Idries Shah

Eventually the hoopoe tells the birds that in the quest they have to traverse seven valleys. First of all is the Valley of the Quest, where all kinds of perils threaten, and where the pilgrim must renounce desires. Then comes the Valley of Love, the limitless area in which the Seeker is completely consumed by a thirst for the Beloved. Love is followed by the Valley of Intuitive Knowledge, in which the heart receives directly the illumination of Truth and an experience of God. In the Valley of Detachment the traveller becomes liberated from desires and dependence.

The hoopoe cried, ‘O laggard, busy with the mere shape of things! Leave off the pleasures of seductive form! The love of the face of the Rose has merely driven thorns into your heart. It is your master. However beautiful the Rose, the beauty vanishes in a few days. Love for something so perishable can only cause revulsion in the Perfected Man. If the Rose’s smile awakens your desire, it is only to hold you ceaselessly in sorrow. It is she who laughs at you each Spring, and she does not cry — leave the Rose and the redness.’
Commenting upon this passage, one teacher remarks that Attar refers not only to the ecstatic who does not take his mysticism further than rapture. He also means the ecstatic’s parallel, the person who feels frequent and incomplete love, and who, although deeply affected by it, is not regenerated and altered by it to such an extent that his very being undergoes a change: ‘This is the fire of love which purifies, which is different whenever it occurs, which sears the marrow and makes incandescent the kernel. The ore separates from the matrix, and the Perfected Man emerges, altered in such a way that every aspect of his life is ennobled. He is not changed in the sense of being different; but he is completed, and this makes him considered powerful of men. Every fibre has been purified, raised to a higher state, vibrates to a higher tune, gives out a more direct, more penetrating note, attracts the affinity in man and woman, is loved more and hated more; partakes of a destiny, a portion, infinitely assured and recognised, indifferent to the things which affected him while he pursued the mere shadow of which this is the substance, however sublime that former experience may have been.’

This teacher (Adil Alimi) warns that these sentiments will not appeal to all. They will be ‘disbelieved by the materialist; attacked by the theologian; ignored by the romantic; avoided by the shallow; rejected by the ecstatic; be welcomed but misunderstood by the theoretician and imitation Sufi’. But, he continues, we must remember qadam ba qadam (step by step): ‘Before you can drink the fifth cup, you must have drunk the first four, each of them delicious.’

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.

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.

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.