Sufism
by Idries Shah
from The Oxford Companion to the Mind (1987)
Sufi individuals and groups became publicly known in Arabia in the 8th century. As mystics, esteemed for religious piety, they were able to exercise the role of mentors of devotion and conduct in the theocratic community of Islam. Observers have been attempting, for 1,000 years, to categorize them, but conventional assessment has proved extremely difficult. Accepting Muhammad the Prophet as the originator of the current phase of Sufi manifestation, they also regard Jesus as a Sufi: while one of the greatest of all Sufis, Jalaluddin Rumi, openly declared that many non-Muslims understood Sufism better than ordinary Muslims. Al-Ghazzali, one of the foremost Sufis, is credited with having saved Islamic thought from dissolution by Greek philosophy. From his time (d. 1111) all Islamic thought may be regarded as being indebted to Sufism. Like all gnostic systems, Sufism regards conduct as secondary, and divine illumination as primary. Sufi masters are therefore those who, having experienced the 'path' to such cognition, are able to guide others along it and also to relate it to terrestrial social needs.
There are three distinct ways in which assessment of this powerful and extraordinary movement has been approached:
(i) The largely Western, scholarly approach, which has sought to analyse literature, seek origins, and identify affinities. The multiplicity of resemblances between Sufi thought and practices and those of other systems has led many of the followers of this technique to 'proof by selected instances'. According to which expert one reads, therefore, one will find Sufism attributed to Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, animist, or other origins. A listing of the proofs invoked by such students shows that they cancel one another out.
(ii) The conclusions reached by Muslim non-Sufis, mainly in the East, over the centuries. Nasrollah Fatemi (1976) provides a summary:
"To some it denotes humanitarianism, tolerance, harmony ... love of mankind and the attempt to achieve spiritual fellowship. To a few, the Sufis are dreamers, rebels and meddlers who interfere with the serious rituals of the church and the business of the state.
"To others, they are the conscience of society and the antennae of the community, who exhibit in their activities a pronounced concern for humanity [and] the values that lie at the core of society, and who accuse the civil and religious authorities of lacking social conscience. The Sufis felt the need to resist the corrupt, tyrannical and arrogant, to ridicule the cruel rich and merciless might, to exalt the low and to help the helpless."
(iii) The assertions made by the Sufis themselves about what they are and what they do and why they do it.
Although it cannot be expected that the Sufis' contentions about themselves will be accepted by those with different assumptions, it can be seen that the Sufi rationale provides a better explanation than has been offered heretofore by members of the outside observing groups. The Sufis say that they have no history, because Sufism is experience, not recording information. Their goal is attaining knowledge of a higher reality, of which familiar religion is a lower level: that of social and psychological balance. When the goal is attained, the Sufi acquires not only knowledge of the divine (and of extra-dimensional reality) but also functions associated with it which are not to be confused with repetitious observance or emotional stimulus. Those alone who have reached this stage may properly be called 'Sufis'. Anyone else is 'on the Path', or a 'dervish', roughly equivalent to a monk or friar. It is this belief that gnosis commands action of all kinds that explains, according to the Sufis, why they are found in so many branches of literature, philosophy, science, administration, and so on. Their instrumental intervention is directed from beyond conventional limitations and, the doctrine continues, cannot be imprisoned in repetitious activity. Although this assertion is not necessarily acceptable to contemporary Western workers, the rich writings of the Sufis have in recent years interested psychologists and sociologists. Sufism itself was 'named' by August Thöluck, in his Sufismus, sive Theosophia Persarum pantheistica, published in Berlin in 1821. Before that it was known as Islamic mysticism and by a number of other names, such as Divine Wisdom (extracted by letter–number substitution cipher from the Arabic).
Sufi 'orders' came into being much later than teachers and schools, and they clearly resemble traditional orders in, for example, Christianity. The orders are therefore regarded as secondary, and few, if any, of their putative founders, famous Sufi masters, were really connected with their establishment. Their practices are mostly of a devotional auto-hypnotic nature, and produce conditioned states which are much at variance with essential Sufi theory relating to the need for individual and specific teaching. Most groups which employ the name Sufi in the Middle and Far East and Africa are in fact Islamic prayer congregations of the enthusiast type. Many closely resemble formal churches of whatever religion, and hence have an attraction for people brought up in parallel systems.
The Sufis enjoy, on the whole, a high reputation in the East, and have been extensively appreciated by non-Islamic religionists and scholars, including Western mystics. The numerous extrasensory manifestations which have always been associated with Sufi activity are regarded by the Sufis themselves as undesirable and preliminary (at best) phases; although they continue to excite those who attempt to study such things. At the present time, self-deluded and spurious 'Sufis' abound, in the East and West, as in the case of all enterprises of this nature.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography:
Burke, O. M. (1973). Among the Dervishes.
Eastwick, E. B. (1974). The Rose-Garden of Sheikh Muslihu'd-Din Sadi of Shiraz.
Fatemi, N. S. (1976). Sufism.
Lewin, L. (ed.) (1976). The Elephant in the Dark.
Shah, I. (1968, 1971). The Way of the Sufi.
Shushtery, A. M. A. (1966). Outlines of Islamic Culture.
Subhan, J. A. (1938). Sufism: Its Saints and Shrines.
Whinfield, E. H. (trans.) (1975). Teachings of Rumi.
Williams, L. F. R. (ed.) (1973). Sufi Studies: East and West.
Sunday, May 24, 2015
Monday, March 16, 2015
Islamic Philosophers and Sufis
entries written by Idries Shah
for the Oxford Companion to the Mind (1987)
Islamic Philosophy
A traditional occidental theme is that the thinkers of Islam were mere synthesizers of Greek and other traditions (such as those of India and Persia) and made no original contribution to human thought. This simplistic view originates with the assumption that such work as that of Avicenna was the totality of Islam's philosophy: which in turn is understandable when it is realized what a profound effect Avicenna had upon the Schoolmen.
The importance of Avicenna's thought for the West cannot be overestimated. Both in its negative aspect, such as the necessity of everything, and its more sympathetic notions, it offered a stimulus to the West. It was par excellence a combination of Neoplatonism and Aristotle, transforming the One into a first mover from whom all existence ultimately sprang. For Christian thinkers it offered especial attraction in distinguishing God from His creatures in terms of being; in holding essence to be the foundation of all existence; in making the effect dependent for both its being and its movement on what was prior to it; and in regarding all knowledge as the result of illumination. (Leff 1958: 154 f.)
Characteristically, T. P. Hughes's massive Dictionary of Islam of 1885 (1964 edn., p. 452) baldly repeats: 'The whole philosophy of the Arabians was only a form of Aristotelianism tempered more or less with Neo-Platonic conceptions.' More recently this generalization has been challenged with great vigour by both Muslim and Western scholars.
The Arab conquest and occupation of eastern and western lands from the early 8th century produced intense intellectual activity in centres of learning as widely dispersed as Baghdad and Spain, Bukhara and Egypt. The study and exercise of traditional knowledge were directly linked to the Prophet's dictum, accepted with the force of law: 'Seek knowledge even unto China.' During much of the thousand years of the period known as the Dark Ages in Europe, the Islamic centres of learning were major agents for the preservation and transmission of accumulated knowledge, those of Spain especially being a magnet for Christian scholars. 'The Christian West became acquainted with Aristotle by way of Avicenna, Al-Farabi, and Algazel (Al-Ghazzali). Gundisalvus' own encyclopedia of knowledge relies in the main on the information he had drawn from Arabian sources' (Guillaume 1949: s.v. 'Philosophy and theology', p. 246).
Many Islamic theorists, including Al-Ghazzali, were even believed by European scholars of the time to be Christian divines. The widespread belief that the Arabian schools were the great source of wisdom was later replaced, particularly in Victorian thought, by the thesis that they were merely run by copyists of the Greeks. More comprehensive study from a wider perspective has indicated that original contributions began to appear as the period of translation of classics and the absorption of ancient teaching advanced, after the 8th century. Work published during the 20th century has increasingly asserted unexpected anticipations of relatively modern Western thought by the major Islamic philosophers, especially from the 9th to the 15th centuries.
Typically, M. S. Sheikh (1982: p. x and passim) has propounded themes in the systems of Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Al-Ghazzali, Ibn Khaldun, and others as prefigurings of the ideas of Descartes (methodological doubt and cogito, ergo sum) and Spinoza (idealism), of Cartesian occasionalism, of Leibnizian pre-established harmony, of Kant (antinomies of pure reason and metaphysical agnosticism), Hegel (panlogism and the notion of the absolute), and Hume (denial of causality), of Bergson's creative evolutionism, and even of logicism and positivism. The Indian Muslim poet and thinker Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1876–1938) is the best-known Islamic philosopher of modern times.
In the Islamic world, in addition to the many customary preoccupations of philosophy as expressed in logic, ethics, method, knowledge, and political thought, there were also a vast number of exponents and schools of religious philosophy and metaphysics (seen as mysticism). Among the most important were the Islamic theologians and the Sufis. The works of the latter are today increasingly studied by both East and West in newer disciplines such as psychology and sociology.
From the comparative point of view, the picture of the Islamic contribution that emerges indicates the relative freedom of speculation within the culture, as contrasted with the somewhat more restricted categories of the West in the same epoch. This may be because Islam has never had a central ideological disciplinary institution which could succeed in imposing dogmatic authority over large populations for long periods of time, and because the door of reinterpretation of the limits of philosophical speculation has remained open, being the responsibility of the courts, in the absence of a priesthood.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography:
De Boer, T. J. (1961). The History of Philosophy in Islam. Trans. E. R. Jones
Guillaume, A. (1949). The Legacy of Islam.
Hashimi, A. Al- (1973). Islamic Philosophy and Western Thinkers.
Hitti, P. K. (1951). History of the Arabs.
Houtsma, W. T., et al. (eds.) (1908–38). The Encyclopedia of Islam and Supplement.
Leff, G. (1958). Medieval Thought: St Augustine to Ockham.
Nicholson, R. A. (1966). A Literary History of the Arabs.
O'Leary, D. (1954). Arabic Thought and its Place in History.
Schacht, J., and Bosworth, C. E. (eds.) (1974). The Legacy of Islam (2nd edn.).
Sheikh, M. S. (1982). Islamic Philosophy.
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Al-Kindi
(Abu-Yusuf YaʼQub Ibn-Ishaq)
(803–73).
The first Arab philosopher. Born at Al-Kufah, now in Iraq, of a southern Arabian family, he worked mainly in Baghdad. He attempted to combine the views of Plato and Aristotle, and his collation of the Theologia ascribed to Aristotle had considerable influence on philosophy and theology in both East and West until the time of St Thomas Aquinas.
Al-Kindi was a polymath, like almost all of the major Islamic philosophers: an optician, music theorist, pharmacist, and mathematician; he wrote 265 treatises, most of them now lost. He saw the universe as an architectonic whole, not as something to be observed piecemeal to discover causality. He asserted 'one of the most marked features of Islamic thought — the belief that there was only one active intellect for all humanity, and that every human soul was moved and informed by this separated active intellect' (Leff 1958). More of his work survives in Latin (such as in the translations by Gerard of Cremona) than in Arabic. One of his major scientific contributions was De aspectibus, on the Optics of Euclid, which influenced Roger Bacon. His works show that mensural music was studied in his culture centuries before it appeared in the Latin West.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Abdulwahab Emiri (1976). The Scientists of Islam.
Hitti, P. K. (1951). History of the Arabs.
Leff, G. (1958). Medieval Thought.
Sheikh, M. S. (1982). Islamic Philosophy.
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Al-Farabi
(Muhammad Ibn-Muhammad Ibn-Tarkhan Ibn-Uzlagh Abu-Nasr Al-Farabi, or Alpharabius)
(870–950). The first great Turkic exponent of Islamic philosophy. Born in Farab, Sughd, now in Uzbekistan, he studied at Baghdad and taught as a Sufi at Aleppo, now in Syria. He states that he read Aristotle's De anima 200 times; he was certainly so well versed in it that he gained the Arabic title of Al-Muʼallim al-Thani — the Second Teacher (after Aristotle). The author of over a hundred volumes, he lived simply, taking employment as a night watchman so that he could work by the light of the lantern provided.
He harmonized Greek philosophy with Islamic thinking, thus continuing the work of Al-Kindi and preceding Avicenna; his considerations covered logic and rhetoric, geometry, psychology, and politics. Baron Carra de Vaux and others state that the logic of Farabi had a permanent effect upon the thought of the Latin Schoolmen.
Farabi believed that God exists as the only ultimate reality and unity, intermediary agencies successively producing the world as we know it through conventional avenues of perception. Human society he regards as emerging through two impulses: a social contract not unlike that later proposed by Rousseau, and an urge prefiguring the Nietzschean will to power. Society, for Farabi, realizes its perfection (the Ideal City) through a ruler who has become a divine agent, or alternatively by the administration of a group of wise men, each specializing in one subject. The capacity to be detached from objects and concerns enables a human being to go beyond familiar dimensions, transcending the ignorance produced by regarding secondary phenomena, such as time and space, as primary.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Hammond, R. (1947). The Philosophy of Alfarabi and its Influence on Medieval Thought.
Sheikh, M. S. (1982). Islamic Philosophy.
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Avicenna
(Abu ʼAli al-Hussein ibn-ʼAbdallah ibn-Sina)
(980–1037).
Islamic philosopher and eminent physician, born at Afshana, near Bukhara, called by the Arabs Al-Sheikh al-Rais, 'Chief and Leader (of thinkers)'. His Canon of Medicine was the standard work, in Europe as in the East, until the 17th century. He was a royal physician at the age of 17.
Avicenna's philosophy exercised, through 12th-century translations, a considerable influence upon Western thinkers, his major work being the eighteen-volume Book of Recovery, written in eighteen months. He follows Al-Farabi in ideas, though his work is regarded by scholars as more lucid, dealing with the distinction between necessary and possible being. Among the terms and concepts that he bequeathed to human thought is intentio (ma ʼqulat), the intellectually intelligible. His theme is that the entire universe is constituted of essences: all existing things have specific essences. 'A horse', he says, 'is a horse.' He holds that all the senses are secondary, being divisions of an inner sense, which is common to all. All reality as we know it derives from one ultimate, unitary reality: God — but not directly. There are agencies that, in a series of actions, cause the apparent differences between phenomena.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Hitti, P. K. (1951). History of the Arabs.
Wickers, G. M. (ed.) (1952). Avicenna: Scientist and Philosopher.
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Ibn Hazm
(ʼAli ibn-Hazm, 994–1064)
A native of Córdoba, Spain, he was the first scholar of comparative religion, and Hitti (1951) characterizes him as anticipating theological problems only arising in Christian Europe in the 16th century. Guillaume (1949), in referring to this author of over 400 books, accepted in the West as the greatest scholar and the most original thinker of Spanish Islam (see Islamic philosophy), notes that he composed 'Europe's first Religions-geschichte and the first systematic higher critical study of the Old and New Testaments'. This is his Al-Fasl fiʼl-Milal wʼal-Ahwaʼ wʼal-Nihal (the Decisive Word on Sects, Heterodoxies, and Denominations), but he also wrote love poems. In The Necklace of the Dove he extols platonic love, and his romanticism is regarded as related to the Spanish–Arabian influence on the formation of the troubadour mentality.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Guillaume, A. (1949). 'Philosophy and theology'. In Arnold, T. (ed.), The Legacy of Islam.
Hitti, P. K. (1951). History of the Arabs.
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Al-Ghazzali
(Imam Abu-Hamid Ibn-Muhammad Al-Ghazzali, or Algazel)
(1058–1111).
Born at Tus, Persia, originally a theologian and scholastic philosopher, and professor at the Nizamiyyah College in Baghdad, Ghazzali is known as Hujjat al-Islam (Proof of Islam) and is one of Islam's greatest thinkers. He decided that ultimate truth could not be attained by intellectual means, and became a Sufi. He influenced all subsequent Sufic thought as well as many Western philosophers and theologians. His Ihya Ulum al-Din (Revival of the Sciences of Religion) is a classic which is widely believed to have had a great (some believe determining) effect upon Europe, through Latin and Hebrew translations, especially in his method of criticizing hypotheses and assumptions. Jehuda Halevi (in his Khazari) follows the Ghazzalian method as found in the remarkable Incoherence of the Philosophers, and the first Hebrew translations of the influential Maqasid al-Falasifah (Aims of the Philosophers) were made by Isaac Albalagh, c.1292, and by Judah ben Solomon Nathan, c.1340. The Dominican Raymund Martin (d. 1285) used Ghazzali's arguments in his Explanatio symboli apostolorum and Pugio fidei, continually quoting the devout Islamic thinker in support of Christian ideas. St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) also cites Ghazzali. Blaise Pascal, writing on belief in God, echoes Ghazzali's Ihya, Kimia, and other writings, while Pascal's theory of knowledge (in Pensées sur la religion) closely follows Ghazzali's book Al-Munqidh. Ghazzali's work is as widely studied today as it ever was.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Kamali, S. A. (trans.) (1963). Tahafat Al-Falasifah.
Shah, I. (1964). The Sufis.
Sheikh, M. S. (1982). Islamic Philosophy.
Watt, W. M. (1953). The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazzali.
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Ibn Bajjah
(Abu-Bakr Muhammad ibn-Yahya ibn-al-Saʼigh, c.1106–38)
A major Islamic thinker, poet and musician, scientist, and mathematician, Ibn Bajjah was a forerunner of Averroës. Known to the Latin Schoolmen as Avempace, or Avenpace, he was born in Saragossa, Spain, and known in his lifetime as the prime exponent of Aristotelian thought after Avicenna. He follows Al-Farabi and his work greatly influenced Ibn Tufail. Averroës himself states that his own ideas of mind are derived from Ibn Bajjah. His ʼIlm al-Nafs (Science of the Soul) is the earliest text hitherto known that gives the gist of all the three books of the De anima of Aristotle, and he is known, among other things, to Western scholars for his theory of separate substances, which they adopted from him. In his Guide to the Solitary he deals with the soul's return to reality by detaching itself from matter.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Leff, G. (1958). Medieval Thought.
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Hakim Sanai
(or Khwajah Abu-al-Majd Majdud ibn-Adam Sanai, c.1046–?1141)
A native of Ghazna in present-day Afghanistan, he was a major Sufi teacher and author, acknowledged by Rumi as one of his inspirers. He wrote an enormous quantity of mystical verse, of which his Hadiqa (Walled Garden of Truth, 1131) is his masterwork and the first Persian mystical epic of Sufism. He taught that lust and greed, emotional excitement, stood between humankind and divine knowledge, which was the only true reality. Love and a social conscience are for him the foundation of religion; mankind is asleep, living in what is in fact a desolate world. Religion as commonly understood is only habit and ritual.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Sanai, Hakim (1976). The Walled Garden of Truth. Trans. D. Pendlebury.
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Fariduddin Attar
(abu-Talib/Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn-Abu-Bakr Ibrahim, ibn-Mustafa ibn-Shaʼban Farid-al-Din Attar, ‘The Druggist’ d. 1220/1230)
Born at Kadkan, near Nishapur, Persia, one of the major Sufi teachers, and acknowledged by Jalauddin Rumi as one of his inspirers, Attar wrote at least 30 books. The most famous is the classical Mantiq at-Tair (The Bird Discourse, or Parliament), thought by some to have influenced Chaucer in his Parliament of Fowls. A major authoritative compilation is his Tadhkirat al-Awliya (Recapitulation of the Saints), with biographies of Sufi teachers down the centuries, partially translated by A. J. Arberry. Also highly esteemed is his Pand-Nama (Book of Counsel) and the Asrar-Nama (Book of Secrets). The Ilahi-Nama he composed while working at his pharmacy, where he had 500 patients; and it was this work which he presented to Rumi when, as a small boy, he passed through Nishapur with his father in 1212. The Mantiq is an allegory of human psychological reactions to the problems encountered on the Sufi way, with each individual bird in turn displaying his hopes, fears, and inadequacies. The birds of the world have elected the hoopoe as their leader in the spiritual quest, and he has to deal with their reactions, in the manner of a Sufi teacher. The purpose of the journey is to seek the king of the birds, the immortal Simurgh (Persian homonym for 'thirty birds'). Ultimately the pilgrims reach the throne and find, when a curtain is drawn aside, that they are looking into a mirror: the collective (human) soul is seen to be the divine one, which differentiation conceals from ordinary consciousness.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Arberry, A. J. (trans.) (1966). Muslim Saints and Mystics: Selections from the Tadhkirat.
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IbnʼArabi
(Ibn Al-ʼArabi, Sheikh Abu-Bakr Muhammad ibn-ʼAli Muhyiuddin, called the Greatest Sheikh/Sheikh Al-Akbar/Doctor Maximus, 1164–1240)
He was born in Murcia, Spain, a descendant of the illustrious Arabian family of Hatim Tai, and died in Damascus. His work influenced Western thought and literature: for example, Asín Palacios and others have argued for textual copying by Dante in the Divine Comedy. He was a most influential Sufi teacher who wrote, according toJami, over 500 works, mostly in Mecca and Damascus; in 1234 he himself reckoned them at 298 volumes. About 90 are extant, mostly in manuscript. Ibn ʼArabi's Tadbirat (Managements) is an important manual of Sufi training. The Fusus al-Hikam (Bezels, or Phases, of Wisdom), written in 1230, is his best-known work. Each of its 27 chapters is named after a prophet or teacher and deals with the Sufi principles which that teacher is said to represent. He is associated with the doctrine of Unity of Being (Wahdat al-Wujud), which is characterized by his critics as pantheism. Although he claimed to have no master and to have been initiated into Sufism by Khidr, a spiritual being, A. E. Affifi (1939) places him firmly in the context of the Spanish Sufi thought of his time. His work constantly appeals to the Koran and traditions of Muhammad, though his interpretations are idiosyncratic. Two other major works are The Meccan Revelations and The Interpreter of Desires, both attacked by pietists as mere love poetry but successfully defended by the author as mystical allegories. By a curious tradition in the East, pious men sporadically assemble groups of students and charge them with the literary study of Ibn ʼArabi's works. The intention is either to exhaust their capacity for research, or for them to discover the authorities who state that Ibn ʼArabi's works are not meant to be understood but to produce bafflement. This realization, according to these Sufis, drives the students to seek the current living exemplar of the teaching who alone can explain the writings.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Affifi, A. E. (1939). The Mystical Philosophy of Muhiyid Din Ibnul Arabi.
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Jalaluddin Rumi
Oxford Companion to the Jalaluddin Rumi
(or Jalaluddin Muhammad Ibn Bahauddin Walad al-Khatibi al-Bakri al-Balkhi, 1207–73)
One of the greatest Sufis and a major Persian poet and thinker. Born of a royal and caliphial line of distinguished scholars in Balkh (present-day Afghanistan), he taught and died in Iconium (Konya, today Asiatic Turkey). His pen-name (literally 'of Rome' or 'the (eastern) Roman') was chosen, by poetic substitution cipher, because it represented both the town of his adoption and the Perso-Arabic word Nur ('light'). He acknowledges the Sufi masters Attar and Sanai as his 'two eyes', and they are undoubtedly his spiritual precursors. His major work is the Mathnawi-i-Maanawi (Poem of Inner Meaning), which was something like 40 years in the writing. His theme as a guide to mystical experience is that man in the ordinary state is cut off ('veiled') from higher perceptions by lower, usually emotional, stimuli. This state is often found in both the learned and the emotionalist: addiction to vice or to imagined virtue are both forms of idolatry, which cause 'veiling'. Teaching people to hate evil and covet sanctity is training in hatred and covetousness more than an approach to goodness or holiness. Bad things cannot be avoided, or good ones approached, he insists, by such crude and ignorant methods. The following major themes give an idea of his teaching.Conventional religious systems are secondary, imitative, and limited: 'Do not attach yourself to the brick of the wall — seek instead the eternal original.' A teacher is essential: 'Water needs a medium between it and the fire, if it is to heat correctly.' Laymen cannot evaluate mystical masters: ' "This ruin may seem a prosperous place to you: for me, the better place is on the King's wrist," said the Hawk. Some owls cried, "He is lying to steal our home!"' Sufi knowledge involves escaping from familiar dimensions: 'You belong to the world of dimension: but you come from non-dimension. Close the first "shop", open the second.' Knowledge of Objective Truth (God) is developed through love and self-knowledge: 'Ultimate Truth is reached by Love, that special love of which worldly love is a crude analogue: HE is within you!'
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Nicholson, R. A. (1926). The Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi.
Shah, I. (1966). Special Problems in the Study of Sufi Ideas.
— — (1974). The Elephant in the Dark.
— — (1978). The Hundred Tales of Wisdom: Materials from the Life and Teachings of Rumi.
Whinfield, E. H. (1974). Teachings of Rumi.
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Ibn Khaldun
(Abu-Zaid Abd-al-Rahman ibn-Khaldun, 1332–1406)
Born in Tunis, he was one of the greatest Islamic scholars of Moorish Spain, Arab ambassador to Pedro the Cruel, judge, and professor of jurisprudence at Cairo. Author of the Muqaddima (Introduction), the first analysis of history by political and social pattern, Ibn Khaldun is regarded as the 'father of the science of history' and one of the founders of sociology. A Sufi by persuasion, he is buried in the Sufi cemetery near Cairo where he died.
Ibn Khaldun was an historian, politician, sociologist, economist, a deep student of human affairs, anxious to analyse the past of mankind in order to understand its present and future ... one of the first philosophers of history, a forerunner of Machiavelli, Bodin, Vico, Comte and Cournot (Sarton 1927–48: iii. 1262).
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Dawood, N. J. (ed.) (1967). The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Trans. F. Rosenthal.
Gellner, E. A. (1981). Muslim Society.
Sarton, G. (1927–48). Introduction to the History of Science (repr. 1975).
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Jami
(Mulla Nuruddin ?Abdurrahman ibn-Ahmad)
1414–92).
Jami, who was born in Jam, Khurasan, and died in Herat, modern Afghanistan, is often called the last great classical poet of the Persian language. He was a most prolific writer and a great scholar, as well as being a mystic of the Naqshbandiyya (Designers) School of Sufis. For him, God alone is absolute truth, and human duty is to reach this truth through love. In his Lawaʼih (Flashes) are the short utterances which encapsulate his teaching, while Nahfat al-Uns (Fragrances of Companionship) is a considerable work treating the lives of 611 male and female Sufi sages. His Silsilat al-Dhahab (Chain of Gold) resembles Sanai's Walled Garden, and his Baharistan(Land of Spring) may have been suggested by Saadi's Rose Garden. In personality he was remarkably straightforward and free from cant, and he expected this behaviour in others: the traditional Naqshbandi attitude. His sense of humour was remarkable. When he was on his deathbed and Koran readers had been brought in, he exclaimed: 'What is all this commotion — can't you see that I am dying?'
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Browne, E. G. (1964). A Literary History of Persia.
Davis, F. H. (1967). Jami, the Persian Mystic.
for the Oxford Companion to the Mind (1987)
Islamic Philosophy
A traditional occidental theme is that the thinkers of Islam were mere synthesizers of Greek and other traditions (such as those of India and Persia) and made no original contribution to human thought. This simplistic view originates with the assumption that such work as that of Avicenna was the totality of Islam's philosophy: which in turn is understandable when it is realized what a profound effect Avicenna had upon the Schoolmen.
The importance of Avicenna's thought for the West cannot be overestimated. Both in its negative aspect, such as the necessity of everything, and its more sympathetic notions, it offered a stimulus to the West. It was par excellence a combination of Neoplatonism and Aristotle, transforming the One into a first mover from whom all existence ultimately sprang. For Christian thinkers it offered especial attraction in distinguishing God from His creatures in terms of being; in holding essence to be the foundation of all existence; in making the effect dependent for both its being and its movement on what was prior to it; and in regarding all knowledge as the result of illumination. (Leff 1958: 154 f.)
Characteristically, T. P. Hughes's massive Dictionary of Islam of 1885 (1964 edn., p. 452) baldly repeats: 'The whole philosophy of the Arabians was only a form of Aristotelianism tempered more or less with Neo-Platonic conceptions.' More recently this generalization has been challenged with great vigour by both Muslim and Western scholars.
The Arab conquest and occupation of eastern and western lands from the early 8th century produced intense intellectual activity in centres of learning as widely dispersed as Baghdad and Spain, Bukhara and Egypt. The study and exercise of traditional knowledge were directly linked to the Prophet's dictum, accepted with the force of law: 'Seek knowledge even unto China.' During much of the thousand years of the period known as the Dark Ages in Europe, the Islamic centres of learning were major agents for the preservation and transmission of accumulated knowledge, those of Spain especially being a magnet for Christian scholars. 'The Christian West became acquainted with Aristotle by way of Avicenna, Al-Farabi, and Algazel (Al-Ghazzali). Gundisalvus' own encyclopedia of knowledge relies in the main on the information he had drawn from Arabian sources' (Guillaume 1949: s.v. 'Philosophy and theology', p. 246).
Many Islamic theorists, including Al-Ghazzali, were even believed by European scholars of the time to be Christian divines. The widespread belief that the Arabian schools were the great source of wisdom was later replaced, particularly in Victorian thought, by the thesis that they were merely run by copyists of the Greeks. More comprehensive study from a wider perspective has indicated that original contributions began to appear as the period of translation of classics and the absorption of ancient teaching advanced, after the 8th century. Work published during the 20th century has increasingly asserted unexpected anticipations of relatively modern Western thought by the major Islamic philosophers, especially from the 9th to the 15th centuries.
Typically, M. S. Sheikh (1982: p. x and passim) has propounded themes in the systems of Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Al-Ghazzali, Ibn Khaldun, and others as prefigurings of the ideas of Descartes (methodological doubt and cogito, ergo sum) and Spinoza (idealism), of Cartesian occasionalism, of Leibnizian pre-established harmony, of Kant (antinomies of pure reason and metaphysical agnosticism), Hegel (panlogism and the notion of the absolute), and Hume (denial of causality), of Bergson's creative evolutionism, and even of logicism and positivism. The Indian Muslim poet and thinker Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1876–1938) is the best-known Islamic philosopher of modern times.
In the Islamic world, in addition to the many customary preoccupations of philosophy as expressed in logic, ethics, method, knowledge, and political thought, there were also a vast number of exponents and schools of religious philosophy and metaphysics (seen as mysticism). Among the most important were the Islamic theologians and the Sufis. The works of the latter are today increasingly studied by both East and West in newer disciplines such as psychology and sociology.
From the comparative point of view, the picture of the Islamic contribution that emerges indicates the relative freedom of speculation within the culture, as contrasted with the somewhat more restricted categories of the West in the same epoch. This may be because Islam has never had a central ideological disciplinary institution which could succeed in imposing dogmatic authority over large populations for long periods of time, and because the door of reinterpretation of the limits of philosophical speculation has remained open, being the responsibility of the courts, in the absence of a priesthood.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography:
De Boer, T. J. (1961). The History of Philosophy in Islam. Trans. E. R. Jones
Guillaume, A. (1949). The Legacy of Islam.
Hashimi, A. Al- (1973). Islamic Philosophy and Western Thinkers.
Hitti, P. K. (1951). History of the Arabs.
Houtsma, W. T., et al. (eds.) (1908–38). The Encyclopedia of Islam and Supplement.
Leff, G. (1958). Medieval Thought: St Augustine to Ockham.
Nicholson, R. A. (1966). A Literary History of the Arabs.
O'Leary, D. (1954). Arabic Thought and its Place in History.
Schacht, J., and Bosworth, C. E. (eds.) (1974). The Legacy of Islam (2nd edn.).
Sheikh, M. S. (1982). Islamic Philosophy.
***********
Al-Kindi
(Abu-Yusuf YaʼQub Ibn-Ishaq)
(803–73).
The first Arab philosopher. Born at Al-Kufah, now in Iraq, of a southern Arabian family, he worked mainly in Baghdad. He attempted to combine the views of Plato and Aristotle, and his collation of the Theologia ascribed to Aristotle had considerable influence on philosophy and theology in both East and West until the time of St Thomas Aquinas.
Al-Kindi was a polymath, like almost all of the major Islamic philosophers: an optician, music theorist, pharmacist, and mathematician; he wrote 265 treatises, most of them now lost. He saw the universe as an architectonic whole, not as something to be observed piecemeal to discover causality. He asserted 'one of the most marked features of Islamic thought — the belief that there was only one active intellect for all humanity, and that every human soul was moved and informed by this separated active intellect' (Leff 1958). More of his work survives in Latin (such as in the translations by Gerard of Cremona) than in Arabic. One of his major scientific contributions was De aspectibus, on the Optics of Euclid, which influenced Roger Bacon. His works show that mensural music was studied in his culture centuries before it appeared in the Latin West.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Abdulwahab Emiri (1976). The Scientists of Islam.
Hitti, P. K. (1951). History of the Arabs.
Leff, G. (1958). Medieval Thought.
Sheikh, M. S. (1982). Islamic Philosophy.
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Al-Farabi
(Muhammad Ibn-Muhammad Ibn-Tarkhan Ibn-Uzlagh Abu-Nasr Al-Farabi, or Alpharabius)
(870–950). The first great Turkic exponent of Islamic philosophy. Born in Farab, Sughd, now in Uzbekistan, he studied at Baghdad and taught as a Sufi at Aleppo, now in Syria. He states that he read Aristotle's De anima 200 times; he was certainly so well versed in it that he gained the Arabic title of Al-Muʼallim al-Thani — the Second Teacher (after Aristotle). The author of over a hundred volumes, he lived simply, taking employment as a night watchman so that he could work by the light of the lantern provided.
He harmonized Greek philosophy with Islamic thinking, thus continuing the work of Al-Kindi and preceding Avicenna; his considerations covered logic and rhetoric, geometry, psychology, and politics. Baron Carra de Vaux and others state that the logic of Farabi had a permanent effect upon the thought of the Latin Schoolmen.
Farabi believed that God exists as the only ultimate reality and unity, intermediary agencies successively producing the world as we know it through conventional avenues of perception. Human society he regards as emerging through two impulses: a social contract not unlike that later proposed by Rousseau, and an urge prefiguring the Nietzschean will to power. Society, for Farabi, realizes its perfection (the Ideal City) through a ruler who has become a divine agent, or alternatively by the administration of a group of wise men, each specializing in one subject. The capacity to be detached from objects and concerns enables a human being to go beyond familiar dimensions, transcending the ignorance produced by regarding secondary phenomena, such as time and space, as primary.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Hammond, R. (1947). The Philosophy of Alfarabi and its Influence on Medieval Thought.
Sheikh, M. S. (1982). Islamic Philosophy.
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Avicenna
(Abu ʼAli al-Hussein ibn-ʼAbdallah ibn-Sina)
(980–1037).
Islamic philosopher and eminent physician, born at Afshana, near Bukhara, called by the Arabs Al-Sheikh al-Rais, 'Chief and Leader (of thinkers)'. His Canon of Medicine was the standard work, in Europe as in the East, until the 17th century. He was a royal physician at the age of 17.
Avicenna's philosophy exercised, through 12th-century translations, a considerable influence upon Western thinkers, his major work being the eighteen-volume Book of Recovery, written in eighteen months. He follows Al-Farabi in ideas, though his work is regarded by scholars as more lucid, dealing with the distinction between necessary and possible being. Among the terms and concepts that he bequeathed to human thought is intentio (ma ʼqulat), the intellectually intelligible. His theme is that the entire universe is constituted of essences: all existing things have specific essences. 'A horse', he says, 'is a horse.' He holds that all the senses are secondary, being divisions of an inner sense, which is common to all. All reality as we know it derives from one ultimate, unitary reality: God — but not directly. There are agencies that, in a series of actions, cause the apparent differences between phenomena.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Hitti, P. K. (1951). History of the Arabs.
Wickers, G. M. (ed.) (1952). Avicenna: Scientist and Philosopher.
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Ibn Hazm
(ʼAli ibn-Hazm, 994–1064)
A native of Córdoba, Spain, he was the first scholar of comparative religion, and Hitti (1951) characterizes him as anticipating theological problems only arising in Christian Europe in the 16th century. Guillaume (1949), in referring to this author of over 400 books, accepted in the West as the greatest scholar and the most original thinker of Spanish Islam (see Islamic philosophy), notes that he composed 'Europe's first Religions-geschichte and the first systematic higher critical study of the Old and New Testaments'. This is his Al-Fasl fiʼl-Milal wʼal-Ahwaʼ wʼal-Nihal (the Decisive Word on Sects, Heterodoxies, and Denominations), but he also wrote love poems. In The Necklace of the Dove he extols platonic love, and his romanticism is regarded as related to the Spanish–Arabian influence on the formation of the troubadour mentality.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Guillaume, A. (1949). 'Philosophy and theology'. In Arnold, T. (ed.), The Legacy of Islam.
Hitti, P. K. (1951). History of the Arabs.
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Al-Ghazzali
(Imam Abu-Hamid Ibn-Muhammad Al-Ghazzali, or Algazel)
(1058–1111).
Born at Tus, Persia, originally a theologian and scholastic philosopher, and professor at the Nizamiyyah College in Baghdad, Ghazzali is known as Hujjat al-Islam (Proof of Islam) and is one of Islam's greatest thinkers. He decided that ultimate truth could not be attained by intellectual means, and became a Sufi. He influenced all subsequent Sufic thought as well as many Western philosophers and theologians. His Ihya Ulum al-Din (Revival of the Sciences of Religion) is a classic which is widely believed to have had a great (some believe determining) effect upon Europe, through Latin and Hebrew translations, especially in his method of criticizing hypotheses and assumptions. Jehuda Halevi (in his Khazari) follows the Ghazzalian method as found in the remarkable Incoherence of the Philosophers, and the first Hebrew translations of the influential Maqasid al-Falasifah (Aims of the Philosophers) were made by Isaac Albalagh, c.1292, and by Judah ben Solomon Nathan, c.1340. The Dominican Raymund Martin (d. 1285) used Ghazzali's arguments in his Explanatio symboli apostolorum and Pugio fidei, continually quoting the devout Islamic thinker in support of Christian ideas. St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) also cites Ghazzali. Blaise Pascal, writing on belief in God, echoes Ghazzali's Ihya, Kimia, and other writings, while Pascal's theory of knowledge (in Pensées sur la religion) closely follows Ghazzali's book Al-Munqidh. Ghazzali's work is as widely studied today as it ever was.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Kamali, S. A. (trans.) (1963). Tahafat Al-Falasifah.
Shah, I. (1964). The Sufis.
Sheikh, M. S. (1982). Islamic Philosophy.
Watt, W. M. (1953). The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazzali.
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Ibn Bajjah
(Abu-Bakr Muhammad ibn-Yahya ibn-al-Saʼigh, c.1106–38)
A major Islamic thinker, poet and musician, scientist, and mathematician, Ibn Bajjah was a forerunner of Averroës. Known to the Latin Schoolmen as Avempace, or Avenpace, he was born in Saragossa, Spain, and known in his lifetime as the prime exponent of Aristotelian thought after Avicenna. He follows Al-Farabi and his work greatly influenced Ibn Tufail. Averroës himself states that his own ideas of mind are derived from Ibn Bajjah. His ʼIlm al-Nafs (Science of the Soul) is the earliest text hitherto known that gives the gist of all the three books of the De anima of Aristotle, and he is known, among other things, to Western scholars for his theory of separate substances, which they adopted from him. In his Guide to the Solitary he deals with the soul's return to reality by detaching itself from matter.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Leff, G. (1958). Medieval Thought.
***********
Hakim Sanai
(or Khwajah Abu-al-Majd Majdud ibn-Adam Sanai, c.1046–?1141)
A native of Ghazna in present-day Afghanistan, he was a major Sufi teacher and author, acknowledged by Rumi as one of his inspirers. He wrote an enormous quantity of mystical verse, of which his Hadiqa (Walled Garden of Truth, 1131) is his masterwork and the first Persian mystical epic of Sufism. He taught that lust and greed, emotional excitement, stood between humankind and divine knowledge, which was the only true reality. Love and a social conscience are for him the foundation of religion; mankind is asleep, living in what is in fact a desolate world. Religion as commonly understood is only habit and ritual.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Sanai, Hakim (1976). The Walled Garden of Truth. Trans. D. Pendlebury.
***********
Fariduddin Attar
(abu-Talib/Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn-Abu-Bakr Ibrahim, ibn-Mustafa ibn-Shaʼban Farid-al-Din Attar, ‘The Druggist’ d. 1220/1230)
Born at Kadkan, near Nishapur, Persia, one of the major Sufi teachers, and acknowledged by Jalauddin Rumi as one of his inspirers, Attar wrote at least 30 books. The most famous is the classical Mantiq at-Tair (The Bird Discourse, or Parliament), thought by some to have influenced Chaucer in his Parliament of Fowls. A major authoritative compilation is his Tadhkirat al-Awliya (Recapitulation of the Saints), with biographies of Sufi teachers down the centuries, partially translated by A. J. Arberry. Also highly esteemed is his Pand-Nama (Book of Counsel) and the Asrar-Nama (Book of Secrets). The Ilahi-Nama he composed while working at his pharmacy, where he had 500 patients; and it was this work which he presented to Rumi when, as a small boy, he passed through Nishapur with his father in 1212. The Mantiq is an allegory of human psychological reactions to the problems encountered on the Sufi way, with each individual bird in turn displaying his hopes, fears, and inadequacies. The birds of the world have elected the hoopoe as their leader in the spiritual quest, and he has to deal with their reactions, in the manner of a Sufi teacher. The purpose of the journey is to seek the king of the birds, the immortal Simurgh (Persian homonym for 'thirty birds'). Ultimately the pilgrims reach the throne and find, when a curtain is drawn aside, that they are looking into a mirror: the collective (human) soul is seen to be the divine one, which differentiation conceals from ordinary consciousness.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Arberry, A. J. (trans.) (1966). Muslim Saints and Mystics: Selections from the Tadhkirat.
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IbnʼArabi
(Ibn Al-ʼArabi, Sheikh Abu-Bakr Muhammad ibn-ʼAli Muhyiuddin, called the Greatest Sheikh/Sheikh Al-Akbar/Doctor Maximus, 1164–1240)
He was born in Murcia, Spain, a descendant of the illustrious Arabian family of Hatim Tai, and died in Damascus. His work influenced Western thought and literature: for example, Asín Palacios and others have argued for textual copying by Dante in the Divine Comedy. He was a most influential Sufi teacher who wrote, according toJami, over 500 works, mostly in Mecca and Damascus; in 1234 he himself reckoned them at 298 volumes. About 90 are extant, mostly in manuscript. Ibn ʼArabi's Tadbirat (Managements) is an important manual of Sufi training. The Fusus al-Hikam (Bezels, or Phases, of Wisdom), written in 1230, is his best-known work. Each of its 27 chapters is named after a prophet or teacher and deals with the Sufi principles which that teacher is said to represent. He is associated with the doctrine of Unity of Being (Wahdat al-Wujud), which is characterized by his critics as pantheism. Although he claimed to have no master and to have been initiated into Sufism by Khidr, a spiritual being, A. E. Affifi (1939) places him firmly in the context of the Spanish Sufi thought of his time. His work constantly appeals to the Koran and traditions of Muhammad, though his interpretations are idiosyncratic. Two other major works are The Meccan Revelations and The Interpreter of Desires, both attacked by pietists as mere love poetry but successfully defended by the author as mystical allegories. By a curious tradition in the East, pious men sporadically assemble groups of students and charge them with the literary study of Ibn ʼArabi's works. The intention is either to exhaust their capacity for research, or for them to discover the authorities who state that Ibn ʼArabi's works are not meant to be understood but to produce bafflement. This realization, according to these Sufis, drives the students to seek the current living exemplar of the teaching who alone can explain the writings.
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Affifi, A. E. (1939). The Mystical Philosophy of Muhiyid Din Ibnul Arabi.
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Jalaluddin Rumi
Oxford Companion to the Jalaluddin Rumi
(or Jalaluddin Muhammad Ibn Bahauddin Walad al-Khatibi al-Bakri al-Balkhi, 1207–73)
One of the greatest Sufis and a major Persian poet and thinker. Born of a royal and caliphial line of distinguished scholars in Balkh (present-day Afghanistan), he taught and died in Iconium (Konya, today Asiatic Turkey). His pen-name (literally 'of Rome' or 'the (eastern) Roman') was chosen, by poetic substitution cipher, because it represented both the town of his adoption and the Perso-Arabic word Nur ('light'). He acknowledges the Sufi masters Attar and Sanai as his 'two eyes', and they are undoubtedly his spiritual precursors. His major work is the Mathnawi-i-Maanawi (Poem of Inner Meaning), which was something like 40 years in the writing. His theme as a guide to mystical experience is that man in the ordinary state is cut off ('veiled') from higher perceptions by lower, usually emotional, stimuli. This state is often found in both the learned and the emotionalist: addiction to vice or to imagined virtue are both forms of idolatry, which cause 'veiling'. Teaching people to hate evil and covet sanctity is training in hatred and covetousness more than an approach to goodness or holiness. Bad things cannot be avoided, or good ones approached, he insists, by such crude and ignorant methods. The following major themes give an idea of his teaching.Conventional religious systems are secondary, imitative, and limited: 'Do not attach yourself to the brick of the wall — seek instead the eternal original.' A teacher is essential: 'Water needs a medium between it and the fire, if it is to heat correctly.' Laymen cannot evaluate mystical masters: ' "This ruin may seem a prosperous place to you: for me, the better place is on the King's wrist," said the Hawk. Some owls cried, "He is lying to steal our home!"' Sufi knowledge involves escaping from familiar dimensions: 'You belong to the world of dimension: but you come from non-dimension. Close the first "shop", open the second.' Knowledge of Objective Truth (God) is developed through love and self-knowledge: 'Ultimate Truth is reached by Love, that special love of which worldly love is a crude analogue: HE is within you!'
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Nicholson, R. A. (1926). The Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi.
Shah, I. (1966). Special Problems in the Study of Sufi Ideas.
— — (1974). The Elephant in the Dark.
— — (1978). The Hundred Tales of Wisdom: Materials from the Life and Teachings of Rumi.
Whinfield, E. H. (1974). Teachings of Rumi.
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Ibn Khaldun
(Abu-Zaid Abd-al-Rahman ibn-Khaldun, 1332–1406)
Born in Tunis, he was one of the greatest Islamic scholars of Moorish Spain, Arab ambassador to Pedro the Cruel, judge, and professor of jurisprudence at Cairo. Author of the Muqaddima (Introduction), the first analysis of history by political and social pattern, Ibn Khaldun is regarded as the 'father of the science of history' and one of the founders of sociology. A Sufi by persuasion, he is buried in the Sufi cemetery near Cairo where he died.
Ibn Khaldun was an historian, politician, sociologist, economist, a deep student of human affairs, anxious to analyse the past of mankind in order to understand its present and future ... one of the first philosophers of history, a forerunner of Machiavelli, Bodin, Vico, Comte and Cournot (Sarton 1927–48: iii. 1262).
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Dawood, N. J. (ed.) (1967). The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Trans. F. Rosenthal.
Gellner, E. A. (1981). Muslim Society.
Sarton, G. (1927–48). Introduction to the History of Science (repr. 1975).
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Jami
(Mulla Nuruddin ?Abdurrahman ibn-Ahmad)
1414–92).
Jami, who was born in Jam, Khurasan, and died in Herat, modern Afghanistan, is often called the last great classical poet of the Persian language. He was a most prolific writer and a great scholar, as well as being a mystic of the Naqshbandiyya (Designers) School of Sufis. For him, God alone is absolute truth, and human duty is to reach this truth through love. In his Lawaʼih (Flashes) are the short utterances which encapsulate his teaching, while Nahfat al-Uns (Fragrances of Companionship) is a considerable work treating the lives of 611 male and female Sufi sages. His Silsilat al-Dhahab (Chain of Gold) resembles Sanai's Walled Garden, and his Baharistan(Land of Spring) may have been suggested by Saadi's Rose Garden. In personality he was remarkably straightforward and free from cant, and he expected this behaviour in others: the traditional Naqshbandi attitude. His sense of humour was remarkable. When he was on his deathbed and Koran readers had been brought in, he exclaimed: 'What is all this commotion — can't you see that I am dying?'
(Published 1987)
— The Sayed Idries Shah
Bibliography
Browne, E. G. (1964). A Literary History of Persia.
Davis, F. H. (1967). Jami, the Persian Mystic.
Friday, March 13, 2015
Sufi Literature
What Looks Like an Egg
and Is An Egg?
by Doris Lessing (1972)
There were the mice who, having learned not only to eat the poison put down for them, but to like it, ignoring the cheese in the traps, were caught because people learned to coat the cheese in the traps with poison. - Reported in The London Daily Mail, Feb. 2, 1967.
"Do you imagine that fables exist only to amuse or to instruct and are based upon fiction ? The best ones are delineations of what happens in real life in the community, and in the individual's mental processes."- From "Reflections," by Idries Shah.
Islamic mysticism, generally called Sufism, has a very large literature, covering several epochs in the past 1,400 years, and contained in the various cultures - Persian, Arab, Turkish and Indo-Islamic, not to mention Indonesian - in which Islam has been manifested. This literature may seem more accessible to us than other aspects of Sufism: but this is because of assumptions bred into us by our culture about "mysticism." Sufism has always been something of a mystery to Eastern scholars and Western orientalists alike. Why has it so many manifestations? How can so many people of apparently irreconcilable views belong to it? How can it be "Islamic" at all if so many apparent heretics, apostates even, have belonged to it? How can it be "mysticism" when it expresses itself so variously, in science, philosophy, literature, social organization?
Each student or school of thought has attempted to answer these problems by finding a " thread." Each attempt has been unsatisfactory because it has involved leaving out certain material to make what is left in fit: when you are looking at Sufism you must look at who is telling you about it. Many modern commentators have tried to show that Sufism is "borrowed" from neo-Platonism, or Christianity, or Hinduism: this happens because they want to answer the question they have themselves framed: What is this derived from?
It is in fact the variety and lack of coherence - looked at from restricted points of view - which give the clue to the nature of Sufism. The answer is that each individual manifestation of Sufism is planned. It takes the shape and follows the pattern laid down by whoever is planning it. It is not an ideology, in which one starts with objectives, and then has to convince people of the need for them, and for rigid methods. Instead, it offers "social" contexts for local activity, creating hordes of apparent anomalies that most students will not face: for instance, the Naqshbandi Sufis are said to abhor music in ritual - the Chishtis employ hardly anything else. How then can it have happened that important Sufi teachers have been initiated into both orders and several others as well? People have been amazed that Rumi had disciples from all local religions and did not convert them to the ideology in which he was supposedly rooted: Islam. But this could easily be seen to be because he did not need to do so in order to offer the action of Sufis'. People find it impossible to explain how Hallaj (executed for apostasy for saying "I am God! " ) could be revered as one of the great Sufis by devout Moslems down the centuries.
Both in science and in logical human thought in the "soft" sciences the principle is universally accepted that the most likely explanation based on the facts is the hypothesis that should be taken as the probable truth about the matter being studied. This principle holds good in the study of Sufism. If Haji Bektash, a descendant of Mohammed and a Shiah (believer in the divine right to rule subsisting in the House of Ali), and Abdul-Qadir of Gilan, a descendant of Mohammed and a Sunni (believer in rulership subsisting in majority opinion of the whole body of believers), could both found Sufi systems and both be regarded as eminent Sufis -although Shiahs and Sunnis have regularly shed one another's blood - the basic connection is not in ideology at all, but in method.
The Sufis themselves seldom conceal that they are concerned with presentation and effectiveness, not indoctrination. Hence their writings are littered with phrases like "The color of the wine is the same as the color of the bottle," or, "Right time, right place, right people are necessary."
The importance of realizing these characteristics of Sufism is that otherwise local expressions of Sufism suited to one time or place might be taken as unalterable dogma ; failure to observe the temporary nature of Sufi formulation forces scholars to choose arbitrary categories and hence label certain Sufis as genuine and others as less so. Even more important, the mere imitation of Sufi organization and activity promotes the growth of false cults...
... But what are the "teachings" of Sufism, if they are not what we have been led to expect? "Wisdom is not in books - only some of the ways to search for it," is a dictum.
But, while Sufis can teach and have taught without words, using gestures, atmospheres, decorations on carpets and ceramics, for us the "vehicle" is words, since that is how our brains are programmed; it is hard for us, indeed impossible, to think in any other way.
Books must not be made into "idols" - but we can approach Sufism remembering that the teachings are partly contained in the lessons, the story-structures, the reports of human interchanges, which are part of this body of literature...
Perhaps the best introduction to the body of [Idries] Shah's work is his first book - his first about Sufism: he has written on many subjects, from travel to magic, anthropology, music, geology. "The Sufis" remains the most comprehensively informative. And one is immediately forced to use one's mind in a new way, because it is not written within our formulas for exegetics. It unfolds like a branch, and to accumulate factual information, let alone the deeper ranges of the material, means to expand one's attention, to abandon the if-and-therefore, a, b, c, d, way of thinking that is the way we have all been trained. There is no index; this demonstrates a good many different things about our memory, and certain dependencies of the mind.
"The Way of the Sufi" also sets out to cover ground; it contains everything from the use of contemplating materials to classical Persian literature chosen to compare its surface meaning with its deeper levels. I wish I could have the experience of reading this book again for the first time: it was like a door opening where one least expects it.
But perhaps the most shocking to our assumptions about "mysticism" is "The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin," the corpus of Nasrudin "jokes," deliberately created to inculcate Sufic thinking, to outwit The Old Villain, which is a name for the patterns of conditioned thinking which form the prison in which we all live.
A wag met Nasrudin. In his pocket he had an egg.
"Tell me, Nasrudin, are you any good at guessing games?"
"Not bad."
"Very well then, tell me what I have in my pocket."
"Give me a clue then."
"It is shaped like an egg, it is yellow and white inside, and it looks like an egg."
"Oh I know," said Nasrudin, " it is some kind of cake..."
(Continue reading the full article at the Idries Shah Foundation.)
by Doris Lessing (1972)
There were the mice who, having learned not only to eat the poison put down for them, but to like it, ignoring the cheese in the traps, were caught because people learned to coat the cheese in the traps with poison. - Reported in The London Daily Mail, Feb. 2, 1967.
"Do you imagine that fables exist only to amuse or to instruct and are based upon fiction ? The best ones are delineations of what happens in real life in the community, and in the individual's mental processes."- From "Reflections," by Idries Shah.
Islamic mysticism, generally called Sufism, has a very large literature, covering several epochs in the past 1,400 years, and contained in the various cultures - Persian, Arab, Turkish and Indo-Islamic, not to mention Indonesian - in which Islam has been manifested. This literature may seem more accessible to us than other aspects of Sufism: but this is because of assumptions bred into us by our culture about "mysticism." Sufism has always been something of a mystery to Eastern scholars and Western orientalists alike. Why has it so many manifestations? How can so many people of apparently irreconcilable views belong to it? How can it be "Islamic" at all if so many apparent heretics, apostates even, have belonged to it? How can it be "mysticism" when it expresses itself so variously, in science, philosophy, literature, social organization?
Each student or school of thought has attempted to answer these problems by finding a " thread." Each attempt has been unsatisfactory because it has involved leaving out certain material to make what is left in fit: when you are looking at Sufism you must look at who is telling you about it. Many modern commentators have tried to show that Sufism is "borrowed" from neo-Platonism, or Christianity, or Hinduism: this happens because they want to answer the question they have themselves framed: What is this derived from?
It is in fact the variety and lack of coherence - looked at from restricted points of view - which give the clue to the nature of Sufism. The answer is that each individual manifestation of Sufism is planned. It takes the shape and follows the pattern laid down by whoever is planning it. It is not an ideology, in which one starts with objectives, and then has to convince people of the need for them, and for rigid methods. Instead, it offers "social" contexts for local activity, creating hordes of apparent anomalies that most students will not face: for instance, the Naqshbandi Sufis are said to abhor music in ritual - the Chishtis employ hardly anything else. How then can it have happened that important Sufi teachers have been initiated into both orders and several others as well? People have been amazed that Rumi had disciples from all local religions and did not convert them to the ideology in which he was supposedly rooted: Islam. But this could easily be seen to be because he did not need to do so in order to offer the action of Sufis'. People find it impossible to explain how Hallaj (executed for apostasy for saying "I am God! " ) could be revered as one of the great Sufis by devout Moslems down the centuries.
Both in science and in logical human thought in the "soft" sciences the principle is universally accepted that the most likely explanation based on the facts is the hypothesis that should be taken as the probable truth about the matter being studied. This principle holds good in the study of Sufism. If Haji Bektash, a descendant of Mohammed and a Shiah (believer in the divine right to rule subsisting in the House of Ali), and Abdul-Qadir of Gilan, a descendant of Mohammed and a Sunni (believer in rulership subsisting in majority opinion of the whole body of believers), could both found Sufi systems and both be regarded as eminent Sufis -although Shiahs and Sunnis have regularly shed one another's blood - the basic connection is not in ideology at all, but in method.
The Sufis themselves seldom conceal that they are concerned with presentation and effectiveness, not indoctrination. Hence their writings are littered with phrases like "The color of the wine is the same as the color of the bottle," or, "Right time, right place, right people are necessary."
The importance of realizing these characteristics of Sufism is that otherwise local expressions of Sufism suited to one time or place might be taken as unalterable dogma ; failure to observe the temporary nature of Sufi formulation forces scholars to choose arbitrary categories and hence label certain Sufis as genuine and others as less so. Even more important, the mere imitation of Sufi organization and activity promotes the growth of false cults...
... But what are the "teachings" of Sufism, if they are not what we have been led to expect? "Wisdom is not in books - only some of the ways to search for it," is a dictum.
But, while Sufis can teach and have taught without words, using gestures, atmospheres, decorations on carpets and ceramics, for us the "vehicle" is words, since that is how our brains are programmed; it is hard for us, indeed impossible, to think in any other way.
Books must not be made into "idols" - but we can approach Sufism remembering that the teachings are partly contained in the lessons, the story-structures, the reports of human interchanges, which are part of this body of literature...
Perhaps the best introduction to the body of [Idries] Shah's work is his first book - his first about Sufism: he has written on many subjects, from travel to magic, anthropology, music, geology. "The Sufis" remains the most comprehensively informative. And one is immediately forced to use one's mind in a new way, because it is not written within our formulas for exegetics. It unfolds like a branch, and to accumulate factual information, let alone the deeper ranges of the material, means to expand one's attention, to abandon the if-and-therefore, a, b, c, d, way of thinking that is the way we have all been trained. There is no index; this demonstrates a good many different things about our memory, and certain dependencies of the mind.
"The Way of the Sufi" also sets out to cover ground; it contains everything from the use of contemplating materials to classical Persian literature chosen to compare its surface meaning with its deeper levels. I wish I could have the experience of reading this book again for the first time: it was like a door opening where one least expects it.
But perhaps the most shocking to our assumptions about "mysticism" is "The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin," the corpus of Nasrudin "jokes," deliberately created to inculcate Sufic thinking, to outwit The Old Villain, which is a name for the patterns of conditioned thinking which form the prison in which we all live.
A wag met Nasrudin. In his pocket he had an egg.
"Tell me, Nasrudin, are you any good at guessing games?"
"Not bad."
"Very well then, tell me what I have in my pocket."
"Give me a clue then."
"It is shaped like an egg, it is yellow and white inside, and it looks like an egg."
"Oh I know," said Nasrudin, " it is some kind of cake..."
(Continue reading the full article at the Idries Shah Foundation.)
The Foundation
News from The Idries Shah Foundation:
In collaboration with The Octagon Press and the Estate of Idries Shah, The Foundation will be making all the published works of Idries Shah available online as eBooks.
In addition, an archive devoted to Shah's work and life will be put online, including video and audio material.
A further project will continue to ensure that Idries Shah's corpus of work is published in both Oriental and Occidental languages.
--------------------------------------
We are planning to put online material of interest to readers of Shah’s work.
Before his death in November 1996, Shah made it known that the large body of work he published during his lifetime formed a course within itself.
This work, he said, was to be regarded as his successor.
---------------------------------------
Idries Shah devoted his life to collecting, selecting and translating key works of Eastern Sufi classical literature, adapting them to the needs of the West and disseminating them in the Occident.
Called by some ‘practical philosophy’, by others ‘templates in straight thinking’ – these works represent centuries of Sufi thought aimed at the development of human potential to its fullest extent.
They stress virtues such as commonsense, clear-thinking and humour to counter cant and religious dogma.
As such they may be viewed as an antidote to radicalism and fanaticism much needed in the world today.
The Idries Shah Foundation exists to make sure that these works remain available to the public – both in the East and in the West.
Visit http://www.idriesshahfoundation.org/
****************
"... my successor is my printed work. My books form a complete course, a Path, and they succeed when I cannot be there."
- Idries Shah, 1995 (as quoted by Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights, 2008.)
*****************
In collaboration with The Octagon Press and the Estate of Idries Shah, The Foundation will be making all the published works of Idries Shah available online as eBooks.
In addition, an archive devoted to Shah's work and life will be put online, including video and audio material.
A further project will continue to ensure that Idries Shah's corpus of work is published in both Oriental and Occidental languages.
--------------------------------------
We are planning to put online material of interest to readers of Shah’s work.
Before his death in November 1996, Shah made it known that the large body of work he published during his lifetime formed a course within itself.
This work, he said, was to be regarded as his successor.
---------------------------------------
Idries Shah devoted his life to collecting, selecting and translating key works of Eastern Sufi classical literature, adapting them to the needs of the West and disseminating them in the Occident.
Called by some ‘practical philosophy’, by others ‘templates in straight thinking’ – these works represent centuries of Sufi thought aimed at the development of human potential to its fullest extent.
They stress virtues such as commonsense, clear-thinking and humour to counter cant and religious dogma.
As such they may be viewed as an antidote to radicalism and fanaticism much needed in the world today.
The Idries Shah Foundation exists to make sure that these works remain available to the public – both in the East and in the West.
Visit http://www.idriesshahfoundation.org/
****************
"... my successor is my printed work. My books form a complete course, a Path, and they succeed when I cannot be there."
- Idries Shah, 1995 (as quoted by Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights, 2008.)
*****************
"We have done all we can to embody as much of the teachership function as we can in the literature itself which we have published, largely we have been able to do this by excluding a lot of extraneous and external accretions ...
"We have been able to reconstitute the emphasis of the stories, so instead of their being instruments only to make you think how great the spiritual master is and how nothing you are, and how wonderful the possibilities of the situation are, we have retrieved the dynamic of the stories in order to show aside from those things what is possible ... what is called in some disciplines enlightenment, can be in the Sufi process, the result of the falling into place of a large number of small impacts and perceptions (from these stories and one's own experiences) producing insights when the individual is ready for them.
"We view Sufism not as an ideology that molds people to the right way of belief or action, but as an art or science that can exert a beneficial influence on individuals and societies, in accordance with the needs of those individuals and societies ... Sufi study and development gives one capacities one did not have before."
-- Idries Shah, 1976, from the lecture entitled 'Learning from Stories.'
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Custodians of the Tradition
Excerpts from DECLARATION OF THE PEOPLE
OF THE TRADITION (Octagon Press, 1966)
Among all peoples, and in all countries, there is a tradition
about a secret, hidden, special, superior form of knowledge
accessible to man after passing through circumstances of
difficulty.
This declaration is concerned with that subject...
... Because this knowledge, in its nature and operation, is
different from what people are accustomed to expect of
knowledge, attempts to find out and make use of it
generally fail. It will respond and operate fully only if
approached in a certain manner. This is the first of the
difficulties encountered in the 'path.'
It has been said that: "a thing can be approached only
according to the manner in which it can be perceived."
Thus trying to mend a watch with a cobbler's tool will not
succeed, trying to look for the sun at night will not succeed.
Few people can hope to live long enough to discover by
trial and error the necessary conditions of the search.
Specialized knowledge and technique are required. Mass
endeavor cannot compensate for the incapacity or
ignorance of the individual.
The knowledge to which we refer is concentrated,
administered and presided over by three kinds of individual
existing at any given time. They have been called an
"Invisible Hierarchy" because, under ordinary
circumstances, they are not in communication or contact
with ordinary human beings; certainly not in two-way
communication with them.
In one sense, the way to the knowledge passes through a
"chain of succession" in which perception of the ordinary
man must have help in attaining a higher degree of contact.
Religion, folklore and the like abound with disguised
examples of this progress.
Many manifestations, taking religious, magical, alchemical,
psychological and other forms, are, in reality, vestigial parts
of the science to which we refer. Very often, procedures,
which are considered to be "Ways of Truth" and the like,
are neither more nor less than traces of techniques which
have been used in the past to attain the link referred to above.
One of the "difficulties" in this quest for knowledge of a
higher order is the very existence, or rather the misuse, of
these survivals. That which was, as it were, the chrysalis
for a butterfly becomes a prison for the caterpillar which
tries to use it to become a butterfly himself. He fails
generally to realize that he has to make his own chrysalis.
Thus, we have attachment to the form of rites, beliefs and
personalities which, in their origin, were of specific and
high function. This attachment becomes a conditioning
which may be sentimental or intellectual. If the true
greatness and importance of such institutions, procedures
and individuals were rightly understood by those votaries
who now attach themselves to superseded methodologies
and pathetically attempt to identify themselves with
externals, they would be able to appreciate the true beauty,
grandeur and greatness of the very things which they
imagine to be threatened by such remarks as these.
Man, then, is generally out of alignment with the truth
which he knows in some way to be there. He has to get
into alignment with it. This he can do only by using a
formulation of his quest which is innocent of past
associations. Here we have the reason for the very many
past formulations of the Path of Truth.
This is not to say that man must dissipate existing
associations or automatisms in order to build afresh;
because now here and now there is a possibility to slip
through the veil of conditioning to a perception with a
part of the mind which is virtually unused...
... It is the task of the Custodians of the Tradition to
communicate, as best they can, in whatever language is
indicated, to those who may be able to benefit from what
can be made available. They are concerned with the
capacity of the people addressed and capacity alone. They
have no special interest in the nominal background,
seniority or superficial psychological characteristics of the
people addressed. If anything is consistent, it is the
experience that suitable candidates may be found among
the members of any tradition.
We should mention here another of the difficulties of the
Path of Truth, which is due to the fact that the knowledge
of which we are speaking exists in places and among
people who might not be expected to possess it. Its
appearance, therefore, is often contrary to expectation.
What has been said about "difficulties" will show that these
are always more apparent than real. A difficulty is always
great to one who cannot adjust himself to the real facts of a
situation...
(Octagon Press, 1966)
OF THE TRADITION (Octagon Press, 1966)
Among all peoples, and in all countries, there is a tradition
about a secret, hidden, special, superior form of knowledge
accessible to man after passing through circumstances of
difficulty.
This declaration is concerned with that subject...
... Because this knowledge, in its nature and operation, is
different from what people are accustomed to expect of
knowledge, attempts to find out and make use of it
generally fail. It will respond and operate fully only if
approached in a certain manner. This is the first of the
difficulties encountered in the 'path.'
It has been said that: "a thing can be approached only
according to the manner in which it can be perceived."
Thus trying to mend a watch with a cobbler's tool will not
succeed, trying to look for the sun at night will not succeed.
Few people can hope to live long enough to discover by
trial and error the necessary conditions of the search.
Specialized knowledge and technique are required. Mass
endeavor cannot compensate for the incapacity or
ignorance of the individual.
The knowledge to which we refer is concentrated,
administered and presided over by three kinds of individual
existing at any given time. They have been called an
"Invisible Hierarchy" because, under ordinary
circumstances, they are not in communication or contact
with ordinary human beings; certainly not in two-way
communication with them.
In one sense, the way to the knowledge passes through a
"chain of succession" in which perception of the ordinary
man must have help in attaining a higher degree of contact.
Religion, folklore and the like abound with disguised
examples of this progress.
Many manifestations, taking religious, magical, alchemical,
psychological and other forms, are, in reality, vestigial parts
of the science to which we refer. Very often, procedures,
which are considered to be "Ways of Truth" and the like,
are neither more nor less than traces of techniques which
have been used in the past to attain the link referred to above.
One of the "difficulties" in this quest for knowledge of a
higher order is the very existence, or rather the misuse, of
these survivals. That which was, as it were, the chrysalis
for a butterfly becomes a prison for the caterpillar which
tries to use it to become a butterfly himself. He fails
generally to realize that he has to make his own chrysalis.
Thus, we have attachment to the form of rites, beliefs and
personalities which, in their origin, were of specific and
high function. This attachment becomes a conditioning
which may be sentimental or intellectual. If the true
greatness and importance of such institutions, procedures
and individuals were rightly understood by those votaries
who now attach themselves to superseded methodologies
and pathetically attempt to identify themselves with
externals, they would be able to appreciate the true beauty,
grandeur and greatness of the very things which they
imagine to be threatened by such remarks as these.
Man, then, is generally out of alignment with the truth
which he knows in some way to be there. He has to get
into alignment with it. This he can do only by using a
formulation of his quest which is innocent of past
associations. Here we have the reason for the very many
past formulations of the Path of Truth.
This is not to say that man must dissipate existing
associations or automatisms in order to build afresh;
because now here and now there is a possibility to slip
through the veil of conditioning to a perception with a
part of the mind which is virtually unused...
... It is the task of the Custodians of the Tradition to
communicate, as best they can, in whatever language is
indicated, to those who may be able to benefit from what
can be made available. They are concerned with the
capacity of the people addressed and capacity alone. They
have no special interest in the nominal background,
seniority or superficial psychological characteristics of the
people addressed. If anything is consistent, it is the
experience that suitable candidates may be found among
the members of any tradition.
We should mention here another of the difficulties of the
Path of Truth, which is due to the fact that the knowledge
of which we are speaking exists in places and among
people who might not be expected to possess it. Its
appearance, therefore, is often contrary to expectation.
What has been said about "difficulties" will show that these
are always more apparent than real. A difficulty is always
great to one who cannot adjust himself to the real facts of a
situation...
(Octagon Press, 1966)
Sunday, August 10, 2014
The Directorate
excerpts from Ernest Scott's The People of the Secret
(Octagon Press, 1983):
A SECRET DIRECTORATE?
It is not surprising to see that all attempts to reintroduce the
lost component and to place man in touch with a genuine
technique whereby he might develop true consciousness (as
opposed to the walking-dream consciousness which he does
possess and which he mistakes for the other) have at all times
and places been regarded as a deep and subtle attack on
religion itself. This is as true of Islam as it is of Christianity.
For some two centuries after the Council of Nicaea it would
seem that Directorate participation was either withdrawn or
confined to a sort of holding operation.
Then, about AD 567, Mohammed was born. There seems to be
nothing in his early life to suggest that an event of significance
had happened, but presently the mark of higher activity begins
to attach to circumstances. Mohammed spent periods during his
youth with Bedouins in the desert and in conducting caravans
from Mecca to Syria, southern Arabia and perhaps to Egypt.
Arab religion at the time - "paganism" according to most
authorities - was influenced in the north by Christianity and in
the south by Jewish tradition. Legends suggest that before
Mohammed, a number of individuals had left Arabia to try to
find links with "the original religion of Abraham" and it may be
that Mohammed made contact with this activity during his
travels.
Perhaps a parallel exists here to the journeys from Greece to
Egypt which resulted in the school of Pythagoras.
At any rate, some event took place which resulted in
Mohammed deciding to retire to Mount Hira near Mecca.
There, it would be seen, he made contact directly with a level of
higher consciousness.
Soon afterwards he began to teach. His first audience
consisted of his own family, his wife Khadija, his friend Abu
Bakr and his cousin Ali. Initial attempts to record
Mohammed's teaching which he received in a state of trance
were abandoned and his hearers began to memorize for oral
transmission the material which he delivered.
The nucleus of a "school" was thus established for which
additional human material was waiting on the periphery. After
Mohammed's death in 632 a group of some 90 men and women
came together and through them the further development of
the impulse was realized. Such descriptions of them as exist
suggest that they included people who already knew that the
possibility of higher consciousness existed and were searching
for an Operation through which it could be exemplified.
One such was Salman the Persian, originally a Zoroastrian
who had gone from one Christian teacher to another and been
passed along through a series of testing trials and tribulations
which culminated in his being sold into slavery.
It was this event, apparently disastrous for his search, which
in fact brought him to the Companions.
This inner group of 90 took an oath of fidelity and are said to
have adopted the name Sufi...
[Arabic documentation of the term, however, begins only after AD 815.]
... Does this mean that Sufism derives from the school that
formed round Mohammed? There are reasons to suppose not.
Uways el Qarni, who died in 657, was regarded as a Sufi master
but he never met Mohammed.
Five hundred years later another Sufi master, Hakim Jami,
implicitly denied the formal Islamic origin of Sufism by
declaring that Plato, Hippocrates, Pythagoras and Hermes
were on an unbroken line of Sufic transmission.
Within our suggested mechanism of history there is no
problem. When Demiurgic levels first incarnated on earth to
achieve closer control of evolutionary trends, certain ordinary
men were initiated by them: that is, ordinary men were given
access to a technique whereby their minds could become able to
process conscious energy and hence to achieve contact with the
Demiurgic intention.
A certain number of such Initiates have been maintained
within the ordinary life of men in all places and at all times.
Sometimes they are known or suspected. Usually they are quite
unknown.
Such men have been given different names in different ages.
It is clear that certain of the Old Testament Prophets and the
Priest-Initiates of Egypt were of this order. The Sufis are the
exemplars of this unbroken Tradition in recent historical times.
The term [Sufi] has been adopted within recent years by groups
imitating such outward form of Sufi practice as they have been
able to discern and the word has to some extent been debased
during the 20th century in both East and West.
We are concerned only with the original and generally
invisible Tradition and to conclude that Sufism is the esoteric
aspect of Islam only is clearly unwarranted on the evidence.
The line, by whatever name it is known, is the line of
esotericism in all religions. It is also the line of esotericism in
many other modalities of evolution whose existence is generally
unsuspected.
There may be reason to suppose, however, that enhanced
techniques of "soul-making", relevant to the present stage of
mankind's development, were made available by the
Demiurgic level, through its Directorate on earth, at the time of
Mohammed. Put bluntly, these techniques constitute the trade
secrets of Sufism.
The Sufic influence was certainly exercised within the
framework of Islam as it has been exercised within the
framework of all religions without being identified with any.
We shall see that it was employed within Medieval Christianity
in an effort to restore the wisdom component which had
been excluded by the formulations of the early Church.
Here it might be permissible to venture a speculation in
general terms. So long as a religion develops according to its
evolutionary potential, Sufic activity will coincide with its
orthodox expression. As a religion becomes formalized in
dogma — that is, when it begins to desert its evolutionary
possibilities - the Sufic influence separates and is then seen by
orthodoxy as a heresy. At a certain stage of divergence, when
nothing more can be salvaged, the kinetic component
withdraws entirely, at which point the religion becomes subject
to the law of diminishing returns and finally extinguishes itself.
There is certainly no indication that the development of
Islam was any less free of contingency at material level than
Christianity was. It may be that in the matter of contingency
Prophets and Messengers are sometimes faced with cruel
alternatives. Rejecting all compromise with events as they
develop may mean that the Message with which they are
charged will be denied actualisation altogether. They may
choose to some extent to compromise with contingency and
thereby ensure that the Message is actualized at least partially.
Something of the sort has been suggested, in that
Mohammed's original insistence on an exclusive monotheism
was altered marginally as the price of securing the survival of
his Companions and hence of his Message.
Certainly the early promise that a genuine theocracy would
arise with spiritual authority subtending a stable structure at
all levels was not fulfilled.
To begin with, there was the familiar explosive expansion
along almost every line of human activity which we have seen
associated with the birth of every new cell in the body of history.
... But, as always, the impulse channelled through a genuine prophet had to be actualised in terms of human instruments congenitally contaminated with pride and jealousy and all the permutations of egoism in human behaviour.
Islam in no way avoided its share of human shortcomings.
On the one hand, there was a sublime reverence for man's
highest aspirations. There was just law-giving, a surging
expression of art and architecture. On the other hand, there
was egoism, conflict and hatred in many of those who sought to
serve the new ideas.
Umar, the second Caliph, was murdered. Uthman, the third
Caliph, and a Meccan aristocrat, aroused widespread opposition
by apparently favouring his own family and he, too,
died by assassination.
Ali, the fourth Caliph, was Mohammed's cousin and the
husband of his daughter Fatima. Ali was opposed by
Mu'awiya, a relative of the murdered Uthman. In 661 Ali, too,
was murdered and at this point arose the schism within Islam
which has never been bridged to this day.
The successors of Ali drew together as a separate sect (the
Shi'ites), while the supporters of Mu'awiya and his line of
Umayyad caliphs regarded themselves and their Sunnite
tradition as the true succession of the Prophet.
At some point in its development, a religion begins to diverge
from the impulse from which it derives; a departure which
appears to be in the nature of things. It is as though space itself
were curved and an unfolding event must actualize in a
sequence diverging from the straight line of its own noumenon.
At this point a religion elaborates dogma and ritual; it becomes
obsessed with the letter and not the spirit of its own inner
nature. Its outward expression becomes formalized, rigid and
autocratic. We have suggested that this is the point at which the
kinetic component appears to separate and is thereafter seen as
a newly-arisen heresy.
From the external viewpoint it seems fair to say that the
social and political body of Islam was showing advanced
entropy within thirty years.
The Umayyad Caliphate, deriving from Mu'awiya, retained
temporal control and continued the external expansion of
Islam.
Damascus was chosen as the capital, Arabic chosen as the
language of Empire. Laws were made, a uniform coinage
established and toleration extended to Jews, Christians and
Zoroastrians.
As the eighth century opened, a second wave of conquest
began in North Africa. ....
There was land across the sea ...: Spain, a land so torn by the chaos left by departing Romans and contending Visigoth rulers that it was ripe and ready for invasion.
In 711 Tariq crossed the Straits with an army. The word
Gibraltar (Jebel-Tariq, Mount Tariq) marks the event. Within
months he was in Cordoba and Moslem armies, Arab, Syrian
and Berber, were pouring through Spain and mustering to
cross the Pyrenees.
Legend has it that the Saracen captains looked down on the
lush lands of France and called out "On, on, to the conquest of
the world for Islam". One general is said to have had
misgivings: "No. We shall remain in Spain. France is too green
and my men would degenerate in that soft land." His
misgivings - according to Moslem legend - gave Charles
Martel time to gather his forces and the westward flood tide of
Islam finally broke on the battlefield of Poitiers in 732.
So the Saracens settled for Spain. Visigoth landowners made
terms with the invaders and the cities and monasteries followed
suit. Settlement was facilitated by a number of widely contrasting
factors. The serfs were still tied to a Roman slave
system but could now obtain at least nominal freedom by
embracing Islam. There was no lack of fervent converts.
The Jews regarded the occupation as a merciful deliverance
from Christian persecution and welcomed the Saracens with
open arms. They remained a powerful component of "Moorish
Spain" for 700 years.
Yet another, almost a theoretical factor, helped. The Council
of Nicaea had declared against Arius but the Arian heresy
remained, for the Visigoths, orthodox Christianity. Not
surprisingly, the Neo-Platonic ideas in Islam found an answering
echo among Spanish Christians.
But there was little of a unified nature about the Moslem
conquest of Spain. Within the occupying forces there was
conflict and hatred. Arabs denigrated Syrians and both were
contemptuous of the Berbers. The latter were so badly treated
by their brothers in Islam that generation by generation they
drifted back to their African homeland.
Dissension at Spanish colonial level was matched by dissension
at the heart of Islam. The Umayyad rulers had Islamized Persia but the Persian aristocrats had contrived to retain positions of an executive nature, from which, it is said, they hoped to keep alive Zoroastrian ideas.
Finally, in protest against taxation, they rebelled and in 749
defeated the forces of the Caliph and proclaimed the first of a
new line of caliphs, the Abbasid, choosing a descendant of
Abbas, the uncle of Mohammed. The centre of government was
then moved to Mesopotamia where the second caliph of the
new line laid the foundations of Baghdad in 763. Here a stable
Caliphate was to continue for nearly a century.
Concurrently Cordoba had crystallized as the centre of the
Umayyad regime. It was to become a showpiece of Islamic
rule. At its peak it contained 700 mosques, three public baths, a
Palace with 400 rooms and a city library with 400,000
books.
At this stage it is difficult to resist the temptation to
speculate, from a human standpoint, upon the experience of the
Hidden Directorate. It must surely have been compounded of a
mixture of alarm, disappointment and qualified satisfaction.
The Directorate had vested high hopes in Islam as the
vehicle of a major evolutionary gain. It had seen much of the
intrinsic promise destroyed by the intransigence of human
nature. Yet two stable centres now existed, 3,000 miles apart,
serving, at least in name, a spiritual reality.
If we think of Cordoba and Baghdad as magnetic poles we
can see that the whole of Europe lay in the field which they
subtended. Within this field much might yet be achieved.
Within it, a required, a fore-ordered, rise in the specific gravity
of human nature could still be contrived. Humanitarianism,
science, art and a technique of man's individual as well as
corporate evolution might be induced.
A wholly new basis of human life was called for, utterly
beyond the wildest imagination of the men of AD 1000. Step by
step, trend by trend, man and his institutions would be
impelled or restrained along a predestined road. Over and over
again man would step aside and be guided back; or would step
off the road and be halted and impelled to retrace.
Institutions once regarded as fundamental verities of human
experience would melt away. Monarchy would yield to the
social management of man by himself. The concept of nation
would change to the concept of continent, and from continent
to the conception of the entire world as one.
Man would be offered a glimpse of an expanding universe
and his mind, which measured in leagues, would strain to
measure in light-years.
Within the millennium which lay ahead of the year 1,000,
the specific gravity of human soul-stuff would be required to
rise by an amount greater than had been achieved in all the eras that had gone before.
Within the force-field that was moulding him, man would
understand little and co-operate hardly at all. From the
viewpoint of his own present moment in any of the unfolding
centuries, he would see only change without pattern; quixotic
ebb and flow; disruption, chaos, order restored and chaos once
again. Sacred standards would be cast down and strange,
seemingly arbitrary, new standards created.
From the present moment of a lifetime of seventy years, all
would seem the whim of chance and accident, all without
purpose or meaning.
Yet from the present moment of Intelligence able to contain
the whole history of mankind as a single perception, all would
be true end-gaining, deliberate, law-conforming and almost -
but never quite - inevitable.
If not quite inevitable then certainly necessary; for a great
event lay ahead in man's temporal future. It existed already in
eternity and was required to be actualized in time.
The event is a mutation in man's evolutionary nature
involving a new modality of experience, a new organ of
perception. Though latent, perhaps, since man emerged from
his primate ancestry, it is an organ of experience that has only
intermittently been active in certain exceptional individuals.
Man is due to inherit it one day as part of his total experience.
For this event man had to be prepared. Certain promising
races of pre-men were inexplicably extinguished and it has
been conjectured that this happened because they were unable
to come to terms with intellect - for them an incomprehensible
and unmanageable experience.
By analogy, a function giving access to a four-dimensional
world might be equally disastrous to intellect-based Modern
Man. A certain minimum standard of soul, a certain minimum
psychic specific gravity is necessary before such a radical new
modality may be risked.
Preparation for this - in our view - was begun as a deliberate
operation of Higher Intelligence 1,000 years ago.
The first steps involved a certain social tolerance, a certain
expansion of intellect, a certain instinctive humanitarianism.
These had to be established before the first tentative switching
on of the new organ could be regarded as viable.
How mankind was prepared within the ferment of the last
thousand years, we shall hope to glimpse in succeeding
chapters.
Once we have the key we shall see that the ebb and flow of
history itself illustrates the goals that were required to be
gained. Here and there it may be possible to see the agents of
the process at work - the Secret People serving, perhaps
members of, the Hidden Directorate.
But for the most part, their presence, like their purpose, will
be obscured from the view of the men and women among whom
they walked.
The People of the Secret (p. 44-52)
(Octagon Press, 1983):
A SECRET DIRECTORATE?
It is not surprising to see that all attempts to reintroduce the
lost component and to place man in touch with a genuine
technique whereby he might develop true consciousness (as
opposed to the walking-dream consciousness which he does
possess and which he mistakes for the other) have at all times
and places been regarded as a deep and subtle attack on
religion itself. This is as true of Islam as it is of Christianity.
For some two centuries after the Council of Nicaea it would
seem that Directorate participation was either withdrawn or
confined to a sort of holding operation.
Then, about AD 567, Mohammed was born. There seems to be
nothing in his early life to suggest that an event of significance
had happened, but presently the mark of higher activity begins
to attach to circumstances. Mohammed spent periods during his
youth with Bedouins in the desert and in conducting caravans
from Mecca to Syria, southern Arabia and perhaps to Egypt.
Arab religion at the time - "paganism" according to most
authorities - was influenced in the north by Christianity and in
the south by Jewish tradition. Legends suggest that before
Mohammed, a number of individuals had left Arabia to try to
find links with "the original religion of Abraham" and it may be
that Mohammed made contact with this activity during his
travels.
Perhaps a parallel exists here to the journeys from Greece to
Egypt which resulted in the school of Pythagoras.
At any rate, some event took place which resulted in
Mohammed deciding to retire to Mount Hira near Mecca.
There, it would be seen, he made contact directly with a level of
higher consciousness.
Soon afterwards he began to teach. His first audience
consisted of his own family, his wife Khadija, his friend Abu
Bakr and his cousin Ali. Initial attempts to record
Mohammed's teaching which he received in a state of trance
were abandoned and his hearers began to memorize for oral
transmission the material which he delivered.
The nucleus of a "school" was thus established for which
additional human material was waiting on the periphery. After
Mohammed's death in 632 a group of some 90 men and women
came together and through them the further development of
the impulse was realized. Such descriptions of them as exist
suggest that they included people who already knew that the
possibility of higher consciousness existed and were searching
for an Operation through which it could be exemplified.
One such was Salman the Persian, originally a Zoroastrian
who had gone from one Christian teacher to another and been
passed along through a series of testing trials and tribulations
which culminated in his being sold into slavery.
It was this event, apparently disastrous for his search, which
in fact brought him to the Companions.
This inner group of 90 took an oath of fidelity and are said to
have adopted the name Sufi...
[Arabic documentation of the term, however, begins only after AD 815.]
... Does this mean that Sufism derives from the school that
formed round Mohammed? There are reasons to suppose not.
Uways el Qarni, who died in 657, was regarded as a Sufi master
but he never met Mohammed.
Five hundred years later another Sufi master, Hakim Jami,
implicitly denied the formal Islamic origin of Sufism by
declaring that Plato, Hippocrates, Pythagoras and Hermes
were on an unbroken line of Sufic transmission.
Within our suggested mechanism of history there is no
problem. When Demiurgic levels first incarnated on earth to
achieve closer control of evolutionary trends, certain ordinary
men were initiated by them: that is, ordinary men were given
access to a technique whereby their minds could become able to
process conscious energy and hence to achieve contact with the
Demiurgic intention.
A certain number of such Initiates have been maintained
within the ordinary life of men in all places and at all times.
Sometimes they are known or suspected. Usually they are quite
unknown.
Such men have been given different names in different ages.
It is clear that certain of the Old Testament Prophets and the
Priest-Initiates of Egypt were of this order. The Sufis are the
exemplars of this unbroken Tradition in recent historical times.
The term [Sufi] has been adopted within recent years by groups
imitating such outward form of Sufi practice as they have been
able to discern and the word has to some extent been debased
during the 20th century in both East and West.
We are concerned only with the original and generally
invisible Tradition and to conclude that Sufism is the esoteric
aspect of Islam only is clearly unwarranted on the evidence.
The line, by whatever name it is known, is the line of
esotericism in all religions. It is also the line of esotericism in
many other modalities of evolution whose existence is generally
unsuspected.
There may be reason to suppose, however, that enhanced
techniques of "soul-making", relevant to the present stage of
mankind's development, were made available by the
Demiurgic level, through its Directorate on earth, at the time of
Mohammed. Put bluntly, these techniques constitute the trade
secrets of Sufism.
The Sufic influence was certainly exercised within the
framework of Islam as it has been exercised within the
framework of all religions without being identified with any.
We shall see that it was employed within Medieval Christianity
in an effort to restore the wisdom component which had
been excluded by the formulations of the early Church.
Here it might be permissible to venture a speculation in
general terms. So long as a religion develops according to its
evolutionary potential, Sufic activity will coincide with its
orthodox expression. As a religion becomes formalized in
dogma — that is, when it begins to desert its evolutionary
possibilities - the Sufic influence separates and is then seen by
orthodoxy as a heresy. At a certain stage of divergence, when
nothing more can be salvaged, the kinetic component
withdraws entirely, at which point the religion becomes subject
to the law of diminishing returns and finally extinguishes itself.
There is certainly no indication that the development of
Islam was any less free of contingency at material level than
Christianity was. It may be that in the matter of contingency
Prophets and Messengers are sometimes faced with cruel
alternatives. Rejecting all compromise with events as they
develop may mean that the Message with which they are
charged will be denied actualisation altogether. They may
choose to some extent to compromise with contingency and
thereby ensure that the Message is actualized at least partially.
Something of the sort has been suggested, in that
Mohammed's original insistence on an exclusive monotheism
was altered marginally as the price of securing the survival of
his Companions and hence of his Message.
Certainly the early promise that a genuine theocracy would
arise with spiritual authority subtending a stable structure at
all levels was not fulfilled.
To begin with, there was the familiar explosive expansion
along almost every line of human activity which we have seen
associated with the birth of every new cell in the body of history.
... But, as always, the impulse channelled through a genuine prophet had to be actualised in terms of human instruments congenitally contaminated with pride and jealousy and all the permutations of egoism in human behaviour.
Islam in no way avoided its share of human shortcomings.
On the one hand, there was a sublime reverence for man's
highest aspirations. There was just law-giving, a surging
expression of art and architecture. On the other hand, there
was egoism, conflict and hatred in many of those who sought to
serve the new ideas.
Umar, the second Caliph, was murdered. Uthman, the third
Caliph, and a Meccan aristocrat, aroused widespread opposition
by apparently favouring his own family and he, too,
died by assassination.
Ali, the fourth Caliph, was Mohammed's cousin and the
husband of his daughter Fatima. Ali was opposed by
Mu'awiya, a relative of the murdered Uthman. In 661 Ali, too,
was murdered and at this point arose the schism within Islam
which has never been bridged to this day.
The successors of Ali drew together as a separate sect (the
Shi'ites), while the supporters of Mu'awiya and his line of
Umayyad caliphs regarded themselves and their Sunnite
tradition as the true succession of the Prophet.
At some point in its development, a religion begins to diverge
from the impulse from which it derives; a departure which
appears to be in the nature of things. It is as though space itself
were curved and an unfolding event must actualize in a
sequence diverging from the straight line of its own noumenon.
At this point a religion elaborates dogma and ritual; it becomes
obsessed with the letter and not the spirit of its own inner
nature. Its outward expression becomes formalized, rigid and
autocratic. We have suggested that this is the point at which the
kinetic component appears to separate and is thereafter seen as
a newly-arisen heresy.
From the external viewpoint it seems fair to say that the
social and political body of Islam was showing advanced
entropy within thirty years.
The Umayyad Caliphate, deriving from Mu'awiya, retained
temporal control and continued the external expansion of
Islam.
Damascus was chosen as the capital, Arabic chosen as the
language of Empire. Laws were made, a uniform coinage
established and toleration extended to Jews, Christians and
Zoroastrians.
As the eighth century opened, a second wave of conquest
began in North Africa. ....
There was land across the sea ...: Spain, a land so torn by the chaos left by departing Romans and contending Visigoth rulers that it was ripe and ready for invasion.
In 711 Tariq crossed the Straits with an army. The word
Gibraltar (Jebel-Tariq, Mount Tariq) marks the event. Within
months he was in Cordoba and Moslem armies, Arab, Syrian
and Berber, were pouring through Spain and mustering to
cross the Pyrenees.
Legend has it that the Saracen captains looked down on the
lush lands of France and called out "On, on, to the conquest of
the world for Islam". One general is said to have had
misgivings: "No. We shall remain in Spain. France is too green
and my men would degenerate in that soft land." His
misgivings - according to Moslem legend - gave Charles
Martel time to gather his forces and the westward flood tide of
Islam finally broke on the battlefield of Poitiers in 732.
So the Saracens settled for Spain. Visigoth landowners made
terms with the invaders and the cities and monasteries followed
suit. Settlement was facilitated by a number of widely contrasting
factors. The serfs were still tied to a Roman slave
system but could now obtain at least nominal freedom by
embracing Islam. There was no lack of fervent converts.
The Jews regarded the occupation as a merciful deliverance
from Christian persecution and welcomed the Saracens with
open arms. They remained a powerful component of "Moorish
Spain" for 700 years.
Yet another, almost a theoretical factor, helped. The Council
of Nicaea had declared against Arius but the Arian heresy
remained, for the Visigoths, orthodox Christianity. Not
surprisingly, the Neo-Platonic ideas in Islam found an answering
echo among Spanish Christians.
But there was little of a unified nature about the Moslem
conquest of Spain. Within the occupying forces there was
conflict and hatred. Arabs denigrated Syrians and both were
contemptuous of the Berbers. The latter were so badly treated
by their brothers in Islam that generation by generation they
drifted back to their African homeland.
Dissension at Spanish colonial level was matched by dissension
at the heart of Islam. The Umayyad rulers had Islamized Persia but the Persian aristocrats had contrived to retain positions of an executive nature, from which, it is said, they hoped to keep alive Zoroastrian ideas.
Finally, in protest against taxation, they rebelled and in 749
defeated the forces of the Caliph and proclaimed the first of a
new line of caliphs, the Abbasid, choosing a descendant of
Abbas, the uncle of Mohammed. The centre of government was
then moved to Mesopotamia where the second caliph of the
new line laid the foundations of Baghdad in 763. Here a stable
Caliphate was to continue for nearly a century.
Concurrently Cordoba had crystallized as the centre of the
Umayyad regime. It was to become a showpiece of Islamic
rule. At its peak it contained 700 mosques, three public baths, a
Palace with 400 rooms and a city library with 400,000
books.
At this stage it is difficult to resist the temptation to
speculate, from a human standpoint, upon the experience of the
Hidden Directorate. It must surely have been compounded of a
mixture of alarm, disappointment and qualified satisfaction.
The Directorate had vested high hopes in Islam as the
vehicle of a major evolutionary gain. It had seen much of the
intrinsic promise destroyed by the intransigence of human
nature. Yet two stable centres now existed, 3,000 miles apart,
serving, at least in name, a spiritual reality.
If we think of Cordoba and Baghdad as magnetic poles we
can see that the whole of Europe lay in the field which they
subtended. Within this field much might yet be achieved.
Within it, a required, a fore-ordered, rise in the specific gravity
of human nature could still be contrived. Humanitarianism,
science, art and a technique of man's individual as well as
corporate evolution might be induced.
A wholly new basis of human life was called for, utterly
beyond the wildest imagination of the men of AD 1000. Step by
step, trend by trend, man and his institutions would be
impelled or restrained along a predestined road. Over and over
again man would step aside and be guided back; or would step
off the road and be halted and impelled to retrace.
Institutions once regarded as fundamental verities of human
experience would melt away. Monarchy would yield to the
social management of man by himself. The concept of nation
would change to the concept of continent, and from continent
to the conception of the entire world as one.
Man would be offered a glimpse of an expanding universe
and his mind, which measured in leagues, would strain to
measure in light-years.
Within the millennium which lay ahead of the year 1,000,
the specific gravity of human soul-stuff would be required to
rise by an amount greater than had been achieved in all the eras that had gone before.
Within the force-field that was moulding him, man would
understand little and co-operate hardly at all. From the
viewpoint of his own present moment in any of the unfolding
centuries, he would see only change without pattern; quixotic
ebb and flow; disruption, chaos, order restored and chaos once
again. Sacred standards would be cast down and strange,
seemingly arbitrary, new standards created.
From the present moment of a lifetime of seventy years, all
would seem the whim of chance and accident, all without
purpose or meaning.
Yet from the present moment of Intelligence able to contain
the whole history of mankind as a single perception, all would
be true end-gaining, deliberate, law-conforming and almost -
but never quite - inevitable.
If not quite inevitable then certainly necessary; for a great
event lay ahead in man's temporal future. It existed already in
eternity and was required to be actualized in time.
The event is a mutation in man's evolutionary nature
involving a new modality of experience, a new organ of
perception. Though latent, perhaps, since man emerged from
his primate ancestry, it is an organ of experience that has only
intermittently been active in certain exceptional individuals.
Man is due to inherit it one day as part of his total experience.
For this event man had to be prepared. Certain promising
races of pre-men were inexplicably extinguished and it has
been conjectured that this happened because they were unable
to come to terms with intellect - for them an incomprehensible
and unmanageable experience.
By analogy, a function giving access to a four-dimensional
world might be equally disastrous to intellect-based Modern
Man. A certain minimum standard of soul, a certain minimum
psychic specific gravity is necessary before such a radical new
modality may be risked.
Preparation for this - in our view - was begun as a deliberate
operation of Higher Intelligence 1,000 years ago.
The first steps involved a certain social tolerance, a certain
expansion of intellect, a certain instinctive humanitarianism.
These had to be established before the first tentative switching
on of the new organ could be regarded as viable.
How mankind was prepared within the ferment of the last
thousand years, we shall hope to glimpse in succeeding
chapters.
Once we have the key we shall see that the ebb and flow of
history itself illustrates the goals that were required to be
gained. Here and there it may be possible to see the agents of
the process at work - the Secret People serving, perhaps
members of, the Hidden Directorate.
But for the most part, their presence, like their purpose, will
be obscured from the view of the men and women among whom
they walked.
The People of the Secret (p. 44-52)
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