Humility

Background to 'Humility'
by Idries Shah (1978)



BEFORE the period generally regarded as historical time, there has
been an operation of a form of cognition linked with human
development which is outside the current methods of acquiring
and utilising information. The result of this effort has often been
called 'wisdom': although the word wisdom has also often been
applied to other fields.


RELICS ARE NOT THE THING ITSELF

Many religious, mystical and other formulations are, up to a
point, shrines for the relics of a completely or partially successful
attempt to present and make available to various individuals and
communities means for acquiring this knowledge. Like almost
everything on earth, they are subject to deterioration or fossilisation.


They become both museums and exhibits, at one and the
same time.


Because of the tendency to stress discipline and group-attention
without contemporaneous adjustments of other factors, many such
formulations (some of them called schools or cults) crystallised in
the short or long term, and not infrequently they have claimed
a monopoly of truth or effective ritual. This process, mirroring
limited thinking-pattems, frequently goes so far as to lead to 
a virtual destruction of the dynamic of the formulation of the School. 
In practice, exclusivism and dogmatism, beyond a
certain point, militate against certain necessities of flexibility.
There is a continuing need for regeneration.


What appears to some people as the sum total of the human
heritage of philosophy, metaphysics or even magical thinking can
also be viewed, for the foregoing reasons, as heavily burdened with
the wreckage or misinterpretation (through selective choice) of
formulations previously operated by coherent Schools. The factor
causing this state of affairs is endemic in the human community,
and has often been unsuspected by large sections of whole civilisa-
tions; though made the subject of close attention and rectification
by specialists outside of mechanical and confined thought. Such specialists are those who can grasp internal principles and dynamics, not those who merely rearrange.


THE TRADITION MAINTAINED BY COMPETENCE


In contradistinction to the public and overt formulations familiar
to all as stabilisations of many forms of religious, psychological
and community action philosophies and other systems, there has
always been a continuous, altruistic stream of guardianship of this
comprehensive and adaptational knowledge, throughout history.
This is based on capacity and knowledge, not on arbitrarily
deciding to become a specialist.


There are excellently sufficient reasons why the foregoing facts
have never been more publicly known or accepted in any real
depth. Among those more easily understandable by customary
thinkers is the fact that 'to make an announcement such as this, to
those who are basically selfish will serve mainly to increase their
selfishness at the expense of their real, inner desire for truth' -
thus further masking the potentialities of the Teaching from such
people.



Another, easily-understood, reason is that the existence of narrow
systems of thought (over-simplified to contain the aspirations
without regard to potential, and to permit a wide-scale disciplining
of populations) has produced a type of 'expert' or concentrator
of this kind of bias who will automatically feel insecure if
any attempt is made to widen his horizons. The result will be
opposition, distrust and confusion.


From time to time, certain cosmological and human factors being in alignment, there is both a need for and a possibility to reestablish, by means of a special and skilled effort, formulations and activities which maximise the prospects of more rapid and thorough penetration of the teaching which leads to the development referred to as 'knowing oneself or 'having wisdom'. Several such periods, cyclic in character, have occurred in recent times: none of them has been generally recognised for what it is. This, again, is not to say that because one believes this one is automatically able to find it. The correct approach is everything.


ROLE OF AN INTERVENTION


The first stage of this knowledge concerns answers to the questions
generally phrased as involving the origin, nature, being and future
of mankind itself, collectively as well as in the individual. The
manner and order of procedure of approaching these questions
themselves involves a capacity whose absence or ineffectiveness in
the ordinary individual spells his incapacity to participate in his
own development. He is in need of an organising intervention to
break the vicious circle which results.


KNOWLEDGE OF THE END CREATES THE MEANS


The desire for an 'awakening', often used as a technical term,
may or may not be accompanied by the information and experience
essential to precede this stage. The Teaching, for its part,
is carried out - and is able to cross ideological boundaries - because
of a knowledge of the objective: an objective which is at
worst postulated as an assumption that it exists; at best glimpsed:
and thenceforward is the subject of repeated attempts to devise a
means to recover this glimpse.


The working hypothesis or traditional framework provides the
structure by which the would-be illuminate attempts to approach
this goal. In the case of the School, knowledge alone provides the
basis upon which the structure can be devised.


'Once you know the end, you can devise the means.' The end
does not justify the means - it provides it. The means, employed
in this sense, is the structure referred to in some literature as 'The
Work'.


THE SCHOOL


One of the structures within which this knowledge is studied,
collected, conserved and transmitted has often been termed a
School. There are others, continuously at work, whose existence
and mode of operation is not of applied value, though frequently
a matter of curiosity and inquisitiveness, occupying much time
and giving rise to much effort, due to the faultily-based assumption
that a lively interest in something once heard about may lead
to familiarity with it, and hence usefulness to be gained from it.


Since, however, its modus operandi is far from having an exactly
operable analogy in current thought, it is in fact, if not in theory,
'completely concealed'.


It is extremely common for encounters to take place between
people who are interested in this area, and those working in it,
without the former being in any way able to enter into it- or,
most frequently, for them to have any conception or recognition of
the role or method of operation of the other individuals.


The 'School Work' is a lower-level activity which nonetheless
has to be passed through before a recognition of the higher level
is possible. Acceptance of this principle is among the first requirements leading to the necessary effective time-scale and order of events in which the Teaching may take effect. One of the chief barriers to accepting this fact- even as a working hypothesis -
is the over-valuation of the role, potentiality and knowledge of the
learner.


It is for this reason that such stress is placed, in so many
traditional systems of which viable fragments subsist, upon the
need for what is approximately rendered in familiar parlance as
humility. Its distortion is self-abasement.



WHAT HUMILITY IS NOT FOR


As one of the great Sufis said: 'My humility is not there to
impress you - it is there for its own reason.'


The person that you feel yourself to be, according to the Sufis,
is a false person, which has no true reality. When humility is
exercised, people begin to realise that they do not, as it were,
exist at all. This perception of oneself as 'Adam (not-being)
is stressed in Hujwiri's Revelation of the Veiled, in the second chapter dealing with the real meaning of poverty. When people take pride in their humility, they have merely adopted another concocted 'self' as part of their not-being: and this is what produces hypocrites.



The purpose of seeing through one's own nothingness is to see
beyond into what is really there to which one's real self can relate.
Humility is therefore directly concerned with the quest for Absolute
Truth.



NO VALUE IN MAKING A VIRTUE OF A FUNCTION


The coincidence of some similarity between the words 'Adam
(not-being) and Aadam (man) has caused poets and others in
Eastern languages to equate the two neatly in verse and prose. It is
interesting to note, by the way, that even orientalists and reviewers,
discussing this point, sometimes observe so little of this
play on words that they even charge Sufi writers with being ignorant or adopting strange usages when they say such things as
'Man is 'adam'. I often feel that this uncharacteristic failure to
register the contention is in such cases due to the fact that the
subjectivity of the commentator is censoring his understanding:
he is, after all, generally a man - as a man he does not want to
think of himself as 'not-being". This is all the more marked in
people (who do of course include scholars) who actually identify
themselves by means of the learnt patterns and information-stock
which is, to the Sufi, part of the non-being, the personality and
not the essence, of humankind.


In other words, as we all know, pride prevents humility.
Pride is attached to a sense of oneself which may be wholly or
partially created by secondary things like believing that one is
learned.


It has truly been said that 'Humility is not so much a virtue
as a necessity, in order to learn.'


RABIA AND THE DOOR


The posture which is required in the Sufi was well illustrated by
Rabia al-Adawiyya. She heard that Salih of Qazwin was teaching
by the phrase: 'Knock at the Door and it will be opened to you.'
Rabia said: 'How long will you persist in saying this, O Salih
- when that Door has never been shut?'


The lack of humility is also something of a conspiracy: where
people not only ignore it when it is found in others, but cannot
credit its reality. This is in addition to those who cannot even
conceive how or when to exercise it.


TALE OF THE PROFESSOR


Not long ago (pursuing the first remark) I was showing a visitor
around the grounds of this house. As we passed a quiet and diligent
man sitting on the ground mending a piece of wood, the
visitor asked: 'Who is that?'


I said: 'That is Professor So-and-So.'


His brow creased into a frown, and he looked at him again.
Then he looked at me. Now he said: 'Are you sure?'


And, pursuing the second remark, there is the incident involving
Maaruf of Karkh


COLLECTING DATE STONES


Sari al-Saqati saw Maaruf picking up the stones of dates from
the ground and asked him what he was doing.

'A child was crying,' he said, "because, being a penniless orphan,
he had no nuts like other children. So I am going to collect
date-stones and sell them [to be ground into flour] so that he
can have some nuts, and be happy.'



from Learning How To Learn, by Idries Shah (1978), pgs 71-76.