Idries Shah

This is the emphasis upon Sufism as a practical activity, denying that the formal intellect can arrive at truth, and that pattern-thinking derived from the familiar world can be applied to true reality, which moves in another dimension.

Nasrudin used to take his donkey across a frontier every day, with the panniers loaded with straw. Since he admitted to being a smuggler when he trudged home every night, the frontier guards searched him again and again. They searched his person, sifted the straw, steeped it in water, even burned it from time to time. Meanwhile he was becoming visibly more and more prosperous.
Then he retired and went to live in another country. Here one of the customs officers met him, years later.
‘You can tell me now, Nasrudin,’ he said. ‘Whatever was it that you were smuggling, when we could never catch you out?’
‘Donkeys,’ said Nasrudin.
This story also emphasises one of the major contentions of Sufism — that preternatural experience and the mystical goal is something nearer to mankind than is realised. The assumption that something esoteric or transcendental must be far off or complicated has been assumed by the ignorance of individuals. And that kind of individual is the least qualified to judge the matter. It is ‘far off’ only in a direction which he does not realise.

People do not know where to look when they are seeking enlightenment. As a result, it is hardly surprising that they may attach themselves to any cult, immerse themselves in all manner of theories, believing that they have the capacity to distinguish the true from the false.
Nasrudin taught this in several ways. On one occasion a neighbour found him down on his knees looking for something.
‘What have you lost, Mulla?’
‘My key,’ said Nasrudin.
After a few minutes of searching, the other man said, ‘Where did you drop it?’
‘At home.’
‘Then why, for heaven’s sake, are you looking here?’
‘There is more light here.’
This is one of the most famous of all Nasrudin tales, used by many Sufis, commenting upon people who seek exotic sources for enlightenment.

This gradual building up of inner consciousness is characteristic of the Nasrudin Sufic method. The flash of intuitive illumination which comes as a result of the stories is partly a minor enlightenment in itself, not an intellectual experience. It is also a stepping-stone toward the re-establishing of mystical perception in a captive mind, relentlessly conditioned by the training systems of material life.

Several of the Nasrudin tales emphasise the falsity of the general human belief that man has a stable consciousness. At the mercy of inner and outer impacts, the behaviour of almost anyone will vary in accordance with his mood and his state of health. While this fact is of course recognised in social life, it is not fully admitted in formal philosophy or metaphysics. At best, the individual is expected to create in himself a framework of devoutness or concentration through which it is hoped that he will attain illumination or fulfilment. In Sufism, it is the entire consciousness which has ultimately to be transmuted, starting from the recognition that the unregenerate man is very little more than raw material. He has no fixed nature, no unity of consciousness. Inside him there is an ‘essence’. This is not yoked to his whole being, or even his personality. Ultimately, nobody automatically knows who he really is. This in spite of the fiction to the contrary. Thus Nasrudin:
The Mulla walked into a shop one day.
The owner came forward to serve him.
‘First things first,’ said Nasrudin; ‘did you see me walk into your shop?’
‘Of course.’
‘Have you ever seen me before?’
‘Never in my life.’
‘Then how do you know it is me?’
Excellent as this may be as a mere joke, those who regard it as the idea of a stupid man, and containing no deeper significance, will not be people who are in a position to benefit from its regenerative power. You extract from a Nasrudin story only a very little more than you put into it; if it appears to be no more than a joke to a person, that person is in the need of further self-work.

Nasrudin enables the Sufi Seeker to understand that the formal ideas current about time and space are not necessarily those which obtain in the wider field of true reality. People who believe, for instance, that they are being rewarded for past actions and may be rewarded in future for future doings, cannot be Sufis. The Sufi time conception is an interrelation — a continuum.

The conquest of the ‘Commanding Self’ which is an object of the Sufi struggle is not achieved merely by acquiring control over one’s passions. It is looked upon as a taming of the wild consciousness which believes that it can take what it needs from everything (including mysticism) and bend it to its own use. The tendency to employ materials from whatever source for personal benefit is understandable in the partially complete world of ordinary life, but cannot be carried over into the greater world of real fulfilment.

The Sufi Seeker will learn, at one and the same time, several different things, at their own levels of perception and potentiality. This is another difference between Sufism and the systems which rest on the assumption that only one thing is being learned at any one moment.

It is more than interesting to observe the effect of Nasrudin tales upon people in general. Those who prefer the more ordinary emotions of life will cling to their obvious meaning, and insist upon treating them as jokes. These include the people who compile or read small booklets of the more obvious jests, and who show visible uneasiness when the metaphysical or ‘upsetting’ stories are told them.

Another Nasrudin ‘joke’ underlines this essential circularity of reality, and the generally invisible interactions which occur:
One day Nasrudin was walking along a deserted road. Night was falling as he spied a troop of horsemen coming toward him. His imagination began to work, and he feared that they might rob him, or impress him into the army. So strong did this fear become that he leaped over a wall and found himself in a graveyard. The other travellers, innocent of any such motive as had been assumed by Nasrudin, became curious and pursued him.
When they came upon him lying motionless, one said, ‘Can we help you — why are you here in this position?’
Nasrudin, realising his mistake, said, ‘It is more complicated than you assume. You see, I am here because of you; and you, you are here because of me.’
It is only the mystic who ‘returns’ to the formal world after literal experience of the interdependence of seemingly different or unconnected things, who can truly perceive life in this way. To the Sufi, any metaphysical method which does not embrace this factor is a concocted (external) one, and cannot be the product of what he calls mystical experience. Its very existence is a barrier to the attainment of its purported aim.