Elements in Courses

from Knowing How to Know, by Idries Shah
 (published posthumously in 1998)

Elements being used in our Courses


In our present study courses, we use:


1. Materials drawn from earlier teachings, which have not
been corrupted, and which still have validity in the
culture whose members we are addressing. Some of this
material is available in print. An example is the Eleven
Rules.*


2. Materials from past teachings, which are not fully
preserved in literature, but of which indications remain.
We expand and explain these, and sometimes illustrate
them from literature and oral tradition. Examples are
mnemonic references in the Sufi and other classics.


3. Materials which belong to the teaching, but which have
to be expressed in a form suitable to the audience being
addressed, the time and the place. Some of these appear
strange, unusual, even contradictory. They are selectively
drawn from the huge stock which is itself based upon
a knowledge of the design of truth on another level.


Many people try to compare these materials, and as a result
become confused. This confusion may lead to conversion
syndrome and a sort of fanatical support for us that makes it
difficult to teach such people. Others develop from their
confusion an opposition to all or part of the material, which,
again, makes it difficult for us to teach them.


Ordinary study, of the academic or traditionalistic type, will
not know which materials from the recorded literary
endowment to use, and which do not now apply. The result
is slavish imitation, traditionalism and gaps in effectiveness due
to the absence of the third class of materials, leading to an
opportunity for automatism to creep in.


On the other hand, during the period of the reintroduction
of a study such as this into a culture, the confusion and lack
of hard facts about materials which by their very nature are not
hard facts, causes gossip, rumour, imagination and so on.


Every real teaching is besieged by a haze of supposition and
imagination, report and counter-report. This is in itself a
disability, because people on the outside tend to form opinions
based upon this unrepresentative material. The result is that,
when the operation is complete, there may well be more people
believing in the incorrect version of the activity than there are
survivors of the real form. The latter, by the usual process of
weight of numbers, may even be declared heretics, because of
the belief in the importance of consensus of opinion.


There is no easy answer to this problem, except education.


By education I mean that people may be told that however much
one would like to give them a single simple set of beliefs or
activities to concentrate upon, the only result of these would
be conditioning.


In the final analysis, true teachings can only work with people
who are prepared to learn whatever there is to be learned, not
people who want to use us for entertainment and 'game'
purposes, however unconscious they may be of what they are
doing.


It is in order to carry out this educational project that real
teaching institutions first of all have to broaden the basis of the
students' attitudes to higher knowledge. There is an analogy
here with the ordinary educational systems. In the latter,
specialisation and higher studies often have to be preceded by
general studies which form the basis for the future studies. Many
an undergraduate has wondered why he has to study botany
or bacteriology before he can learn how to heal people as a
physician. He is in fact receiving factual information, learning
a skill and also exercising his brain in a manner which will enable
him to cope with more complex things.


Real study centres of higher knowledge really are institutes
of higher studies which, up to a point, have to lay the foundation
of their studies as they go along.


The habit of questioning the curriculum, however indicative
of an enquiring mind, may often be very much out of control.
If one does not know what questions to ask, there is less value
in asking questions than one might imagine.



The very idea that one can learn what one wants to learn, 
when one wants to, in the right manner, is appealing and 
therefore not recognised as insidious because it destroys the capacity to learn. 



* See: The Perfumed Scorpion by Idries Shah (Octagon Press Ltd., London), page 85.



--from Knowing How To Know, p. 77-79.