Forms of Study

Use, Misuse and Disuse of Forms of Study

Q&A with Idries Shah


Q: How can you explain the many forms in which people have
attempted to teach? Since people believe in these forms, believe
that they are true renditions of fact, they are enabled to reach
truth through them. But is it that some are true and some are
not, as the exponents of the organisations claim? If certain forms
through which studies are carried out are true, are all the others
false?


A: I must have answered this question - or, rather, the questions
in this cluster - several hundred times, both in speech and in
writing, including what I have written and quoted in books.


The fact that such questions continue to be asked constitutes a
quite remarkable demonstration of what questioners are like:
some at least will ask questions even though they have been
answered in accessible form dozens of times.


But this may mean that the questions need to be answered
again and again, until the answers penetrate.


The answers, once again, are:


1. Truth has no form;

2. The means through which people may perceive Truth have
forms;

3. All forms are limited. Some of the limitations are time, place,
culture, language;

4. Different forms are not necessarily antagonistic, for the
above reasons;

5. Forms have changed through the centuries in obedience to
the external world to which all forms belong;

6. When people believe that the form is more important than
the Truth, they will not find truth, but will stay with form;

7. Forms are vehicles and instruments, and vehicles and instruments
cannot be called good or bad without context;

8. Forms outlive their usefulness, increase or diminish in usefulness;

9. These statements are abundanty to be found in the writings
of Sufi teachers. They were written down in order to be read and
remembered. They are seldom so energetically stated or so strongly
maintained elsewhere, which may account for the fact that they
have not been sufficiently heeded by people who have not given
Sufi materials the study they deserve.


The outward forms of things of the world, about which Sufis so
often speak, include the forms of teaching, which must be understood in their inward meaning, as well as exercising an instrumental function.


Nasir-i-Khusru has truly said:

Your diver [for treasure] has only given you salty clay
Because he has seen from you only envy.
Seek the meaning from the Outward like a man:
Don't be like an ass, content with noise.


THE CAT WITH A UNIVERSITY DEGREE


In February 1975, a fine ginger tom-cat named Orlando was
nominated in the Surrey University elections for President of the
Students' Union. That the cat was a bona fide student seems evident
by the fact that it has a BSc. No doubt it will go on to a
higher degree. This news story could very well, in traditional
times, have been originated by a Sufi, as a comment on study and
the times . . .




-- from Learning How To Learn (1978), Idries Shah, pgs. 145, 146

Humility

Background to 'Humility'
by Idries Shah (1978)



BEFORE the period generally regarded as historical time, there has
been an operation of a form of cognition linked with human
development which is outside the current methods of acquiring
and utilising information. The result of this effort has often been
called 'wisdom': although the word wisdom has also often been
applied to other fields.


RELICS ARE NOT THE THING ITSELF

Many religious, mystical and other formulations are, up to a
point, shrines for the relics of a completely or partially successful
attempt to present and make available to various individuals and
communities means for acquiring this knowledge. Like almost
everything on earth, they are subject to deterioration or fossilisation.


They become both museums and exhibits, at one and the
same time.


Because of the tendency to stress discipline and group-attention
without contemporaneous adjustments of other factors, many such
formulations (some of them called schools or cults) crystallised in
the short or long term, and not infrequently they have claimed
a monopoly of truth or effective ritual. This process, mirroring
limited thinking-pattems, frequently goes so far as to lead to 
a virtual destruction of the dynamic of the formulation of the School. 
In practice, exclusivism and dogmatism, beyond a
certain point, militate against certain necessities of flexibility.
There is a continuing need for regeneration.


What appears to some people as the sum total of the human
heritage of philosophy, metaphysics or even magical thinking can
also be viewed, for the foregoing reasons, as heavily burdened with
the wreckage or misinterpretation (through selective choice) of
formulations previously operated by coherent Schools. The factor
causing this state of affairs is endemic in the human community,
and has often been unsuspected by large sections of whole civilisa-
tions; though made the subject of close attention and rectification
by specialists outside of mechanical and confined thought. Such specialists are those who can grasp internal principles and dynamics, not those who merely rearrange.


THE TRADITION MAINTAINED BY COMPETENCE


In contradistinction to the public and overt formulations familiar
to all as stabilisations of many forms of religious, psychological
and community action philosophies and other systems, there has
always been a continuous, altruistic stream of guardianship of this
comprehensive and adaptational knowledge, throughout history.
This is based on capacity and knowledge, not on arbitrarily
deciding to become a specialist.


There are excellently sufficient reasons why the foregoing facts
have never been more publicly known or accepted in any real
depth. Among those more easily understandable by customary
thinkers is the fact that 'to make an announcement such as this, to
those who are basically selfish will serve mainly to increase their
selfishness at the expense of their real, inner desire for truth' -
thus further masking the potentialities of the Teaching from such
people.



Another, easily-understood, reason is that the existence of narrow
systems of thought (over-simplified to contain the aspirations
without regard to potential, and to permit a wide-scale disciplining
of populations) has produced a type of 'expert' or concentrator
of this kind of bias who will automatically feel insecure if
any attempt is made to widen his horizons. The result will be
opposition, distrust and confusion.


From time to time, certain cosmological and human factors being in alignment, there is both a need for and a possibility to reestablish, by means of a special and skilled effort, formulations and activities which maximise the prospects of more rapid and thorough penetration of the teaching which leads to the development referred to as 'knowing oneself or 'having wisdom'. Several such periods, cyclic in character, have occurred in recent times: none of them has been generally recognised for what it is. This, again, is not to say that because one believes this one is automatically able to find it. The correct approach is everything.


ROLE OF AN INTERVENTION


The first stage of this knowledge concerns answers to the questions
generally phrased as involving the origin, nature, being and future
of mankind itself, collectively as well as in the individual. The
manner and order of procedure of approaching these questions
themselves involves a capacity whose absence or ineffectiveness in
the ordinary individual spells his incapacity to participate in his
own development. He is in need of an organising intervention to
break the vicious circle which results.


KNOWLEDGE OF THE END CREATES THE MEANS


The desire for an 'awakening', often used as a technical term,
may or may not be accompanied by the information and experience
essential to precede this stage. The Teaching, for its part,
is carried out - and is able to cross ideological boundaries - because
of a knowledge of the objective: an objective which is at
worst postulated as an assumption that it exists; at best glimpsed:
and thenceforward is the subject of repeated attempts to devise a
means to recover this glimpse.


The working hypothesis or traditional framework provides the
structure by which the would-be illuminate attempts to approach
this goal. In the case of the School, knowledge alone provides the
basis upon which the structure can be devised.


'Once you know the end, you can devise the means.' The end
does not justify the means - it provides it. The means, employed
in this sense, is the structure referred to in some literature as 'The
Work'.


THE SCHOOL


One of the structures within which this knowledge is studied,
collected, conserved and transmitted has often been termed a
School. There are others, continuously at work, whose existence
and mode of operation is not of applied value, though frequently
a matter of curiosity and inquisitiveness, occupying much time
and giving rise to much effort, due to the faultily-based assumption
that a lively interest in something once heard about may lead
to familiarity with it, and hence usefulness to be gained from it.


Since, however, its modus operandi is far from having an exactly
operable analogy in current thought, it is in fact, if not in theory,
'completely concealed'.


It is extremely common for encounters to take place between
people who are interested in this area, and those working in it,
without the former being in any way able to enter into it- or,
most frequently, for them to have any conception or recognition of
the role or method of operation of the other individuals.


The 'School Work' is a lower-level activity which nonetheless
has to be passed through before a recognition of the higher level
is possible. Acceptance of this principle is among the first requirements leading to the necessary effective time-scale and order of events in which the Teaching may take effect. One of the chief barriers to accepting this fact- even as a working hypothesis -
is the over-valuation of the role, potentiality and knowledge of the
learner.


It is for this reason that such stress is placed, in so many
traditional systems of which viable fragments subsist, upon the
need for what is approximately rendered in familiar parlance as
humility. Its distortion is self-abasement.



WHAT HUMILITY IS NOT FOR


As one of the great Sufis said: 'My humility is not there to
impress you - it is there for its own reason.'


The person that you feel yourself to be, according to the Sufis,
is a false person, which has no true reality. When humility is
exercised, people begin to realise that they do not, as it were,
exist at all. This perception of oneself as 'Adam (not-being)
is stressed in Hujwiri's Revelation of the Veiled, in the second chapter dealing with the real meaning of poverty. When people take pride in their humility, they have merely adopted another concocted 'self' as part of their not-being: and this is what produces hypocrites.



The purpose of seeing through one's own nothingness is to see
beyond into what is really there to which one's real self can relate.
Humility is therefore directly concerned with the quest for Absolute
Truth.



NO VALUE IN MAKING A VIRTUE OF A FUNCTION


The coincidence of some similarity between the words 'Adam
(not-being) and Aadam (man) has caused poets and others in
Eastern languages to equate the two neatly in verse and prose. It is
interesting to note, by the way, that even orientalists and reviewers,
discussing this point, sometimes observe so little of this
play on words that they even charge Sufi writers with being ignorant or adopting strange usages when they say such things as
'Man is 'adam'. I often feel that this uncharacteristic failure to
register the contention is in such cases due to the fact that the
subjectivity of the commentator is censoring his understanding:
he is, after all, generally a man - as a man he does not want to
think of himself as 'not-being". This is all the more marked in
people (who do of course include scholars) who actually identify
themselves by means of the learnt patterns and information-stock
which is, to the Sufi, part of the non-being, the personality and
not the essence, of humankind.


In other words, as we all know, pride prevents humility.
Pride is attached to a sense of oneself which may be wholly or
partially created by secondary things like believing that one is
learned.


It has truly been said that 'Humility is not so much a virtue
as a necessity, in order to learn.'


RABIA AND THE DOOR


The posture which is required in the Sufi was well illustrated by
Rabia al-Adawiyya. She heard that Salih of Qazwin was teaching
by the phrase: 'Knock at the Door and it will be opened to you.'
Rabia said: 'How long will you persist in saying this, O Salih
- when that Door has never been shut?'


The lack of humility is also something of a conspiracy: where
people not only ignore it when it is found in others, but cannot
credit its reality. This is in addition to those who cannot even
conceive how or when to exercise it.


TALE OF THE PROFESSOR


Not long ago (pursuing the first remark) I was showing a visitor
around the grounds of this house. As we passed a quiet and diligent
man sitting on the ground mending a piece of wood, the
visitor asked: 'Who is that?'


I said: 'That is Professor So-and-So.'


His brow creased into a frown, and he looked at him again.
Then he looked at me. Now he said: 'Are you sure?'


And, pursuing the second remark, there is the incident involving
Maaruf of Karkh


COLLECTING DATE STONES


Sari al-Saqati saw Maaruf picking up the stones of dates from
the ground and asked him what he was doing.

'A child was crying,' he said, "because, being a penniless orphan,
he had no nuts like other children. So I am going to collect
date-stones and sell them [to be ground into flour] so that he
can have some nuts, and be happy.'



from Learning How To Learn, by Idries Shah (1978), pgs 71-76.

Mysticism and Psychotherapy

excerpts from The Observing Self, by Arthur Deikman (1983) Psychotherapy arose in response to human suffering, and, as far as we can tell, human suffering has always existed. The ancient lineage of psychotherapy is seldom appreciated because Western culture considers psychotherapy as a relatively recent development of psychiatry, one of its subdivisions.  If we define psychotherapy as the treatment of mental distress through psychological means, we find records of such practices from the origins of civilization whenever priests, shamans, and witch doctors appear. While psychiatry, a category of scientific medicine, is a modern development, psychotherapy has been associated with the sacred for thousands of years. Historians of psychotherapy acknowledge priests and shamans as the first to heal the psyche. A sorcerer, his head crowned with deer's antlers, is depicted on the wall of a cave In southern France, dating from 15,000 B.C. Psychotherapists of one sort or another have been around a long time.    Formal psychotherapy originated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when treatment was taken over from the clergy by rationalistic medicine and eventually became the specialty of psychiatry. Psychiatry at first dealt primarily with madness, but Freud's psychoanalysis extended psychiatry and psychotherapy to neurotic and character problems as well. The scope of formal psychotherapy has been progressively enlarged and is now concerned with problems of existential human suffering, the traditional domain of religion, from which psychotherapy historically originated.    Psychotherapy appears to have come full circle. Although the modern version is quite different from the archaic ceremonies that featured magic, taboos, gods, and dramatic rituals of exorcism, there have been changes other than appearance. Its marriage to rational medicine has given psychotherapy a systematic understanding of neurotic and psychotic syndromes and refined technical procedures. And an entirely new dimension, the enhancement of the observing self, has been added.    However, Western science is characterized by a split between the sacred and the rational, which has left modern psychotherapy less well equipped than the superseded ancient, primitive versions to handle certain problems. The loss of dramatic placebo devices is not the difficulty. The issue goes deeper, involving the most fundamental assumptions of Western thought. Freud's view of reality and that of most contemporary theorists of  psychotherapy is based on a nineteenth-century physical and biological scientific model that is far too narrow to encompass human consciousness. Consequently, certain sources of suffering cannot be dealt with from within a Western framework. We are faced with major problems that call for broadening our perspective and extending our science. THE MYSTICAL TRADITION    The mystical tradition is also ancient in origin. The oral teachings recorded in the Upanishads, Buddhist sutras, and similar records go back thousands of years and provide evidence that mystical teachers of widely different cultures say remarkably similar things. Also concerned with human suffering, they propose that human beings are ignorant of their true nature and that ignorance leads to lives of pain and futility. The sages describe a Way that leads to a higher level of existence, one infinitely more desirable than the level on which most people conduct their lives. The mystical tradition does not offer therapy in the usual sense of that word, but  achieving the goal of mysticism -‑ experiencing the Real Self  — is said to cure human suffering because its very basis is thereby removed.    Often confused with religion, the mystical tradition occupies a place of its own. Durkheim suggested that human beings developed religions through their perception of the tiered, a superior realm impalpable through the five senses but one that can nevertheless be experienced. Religion and mysticism are both concerned with the sawed realm, but most religions tend to associate the sacred with a deity, Whereas mysticism associates the sacred with the unrecognized Real Self of each human being. Thus, followers of formal religions often try to affect the behavior of a god -‑ propitiating, phasing, and seeking aid. In contrast, the mystical tradition asserts the equation: I (Real Self) = God. While "I am God"” is the fundamental realization of mysticism, it is blasphemous in many religions.    Because both religion and mysticism respond to the perception of the sacred, the work of mystics historically took place within a religious context although it remained distinct from the activities of everyday religious practices. For example the wandering monks for whom the Upanishads were mitten did not perform Hindu sacrifices and rituals, but followed special practices imparted in secret by their teacher.    The monks, usually thought of by laypersons as part of an established religious tradition, were actually following a teaching that said the ordinary forms and concepts of that religion were illusions one must transcend. A similar situation prevailed for Zen monks who pursued their training in the context of Buddhism.    Western culture often overlooks the distinction between religion and mysticism, especially in the psychological and psychiatric literature. This is unfortunate because the mystical emphasis on self‑development makes it consonant with modern psychotherapy. The mystical tradition has been concerned with the very problems that modern psychotherapy has been unable to resolve. It makes sense, therefore, to investigate mysticism with a view to dealing more effectively with those problems and gaining wisdom as human beings. THE PROBLEM OF MEANING    Human beings need meaning. Without it they suffer boredom, depression, and despair. Increasingly, psychotherapists are called on to deal with these symptoms as people confront aging and death in the context of a society that is coming to realize the possibility of its own decline and extinction. The religious framework that formerly defined meaning has been replaced by a scientific world view in which meaning does not exist. "What is the purpose of human life?" and "Why am I?" are questions that are said by most scientists to lie outside the scope of science or to be false, since they assume that the human species developed by chance in a random universe. According to this view, human beings are complex biochemical phenomena, of considerable scientific interest but not essentially different from anything else that science examines.    Western psychotherapy is hard put to meet human beings’ need for meaning, for it attempts to understand clinical phenomena in a framework, based on scientific materialism, in which meaning is arbitrary and purpose nonexistent. Consequently, Western psychotherapy interprets the search for meaning as a function of childlike dependency wishes and fears of helplessness or, at best, a genetic disposition toward intellectual control, preserved and enhanced by natural selection because of its survival value.    Such explanations, however tidy they may be, do not offer much help to adolescents and young adults seeking a life path, to persons confronting the anxieties of the nuclear age, or to those who experience despair as death approaches, unable to find significance in life goals based on personal acquisition, unable to find meaning in the purposeless universe of scientific empiricism. Not only are patients affected; psychotherapists fall prey to the same ailment. Consider the following extract from an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry reporting the experience of a group of therapists, aged thirty-five to forty-five, most of whom had a psychoanalytic background. The group met ostensibly to obtain peer supervision but soon became a therapy group to deal with a crisis all the members were experiencing:    This depressed, resigned outlook should not be dismissed as peculiar to that particular group; it is, in fact, an approved psychiatric standard. The American Handbook of Psychiatry articulates its contemporary "wisdom" as follows:    Here, the meaning of life is death, which provides an end to the fatigue of the elderly. What a vision!    The greatest problem Western psychotherapists face may be the absence of a theoretical framework to provide meaning for patients and therapists alike. Clearly, those struggling to overcome neurotic problems are likely to be badly handicapped when the context within which they view themselves provides neither meaning, direction, nor hope. It is also clear that science's vision of an orderly, mechanical, indifferent universe can provide no purpose for life. Yet our lives and our psychological health depend on a sense of purpose. Mere survival is a purpose, but not enough for human consciousness. Nor is working for the survival of others sufficiently meaningful if one believes that the human race has no place to go, that it endlessly repeats the same patterns, or worse.    The "midlife" crisis with which the psychotherapists grappled probably reflects the fact that at midlife one's own death becomes less theoretical and more probable. Goals of money, security, fame, sex, or power might formerly have peen purpose to life. With experience, the limited nature of such satisfactions becomes increasingly evident. As one grows older an awareness surfaces that one is on a relentless slide toward extinction, making self‑serving goals seem utterly futile. Even altruistic goals  can wear thin without a larger picture of the human race than the one our scientific culture provides. As life progresses, the search for meaning becomes increasingly urgent. Profound despair and dull resignation are symptoms of failing in that search. The pervasive use of alcohol, sedatives, and narcotics in our society might well reflect many people's attempts to suppress despair at their purposelessness, to substitute heightened sensation for meaning.    This widespread malady need not be inevitable, for it is possible that the conclusions of scientific materialism are wrong. From time to time we sense a larger reality than the pot science provides, a subtle perception pointing to a better, Meaningful existence. The dissonance between the scientific view and the one we intuit produces restlessness and a need for resolution. Even the pursuit of material goals may be a blind response to the urge to attain a dimly sensed reality in which purpose and meaning are facts, not fantasies. Our ability to progress in that direction is severely hampered by our not understanding the nature of the problem, by restricting reality to the empirical realm. Indeed, Western psychological science tends to regard the very consciousness through which we know the physical world to be no more than a product of that world, an epiphenomenon less real than that which it comprehends. No wonder meaning vanishes. A physicist commented on this assumption:    It is as if Descartes had been stood on his head and made to declare, "I think; therefore, the world exists and I am an illusion."    Pain and dysfunction inevitably result from the denial or distortion of reality, a consequence clearly demonstrated in the effects of the fantasies of those suffering from psychosis or neurosis. It is equally true of the fantasies and beliefs promulgated by an entire culture. Our culture's belief in positivistic empiricism  — only the tangible is real‑produces increasing symptoms at the individual, social, and political levels. A person who seeks psychotherapy may be suffering from a distortion of reality. not only at the interpersonal but at the metaphysical level, and neither the person nor the psychotherapist is aware of that.    A basic tenet of mysticism is chat reality as ordinarily perceived is indeed a distortion' and that human suffering is the consequence of believing in that distorted view. According to mystics, the problem is compounded by human beings' inherent need to progress in their ability to perceive the reality that underlies the phenomenal world, which can result only from the development of a higher intuitive faculty, a process called "conscious evolution." People whose evolutionary need is frustrated experience a persistent dissatisfaction with the course of their lives. On the other hand, fulfillment of that developmental goal enables people to perceive the meaning of their own lives and the purpose of human existence. Thus, in the mystical tradition, meaning is a perceptual issue.    The problem of limited perception -‑ as encountered in biology ‑- has been described by C. F. Pantin:    Similarly, it is possible that the meaning and purpose of human life are outside the spectrum of ordinary consciousness, whose widening and deepening are the concern of the mystical tradition. In fact, some see the evolution of consciousness as the principal task of the human race. Western psychology, in its often vain attempts to explain away the sense of meaninglessness and its attendant symptoms, may havemuch to learn from  mysticism, which sees meaning as something real and accessible to consciousness, provided the appropriate perceptual capacity has been developed.    The fundamental questions, "Who am I?" and "What am 1?" arise increasingly in the struggle to find meaning and purpose in life. Therapists hear them as explicit queries or to indirect form: "Who is the real me?" or "I don't know what I want  — part of me wants one thing and part of me wants something else. What do I want?" Western psychology is severely handicapped in dealing with these questions because the center of human experience  — the observing self  — is missing from its theories. Yet, at the heart of psychopathology lies a fundamental confusion between the self as object and the self of pure subjectivity. Emotions, thoughts, impulses, images, and sensations are the contents of consciousness: we witness them; we are aware of their existence. Likewise, the body, the self-image, and the self‑concept are all constructs that we observe. But our core sense of personal existence ‑- the "I" ‑- is located in awareness itself, not in its content.    The distinction between awareness and the content of awareness tends to be ignored in Western psychology, its implications for our everyday life are not appreciated. Indeed, most people have trouble recognizing the difference between awareness and content, which are part of everyday life. Yet, careful observation shows people that they can suspend their thoughts, that they can experience silence or darkness and the temporary absence of images or memory patterns ‑- that any element of mental life can disappear while awareness itself remains. Awareness is the ground of conscious life, the background or field in which all elements exist, different from thoughts, sensations, or images. One can experience the distinction simply by looking straight ahead. Be aware of what you experience, then close your eyes. Awareness remains. "Behind" your thoughts and images is awareness, and that is where you are.    What we know as our self is separate from our thoughts, memories, feelings, and any content of consciousness. No Western psychological theory concerns itself with this fundamental fact; all describe the self in terms of everything but the observer, who is the center of experience. This crucial omission stems from the fact that the observing self is an anomaly  — not an object, like everything else. Our theories are based on objects: we think in terms of objects, talk in terms of objects. It is not just the physical world that we apprehend in that way; the elements of our mental life are similar. Seemingly diffuse and amorphous emotions are localized and observable; they have definite qualities. emotions, like fluid objects, are entities we observe. Images, memories, and thoughts we objects we grasp, manipulate, and encompass by awareness just as we do the components of the physical world. In contrast, we cannot observe the observing self; we must experience it directly. It has no defining qualities, no boundaries, no dimensions. The observing self has been ignored by Western psychology because it is not an object and cannot fit the assumptions and framework of current theory.    Lacking understanding of this elusive, central self, how are we to answer the essential questions "Who am I" "What am I?" that lie at the heart of science, philosophy, the arts, the search for meaning? To find answers we must step outside the boundaries of our traditional modes of thought.    Here too the mystical tradition has focused on an area ignored by Western science. Both Yogic and Buddhist metaphysics and psychology emphasize the crucial difference between the observer and the content of consciousness and use meditation techniques to heighten the observing self. As with meaning, mystics hold that answering "Who am I?" and "Why am I?" requires a special mode of perception. That claim is not surprising, considering the anomalous character of the observing self. To understand the "I," we should first learn what the mystical tradition can teach us about it.

--  Arthur Deikman

The Gnostics

from Secret Societies by Arkon Daraul (1961)



THE GNOSTICS


An extraordinary number of exceedingly bizarre talismans and inscribed stones bear witness to the power of the secret Gnostic organizations which flourished in various forms during the few centuries immediately before and after the rise of Christianity in the Middle East. One of the oddest emblems of these schools was the figure of Abraxas. A human body clothed in a Roman soldier's garb wielded a battle axe, as if threatening an enemy. In its left hand it carried an elliptical shield, upon which the words of power IAO and SABAOTH were sometimes written. The head of this fearsome being was that of a cock, with open beak. For legs it had twin serpents, coiling to either side. Underneath the figure sometimes lay a conventionalized thunderbolt.



Who was Abraxas? His name, in accordance with cabbalistic computation, is decoded to mean "three hundred and sixty-five" - the number of days in the year. There was no god or idol belonging to the society: the Abraxas figure merely represented the aspects of power which went to make up the supreme intelligence, and the hailing of light which is the cock's habit at dawn. The tunic represented the need for struggle, the arms the protection and power given by the dedication to the Gnosis-- knowledge. The shield was wisdom, the club or whip, power. The two snakes meant NOUS, insight, and LOGOS, understanding. 



By means of this diagram Gnostic teachers inculcated the theory that man comes to his full power by developing certain facets of his mind. He must struggle to arrive at gnosis; but this knowledge is of the mystical kind, and is not the mere collection of facts. Great stress was laid upon personal mystical experience, to and through which the initiate was guided under conditions of great secrecy.


The Gnostics did not confine their studies, or their teachings, to any one religion, but borrowed illustrations from all that were accessible to them. This caused them to be considered Christian heretics, Jews, who were trying to undermine Christianity, remnants of the Persian sun-worshippers. They have been widely studied by early Christian sages, and it is upon the opinions of these latter that many conclusions have been formed. Little or no investigation of these "People of Wisdom" has been done by research workers on the spot- In Asia and North Africa- where strong and interesting traces of their beliefs and practices still remain.


The main teaching states that there is a supreme being or power which is invisible and has no perceptible form. This power is the one which can be contacted by mankind, and it is through it that man can control himself and work out his destiny. The various religious teachers through the ages, putting their creeds in many different ways, were in contact with this power, and their religions all contain a more or less hidden kernel Of initiation. This is the secret which the Knowers can communicate to their disciples. But the secret can be acquired only through exercising the mind and body, until the terrestrial man is so refined as to be able to become a vehicle for the use of this power. Eventually the initiate becomes identified with the power, and in the end he attains his true destiny as a purified personality, infinitely superior to the rest of unenlightened mankind.


The symbolism in which this teaching is concealed, the methods by which the mystical power is attained, vary from one Gnostic society to another. But the constant factor is there: the attainment of that which humankind unconsciously needs. The gnostic claims that within every man and woman there is an unfulfilled urge which cannot be given proper expression in the normal way because there is no social means by which it can be fulfilled. This feeling has been put into man in order that he may seek the fulfillment which the Gnostics can give him. His search for completeness in love, trade, professions, theology is vain and unsuccessful.


The theories of the various schools of Gnosticism with which the Christian clerics came into contact are very much secondary to the rituals and practices which are used to produce the Gnosis, the enlightenment. This has not been fully understood by too many writers, who devote much space to trying to work out the beliefs of the Knowers by a perusal of their writings, or by reports which have been given them by others. 


What were-- and are-- the Gnostic practices? First, discipleship and the inculcated belief that the initiate must struggle, must devote himself as much as possible to the identification with the power which inspires all. Secondly, there are two kinds of men, those who are bound to the earth and matter and those who can refine themselves. It is from the latter class that aspirants are chosen. 


Thirdly, the methods by which the divine illumination may come are many and varied; and it is the province of the teacher to choose which path he will give to his disciple to follow. Some Gnostics believed that frenzy and excitement would produce the necessary liberation of the mind from the fetters of the body; others considered that this could be done best by fasting and mediation. Present-day Gnostic practices in the East has it that different methods suit different temperaments: and this may be one cause for the historical confusion as to which branch of
'heretics' practised what. 


The Gnostics believed themselves to be intellectual aristocrats: their knowledge was only for the few who were ready to receive it. And this is what made them a secret cult, not the fear of persecution. The had their own passwords, in shaking hands they tickled the palm as an identification signal, and they helped one another in every conceivable way.


They could not be called pantheists, because they considered that the doctrine was secondary to the experience of religion; and the theologians and ordinary priesthood of any religion did not approve of that. They were not, in fact, a religion like most others, because they stressed the importance of the individual before that of the community. Those who were more enlightened were more important in every possible way, because they were valuable, refined, aristocrats. At the same time they taught that providing the well-being of the Gnostics was assured, so was that of the community at large. This meant that they could subscribe to the outward doctrines of any religion, and could continue to operate under many different politico-religious systems. Gnosticism profoundly influenced men's minds even in Europe up to and after the Middle Ages, and its basic way of thinking is probably an underlying factor in other secret societies whose members would be
surprised to know it. 



Terrible obscenities and other crimes have been laid at the door of the Gnostics by the early ecclesiastical writers. Although there is little doubt that some of them did believe in mass ecstasy, it seems unlikely that their secrets were well-enough known to enable the commentators to assess them. The belief that certain special men could control their destiny and obtain extra powers through dedication to Gnostic practices meant that, inevitably, there was a belief in magic. The myriad Gnostic 'gems' (inscribed stones) decorated with serpents, cabbalistic names and the rest, are more likely to be proofs of initiation and talismans than mere identification tokens presented to ensure admission to meetings, as some authors have thought. The reason for supposing this is that (1) the 'gems' are very similar in many respects to talismans in use by other communities; and (2) they can often be interpreted as containing magical messages or 'diagrammatical
invocations'.


Ethically speaking, Gnostic belief is that there are two principles: that of good and that of evil. A balance must be struck between these forces; and that balance is in the hands of the Gnostic- the Knower- partly because nobody else can tell whether an action is for the eventual good of the individual or the community. This secret knowledge comes through the mystical insight which the supermen-Gnostics attained. 



The rise of individuals who wrongly believed that they had attained to Gnosis-- all-knowledge-- some of whom were leaders of Gnostic societies, produced notorious characters. Those who followed the way of the Ophite branch glorified the serpent who tempted Eve. They did this because this snake by his actions brought knowledge into the world. Basilides was a leader who taught that Jesus did not die on the cross. Since matter and material things were considered to be part of the inferior, non-spiritual world, the sect known as the Cainites called upon everyone to destroy those things which belonged to the world.



These deviations and aberrations have attracted the greatest attention-- as is natural-- and the quieter teachers of the creed have received less attention. The pious horror with which the less respectable Gnostics were viewed by the early Christian fathers has stamped itself forever on Western literature and belief about the Enlightened Ones. But in more than one place in the Middle East, as well as in small groups in Western Europe, there are still followers of various schools of Gnosticism. They mainly follow the ideas held by Valentinus, with some variations. This school teaches its initiates that matter is more evil than good; that man must be purified by mental concentration; that after death man will rejoin that from which he has been severed, and will be unified with those whom he loves. The also believe that all matter will eventually be destroyed by fire.



The Mandaeans, a small but tenacious community which dwells in Iraq, follow an ancient form of Gnosticism, which practices initiation, ecstasy and some ritual which have been said to resemble those of the Freemasons.

The Visionary Recital (II)

excerpts from the introduction to The Mystical and Visionary Treatises of Suhrawardi,  by W.M. Thackston, Jr.:


THE INTERNAL JOURNEY THROUGH THE MICROCOSM:



The type of the internal quest into the self is best exemplified by Love's
allegory in Treatise VI. Here, in order for the seeker to reach the prime
intellect, called Jawed Khirad ("eternal wisdom") the "young old man" who
guards the City of the Soul, a journey through the various human faculties
is undertaken.



The seeker progresses from the highest faculties of sensorial perception
common to the animal kingdom back to the lowest faculties of basic
alimentation common to all organisms. Cast into this allegorical symbolic
type the seeker progressively gains conscious control over the faculties by retrogressing, so to speak, back to the most elementary of the life functions.



In the process he breaks the spell of amnesia, vis-a-vis his
origin into which he has fallen and thereby purifies the corporeal shell
that contains the divine spirit so that the nostalgic yearning for the
original abode, personified as his steed, can carry him across the
celestial barriers of the City of the Soul where he is bathed in the living
waters that confer the immortality of divine wisdom.




The vegetal faculties common to all life forms are necessary for the
maintenance and growth of the individual and reproduction of the species.
The three major faculties of the vegetal class which Suhrawardi, like
Avicenna, calls the faculties that are "to be served" are :

1) the Nutritive , the sine qua non of any living thing, the faculty that
obtains nutrition for the individual and without which the individuals
survival is impossible;

2) the Augmentive, the faculty that supervises growth of the organisms
various parts; and

3) the Generative, the faculty that ensures survival of the species through
reproduction of the individual



The minor, or subordinate faculties , all of which "serve" the Nutritive
faculty , which in turn serves the "growth" faculty and which in tandem
with the Augmentive serves the Generative, are:

1: the Attractive, by means of which the organism attracts itself to
nutrition, or nutrition to itself

2. the Retentive, by means of which what is deemed necessary and good for the individual's nutrition is retained

3. the Digestive, which breaks down raw nutritive material into an
acceptable, assimilable form

4. the Expulsive, which eliminates what is deemed unnecessary or harmful for nutritive purposes.




Next come the motor and sensory faculties that distinguish the Animal Soul from the Vegetal Soul. The motor faculty has two functions:


1: the Concupiscible, which stimulates motion towards things deemed
necessary and/or beneficial, i.e., the quest for pleasure


2) the Irascible, which stimulates motion away from what is deemed harmful or destructive, i.e. the quest for domination



The second part of the animal soul is the conglomerate of faculties that
constitutes sense perception...



It appears that [Surhawardi] follows the developed Avicennan approach to the categorization of the senses into the external five and internal five.



The external five are... sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch.



They provide the raw material for the first of the post-sensationary
internal senses, the senses communis, the immediate recipient and
integrator of the sensory perceptions of the external perceptions. [It]
enables an animal to know, for example, that a form visually perceived as
white and gustatorily perceived as sweet is one and the same.



The second sense is the retentive imagination that retains the common forms of the senses communis.


Third is the compositive-imaginative, which performs an unstructured and
disorderly analytical and /or synthetical function on sensibles.



When dealing with these analyzed/synthesized sensibles on the animal level, it is called the imaginative faculty. When it presents its analyzed/synthesized intelligibles to the rational faculty, it is called the cogitative.



The fourth faculty, the estimative, reduces perceived things to their
intangible intrinsic meanings to form a judgement, as a cat judges the
intrinsic meaning of a mouse-form to be something to chase, and the mouse judges the intrinsic meaning of a cat-form to be something to run away from.



In animals, this faculty is very strong, and is generally called instinct;
in humans, however, it is in constant contention with the rational faculty.



The estimative tends to draw man towards the material, while the rational
seeks to extricate him from the material toward the spiritual. By ascetic exercise and mortification, however, the estimative can be subordinated to the rational.



The fifth faculty is memory, which serves to retain the intrinsic meanings
of the estimative and compositive imagination, much as the retentive
imagination stores the forms of the sensus communis.



Suhrawardi's analysis of the senses is solidly based on Avicenna's
categorization, which in turn has as its starting point, the Peripatetic
view of sensation as modified and refined by Islamic thinkers like the
Ikhwan al -Safa and Alfarabi...



Suhrawardi... eludes to the senses in order to make the neophyte aware of the proper function of these senses, so that he may come to know their limitations and then elude their "shackles" thereby becoming receptive to the "dawning of the lights" of the soul's true realm.



Allegorical description of the vegetal and animal faculties


... these faculties are depicted as people gathered around a pot in
which something is being cooked, separated and distributed.



 The fire and pot over it represent the stomach, the cook is the attractive faculty; the fanner of the flames, the digestive; the one who waits patiently, the retentive; the one who separates the light from the heavy, the expulsive (the four minor faculties); the one who distributes the cooked victuals to the people represents the nutritive faculty; while the one who pulls up by the ears those who have finished eating is the augmentative faculty.



Nearby, in a "forest" are a lion, which rips and tears things and a boar
that pilfers, eats and drinks, and these two appear to represent fairly
clearly the motor functions of the irascible and concupiscible, since the
"seeker of the microcosm" lassoes them and binds them tightly, lest they
get out of control .



Since none of the vegetal faculties can very well be disrupted without the
destruction of the organism, it is upon precisely these two motor functions
of the animal soul that the Sufis tend to concentrate. For these functions
receive impulses for motion from the estimative faculty, the very one that
can be dominated through ascetic discipline by the rational faculty, which
man alone possesses.



Just as the seeker in Love's allegory [in Treatise II] proceeds in his
journey through the souls, notably from the highest, the internal senses,
back through the lower animal faculties and the vegetal soul to emerge
victorious from each encounter, so Suhrawardi postulates a ruling spirit,
the "animate spirit " (ruh-i hayawani) for the various faculties.



This spirit, a "subtle body" made of a subtle mixture of humours (much as
the physical organs are made of a gross mixture of humours) speads through the body from the left side of the heart. That part that goes to the liver, where it is called "the natural spirit" (ruh-i-tabi'i) rules over the locus of activity of the stomach, the digestive system, and the vegetal
functions.





The other part, which ascends through the arteries to the brain, is called
the "psychic spirit" (ruh-i-nafsani) and rules the locus of activity of the
animal functions.





Ten senses are represented in the treatises by the ten wardens set over the captive bird. When the prisoner realizes that they are not really paying any attention to him, he discovers how easily eluded they are...




[In another treatise] when sensory input is no longer allowed to interfere by providing its imperfect information on the world of gross materiality,
the [world-revealing cup] can be taken from the turner, removed from the
confines of the material cosmos, and allowed to glow with the brilliant rays
of reality and display the real world.



The purgative of Treatise IV has the effect of "opening the inner faculties"
so that the soul can see, hear, taste, feel and smell without recourse to the defective external senses, much as the soul, affected by music, overrides the external sense of hearing in order to listen directly for itself [Treatise V] and in consequence, moves the body upward.



The first step of the aspirant out of material bondage into the realm of the
soul is to "close the door to the city" and to "open the door to the
wilderness". It becomes a common place of Persian poetry... that the "city" is the realm of rationality, while the "wilderness" is the abode of the "mad"...or those who have transcended the boundaries of ratiocination and entered into the area of trans-rationalism, or intutive knowledge, knowledge "through the heart" rather than "through the intellect".



For this reason, the aspirant must leave the rational city and venture into
the metanoetic wilderness in order to encounter the "Archons" of the "other world."



In each of the treatises, the aspirant meets someone who acts as his guide or initiator into the process of material divestiture...



The master/guide is considered by the Islamic spiritual tradition to be
necessary for the neophyte, lest he lose his way or be tempted off the
right path toward the goal by any of the myriad distractions that present
themselves along the way.



The means for breaking out of the cage of time-space-matter are variously given...



When "warmed" by Illumination , i.e., the outpouring of the source of light
and luminosity, toward which the vertical orientation draws the aware soul, an intutive and experiential receptivity to the gravitational pull back towards its origin, the soul can pass easily out of the strictures of matter, time and space. A necessary concommitant to the passage of the spiritual nature out of its temporary boundary is the loss of ego identity, described in treatise VIII... in terms of the five-fold distinction of tawhid and in treatise VI in terms of the salughter of the yellow cow...



Both these vivid images deal with the hold the carnal soul maintains over
the individual so long as he remains in his amnesiac state vis a vis his
true origin.



The carnal soul is responsible for each individual's ego-identity, the
identification of the carnally dominated self as a discrete being,
possessed of an existence of his own.



... the loss of ego identity means that the stranglehold of the carnal self has been broken: It no longer dominates in the individual's conscious self-identification, and the mystic has been disindividuated into the consciousness of the Godhead.



The remaining state, the fifth and highest of all, is the ineffable mute
state wherein all connections with humanity have been severed and all
traces of temporal existence in the soul have been obliterated. To reach this state renders words meaningless and explanations useless.




[In Treatise VI] the carnal soul is explained as the unusual yellow cow
[described in sura 2 of the Quran] which was required to be slaughtered in order to identify a murderer.



The carnal cow, wandering capriciously through the city of the body, will
continue to wreak havoc unless it is slaughtered so that Love, portrayed as the policeman of this world and the next can enter the city and establish his reign of order.


Once the carnal cow of conscious identity is sacrificed to love, then one
can become like the polished mirror of the moon which reflects the splendor of the sun so faithfully that it can say "So close have I come that I imagine you are I."



Suhrawardi is careful to state explicitly that never, even in ecstatic
proximity, does substantial union occur between mortal and divine...
However... this did not save him from the wrath of the orthodox... for whom his ideas, like those of the martyred al-Hallaj before him, represented a dangerous espousal of immediate cognition of God, a doctrine they were not prepared to accept... like al-Hallaj, he paid for his conviction with his life.



Notes:




Senses communis is... quick to accept forms, but unable to retain them because its dominant humour is wetness, which readily accepts a shape but cannot maintain it in...


*****


The compositive-imagination or the imaginative faculty is so-called when it deals with the animal-sensibles and its locus of operation is the estimative faculty. When it deals with intelligibles and is localized in the rational faculty, it is called the cogitative and is inclined towards the deduction of sciences, crafts and the perception of intelligibles...


*****

Estimative faculty:... [gives] instinctive, intrinsic meanings, like the enmity and malice a sheep recognizes in a wolf. This sense is quite prone to error, says Avicenna. It was introduced explicitly into the system by Alfarabi.



*****

Correspondences [in the allegories]... were worked out by an anonymous Persian commentator.

*****


Sometimes Suhrawardi refers to all the animal and vegetal faculties together as the fourteen coffins, which the Persian commentary explains as:


the four major faculties of Avicenna's scheme in the cannon, the four subordinate faculties, the two motor faculties and the four humours  (hot, cold, wet and dry)


***** 
The rational faculty, the human intellect, is traditionally divided into the theoretical (speculative) and practical. Suhrawardi does not, oddly enough, elude to its divisions.



*****
The "amazing things" Love chooses not to tell Zulhaikha because she would not understand, in [Treatise VI], would all have to do with the realm of the intellect and beyond.




(from The Mystical and Visionary Treatises of Suhrawardi,  translated and introduced by W.M. Thackston, Jr., Octagon Press, 1982.)

The Visionary Recital (I)

excerpts from the introduction to The Mystical and Visionary Treatises of Suhrawardi,  by W.M. Thackston, Jr.:



...what the neophyte must achieve is a release of the soul from the material world of the senses, the "bottomless pit" of this temporal world, into which the soul of man has been cast and where his atemporal, spiritual nature is held captive, so trapped inside the strictures of gross matter, the stuff of which this world is made, that the soul becomes like the king's peacock in Treatise VII that was placed under a basket: it forgets entirely its original home and thinks that this world is all it has ever known.



While in this state of forgetfulness, the soul cannot extricate itself if
it is attached to any of the goods this world has to offer, be they
material like property and wealth or immaterial like position and renown.

The process of detaching oneself from the material... is often expressed as a journey or pilgrimage-quest, which can take the form either of an external journey out of the material world or of an internal journey into the self and thence out of this world.





THE EXTERNAL JOURNEY THROUGH THE MACROCOSM:



The external journey leads the pilgrim up through the celestial spheres
that encompass the totality of spatial and temporal creation. Everything
that is subject to human sensorial perception is contained within the
concavity of the celestial spheres. What lies outside them is, in terms of
created matter, nothingness. This "nothingness" which is beyond the
encompassment of created spatiality and temporality, is the spiritual realm,
the true home of the soul. From there, the atemporal world of eternality,
came the divine part of man's soul, and it is there that the aspirant seeks to return.



To effect this type of return, the seeker travels figuratively out of the
sublunar region , the earthly realm and across the celestial spheres of the
macrocosm ...



[Suhrawardi] is too subtle in his treatment to be interested in simple
cosmological allegory, for he constantly weaves his narrative fabric from
the warp of the external cosmos and the phenomena of the celestial spheres and from the weft of the internal cosmos, the microcosm of man's inner "celestial" configuration...



A brief survey of the physical cosmos as generally accepted by the
traditional Islamic world:



Suhrawardi's main allegorical descriptions of the heavens reflect the
standard Ptolemaic universe inherited by Islamic civilization from the
Hellenistic world. In this geostatic view of the celestial order, the earth
stands in the concavity of nearly immaterial spheres which contain the
heavenly bodies that revolve around the earth on the ecliptic.



The number of the spheres, though conceptually constant, is variously given by Suhrawardi, depending upon how he is considering them.



They are, from highest to lowest:

1. The Great Sphere of Diurnal Motion, the primum mobile of Latin
cosmography: it revolves westerly once every 24 hours and is responsible for the movement of all the other spheres.

2. The Sphere of Fixed Stars including the 12 Signs of the Zodiac..

3. Sphere of Saturn

4. Sphere of Jupiter

5. Sphere of Mars

6. Sphere of Sun

7. Sphere of Venus

8. Sphere of Mercury

9. Sphere of the Moon

10-11. Spheres of Ether and Zamharir, part of the sublunar realm of gross
materiality and properly reckoned as the boundary of Earth.



When Suhrawardi alludes to a cosmological 'eight', he means the spheres that contain one or more heavenly body (i.e., Fixed-Stars to the Moon); 'nine' spheres will include the Great Sphere; 'seven' is the number of planetary bodies plus the Moon; and 'eleven' is the total number, including the two sublunar spheres to balance the two highest non-planetary spheres.



The Sun is always said to be in the middle.



In the most cosmologically detailed of the treatises, he gives the allegorical number of the "old men"-- the Intellects of the spheres-- as ten, i.e., the nine upper spheres plus one for the sublunar region.



As Suhrawardi explains, the Great Sphere, represented by the first old man of Treatise II, is much too subtle materially to hold onto the light that emanates from the Creator from without the realm of temporal existence: this sphere is the intermediary or bordeline between being and non-being and thus has but a shadowy hold on materiality so that the emanating light passes through it without being captured.



The dual nature of this sphere is also expressed in terms of the
Suhrawardian symbol of Gabriel's wings: the right wing being an abstraction of the relation of the Prime Intellect (Gabriel) to God's being, is pure "light", i.e. without any taint of "darkness" or materiality, and it is divine in attribute, and represents absolute being.



The left wing, on the other hand, is the essential realization of non-being
as posited in the soul. Thus the Great Sphere (or right wing), with regard to form , is as near to "nothing" as anything can be and still be "something"; while in terms of attribute or predication of God, it is the most "something" that exists. In ontological terms, the Great Sphere is the intermediary between material, temporal and spatial existence and immaterial existence.



It is symbolically represented by Mount Qaf, the mythic mountain range that surrounds the earth.



As the light emanating from the Creator reaches the second sphere, it is
shattered into myriads of small bits, much as a globule of mercury breaks up on a large spinning plate. These small bits of light are the Fixed Stars of the Constellations and Signs of the Zodiac, the primal "workshops" of Treatise III.




Because this sphere is close to the first, it is still too diffuse in force
to capture much light, for which reason the stars of this sphere appear dim
in relation to the light of the planets, which, having much smaller spheres,
are made of coalesced fragments of the light that escape from the sphere
of the fixed stars.



The greatest amount of luminosity belongs to the Sun by virture of its
middle position, where the equilibrium provides the resistance necessary to generate the force to hold enormous luminosty.



From the Sun down to the Earth, the amount of luminosity decreases until
the Moon is reached. In its position as the farthest from the source of
light, and because it has no sphere in its convex, the Moon has no
luminosity of its own and merely reflects the light it receives from the
Sun...



The realm of temporality and spatiality, represented cosmollogically by
the celestial spheres, is finite in extent. Beyond the Great Sphere there is
nothing of matter; and it is this very immaterial, atemporal and non-spatial
realm that the soul must strive to attain in order to regain the original
homeland.



Thus the bird-soul of Treatise I crosses eight mountains to reach the court of the great king, so also must the hawk [Treatise III] traverse the eleven mountains of Qaf when delivered of its bondage.



In all cases, it is matter composed of the four elements (fire, water, earth
and air) and what is coincident with it, that have fettered the soul and
prevent it from escaping its temporary imprisonment.



That which is conjoined with the material, a divisible thing... necessarily
temporal, cannot by its nature comprehend the immaterial eternal.



If we think in Avicennan terms of a vertical orientation ...an orientation
such that "down here" (this corporeal world) is the "west" of this world and
"out there"(the spiritual realm beyond the senses) is the "east" (*mashriq,
lit. "the point whence the dawning rays of the sun emanate) of the "other
world", i.e., the world of the unseen from which the rays of the spiritual
sun arise, then the quest of the soul to regain that original "east" will be
expressed in an external , "vertical" pilgrimage up through the spheres and
ultimately out of the created universe.



In this manner the birds of Treatise I make their quest across the mountains, each representative of one of the celetial spheres, until they finally come to the cities atop the last mountain, where the [beautiful King] dwells... symbolic of the Prime Intellect. The king tells the birds that the remants of the fetters that have clung to their legs since they were trapped by the senses in the oblivion of the material world can be removed only by those who put them there in the first place.



The pilgrimage of the individual soul must inevitably end thus. Although
the soul may attain its goal of finding the "king",  it must return whence it
came and conquer the materiality that has ensared it from the beginning.



Note:  Suhrawardi uses the Arabic word latif to describe the substance of the spheres. In order to avoid the ambiguous term "immaterial", the word "subtle" has been used throughout the translation...




(from The Mystical and Visionary Treatises of Suhrawardi,  translated and introduced by W.M. Thackston, Jr., Octagon Press, 1982.)