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A conversation with Idries Shah about Sufism and mystical
Moslems; why followers need gurus, breaking free of conditioning, and the
ecstatic experience as the lowest form of advanced knowledge. By rich
religious tradition growing out of the when
new cults are springing up, do you refuse to be a guru? You could easily
become one. IS:
There are a lot of reasons. But if we are talking about the teacher who has disciples, it's because I feel no need for
an admiring audience to
tell me how wonderful I am or to do what I say. I believe that the guru
needs his disciples. If he had a sufficient outlet for his desire to be a big shot or his feeling of holiness or his
wish to have others dependent
on him, he wouldn't be a guru. can
and should. The West still has a vocation hang-up and has not yet discovered
this. Here, the only recognized achiever is an obsessive. In the East we believe that a person who can't help
doing a thing isn't necessarily
the best one to do it. A compulsive cookie baker may bake very
bad cookies. EH:
Are you saying that a person who feels that he must engage in a certain
profession is doing it because of some emotional need? IS:
I think this is very often the case, and it doesn't necessarily produce
the best professional. Show an ordinary person an obsessive and he will believe you have shown him a dedicated and
wonderful person – provided
he share his beliefs. If he doesn't, of course, he regards the one
obsessed as evil. Sufism regards this as a facile and untrue posture.
And if there is one consistency in the Sufi tradition, it is that
man must be in the world but not of the world. There is no role for a
priest-king or guru. EH:
Then you have a negative opinion of all gurus.
his
followers. I just don't regard it as a religious operation. I take a guru
to be a sort of psychotherapist. At the very best, he keeps people quiet and polarized around him and gives some sort
of meaning to their lives. EH:
Librium might do the same thing.
room for what we might call "neighborhood
psychotherapy" - the community looking
after its own? However, why it should be called a spiritual activity
rather baffles me. EH:
One can't help getting the feeling that not all gurus are trying to IS:
Some are frankly phonies, and they don't try to hide it from me. They think that I am one, too, so when we meet
they begin the most disturbing
conversations. They want to know how I get money, how I control
people, and so on. EH:
They want to swap secrets.
they
feel better if they talk to somebody else who is doing it. I always tell them that I think it would be much better if
they gave up the guru role in their own minds and realize that they are
providing a perfectly good
social service. EH:
How do they take to that advice?
is
that one of us is wrong. Because I don't make the same kind of noises that they do, they seem to believe that either I
am a lunatic or that I am
starting some new kind of con. Perhaps I have found a new racket. EH:
I am surprised that these gurus tell you all their secrets as freely as
they do. IS:
I must tell you that I have not renounced the Eastern technique of pretending
to be on his side. Therefore, I am able to draw out gurus and get them to commit themselves to an extent that a
Westerner, because of his
conscience, could not do. The Westerner would not allow certain things to go unchallenged and would not trick, as
it were, another person.
So he doesn't find out the truth. and
the West. Gurus from to
the cleaners; they colonized us, now we will get money out of them. I heard this sort of thing even from people who had
impeccable spiritual reputations
back home in EH:
It is an understandable human reaction to centuries of Western IS:
It's understandable, but I deny that it's a spiritual activity. What I want to say is, "Brother, you are in the
revenge business, and that's a
different kind of business from me." There are always groups that are chap in a black shirt and white tie told me,
"You take don't
touch the vision
of Al Capone. The difference was that the guru's disciples kissed his
feet.
EH:
Gurus keep proliferating in the IS:
Getting the masses is the easy part. A guru can attract a crowd of a has had gurus for thousands of years, so they are
generally sophisticated about them; they take in the
attitude with their mothers' milk.
This culture just hasn't been inoculated against the guru. Let's turn
it around. If I were fresh off a plane from I was going to would
smile at me. You know perfectly well the obstacles, the taxes, the ulcers
that I face. Well, the Indian is in the same position with the automobile
industry as the American with the guru. I'm not impressed by naive American reactions to gurus; if you can show
me a guru who can pull
off that racket in the East, then I will be surprised. EH:
Before we go any farther, we'd better get down to basics and ask the IS:
The most obvious question of all is for us the most difficult question.
organize
one's relationships and one's learning systems. So instead of saying that Sufism is a body of thought in which
you believe certain things and don't believe other things, we say that
the Sufi experience has
to be provoked in a person. Once provoked, it becomes his own property,
rather as a person masters an art. EH:
So ideally, for four million readers, you would have four million IS:
In fact, it wouldn't work out like that. We progress by means of NASHR,
an Arabic word than means scatter technique. For
example, I've published quite a number of miscellaneous books,
articles, tapes and so on,
which scatter many forms of this Sufi material. These 2,000 different stories cover many different tendencies
in many people, and they
are able to attach themselves to some aspect of it. EH:
I noticed as I read that the same point would be made over and over think the story that made the most profound
impression on me was "The Water of but had I not read "The Water of
Paradise" first, I might not have picked
it up. IS:
That is the way the process tends to work. Suppose we get a group of 20 people past the stage where they no longer
expect us to give them miracles
and stimulation and attention. We sit them down in a room and give them 20 or 30 stories, asking them to tell us
what they see in the stories,
what they like, and what the don't like. The stories first operate
as a sorting out process. They sort out both the very clever people who need psychotherapy and who have come
only to put you down, and
the people who have come to worship.
IS:
In responsible Sufi circles, no one attempts to handle either the the
others.
IS:
There's no reason for them to bother us. Next we begin to work with have
any spooky atmosphere, any strange robes or gongs or intonations. The new students generally react to the stories
either as they think you would like them to react or as their background
tells them they should react.
Once they realize that no prizes are being given for correct answers, they begin to see that their previous
conditioning determines the
way they are seeing the material in the stories. ordinary
lives. The third use comes later, rather like when you get the oil
to the surface of a well after you burn of the gases. After we have burnt off the conditioning, we start getting
completely new interpretations
and reactions to stories. At last, as the student becomes less emotional, we can begin to deal with
the real person, not the
artifact that society has made him. EH:
Is this a very long process?
process;
with others, it takes weeks or months. Still others get fed up and quit because, like good children of the
consumer society, they crave something
to consume and we're not giving it to them. EH:
You say that conditioning gets in the way of responses to Sufi material.
But everyone is conditioned from birth, so how does one ever escape
from his conditioning? IS:
We can't live in the world without being conditioned. Even the control
of one's bladder is conditioned. It is absurd to talk, as some do,
of deconditioned or nonconditioned
people. But it is possible to see why conditioning has taken place and why a
person's beliefs become oversimplified. mixture
of emotional impulses and various pieces of conditioning. As a consequence of Sufi experience, people - instead
of seeing things through a filter of conditioning plus emotional
reactions, a filter which constantly discards certain stimuli - can
see things through some part
of themselves that can only be described as not conditioned. EH:
Are you saying that when one comes to an awareness
that he is IS:
Exactly. Then he is halfway toward being liberated from his say that we must smash conditioning are themselves
oversimplifying things. EH:
A number of years ago an American psychologist carried out an had a group of American and Mexican schoolteachers
look thru this device.
Most of the Americans saw a baseball player and most of the Mexicans saw the matador. From what you have said,
I gather that Sufism might enable an American to see the matador and a
Mexican to see the baseball
player. IS:
That is what many of the Sufi stories try to do. As a reader, you tend
to identify with one of the people in the story. When he behaves with
different eyes. EH:
When one reads about Sufism, one comes upon conflicting explanations.
Some people say that Sufism is pantheistic; others that it is
related to theosophy. Certainly there are strains in Sufism that you can
find in any of the major world religions. IS:
There are many ways to talk about the religious aspects of Sufism. I'll just choose one and see where it leads. The
Sufis themselves say that
their religion has no history, because it is not culture bound. Although Sufism has been productive in Islam,
according to Sufi tradition
and scripture, Sufis existed in pre-Islamic times. The Sufis say
that all religion is evolution, otherwise it wouldn't survive. They also say that all religion is capable of
development up to the same point.
In historical times, Sufis have worked with all recognized religions:
Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Vedanta, Buddhism and so on. Sufis are in religion but not of it.
experience? IS:
Sufis are extraordinarily cautious about this. They don't allow a distraction.
of
context, they become a circus at best and unhinge minds at worst. EH:
So the ecstatic experience has its place but only at a certain time at
a certain stage of development? IS:
Yes, and with certain training. The ecstatic experience is certainly potential.
advanced knowledge. Western biographers of the saints have
made it very difficult for us by
assuming that Joan of Arc and Theresa of Avila, who have had such experiences, have reached God. I am sure
that this is only a misunderstanding
based on faulty stories and faulty retrieval of information. give you a banal analogy. If I were training to be a
runner and went out every day to run, I
would get faster and faster and be able to run farther and farther with less fatigue. Now, I also find
that I have a better complexion, my
blood supply is better, and my digestion has improved. These things don't interest me; they are only
by-products of my running. I have another objective. When people I am
associated with become overwhelmed by
ESP phenomena, I always insist that they stop it, because their objective is elsewhere. attempting to read minds or move objects around. Do you think
that who are able to get enormous grants for research into
ESP. But I think, yes, a great deal more
can be discovered providing the scientists are prepared to be good scientists. And by that I mean that they
are prepared to structure
their experiments successively in accordance with their discoveries. They must be ready to follow and not
hew doggedly to their original working hypothesis. And they will
certainly have to give up their concept of the
observer being outside of the experiment, which has been their dearest pet for many years. And another
thing, as we find constantly in
metaphysics, people who are likely to be able to understand and develop
capacities for ESP are more likely to be found among people who are not interested in the subject. properly? more coolly and calmly. The Sufis say: "You will be
able to exercise these supernatural
powers when you can put out your hand and get a wild dove to land on it." But the other reason why the
people who are fascinated by ESP or
metaphysics or magic are the last who should study it is that they are interested in it for the wrong
reasons. It may be compensation. They are not equipped to study ESP. They are
equipped for something else: fear, greed, hate, or love of humanity. or false. that's what the job calls for. and The Secret Lore of Magic, an investigation of
Western magic. Today there's an upsurge of interest in astrology and witchcraft
and magic. You must have
speculated somewhat about magic in those books. this material available to the general reader. For too
long people things. They held onto this information as something to
frighten themselves with. So the first purpose was information. This is
the magic of East and West. That's all. There is no more. The
second purpose of those books
was to show that there do seem to be forces, some of which are
either rationalized by this magic or may be developed from it, which do not
come within customary physics or within the experience of ordinary people. I think this should be studied,
that we should gather the data and analyze the phenomena. We need
to separate the chemistry of magic from the alchemy, as it were. and magic are up to. Oh, it makes my books
sell, but they were written for cool-headed people and there aren't many of those around. enthusiasts. be enthusiasts, but
having encouraged them - which I couldn't help - I must now avoid them. They would only be disappointed in
what I have to say. You know, Rumi said that
people counterfeit gold because there is such a thing as real
gold, and I think that's the situation we are in with Sufi studies at the moment. It is much easier to
write a book on Sufism than it is to
study it. It is much easier to start a group and tell people what to do than it is to learn first. The
problem is that the spurious, the
unreal, the untrue is so much easier to find that it is in danger of becoming the norm. Until recently, for
example, if you didn't use drugs in
spiritual pursuits, you were not considered genuine. If you said, "look, drugs are irrelevant to
spiritual matters," you were considered a square. enlightenment. It's astonishing. When
people come here to see me, they want to get something, and if I
can't give them higher consciousness, they will take my bedspreads or
my ashtrays or whatever else they can pick up around the house. They are savages in the
best sense of the word. They are not what they think they are at all. I am invited to believe that they
take bedspreads and ashtrays by accident. But it never works the
other way; they never leave their wallets behind by mistake. One
thing I learned from my father very
early: Don't take any notice of what people say, just watch what they do. introducing the Sufi way of thinking to the West? enough to establish the Sufi phenomenon as viable. We
don't plan to form an organization
with somebody at the top and others at the bottom collecting money or
wearing funny clothes or converting people to Sufism. 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 or societies, in accordance with the needs of those individuals and societies. because it gives one something one cannot get elsewhere.
For example, better watchmaker. A housewife becomes a better housewife.
When somebody said as much
in left the hall. They didn't wait to hear that they
weren't going to be forced to be more efficient. efficiency, even though
it does make one more effective in all sorts of ways. I think Sufism is important because it enables one
to detach from life and see it as near to its reality as one can
possibly get. about an event or problem is not going to have any lasting
effect. problems of this time
similar to the outlook he might presently have on the problems of the 16th century? every contention. Instead of becoming the classical
Oriental philosopher who says, "All reality is imagination. Why
should I care about the world," you begin to see alternative ways
of acting. deal of their time
jumping up and down waving banners that condemn the various dirty beasts of the world. Such behavior makes the
dirty beasts delighted at the
thought that they are so important and the jumpers are so impotent. If the Trafalgar square jumpers had an
objective view of their behavior, they would abandon it. First, they would
see that they are only giving aid and
comfort to the enemy, and second, they would be able to see how to do
something about the dirty beasts - and if it were necessary to do anything about them. Sufi metaphysics has
even got a magical reputation. The truth is that Sufi study and
development give one capacities that one did not have before. One would not kill merely because killing is bad.
Instead, one would know that killing
is unnecessary and, in addition, what one would have to do in order to
make humanity happier and able to realize better objectives. That's what knowledge is for. that you are not
interested in rational, sequential thought - in what Bob Ornstein calls
left-hemisphere activity. say that I can live without it. I have it up to a
certain point, and I expect the people I meet to be able to use it. We need
information in order to approach a
problem, but we also need to be able to see the thing whole. intuitive thought,
where you don't reason the problem out but know the answer without knowing how you got it. That is the difference
between romantic imagining and something that rational, linear
thought and that we tend to use very little of the intuitive, nonlinear thought of the brain's right hemisphere.
thought? of left-hemisphere activity, although it's often used
them. the proper form. I think that the behavior and products
of Sufism are I don't want to discuss
Sufism in Ornsteinian terms, however, because I'm not qualified to do
so. I can only say that insofar as there is any advantage in these two
hemispheres acting alternately or complementing one another, then Sufi
material undoubtedly is among the very little available material that can help this process along. for the study of Sufism? than someone else. But some of the teaching methods that
Sufis use seem rather odd to the Westerner. If I were to say to you that
my favorite method of teaching is
to bore the audience to death, you would be shocked. But I have just results of some tests, which show
that English schoolchildren, when
shown a group of films, remembered only the ones that bored them. Now this is consistent with our
experience, but it is not consistent with Western beliefs. sometimes shouting them
down or shooing them away, a technique that is not customary in cultivated circles. By experience we
know that by giving a certain kind
of shock to a person, we can - for a short period - increase his
perception. Until recently I wouldn't have dared speak about this, but I now
have a clipping indicating that when a person endures a shock he produces Theta rhythms. Some people have
associated these brain rhythms with various forms of ESP. No
connection has been made yet, but I think we may be beginning to understand
it. present, no learning takes place, and shock causes
adrenalin to flow. We also know from
experience that when you find yourself in a situation of grave danger, you
tend to notice some very small detail with great clarity. teachers a reputation for having bad manners. The most polite
thing they can say about us is that we are irascible and out
of control. Some people say that a
spiritual teacher should have no emotions or be totally balanced. We say that a spiritual teacher must be a
person who can be totally balanced, not one who cannot help but be
balanced. whether spiritual or
political, and they keep complaining because there are no leaders to follow. this is the time for a leader. The problems that a
leader would be able to resolve have not been identified. Nor does the
clamor mean that those who cry out are suitable followers. Most of the
people who demand a leader seem to have some baby's idea of what a
leader should do. The idea that a leader will
walk in and we will all recognize him and follow him and
everybody will be happy strikes me as a strangely immature atavism. Most of these people, I believe, want not
a leader but excitement. I doubt that those who cry the loudest
would obey a leader if there was one. Talk is cheap, and a lot of the
talk comes from millions of old washerwomen. like washerwomen. For example, if you are selling books
and you send a professor of philosophy
something written in philosophical language, he will throw it away. But if you send him a spiel written
for a washerwoman, he will buy the book. At heart he is a washerwomen. Intellectuals don't
understand this, but business people do because their profits depend upon it. You can learn much more
about human nature on Madison
Avenue than you will from experts on human nature, because on Madison Avenue on stands or falls by the sales.
Professors in their ivory towers
can say anything because there's no penalty attached. Go to where there is a penalty attached and there
you will find wisdom. academics. lectures at
universities, and I have become terrified by the low level of ability. It is as if people just aren't trying. They
don't read the books in their fields,
don't know the workings of them, use inadequate approaches to a
subject, ask ridiculous questions that a moment's thought would have enabled them to answer. professors? articles in learned journals and literary weeklies. The
punctuation gone to hell, full of
non-sequiturs, an obvious lack of background knowledge, and so on. I went to a newspaper and looked up the
equivalent articles from the 1930's. A great change has taken good and terribly bad. There seemed nothing in-between.
Now everything is slapdash and mediocre. Why are so many famous
persons in hallowed institutions now so mediocre? education becomes
widespread and people become semiliterate, the culture at the top is inevitably pulled down. thinkers. But I do not believe that it is necessary for us
to have 80% blithering idiots in order to get 20% marvelous academics.
This ratio depresses me. I think that the good people are unbelievably
noble in denying that the rest of them are such hopeless idiots.
Privately they agree with you, but they won't rock the boat. by the public, by
everybody, so that the findings become part of their way of thinking. At the moment, people have adopted
only a few. They talk glibly about
making Freudian slips and they have accepted the idea of inferiority complexes. But they have this great
body of psychological information and refuse to use it. hasn't got the
knowledge that would save it, but because nobody will use the knowledge. Due to imperfections of the scanning process the text may contain
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