Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation).
As we begin today ‘let us remember this about ‘Attention’. Our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. Attention: is important and most of the times we are so indifferent to it. It is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. We feed the hunger blindly. Once the mechanism is brought to our attention and we begin to study it, it is as if a veil has been stripped off ordinary life, and we become freer in our action and choices.
Q: Surely material reality is true and we can understand things from sight, description and experience. Information is reliable. The significance of words standing for events must be standard. If I see a statue, I know what it represents: especially if it has a halo on it. When I come to see you, the airline people weigh my luggage to prevent overloading. When I see a headline: ‘Motorway Disaster’ I know that cars have crashed. And so on.
You seem so often to claim that people don’t know what is happening or why something came into being or what things mean. But I know that facts are facts.
A: Facts are useful for some purpose. For others, they are extremely misleading. I will take your facts one at a time. ‘Disaster’ may mean a crash to you, but etymologically it means ‘a bad aspect of the stars’, and it meant at one point in time, something caused by astrological influences. So much for what words for events mean: They mean what successive people want them to mean. Even a motorway disaster does not mean a car crash to everyone. It may mean a bridge fallen onto a truck. As for a statue: you may or may not know what it means. Anthropologists and Archaeologists do not know what the oldest human figures mean, but assume they are idols or votive offerings. Everyone thinks that he knows that the statue which stands in Piccadilly Circus in London represents ‘Cupid, God of Love’. In fact, it was Sculpted by Alfred Gilbert to symbolise ‘Christian Charity’, and commemorates the Earl of Shaftesbury. I wonder, by the way, if when you see a halo attached to a statue you know that these were, in ancient times, placed there to collect bird-droppings and thus prevent the disfigurement of the face of the statue? Or did you perhaps think that they ‘represent a nimbus’ as people now think, because they looked at the halo shape and not at the function?
When the airline checking people weigh your baggage, whether it is to come to see me or otherwise, they allow you 44lbs (20kg.) of luggage. It may be imagined that this weight has been fixed because of what the aircraft can carry. You may be interested to know, since you are concerned with secondary things, that this ‘wasn’t’ the finely calculated allowance designed for the jet age which the airlines proclaimed it to be, but a rule instituted by Wells Fargo in 1880s to ensure that stage-coaches were not overloaded, and adopted wholesale by IATA(International Air Transport Association).
Perhaps the approximate and ever-changing meaning of ‘facts’ may enable you to understand why so many people have for so long sought for something more reliable. Facts are useful up to a point. This is what has led people to imagine, unreflectingly, that they must be of absolute value, or useful for all kinds of things to which they are not suited. Your facts, as we have seen, can be shown to have different ‘meanings’ by means of yet other facts. Facts, therefore, are not what they are assumed to be. Facts are only relatively true. Those who are interested in ultimate truth cannot regard material reality as more than transitory.
Excerpt from The Commanding Self – Idries Shah
“The Commanding Self” here points to the “mixture of primitive and conditioned responses, common to everyone, which inhibits and distorts human progress and understanding”.
Written in response to requests for “clarification, interviews, question-and-answer sessions, lectures”, the following sections of the book present study themes intended to enable the student of Sufism to observe the functioning of their own emotional and conditioned responses.
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