Knowing How to Know

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Preface

A book of 200 pages may contain nothing of any value at all.

Another may contain as little as one hint, one fact, which is of supreme importance to readers.

Most books could be better written, and very many of them are padded in order to produce a length which the author, the publishers – or the readers – (or all three) regard as worthwhile.

This book contains material which, if expanded even in the most acceptable way, could easily fill many hundreds of pages. Such expansion, however, would not necessarily be of any use.

If you are influenced by some prestige-content in a fat book, this book is not for you, for you will be disappointed because it is not crammed with words.

If you could, however, have benefited just as much from seeing the same materials printed in pamphlet form, then you would not have thought that you needed to read this book: you would already have the information which it contains, and would not be reading books like this.

If you can take its message and apply it, while benefiting from its handling qualities, bulk and unspoken communication: this book is for you.

Section I

Inclusion and Exclusion – a prologue

We are all interested in spiritual, psychological and social questions, and particularly in our personal problems, but in order to understand how we should learn, what we must know, we must have information.

The first important principle which we must understand is that there are two pre-eminent concepts; one is inclusion and the other is exclusion. Now this is extremely important – what we include in our studies, and what we exclude from our studies.

Although this concept is not instantly familiar in this form to most people, they can usually understand that it is necessary. However they have often made certain mistakes. These mistakes have been made by people who are studying higher things, and also by the culture in general.

The mistakes arise from not understanding or not emphasising correctly what is inclusion and what is exclusion. And although that error is not hard to correct, it has great consequences. Therefore we must clear it away, right at the beginning.

We start, simply, by giving some definitions of this problem.

I will first give you an example of how people ordinarily imagine ‘inclusion and exclusion’ is carried out. Religionists (notice that I do not say ‘spiritual people’), for example, attempt to avoid things which are unpleasant, undesirable, and which are not permitted by their religion. This is exclusion: ‘I will exclude myself from the world. I will exclude myself from contact with bad people. I will exclude myself from the study of things which are not religious.’

This is familiar, traditional exclusion. When you are among this kind of religious people, you will find that you are forbidden to study certain things, or to go to certain places, or to carry out certain activities – even to think certain things...

That is exclusion. Therefore, for example, if you are a good monotheist, you are expected not to go into an idol temple and ring their bells – you must exclude that form of ritual, and you must include your own form instead. Even in the case of idol-temples, where I have seen statues of the Virgin Mary and Father Christmas included, on making enquiries I have been told that the priests of this temple – while very permissive about images – would not permit, say, the removal of idols... So this is exclusion.

This is not a strange concept to any of us, no matter what our culture is; it is standard procedure in all countries to include in this way and exclude in that. Yet people do not think of it in these terms.

If we go back to the origin of the reason for inclusion and exclusion, we find that the problem arises where there was in the past a different definition of an enterprise from the one which we understand today.

In other words, the activity has changed because the definition has changed. We must, therefore, go back to an earlier stage in order to understand how we can best employ exclusion and inclusion in our studies. When we do this, we immediately face a problem.

The problem is that those people who have become accustomed to including and excluding in a mechanical way will imagine that we are against them, or that we are opposing them.

This is not our intention, however.

We are fortunate in some respects to be operating in the present-day world, the actual world. I would like to draw your attention to our good fortune. Thus, when I talk about exclusion and inclusion, I am able to refer you to the modern methods of studying any subject. The difference is that I am trying to introduce into this type of study the very ancient methods which have been lost, the method of specialisation. Specialisation is a modern phenomenon, but it is also a very ancient one. It had for long been lost. We are trying to specialise. As a small example, we can say that if we want to study something we must exclude.

If, for instance, we want to study Spanish we must exclude French, and we must include Spanish. If we want to talk in this room, we must exclude the children and the noise and we must ‘include’ the walls of the room and the language in which we are speaking; these are part of the necessities of the situation.

This is in fact a specialisation. We are narrowing down in order to see more clearly.

There is another method, however – still very well established in the mind of modern man. The method to which I refer is called, in modern terminology, ‘conditioning’.

Conditioning is not just specialising; it is becoming trained to certain responses so that one cannot think flexibly. We see the faults and the problems produced by this in political, religious and social life everywhere in the world today.

People become obsessed; an idea gets into their heads and as a result they become less capable, less – not more – able to learn. They are capable only of acting and feeling, emotions and intellect, and they are not capable of learning deeper knowledge.

We can help to restore to people the flexibility of specialisation and changing of focus. This is quite a different method of study from that which is familiar to most people today.

In the modern world we are in a paradoxical situation; because although in theory man knows that he can extend his attention to something and then remove it, he very often does not do so. In many areas he does not look at something and then detach from it, and look at something else.

Once he has found something to interest himself in, he cannot detach himself from it efficiently, and therefore he cannot be objective. Note that, in most if not all languages, we have words like ‘objectivity’ which leads people to imagine that they have it, or can easily use it. That is equivalent (in reality if not in theory) to saying ‘I know the word gold, so I am rich.’

The consequences of this lack of flexibility surround us everywhere, in every country, in every culture, and this lack of flexibility is a major danger to the existence of humanity. It can be said that man may even destroy himself in consequence. Such is the degree of importance which this matter possesses.

I would like to invite your attention to the consequences of this mentality in a situation such as that which I am trying to develop. What has happened on many occasions is that a lot of people come and they want to study, they want to learn, they want to organise, they want to develop themselves; and they say to me, ‘Give me the guidance, give me the material, give me the information, give me this, give me that.’

If I gave them those things (or such of them as I might be able to) while they were suffering from this disease of obsessing themselves, I would be their worst enemy.

It is for this reason that you will probably have read that some of the stories which I have published make this point; they illustrate this seeming paradox that I can be your enemy if I give you something. This may be strange to our thinking, foreign to our ordinary thinking, but it is very true.

You have seen the operation of this malaise yourselves already in your lives, and therefore it is not necessary for me to emphasise it, but it would be worthwhile thinking about it.

If you do, I think you will agree with me that you have seen the consequences of this yourselves in past years.

Fortunately the malaise is not irreversible. It can be reversed: but only if we have the right conditions and the right people involved in the effort.

But we cannot say that we have the medicine, or the remedy, for everybody in the world, on demand, and we cannot say that we can reverse the tendency in five minutes, and we cannot say that we can do this without perhaps some discomfort.

We must say these things so as to be realistic, and in order to tell the truth.

We are not dealing in promises and imagination; we are operating an enterprise. Although it is not romantic to talk in this way (and most people demand, as their ‘price’ for giving attention, some degree of romanticism and imagination), we are interested in the results, and let other people be interested in fantasies. There are plenty of people who are emotionally minded. We must be serious.

And we must also remember that many people are, effectively, asleep, dreaming romantic dreams. These people will always oppose this approach, dislike it, as they always have; and undoubtedly we are spoiling their amusement, or interrupting their dream.

They will not, however, realise that this is their condition, and they will therefore oppose these ideas, as always, on other grounds. This helps the cause of sleep, and therefore it is important for us to remain calm, and to recognise the disease. When a person has a disease, you do not attack him, but neither do you worry about all that he is saying.

If a man is in pain, or is in a fantasy world, you do not love him nor do you hate him, for that. You do not take very great notice or pay unbalanced attention to what a certain kind of sick person is saying or doing; because he is not capable of understanding you, and therefore you are in a false position if you react emotionally or even intellectually to his behaviour. It is very important to remember that. Remain calm, above all.

Therefore you will see that charity and kindness towards other people is not a virtue, it is a necessity – a necessity of the situation. It comes from a true diagnosis of the reality, and not directly from a high spiritual source at all. Charity and kindness is not a high quality, it is a realistic quality, and a necessary one. It stems from duty, sympathy and measure.

I invite your attention to the historical situation in which a teacher is dealing with a primitive people who have no sense of the situation, and no diagnostic capacities.

This teacher must appeal to them to be charitable and to try to be objective; he must initially appeal to them emotionally. He may represent charity as a virtue to them, because they do not understand anything else. But this is a primitive stage before the development of understanding. You do not need to be emotionally charitable towards a diseased person, a sick person, if you are a doctor. If you can see he is ill, you don’t need to say, ‘It is for the sake of God that I am being kind to him.’

It is for the sake of man that you are being kind to him; it is for the sake of the necessity that you are being kind to him.

If a man is suffering from pain, and he attacks you because he has got this terrible pain, you do not say, ‘I will not hit back because I am a religious man.’ You say, ‘I am a doctor, I know what’s wrong with him. My emotions are not involved and I must, from duty, try to help him.’ You have here gone one stage beyond the primitive, and this is a very important argument, because most of the people in this world are still being taught as if they were primitive people.

They are being told: be charitable, be understanding, it is divine. They are thus being treated as if they were primitive savages: regressed, even, to an earlier stage than they were before. But they’re not so primitive any more: their supposed mentors are in fact treating them with something like contempt.

As a result they are easily confused. Because they are really capable of understanding this sleep, this narcoleptic malaise, they should be told about it on that level. This is the shortcoming of certain forms of allegedly spiritual instruction, which continue to treat people as if they were primitive tribalists living one, two or more thousand years ago.

And it is because the audience does not correspond in its cultural level with those who are teaching it, that very little progress can be made. As an example, I will tell you quite plainly that you will find, in certain forms of supposedly spiritual teachings, the audience are given promises and treated to threats. They are told, ‘If you do this, it will be good for you; if you do that it will be bad for you.’ And they are alternately frightened and promised wonderful things. Now this is the most primitive way of dealing with human beings, and it can indeed be necessary with a primitive community. It is not necessary for all members of all the communities of today. This is not to say that there is not a place for threat or promise; but only a place, and a specific one at that.

It is for that reason that a very famous woman, Rabia, one of the saints of our tradition, has left us a very beautiful prayer. She said, ‘Oh God, if I worship You from fear of Hell, then put me in Hell, and if I worship You from desire for Paradise, exclude me from Paradise.’ This is what that prayer means. That she is not doing something to please or displease God, she is doing it for another reason: because she understands something. This is a very important principle, and it brings us to a higher level than the generally familiar, primitive version of religion.

So you will see that if we are dealing with a primitive individual or community, we may well use threat and promise. But where we are dealing with a more advanced community, if we use these methods of fear and hope too strongly, we will actually regress the person to a more primitive condition even if he or she has already passed that stage; we will not only be doing such a person no good, we will be doing damage to a person who is now trained to respond mainly to fear and hope.

This fact has been known, of course, for many thousands of years, and has been taught for as long a period of time. But there have always been large populations of the world which have been at some time ignorant of it.

Fortunately at this time, with the development of sociological and psychological knowledge and experimentation, there is a great deal of material published not by us but by experts all over the world which verifies and proves this point, and there is now no need to rely on our unsupported word for this information.

We are able to direct your attention to the scientific work which has been done in this field. This is a very great advantage which we have, which we would not have had even one hundred years ago, because the research material was not then available.

Therefore we must be thankful and grateful to the scientists who have placed these instruments in our hands, and we should not imagine that there is some conflict between us and the scientific method and scientific work.

We should also note in passing that such has been the power of the scientific revelations in the late twentieth century on this subject that even the traditionalistic religious people must take account of it, must take notice of this, and they must adjust their teaching in response to this scientific knowledge, otherwise their form of training will die out.

Now there was a very famous Sufi called Muhiyuddin Ibn el Arabi in Spain who pointed out in his writings that when you are teaching somebody something, you must first assess the level of that person, and you must have different circles of people in accordance with their capacity to understand.

For saying this, Ibn el Arabi was very seriously criticised, because he was ‘being unfair’ and people said: ‘There is no monopoly of truth. Tell the truth to everybody and they will understand.’

It is only in the last few decades, in the last few years, that Ibn el Arabi’s theory has been understood properly. We have been able to verify it because we know that you must speak to everybody in accordance with his understanding, otherwise you may be doing damage.

Now we can return to exclusion and inclusion. You will be aware that in traditional spiritual teaching we are told that we must make sacrifices, and we must hold back from gaining certain things which we want, we must not be over-ambitious. We must be considerate to other people, we must not make a great noise and must avoid pride, and so on. These are some of the virtues which we are expected to cultivate. There is a profound psychological reason for trying to cultivate these abilities.

This is what we must now understand: that these virtues which we are supposed to cultivate have a scientific background, and they are necessary, not for our social happiness, but for our psychological integrity.

When this has not been fully explained, and when it is not understood, there will be serious mistakes in the development of a group of people. It is not rare to find such diseases – in many if not all religious organisations. For example, people behave as though they are very humble externally, yet this is just a mask, this is a persona.

It happens when people judge others by their behaviour: ‘This man is very simple, he only eats one meal a day, therefore he must be good.’ They judge him externally, and that is because we have been taught to judge externally. How does he behave, and not ‘what is he really like?’ It is this confused kind of mind which imagines that ‘miracles’ presuppose divine guidance, contact or the rest.

To refer again to the woman Sufi Rabia: when people claimed that onions had appeared by a miracle in her kitchen, she said, ‘My Lord is not a greengrocer!’

Here is another important example: the idea of sacrifice and service. These are two important necessities for humankind. If they become diseases, if they become obsessions, then they are destructive to humans.

As an example: a week or two ago I was at a meeting where a lecture was given by a very famous religious figure in London, a man who has been teaching and preaching for fifty years.

He was constantly asking his audience to be humble and to repent and to sacrifice and to feel guilty, and the result was that they were all extremely unhappy because they had already sacrificed, they had already felt guilty, they had already served as much as they could, and they didn’t know what more to do.

But he was just going on like a recording – saying ‘You must suffer, you must sacrifice, you must be humble,’ as if he were a doctor giving an aspirin to somebody and telling him that he must have 50 aspirins, 100 aspirins, 200 aspirins.

But too many aspirin tablets will kill you in the end! Any psychologist will be able to tell you that the people who are the audience of that religious man, his followers, have been conditioned into feeling unhappiness every time they meet him. They will feel this until he tells them that all will be well: is this a religious objective, or is it not?

There is another teacher of this sort, who is doing the reverse. He collects large numbers of people together, and he makes them feel happy by saying pleasant things to them, by telling them that everything is all right, and all they have to do is this, that and the other and they will be happy and successful – and they love him, and they feel very happy.

But unfortunately if you study them you find that they have become extremely inefficient and useless people. All they have is a sensation that they are happy. Now if this is what you seek, then that is the man to follow. But all he is really doing is mental engineering.

He is an engineer, just like the first man of whom I spoke was an engineer.

In both cases these gentlemen are excluding certain things and including certain things. But unfortunately the mixture which each has ended up with is a very unsuitable one, although nobody will blame them. That is one of the serious problems, that once people believe in something or somebody, they will never reproach or blame the person who is manipulating them, because they are unaware that any manipulation is being carried out.

Now you must note at this point that I have attacked what people imagine (quite erroneously) to be the very basis of the so-called spiritual teaching of almost the entire world, and I cannot hope to attack people in this manner without producing a very savage reaction.

But I would like you to remember that what the majority believes is not necessarily the truth.

This brings us to the point that it is not only a question of inclusion and exclusion, but it is: what are we including and what are we excluding? We must be specific as to what things it is necessary to exclude.

At this point we must say that the things which we include and the things which we exclude are offered to you to study and to experiment with, for the purposes of familiarisation. We cannot prove that the things which we include and the things which we exclude are different or superior, we can only say we offer them for study.

It is for this reason that we cannot convert you to a belief in what we are doing. And it is for this reason also that we can never be called a cult of any kind; because by definition we do not expect belief.

Those people who call us a cult are only showing their own ignorance of what a cult is. It is interesting to notice that the people who imagine that we are a cult are the people in the developed countries of the West, who have not yet become aware of the scientific research on this subject carried out by their own specialists. In the East we are not considered to be a cult. There are, of course, both in the East and the West, cults which use our name and imagine that they are Sufic. I exclude these, for they are obvious for what they are to all sensible people.

Our imitators are criticised in the West, and so they should be. We suffer from this disability, that what we are doing is so unfamiliar to this culture, which has not yet reached a knowledge of its own discoveries, that we are at a disadvantage, still.

As a matter of interest, I will illustrate this. I have here a list of more than twenty international authorities in literature, philosophy, science, and so on. All these authorities, some of whom are professors and some of whom are heads of departments in universities, and some of whom are respected individuals of the greatest importance in their own countries – all these people are writing chapters for a book on Sufism.

There are cabinet ministers, ambassadors, ministers; some are millionaires, some are commercial people, all of them are what is called, in English, household names. Everybody knows them as people of great achievement, greatly respected and of great calibre and importance. These people are all familiar with, and know a great deal about, the history and development and value of Sufism.

Some of them are Turks, some are Persians, some Pakistanis, some are Indians, some are Arabs from Egypt, from Iraq, from Syria, from Jordan, from the Lebanon, from North Africa and the Sudan, not to mention countries like Afghanistan. One of them is the Chief Justice of India, that is to say, he is the most important judge in India, and another one is a Christian ecclesiastic of the Coptic Church of Egypt; another is a hermit of India. Many of these people are not Moslems. They are not influenced by money or propaganda; they have their own communities, their own achievements, and so on. To each one of these people the Sufi history, philosophy and culture is well known, respected and understood. No such equivalent can be found in the West.

There was a peasant working in a field ploughing the ground with his horse, when a general in the army was going along the road beside the field. His horse got a stone in its shoe and became lame. The general, being accustomed to authority, shouted to the peasant:

‘Hey, you, come here, and give me that horse,’ and the peasant came to him and said, ‘Why should I give you my horse?’

The general said, ‘My horse is lame, with a stone in his hoof.’ The peasant replied, ‘Who are you, that I should give you my horse? If I give you this horse, then I will be nothing, I will lose all my money, I won’t be able to do anything. I’m not going to give you my horse; my horse is my life.’ And the general said, ‘I am a general, don’t you understand?’ The peasant said: ‘What is a general?’

‘A man in the army.’

Said