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going to obtain this opportunity of living through and observing
your reactions and those of others, outside of social groupings
where the lessons are either obscured or twisted to provide super-
ficial, tribal-type, conclusions?
If you refer again to the published narratives which illustrate the
coming-together of people, the effect of interchanges to show up
unworthy or irrelevant behaviour or the uselessness of facile inter-
pretation, you will find the material against which you can check
the behaviour of people in such a group, if you are in one.
The main characteristic displayed by the questioner is that of a
person who wants something ('progress', or 'a sense of how things
are going') without carrying on an active observation and digesting
of experience happening in and to the group. In traditional termin-
ology familiar to people of all cultures (used in this instance not as
a reproach but as a technique) we have here too much greed ahead
of capacity, too much dissatisfaction due to greed and false
premises, too much laziness which gives rise to a person being a
potential victim of an exploiter who might appear and promise
automatic progress without effort or right alignment.
Anyone who seeks to escape from his inherited culture's moral
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demands need not think that they may have no function as exer-
cises. He has to re-learn the other possible functions in traditional
principles, and he can do this through more study of narrative and
illustrative materials and in participation in very preliminary
group work, through more of such activity, not less.
Finally, individual and sub-group progress is not always visible
to all participants on demand.
OBSESSED WITH THE WORLD
Contrast this approach with that of the mechanical religionists,
who merely cultivate obsession. Fariduddin Attar gives a tale of
the great woman Sufi Rabia, when she was ill. A cenain scholar
came to see her and, as he sat beside her bed, he repeated again
and again arguments about the evils of the world.
But Rabia could see through this and told him that he obviously
loved the world very much. People speak again and again of things
which they love, whether they do so in pleasant or unpleasant
terms. To be attached to something, favourably or otherwise, is
the basic condition. 'If you had no truck with the world,' Rabia
reminded the man, 'you would say notthing about it, favourable or
otherwise.'
270
Jumping to Conclusions
ASSUMPTIONS can stand between the student and what he might
learn, if these preconceptions are not correct or if they are not
functional.
The assumptions that spiritual paths should take this or that
form, should be followed by this or that type of person, should
belong to certain kinds of recognisable institution, etc., these ideas
not only block learning - they often transform it into a search for
the expected diversion, and therefore, in reality if not in appear-
ance, towards becoming a pan of the entertainment industry.
To connect with people at the outside edge, so to speak, Eastern
sages have grown beards and worn turbans; to point up the
jumping-to-conclusions syndrome, others have behaved like luna-
tics; to alert those who are most teachable, yet others have not
compromised with expectation to any real extent. And frauds and
adventurers, to exploit the only-too-obvious assumptions, have
never been slow to accord with them-to tell people what they
want to hear.
If you cannot question your assumptions, you must stand up to
be counted among the people of whom some may be right: but
who include a large number of people, conditioned to bigotry,
who must be wrong.
Perhaps worth thinking about is the illustrative test which was
recently applied to over two hundred people who had been
attracted to a certain spiritual teaching. They were given a
number of statements and literary extracts and asked which of
them were genuine and which not. Over eighty-five per cent of
these people got the answers wrong: they identified the spurious
documents and statements as genuine.
This indicated at least two things: (1) that these people, for the
most part, had not been attracted to the teaching through any
ability to discern its legitimacy; and (2) that since most of them
had rejected the real materials, the likelihood was that they would
eventually reject the teaching materials and procedures of the
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genuine school, since they displayed an overwhelming appreciation
of the spurious as 'authentic'.
One of the commonest assumptions among people who only
imagine what a real teaching might be, is connected with 'initia-
tion'.
All over the world you will find people willing and anxious to
initiate others into spritual schools.
But, as the procedure is still preserved among the Sufis, initia-
tion-the pledge of fealty to a teacher, only takes place 'several
years after his admission to the Order of Dervishes'. This is
because, until the student knows enough, and until he has learnt
something, he cannot truly commit himself to the deep studies.
To get him to engage himself to follow a path while he is still not
capable of it is a real mark of ignorance or imposture.
THE CHRISTIAN IN MECCA
On the other hand, someone may be ready to learn and to under-
stand when he is regarded by externalist tests as being quite un-
suitable. The great Shibli one day made this very clear, in a story [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
