/lit/ - Literature

Another interview of Naqshbandi Sufi, Idries Shah

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.

https://sherpoint.uk/sherpoint/docs/TheSufiTradition.pdf

The scatter (nashr) technique is a technique in which many crumbs are placed in many different places, slowly and disparately, until eventually “the penny drops,” and the devoted reader eventually has an instant enlightenment or “satori” moment. In modern psychological terms, the introduction of disparate, confusing elements, sudden detours, and a non-linear way of expressing things also promote non-linear thinking and creativity, or “right-brained” thinking (a somewhat outdated but still valid term) as opposed to “left-brained”, strictly logical thinking. At it’s most dramatic, this can even lead to the development of extrasensory perception and what feels like immediate, direct telepathy with the writer of these messages. In Robert Anton Wilson’s writings, this is known as “mindfuck” or “being mindfucked.”