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A conversation with !dries Shah about Sufism and mystical Moslems; why followers need gurus, breaking free of conditioning, and the ecstatic experience as the lowest form of advanced knowledge. bll Elizabeth Hall

The Sufi lfadition

··soME GURUS ARE FRANKLY PHONIES.

AND THEY DON.T TRY TO HIDE IT FROM ME.

THEY THiNK I AM ONE Too··

Elizabeth Hall: !d­ries Sh ah , you are the West's leading expo­nent of Sufism, that rich re ligiou s t rad i­t ion growing out of the Mid dl e Eas t . Why, at a time when

new cu lts are springing up, do you refuse to be a guru? You could easily become o ne.

Idries Shah: There are a lot of reasons. But if we a re talking about the teacher who has disciples, it's because I feel no need for an ad m iring audien ce to tell me how wonde rful Tam or to do what I say. I believe that the guru needs h is d isciples. If he had a su fficient outlet for h is desire to

be a big sho t or his feeling of holiness or h is wish to have others dependent on him, he wouldn 't be a guru.

I got all that out of my system very early and , consistent with Sufi t radition, I be­lieve that those who don't wan t to teach are the ones who can and shou ld . T he West s till has a vocation hang-up and has not yet discovered t h is. Here, the only rcc· ognized achiever is a n obsessive. In the East we believe that a pe rson who can 't help doing a thing isn 't necessa rily th e best one to do it. A com pulsive cookie baker may bake very bad cookies.

Hall: Are you saying that a person who feels tha t h e m ust engage in a certain pro­fession is do ing it because of som e emo­t ional need ?

Shah: I thin k th is is very often th e case, and it doesn't necessarily produce the best professional. Show an ordina ry person an obsessive a nd he will believe you have shown h im a dedicated and wonderfu l person-provided he shares his beliefs. If he doesn 't , of course, he regards the one obsessed as evi l. Su fism regards th is as a

fac ile and untrue postu re. An d if there is o ne consisten cy in th e Sufi trad ition , it is that man must be in the world but not of the world. T here is no role for a priest-king or guru .

Hall: Then you have a negat ive opin idn of all gu rus.

Shah: Not of all . Their fo llowers need the guru as much as the guru needs h is fol­lowe rs. I just d on't regard it as a religiou s operation. I take a guru to be a sort of psy· chotherapist. At the very best, he keeps people qu iet and polarized around him and gives some sort of mean ing to th eir lives.

Hall: Librium might do the same thing. Shah: Yes, bu t th at's no reason to be

aga inst it. Why sh ouldn't th e re be room for what we might cal l " neighborhood psychotherapy"- the community looking a fte r its own? However, why it should be ca lled a spiritual activity rather ba ffles me.

Hall: One can 't help getting the feeling that not a ll gurus arc t ry ing to serve th e ir fe llowman .

Shah : Some a re frankly ph o n ics, and they do n't try to h ide it fro m me . They thin k that I am one, too, so \vh cn we meet they begin the most disturbing conversa­tion s. They w ant to k n ow how I get money, h ow I control people, and so on.

Hall: They want you to swap secrets. Shah: T ha t's going a little too far. But

they feel safety in numbers. T h ey actually feel the re is somethi ng wrong with what they are doing, and they feel better if they talk tO somebody else who is doing it. I al­ways tell them that I think it would be much better if they gave up the guru role in t he i r own minds and realized that they are· providing a perfect ly good social service .

Hall: H ow do they ta ke to that advice?

Shah: Sometimes they laugh and some­times they cry. Tht;: gene ra l impress ion is that one of us is wrong. Because I don ' t make the same kind of noises that they db, they seem to bel ieve that either I am a lu na tic or that I am starting some new kind of con . Perhaps I have found a new

racket . Hall: I am surprised that these gurus

tell you all their secrets as freely as they do.

Shah: I must tell you that I have notre­nounced the Eastern technique of pre­te nd ing to be interested in what another pe rson is saying, even pretending to be on his side. T herefore, I am able to draw out gu ru s and get them to commit themselves to a n extent that a Westerner, because of h is conscience, could not do. The West­erner would n ot allow certain things to go unchallenged and would not trick, as it were, anothe r person . So he doesn' t find out the truth.

Look he re, it's time that somebody took the lid off the guru racket. Since I have noth ing to Jose, it might as well be me. W ith many of th ese gu rus it comes down to an "us and them'' sort of thing between the East and the West . Gurus from India used to stop by on their way to California a nd their attitude wasgenerally, let 's take the Westerne rs to the cleaners; th ey colo­nized us, now we will get money out of them. I heard this sort of thing even from people who had impeccable spiritual rep­u ta tions back home in India.

Hall : It is an und erstand able hu ­ma n reaction to centuries of Western exploitation .

Shah: It's understandable, but I deny that it 's a spiritual activity. What I want to say is, " Brother, you arc in the revenge business, a nd that's a different k ind of

business from me~' There arc always groups that are willing to negotiate with me and want to use my name. On one oc­casion a chap in a black shirt and white tie told me, "You take Brita in, b ut don ' t touch the United States, because that's ours~' I had a terrible vision of AI Capone. The diffe rence was that the guru's dis­ciples kissed his feet.

Hall: Gurus keep proliferating in the United States, always with massive fol-

SEE WHAT I MEAN? Nasrudin was throwing handfuls of crumbs around his house.

"What are you doing?" someone asked him.

"Keeping the tigers away." "But there are no tigers in these

parts." "That's right. Effective, isn't it?"

!owings. A IS-year-old Perfect Master can fill the Astrodome.

Shah: Getting the masses is t he easy part. A guru can attract a crowd of a mil­lion in India, bu t few in the crowd take him seriously. You see, India has had gurus for thousands of years, so they are gene rally sophisticated about them; they take in the attitude with their mothers' milk. Th is culture just hasn't been in­oculated against the guru. Let's turn it around. If I were fresh off a plane from In­dia and told you that I was going to Detroit to become a wonderful automobile mil­lionai re, you would smi le at me . You know perfectly well the obstacles, the taxes, the ulcers that I face. Well , t he In­dian is in the same position with the au­tomobile industry as the American with th e gu ru . I'm n.o t imp ressed by naive American reactions to gurus; if you c;m show me a guru who can pull off that racket in t he East, then I will be surprised.

Hall: Before we go any farther, we'd bet­ter get down to basics and ask the obvious question . Wh at is Suftsmr

Shah: 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 rela tions. 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 be-

comes his own property, rather as a person masters an art.

Hall: So idea lly, for four million read­e rs, you wou ld have four million different explanations.

Shah: In fact, it wouldn't work out like that. We progress by means of nash r, an Arabic word t ha t means scatte r tech­n ique. For example, I've published quite a number of m iscellaneous books, articles, tapes and so on, which 3Catter many forms of th is Su fi 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.

Hall: I noticed as I read that the same point would be made over and over again in a different way in a different story. In all my reading, I think the story that made the most profound impression on me was " The Water of Paradise:' Afterward, I found the same point in other stories, but had I not read "T he Water of Paradise" first, I might not have picked it up.

Shah: That is the way the process tends to work. Suppose we get a group of 20 people past t he stage where they no longer expect us to give them miracles and stimu­lation and attention. We sit them down in a room and give them 20 or 30 stories, ask­ing them to tell us what they see in the sto­ries, what they like, and what they don't like. The stories first operate as a sorting­out process. They sor~ out both the very

IF A POT CAN MULTIPLY One day Nasrudin lent his cooking pots to a neighbor, who was giving a feast. The neighbor returned them, to­gether with one extra one - a very tiny pot.

"What is this?" asked Nasrudin. "According to law, I have given

you the offspring of your property which was born when the pots were in my care," said the joker.

Shortly afterwards Nasrudin bor­rowed his neighbor's pots, but did not return them.

The man came round to get them back.

"Alas!" sa id Nasrudin, "they a re dead. We have established, have we not, that pots are mortal ?"

clever people who need psychotherapy and who have come o nly to put you down, and the people who have come to wor­ship. In responsible Sufi circles, no one a t-

tempts to handle either the sneere rs or the worshippers, and they are very politely de­tached from the others.

Hall: T hey are not fertile ground? Shah: They have something else to do

first . And what they need is offe red a bu n-

I KNOW HER BEST People ran to tell the Mulla that his mother-in-law had fa llen into the river. "She will be swept out to sea, for the torrent is very fast here," they cried.

Without a moment's hesitation Nasrudin dived into the river and started to swim upstream.

"No!" they cried, "downsrream!

That is t he only way a person can be carried away from here."

"Listen!" panted t he Mulla, " I know my w ife's mother. If every­one else is swept downst ream, t he place to look fo r her is upstream':

dand y elsewhere. T here's no reason for them to bother us. Next we begin to work with people who arc left. In order to do this, we must cool it. We must not have any spooky atmosphere, any strange robes or gongs or intonations. The new students generally react to the stories either as they th ink you would like t hem to reac t or as their ~ackground tells them they should react. Once they realize that no prizes are being given fo r correct answers, they be­gin to see t hat their previous conditioning determines the way they are seeing the mate rial in t he stories.

So, t he second use of the stor.ies is to

provide a protected situation in which Text and 111us1ratoons ot Nasrudon ston~s copyright ~ 1966 by Mulla Nasrudtn Enterpnses ltd Repr~nted by permtSS>On ot Cothns-Knowlton-Wing. Inc

ATHOMEIN EAST& WEST A Sketch of ldrics Shah The English countryside is an unlikely place to meet a direct descendant of Mo­hammed , a man described in Who's Who in th~ Arab World as His Sublime High­ness the Saiyid !dries ei-Hashimi, Leader of the Sufi community. Butt here, no more than an hour from London, lives !dries Shah on a 50-acre estate that once be­longed to the family of Lord Baden­Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts.

Shah, a witty, urbane man whose fam­ily palaces are in Afghanistan, was born in Simla, India in 1924. As was his father before him, Shah is adviser to sev­eral monarchs and heads of state-pure­ly in an unofficial capacity. It was his

father, the Sirdar Iqbal Ali Shah, who first suggested the partition of Pakistan. And his grandfather who, dissatisfied with both eastern and western education, built a school for his grandson. The cur­riculum included working for a year on a farm.

Whether it was this unique educatior>, heredity, opportunity or Sufism, Shah be­came a remarkable man. He has written nearly a score of books, invented a de­vice for the negative ionization of air, writ­ten and produced a prize-winning film, established a printing house, and now di­rects a texti le company, a ceramics company, an electronics company, and

the Institute for Cultural Research. Shah was a founding member of the

Club of Rome and while he retains his membership, he did not attend last fall's gathering in Berlin. The criticism that fol ­lowed the publication of Limits to Growth , a controversial report commissioned by the club, taught him that his father's re­fusal to join any organization was wise. The report forecast a worldwide collapse unless population and industrial growth halted and Shah was accused of being a prophet of doom.

It was not fear of controversy that dis­turbed Shah. When he leans forward to describe how his books were taken from

Persian university students and burned, his smile is genuine. Nationalistic officials touched off the ritual pyre because Shah states plainly in his books that Sufism is not an ancient Persian religion.

After an initial flurry of resentment when Shah and his Cultural Institute first occupied Langton House. the local resi­dents came to accept the inhabitants as English. Over a grilled sole at the pub, Shah reported that the pub keeper once told him that, as master of Langton House, the Indian-born Afghan was the village squire. Shah objected, pointing out that there was a larger estate in the vi­cinity and that its master was the squire. " Oh, no;' replied the pub keeper, " he can't be the squire, he's an Irishman:·

The house at Langton Green draws vis­itors, pupils, and would-be pupils from all over. Their ranks include poet Ted Hughes, novelist Alan Sillitoe, zoologist Desmond Morris and psychologist Robert Ornstein. His best-known pupil, novelist Doris Lessing, has written of Shah's work for publications as varied as Vogue, the American Scholar, and The Guardian.

One opens Shah's door and steps into an English home decorated in a Middle­Eastern fashion. Oriental rugs cover the floor; sheep, leopard, and antelope skins are thrown across the couches; and the soft tapestries on the walls contrast with the brass tabletops and trays. Shah has deliberately combined hard and soft ob­jects in order to modify the room's acous­tic qualities and produce certain harmonious resonances. It is a thing, he says, done mostly by " old-fashioned" people in the East, but he finds it satisfying.

Every Sunday there is a buffet lunch for guests in the Elephant. a dining room that was once the estate stable. Connected to the Elephant by a walkway is a large con­servatory. Inside, flowers bloom, vines grow, and guests can reach up from their lounge chairs to pluck grapes. Outside the glass walls, icy rain drips off bare branches onto the bleak autumn landscape.

It is a long journey from Afghanistan to the county of Kent . The East regards Shah as a hometown boy who made good in the wicked West and would like to see him act as their political propagandist. This he refuses to do. Shah's greatest fear is that world tensions will sharpen until he is forced to choose between East and West. Until then, he is equally at home in both worlds.

-Elizabeth Hall

quired. It is merely a way of helping man to realize his po tentia l.

Hall: M any of the great Sufi teachers seem to regard the ecstatic experience as on ly a way stat ion .

Shah: Oh, yes. The ecstatic experience is absolutely the lowest form of advanced knowledge. Western biographers of the saints have made it very difficult fo r us by assuming that Joan of Arc and Theresa of Avila, who have had such expe riences, have reached Cod. I am sure that this is only a misunderstanding based o n faul ty stories a nd faulty re t rieva l o f informatio n .

Hall: Sufis also seem to take extra· sensory pe rception as a matter of course and as not ve ry interesting.

Shah: No t inte resting at a ll. It is no more than a by-product. Let me give you a banal analogy. If I were tra ining to be a runne r and we nt out every day to run, I would ge t fa ste r and fa ster and be able to run farther and farther with less fat igue. Now, I also find that I have a better com ­plexion, my blood supply is better, and my digestion ha s improved . These things don ' t inte rest m e ; they a rc onl y by­products of m y running. I have another objective . When people 1 am associa ted with beco me overwhelmed by ESP phe­nomena, I always ·insist that they stop it , because their objective is elsewhere.

Hall: They arc supposed to be devel­o ping their potential; not attempting to read minds or move objec ts a round. Do you think tha t researchers will one day explain the physical basis of ESP or do you think it will always elude them?

Shah: If I say it will elude the scientists, i[ will annoy the people who are able to ge t enormous grants for resea rch into ESP. But I think, yes, a great deal more can be d is· covered , providing the scientists a re pre­pared to be good scientists. And by that I mean that they <tre prepared to structure t heir experiments successively in accord­ance with their d iscoveries. T hey must be read y to fo llow a nomalies and not hew doggedly to their original working hy­pothesis. And they will certa inly have to give up their concept of the observer being o uts ide of th e ex pe riment, w hic h h as been their dearest pet for many years . And another thing, as we fi nd const:llltly in metaphysics, people who arc likely to be able to understand and develop capacities for ESP arc mo re likely to be fou nd among people w ho are no t i n terested in the su bject.

Hall: Is that because d isinterest is nec­essary to approach the subject properly?

Shah: Something like that . Being dis­interested , you can approach ESP more

cooly and calmly. The Sufis say, "You will be a ble t o exerc ise t hese supe rna tu ral powers when you can pu t ou t your hand and get a wild dove .to land on it:' But the other reason why the people who are fasci­nated by ESP or m etaphysics or magic are the last who should study i t is tha t they are interested fo r the wrong reasons. It m a y be c om pe n sa t ion . They are not equipped to study ESP. They are equipped for something else: fear, greed, hate, or love of h umanity.

Hall: Often they have a desperate wish to prove that ESP is either true o r fa lse.

Shah: Yes, that 's what I call heroism. But it 's n ot professiona lism and that's what the job ca1ls fo r.

Hall: You 've also written a couple of books on magic : Orien tal Magic and The Secret Lore of Magic, an invest igation of Western magic. Today there 's a n upsurge o f interest in astro logy a n d witchcra ft and magic . You must have spec u lated somewhat about magic in those books.

Shah: Very litt le. T he main purpose of my books on magic was to make th is mate· rial available to the genera l reader. Fortoo lo ng people believed tha t there we re se­cret books, hidden places, and amazing things. They held onto th is information as som ething to frigh ten t hem selves with. So the first pu rpose was informat ion . T h is is the magic of East and West . That's aU. The re is no more. The second purpose of those books was to show t hat there do seem to be fo rces, som e of which are ei· ther rationalized by th is magic or may be developed from it, wh ich do not come within custo mary physics or within the experience of ordinary people. I think this should be studied, that we should gather the data and analyze the phenomena . We need to separate the chemistry of magic from the alchemy, as it were.

Hall: T hat 's not exactly what the con­te m porary de votees of witchcraft a nd magic are up to .

Shah: No. My work has no relevance to t he c urrent i n terest wha tever. O h , it makes my books sell, but they were writ­t en for cool-headed people and there aren 't many of t hose around.

Hall: M ost of the people who get inter­ested in magic seem to be en thusiasts.

Shah: Yes, it 's just as with ESP. There's no reaso n w h y they sho uldn ' t be en­thusiasts, but having encouraged them­wh ich I could n't help- 1 m ust now avoid them. T hey would only be disppointed in what I have to say.

You know, Ru m i sa id t hat people coun­terfeit gold because there is such a th ing as real gold, and I think that's the situation we are in with Su fi studies at the m oment. It

PSYCHOlOGYTOOAY.JUIV 1975 57

"When people come here to see me, they want to get something, and if I can't give them higher consciousness, they will take my bedspreads."

is much easier to write a book on Sufism than it is to study it. It is much easier to start a group and tell people what you want them to do than it is to learn first.

The problem is that the spurious, the unreal, the untrue is so much easier to

find that it is in danger of becoming the norm. U n til recently, for example, if you d idn 't use drugs in spiritual pursuits, you were not considered genuine. If you said, " look, drugs are irrelevant to spiritual matters;' you were rega rded as a square. Their attitude is not at all a search for truth.

Hall: Many people seem to u se drugs as an attempt to get instant enlightenment.

Shah: People want to be healed o r cured or saved, but they want it now. It's aston­ishing. When people come here to sec me, they want to get somCthing, and if I can ' t give them h igher consciousness, they will take my bedspreads or my ash trays or whatever else they can pick up around the house.

Hall: They want something to carry away.

Shah: They are thinking in terms of loose property, almost physical. They are savages in the best sense of the word. T h ey are nat what they think they arc at all. I am invited to believe that they take bed­spreads and asht rays by accident. But it never works the other way; they never leave their wallets behind by mistake. One thing I learned from my father very early: Don't take any n otice of what people say, just watch what they do.

Hall: Let's get back to your main work. What is the best_ way of introducing the Sufi way of thinking to the West?

58 PSYCHOLOGY TODAY. J uly 19 75

Shah: I am sure that the best way is not to start a cult, but to introduce a body of literary mater ial that sho u ld interes t people enough to esta blish the Sufi phe­nomenon as via'ble. We don't plan to form an organization with somebody at the t op an d ot h ers at the bottom collec tin g money or wearing funny clothes or con­verting people to Sufism. We view Sufism not as an ideology that molds people to the right way of belief or ac tion, but as an art o r science that ca n exert a beneficial influence on individuals and societies, in accordance with the needs of those indi­viduals and societies.

Hall: Does Western society need this infu sion of Sufi thought'

Shah: It needs it fo r the same reason that any society needs it, because it gives one something that one cannot get else­where. For exa mple, Sufi though t makes a person more efficient. A watchmaker be­comes a beuer watchmaker. A ho usewife becomes a bet ter housewife . When som e­body said as much in Califo rnia last year, 120 hippies got up and left the ha ll. T hey didn't wait to hear that they weren 't going to be forced to be more efficient.

Hall: But there must be more than effi­c iency to it.

Shah: Of course. I wouldn ' t try to sen Sufism purely as a means to efficiency, even though it does make one more effec­tive in all kinds of ways. I think Sufism is important because it enables one to de­tach from life and sec it as near to its real­ity as one can possibly get. Sufi experience tends to produce the kind of person who is calm, not becau se he can' t get excited, but because he knows that getting exci ted

abou t an event or problem is not going to have any lasting effect.

Hall: Would you say t hat it migh t give a person a n outlook on the problems of this time similar to the outlook he m ight pres­ently have on the problems of the 16ih century?

Shah: Very much so. And such an out­look takes the heat o ut of almost every kind of contention . Instead of becoming the classical Orie ntal philosOphe r who says, "All rea lity is imagination . Why should I care about the world;' you begin to see alternative ways of acting. For ex­ample, some of the finest people in th is country spend a great dea l of their time jumping up and down in Trafalgar Square waving banners that condemn the va rious dirty beasts of the world. Such behavior makes the dirty beasts delighted at the thought that they arc so important and the jumpers are so impoten t. If the Trafal­gar Square jumpers had an objective view of their behavior, they would abandon it. First, they would see that they were only giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and second, they would be able to see how to do som ething about the dirty beasts-and if it we re necessary to do anything about them.

Hall: In other words, Sufism might help us solve some of the enormous social, po­litical and environmental problems that face us .

Shah: People ta lk about Sufism as if it were the acquisition of powers. Sufi meta­physics has even got a magical reputation. T he truth is that Sufi study a nd devel­opmen t give one capacities one did no~ have before. One would not kill merely

l

"If I were to say to you that my favorite method of teaching is to bore the audience to death, you would be shocked."

because killing is bad. Instead , one would know that killing is unnecessary and, in addition, what one would have to do in or­der to make humanity happie r an d able to realize better objecti ves. T hat 's w ha t knowledge is for.

Hall: When I read your books, the mcs· sage came th rough very clearly t hat you are nor inte rested in rationa l, sequ e ntial thought- in what Bob Ornstein ca lls left ­hemisphere activity .

Shah: To say that I am not interested in sequential thinking is n ot to say that I can exist withou t it. I have it up to a certain point, and I expect t he people l m eet to be able to u se it. We need information in or­der to approach a problem, but we also need to be able to see the thing whole.

Hall: When you speak of seein g the thing w h ole, you 're ta lking ab o ut in­tuitive thought, where you do n 't reason the problem out but know the a nswer without knowing how you got it .

Shah: Yes. You know the answer and can verify tha t it is an answer. That is the diffe rence between romantic imagining and something that belongs to this world .

HaU: Ornstein, who seem s to have been profound ly influe nced by Sufi though t, has suggested that most people toda y tend to rely on logica l, rational, linear thought and tha t we tend to use ve ry little of the intuitive, nonlinear though t of t he brain's right hemisphere. Would you say that Sufism can teach one to tap right­hemisphere thought?

Shah: Yes, I would. Sufi sm has never been overimpressed by the products of left-hemisph e re act ivity, a lthough it's of­ten u sed th em . For instance, Sufis have

written virtually all the great poetry of Pe r­sia, and while the inspiratio n for a poem may come from the right h emisphere, one must u sc the left hemisph ere to put the poem down in proper fo rm. I think that the behavior and products of Sufism a re among the few things we have that en­cou rage a holistic view of things. I don' t want to discuss Sufism in O rnste in ian terms, however, because I'm not quali fied to do so. l can only say that insofar as there is any advantage in these two hemisph eres acting a lte rnately or complementing one another, the n Sufi material undoubtedly is among the very little available material that can help this process along.

Hall: Why are t he traditio nal Western ways of study inappropriate for the study of Su fism'

Shah: They are inappropriate only u p to a point. Both the Wes te rn and the

M iddle Eastern methods of study come from the common heritage of the Middle Ages, when one was regarded as wise if he had a bette r mem ory than someon e e lse. But some of the teaching methods that Su fis u se do seem rather odd to the West­erner. If I we re to say to you that my fa vo r­ite m ethod of teaching is to bo re t h e audience to death, you would be shocked. But I have ju st received the resu lts of some tests, which show that English schoolchil­dren , when shown a grou p of films, re­membered o nly the ones tha t bored them . Now this is consistent with ou r ex­peri en ce, but it is not consistent with Western beliefs.

Another favorite Su fi teaching m ethod is to be rude to people, sometimes sh ou t­ing th em down or shooing t hem away, a

technique that is not customary in culti­vated circles. By experience we know that by giving a certa in ki n d of shock to a per­son, we can-for a sh ort period-increase his perception. Until recently I wouldn't have dared speak about th is, but I now have a clipping indicating t hat when a per­son endures a shock h e produces Theta ·rhythms. Some people have associated these brain rhythms with various forms of ESP. No connection has been made yet, but I think we may be beginning to under­stand it.

Hall : Recent s tudies of memory in­dicate t hat unless adre nalin is present, no learning takes place, and shock causes ad­rcnal in to flow . We a lso know from expe­rience that when you find you rself in a situation of grave danger, you tend to notice some very small detail with great clarity.

Shah: Exactly . Concentration comes in on a strange level and in an u naccustomed way. But using this knowledge has t radi­tionally given Sufi teachers a reputation for having bad manne rs. T h e most polite thjng they say about us is that we arc iras­cible an d out of control. Some people say that a spiritual teacher should have no emotions or be totally ba lanced. We say that a spiritual teacher m ust be a person wh o can be totally balanced, not one who cannot h e lp bu t be ba lanced.

Hall: People in the United States seem to be looking for leaders, wh ether spi ritual o r political , and they keep complaining because there arc no leaders to follow.

Shah: People are always looking for leaders; that docs not mean that this is the t ime for a lead er. The problems that a

PSYCHOLOGY TOOA.Y, July 1975 59

"This is a civilization that is going down, not because it hasn't got the knowledge that would save it, but because nobody will use the knowledge."

leader would be able to resolve have not been ide nt ified. Nor does th e clamor mean that those who cry out are suitable followers. Most of the people who de­mand a leader seem to have some baby's idea of what a leader should do. T he idea that a leader will walk in and we will all recognize him and follow him and every­body will b e happy s trikes m e .as a strangely immature a tavism. Mos t of these people, I believe, want not a leader, bur excitement. I doubt that those who cry the loudest would obey a leader if there was one. Talk is ch eap, you . know, and a lot of the talk comes from millions of old washerwomen.

Hall: If so, the washerwomen are spi-ead throughout the cultu re .

Shah: They're not call e d was h er­women, but if we test them, they reac t like washerwomen. For example, if you arc selling books and you send a professor of philosophy something wriuen in philo· sophicallanguage, he will throw it away. But if you send him a spiel written for a wash erwoman, h e will buy the book. At heart he is a washerwoman. In tellectuals don't understand th is , but business people d o because their profits depend upon it. You can learn much more about human natu re on Madison Avenue than you will from experts on hu man nature, because on Madison Avenue one stands or falls by the sa les. Professors in their ivory towers can say anything because there's no penalty attached . Co to where there is a penalty attached and there you will find wisdom.

Hall: That's a tough statement. You sound as if you are down on all academics.

Shah: Well, in the past few years I have given quite a few sem inars and lectures at universities, and I have become terrified by the low level of ability. It is as if people just a ren't try ing. They don't read the books in thei r fields, don't know the work· ings of them, use inadequate approaches to a subject, ask ridiculous questions that a moment's thought would have enabled them to answer. If t hese ·<lfe the cream, what is the milk like?

Hall : Are yo u t alk in g about un ­dergraduat es, graduate st ud en ts , or professors~

Shah: The whole lot. Recently l"vc been appalled at the low levels of articles in learned journals and literary weeklies. The pu nctUation gone to hell , fu ll of non sequiturs, an obvious lack of background knowledge, a nd so on. I went to a news­paper library and looked up the equiva­lent uticles from the 1930s. A great c hange has taken place. Forty years ago there were two kinds of articles: very, very good and terribly bad. There seemed noth· ing in between. Now everything is slap­dash and medioc re. W h y are so ma n y fa· mous pe rsons in hallowed institutions now so mediocre?

Hall: Critics like Dwight Macdonald have sa id for yea rs that as educa tion be· comes wid espread ~tnd people become semiliterate, the culture at the top is inevi­tably pulled down .

Bu t you ' re not rea lly h ostile to all aca­demics, are you?

Shah: No, some of my best friends arc academics.

Hall: That is no way to get out of it . Shah: Of course, I'm not hostile to all

academics. There are some great thinkers. But I do not believe that it is necessary for us to have 80 percent blithering id iots in order to get 20 percent marvelous academ­ics. This ratio d epresses me. I thi nk that the good people are unbelievably noble in denying that the rest of them are such hopeless idiots. Privately they agree with you , but they won't rock the boat. For the sak~ of humanity, somebody has got to

rock the boat. Hall: For the sake of humanity, w hat

would you like to sec happenr Shah: What I rea lly wan t, in case any­

body is listening, is for the products of the last 50 yea rs of psychological research to

be studied by the publ ic, by everybody, so that the findings become part of their way of thinking. At the momenc, people have adopted only a few. They talk gl ibly about making Freudian slips and they have ac­cepted the idea of inferiority complexes. But they have this great bod y of psy­chological information and refuse to use it.

T here is a Sufi story about a man who went into a shop and asked the shop· keeper, " Do you have leather?" "Yes;' sa id the shopkeeper. "'Nails'"" "'Yes:· "'Thread'"' "'Yes: · "'Needle'"' "'Yes:· "'Then why dan't you make yourself a pair of boots?" That story. is intended to pinpoint this failure to use available knowledge. People in this c ivilization are s.ta rvi ng in the m iddle of plenty. This is a c ivilizat ion that is going down, not because it hasn 't got the knowl­edge that would save it, but because no· body will use the knowledge. n To obtain reprints of this article, see page 98.