FIVE FACULTIES OR SPIRITS

The first of these is the sensory spirit. This is the recipient of the information brought in by the senses; for it is the root and origin of 'the animal spirit' and constitutes the differentia of the animal genus. It is found in the infant at the breast.



The second is the imaginative spirit. This is the recorder of the information conveyed by the senses. It keeps that information filed and ready to hand, so as to present it to the intelligential spirit above it, when the information is called for. It is not found in the infant at the beginning of its evolution. This is why an infant wants to get hold of a thing when he sees it, while he forgets about it when it is out of his sight. No conflict of desire arises in his soul for something out of sight until he gets a little older, when he begins to cry for it and asks to have it, because its image is still with him, preserved in his imagination.



 This faculty is possessed by some, but not all animals. It is not found, for example, in the moth which perishes in the flame.  The moth makes for the flame, because of its desire for the sunlight, and, thinking that the flame is a window opening to the sunlight, it hurries on to the flame, and injures itself. Yet, if it flies on into the dark, back it comes again, time after time. Now had it the mnemonic spirit, which gives permanence to the sensation of pain that is conveyed by the tactile sense, it would not return to the flame after being hurt once by it. On the other hand, the dog that has received one whipping runs away whenever it sees the stick again.



Third, the intelligential spirit. This apprehends ideas beyond the spheres of sense and imagination. It is the specifically human faculty. It is not found in the lower animals, nor yet in children. The objects of its apprehension are axioms of necessary and universal application, as we mentioned in the section in which the light of intelligence was given precedence over that of the eye.



Fourth, the discursive spirit. This takes the data of pure reason and combines them,  arranges them as premises, and deduces from them informing knowledge. Then it takes, for example, two conclusions thus learned, combines them again, and learns a fresh conclusion; and so goes on multiplying itself ad infinitum.



Fifth, the transcendental prophetic spirit. This is the property of prophets and some saints. By it the unseen tables and statutes of the Law are revealed from the other world, together with several of the sciences of the Realms Celestial and Terrestrial, and pre-eminently theology, the science of Deity, which the intelligential and discursive spirit cannot compass.



...  recluse in thy rational world of the intelligence! Why should it be impossible that beyond reason there should be a further plane, on which appear things which do not appear on the plane of the intelligence, just as it is possible for the intelligence itself to be a plane above the discriminating faculty and the senses; and for relations of wonders and marvels to be made to it that were beyond the reach of the senses and the discriminative faculty? 



Beware of making the ultimate perfection stop at thyself! Consider the intuitive faculty of poetry, if thou wilt have an example of everyday experience, taken from those special gifts which particularize some men. Behold how this gift, which is a sort of perceptive faculty, is the exclusive possession of some; while it is so completely denied to others that they cannot even distinguish the scansion of a typical measure from that of its several variations.



 Mark how extraordinary is this intuitive faculty in some others, insomuch that they produce music and melodies, and all the various grief-, delight-, slumber-, weeping-, madness-, murder-, and swoon-producing modes! Now these effects only occur strongly in one who has this original, intuitive sense. A person destitute of it hears the sounds just as much as the other, but the emotional effects are by him only very faintly experienced, and he exhibits surprise at those whom they send into raptures or swoons. And even were all the professors of music in the world to call a conference with a view of making him understand the meaning of this musical sense, they would be quite powerless to do so. Here, then, is an example taken from the gross phenomena which are easiest for you to understand. 



Apply this now to this peculiar prophetical sense. And strive earnestly to become one of those who experience mystically something of the prophetic spirit; for saints have a specially large portion thereof. If thou canst not compass this, then try, by the discipline of the syllogisms and analogies set forth or alluded to in a previous page, to be one of those 'who have knowledge of it scientifically. But if this, too, is beyond thy powers, then the least thou canst do is to become one of those who simply have faith in it ... Scientific knowledge is above faith, and mystic experience is above knowledge....




You now know the five human spirits. So we proceed: they are all of them Lights, for it is through their agency that every sort of existing thing is manifested, including objects of sense and imagination. For though it is true that the lower animals also perceive these said objects, mankind possesses a different, more refined, and higher species of those two faculties they having been created in man for a different, higher, and more noble end. In the lower animals they were only created as an instrument for acquiring food, and for subjecting them to mankind. But in mankind they were created to be a net to chase a noble quarry through all the present world; to wit, the first principles of the religious sciences....

EXPOSITION OF THE SYMBOLISM OF THE LIGHT-VERSE

We now come to what the symbolism of this Verse actually signifies: 

Allâh is the Light of the Heavens and of the Earth. The similitude of His Light is as it were a Niche wherein is a Lamp: the Lamp within a Glass: the Glass as it were a pearly Star. From a Tree right blessed is it lit, an Olive-tree neither of the East nor of the West, the Oil whereof were well-nigh luminous though Fire touched it not: Light upon Light! [Koran, Sura. 24: 35]

The full exposition of the parallelism between these five classes of Spirit, and the fivefold Niche; Glass, Lamp, Tree, and Oil, could be indefinitely prolonged. But we must be content with shortly indicating the method of the symbolism.


1. Consider the sensory spirit. Its lights, you observe, come through  several apertures, the eyes, ears, nostrils, etc. Now the aptest symbol for this, in our world of experience, is the Niche for a lamp in a wall.


2. Take next the imaginative spirit. It has three peculiarities: first, that it is of the stuff that this gross lower world is made of, for its objects have definite and limited size, and shape, and dimension, and are definitely related to the subject in respect of distance. 


Further, one of the properties of a gross substance whereof corporal attributes are predicated is to be opaque to the light of pure intelligence, which transcends these categories of direction, quantity, and distance. But, secondly, if that substance is clarified, refined, disciplined, and controlled, it attains to a correspondence with and a similarity to the ideas of the intelligence, and becomes transparent to light from them. 


Thirdly, the imagination is at first very much needed, in order that intelligential knowledge may be controlled by it, so that that knowledge be not disturbed, unsettled, and dissipated, and so get out of hand. The images supplied by the imagination hold together the knowledge supplied by the intellect. 



Now, in the world of everyday experience the sole object in which you will find these three peculiarities, in relation to physical lights, is Glass. For glass also is originally an opaque substance, but is clarified and refined until it becomes transparent to the light of a lamp, which indeed it transmits unaltered. Again, glass keeps the lamp from being put out by a draught or violent jerking. By what, then, could possibly the imagination be more aptly symbolized?



3. The intelligential spirit, which gives cognizance of the divine ideas. The point of the symbolism must be obvious to you. You know it already from our preceding explanation of the doctrine that the prophets are a "Light-giving lamp."



4. The ratiocinative spirit. Its peculiarity is to begin from one proposition, then to branch out into two, which two become four and so on, until by this process of logical division they become very numerous. It leads, finally, to conclusions which in their turn become germs producing like conclusions, these latter being also susceptible of continuation, each with each. The symbol which our world yields for this is a Tree.



 And when further we consider that the fruit of the discursive reason is material for this multiplying, establishing, and fixing of all knowledge, it will naturally not be typified by trees like quince, apple, pomegranate, nor, in brief, by any other tree whatever, except the Olive. For the quintessence of the fruit of the olive is its oil, which is the material which feeds the lamps, and has this peculiarity, as against all other oils, that it increases radiance. 



Again, if people give the adjective "blessed" to specially fruitful trees, surely the tree the fruitfulness whereof is absolutely infinite should be named Blessed! Finally, if the ramifications of those pure,  intellectual propositions do not admit of relation to direction and to distance, then may the antitypical tree will be said to be "Neither from the East nor from the West."



5. The transcendental prophetic spirit, which is possessed by saints  as well as prophets if it is absolutely luminous and clear. For the thought-spirit is divided into that which needs be instructed, advised, and supplied from without, if the acquisition of knowledge is to be continuous; while a portion of it is absolutely, clear, as though it were self-luminous, and had no external source of supply. Applying these, considerations, we see how justly this clear, strong natural faculty is described by the words, "Whose Oil were well-nigh luminant, though Fire touched it not;" for there be Saints whose light shines so bright that it is "well-nigh"' independent of that which Prophets supply, while there be Prophets whose light is "well-nigh" independent of that which Angels 'supply. Such is the symbolism, and aptly does it typify this class.


And inasmuch as the lights of the human spirit are graded rank on rank, then that of Sense comes first, the foundation and preparation for the Imagination (for the latter can only be conceived as superimposed after Sense); those of the Intelligence and Discursive Reason come thereafter.


 All which explains why the Glass is, as it were, the place for the Lamp's immanence; and the Niche, for the Glass: that is to say, the Lamp is within the Glass, and the Glass within the Niche. Finally, the existence, as we have seen, of a graded succession of Lights explains the words of the text "Light upon Light."

Epilogue: the Darkness Verse

But this symbolism holds only for the 'hearts of true believers, or of prophets and saints, but not for the hearts of misbelievers; 'for the term "light" is expressive of right-guidance alone. 



But as for the man who is turned from the path of guidance, he is false, he is darkness; nay, he is darker than darkness. For darkness is natural; it leads one neither one way nor the other; but the minds of misbelievers, and the whole of their perceptions, are perverse, and support each other mutually in the actual deluding of their owners. They are like a man "in some fathomless sea, overwhelmed by billow topped by billow topped by cloud; darkness on darkness piled!"


Now that fathomless sea is the World, this world of mortal dangers, of evil chances, of blinding trouble. 


[The following tripartite division of the soul, with its analogues, is Platonic (see Republic, bk. iv).]



 The first "billow" is the wave of lust, whereby souls acquire the bestial attributes, and are occupied with sensual pleasures, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions, so that "they eat and luxuriate like cattle. Hell shall be their place of entertainment!" Well does this wave represent darkness, therefore; since love for the creature makes the soul both blind and deaf. 



The second "billow" is the wave of the ferocious attributes, which impel the soul to wrath, enmity, hatred, prejudice, envy, boastfulness, ostentation, pride. Well is this, too, the symbol of darkness, for wrath is the demon of man's intelligence; and well also is it the uppermost billow, for anger is mostly stronger even than lust; swelling wrath diverts the soul from lust and makes it oblivious of enjoyment; lust cannot for a moment stands up against anger at its height.



Finally, "the cloud" is rank beliefs, and lying heresies, and corrupt imaginings, which become so many veils veiling the misbeliever from the true faith, from knowledge of the Real, and from illumination by the sunlight of the Koran and human intelligence. 



For it is the property of a cloud to veil the shining of the sunlight. Now these things, being all of them darkness, are well called "darkness on darkness piled", shutting the soul out from the knowledge of things near...



 Finally, if all these Lights have, as we, saw, their source and origin in the great Primary, the One Real, then every Confessor of the Unity may well believe that "the man for whom Allâh doth not cause light, no light at all hath he."

from "THE NICHE FOR LIGHTS" by AL-GHAZZALI [1058-1111 C.E.] Translation and Introduction by W. H. T.  GAIRDNER (1924)

The Verse of light from the Koran (Sura 24, verse 35)

itself states that it is an allegory and that its inner meaning

must be understood metaphorically .

The idea of illuminism, and especially the analogy of the

Lamp in Sufism and its derivatives, comes from this verse .

It is the transmitting of the meaning of the Lamp allegory

which forms a part of Sufi esoteric development, because

the Lamp has to be experienced, as soon as the individual

consciousness is capable of perceiving it....

This mystical passage gives the essence of Sufism, and

conceals the nature of the cognition of the extra dimensions

of the human consciousness which comes beyond the

Intellect.

It is the subject of the great al-Ghazali's Niche for Lights,

a Sufi classic.

--Idries Shah, The Sufis (1964)

Veils

Some Stages of Religious Development
according to Al-Ghazzali (1058-1111 C.E.)


excerpt from  W. H. T.  GAIRDNER's 1924 Introduction to Al-Ghazzali's "THE NICHE FOR LIGHTS":


...[The Veils-Tradition] speaks of "Seventy Thousand Veils of Light and Darkness" which veil pure Godhead from the human soul....


According to Ghazzâlî, these Veils are various according to the varieties of the natures which they veil from the One Real. And it is the classification of these natures, which is thus involved, that supplies rich material for an unusually inside view of Ghazzâlî's real views concerning men, doctrines, religions, and sects.... 


He divides mankind into four classes: those veiled with veils of pure darkness; those veiled with veils of mixed darkness and light; those veiled with veils of pure light; and those who attain to the vision of the Unveiled. 



Every line of this part of the work merits and requires the closest study. It is not possible to give this detailed study here--it has been given elsewhere, and to that the reader must be referred. But a summary of Ghazzâlî's classification of souls and creeds may be given here, for thus, even more effectively than by an extended study, may a vivid preliminary appreciation be gained of the importance of this section for students...


He begins at the bottom and works up the light-ladder, rung by rung, to the very top, thus giving a gradation of human natures and human creeds in respect of their approach to absolute truth. 


Sometimes the grades are definitely identified by the author. In other cases they may be certainly, or nearly certainly, identified from the description he gives. 



In the following summary Ghazzâlî's own identifications are given between round brackets; inferred identifications certain or nearly certain, between square brackets.

Class I.--Those veiled with Veils of pure Darkness

Atheists--

(a) Naturist philosophers whose god is Nature,

(b) Egotists whose god is Self.
Subdivisions of (b):--

(1) Seekers after sensual pleasures (the bestial attributes).

(2) Seekers after dominion ("Arabs, some Kurds, and the very numerous Fools").

(3) Seekers after filthy lucre

(4) Seekers after vainglory
(2-4) (the ferocious attributes).

***********

Class II.--Those veiled with Veils of mixed Darkness and Light

A. THOSE WHOSE DARKNESS ORIGINATES IN THE SENSES


(1) Image-worshippers. [Polytheists of the Hellenic (? and Indian) type.]

(2) Worshippers of animate objects of physical beauty. (Some of the most remote Turkish tribes.)

(3) Fire-worshippers. [Magians.]

(4) Astrologizing Star-worshippers. [Star-worshippers of Harran: ?Sabîans.]

(5) Sun-worshippers.

(6) Light-worshippers, with their dualistic acknowledgement of a supreme correlative Darkness. (Zoroastrians of the cult of Ormuzd and Ahrimân.)

B. THOSE WHOSE DARKNESS ORIGINATES IN THE IMAGINATION

(who worship a One Being, sitting [spatially] on his throne).

(1) Corporealists.
[Extreme Hanbalites: Zâhirites.] (2) Karrâmites.

(3) Those who have eliminated all spatial ideas in regard to Allâh except the literal "up-above".
[Ibn Hanbal. Hanbalites.]

C. THOSE WHOSE DARKNESS ORIGINATES IN THE [DISCURSIVE] INTELLIGENCE

[Various sorts of Mutakallimîn]

(1) Anthropomorphists in respect of the Seven Attributes of Allah, "Hearing, Seeing," etc., and especially the "Word" of Allah.
(Those who said that the Word of Allah has letters and sounds like ours.) [Early literalists; Hanbalites: early Ash`arites.]

(2) Those who said that the word of Allah
is like our mental speech (hadith al-nafs.) [Later Ash`arites.]


           ***************

Class III.--Those veiled by pure Light

[i.e. purged of all anthropomorphism (tashbîh)]

(1) Those whose views about the Attributes were sound, but who refused to define Allah by means of them: replying to the question "What is the Lord of the World?" by saying, "The Lord, who transcends the ideas of those attributes; He, the Mover and Orderer of the Heavens."

[Hasan al-Basrî, al-Shâfi`î, and others of the bilâ kaifa school.]


(2) Those who mounted higher than the preceding, in declaring that Allah is the mover of only the primum mobile (the Ninth and outermost Heaven), which causes the movement of the other Eight, mediated by their respective Angels.

[Sûfî philosophers. (?) Al-Fârâbî.]

(3) Those who mount higher than these again, in putting a supreme Angel in place of Allah, Who now moves the heavens by commanding this supreme Angel, but not immediately by direct action.

[Sûfî philosophers. Al-Ghazzâlî himself when coram populo (Munqidh, p 11)!]


        *****************

Class IV.--The Unveiled who Attain

Those who will predicate nothing whatsoever of Allah, and refuse to allow that He even issues the order for the moving of the primum mobile. This Commander (Mutâ`) is now a Vicegerent, who is related to the Absolute Being as the sun to Essential Light or live coal to the Element of Fire.

(1) Adepts who preserve self-consciousness in their absorption in this Absolute, all else being effaced.

(2) Adepts whose self-consciousness is also effaced ("the Fewest of the Few") [al-Hallâj and the extreme Mystics],

(a) who attain to this State with a single leap--as Abraham "al-Khalîl" did, 

(b) who attain to it by stages,--as Mohammed "al-Habîb" did [at the Mi`râj].

Psychiatric Report on Mysticism

Review of Mysticism: Spiritual Quest or Psychic Disorder? by the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry. by Arthur J. Deikman, M.D. (1976)1    The report by the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry entitled Mysticism: Spiritual Quest or Psychic Disorder? is intended to supply the psychiatric profession with needed information on the phenomena of mysticism, of which most psychiatrists have only a sketchy knowledge. Certain of the sections, especially those on Christian and Hindu mysticism, show an objectivity and scholarship that are quite commendable. As a whole, however, the report displays extreme parochialism, a lack of discrimination, and naive arrogance in its approach to the subject.    From the point of view of scholarship, the basic error lies in the committee's ignoring the importance of the distinction made by both Western and Eastern mystics between lower level sensory-emotional experiences and those experiences that go beyond concepts, feelings, and sensations. Repeatedly, the mystical literature stresses that sensate experiences are not the goal of mysticism; rather, it is only when these are transcended that one attains the aim of a direct (intuitive) knowledge of fundamental reality. For example, Walter Hilton, an English mystic from the 14th century, is quite explicit about this distinction: . . . visions of revelations by spirits .... do not constitute true contemplation. This applies equally to any other sensible experiences of seemingly spiritual origin, whether of sound, taste, smell or of warmth felt like a glowing fire in the breast . . . anything, indeed, that can be experienced by the physical senses" (7, pp. 14, 15).    St. John of the Cross, 18th century, states: "That inward wisdom is so simple, so general and so spiritual that it has not entered into the understanding enwrapped or clad in any form or image subject to sense, it follows that sense and imagination (as it has not entered through them nor has taken their form and color) cannot account for it or imagine, so as to say anything concerning it, although the soul be dearly aware that it is experiencing and partaking of that rare and delectable wisdom" (3. p. 457).    A similar distinction between lower (sensate) and higher (transcendent) contemplative states may be found in Yoga texts: "When all lesser things and ideas are transcended and forgotten, and there remains only a perfect state of imagelessness where Tathagata and Tathata, are merged into perfect Oneness . . . .” (5, p. 322).    Western mysticism, from which the authors derived most of their examples, constitutes only a minor segment of the literature in the field of mysticism, and its basic contemplative tradition actually derives from Eastern sources, as acknowledged in the report. Yet the goal of Eastern (Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, Sufic) mysticism  — "enlightenment"  — is not visions of angels or Buddhas but the awakening of an inherent capacity to perceive the true nature of the self and the world. Over and over again, these texts warn that the type of mystical experience on which the GAP report focuses is not the goal of the mystical path. Such visionary experiences are regarded as illusions and, at worst, snares for the poorly prepared or the ill guided. An example from the Zen literature follows: "Other religions and sects place great store by the experiences which involve visions of God or hearing heavenly voices, performing miracles receiving divine messages, or becoming purified through various rites . . . yet from the Zen point of view all are morbid states it devoid of true religious significance and hence only makyo (disturbing illusions)" (8, p. 40).    In the Sufi literature, we find many explicit statements that Sufism is a science of knowing and is not a religion in the way that term is ordinarily understood. "The Sufis often start from a nonreligious viewpoint. The answer, they say, is within the mind of mankind. It has to be liberated, so that by self-knowledge the intuition become, the guide to human fulfillment" (11, p. 25).    The Sufis regard most mystical experience as being essentially emotional with little practical importance  — except for the harmful effect of causing people to believe they are being "spiritual" when they are not: Sahl Abdullah once went into a state of violent agitation with physical manifestations, during a religious meeting. Ibn Salim said, "What is this state?" Sahl said: "This was not, as you imagine, power entering me. It was, on the contrary, due to my own weakness." Others present remarked: "If that was weakness, what is power?" "Power" said Sahl, "is when something like this enters and the mind and body manifests nothing at all" (12, p. 182).   Despite these clear warnings in the mystical literature, the GAP publication emphasizes lurid, visionary phenomena which lend themselves readily to standard psychiatric interpretations. Because of this, the authors have failed to come to grips with the fundamental claim of mystics: that they acquire direct knowledge of reality. Furthermore, the authors follow Freud's lead in defining the mystic perception of unity as a regression, an escape, a projection upon the world of a primitive, infantile state. The fact is, we know practically nothing about the actual experience of the infant, except that whatever it is, it is not that of a small adult. No one who has read carefully the accounts of "enlightenment" can accept this glib equation of mystical = infantile. An infant mind could hardly have had the experience that conveyed the following: "The least act, such as eating or scratching an arm, is not at all simple. It is merely a visible moment in a network of causes and effects reaching forward into Unknowingness and back into an infinity of Silence, where individual consciousness cannot even enter. There is truly nothing to know, nothing that can be known. “"The physical world is an infinity of movement, of Time-Existence. But simultaneously it is an infinity of Silence and Voidness. Each object is thus transparent. Everything has its own special inner character. its own karma or 'life in time,' but at the same time there is no place where there is emptiness, where one object does not flow into another" (8, p. 268).    To confuse lower level sensory-emotional experiences with the transcendent "Knowledge" that is the goal of mysticism seriously limits the usefulness of the report and tends to perpetuate in the reader the ignorant parochial position that was standard in most psychiatric writings before the GAP publication and now, unfortunately, is likely to be reinforced.    This naive reductionism is all the more striking in the context of the numerous reports from physicists indicating that the world is actually more like the one that the mystics describe than the one on which psychology and psychoanalysis are based. Contemporary scientists have ample evidence that the world of discrete objects is an illusion, a function of the particular scale of our perception and time sense. For them, it is commonplace that the phenomena of biology and physics point to a continuous world of gradients, not a collection of objects. Percy Bridgman, Nobel Laureate in physics, comments: "It has always been a bewilderment to me to understand how anyone can experience such a commonplace event as an automobile going up the street and seriously maintain that there is identify of structure of this continually flowing, dissolving and reforming thing and the language that attempts to reproduce it with discrete units, tied together by remembered conventions" (1, p. 21).    What is missing from the GAP report is any acknowledgment that the mystic who has completed his or her development may have access to an intuitive, immediate knowledge of reality. The authors assume that the known sensate pathways are the only means to acquire knowledge of what is real. In fact, studies of how scientific discoveries were actually made show in almost every instance that this is not the case at all. Another Nobel prize-winning physicist, Eugene Wigner, has remarked: "The discovery of the laws of nature requires first and foremost intuition, conceiving of pictures and a great many subconscious processes. The use and also the confirmation of these laws is another matter . . . logic comes after intuition" (6, p. 45).    "Intuition" can be considered a lower order example of the latent capacity to which mystics refer.    The eclectic ignorance of the authors has led them at one point to lump together Einstein, Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, biofeedback, Vincent Van Gogh, and St. John of the Cross. Interestingly enough, if the authors had pursued the case of Einstein alone, they might have come to the epistemological issue that is the core of mysticism  — and paid proper attention to it; for Einstein's modern discoveries, as well as the discoveries of natural philosophers thousands of years earlier, were based on an intuitive perception of the way things are. Such perceptions are the source of our greatest advances in science. Michael Polanyi, at one time Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Manchester, made an extensive and thorough study of the actual process of scientific discovery and found that the revolutionary ideas of geniuses such as Einstein had "come to them" by some form of direct intuition, often presented as imagery (10). Polanyi was led by his data to propose a theory of knowledge and human consciousness that is clearly "mystical." Furthermore, at least two books have been published recently documenting the strikingly close correspondence between the scientific conceptions of physicists and the insights of mystics (2, 9).    Thus, it is truly remarkable to have a group of psychiatrists issue a report in 1976, in which the only comment they make on the mystic perception of unity is that it represents a "reunion with parents." Nowhere is the report do we find a discussion of the possibility that the perception of unity occurring in the higher forms of mysticism may be correct and that the ordinary perception of separateness and meaninglessness may be an illusion, as mystics claim. Clearly, mystic perception could be true whether or not a particular mystic might wish, in fantasy, to be reunited with his or her mother.    The GAP report states: "The psychiatrist will find mystical phenomena of interest because they can demonstrate forms of behaviour intermediate between normality and frank psychosis; a form of ego regression in the service of defense against internal or external stress; and a paradox of the return of repressed regression in unconventional expressions of love" (p. 731).    How totally provincial our profession has become if this is a summary statement from a group that claims W be devoted to "advancing" psychiatry!    It is interesting that the only place in which the authors are able to allow themselves to think in positive terms of mysticism is when they discuss the concept of "creativity." Apparently, creativity is OK. In this section of the report, the authors venture to speculate: "At the same time, intense or external perceptions may be heightened, and this sensitivity may open a path to hidden aspects of reality"” (p. 795).    Unfortunately, that one sentence, like a lonely ray of sunshine, is soon swallowed up by a return of the monotonous clouds of reductionism. The very next chapter, entitled "Case Report," concerns a woman in psychotherapy who reported having had the sort of low level, sensate mystical experience on which the authors focus. The report provides the following conclusion: "Her interests were reinvested in the fantasy universe, representing God, in which such problems do not exist, and she felt herself united with this God-Universe, a substitute for an unavailable or rejecting parent. The mystical union made up for the rejection she feared from her father, now represented by the therapist in another man . . . so, while a psychiatric diagnosis cannot be dismissed, her experience was certainly akin. to those described by great religious mystics (!) (emphasis mine) who have found a new life through them" (p. 806).    In the last paragraph it becomes even more presumptuous and confused:    "The mystical state itself provided the illusion of knowledge. But unlike many mystical states in which the search ends with illusion, it stimulated her to seek further knowledge and led directly to the disappearance of her inhibition to serious reading (!) This continued search is characteristic of those in whom mystical states contribute towards creative activity" (p. 807).    The authors of this report are intelligent, educated, sincere men. It is hard to believe that they would display such provincialism, carelessness, and bias if they were discussing schizophrenia. Judging by this and other, similar psychiatric discussions, our profession, when it comes to mysticism, does not feel the need to ask serious questions about its own assumptions, nor to take the devil's advocate's position toward its too-easy conclusions. Ironically, the authors are capable of painting out the problem in others. In discussing "the naive Western observers of the Indian scene" they say: “Confronted by such common symbols as that of the representation of the divine activity in sexual form, and bewildered by the profusion of deities in the Hindu pantheon, they could impute to Hinduism a 'decadence' following from its essence, and they fail to apply to that religion the discrimination between enlightened and superstitious observance which they would be sure to demand for their own" (p. 747).     Exactly.    In trying to understand the phenomenon of the GAP report itself, I am led to two principal considerations. First, in order to understand and have some appreciation of "mysticism," it is necessary that psychiatrists participate to some extent in the experience. When it comes to its own discipline, the psychiatric profession is unwavering in its requirement that one must "know" through experience, not just description. Who can really understand "transference" without experiencing it? Actual experience is necessary because the position of the outside observer has its limits, particularly in areas not well adapted to language. I can give an example of the necessity for participation from my own research on meditation and mysticism. In surveying the literature, I had noticed that contemplation and renunciation were the two basic processes specified for mystical development by almost all mystical authors, East and West. I proceeded to study the effects of meditation in the laboratory and, naively, assumed that renunciation meant giving up the things of the world in a literal sense. It was only later, when I both studied and participated in Soto Zen training, that I came to understand that renunciation refers to an attitude, not to asceticism, per se. That understanding enabled me to formulate the hypothesis of "bimodal consciousness," based on motivational considerations (4). The hypothesis, in turn, enabled me to understand a wide variety of unusual states of consciousness.    Perhaps by stating that I have, myself, practiced meditation, I will automatically disqualify myself in the eyes of some readers as having any credibility in these matters. I refer those readers to the paper by Charles Tart, wherein he presents a compelling case for the development of "state-specific sciences"  — sciences whose mode of investigation is specifically adapted to the area it is investigating (13). Indeed, participation by scientists in these areas of mysticism would result in an understanding that is less exotic and less religious  — and would help rid ourselves of the clap-trap associated with mysticism that constitutes a burden to scientist and mystic alike.    Unfortunately, such participation is not likely to occur because of the other basic problem confronting psychiatrists when they approach this field: arrogance  — reflecting the arrogance of Western civilization. In this connection, it is interesting that the fundamental requirement for participating in any of the mystical traditions has been, and still is, humility. This is so, not because humility is a virtue, something that earns one credit in a heavenly bank account, but because humility is instrumental  — it is the attitude required for learning. Humility is the acceptance of the possibility that someone else or something else has something to teach you which you do not already know. In crucial sections of the GAP report, there is no sign of humility. It seems to me that in our profession we display the arrogance of the legendary British Colonial who lived for 30 years in India without bothering to learn the language of the inhabitants, because he considered them to be inferior. Perhaps medicine's long battle to free itself from religious control, from demonology and "divine authority," has left us with an automatic and costly reaction against anything that bears the outward signs of religion. In point of fact, mystics outside the Western tradition tend to share our suspicion and describe their disciplines as a science of development-not a religion, as ordinarily understood.    The authors of the GAP report have selectively ignored the central issues of mysticism and have made traditional interpretations of the secondary phenomena. If our profession is to advance, we must recognize our defenses against ideas that would change our assumptions. Mysticism, studied seriously, challenges basic tenets of Western cultures: a) the primacy of reason and intellect; b) the separate, individual nature of man; c) the linear organization of time. Great mystics, like our own great scientists, envision the world as being larger than those tenets, as transcending our traditional views. By not recognizing our defensiveness and by permitting our vision to be narrowed so as to exclude the unfamiliar, we betray our integrity as psychiatrists, showing no more capacity for freedom from prejudice than persons totally ignorant of psychodynamics  — perhaps less.    Psychiatry's aversion to things ecclesiastical should not blind the profession to the possibility that "real gold exists, even though false coin abounds." It is unfortunate that the GAP report carries us little further toward gaining for ourselves that wider base for human fulfillment that we need. The attitude reflected in the report is myopic and unnecessarily fearful of an avenue of human endeavor, aspiration, and discovery thousands of years old-one productive of outstanding achievements in science and literature that we are only now beginning to recognize. Yet, if we learn nothing more from mystics than the need far humility, they will have contributed greatly to Western culture in general and to the profession of psychiatry in particular.

-- Arthur Deikman

Bibliography

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^{10 Polanyi, M. Personal Knowledge. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958.
11} Shah, I. The Sufis. Anchor Books (Doubleday & Co., Inc.) Garden City, N.Y., 1971.
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¹³ Tart, C. States of consciousness and state-specific sciences. Science, 176\: 1203-1218, 1972.