The Commanding Self - Hardcover

Shah, Idries

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0863040667 ISBN 13: 9780863040665

Publisher: Octagon Pr, 1994

Synopsis

THE COMMANDING SELF is based on tales, lectures, question- and-answer sessions, letters and interviews. Uniquely, it forms both an introduction to Sufi thought and clarifies many of the now-superseded ancient classics.

About this title

About the Author

Idries Shah, the best known and most influential Afghan writer and thinker of modern times, author of more than 35 books, including 20 bestselling titles on Sufism (which have so far sold 15 million copies in 12 languages), Grand Sheikh of the Sufis, advisor to a number of monarchs and Heads of State, educator, scholar, world traveler and humanitarian, was born in Simla, India, on June 16, 1924, the eldest son of the writer and savant Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, the Nawab (the Mohammedan equivalent of Maharajah) of Sardana, near Delhi in India.
Shah's distinguished family has lived and reigned in Paghman in the Afghan highlands since 1221, has titles and prestige in India and Pakistan, and can trace its ancestry, through some of the most celebrated Sufi teachers in history, back to the Prophet Mohammed and the Sassanian Emperors of Persia, and. beyond that, to the year 122 B.C.--perhaps the oldest recorded lineage on earth.
Shah was educated in both the East and West, by private tutors and through wide-ranging travel and personal encounters--the series of journeys which in fact characterize Sufi education and development. He lived in London, in a large Regency house near Tunbridge Wells, was a member of the Atheneum and Garrick Clubs, and in speech and bearing seemed the epitome of an English gentleman. In keeping with Sufi tradition, his life was essentially one of service. His knowledge and interests appeared limitless, and his activities and accomplishments took place in many different countries and in numerous fields of endeavor.
Shah was Director of Studies of the Institute for Cultural Research, an educational organization established in 1965 to sponsor interdisciplinary and crosscultural studies of human thought. He was also the founder of Octagon Press, a publishing house; a founding member of the Club of Rome; and a Governor of the Royal Humane Society and the Royal Hospital and Home for Incurables.
Shah's landmark book, The Sufis, published in 1964, sightly ahead of the surge of interest in metaphysical ideas, pronounced that tradition alive and well, and more or less invited readers to approach its ideas and test them out. The evident sense, and common sense, most readers found made it clear that here was a sane, authoritative voice in the wilderness of the gobbledegookish mysticism of the sixties. The books that followed established a broad historical and cultural context for Sufi thought and action.
By 1974, university and college courses throughout the world were employing Shah's books, or works based on them, in a wide variety of disciplines including sociology, psychology and literature. In 1969, he was awarded the Dictionary of International Biography's Certificate of Merit for Distinguished Service to Human Thought. Other honors included a Two Thousand Men of Achievement award(1971), Six First Prizes awarded by the UNESCO International Book Year(1972), and the International Who's Who in Poetry's Gold Medal for Poetry (1975).
Idries Shah married the former Cynthia (Kashfi) Kabraji in 1958, and was the father of a son and two daughters. He died in London on November 23, 1996.
He was, it is said, the Sufi Teacher of the Age.

From the Back Cover

THE COMMANDING SELF, in Sufic Terminology, is that mixture of primitive and conditioned responses, common to everyone, which inhibits and distorts human progress and understanding. This book, while complete in itself as an anthology of hitherto unpublished work, serves to illustrate and amplify Idries Shah's preceding twenty and more books on the Sufi Way.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Value for Money
From page 1, "Sufi Thought, Experience and Teaching"
Thousands of books and monographs have been written on Sufism and the Sufis, almost all of them from the point of view of other ways of thinking. The result has been chaos in the literature, and confusion in the reader. Over the centuries, some of the world's most eminent scholars have fallen into the trap of trying to examine, assess or consider the Sufi phenomenon through a set of culture-bound preconceptions.
All this may not be as foolish as it looks to us, today: after all, it is only relatively recently that students, including academics and people of the spirit, have begun to realize that their attitudes have traditionally been heavily influenced by subjectivity and unexamined assumptions. Although the pendulum is slowly swinging back, there is still no lack of people - - specialists and others - - who continue to look at anything, including Sufis, in anything but an objective way.
The problem is that most commentators are accustomed to thinking of spiritual schools as 'systems', which are more or less alike, and which depend upon dogma and ritual: and especially upon repitition and the application of continual and standardised pressures upon their followers.
The Sufi way, except in degenerate forms which are not to be classified as Sufic, is entirely different from this.
Following closely after the primary misconception is the general impression that all spiritual entities must strongly depend upon emotion. Indeed, there is a marked confusion, even in the most lucid writers, between spirituality and emotionalism. Such confusion does not exist in authentic Sufi teaching or study.
The misconceptions of which the above two are typical produce in the student a frame of mind through which he or she will try to approach the understanding or study of Sufism, with predictably useless results. For this reason Sufi literature shows a marked rejection of ultra-formalism, of mentalfetishes, the over-simplifications which hamper understanding. The Sufis refer to the action of the mixture of primitive emotionality and irrelevant associations which bedevil outside would-be observers as that of the Commanding Self.
It is only since the nineteen-fifties, with the discovery of the far-reaching effects of conditioning, brain-washing and attitude-engineering, that the subjective nature of virtually all approaches to knowledge has been perceived to the degree to which the Sufis, for centuries, have tried to establish.
The Sufis have always taught: 'Examine your assumptions; avoid mechanicality; distinguish faith from fixation'.
The Sufi teacher, in the first place, has to be someone who has experienced all the stages of the Way along which he will conduct his disciples. Outward observers are not capable of commenting upon Sufism, only upon its externals. they lack both the experience and the capacity to discriminate between real and degenerate forms. 'Who tastes, knows, ' is a Sufi saying. Equally, whoever does not taste, does not know.
The validity of this concept is, naturally enough, strenuously opposed by outward observers. But if, in any field, an unqualified person, lacking essential experience, decides to 'become and expert', it is inevitable that the specialist, the person with the experience, will --indeed must--assert the primacy of proper knowledge.
It has to be remembered here that the externalists (whether people of the spirit or of the pen and tongue) are themselves not particularly to blame. Reared on the concept that anyone can, at will, examine anything, they are victims of their own culture's assumptions. After all, this approach is adequate for a large number of disciplines. They have merely applied a principal which holds good in one area to a subject where it does not.
The Sufi, unlike the externalists, cannot, and does not, work mechanically. The projection of the message and the help which is given to the learner, must always vary in conformity with the needs of the time, the culture involved and the nature and potential of the student.
But as soon as we say this, we can see that Sufi organisation, teaching and learning differ fundamentally from all other 'systems'.
The Sufi, in short, is aiming for a development, not to produce conditioned reflexes. He is teaching, not training. he intervenes, to provide the right stimulus at the right time for the right person. Such an activity is seen as chaotic by those who cannot perceive its purposefulness; just as the way of life in some open societies feels the unbearably disorderly to those who have escaped from regimented ones: something which frequently happens today.

Edition details

• Publisher: Octagon Pr
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0863040667
• ISBN 13: 9780863040665
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 332