1 Tales of the Classical Masters
(Manipulation of feeling as teaching device)
‘Secondly, because you were required to show that your superficial feelings could easily be manipulated to make you come here even though you had individually made up your minds at first not to do so.
Weapons Hakim al-Mansuri was a great sage of Balkh, in Central Asia. He had thousands of disciples, and his mere presence at the courts of kings was regarded as conferring legitimacy upon their rule. But he very seldom spoke. When he did, it was about matters which did not seem to be connected with spiritual concerns. And yet many great masters of the Sufi Way attribute their attainments to having sat at his table, or from being in his guest-house, or even from associating with the other disciples, or working in his house.
The Hakim answered: ‘If you have a sword in your hand, do you charge the opponent with mud bricks? Even a monkey would not chatter if it could do something more effective. That man wanted to defeat me, not to discover truth.’
Generosity The great teacher Sahl of Tustar relates that God told Moses that real self-sacrifice for the sake of others is the basis of the greatest capacity for perception of the divine: the extreme selfsacrifice which was given to Muhammad and his followers. Imam Ghazzali relates, in the Third Book of his Revival of Religious Sciences, how a man who was famed as generous learnt what generosity really was:
(Scent versus nectar: report versus reality)
‘Bees approach flowers by scent, but they do not, once arrived at the proximity of the bloom, demand merely more and more scent. They adjust to the nectar, which they have to collect. This is the equivalent of the reality of wisdom, of which the report and imaginings are as it were the scent.
‘So the number of “real bees” among humanity is very small. Whereas almost all bees are bees, in being able to collect nectar, almost all human beings are not yet human beings in the sense of being attuned to perceive what they were created for.’
In terms of studies, the first group attach themselves to lower and exciting cults; the second to zealously propagated ideas; the third to systems of their own choosing or devising, taking something here and something else there; the fourth are the Sufis.
The Sufi poet Jami, in some especially beautiful lines, says: Whether seeker of evil or good Whether inmate of a monastery or cloister From the viewpoint of Form, all is other than He! From the viewpoint of Truth, all is none other than He!
‘A Sufi,’ he says, ‘is one who is not bound by anything nor does he bind anything.’ This means that he does what he does from free choice and not from compulsion or conditioning. Equally, he is not attached to things and does not bind others to him. Nuri continues: ‘Sufism is not a doctrine or worldly knowledge. If it were ceremonial, this would have to be practised (regularly). If it were ordinary learning, it would have to be taught by formal methods. In fact, it is a matter of disposition.’
‘Whatever goes into a salt-mine becomes salt.’ The Teaching is the worldly manifestation of something, and as such a manifestation it is affected by the deforming character in appearance and operation of those who adopt it into their culture without understanding its inner dimensions.
(Learning to learn by abandoning fixed assumptions)
Fox and Lion Q: What is the first step in ‘learning how to learn’? A: It is undoubtedly to abandon the attempt to learn entirely through one’s own assumptions. Most people are trying to learn by means of concepts which they have adopted but have no suspicion that these will not work.
The Sufis also hold that desire of this kind holds people back: they obtain satisfactions or feed their desire until they are either satisfied or chronically dissatisfied. But, they continue, beyond this there is a way of progress, understanding, perception, which is ‘veiled’ (obscured) by desire. For this reason, Bayazid seeks the avoidance of desire. Mundane things, and this includes emotional stimuli which are often imagined by very devout people to be religious, are pursued by means of this desire, this coveting.
To distinguish real objectives from secondary ones the Sufis have said: ‘The importance of something is in inverse proportion to its attractiveness.’
Fear of loss and exulting at gain are methods of emotional stimulus which both provide temporary excitement (which people crave) and stand in the way of deeper understanding.