LEARNING FROM STORIES
A lecture by Idries Shah, plus teaching-stories and narratives selected from Caravan of Dreams and The Adventures of Mulla Nasrudin, jokes and tales from the Nasrudin Corpus

Idries Shah, selections read by The London College of Storytellers

ISHK Audiobooks, 1996

In this recording Shah talks in detail and with many examples about the Sufi teaching-story and its instrumental function. He emphasizes the way in which one might approach this vast and comprehensive body of literature to benefit best from it. Shah's delivery is lively, witty, entertaining, and always instructive. This two-tape set includes selections from Shah's Caravan of Dreams and from his Mulla Nasrudin corpus, read by members of The London College of Storytellers. It provides an ideal introduction to his work.

1 CD, running time: approx. 3 hours

The knowledge of the time-lag and the perception of it between the telling of a story, or the happening of an event: the realisation of something and its integration into one's own mind, and its digestion into one's own psychology, has itself to be learnt. This is one thing which most people don't realise. They either laugh at a gag and dispose of it, or they understand what it means: they take its moral application and, as it were, abolish it. They do not take any interest in general in this question of the digestion of the impact.
--From Learning From Stories © 1976 1982 The Estate of Idries Shah