Inclusion and Exclusion

Prologue to Knowing How To Know
by Idries Shah
(published posthumously in 1998)


We are all interested in spiritual, psychological and social questions, and particularly in our personal problems, but in order to understand how we should learn, what we must know, we must have information.

The first important principle which we must understand is that there are two pre-eminent concepts; one is inclusion and the other is exclusion. Now this is extremely important – what we include in our studies, and what we exclude from our studies.

Although this concept is not instantly familiar in this form to most people, they can usually understand that it is necessary. However they have often made certain mistakes. These mistakes have been made by people who are studying higher things, and also by the culture in general.

The mistakes arise from not understanding or not emphasising correctly what is inclusion and what is exclusion. And although that error is not hard to correct, it has great consequences. Therefore we must clear it away, right at the beginning.

We start, simply, by giving some definitions of this problem.

I will first give you an example of how people ordinarily imagine ‘inclusion and exclusion’ is carried out. Religionists, (notice that I do not say ‘spiritual people’) for example, attempt to avoid things which are unpleasant, undesirable, and which are not permitted by their religion. This is exclusion: ‘I will exclude myself from the world. I will exclude myself from contact with bad people. I will exclude myself from the study of things which are not religious.’

This is familiar, traditional exclusion. When you are among this kind of religious people, you will find that you are forbidden to study certain things, or to go to certain places, or to carry out certain activities – even to think certain things .. .

That is exclusion. Therefore, for example, if you are a good monotheist, you are expected not to go into an idol temple and ring their bells – you must exclude that form of ritual, and you must include your own form instead. Even in the case of idol-temples, where I have seen statues of the Virgin Mary and Father Christmas included: on making enquiries I have been told that the priests of this temple – while very permissive about images – would not permit, say, the removal of idols . . . So this is exclusion.

This is not a strange concept to any of us, no matter what our culture is; it is standard procedure in all countries to include in this way and exclude in that. Yet people do not think of it in these terms.

If we go back to the origin of the reason for inclusion and exclusion, we find that the problem arises where there was in the past a different definition of an enterprise from the one which we understand today.

In other words, the activity has changed because the definition has changed. We must, therefore, go back to an earlier stage in order to understand how we can best employ exclusion and inclusion in our studies. When we do this, we immediately face a problem.

The problem is that those people who have become accustomed to including and excluding in a mechanical way will imagine that we are against them, or that we are opposing them. This is not our intention, however.  We are fortunate in some respects to be operating in the present-day world, the actual world. I would like to draw your attention to our good fortune. Thus, when I talk about exclusion and inclusion, I am able to refer you to the modern methods of studying any subject. The difference is that I am trying to introduce into this type of study the very ancient methods which have been lost, the method of specialisation. Specialisation is a modern phenomenon, but it is also a very ancient one. It had for long been lost. We are trying to specialise. As a small example, we can say that if we want to study something we must exclude.

If, for instance, we want to study Spanish we must exclude French, and we must include Spanish. If we want to talk in this room, we must exclude the children and the noise and we must `include’ the walls of the room and the language in which we are speaking; these are part of the necessities of the situation.

This is in fact a specialisation. We are narrowing down in order to see more clearly.  There is another method, however — still very well established in the mind of modern man. The method to which I refer is called, in modern terminology, ‘conditioning’.

Conditioning is not just specialising; it is becoming trained to certain responses so that one cannot think flexibly. We see the faults and the problems produced by this in political, religious and social life everywhere in the world today.

People become obsessed; an idea gets into their heads and as a result they become less capable, less — not more — able to learn. 
They are capable only of acting and feeling, emotions and intellect, and they are not capable of learning deeper knowledge.

We can help to restore to people the flexibility of specialisation and changing of focus. This is quite a different method of study from that which is familiar to most people today.

In the modern world we are in a paradoxical situation; because although in theory man knows that he can extend his attention to something and then remove it, he very often does not do so. In many areas he does not look at something and then detach from it, and look at something else.

Once he has found something to interest himself in, he cannot detach himself from it efficiently, and therefore he cannot be objective. Note that, in most if not all languages, we have words like ‘objectivity’ which leads people to imagine that they have it, or can easily use it. That is equivalent (in reality if not in theory) to saying ‘I know the word “gold”, so I am rich.’

The consequences of this lack of flexibility surround us everywhere, in every country, in every culture, and this lack of flexibility is a major danger to the existence of humanity. It can be said that man may even destroy himself in consequence. Such is the degree of importance which this matter possesses.

I would like to invite your attention to the consequences of this mentality in a situation such as that which I am trying to develop. 

What has happened on many occasions is that a lot of people come and they want to study, they want to learn, they want to organise, they want to develop themselves; and they say to me, ‘Give me the guidance, give me the material, give me the information, give me this, give me that.’

If I gave them those things, (or such of them as I might be able to) while they were suffering from this disease of obsessing themselves, I would be their worst enemy.

It is for this reason that you will probably have read that some of the stories which I have published make this point; they illustrate this seeming paradox that I can be your enemy if I give you something. This may be strange to our thinking, foreign to our ordinary thinking, but it is very true.

You have seen the operation of this malaise yourselves already in your lives, and therefore it is not necessary for me to emphasise it: but it would be worthwhile thinking about it.

If you do, I think you will agree with me that you have seen the consequences of this yourselves in past years.

Fortunately the malaise is not irreversible. It can be reversed: but only if we have the right conditions and the right people involved in the effort. But we cannot say that we have the medicine, or the remedy, for everybody in the world, on demand, and we cannot say that we can reverse the tendency in five minutes, and we cannot say that we can do this without perhaps some discomfort.

We must say these things so as to be realistic, and in order to tell the truth.

We are not dealing in promises and imagination; we are operating an enterprise. Although it is not romantic to talk in this way, (and most people demand, as their ‘price’ for giving attention, some degree of romanticism and imagination) we are interested in the results, and let other people be interested in fantasies. There are plenty of people who are emotionally-minded. We must be serious.

And we must also remember that many people are, effectively, asleep, dreaming romantic dreams. These people will always oppose this approach, dislike it, as they always have; and undoubtedly we are spoiling their amusement: or interrupting their dream.

They will not, however, realise that this is their condition, and they will therefore oppose these ideas, as always, on other grounds. This helps the cause of sleep, and therefore it is important for us to remain calm, and to recognise the disease. When a person has a disease, you do not attack him, but neither do you worry about all that he is saying.

If a man is in pain, or is in a fantasy world, you do not love him nor do you hate him, for that. You do not take very great notice or pay unbalanced attention to what a certain kind of sick person is saying or doing; because he is not capable of understanding you, and therefore you are in a false position if you react emotionally or even intellectually to his behaviour. It is very important to remember that. Remain calm, above all.

Therefore you will see that charity and kindness towards other people is not a virtue, it is a necessity — a necessity of the situation. It comes from a true diagnosis of the reality, and not directly from a high spiritual source at all. Charity and kindness is not a high quality, it is a realistic quality, and a necessary one. It stems from duty, sympathy and measure.

I invite your attention to the historical situation in which a teacher is dealing with a primitive people who have no sense of the situation, and no diagnostic capacities.

This teacher must appeal to them to be charitable and to try to be objective; he must initially appeal to them emotionally. He may represent charity as a virtue to them, because they do not understand anything else. But this is a primitive stage before the development of understanding. You do not need to be emotionally charitable towards a diseased person, a sick person, if you are a doctor. If you can see he is ill, you don’t need to say, ‘it is for the sake of God that I am being kind to him’.

It is for the sake of man that you are being kind to him; it is for the sake of the necessity that you are being kind to him.

If a man is suffering from pain, and he attacks you because he has got this terrible pain, you do not say, ‘I will not hit back because I am a religious man.’ You say, ‘I am a doctor, I know what’s wrong with him. My emotions are not involved and I must, from duty, try to help him’. You have here gone one stage beyond the primitive, and this is a very important argument, because most of the people in this world are still being taught as if they were primitive people.
They are being told: be charitable, be understanding, it is divine. They are thus being treated as if they were primitive savages: regressed, even, to an earlier stage than they were before. But they’re not so primitive any more: their supposed mentors are in fact treating them with something like contempt.

As a result they are easily confused. Because they are really capable of understanding this sleep, this narcoleptic malaise, they should be told about it on that level. This is the shortcoming of certain forms of allegedly spiritual instruction, which continue to treat people as if they were primitive tribalists living one, two or more thousand years ago.

And it is because the audience does not correspond in its cultural level with those who are teaching it, that very little progress can be made. As an example, I will tell you quite plainly that you will find, in certain forms of supposedly spiritual teachings, the audience are given promises and treated to threats. They are told, `If you do this, it will be good for you; if you do that it will be bad for you.’ And they are alternately frightened and promised wonderful things. Now this is the most primitive way of dealing with human beings, and it can indeed be necessary with a primitive community. It is not necessary for all members of all the communities of today. This is not to say that there is not a place for threat or promise; but only a place, and a specific one at that.

It is for that reason that a very famous woman, Rabia, one of the saints of our tradition, has left us a very beautiful prayer. She said, ‘Oh God, if I worship You from fear of Hell, then put me in Hell, and if I worship You from desire for Paradise, exclude me from Paradise.’ This is what that prayer means. That she is not doing something to please or displease God, she is doing it for another reason: because she understands something. This is a very important principle, and it brings us to a higher level than the generally familiar, primitive version of religion.

So you will see that if we are dealing with a primitive individual or community, we may well use threat and promise. But where we are dealing with a more advanced community, if we use these methods of fear and hope too strongly, we will actually regress the person to a more primitive condition even if he or she has already passed that stage; we will not only be doing such a person no good, we will be doing damage to a person who is now trained to respond mainly to fear and hope.

This fact has been known, of course, for many thousands of years, and has been taught for as long a period of time. But there have always been large populations of the world which have been at some time ignorant of it.

Fortunately at this time, with the development of sociological and psychological knowledge and experimentation, there is a great deal of material published not by us but by experts all over the world which verifies and proves this point, and there is now no need to rely on our unsupported word for this information.

We are able to direct your attention to the scientific work which has been done in this field. This is a very great advantage which we have, which we would not have had even one hundred years ago, because the research material was not then available.

Therefore we must be thankful and grateful to the scientists who have placed these instruments in our hands, and we should not imagine that there is some conflict between us and the scientific method and scientific work.

We should also note in passing that such has been the power of the scientific revelations in the late twentieth century on this subject that even the traditionalistic religious people must take account of it, must take notice of this, and they must adjust their teaching in response to this scientific knowledge, otherwise their form of training will die out.

Now there was a very famous Sufi called Muhiyuddin Ibn el Arabi in Spain who pointed out in his writings that when you are teaching somebody something, you must first assess the level of that person, and you must have different circles of people in accordance with their capacity to understand.

For saying this, Ibn el Arabi was very seriously criticised, because he was ‘being unfair’ and people said: ‘There is no monopoly of truth. Tell the truth to everybody and they will understand.’

It is only in the last few decades, in the last few years, that Ibn el Arabi’s theory has been understood properly. We have been able to verify it because we know that you must speak to everybody in accordance with his understanding, otherwise you may be doing damage.

Now we can return to exclusion and inclusion. You will be aware that in traditional spiritual teaching we are told that we must make sacrifices, and we must hold back from gaining certain things which we want, we must not be over-ambitious. We must be considerate to other people, we must not make a great noise and must avoid pride, and so on. These are some of the virtues which we are expected to cultivate. There is a profound psychological reason for trying to cultivate these abilities.

This is what we must now understand: that these virtues which we are supposed to cultivate have a scientific background, and they are necessary, not for our social happiness, but for our psychological integrity.

When this has not been fully explained, and when it is not understood, there will be serious mistakes in the development of a group of people. It is not rare to find such diseases – in many if not all religious organisations. For example, people behave as though they are very humble externally, yet this is just a mask, this is a persona.

It happens when people judge others by their behaviour; ‘This man is very simple, he only eats one meal a day: therefore he must be good’. They judge him externally, and that is because we have been taught to judge externally. How does he behave, and not ‘what is he really like?’ It is this confused kind of mind which imagines that ‘miracles’ presuppose divine guidance, contact or the rest.

To refer again to the woman Sufi Rabia: when people claimed that onions had appeared by a miracle in her kitchen, she said, `My Lord is not a green grocer!’

Here is another important example: the idea of sacrifice and service. These are two important necessities for humankind. If they become diseases, if they become obsessions, then they are destructive to humans.

As an example: a week or two ago I was at a meeting where a lecture was given by a very famous religious figure in London, a man who has been teaching and preaching for fifty years.

He was constantly asking his audience to be humble and to repent and to sacrifice and to feel guilty, and the result was that they were all extremely unhappy because they had already sacrificed, they had already felt guilty, they had already served as much as they could, and they didn’t know what more to do.

But he was just going on like a recording — saying ‘You must suffer, you must sacrifice, you must be humble’, as if he were a doctor giving an aspirin to somebody and telling him that he must have 50 aspirins, 100 aspirins, 200 aspirins.

But too many aspirin tablets will kill you in the end! Any psychologist will be able to tell you that the people who are the audience of that religious man, his followers, have been conditioned into feeling unhappiness every time they meet him. Until he tells them that all will be well: is this a religious objective, or is it not?

There is another teacher of this sort, who is doing the reverse. He collects large numbers of people together, and he makes them feel happy by saying pleasant things to them, by telling them that everything is all right, and all they have to do is this, that and the other and they will be happy and successful — and they love him, and they feel very happy.

But unfortunately if you study them you find that they have become extremely inefficient and useless people. All they have is a sensation that they are happy. Now if this is what you seek, then that is the man to follow. But all he is really doing is mental engineering.

He is an engineer, just like the first man of whom I spoke was an engineer.

In both cases these gentlemen are excluding certain things and including certain things. But unfortunately the mixture which each has ended up with is a very unsuitable one, although nobody will blame them. That is one of the serious problems, that once people believe in something or somebody, they will never reproach or blame the person who is manipulating them, because they are unaware that any manipulation is being carried out.

Now you must note at this point that I have attacked what people imagine (quite erroneously) to be the very basis of the so-called spiritual teaching of almost the entire world, and I cannot hope to attack people in this manner without producing a very savage reaction.

But I would like you to remember that what the majority believes is not necessarily the truth.

This brings us to the point that it is not only a question of inclusion and exclusion, but it is: what are we including and what are we excluding? We must be specific as to what things it is necessary to exclude.

At this point we must say that the things which we include and the things which we exclude are offered to you to study and to experiment with, for the purposes of familiarisation. We cannot prove that the things which we include and the things which we exclude are different or superior, we can only say we offer them for study.

It is for this reason that we cannot convert you to a belief in what we are doing. And it is for this reason also that we can never be called a cult of any kind; because by definition we do not expect belief.

Those people who call us a cult are only showing their own ignorance of what a cult is. It is interesting to notice that the people who imagine that we are a cult are the people in the developed countries of the West, who have not yet become aware of the scientific research on this subject carried out by their own specialists. In the East we are not considered to be a cult. There are, of course, both in the East and the West, cults which use our name and imagine that they are Sufic. I exclude these, for they are obvious for what they are to all sensible people.

Our imitators are criticised in the West, and so they should be. We suffer from this disability, that what we are doing is so unfamiliar to this culture, which has not yet reached a knowledge of its own discoveries, that we are at a disadvantage, still.

As a matter of interest, I will illustrate this. I have here a list of more than 20 international authorities in literature, philosophy, science, and so on. All these authorities, some of whom are professors and some of whom are heads of departments in universities, and some of whom are respected individuals of the greatest importance in their own countries — all these people are writing chapters for a book on Sufism.

There are Cabinet Ministers, ambassadors, ministers; some are millionaires, some are commercial people, all of them are what is called, in English, household names. Everybody knows them as people of great achievement, greatly respected and of great calibre and importance. These people are all familiar with, and know a great deal about, the history and development and value of Sufism.
Some of them are Turks, some are Persians, some Pakistanis, some are Indians, some are Arabs from Egypt, of Iraq, from Syria, from Jordan, from the Lebanon, from North Africa and the Sudan, not to mention countries like Afghanistan. One of them is the Chief Justice of India, that is to say, he is the most important judge in India, and another one is a Christian ecclesiastic of the Coptic Church of Egypt; another is a hermit of India. Many of these people are not Moslems. They are not influenced by money or propaganda; they have their own communities, their own achievements, and so on. To each one of these people the Sufi history, philosophy and culture is well known, respected and understood. No such equivalent can be found in the West.


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There was a peasant working in a field ploughing the ground with his horse, when a general in the army was going along the road beside the field. His horse got a stone in its shoe and became lame. The general, being accustomed to authority, shouted to the peasant:

`Hey, you, come here, and give me that horse’, and the peasant came to him and said, ‘Why should I give you my horse?’

The general said, ‘My horse is lame, with a stone in his hoof .' 

The peasant replied, ‘Who are you, that I should give you my horse? If I give you this horse, then I will be nothing, I will lose all my money, I won’t be able to do anything. I’m not going to give you my horse; my horse is my life.’

And the general said, ‘I am a general, don’t you understand?’

The peasant said: `What is a general?’

`A man in the army.’

Said the peasant: ‘Ah, now, I don’t know what a general is, but I know that when I was in the army, the sergeant was my chief, and if the sergeant told me to give him my horse I would give him the horse. But I don’t know who or what you are, because I never heard of your kind of people. If you want my horse, you go and get the sergeant, because I know whom to obey. I know that the man above me is the sergeant, but a general — God knows what a general is!’

The obvious ‘application’ of this story is that a man cannot see anything much higher, he can only see one degree higher and if he is just a peasant, a sergeant is like God to him.

That is perfectly true, but it is the crude moral. The interpretation I want to give you here is one of structure, that the man, the peasant, is working in a certain structure. The story is supposedly about hierarchy, but in fact it is concerned with structure.

The peasant has been in the army, so he has got two structures; one is the horse in the field. If he loses that horse he may die, or become penniless. The other structure is when the general mentions the army, he immediately understands the structure up to sergeant, and that is perfectly right for him, that he should work in that structure.

So it is structure I am talking about, structure and not hierarchy. The man received orders from somebody in the structure, and that was what he understood.

It is not sufficient for us to produce a structure in which to learn, and then to abandon that structure, and allow the people to continue studying in that structure for the rest of their lives. This would simply automatise them. It is for that reason we cannot have a mass movement. For that reason we must have an organic movement.

The difference between a mass movement and an organic movement is that a mass movement is composed of a mass of people, and an organic movement is more like a plant, in which messages are received when they are necessary and according to a certain requirement.

For example, if the plant needs more water it calls for water and water comes up from the roots to the stem and so on. With a mass movement you don’t get that, you just get `the mass wants to do something’. But a plant is, of course, a very delicate, complicated and varied thing. Not all of the plant needs all of the water at the same time, so it must be properly organised. And that is why we use the term organic.

Many people talk about organic organisations, but they do not in fact have such an organisation, they have mass movements, and they call them organic. So you must not only listen to the words, you must look at the phenomenon. We have the phrase: Al mujazu qantarat al Haqiqa which means ‘The phenomenal is the channel to the Truth’.  That is the phrase which we use for this process.
We have forms in which we work. Now the form in which we work may be a vocational one, some kind of activity of manufacturing something. So we relate a number of people together, with an objective to manufacture something, it might be carpets, it might be tables, it might be artisan work. Providing that the people are carefully enough selected, and provided that the objective is correctly enough chosen, we will develop a remarkable result. This is the sort of operation which in the past has produced very great art and very great achievements in human culture. This is the type of operation in which we are working, the kind of operation of which you constantly hear rumours such as those about the Cathedral builders and about the great artisans of the past who had spiritual objectives as well as vocational ones.

It is this type of operation. However, in the West the information about who these people were and how they operated has been lost. People are anxious to know all about them. What they do not know is that if they did have this information, it would be of no value to them: it would only be museum- or catalogue-information.

The consequence of the attempts to rediscover these methods has been that people in the West have become emotionally aroused by art, because they can see and feel something in this art: and because emotion is so important to them, they have joined the two things together and they have become emotionally obsessed by art.

In doing this, they have lost the idea of method. Slowly, some people are rediscovering some of this, quite independently of us, and we are delighted to find that this is so.

I will give you an example which I used in a television broadcast, and which created a tremendous amount of interest, mainly in the form of letters.  The particular example which I chose and which created so much interest, was this: In the United States of America it was discovered that there is another way of teaching than the way which we have normally been accustomed to.

Other, that is, than the way of indoctrination and of tension, repetition and anxiety: ‘do it again, do it again’. And if this method of learning can be applied to human beings as it has been applied to animals, then our whole ideas about education will have to change.

I will summarise the method: It was discovered that if you take cats, and you teach them how to perform simple tasks, it takes a certain time because cats are difficult to teach; they have very little attention-capacity and they are not interested in trying to learn. 

They are not, therefore, taught very much.

A group of cats were taught certain things, to perform various tasks, and it was recorded how many hours it took to teach these cats.

Then the researchers took one of the ‘educated’ cats and they put it in a room with ‘uneducated’ cats, of the same age and of the same group, of the same family, and they discovered that the cats which had not been educated learned from being in the presence of the educated cat and watching it.

They learnt fifty times faster than the other cats. In other words, they learnt by association with the educated cats, only fifty times faster. The interesting thing is that when these experiments were first published in England, the man who wrote the article – the popularisation of this work – ended it with some significant words.
He said that it was possible that we are now learning why, in the Middle Ages, great artists and great thinkers used to have disciples with them all the time who simply adored the master and stayed with him, waited on him. They worked with him, and they learned; and they became masters in their turn, and therefore it may be that we are rediscovering a method of learning which is superior for certain purposes to our present-day methods of education.

Today, particularly in the Western world, it is difficult to apply this method of teaching to humans, and the reason for that is extremely important to observe.

The reason is that if you want to learn from a contemporary man or woman who is at the top of a profession, the only way you will be taught is by a mixture of propaganda and repetition and anxiety.

This will interrupt the learning system; he will not be content for you to learn from him as he goes about his daily work; you will not move into his house and live with him and learn from him, because this is considered to be inefficient. In fact, the truth is that the man who is an expert nowadays is too vain, too full of self-importance, and he insists first, generally speaking, on transferring that to you, his sense of self-importance. This interrupts the learning process.

But the cat which learnt didn’t feel anything – not ‘I am a great cat because I have learnt’ – therefore he could communicate. And so you will not find it easy to learn certain things from a Westerner nowadays because he just feels that his learning gives him some kind of importance.

This in turn is a barrier between you and him. And now you see the wisdom of the people in the past who taught us all, you and me, that we should have humility towards our teacher because this means that you are open to whatever he or she can teach. But unfortunately the tradition perhaps did not insist so strongly upon the humility of the actual teacher, and therefore the learning process has effectively been interrupted. We can, though, reclaim our heritage in this respect.

It will not have escaped your attention that the habit of people to sign their work and to become well-known as artists in their own name is a modern one; that none of the ancient artists put their name on their work. And the names of the people who produced the great objects of art of the past are totally unknown.

On a visit to India I seized the opportunity to talk to one or two spiritual teachers there. When I went to see one of them, a very important one, I was sitting with him when an American gentleman who had made great sacrifices to come there, was announced.
He said to this guru, as he is called, ‘Tell me, what is a guru? How can I recognise a guru? Who is the greatest guru in the world?’
That is all he wanted to know. In that respect this American gentleman’s questions were very much paralleled by my own post-bag. I get the same sort of questions every day from correspondents who read my books. And this Hindu gentleman, who was the guru, smiled and said to the American gentleman: `What I am going to say will not please you. I hope you have not come here to be pleased.’

And the American said: ‘Oh, no! I want the truth!’

`Very well, the answer is this. If I am walking through the jungle on a path and there is a stone in the path, and I trip and fall on that stone, and if I learn from that stone to look where I am going, that is my guru, because it has taught me something; not somebody who is going to teach me, not somebody who might teach you, but somebody who has taught you something. And if it is a stone, it is a stone. But you no doubt are thinking about human beings, about god-men.

`A guru is something or somebody from whom you have learnt something, not from whom you might or will or whom you respect or whom other people respect. If you can’t learn, the teacher, effectively, “does not exist”.’

Now we will return to the question of the structure and the learning.
There are real Sufic study-centres in many, if not most, areas of the world. They exist wherever they are needed, and have done so for many centuries.

These are organised deliberately. That is to say, we don’t use a Western system. Western and other primitive systems collect together people who are interested in a certain subject. It is then assumed that they are eligible and that they can learn. It is also imagined that someone who wants to do so, or who has been chosen by Heaven knows what process, will be able to teach them. Or even that, given enough effort or orientation, learning will come about.

To us that is an intolerably ‘oriental’ mentality. We regard this as oriental nonsense because you are impractical in this particular area: in this particular field you are not only impractical, but you imagine that you must not be practical, that this is not a practical area, and when I start to talk about practical things, you think that this is not spirituality, this is something else.

We find it difficult to work with such people. Naturally, the representatives of such thinking who come to Asia to study spiritual things are unsuitable to learn or to teach. Call it a paradox. It is a fact.

In other words, they go and look for the people who look like gurus to them. We don’t, generally, tell them because they don’t listen.
In fact I’ve tried to tell people but many don’t listen. Here is a very important point that you must remember: the people who advertise themselves and the people who have great visibility, people who make a lot of noise and people who are known to be great spiritual teachers, or the like – such people monopolise the communications media, the TV, the radio, the newspapers. They all have active, loud-mouthed disciples, which gives the impression that this is the spirituality of the East, because there are thousands of them going about.

If you go to places in India, for example, you will find thousands of Americans and English people, and Indians. In fact you may even find millions of Indians, because in India you can easily collect a crowd of one million people.

And everybody imagines that this must be a great spiritual teacher because he has got a million people listening to him at one time. But I must beg of you to note two things. One is that quantity is not the same as quality. Visibility is not the same as quality. And although I am saying this here, you must remember that if I say this in public, ten thousand important and respected people in England will shout me down and say that I am a liar and I am wrong and that it isn’t true and that I hate them; because they’re obsessed, and I am taking away their toys, their amusements.

But I am afraid it is the truth, nevertheless. It revolves just the same, as Galileo’s famous saying has it. But we continue to operate nevertheless. Now you will probably understand some of the reasons why we cannot go into competition with these people in the mass communications media or in forming a mass movement.

Now we will revert to this question of working format, of structures. We find it difficult to convince people in the West that generally we can work only with people who have been chosen as suitable for this work, not people who want to do it, even if they want to give up all their money and all their loyalty, and everything.
Suppose some people are not suitable: especially at any given moment. What are we going to do with them? I must remind you here that when we demand the right to choose the student, we are doing exactly the same as you are doing.

In your own educational institutions nobody has a right to study an advanced subject if they are illiterate. You choose a student according to capacities and previous education.

We insist on the same right. But do you see how far you have strayed from the path of your civilisation, your culture and your traditions in permitting the collection of people without any sort of preparation, without any sort of testing as to their capacity, in these extraordinary groups? Now there is a delicate point here. You may believe that in a democratic society everybody should have a chance to get some of what there is to obtain.

I agree. However, another mentality co-exists in Western people. It is, unfortunately, the mass-production mentality, the mentality which regards the human being not as a human being but as a product. This often lies behind modern thinking and you must be careful of it. The consequence of that mind-set: the factory mentality, is to think, ‘bring all these people into this room, tell them something, train them, and then push them out there as finished products’.

Our conception of humanity is far higher than that. To me you are individuals, not objects to be processed by me and go through my course, just as if you were all the same, so that you all get exactly the same, and you all come out exactly the same at the other end. 

This is for manufacturing sausages, this is not for developing humans.

Now, you might say, ‘well that is not very efficient, there must be some way of overcoming this problem. How do we deal with a mass of people?’ And I have good news for you, because I can tell you we have developed means to overcome this problem. But we have not solved it in your way, and therefore you must look at the way in which we do solve it.

Our solutions are not the same as your theoretical solutions would have been. They are determined by possibilities, not fantasies.
In the first place, we know that when a group of people becomes too large, it must be sub-divided, in order to maintain the organic nature of the group, of the movement of people. This is not a strange conception to you, you can understand it, and you can see its advantages. And in order to deal with, to work with a large number of people at one time, it has been necessary to overcome the evils, the drawbacks, the disadvantages, which exist when you concentrate all the people in a geographical area which is the Western method. Consequently, we have a different communication system.

In talking about this special communication system, we must be careful not to become excited or emotionally involved with it, because this will interrupt it.

It is in two parts. The first part is that we give a task or an assignment or an activity to a group of people, and we ask them to follow that activity until we ask them to stop it.

This activity which we have designated for them contains all the requirements for that group of people up to the point when we want to stop their activity, or change it.

This is the first thing – the work, the elements are contained in the ambience, in the activity: that is the first communication. The atmosphere in which they work is communicating with them through the objects with which they are working.

In other words, the situation in which we put the people contains the elements, or half the elements which they need.

It is just the same as if we sent you on a journey somewhere, and we gave you some food and that food was sufficient for that journey. This is the first communication element.

The second communication element is that when the group is operating correctly in accordance with the requirements and in the proper balance without too much emotion, and without too much intellectuality, there is a direct communication among all the people connected with this work, and that communication is telepathic.

Now the problem is this, that in general most people in study groups do not want to study, they want attention. And they want to go and see some guru, or they want to be told something fantastic, they want to feel something in their stomach, therefore they are not learning at all; they are a sociological phenomenon, and therefore they cannot learn, therefore they want to learn desperately, and therefore nothing will happen.

It is a vicious circle. We are dealing with a sociological phenomenon, in such instances, and not with a spiritual or a learning one at all.  You will have observed in the groups in which you have worked, all kinds of groups, that there are a lot of people who want to attract attention to themselves, or want to make trouble, or want psychotherapy, or want money, or want comfort, or want parents, or something, from the group. Now we say that you can obtain all these things in the ordinary world much better, much more easily and much more satisfactorily, and therefore we always encourage everybody to have proper friends, proper social relationships and proper outlets, all their lives, so that they do not come to depend on us for those things. And the reason for that is that otherwise you will convert your study group into a social organisation and its objectives will be lost, its objectives will become social.

This is what has happened to spiritual groupings all over the world. It always happens. We must try to prevent it. Now there is not an infinite variety of people nor is there an infinite variety of groups. They fall into various categories. The number of types of people and the number of types of group are limited, so this helps us, because if they were infinite, we would not be able to work with them.

Therefore we generally find in a group of people, people who are at different stages, or who really belong to different groups. They should be in another type of group instead of the group in which they are. Now, our concern is that the majority of people in a group should be suitable for that group. Some of them will not be suitable, but it doesn’t matter as long as the majority is suitable for that group of people. So what happens in actual fact is, that people form groups, and many of these groups have no hope of developing into anything at all. But the members of the group will not accept that, because it is too uncomfortable for them to accept it, but nevertheless it is the case, it is the condition.

Fortunately, groups which have not got the stability potential, which have not got the potential of stabilising themselves, generally break up relatively soon, relatively early, or we help them to break up if we can.

There are many easy ways of helping these groups to deteriorate, and one uses those methods. For example, when we get letters from these people which reveal that they are seeking emotional excitement; or they ask questions which show us that they are merely looking for a social stabilisation, we send them the kind of direction which will cause the group to dissolve through dissatisfaction.

In an exactly similar manner, when somebody comes to me looking for a guru, I always talk like a materialist who is not interested in humanity and I behave in a very frivolous manner. I tell jokes, and my visitor soon decides that I am not a serious person, and goes away painlessly.

The verdict: ‘This man is no good at all. Thank God I didn’t get into his hands.’ And therefore we are all happy. This is rather an oriental technique, because in the West people do not like to lose their gravity, they do not like to lose their sense of dignity, and therefore they have deprived themselves of this weapon, they have thrown away this tool.

Do you notice how we include and others (through the desire for dignity) exclude an activity?