What do you think about this enigmatic guy? Does anyone agree with him that the Sufi parables and Mulla Nasrudin tales/jokes he tells really have some non-immediately-obvious psychological meaning and that studying them can exercise our minds along more intuitive, often less-developed pathways? What's the esoteric meaning behind a seeming joke such as:
>When I was in the desert,’ said Nasrudin one day, ‘I caused an entire tribe of horrible and bloodthirsty bedouins to run.’ >‘However did you do it?’ >‘Easy. I just ran, and they ran after me.’
or
>The rain was pelting down. Aga Akil, the most sanctimonious man in town, was running for shelter. ‘How dare you flee from God’s bounty,’ thundered Nasrudin at him, ‘the liquid from Heaven? As a devout man, you should know that rain is a blessing for all creation.’ >The Aga was anxious to maintain his reputation. ‘I had not thought of it in that way,’ he muttered, and slackening his pace he arrived home soaked through. Of course he caught a chill. >Soon afterwards, as he sat wrapped in blankets at his window, he espied Nasrudin pelting through the rain, and challenged him: ‘Why are you running away from divine blessings, Nasrudin? How dare you spurn the blessing which it contains?’ >‘Ah,’ said Nasrudin, ‘you don’t seem to realise that I do not want to defile it with my feet.' ?
Besides that, what do you think of Sufism in general and their history of poetry? Fariduddin Attar, Rumi, and Sanai, for example.
"‘Good’ and ‘evil’ have no meaning in the world of the Word: they are names, coined in the world of ‘me’ and ‘you’."
"Your life is just morsel in his mouth; his feast is both wedding and a wake. Why should darkness grieve the heart? – for night is pregnant with new day." Hakim Sanai, The Walled Garden of Truth
I don't know Idries Shah, though you got me really interested in them. I also don't know much about sufism, but it's something I want to get into.
The stories of Nasrudin, as far as I know, are exactly as you say, non-obvious stories. Nasrudin is like a wise idiot, he always says something clever, but not in the way you expect, sometimes it's really "stupid". Not surprising that he is usually represented by riding a donkey facing his back. It's never on your face, but at the same time it mocks deeper meanings. You can't just say "I figured out the meaning of this story" in a minute, they are subject to debate.
The first story makes me think of the expectation we have that one cannot affect a group of horrible bloodthirsty men. And yet when they run after him, it is his presence that affects them, he truly is able to move them. In other words, the object of desire has an effect on the subject, even in passivity we have an effect in the world, even not responding to a situation is a response.
I know another story, from the top of my head
>A man sees Nasruding walking around, crouching and looking to the floor near a street lamp as if looking for somethign. He comes closer and asks what he was doing. Nasrudin says >"I was coming home when I missed the keyhole and my keys fell to the ground and now I can't find them". >"But how come you are looking for them here on the streets by this lamp and not at your doorstep?". >"It was just too dark there"
Asher Cooper
Hafez changed my life
So did Nusra Fatah Ali Khan
Too late to write about it
I'm just with you
Ryder Sanchez
>u.cs.biu.ac.il/~schiff/Net/t22.jpg Hodja went to the pulpit and asked the congregation. "Do you know what I will be talking about today?" "No" responded the congregation. "If you don't know then what can I tell you?" he said and walked away. The next week he went to the pulpit and asked the same question. The congregation responded. "Yes" "If you do then there is nothing I can tell you," Hodja said and walked away again. The congregation decided if Hodja asked the same question again they would divide the answers between themselves and yes and no. Sure enough Hodja showed up the next week and asked the same question. The congregation uttered its mix of yes and no. To this Nasreddin Hodja replied "In that case those who know tell the ones who don't know," and walked away.
Evan Allen
I want to bump this
Jonathan Cox
shah is trash nasurridin is cool
Sebastian Barnes
Bump from almost the bottom of the catalog
Kevin Flores
...
Cooper Gomez
y u bully me
Logan Cooper
>>A man sees Nasruding walking around, crouching and looking to the floor near a street lamp as if looking for somethign. He comes closer and asks what he was doing. Nasrudin says >>"I was coming home when I missed the keyhole and my keys fell to the ground and now I can't find them". >>"But how come you are looking for them here on the streets by this lamp and not at your doorstep?". >>"It was just too dark there" This one is one of the more transparent and more famous Nasrudin stories. The original is actually about him losing the keys in his house, and him looking for it outside his house. The key = the key to higher knowledge. The house = the (domain of the) self, the ego. Instead of looking for what we've lost in ourselves, we look to the outer world (outside the house) for enlightenment and peace. There's "more light there" --- more attention paid to the outer world. Focusing on things/attention is like light. According to Gurdjieff (who Shah and others say took a lot of his teachings from the Sufis), observing ourselves is compared to shining more light on ourselves. Also according to Gurdjieff, the house in some ancient systems is a symbol of the self (see the Gospels, the house with unruly servants in it representing our selves with unruly, conflicting parts in them). Our houses are dark, not enough light in them --- we don't observe ourselves, remember ourselves. We do things mechanically, without being aware of them, mindful, present in the moment --- everything we do, we forget that WE'RE doing it. We forget we exist. It's a form of hypnotism, really.
This idea of the key to existence being in ourselves is also a common view of esotericism --- that God/the capacity for enlightenment is in ourselves.
This idea that we often forget our own existence is also shown in the following Mulla Nasrudin tale:
>Nasrudin once undertook to take nine donkeys for delivery to a local farmer. >The man who entrusted them to him counted, one by one, so that Nasrudin could be sure that there really were nine. >On the road his attention was distracted by something by the wayside. >Nasrudin, sitting astride one of the animals, counted them, again and again. He could only make out eight. >Panic-stricken, he jumped off, looked all over the place, and then counted them again. >There were nine. >Then he noticed a remarkable thing. When he was sitting on donkey-back, he could see only eight donkeys. When, however, he dismounted, there were nine in full view. >'This is the penalty,' reflected the Mulla, 'for riding, when I should, no doubt, be walking behind the donkeys.' >'Did you have any difficulty getting them here?' asked the farmer when he arrived, dusty and disheveled. >'Not after I learned the trick of donkey-drivers -- walk behind,' said Nasrudin. 'Before that, they were full of tricks.'
Elijah Walker
Thank you for this post.
I don't remember where I read the Nasrudin story that way, though I remember reading it in different versions. Which brings the obvious question, where to find more traditional versions of the Nasrudin and other stories?
Noah Richardson
“And then came that deep crisis in Greek culture and Greek religious life in which all the Homeric conceptions were threatened with a complete breakdown. The simplicity and serenity of the Olympian gods seemed suddenly to fade away. Zeus, the god of the bright sky, Apollo, the god of the sun, had no power to resist and banish the demonic forces that appeared in the cult of Dionysus. In Homer Dionysus has no place among the Olympian gods. He came as a stranger and late comer into Greek religion… We witness in Greek religion thereafter the continuous struggle between two opposite forces. The classical expression of this struggle is given in Euripides’ “Bachhae”. If we read the verses of Euripides we need no other testimony as to the intensity, the violence, the irresistible power of the new religious feeling. In the Dionysian cult we find scarcely any specific feature of the Greek genius. What appears here is a fundamental feeling of mankind, a feeling that is common to the most primitive rites and to the most sublime spiritualized mystic religions. It is the deep desire of the individual to be freed from the fetters of its individuality, to immerse itself in the stream of universal life, to lose its individuality, to immerse itself in the stream of universal life, to lose its identity, to be absorbed in the whole of nature – the same desire as expressed in the verses of the Persian poet Mualana [sic] Jalaluddin Rumi: “He that knows the power of the dance dwells in God”. The power fo the dance is to the mystic the true way to God. In the delirious whirl of the dance and of the orgiastic rites our own finite and limited Self disappears. The Self, the “dark despot” as it is called by Rumi, dies; the God is born. (Cassirer, Myth of the State p. 42-3)
Andrew Evans
i liked him in the wire
Matthew Hernandez
Any book recommendation in these veins?
Luke Carter
Idries Shah - miscellaneous. He's written so many books and none of them really stand out above the others. The ones most related to the thread at hand are:
His 3 Mulla Nasrudin books (3 books he wrote containing Mulla Nasrudin jokes and stories) His more general Sufi parable books including tales he's collected from the Middle East/heard; some I remember are Wisdom of the Idiots Caravan of Dreams Tales of the Dervishes
etc.
The comparison to Gurdjieff can best be understood by reading Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous.
Rumi's Mathnawi (alternate spelling Masnavi) is a good work to read by Rumi.
Christian Baker
Cool, thanks I'll take a look Do you have any more general recommendations?
Brandon Foster
...
Xavier Mitchell
Myth of State is really about the history of political myth in philosophy, including, or culminating with the political myths of the 20th century.
However, in the first chapter, the author unites Schopenhauer and Hegel through Freud (whom he also dislikes) in a way which I had been thinking about but did not have the background or courage to explicitly state.
The quote I posted is right before that, in which he describes the "feeling" in Dionysian cults (which is p. much promoted as the equivalent of Schopenhauer's Will by Nietzsche in his famous thesis on the Birth of Tragedy) as part of the same current as Mysticism or Esotericism in religions, which is also, according to Cassirer, similar to what led to nazism (and I would argue, communism).
Interesting book, not mystical per se, but has important philosophical insights into what mysticism entails. Even if it is in many aspects disagreeable (read Voegelin's review of the book if you don't have the time to read a whole philosophical work).
Asher James
Interesting chart
Hunter Campbell
good work, user
Dominic Bailey
Why/since when does /x/ into reading? Especially books like these?
Brody Wright
No board actually reads its own chart canons, they just know them by name.
