Learning from Stories (playlist)

From The Estate of Idries Shah:

A lecture by Idries Shah before a live audience in 1976, along with teaching-stories and narratives selected from Caravan of Dreams and jokes and tales from the Nasrudin Corpus. Selections read by The London College of Storytellers. Originally released in 1984 in the audio collection,  An Advanced Psychology. 

In this lecture Shah talks in detail and with many examples about the Sufi teaching-story and its instrumental function. He emphasizes the way in which one might approach this vast and comprehensive body of literature to benefit best from it. Shah's delivery is lively, witty, entertaining, and always instructive.


"The knowledge of the time-lag and the perception of it between the telling of a story, or the happening of an event: the realization of something and its integration into one's own mind, and its digestion into one's own psychology, has itself to be learnt. This is one thing which most people don't realize. They either laugh at a gag and dispose of it, or they understand what it means: they take its moral application and, as it were, abolish it. They do not take any interest in general in this question of the digestion of the impact." --From Learning From Stories © 1976, 1982 The Estate of Idries Shah