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and finds that his students have not yet learned simple equations.
Mention this, and you will most surely be accused of giving
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yourself airs and graces.
Try to live down this reputation, and you will have a hard time
of it.
You may have to associate people with yourself literally for
years before the fact penetrates into their minds that you are not a
monster, not a mahatma, but a man trying first of all to teach
them the basic tools of their own possible learning process,
which should have been in their possession years before. It is these
tools that should have been conveyed by the secondary type of
teacher who passes on traditional learning.
Take another instance. Primitive thought depends strongly
upon regularity, upon rhythm, upon reassurance. This is per-
petuated in our time in the atavism whereby people have been
encouraged to believe that they must be taught at a certain time
(preferably the same time each day or week) in the same surround-
ings, in the same manner. Tell them that this belongs to children
and they may take it in one way, but they will tend to become
confused and refuse, in effect, to take it in another.
But do the reverse: give them authority figures, canonical
books, hierarchies of authority, symbols, chants and costumes,
and they will worship you and believe that you are on the 'right
lines', whether they are or not; whether or not you have made up
the cult the day before.
This, too, real teachers have been compelled to demonstrate in
actual instances before people would credit it.
If you cannot rationalise their previous learning with your
teaching, you will have a hard time of it. You will be like a man
telling a bedtime story to a child who refuses to agree that the
wolf did not really eat up Red Riding Hood's grandmother after
all.
You will break the primitive totems at your peril. The irony
here is that, if you allow yourself to be discredited in the eyes of
the learner, you will harm him as well: for he has no other
recourse, more often than not, than to adhere to some other
system: one which will reassure him while inhibiting his progress.
Now there is another category of people. Those are the ones,
who listen to, or read, entire expositions like the foregoing, and
feel that they are exactly right. This feeling leads them to suppose
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that they must surely be first-class material. The real fact is that
people who can attain a higher knowledge are those who can
feel it in the right way: not just the people who decide that they
are the 'right people'.
In contemporary civilisations there is hardly a real thought
about the possibility that people who feel a thing strongly may be
feeling it in an erroneous and unconstructive manner except in
delusion situations; let alone a word or words to describe the
various states in which one can feel the conditioned conscience.
The bitter truth is that, if a real metaphysical path is to be
opened and maintained, it has to be mainly recruited from and
staffed by people who have perhaps never heard of 'higher con-
sciousness' or 'self realisation' in their lives. This is because the
associative mechanism which does so much harm to man has long
ago taken over the major part of the mentation of the would-be
illuminated. Those who can save them are those whom they tend to
discount, even to despise. They are people who are often younger,
less experienced.
Esoteric studies today, as viewed by someone from outside, are
an oldster's world, redolent of all the bitternesses and stupidities of
the unregenerate old. A bitter thought in itself? Only if you are
yourself bitter. If you can see a little more objectively, these
remarks are statements of fact, and therefore of constructive
potential.
What is so amazing is that people will so readily throw away
the promise of a lifetime for what Rumi called the 'nuts and
raisins and games' of shallower satisfactions.
No wonder riper minds, hearing of esoteric studies, laugh and
shrug them off.
Are you innocent of confabulation, rationalisation, of accepting
lower satisfactions, of calling self-indulgence 'higher activity', of
oppressing others in the name of an assumed seniority, a little
brief authority, of suppressing your own inklings and of mas-
querade?
At the risk of adopting unfashionable terminology, I have to say
that for all these and many other ways of thinking, feeling and
acting, payment has some time to be made.
The question of the present-day receptivity of people to Sufi
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ideas has not changed since the times when, 1,000 years ago,
Hujwiri in his Revelation of the Veiled gave a little story which
pointed out that you cannot receive if your mind is blocked with
crude aspirations.
FAVOURS AND SLAVES
A dervish and a king met. The king, following the custom in the
East when a ruler meets a subject, said: 'Ask me a favour.'
The dervish said: 'I will not request a favour from one of my
own slaves.'
The king asked him how he could see him as a slave.
The dervish answered: 'I have two slaves who are your own
masters: greed and expectation.'
The receptivity of man to Sufi ideas, which you ask about, is
sometimes clouded by the demand for 'being given' something. I
say clouded, because there are really three conditions which have
to be looked at. First, there is the potential of the human being -
the endowment which he already has; second there is the inter- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]