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 Elizabeth Hall

The Sufi Tradition

"SOME GURUS ARE FRANKLY PHONIES, AND THEY DON'T TRY TO HIDE IT FROM ME. THEY
THINK I AM ONE TOO"

EH: Idries Shah, you are the West's leading exponent of Sufism, that rich
religious tradition growing out of the Middle East. Why, at a time 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.
I got all that out of my system very early and, consistent with Sufi
tradition, I believe that those who don't want to teach are the ones who 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.
IS: Not of all. Their followers need the guru as much as the guru needs 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.
IS: Yes, but that's no reason to be against it. Why shouldn't there be 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
serve their fellowman.
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.
IS: That's going a little too far. But they feel safety in numbers. They
actually feel there is something wrong with what they are doing, and 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: Sometimes they laugh and sometimes they cry. The general impression 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 interested in what another person is saying, even 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.
Look here, it's time that somebody took the lid off the guru racket.
Since I have nothing to lose, it might as well be me. With many of these
gurus it comes down to an "us and them" sort of thing between the East and
the West. Gurus from India used to stop by on their way to California and
their attitude was generally, let's take the Westerners 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 India.
EH: It is an understandable human reaction to centuries of Western
exploitation.
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
willing to negotiate with me and want to use my name. On one occasion a chap
in a black shirt and white tie told me, "You take Britain, but don't touch
the United States, because that's ours." I had a terrible vision of Al
Capone. The difference was that the guru's disciples kissed his feet.

{ SEE WHAT I MEAN? Nasrudin was throwing handfuls of crumbs around his
house. "What are you doing?" someone asked him. "Keeping the tigers away."
"But there are no tigers in these parts." "That's right. Effective, isn't
it?"}

EH: Gurus keep proliferating in the United States, always with massive
followings. A 15-year-old Perfect Master can fill the Astrodome.
IS: Getting the masses is the easy part. A guru can attract a crowd of a
million in India, but few in a crowd take him seriously. You see, India 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 India and told you that I was going to Detroit to
become a wonderful automobile millionaire, you 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
obvious question. What is Sufism?
IS: The most obvious question of all is for us the most difficult question.
But I'll try to answer. Sufism is experience of life through a method of
dealing with life and human relations. This method is based on an
understanding of man, which places at one's disposal the means to 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
different explanations.
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
again in a different way in a different story. In all my reading, I think
the story that made the most profound impression on me was "The Water of
Paradise." Afterward, I found the same point in other stories, 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.

{ IF A POT CAN MULTIPLY One day Nasrudin lent his cooking pots to a
neighbor, who was giving a feast. The neighbor returned them, together with
one extra one - a very tiny pot. "What is this?" asked Nasrudin. "According
to law, I have given you the offspring of your property which was born when
the pots were in my care," said the joker. Shortly afterwards Nasrudin
borrowed his neighbor's pots, but did not return them. The man came round to
get them back. "Alas!" said Nasrudin, "they are dead. We have established,
have we not, that pots are mortal?"}

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." }

EH: What is the Sufi attitude toward mysticism and the ecstatic experience?
IS: Sufis are extraordinarily cautious about this. They don't allow a
person to do spiritual exercises unless they are convinced that he can
undergo such exercises without harm and appreciate them without distraction.


{ MOMENT IN TIME "What is fate?" Nasrudin was asked by a scholar. "An
endless succession of intertwined events, each influencing the other." "That
is hardly a satisfactory answer. I believe in cause and effect." "Very
well," said the Mulla, "look at that." He pointed to a procession passing in
the street. "That man is being taken to be hanged. Is that because someone
gave him a silver piece and enabled him to buy the knife with which he
committed the murder; or because somebody saw him do it; or because nobody
stopped him?"}

IS: Spiritual exercises are allowed only at a certain time and a certain
place
and with certain people. When the ecstatic exercises are taken out 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
not required. It is merely a way of helping man to realize his potential.


{ AT HOME IN
EAST AND WEST
A Sketch of Idries Shah


The English countryside is an unlikely place to meet a direct
descendant of Mohammed, a man described in Who's Who in the Arab
World as His Sublime Highness the Sayid Idries el-Hashimi, leader of
the Sufi community. But there, no more than an hour from London,
lives Idries Shah on a 50-acre estate that once belonged to the
family of Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts.

Shah, a witty, urbane man whose family palaces are in Afghanistan,
was born in Simla, India in 1924. As was his father before him, Shah
is advisor to several monarchs and heads of state-purely in an
unofficial capacity. It was his father, the Sirdar Iqbal Ali Shah,
who first suggested the partition of Pakistan. And his grandfather
dissatisfied with both eastern and western education built a school
for his grandson. The curriculum included working for a year on a
farm.

Whether it was this unique education, heredity, opportunity or
Sufism, Shah became a remarkable man. He has written nearly a score
of books, invented a device for the negative ionization of air,
written and produced a prize-winning film, established a printing
house, and now directs a textile company, a ceramics company, an
electronics company, and the Institute for Cultural Research.

Shah was a founding member of the Club of Rome and while he retains
his membership, he did not attend last fall's gathering in
Berlin.
The criticism that followed the publication of Limits of Growth, a
controversial report commissioned by the club, taught him that his
father's refusal to join any organization was wise. The report
forecast a worldwide collapse unless population and industrial growth
halted and Shah was accused of being a prophet of doom.

It was not fear of controversy that disturbed Shah. When he leans
forward to describe how his books were taken from Persian university
students and burned, his smile is genuine. Nationalistic officials
touched off the ritual pyre because Shah states plainly that Sufism
is not an ancient Persian religion.

After an initial flurry of resentment when Shah and his Cultural
Institute first occupied Langton House, the local residents came to
accept the inhabitants as English. Over a grilled sole at the pub,
Shah reported that the pub keeper once told him that, as master of
Langton House, the Indian-born Afghan was the village squire. Shah
objected, pointing out that there was a larger estate in the village
and that its master was the squire. "Oh, no," replied the
pub keeper, "he can't be the squire, he's an
Irishman."

The house at Langton Green draws visitors, pupils, and would-be
pupils from all over. Their ranks include poet Ted Hughes, novelist
Alan Sillitoe, zoologist Desmond Morris, and psychologist Robert
Ornstein. His best-known pupil, novelist Doris Lessing, has written
of Shah's work for publications as varied as Vogue, the American
Scholar, and The Guardian.

One opens Shah's door and steps into an English home decorated in
a Middle-Eastern fashion. Oriental rugs cover the floor; sheep,
leopard and antelope skins are thrown across the couches; and the
soft tapestries on the walls contrast with the brass tabletops and
trays.
Shah has deliberately combined hard and soft objects in order to
modify the room's acoustic qualities and produce certain
harmonious resonances. It is a thing done mostly by
"old-fashioned" people in the East, but he finds it
satisfying.

Every Sunday there is buffet lunch for guests in the Elephant, a
dining room that was once the estate stable. Connected to the
Elephant by a walkway is a large conservatory. Inside, flowers bloom,
vines grow, and guests can reach up from their lounge chairs to pluck
grapes. Outside the glass walls, icy rain drips off bare branches
onto the bleak autumn landscape.
It is a long journey from Afghanistan to the county of Kent. The East
regards Shah as a hometown boy who made good in the wicked West and
would like to see him act as their political propagandist. This he
refuses to do. Shah's greatest fear is that world tensions will
sharpen to until he is forced to choose between East and West. Until
then, he is equally at home in both worlds.

--Elizabeth Hall }

part 2 of interview

Hall: Many of the great Sufi teachers seem to regard the ecstatic
experience as only a way station.

Shah: Oh, yes. The ecstatic experience is absolutely the lowest from
of 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.

Hall: Sufis also seem to take extra-sensory perception as a matter of
course and as not very interesting.

Shah: Not interesting at all. It is no more than a by-product. Let me
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.

Hall: They are supposed to be developing their potential; not
attempting to read minds or move objects around. Do you think that
researchers will one day explain the physical basis of ESP or do you
think it will always elude them?

Shah: If I say it will elude the scientists, it will annoy the people
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.

Hall: Is that because disinterest is necessary to approach the
subject properly?

Shah: Something like that. Being disinterested, you can approach ESP
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.

Hall: Often they have a desperate wish to prove that ESP is either
true or false.

Shah: Yes that's what I call heroism. But it's not
professionalism and that's what the job calls for.

Hall: You've also written a couple of books on magic: Oriental
Magic 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.

Shah: Very little. The main purpose of my books on magic was to make
this material available to the general reader. For too long people
believed that there were secret books, hidden places, and amazing
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.

Hall: That's not exactly what the contemporary devotees of
witchcraft and magic are up to.

Shah: No. My work has no relevance to the current interest whatever.
Oh, it makes my books sell, but they were written for cool-headed
people and there aren't many of those around.

Hall: Most of the people who get interested in magic seem to be
enthusiasts.

Shah: Yes, it's just as with ESP. There's no reason why they
shouldn't 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.
Their attitude is not at all a search for truth.

Hall: Many people seem to use drugs as an attempt to get instant
enlightenment.

Shah: People want to be healed or cured or saved, but they want it
now. 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.

Hall: They want something to carry away.

Shah: They are thinking in terms of lose property, almost physical.
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.

Hall: Let's get back to your main work. What is the best way of
introducing the Sufi way of thinking to the West?

Shah: I am sure that the best way is not to start a cult, but to
introduce a body of literary material that should interest people
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.

Hall: Does Western society need this infusion of Sufi thought?

Shah: It needs it for the same reason that any society needs it,
because it gives one something one cannot get elsewhere. For example,
Sufi thought makes a person more efficient. A watchmaker becomes a
better watchmaker. A housewife becomes a better housewife. When
somebody said as much in California last year, 120 hippies got up and
left the hall. They didn't wait to hear that they weren't
going to be forced to be more efficient.

Hall: But there must be more than efficiency to it.

Shah: Of course. I wouldn't try to sell Sufism purely as a means
to 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.
Sufi experience tends to produce the kind of person who is calm, not
because he can't get excited, but because he knows that getting
excited about an event or problem is not going to have any lasting
effect.

Hall: Would you say that it might give a person an outlook on the
problems of this time similar to the outlook he might presently have
on the problems of the 16th century?

Shah: Very much so. And such an outlook takes the heat out of almost
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.
For example, some of the finest people in this country spend a great
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.

Hall: In other words, Sufism might help us solve some of the enormous
social, political and environmental problems that face us.

Shah: People talk about Sufism as if it were the acquisition of
powers. 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.

Hall: When I read your books, the message came through very clearly
that you are not interested in rational, sequential thought-in what
Bob Ornstein calls left-hemisphere activity.

Shah: To say that I'm not interested in sequential thinking is
not to 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.

Hall: When you speak of seeing the thing whole, you're talking
about intuitive thought, where you don't reason the problem out
but know the answer without knowing how you got it.

Shah: Yes. You know the answer and can verify that it is an answer.
That is the difference between romantic imagining and something that
belongs to this world.

Hall: Ornstein, who seems to have been profoundly influenced by Sufi
thought, has suggested that most people today tend to rely on
logical, rational, linear thought and that we tend to use very little
of the intuitive, nonlinear thought of the brain's right
hemisphere.
Would you say that Sufism can teach one to tap right-hemisphere
thought?

Shah: Yes, I would. Sufism has never been overimpressed by the
products of left-hemisphere activity, although it's often used
them.
For instance, Sufis have written virtually all the great poetry of
Persia, and while the inspiration for a poem may come from the right
hemisphere, one must use the left hemisphere to put the poem down in
the proper form. I think that the behavior and products of Sufism are
among the few things we have that encourage a holistic view of
things. 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.

Hall: Why are the traditional Western methods of study inappropriate
for the study of Sufism?

Shah: They are inappropriate only up to a point. Both the Western and
Middle Eastern methods of study come from the common heritage of the
Middle Ages, when one was regarded as wise if he had a better memory
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.
Another favorite Sufi teaching method is to be rude to people,
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.

Hall: Recent studies of memory indicate that unless adrenalin is
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.

Shah: Exactly. Concentration comes in on a strange level and in an
unaccustomed way. But using this knowledge has traditionally given
Sufi 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.

Hall: People in the United States seem to be looking for leaders,
whether spiritual or political, and they keep complaining because
there are no leaders to follow.

Shah: People are always looking for leaders; that does not mean that
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.

Hall: If so, the washerwomen are spread throughout the culture.

Shah: They're not called washerwomen, but if we test them, they
react 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.

Hall: That's a tough statement. You sound as if you are down on
all academics.

Shah: Well, in the past few years I have given quite a few seminars
and 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.
If these are the cream, what is the milk like?

Hall: Are you talking about undergraduates, graduate students, or
professors?

Shah: The whole lot. Recently I've been appalled at the low
levels of 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
place. Forty years ago there were two kinds of articles: very, very
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?

Hall: Critics like Dwight Macdonald have said for years that as
education becomes widespread and people become semiliterate, the
culture at the top is inevitably pulled down.
But you're not really hostile to all academics, are you?

Shah: No, some of my best friends are academics.

Hall: That is no way to get out of it.

Shah: Of course, I'm not hostile to all academics. There are some
great 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.
For the sake of humanity, somebody has got to rock the boat.

Hall: For the sake of humanity, what would you like to see happen?

Shah: What I really want, in case anybody is listening, is for the
products of the last 50 years of psychological research to be studied
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.
There is a Sufi story about a man who went into a shop and asked the
shopkeeper, "Do you have leather?"
"Yes," said the shopkeeper.
"Nails?"
"Yes."
"Thread?"
"Yes."
"Needle?"
"Yes"
"Then why don't you make yourself a pair of boots?"

That story is intended to pinpoint this failure to use available
knowledge. People in this civilization are starving in the middle of
plenty. This is a civilization that is going down, not because it
hasn't got the knowledge that would save it, but because nobody
will use the knowledge.

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