Idries Shah

In order to approach the Sufi Way, the Seeker must realise that he is, largely, a bundle of what are nowadays called conditionings — fixed ideas and prejudices, automatic responses sometimes which have occurred through the training of others. Man is not as free as he thinks he is. The first step is for the individual to get away from thinking that he understands, and really understand. But man has been taught that he can understand everything by the same process, the process of logic. This teaching has undermined him.

The way in which the different religious paths are symbolised for the Sufi is stated by Rumi when he says that the path of Jesus was struggling with solitude and overcoming lustfulness. The path of Muhammad was to live within the community of ordinary humanity. ‘Go by the way of Muhammad,’ he says, ‘but if you cannot, then go by the Christian way.’ Rumi here is not by any means inviting his hearers to embrace one or other of these religions. He is pointing to the ways in which the Seeker can find fulfilment; but fulfilment through the Sufic understanding of what the paths of Jesus and Muhammad were.

The same thought is often given by the master in many different forms, in order to make it penetrate the mind. Sufis say that an idea will enter the conditioned (veiled) mind only if it is so phrased as to be able to bypass the screen of conditionings.

The meditations of Rumi include some remarkable ideas, designed to bring the Seeker into an understanding of the fact that he is temporarily out of contact with complete reality, even though ordinary life seems to be the totality of reality itself. What we see, feel and experience in ordinary, unfulfilled life, according to Sufic thinking, is only a part of the great whole.

The attitude toward ordinary conventions of life undergoes an examination. The question of humanity’s inner yearnings is seen, not as a Freudian need, but as a natural instrument inherent in the mind in order to enable it to attain to truth. People, Rumi teaches, do not really know what they want. Their inner yearning is expressed in a hundred desires which they think are their needs. These are not their real desires, as experience shows. For when these objectives are attained, the yearning is not stilled.

Now the elusiveness of spiritual experience is glimpsed by the Seeker. If he is a creative worker, he enters the stage when inspiration enters him sometimes, but not at other times. If he is subject to ecstatic experience, he will find that the joyous meaningful sense of completeness comes transitorily, and that he cannot control it. The secret protects itself: ‘Concentrate upon spirituality as you will — it will shun you if you are unworthy. Write about it, boast of it, comment upon it — it will decline to benefit you; it will flee. But, if it sees your concentration, it may come to your hand, like a trained bird. Like the peacock, it will not sit in an unworthy place.’
It is only when he is beyond this stage of development that the Sufi can communicate anything of the path to others. If he tries to do so before, ‘it will flee’.

Hardly anything will shake the intellectualising observer in his confidence that everything which he is studying is made up of a patchwork of other things.

‘I travelled to Syria,’ he says, ‘and remained there for two years. I had no other objective than that of seeking solitariness, overcoming selfishness, fighting passions, trying to make clear my soul, to complete my character.’ He did this because the Sufi cannot enter into understanding until his heart is prepared to ‘meditate upon God’, as he calls it.
This period of time was sufficient only to give him sporadic flashes of spiritual fulfilment (foretaste) — the stage which is considered by most non-Sufi mystics to be the ultimate, but which is in fact only the first step.
It had become clear to him that ‘the Sufis are not men of words, but of inner perception. I had learned all that could be learned by reading. The remainder could not be acquired by study or by talk.’

The Perfected Man (insani kamil), because of his living in different dimensions at the same time, must appear to follow more than one set of doctrines. A man who is swimming across a lake is carrying out actions and responding to perceptions other than a man walking down a hill, for instance. He is the same man; and he carries with him when he is walking all the potentiality of swimming.

The Perfected Man has three frameworks of belief:
1. That of his surroundings.
2. That which he conveys to students in accordance with their capacity for understanding.
3. That which he understands from inner experience, only to be known among a special circle.