KNOWING HOW TO KNOW
Idries Shah
Octagon Press, 1998
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: After reading this book, the reader will be familiar with the Sufi approach to teaching stories and their use in understanding human thought and behavior.
The Sufis make extensive use of tales, anecdotes, poems, and jokes to teach a complex psychology of human nature. They insist that the simple morality usually taken from parables represents only a very low level of understanding possible from stories. A real teaching story has layers of meaning, some not to be verbalized. This is not like contemporary teaching of literature in schools or universities, a method the Sufis say is like the child who has taken a fly apart and, left with the wings, head, body, and legs, asks, 'Where is the fly?' The Sufis use stories in ways unfamiliar to us. They ignore the analytical approach and focus on stories as presenting an alphabet for understanding human psychology. This process involves contemplation and may take years, but eventually one sees the templates of the stories illustrated in his or her own behavior and thinking, and in that of others.
The Sufis have pointed for centuries to the conditioning inherent in human societies as a barrier to deeper understanding of the self and others. They prefigured modern psychology in this way, emphasizing that every culture is maintained by the use of hope, fear, and repetition. These mechanisms are not visible to the majority of people, but are employed in every type of organization, whether tribal, national, political, religious, recreational, educational or any other. 'Because everyone is accustomed to being manipulated by hope and fear, because everyone assumes that repetition is necessary, the possible progress in analyzing this situation is virtually at a halt.'
Idries Shah's contribution to psychology have been called 'a blueprint for the human mind' by PSYCHOLOGY TODAY. He spent 12 years studying the Eastern heritage of Sufi philosophy from original sources and contemporary Sufis and spent 12 years studying Western ideas and journeying throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, India, and Africa. He has lectured on the relationships between scientific psychology and Eastern thought at the University of California and Geneva University, among many other educational institutions. He has authored over 27 books including THE COMMANDING SELF.
14 CE credits; 343 pages
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