Ancient Way to Freedom

An Ancient Way to New Freedom 
by Doris Lessing (1971)


For a long time 'mysticism' has been almost a
joke in the West, although we have been taught
that at the heart of the Christian religion have
been great mystics and religious poets. If we knew
more than that, it was that these people's
approach to God was emotional, ecstatic, and that
the states of mind they described made ordinary life
look pretty unimportant. But our information, in a
Christian-dominated culture, did not include the
fact that the emotional road was only one of the
traditional, and very ancient, approaches.


Recently, a feeling that the kind of education
most of us get is not giving us information we ought
to have has led to curiosity about Eastern cults,
Buddhism, gurus of various sorts, or the dozen
or so Yogas. Since the Holy Man, the Sage, has
been no part of our culture for centuries, we have
had no yardstick to judge the gurus by; but the
more eccentric in behavior, wildly bearded, and
sensational in utterance they are, the more
attention they get. Our biases (since in the West
we are preoccupied with money, the gaining and the
keeping and spending of it) are likely to let us
judge a Sage, genuine or not, by whether he takes
money, and how much, and by the way he 
outwardly arranges his life.


A man who lives in a damp cave on lentils is
considered more holy than one who lives an
ordinary life in society. But as a result of so
many cults, gurus, crazy diets, people standing
on their heads, meditations, and mantras, many
sincerely curious have been put off and have
retreated into an attitude summarized by this
anecdote:

'What is your view about inner knowledge?'
asked a dervish of a theologian.
'I have no patience with it.'
'And what else?'
'It makes me sick.'
'And what else?'
'The idea is revolting.'
'How interesting that a logical and trained
mind like yours, when asked for a view
on a matter, can only describe three
personal moods.'


A Sufi would say that people living in a society
where Sufism has been openly at work, and respected
for what it offers, must regard all these
attitudes towards mysticism as ill-informed, to say
the least. 'You will have to learn through that most
banal of all things,' says the Sufi to the would-be
student, 'you must learn through ordinary life.' And
he is likely to have nothing to say to people looking
for excitements and sensational experiences. A
dervish on a journey met a yogi who was trying to
plumb the secrets of the animal kingdom. The dervish
said that a fish had once saved his life, and the
yogi exclaimed: 'In all my years of meditation and
discipline I have never approached such depths of
knowledge! May I travel with you?' After some
days the yogi said: 'Now that we know each other
better, do please tell me how the fish saved your
life?' The dervish replied: 'Now that we know each
other better, I doubt whether it is any use telling
you, but I will: I had not eaten for three days, and
I was starving. That fish saved my life all right.'


Sufism works through such jokes as this one,
books, lectures, all sorts of everyday activities.
A Sufi can be a scientist, a politician, a poet, a
housewife, the usherette in the cinema and may
never be known as one, since Sufism may have
nothing to do with outward appearance and behavior.
It is in operation all the time, all over the world,
in every country, sometimes openly, sometimes
not. The people offering it can be well-known, as
it were, beating a drum to say, 'We are here.' Or
they may teach secretly.


But what, you ask, are they teaching? What is
Sufism? In a Persian dictionary, the entry for Sufi
goes, in rhyme: 'Sufi chist? Sufi Sufi'st. .. "A Sufi
is a Sufi.' This is not a form of coyness but an
acknowledgement of the difficulty of defining something
that must be experienced and in a different
way for every person according to his or her state
of development. 'God is love' can be the highest
experience man can have, or some words scrawled
on a poster carried by a poor old tramp -- in between
are a thousand levels of experience. How to guide
the student from one level to the next is the knowledge
of the Teacher.


'Man must develop by his own effort, toward
growth of an evolutionary nature, stabilizing his
consciousness. He has within him an essence, initially
tiny, shining, precious. Development depends
upon man, but must start through a teacher. When
the mind is cultivated correctly and suitably, the
consciousness is translated to a sublime plane.'
(from The Sufis by Idries Shah). As Robert Graves
wrote in his introduction to this book: 'The earliest
known theory of conscious evolution is of Sufi origin....
The child's slow progress into manhood or
womanhood figures as only a stage in his development
... for which the dynamic force is love, not
either asceticism or the intellect.'


Now, all this is at a far remove from the sort of
thinking regarded by us as 'rational.' But it is no
odder than things we do believe or institutions we
take for granted. In the West we all live beside one
version or another of Christianity and believe, half
believe, or have to put up with some pretty bizarre
ideas. Perhaps the most useful thing I personally
have been invited to do in my own approach towards
Sufi study is to 'find out why you believe the things
you do believe; examine the bases of your ideas.'


Here is an approach to this philosophy that may
seem a long way around; it is to take a look at those
great Islamic civilizations that blossomed all over
the Near East, Spain, Central Asia, North and West
Africa, for a thousand years or more. In these,
Sufism was always a strong visible force, dervishes
being kings, soldiers, poets, astronomers, educators,
advisers, sages. Sufism was the core of Islam.


The contention is that the river of knowledge
'from beyond the stars' that has run since Adam,
through Noah and Abraham, and on through a hundred
wise men and prophets, ran also through
Jesus and then Mohammed. It is not a question of
one's being better or worse than another,
smaller or greater, but of these men's being
different aspects of the same Truth, or Way,
manifesting as Divine Messengers. Both started
world religions, both fed the inner heart of
religion. During early Christianity this inner
knowledge was available, then was lost, or went
underground. But it was able to survive the death
of Mohammed and his Companions and to
illuminate Islam wherever it took root.


But it is very hard for us to look in this direction
at all. Our history has made it almost impossible.
You can try this small experiment: Go down
to the nearest paperback-book shop, and leaf through
the first dozen textbooks on popular astronomy, the
history of art, meteorology, medicine, psychiatry,
archaeology. In each will be found versions of the
following: 'Between the decline of Greece and Copernicus,
science stagnated in superstition.' 'Those
temperate latitudes in which all civilization has
flowered.' 'Europe, the cradle of civilization … '
'Science was the creation of the Renaissance in Europe.'
'Before Freud the unconscious did not exist.'
'Jung's theory of the archetype .... ' A much trumpeted,
and very flattering, history of civilization,
on television, is the history of art in Europe --
with a few side-glances elsewhere.


This attitude is always implicit in our scholarship.
It is one of the great pillars of our thought;
but while Europe lay in the dark for centuries,
marvelous civilizations brought some sciences to
levels we have not approached -- medicine and psychiatry
among them. Individually, each one of us
may or may not be Christian; but like it or not, we
are steeped in Christian history. The centuries long
wars with Islam are done with; but the residual
mental blocks, the myopia, the parochialism, still
cripple our thinking. Nor is it only Islamic cultures
that suffer from our prejudices. When Copernicus
and Galileo discovered that the earth went
around the sun, this knowledge was not only a commonplace
in Islamic cultures, but, in Darkest Africa,
cultures that our scholars are only just beginning to
notice, let alone study, taught that the earth
was the sun's planet. Long before Lister had to
fight the medical hierarchy about germs and
infection, African witch doctors were using
antisepsis and other advanced medical techniques.


It is almost impossible for us to see Europe as
it was, a little dark provincial fringe to great civilizations
that sent emissaries, advisers, missionaries
out of the plenitude of their arts and
sciences to help the barbarians.


Then Europe came forward, in its particular
contribution to human knowledge, technology; and it
was the turn of the others to fall back. The newcomer,
like an adolescent, has had to believe that
he was the first to experience or to understand anything.


But already this insularity is beginning to
break down. When there has been an area of prejudice
in a culture, a dam in the mind, the time of its
dissolving is always exciting, one of sudden unexpected
advance. As one researcher put it: 'It is
exactly as if great heaps of treasure were lying
about in the open; but we were looking in another
direction, we were hypnotized by the words Greece
and Rome.'


But Sufism is not a study of past civilizations -
it must be contemporary, or it is nothing. Why is
it being offered again in the West now? For the
simplest of reasons -- Sufism works openly where it
can, silently when it must. Even fifty years ago,
the churches had so strong a hold on thought and
morals that the introduction of this ancient way of
thinking would have been impossible. But in an
Open Society, Sufism can be offered openly; and
perhaps we can now look calmly at the claim that it
is a philosophy that can be hostile to no true religion,
since all religions are the outer faces of an
inner truth. As for people like myself, unable to
admire organized religions of any kind, then this
philosophy shows where to look for answers to
questions put by society and by experience -- questions
not answered by the official purveyors of
knowledge, secular or sacred.


'Man has had the possibility of conscious development
for ten thousand years,' say the Sufis. This
thought shows itself differently in the claim that
man is woefully underused, undervalued, and does
not know his own capacities. I have believed this
all my life, and that the idea is central to Sufism is
one reason I was attracted to it. Put it this way: In
a circus, every child born to a certain family will
become a wonderful acrobat. Is this because these
children have “acrobats' genes" or because they are
expected to be acrobats? The implications shatter
our assumptions about education. I must have read
hundreds of manuscripts in my time. Very early I
saw that these authors have every bit as much talent
as I have: All writers' early efforts are very
similar. But some writers go on writing, others
fall out: We live in a society where we all think in
terms of success or failure. I am sure that the
manifold talents, creativity, inventiveness of young
children -- who can sing and dance and draw and tell
tales and make verses and whose view of life is so
very clear and direct -- could go on into adult life
and not disappear, as tends to happen in our system
of education.


We see as quite different the process of intense
concentration of the scientist or artist that results
in flashes of extraordinary achievement, telepathy,
second sight, hunches, the intimations of dreams ...
but these are seen by the Sufis as manifestations of
the same thing, the first stirrings of this evolving
part of humanity. But it is easy to waste this potential,
for instance, by using drugs to stimulate the
brain or by self-induced ecstacies. 'It is only those
who taste, who can know,' say the Sufis, reiterating
that this experience is not a question of intellectual
development


Every person comes to a point when the need
is felt for further inner growth. Then it is wise to
look for the Guide, the Teacher, the Exemplar, the
figure central to Sufism, who shows others what is
possible. This person, the product of a certain kind
of varied and intensive education, will be master
not of one trade but of a dozen, learned through
pressures of necessity, created by the people by
whom he has been surrounded from birth, people
whose duty it is to see that he should fulfill all his
capacities. The child will be protected from the
narrowing and littling of ordinary education, from
the idea that a person can be a tinker or a tailor
but not both, or if both, then he is to be
congratulated on his versatility.


In Sufism the notion of 'two cultures' is nonexistent;
the idea that the arts and the sciences must be
hostile, absurd. Of the great figures who have successfully
combined mathematics and poetry (and
much else), perhaps Omar Khayyam is best known
in the West. The products of Sufi schools are
people who are prodigies from our point of view.
Our forms of education produce nothing like them.
People who, in our violent time, get whirled out of
their little ruts through different countries, climates,
ideas, languages, who have had to learn to
earn their living in varied ways, who lose the arrogance
of class and race are more likely to approach
the Sufi idea of the whole man.


Idries Shah, who is bringing Sufism into the West
now, is the product of this intensively varied education.
He has been living in Britain for fifteen
years and in that time has re-established Sufism
as a vital force. He exemplifies Sufic versatility.
For instance, he has just helped to decipher and to
have performed ancient Egyptian music unheard by
man for three and a half millenia. He has
patented scientific devices. He has been journalist,
explorer, traveler; has studied archaeology, geology,
economics, politics.


He writes books on travel, anthropology, magic,
Sufism, each unique in its field. He writes Sufic
fables and stories of his own. He has written a
prizewinning film script. He corresponds in Arabic,
Persian, English, French, Spanish with experts
in a dozen different fields. He is a husband,
the father of three, and runs, from his home, the
Institute for Cultural Research, which has hundreds
of members and is in vigorous operation. Two
years ago he started a publishing firm, which has
already put out a dozen books, all successful. But
he would say: 'Perhaps it is not me, but your ideas
about the possibilities of man that are extraordinary.'
And he discourages all those who approach
him with the idea of finding a 'guru.'


It does not do to say that a man, a book, an institution
is Sufism, which is essentially something
always the same, but taking different forms. 'If you
encounter two institutions calling themselves Sufic,
exactly the same, one of them must be a fake.'


Those who are likely to recognize a Sufic current
are those with noses for the fresh and the lively;
and this thing might be anything from a person,
a book, a sharply angled statement by a physicist
at a conference, the attitude of a politician, a new
trend in fashion, a poem, a play, a garden planted
and tended in a certain way. In every part of the
world, the forms of Sufism differ, since they are
shaped to fit the people living there. The way Sufism
is being taught in Britain now differs from
what happens in Morocco, Afghanistan, Greece,
South America; the teachers and the institutions
containing Sufism for this time are different from
those in the past, and always changing ... a far cry
from what our conditioning has taught us to call
'mysticism.' Before you can even start on Sufic
study, you must first try to 'learn how to learn' -and
everything is unexpected.


Sometimes, when we look back over our lives, we
may think: 'I learned more through that experience
than in all the rest of my life put together;' and the
experience may be a tough job of work, a phase of a
marriage, a serious love, an illness, a nervous
breakdown. This way of learning, a time of
crammed thoughtful living, is perhaps nearer to the
learning of the Sufi Way than any other. 



*Originally printed in Vogue, July, 1971; reprinted in 
The Diffusion of Sufi Ideas in the West
An Anthology of New Writings By and About Idries Shah
Edited by Leonard Lewin
Keysign Press, Boulder, Colorado (1972)