Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Doris Lessing, on Learning How To Learn

Doris Lessing's Introduction to Idries Shah's Learning How To Learn (1981 edition).





It was as recently as 1964 that Idries Shah's The Sufis appeared. It 
was evident that with this new classic on the subject, there had 
emerged the Exemplar who from time to time comes forward to 
offer the Sufi Way in new forms that fit modern needs. For Sufism 
is not the study of the past, or the worship of medieval saints; it is 
always, has ever been, evolutionary in spirit and action. The great 
Sufi classics of the Middle East, for instance, were once abrasively 
original, with new insights and information that shocked the 
hidebound.



 Idries Shah has offered us many books, as many-faceted as 
Sufism has to be, from the re-issue of these classics, to jokes from 
the Nasrudin corpus, to printed university lectures, to traditional 
stories retold in fresh and sharpened language. Learning How to 
Learn, and others that Shah is writing now, in a modern format, 
pioneer where we, in our time, face the biggest challenges: human 
nature itself, how to understand our behaviour and our organisations and our cultures. Shah significantly calls anthropology and psychology the infant sciences; for he holds that we have hardly begun to use these tools.


 It is now a commonplace that in the higher reaches of physics 
the same language and concepts as in traditional mysticism are 
used; but this common ground, this frontier, extends to include 
the new original thinking in psychology, anthropology, the 
religions, esotericism. Shah would like to aid this confluence. 


Specifically, he is offering the Sufic viewpoint, and-more than 
that-making available a stock of knowledge, of information. In 
our lifetime we shall see-are already beginning to see-our 
scientists, usually the younger ones, because of their greater 
flexibility, approaching Shah with the question: What do you 
have in your possession, as part of your tradition, that we modern
researchers may use, that we may have overlooked or perhaps 
don't even suspect exists? I have seen this happen: a simple 
question opening up a new field.


 Is it not worth our while to consider how it can have come about 
that what amounts to a treasure house of information, the results 
of centuries of research and skilled practice, can have existed so 
long without us being able to concede that it might be there? I am 
not talking about "the secrets of the East," conceived of as 
something between Shamanism and tea-table spiritualism-what 
Shah dismissed as "spills, thrills and chills." There have always 
been travellers to the mystic East. "Tell me, Master, what is the 
Secret?" "Oh, you want a Secret, dear child, is that it? Well, stand 
on your head for a week, and chant this mantra . . ." But those of 
us who have tried to approach Sufism through what is offered to 
us in the West seem nearly always to have gone through 
something like that, and had to outgrow it: it is how we have been 
conditioned to think. What we find in the East is not the 
glamorous and the mystic but an approach to humanity, both as 
individuals and as an organic unity, that goes far beyond our own 
sciences, in conception and achievement-in sophistication.


 How has this come about?


 For one thing, perhaps the culture we inhabit is not the 
advanced, open-minded culture we believe it is. Outsiders, who 
have always been valuable in providing insights into societies, 
although they are always resisted at first, judge us differently.


 We are judged as being fettered, and in many ways. We easily 
talk now of Western arrogance: we begin to know we are insular. 
But it is a slow business, for we have to contend, in the case of the  
Middle East and Central Asia, with the implanted results of 
hundreds of years of suspicion of the dreaded Saracen. This has 
had, still has, stultifying effects on our culture, from ignorance 
and bigotry about Islam, to something like this: that the symbols 
for the planets in astrology-- Mars, Venus, Mercury and the 
rest-are no more than Arabic letters, easily recognisable as such 
to those who know Arabic. Yet we ascribe to them amazing 
origins. A tiny example, even an absurd one, of an enormous 
unmapped area. But why is it not being researched?


 We may go on murmuring about Western complacency, but it 
is another thing actually to face it. Shah instances our belief that w
in the West pioneered certain psychological ideas. But the 
"discoveries" of Freud and Jung are to be found in Al Ghazzali and 
Ibn El Arabi, who died in the twelfth century, and in other great 
thinkers of the time. (Jung acknowledged his debt to the East. Is it 
not remarkable that his disciples are not curious about what else 
there might be?) Al Ghazzali wrote extensively about condition- 
ing: then, as now, Sufi teachers were concerned about freeing 
people from social and religious indoctrinations. What happened 
to all that expertise? It was used. It became the property of doctors 
of the mind, of the soul, of the body; it has been built on, 
developed ... But we, in the West, have been cut off from it-are 
still cut off from it, and will be until we are prepared to think hard  
about our own mental sets.


 Another instance: we tell ourselves about our infinitely various 
and rich language. But the fact is that English is impoverished; it 
lacks words and concepts we need. Any writer who has tried to 
describe certain processes and experiences has come up against it: 
the absence of words. There are ways around it-analogy is 
one-but the problem remains. A handful of pitiful and worn 
terms-unconscious, soul, spirit, collective unconscious, super- 
mind, ego, super-ego, id, paranormal, ESP, super-nature-and 
suddenly, very soon, you've run into the sand. You cannot use 
these words for fresh experiences, new ideas, because each is 
loaded with unwanted associations. But other languages are not so 
barren; their words are not so overloaded. No, this is not an essay 
in disparagement of English, or in admiration of other tongues, 
for the sake of it, but a plea for recognition: if there is a desperate 
and urgent need for something, that need may be met. I hope so. 
Meanwhile, it is hard going. I am not a linguist, to put it mildly, 
but my tiniest acquaintance with Persian, for example, shows our 
own dreadful deprivation. But that is the language of a culture 
where certain kinds of spirituality were in active operation for 
hundreds of years. (The appearance of a manic bigot like 
Khomeini doesn't take that away.) Friends who study "primitive" 
cultures and know the language of American Indians, or certain 
African societies, say that these, too, are well supplied with 
concepts that we lack. Our language is probably the best of tools 
for technical processes, as long as technical processes are still 
conceived of as being restricted to the mechanical, but when they
impinge on the frontiers of the mind ...


 And there is another, Himalayan block, which we scarcely 
consider. It is that for 2,000 years the West has been under a most 
terrible tyranny, the Christian religion. (I am aware that at this 
point readers are sighing, thinking vaguely, "How very 
nineteenth century.") But it was, historically speaking, an 
extremely short time ago. I have met people wh o came into 
conflict with the churches, when all they wanted was to opt out of 
certainties and dogma into agnosticism. Wives and husbands left 
them, they lost jobs, were socially ostracised, were cast off from 
families-and went to the colonies. There I met them, as a child. 
Now the churches have a benevolent, harmless aspect, half social 
agency, half genial bully; they cajole people into thinking that they 
really have to be born again, or belong to something or other. But 
for 2,000 years we were kept in a mental straitjacket, and even the 
most limited rebellion was horribly punished. Luther's was 
limited. He said, I insist on the right to talk with God directly, 
without the mediation of the church. He did not say, For many 
thousands of years there have been people in this world who have 
had the techniques, the information, to enable those with 
sufficient preparation to make use of these tools, to achieve states 
of mind, or of spirit,that thelchurches know'nothing about. (Butiat 
this point I have to make it clear that Sufism respects all religions, 
saying that the Truth is at the core of each. It is the tyrant, 
benevolent or wicked, who has to be exposed.) What I would like 
to know is this: how is it that, understanding that our culture has 
had two millennia of a certain kind of indoctrination, we, our 
scientists, are not researching the effects on our mental processes? 
For these effects are there: once you begin thinking on these lines, 
they are very evident. It is as if the ban, the ukase, the no of the 
churches into thinking about, for instance, what Jesus and his 
associates were really thinking (for the Sufis claim Jesus as one of 
the real Teachers of mankind, whose message has been obliterated 
by institutions) had been absorbed into the very stuff of our minds, 
making it impossible for us to look in certain directions.


 And this no can operate in the minds of scientists as strongly as 
in anyone's.


 What I am sketchily, inadequately, outlining here is a whole 
series of blocks and impediments that amount to a mental prison.
Well, the Sufis say we live in such a prison, and it is their concern 
to give us the equipment to free ourselves. We are all conditioned, as we now claim so easily and trippingly; but perhaps being able to 
say that is not enough to enable us to see how.


       If we want to approach the Sufis, their ways of looking at life, at some point it is necessary to swallow the unpalatable fact that they think of us as backward, barbarian, ill-equipped, ill-informed, 
and primitive, with closed minds in areas where it is vital to our 
futures that we open them.


       Meanwhile Shah most patiently answers the questions he has 
been asked, waiting and hoping for questions that are more 
educated, more sophisticated, based on better information and 
self-understanding.


       He gets thousands of letters from everywhere, for he is not a 
Western more than an Eastern figure, and people from Afghanistan to California ask about the Sufi Way. From these questions and answers he has compiled this book, which is so full of useful viewpoints and information that I cannot do more than draw attention to ideas that may be found profitable starting points.


Attention. Shah devotes a full section to it, so important does he 
consider it, and so indifferent are we to it. In our society we are not 
taught about attention as a need, as fundamental as food; and we 
go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead 
of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly 
and calmly. We feed the hunger blindly, telling ourselves we are 
seeking God or Love or Service; and we are not taught to 
recognise the drive in others, and how we are used and 
manipulated by them. Once the mechanism is brought to our 
attention and we begin to study it, it is as if a veil had been stripped 
off ordinary life, and we become freer in our actions, our choices.


      Knowledge. "God," as a commodity. Conditioned to the 
commercial, to having, wanting, trading, buying, selling, we 
treat everything in this way, including what Shah has to offer. But 
"higher knowledge" is not a commodity, to be bought and sold.


       The uses of literature. Here Shah is revolutionary. The Sufis 
know and use dozens of techniques, while we believe there is one. 
Our teaching in schools and colleges is based on simplistic ideas 
that take no account of the variations from hour to hour of the
human mind. We Westerners demand a standardised product, 
says Shah: it is what we prize. But the standardised and mass- 
produced is not what interests him or his associates, who teach 
individuals, in individual ways.


 The human group- its dynamics. Psychologists are indeed 
studying this subject, so vital to our society, and to all our 
associations. Shah has a good deal to contribute: the human group 
is what the Sufis work with, and their sophistication goes beyond 
anything we approach.


 Emotionalism. Shah does not hesitate to make the claim, 
infuriating to religionists everywhere, that nearly all we claim as  
"religion," as "higher feelings," as "mystical experience," is no 
more than emotionalism. We are taught that there are emotions 
and intellect, but not that there is something else possible, beyond 
both and not to be confused with either.


 Exposing delusions.
 Using religions, cults, sects, "God," to satisfy power drives, the  
need for togetherness, to provide substitutes for the family, sex. 


How to recognise false teachers and self-appointed Sufis. 
They proliferate, and delude unfortunate people who could be 
saved from them by the use of a little logical thought and some 
common sense.


 Many words and concepts have fallen out of real use. Reading 
this book, we are forced to recognise that in our scientifically- 
oriented, materialistic culture, words like humility, pride, greed,  
love, idolatry, charity, tend to be disposed of into areas labellad  
"religion" or "ethics." Shah rescues them, strips them of 
sentiment and vague emotion, and re-introduces them-as tools.



 Abjure the why and seek the how, as one Sufi, the explorer 
Richard Burton, put it. Well, this book is about how we, indi- 
vidually and collectively, may learn to look at ourselves and our 
institutions differently. And if what we are being taught is unex- 
pected and sometimes disconcerting, then that is in the great 
tradition too.         


DORIS LESSING

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