Human Behavior

Interview with Idries Shah by Edwin Kiester, Jr., published as 
"Grand Sheikh of the Sufis" in Human Behavior, August 1977




Idries Shah, a worldly descendant of Mohammed, doesn't
mind being known as the leading peddler of Sufism in the
West. But please don’t call him a guru. Idries Shah and I
are sitting in the village pub near his country estate south of
London, elbows resting on the gleaming varnished table
top. After a morning of weightier subjects, we are engaged
in the middle-age man lunchtime talk – exchanging
military reminiscences (his of the Afghan army, mine of
the American) and discussing his forthcoming trip to
America. Now the waiter places before each of us a plate of
cold roast beef and a pint of bitter.



In the same idle-chatter vein, I ask the man who has almost
single-handedly reawakened Western interest in the ancient
tradition of Sufism whether Sufis follow a special diet.
Three hours of talking with Shah and a generous sample of
this writing should have taught me that Sufis concern
themselves with internal matters, not external ones, and
that a prime Sufi objective is to rid people of just the kind
of preconceived notions and limited thinking I had just
displayed. I should also know that ill-informed questions
make Shah’s beard bristle. 



“A Sufi lifestyle, is it?” he asks,
spacing the words out evenly for emphasis. “No, my friend,
not a bit of it. That's what people crave. That's what they
demand. Recently another man came to interview me, and
his first question was, 'What do Sufis eat? You’re
vegetarians, of course.’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘You amaze me!’ he
said. “I said to him, ‘Now if I can be of any use to you,
write that down and see what it means. What it means is
that you have been able to elicit from me a reaction which
helps you to describe yourself. ‘You amaze me.’ Why do I
amaze you? I amaze because you think that all
metaphysicians must be vegetarians. Does that tell you
anything about me? It tells you things about yourself! Now
when are you going to get out of that, and learn things
about yourself, and not think that you're learning things
about other people?” Shah leans forward, gesturing with
the knife and fork. “We are not totemists who eat brown
rice and consult the I Ching. That is not the Sufi at all, my
friend. We have other things to do than have a lifestyle. We
are getting on with our thing. And our thing does not
impose on us the sort of restrictions which other people use
as a substitute for getting on with their thing. You can
either do something, or you can pretend to be doing
something. 



“Western society seems to have exhausted all
its investigative potential. It is largely composed of cul-de-sacs.
One cul-de-sac is marked Lifestyle; one is marked
Vegetarianism, and so on. People want to know about the
Sufis in terms of what limitations they observe. ‘What do
you eat for breakfast?’ ‘How many pairs of socks do you
wear?’ “What is the relevance of such questions? Why
don’t they ask something about what I am doing? One of
our traditional functions has been to point out the
limitations other people have been putting on themselves,
not to impose limitations on other people. That's what the
gurus do. We seek to expand, increase vision, deepen
perception. You don’t live by decreasing these qualities.
“That’s why you don’t find any lifestyle with us, brother.
There’s no eating of brown rice, and no muttering of
Sanskrit mantras in our way.” With that, Shah turns back 
to the beef and the beer.



Over the past 15 years, Sayyed Idries Shah, 53, the grand
sheikh of the Sufis and a lineal descendant of the prophet
Mohammed, has had myriad opportunities to learn how
little the West knows about Sufism – and how much it
yearns to know. Since his book The Sufis was published in
1963, the lean, intense, Afghan-born prince has been
propelled into international celebrity, sought on lecture
platforms all over the world. Twenty more books have
followed the first, and all have been bought up eagerly;
Sufi “study circles” have proliferated (often without Shah’s
blessing) across the United States and Europe; courses in
Sufism are the “in” thing at colleges and universities; Sufi
theories of learning have influenced educational institutions
everywhere. 



Shah himself has won a host of literary prizes
and recently was the subject of a festschrift, a collection of
published commentaries by 24 renowned scholars
discussing his work – an honor usually reserved for a
professor emeritus of 70 who has been tending his
scholarly vineyard for 50 years. One small sample of
Shah’s impact can be seen in his recent appearance at a
U.S. seminar sponsored by the Institute for the Study of
Human Knowledge. Twelve hundred persons turned out to
hear him, at $65 a pop. Ironically, the “product” Shah is
“peddling” – to use his term – is anything but new. The
Sufis are often called “Muslim mystics,” but their roots go
much deeper than Islam. In that cradle of the world’s great
religions, the Middle East, Sufi influence has been traced
back to the second century B.C. and is said to have crossfertilized
Hinduism, Christianity and Judaism along with
the followers of Mohammed. In the golden days of the
caliphs, from A.D. 800 to 1800, many of the world’s great
writers and thinkers were Sufis. They included Omar
Khayyam and Jala ed-Din Rumi, considered one of the
titans of the world literature; long before Einstein and
Darwin, Sufis theorized that time and space were identical
and that humans had ascended from lower animals. One of
the West’s own great minds was a Sufi. The Franciscan
Roger Bacon, considered the originator of modern
scientific thought, studied with the Sufis in Saracen Spain.
It was for learning their “black arts” that he ran afoul of
ecclesiastical authority. Explaining Sufism to a word oriented,
linear-thinking Westerner is difficult even for an
articulate and insightful man such as Shah. “He who tastes
not, knows not,” he says, quoting Jala ed-Din Rumi.




Although there are said to be five million Sufis, mostly
affiliated with established sects, Shah says that Sufism is
“not a religion but a body of knowledge”; the sects
represent a “deterioration” or “cultural elaboration of the
original internal teaching.” Sufism has no rituals, no holy
city and no ecclesiastical hierarchy. Although Shah carries
the title grand sheikh, all Sufis are considered equal. Poet
Robert Graves, a Shah admirer, compares him to a
“fugleman,” which Graves defines as an old army term for
the soldier who stood before a company on the parade
ground and served as the exemplar in arms drill. Sufis do
not even call themselves Sufis, which is a nickname akin to
Quakers. They use the terms We friends or Our people.



Genuine Sufism is inward, concerning itself with “true
reality – what exists beyond what is observed.” Like
peeling an onion, Sufism tries to strip away the outer layers
of limited thinking, misconception and social conditioning
to disclose the kernel that lies beneath – that unity of
existence that Shah calls “the essence of all religion.”
Sufism’s goal is to reorganize human mentation so that it is
more sensitive to things that are there anyway – “We say in
Sufism that exclusion is just as important as inclusion,”
Shah says. You can gain Sufi truths from other people and
by intuition, insight, folk wisdom and experience. Long
before the work on brain hemispheres of Dr. Robert E.
Ornstein, the Sufis knew that part of the brain learned
through words arranged in sequence and the other part by
hunches and seeing the whole situation at once. Of course,
over the past two decades, literally dozens of mystical,
quasi-mystical and semi-mystical Eastern sects have
invaded the West. If you really want to see Shah’s beard
bristle, suggest that Sufism is part of the yoga-and-transcendental-
meditation craze.



“That gray area of mumbo jumbo and gurus and mantras,”
he says, bitingly. “It has little connection with any tradition
except the circus. In Eastern countries like India that is
fairly well understood. Only the ‘new boys’ profess to see
anything significant in the phenomenon. But here the
carnival has taken over. We have a grotesque of the true
Indian guru.” He also has a few disparaging words for Zen.
“No Sufi would ever think it important to think of a phrase
like, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ He would
regard it as training for automatism. You could obsess
people with one hand.” The Sufi has nothing in common,
either, with groups that seek to withdraw from the world.
“Be in the world, but not of it,” is the Sufi watchword.



When I first met Shah, he struck me as anything but the
stereotype of the Eastern holy man. He greeted me in a red
turtleneck sweater, glen-plaid slacks, magenta socks and
calfskin sandals. He speaks Oxford-accented English with a
rich vocabulary and a range of expression that is stunning
in its scope; he is the only man I ever heard use the world
phantasmagoria in casual conversation. As his books show,
he is a gifted storyteller; but in person, his tales are even
more compelling, because he acts out all the parts and
mimics all the voices. Once, telling of an encounter with a
Nubian student from the Sudan during a lecture, he leaped
to his feet, put his hand on top of his head to represent a
Nubian topknot and dropped his voice a full octave to
impersonate the man’s basso.



He also leads the life of a country squire. The Shah home,
Langton House at Langton Green, a tiny hamlet nestled
into the Kentish countryside south-east of Tunbridge Wells,
once belonged to Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy
Scout movement. A rambling, whitewashed, greenshuttered
mansion, it is surrounded by 50 acres of gardens
and pastureland and by the village green. Inside, like Shah
himself, it is a subtle blend of East and West. Oriental
carpets, hammered brass trays and a children’s peacock
swing designed by Shah’s wife contrast with a massive
desk Shah picked up in a junk shop and an IBM electric
typewriter.



When asked how long he had kept a foot in both Eastern
and Western worlds, he said, “All my life.'' Although a
resident of Britain for many years and a British subject, he
was born in the East and groomed from boyhood for his
eventual role of building bridges between cultures. The
eldest son of the late Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, one of the
legendary figures of contemporary Middle Eastern history,
he was born near Simla in the Himalayas and was raised in
Afghanistan, India and Saudi Arabia, “thus being exposed
to three of the five main cultural traditions of the Middle
East.” (The other two are Persian and Turkish.) He never
attended school in the formal sense. “I was educated by the
old oriental tradition that if I needed to learn something,
someone was procured to teach it to me,” he recalls.
However, his father insisted that he learn firsthand about
the world. The young prince worked a year as a laborer on
a farm and served a hitch in the Afghan army. As
descendants of Mohammed through the prophet’s eldest
son, the family carries considerable prestige through the
Middle East. Their influence transcends national
boundaries and mere sectarian lines. Shah’s father served
as an unofficial adviser to several Middle Eastern countries,
and often carried out diplomatic missions between East and
West.



Often the young Shah accompanied him, gaining access to
the highest ruling and spiritual levels in his part of the
world. The experience stood him in good stead. Today, one
of the little-known and little-discussed aspects of his life is
to serve as adviser to several African and Asian
governments. 



As Shah was growing up, he also adhered to
the Sufi stricture that every Sufi must earn his own way.
“We have a sense of priorities,” Shah says “To belong to
the human community is essential.
We say, ‘If you cannot earn your livelihood, go out and
learn how and then become a Sufi.’” Shah’s education had
given him a thorough grounding in literature, history and
economics but no profession; he chose to enter the world of
business and finance. He established three successful
electronics firms, a carpet factory and a publishing house
and still serves as chairperson of each. This record also
gave him entrée to London financial and social circles.
“Many of my sober business acquaintances would never
believe I am to be bracketed with what they consider the
guru phenomenon,” he says, laughing. “They know me too
well to believe that.”



As Shah poured a cup of tea from a glittering heirloom tea
service, I asked him how the campaign to familiarize the
West with Sufi principles was faring. He lit one of his
favorite small cigars before responding. “The people of the
West are starving in the midst of plenty,” he began. “They
have made all these discoveries about human behavior but
they have not related them to their own behavior. And until
they integrate this knowledge, I don’t know if we can help
them.



"It may be 300 years before they have properly absorbed
this knowledge.



“People can learn from one another which attitudes aren’t
scientific, which attitudes don’t work. It’s just a question of
absorption. It’s no use just reading about behavior in a
paperback and then throwing it away and reaching for the
next paperback, or reading to answer questions in an
examination, or to torture your friends with a few
gimmicks, like ‘You have an Oedipus complex’ or ‘that’s a
defense mechanism.’ The potential is there,” he continued.



“There’s an old Sufi story that’s relevant to that. An old
traditional Sufi used to dress his disciples in patchwork
cloaks and have them carry a beggar’s bowl and repeat
certain formulae in order to concentrate their minds. He
recommended that they eat mulberries off a certain tree.


“One day somebody said to him, ‘Suppose you went to a
country where they didn’t have patchwork, and you
couldn’t dress your disciples in cloaks. Suppose the seed
coconut from which beggars’ bowls are traditionally made
was not available.
Suppose mulberries were considered unlucky and suppose
these repetitions which you require were considered
socially undesirable. What would you do under those
circumstances?’ And he said, ‘Ah, well, if I were under
those circumstances, I would have to get myself a totally
different kind of disciple.'”



“The challenge now is embodied in the Sufi tradition that
you must teach people in the way that they can learn. The
West has the requirements to learn, but non-traditional
approaches – that is, non-oriental approaches – must be
made. “You have to come to certain conclusions in order to
do anything at all. For example, say that you – or the
community at large, or Western society – concludes that
contemporary physics shows that it is unlikely or
impossible that one will be able to exceed a certain velocity
of travel in space, so that our galaxy is closed to us. And as
we want to go farther there must be some other way
discovered in order to slip through the imprisonment of
these dimensions of time and space. 



“You, or your society,
would have arrived at that conclusion through your
investigations into the physical sciences. An Oriental might
have arrived at an identical conclusion by some other route.
But you two would be in precisely the same posture if you
decided to start your further investigation by some
metaphysical method or non-material method. You’d have
arrived at the same jumpoff point by different routes, but
you would be able to address the same sort of problem.



“That’s what I’m interested in doing in the West,” he
concluded. “Or rather, in the modern Western culture that
now covers so much of the world that people of my
generation in the Middle East are in fact often
indistinguishable from Europeans.”



According to Shah, he had dabbled in writing ever since his
youth and, in fact, had produced a widely acclaimed book,
Destination Mecca, in 1957; but the idea of a book on the
Sufis did not take flower until he was past 40. Graves was
one of those who encouraged him to “write for the natural
Sufis everywhere,” but, Shah says modestly, “I did not yet
feel I had the proper literary skills.” In addition, several
other developments were necessary before the West was
ready for a book on Eastern mysticism. The East had to live
down the Rudyard Kipling view of mystics as freaky
savages who slept on nails and charmed cobras; and the
West had to accept that human beings were conditioned
into limited ways of thinking that obscured their humanity
within, rather than creatures of free will. Shah places the
Korean War as a landmark. Discovering that American
fliers could be “conditioned in reverse” by their captors,
American social scientists were forced to acknowledge and
to study the whole conditioning process. This development,
Shah believes, not only explains B.F.Skinner but the
revival of Pavlov. “If I had discussed how man has been
conditioned away from his origins before 1950,” Shah says,
“I would simply have been put into the same box with
Pavlov.” 



A more recent impetus was given Sufism by
Ornstein’s work into the bilateral specialization of the
brain. For the first time, science supported the Sufi view
that learning could be achieved both sequentially and
holistically. “After Ornstein’s work, we were able to
introduce what we were saying in a framework not
available before, because there was no scientific word for
it,” Shah says. “Previously we had to say that our way was
not scientific, but artistic – and those words were much too
loaded. Now we can talk about the left brain and the right
brain and it is respectable, in the sense that people will
listen to it.



 “It also helps us to explain by analogies derived
from Ornstein’s work what happens to human thinking
systems once rooted in human beings and the human
community and how our way differs from – and resembles
– other ways of thinking. It can be put down almost
diagrammatically, and it does help a person looking into it
to understand: whatever is this man talking about? Where
does he place himself or what he is saying in the pattern of
human thought?” 



When Shah began to write, he reached
back into his childhood and brought forth literally hundreds
of simple folk tales he had learned from servants, from
village storytellers, from Persian literature and “just out of
the air.”



(In fact, they are so commonplace that one Turkish
publisher refused to publish one of Shah’s collections,
declaring, “It is unbelievable to me that anyone could make
a book of nothing more than he could collect from the lips
of peasants while touring the villages of Anatolia.”)



Some witty, some epigrammatic, some pointed, the now
famous tales are interspersed in Shah’s books with his own
reflections and gathered into anthologies of their own.
Many of them concern Mulla (Master) Nasrudin, a kind of
Middle Eastern Everyman who is sometimes court jester,
sometimes cracker-barrel philosopher, sometimes village
sage and sometimes buffoon. He combines native
shrewdness and insight in a way that helps him see to the
heart of a situation that his more analytical “betters”
cannot. He also illustrates, in exaggerated form, the kind of
fallacious thinking that hobbles the more sophisticated.
When asked to tell some of his favorite Nasrudin stories
and to explain their role in Sufism, he offered several:



“Nasrudin was throwing handfuls of bread all round his
house.
‘What are you doing?’ someone asked.
“’Keeping the tigers away.’ “’But there are no tigers
around here.'
“’Exactly. Effective, isn’t it?’”



Another tale recalls the time Nasrudin went into the shop of
a man who sold all kind of miscellaneous things.
“Have you leather?” Nasrudin asked.
“Yes.”
“And nails?”
“Yes.”
“And dye?”
“Yes.”
“Then why don’t you make yourself a pair of boots?''



**********

Once Nasrudin was called upon to preach a sermon.
From the pulpit, he asked the congregation: “Do you
know what I am going to preach about?”
”No,” they replied.
“In that case,” he said, “it would take too long to
explain.” And he went home.
Next day he ascended the pulpit and asked the same
question.
“Yes,” the people said this time, determined to put him on
the spot.
“In that case,” said Nasrudin, “there is no need for me to
say more.” And he went home.
Yet again the following day he put the same question. “Do
you know what I am going to preach about?
But now the congregation was ready to corner him:
“Some of us do and some of us don’t,” they answered.
“In that case,” said Nasrudin, “let those who know tell
those who don’t.”



Although each of these tales has a punchline, Shah
explained, it also contains a teaching moral and can be
examined on many levels for illumination of human
behavior.



Nasrudin’s sermon, for example, depicts the Sufi belief that
there can be no teaching to those completely ignorant, none
to those who profess to know all the answers, and that the
best teaching method is when one who has learned by
experience teaches another. Shah considers the tales an
ideal way to communicate with the West. “One way we use
them is as a sort of test,” he said.



“For instance, we often use the old Sufi tale of the sands. A
little river has to cross a desert, you see, and it runs into the
sand. It finds it’s becoming a marsh. So the wind says to it,
‘Come with me and I will carry you over the desert.’ But
the little river says, ‘No, no, I can’t! I’ll lose my identity! I
refuse to be turned into water vapor!’ So the wind says,
‘Well, all right. But look at you. You’re becoming a marsh.
You have to decide whether you wish to become a marsh or
become water vapor.’


"So after a great deal of consideration the river finally yields
up to he wind, which carries it into the high mountains and
drops it in the form of rain, whereafter it continues as a
river.


“Now when you tell this tale, some people – crude,
barbaric types – see it as a sort of commercial. The guru is
asking his disciples to surrender themselves to him and he
will carry them safely over the marsh, which is death or
some other condition in which they are going to stagnate or
putrefy. Other people react in a quite different way. They
say, ‘Oh, isn’t that a beautiful story! And they talk about
nature and the transposition of substances and ecology and
so on. 


“People who don’t react in either of these ways can
then use the story for further training of their hemispheres,
as it were. They don’t have the hang-up that they think 
you are trying to convince them of something, or that they desperately 
want to be convinced. “What makes it very
difficult in dealing with these stories is that people want to know, ‘Is it 
a test or is it a teaching?’ and ‘How am I supposed to react
to it?’ ‘At what point does it become perceptible to me
what it really means?’ Which is rather like saying, ‘Is a 
house for eating in or sleeping in or blowing up?’ 
It’s all those things. But the so-called linear mind always wants you to 
‘get to the point.’ A great deal of Sufism involves learning 
not in the sequence the Western mind expects to learn it. 
That is not acceptable to the sequential thinker who is 
incapable of thinking in any other way.” 



The value of these tales is often misunderstood, Shah said.
Like Christ’s parables, they are designed to enable the listener to 
hold in his mind a kind of structure to which he can relate philosophical or other considerations.



“That’s why there are two men and a dancing bear, or two
mysterious dervishes,” Shah says. Because the stories are
often funny, they are regarded as slight or insignificant by
scholars – “It is not my discovery alone that academics do
not encourage humor in what they take to be serious areas.”
In fact, they are the very core of Sufi teaching.



“The Sufi people,” Shah explains, “have been held in very
great esteem while armed with these stories and using them
all the time for nearly a thousand years. They have built
them into some of the great classics of the least. They are
universally revered as classics. Some of these people have
been people of great gravity, great mystical attainments and
great discoverers of scientific things – the very flower of
various civilizations. It hardly seems likely when you
approach it rationally that such people would have gone to
such lengths to prepare and maintain these stories, even
building them into major facets of their thought, if they
were a sideline, something old men in their dotage
mumbled to each other. The stories are an integral part of
Sufi teaching. If the Sufis are to be respected – as they
enormously are – then surely one of their major teaching
instruments must be given some consideration in the light
of their status and achievements.”



The role of the teacher in Sufism is also often
misinterpreted. “There is no Sufism without a teacher,”
Shah has written. But the teaching role is quite different
from that of the gurus in other sects whose antics Shah
dismisses as filled with “chanting, ritual and
phantasmagoria.” “A teacher is someone who is able to
connect instructionally with you,” Shah says. “He need not
be physically present. You don’t even have to know him.
He doesn’t have to have a white beard and sandals. In a
sense, a teacher need not even be a person. 


“I was once walking with a group of people including 
a spiritual teacher, and someone asked him, 
‘What is a guru?’ And he pointed to a stone in the road 
and said, ‘Look, if I fall over that stone and I learn from
that event to look where I’m going that stone is my guru.’
The teaching role should be an instrument, not an 
opportunity for theater, not a source of self-gratification.



A Sufi teacher does what he can to produce what he has to.
He teaches what he can in a way students can learn it. “We
see teaching as a system of interaction. In the ordinary
course of events, people persist in certain courses to
achieve something. Sometimes they learn by experience
that they can’t do it. They find they can’t climb the wall, so
they have to adjust. Should I get a ladder? Is it worth
climbing? Are there other ways to get over it? By the
interplay of themselves and the wall and their knowledge
and experience, they learn. 



“A lot of people in esoteric circles, that is, philosophical
and psychological circles, ignore this fact. They tend to
look for a sort of Eureka! system, a golden key. They 
look at our stories, for example, for what mysterious 
depths and teachings are in them, or for what golden 
key they might be able to worry out of them, in spite 
of the fact that the stories themselves often illustrate 
the interplay between the people and their experience 
and the teacher or the circumstances, which is
very similar to the person trying to climb the wall.



“There’s an old Sufi story about a young man who set off
to receive illumination from an old teacher who lived in a
remote cave on the top of a mountain. He was an old man
with a long white beard dressed in a white shroud, a sort of
hermit. When the young man, after great privation and
enormous difficulties, reached that cave and almost
collapsed in front of him, he said, ‘I have come all this
way, and had all this trouble, and I want you to teach me
illumination.’ But the old man said, ‘Certainly not.’ The
young fellow begged and begged, but the old man simply
said, ‘No, I can’t teach you that.’ Finally, the old man said,
‘Go.’ 


“So the young man went back down the mountain
track. Almost at the bottom, he looked back and saw a
white figure and he realized that the old man was
beckoning to him! So he made his way back up, thinking,
‘Ah, he’s going to teach me, after all,’ and so he went up
and up until he arrived back outside the cave. The old man
was sitting there and he pointed his finger at the young
man, and said, ‘And another thing. Don’t you ever come
back, bothering me like that again!’



“Now that’s a joke, a sort of shaggy-dog story, but the
teaching moral is that the young man was treating the old
man like an employee. He had gone all that way, but he
was acting like the old man was a machine – you put
something in, and got something out.
He said, 'Teach me to be illuminated.’ He did not say, ‘I
want to learn whatever you have to teach me.’ Teaching,
you see, is a matter of interchange between a willing
learner and a willing teacher. 



“There is another story which illustrates how 
one must learn by indirect methods. There
was a merchant in Persia who was to travel to India. Before
he left, he said to his pet parrot, ‘I am going to India and I
may see some of your relatives there. Is there any message
which you wish me to convey to them?’ The parrot thought
and then he said, 'Tell them that I am well, but that I live in
a cage in a house.’ 


“When the merchant returned, the parrot said, 
‘Did you see my relatives?’ And the merchant replied,
‘I did, but I am afraid they are not well. When I gave one of
them your message, he collapsed and fell to the ground.’
When the merchant said this, the parrot also collapsed and
fell to the floor of the cage.
Whereupon the merchant in great alarm picked up the bird
and carried him to the window to get air. The parrot
immediately recovered, flew out the window and escaped.



“You see, it is a model of indirect learning. The message
that was communicated to the parrot was, ‘Collapse and
pretend to be dead, and you can escape.’



"There are other messages within it. I was told this story
recently by a person who was studying with a professed
Sufi teacher. He asked me the meaning of the story. I
usually dislike to discuss such meanings preferring that
each person discover them for himself. In that case, it
seemed to me that meaning was clear, ‘Your teacher may
have to do something to you to release you from bondage
to him.’”



 As in yoga, the Sufis believe there are internal
“centers of perception” that can be utilized to help heighten
the powers of the mind. There are five such “purity spots”
that do not have a physical location in the sense of
acupuncture points but that can be visualized for the
purpose of transcending normal receptivity. Through a
series of concentration exercises, a Sufi may be able to fix
his attention on these spots as a means of enabling the mind
to move to a higher plane. “But these cannot be attempted
by anybody,” Shah says. “This is the method of which
there is 1 percent operation, and 99 percent preparation. It
is one of the most advanced of all techniques. It could take
you 30 years to get to the point where you could do it and it
might be over in 30 minutes. 



“It’s like the simple dervish dance. It’s an incredibly 
sophisticated instrument which can only happen at 
certain times and under certain circumstances. To 
try to make it theater, as it is sometimes done, is itself 
diagnostic of the inability of the person to
understand its role. It disables him completely from what is
happening.”



For Shah, the task of bringing the Sufi message to the West
remains formidable. All too many presumably intelligent
persons remain defensive about their thought processes,
unwilling to re-examine themselves to see if a situation
might be viewed in a different way. “All we really ask is
that they detach themselves from their sophisticated
analytical minds to just a second,” Shah says. “We’re not
going to cripple them, we’re not going to harm them, we
just ask them to let go. After all, if you’re listening to
music, you’re not constantly tearing it apart in your mind.
It’s a protected situation. The same with our materials. If
you don’t try to be too clever and think about what they
might mean, instead of what they must mean, you can gain
something from them. It’s not necessary to be perfectly
secure in order to learn. In fact, the ‘secure’ people seemed
to be the most nervous.”