The Search for Fruit

excerpt from In Arabian Nights, by Tahir Shah (2007)

In his effort to popularize teaching stories and the Sufi tradition, my father's work [the work of Idries Shah] has attracted a wide range of readers across the world. They come from all types of social strata, backgrounds, and professions. Since my earliest childhood, I have met thousands of them, because they have beat a path to our front door.


Most of them are pretty conventional. A few are questionable. And a handful are downright odd.


When my father died from a heart attack a decade ago, his mail--sent to his publishers— was forwarded to me. Over the years, I wrote to hundreds of his readers, explaining that my father, Idries Shah, was no longer alive. The majority took the news with sadness, but were satisfied to have an answer nonetheless.


There was, however, one reader from Andalucia in Spain, who refused to believe that my father was no longer alive. Every month he wrote an airmail letter addressed to Idries Shah, sometimes begging and at other times ordering him to make his whereabouts known. At first I wrote back, assuming the gentleman had not heard the news. But the years passed, and the letters continued with increased regularity.


My father used to say that the answer to a fool is silence.


And so, I refrained from correspondence. Then, on the Monday morning before I set out for the desert, Osman came to tell me there was a visitor at the door. I asked who it was. The guardian motioned the confused outline of a man.


"He's both tall and short," he said.


"You'd better bring him in."


A minute passed. I had turned the dining room into a makeshift office, and was working in there. Osman trudged through the house, and stood to the side to allow the visitor to enter. I finished what I was doing on my computer. When I looked up a tall man with a hunched back was standing over my desk. He had a fatigued face, gray-blue eyes, and a froth of salt-and-pepper hair. I hadn't been prepared and so did not make the connection. I introduced myself. The visitor extended his hand. It was rough and clammy.


"Jose Gonzales," he said.


I narrowed my eyes, then opened them wide in an involuntary action. "As in ... the Jose Gonzales?"


The gentleman seemed content to have elicited a response.


I stayed quite still. Perhaps he half-expected me to show him out.


"My father is dead," I said. "He's been dead quite a while now."


Gonzales didn't flinch. "I have heard this before," he said, in a heavy accent.


" I wrote to tell you."


"Yes."


And you have not believed me."


The visitor seemed to stoop a little lower. "I am searching for Truth," he said.


"Are you sure that you are not really searching for Idries Shah?"


Gonzales looked at me coldly. He didn't reply.


A year before my father died, he sat me down in a quiet corner of his garden. We shared a pot of Darjeeling tea and listened to the sound of a pair of wood pigeons in a nearby tree. I poured a second cup of tea. As I was putting the strainer back on its holder, my father said "Some time soon I will not be here anymore. My illness has reached another phase. I can feel it."


I sat there, touched with sadness. I didn't say anything because I could not think of anything appropriate to say.


"When I am not here," my father continued, "some people we have always trusted will betray us. Beware of this. Others will stand forward as true friends, people who were in the shadows before. Many more will ask who I left as my successor. They will hound you, asking for a name. It is important that you tell them that my successor is my printed work. My books form a complete course, a Path, and they succeed when I cannot be there."


He stopped talking, raised the porcelain cup to his lips, and took a sip. I finished my tea, and we walked back to the house. I was going to leave, when he told me to wait.


"One day," he said, "you may meet someone who is misguided. It might not make sense now, but at the time when it happens, you will know. If this happens, take this piece of paper and give it to him."


He held up the sheet, folded it in half once, and then again, and gave it to me. The following November he died. I grieved, but I was consoled by the thought that he was inside me, alive in the stories he had told. Our lives rattled forward. Ariane and Timur were born, and we moved into the Caliph's House. Nine years eventually passed. The paper was kept safe in a box file, along with my own papers.


And so came the morning on which I found Jose Gonzales standing over me. I took a deep breath, and he repeated himself. "I am searching for Truth."


I asked him to wait for me, and I went into my storage room and rooted about until I found the file and the paper. It was still folded as it had been when my father handed it to me. Before I stepped back into the dining room, I opened the sheet and read what was written on it.


It was this story:


There were once three men, all of whom wanted fruit, though none of them had ever seen any, since it was very rare in their country. 


It so happened that they all traveled in search of this almost unknown thing called fruit. And it also happened that, at about the same time, each one found his way to a fruit tree.


The first man was heedless. He got to a fruit tree, but had spent so much time thinking about the directions that he failed to recognize the fruit.


His journey was wasted.


The second man was a fool, who took things very literally. When he saw that all the fruit on the tree was past its best, he said: "Well, I've seen fruit, and I don't like rotten things, so that is the end of fruit as far as I am concerned."


He went on his way, and his journey was wasted.


The third man was wise. He picked up some of the fruit and examined it. After some thought, and racking his brains to remember all the possibilities about this uneatable delicacy, he found that inside each fruit there was a stone.


Once he knew that this stone was a seed, all he had to do was to plant, and tend the growth, and wait for — fruit. 





-- Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights, p. 214-217.

Seeking in the East

excerpt from The Diffusion of Sufi Ideas in the West (1972)


How They See Us

 by Boris Kolinsky 


... As far as [the Sufis] are concerned, the world is divided into regions, often called 'islands' or 'territories'. People who have grown up in one territory are expected to carry out their studies in that territory and nowhere else unless the teacher in charge of their island sends them, say, to the East. 


If this concept is put into modern Western terms, such as are used in commerce, the parallel is strikingly 'modern' and apt. The headquarters of the concern may (or may not) be in the East. The local branches are organized in such a manner as to make possible the work of the organization in that locality. Distant centers are not equipped for the reception and training of people from another area: anymore than the Japanese branch of a British firm might be able to receive someone from, perhaps, South Africa, for a job or instruction which is set up in a specific place. 


Exceptions to this rule can only be found in the East where Orientals do recruit Westerners and convert them into similitudes of Easterners. No recognizable Sufi would attempt such a project. 


This brings us to an almost insuperable problem, that was described to me by one Sufi master as the 'primitive logic system.' The Western would-be disciple, having read various books, reasons-- fallaciously-- somewhat in this manner:


'This teaching originates in the East. In the East there are people who know about it. Therefore I shall go to the East and find a master who will be able to teach me more about it.'


This is fallacious because it would be true only if the Eastern mystical masters were so inefficient that, wanting to project their teaching in the West, they were incapable of setting up Western centers, especially adjusted to Western ways, for the establishment and progress of their work.


 All recognized Sufi Masters in the East who were consulted by me are agreed that anyone who imagines that he must go to the East and find something in this manner is looking for romance and color, mystery and so on-- or else he is so primitive in his basic thinking that Sufism would be most unlikely to be able to help him in any case. 


Therefore, however reluctantly, it must be concluded that the people who seem most anxious to learn are least fitted for it, because they have not done basic thinking about it. Those who may make the great sacrifices (by throwing up their job and heading for the East) may in fact be making the least real sacrifice, because they are seeking only emotional stimulus.


 Both of these points have been strikingly made in items about Sufism published in the West in the 1960's. A correspondent of The Times, writing in 1964, quoted a Sufi chief as saying, in relation to the Sufis and the Sufi knowledge, 'They diffused this, it appeared, at intervals throughout the world, watched its progress and maintained their end of the activity.... 

'I cannot report that the Mir showed any interest in recruiting either of his visitors...'




The Diffusion of Sufi Ideas in the West, p. 153-154

Orientation Points

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

Summary of Orientation Points


In order for a study to be launched and its performance
maintained, it is necessary that facts which inhibit or prevent
the development of the study be thoroughly known. All over
the world, at all times, people have been carrying out studies
in philosophy, metaphysics, religion, without realising that the
materials which they study, the way in which they study them,
and the factors which influence individuals and groups must
be understood in a certain manner. Here are some brief remarks
on this subject:


1. People behave in certain ways due to their cultural,
national and psychological background. This behaviour
colours their whole being. Not knowing this, they
attribute naturally-arising reactions to the 'teaching.' See
Silent Language, Edward Hall.


2. People organise themselves into groups without realising
that group organisation can be fatal to learning. Certain
types of group exist only for the group, although the
members do not know it. Groups can actually become
'religious' even though no religion is being studied.
Study Human Groups, WJ.H. Sprott, for popularised
material on this.


3. Random or systematised study of certain ideas is next
to useless. It is one thing to have an open mind; it is
another to think that one can choose the materials which
one should study when one is not aware of the special
circumstances of study needed and the special personnel
of a group needed for special studies. See Shah: The Study
of Sufism in the West*.


4. Many 'teachings' and ideas come to their students
strongly influenced by local cultural modes of
expression. Unless this is known, and steps are taken
to combat this, the result tends to be indoctrination with
superficial and worse characteristics of the vehicle of the
teaching. See: Afghanistan, by Peter King.


5. People take 'ideas' which were intended to be
'prescribed' for specific situations and groups to enable
them to learn. These they imagine are 'laws' or perennial
truths. The result is a mechanical system which is next
to useless. See: The Teachers of Gurdjieff by Rafael Lefort.


6. People study a man and his work through doctrines and
personality conceptions which do not apply to that man
or that work. They get lost in this enterprise. See: Rumi
the Persian, Reza Arasteh.



*Part I: The Way of the Sufi by Idries Shah (Octagon Press Ltd., London).




--from Knowing How To Know, p. 119-120

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.

Sufis in England

excerpt from Idries Shah's Darkest England (1987):

"Common sense is needed, and found in my own part of the world in such matters as dealing with metaphysical madmen, cranks and impostors. In its traditional form, the term Sufi stands for a person of such impeccable virtue and spiritual attainment that none may so style himself (or herself) and still be innocent of vanity. 

"In other words, if you say you're one, you're not....

"But let it not be concealed from you that we, like you, nowadays, are besieged by groups of near-madmen-- cultists-- who imitate what they imagine to be Sufis, who caper and dress in weird clothes, sometimes taking great liberties with others, and generally behaving in a manner open to justifiable criticism. Instead of seeking power over themselves, they try to acquire control over others.

"Real Sufis, contrary to this systematic behaviour, often assail such things as fixed thinking-patterns, however laudable these may seem to the converted. The aim is to make room for fresh ideas. Among other things, this flexibility enables people to survive when there is a need to adjust to changed circumstances.

"What happens when these putative Sufis invade, or arise in, England? Not far from where I now sit there is what is misnamed a settlement (it is very unsettled) centred on a house in Southern England. There you will find strangely-clad, gamboling fools, led by a wiseacre in a tarboosh. English to a man-- and woman-- they have convinced themselves, and even sections of the Press plus some Eastern residents here, that they are Sufis. 

"When I recently approached their abode, embarrassed that the name of Sufi should be freely used by such as I could see marching and skipping up and down the village street, I noted a local rustic sitting outside the inn, nursing a pint of ale. 

"I sat down beside him and he said, with the kind of forbearance which bespeaks not only common sense but that propensity for becoming a Sufi which stems from seeing the good and shunning the evil: 'Afar, there be the Soofees. Not right in the head at all, but they do have some lovely hives and dainty honey... " 

-- Idries Shah, Darkest England, p. 28-29

Traditions of the Prophet

excerpts from 'Traditions of the Prophet', in Idries Shah's Caravan of Dreams (1968)

Sayings of the Prophet


Trust

Trust in God, but tie your camel first.


The World

Treat this world as I do, like a wayfarer; like a horseman who stops in the shade of a tree for a time, and then moves on. 


Objects

It is your attachment to objects which make you blind and deaf.


Sleep

Sleep is the brother of death.



Reflection

The Faithful are mirrors, one to the other.


Women

Women are the twin-halves of men.


Privacy

Whoever invades people´s privacy corrupts them.




Oppression

When oppression exists, even the bird dies in its nest.


Love

Do you think you love your Creator? Love your fellow-creature first.



Distribution

God it is who gives: I am only a distributor,

Helping others

I order you to assist any oppressed person, whether he is a Muslim or not.

Monkishness

No monkery in Islam.


Teaching

One hour's teaching is better than a whole night of prayer....

Humility

Humility and courtesy are themselves a part of piety.



Envy

Envy devours good deeds, as a fire devours fuel.



Death

Die before your death.



The Tongue 

A man slips with his tongue more than with his feet. 



Desire

Desire not the world, and God will love you. Desire not what others have, and they will love you. 


Practice

Who are the learned? Those who put into practice what they know .



Anger

You ask for a piece of advice. I tell you: 'Do not get angry.' He is strong who can withhold anger. 



Judge

A man appointed to be a judge has been killed without a knife. 



Struggle

The holy warrior is he who struggles with himself.



Ink and Blood

The ink of the learned is holier than the blood of the martyr.

Accusations

Anyone reviling a brother for a sin will not himself die before committing it.



Obligation to Learn

The pursuit of knowledge is obligatory on every Muslim.

Lies, promises, trust

He is not of mine who lies, breaks a promise or fails in his trust.


Some behaviour

I am like a man who has lighted a fire, and all the creeping things have rushed to burn themselves in it.



The Bequest

I have nothing to leave you except my family.


Understanding

Speak to everyone in accordance with his degree of understanding.

***********

see  https://www.facebook.com/IdriesShah
and  http://www.idriesshahfoundation.org/

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