Theos-Talk Archives (March 2003 Message tt00062)

Hi all of you,

Here is part 2 of the article "The Sufi Tradition" by Elizabeth Hall on Idries Shah.

Article originally published in Psychology Today, July 1975
Copyright Elizabeth Hall


Part 2 - with about 2 pages:




IS: In responsible Sufi circles, no one attempts to handle either the 
sneerers or the worshippers, and they are very politely detached from the 
others.
EH: They are not fertile ground?
IS: They have something else to do first. And what they need is offered 
abundantly elsewhere.

{ I KNOW HER BEST People ran to tell the Mulla that his mother-in-law had 
fallen into the river. "She will be swept out to sea, for the torrent is 
very fast here," they cried. Without a moment's hesitation Nasrudin dived 
into the river and started to swim upstream. "No!" they cried, "DOWNSTREAM! 
That is the only way a person can be carried away from here." "Listen!" 
panted the Mulla, "I know my wife's mother. If everyone else is swept 
downstream, the place to look for HER is upstream."}

IS: There's no reason for them to bother us. Next we begin to work with 
people who are left. In order to do this, we must cool it. We must not 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.
So, the second use of the stories is to provide a protected situation in 
which people can realize the extent of the conditionings in their 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?
IS: You can't predict it at all. With some people it is an instant 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.
Nobody is trying to abolish conditioning, merely to describe it, to make 
it possible to change it, and also to see where it needs to operate, and 
where it does not. Some sort of secondary personality, which we call the 
"commanding self" takes over man when his mentation is not correctly 
balanced. This self, which he takes for his real one, is in fact a 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 
conditioned, that he can operate aside from it? He can say, "Why do I 
believe this? Well, perhaps it is because..."
IS: Exactly. Then he is halfway toward being liberated from his 
conditioning - or at least toward keeping it under control. People who say 
that we must smash conditioning are themselves oversimplifying things.
EH: A number of years ago an American psychologist carried out an 
interesting experiment. He had a device that supplied two images, one to 
each eye. One image was a baseball player, the other was a matador. He 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 
unexpectedly, it gives you a bit of a jolt and forces you to see him 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.

{ EARLY TO RISE "Nasrudin, my son, get up early in the mornings." "Why 
father?" "It is a good habit. Why, once I rose at dawn and went for a walk. 
I found on the road a sack of gold." "How did you know it was not lost the 
previous night?" "That is not the point. In any case, it had not been there 
the night before. I noticed that." "Then it isn't lucky for everyone to get 
up early. The man who lost the gold must have been up earlier than you." }

Part 3 of 6 follows shortly. 

from
Sufilight with peace and love...






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