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.
This week I bring to your attention a story titled ‘Sound and Unsound’ from the book titled ‘Wisdom of the Idiots’. It is a carefully chosen collection of illustrative anecdotes and stories used in Sufi teaching here the stories contain several levels of meaning and work like psychological mirrors in which the reader may see himself and reality reflected, and come to better understand both.
The Persian word dervish is generally considered to be derived from the verb der-vekhtan to wait at a door. The reference is to waiting before the door of enlightenment.
Sound and Unsound
A wandering Seeker saw a dervish in a rest-house and said to him:
‘I have been in a hundred climes and heard the teachings of a multitude of mentors. I have learned how to decide when a teacher is not a spiritual man. I cannot tell a genuine Guide, or how to find one, but half the work completed is better than nothing?’
The dervish rent his garments and said:
Miserable man! Becoming an expert on the useless is like being able to detect rotten apples without learning the characteristics of the sound ones.
‘But there is a still worse possibility before you. Beware that you do not become like the doctor in the story. In order to test a physician’s knowledge, a certain king sent several healthy people to be examined by him. To each the doctor gave medicine. When the king summoned him and charged him with this deceit, the leech answered: ‘Great King! I had for so long seen nobody but the ailing that I had begun to imagine that everyone was ill and mistook the bright eyes of good health for the signs of fever!’
Story from ‘Wisdom of the Idiots’ by Idries Shah
I am sure that you will enjoy reading this book; you can buy your copy from the following link:
Enjoy reading it with your family, friends and near and dear one’s.
Before concluding today’s episode please pay attention to these words of a Storyteller.My stories require, at this stage, no extra commentary, imaginings, or guesswork by you, me, or anyone else. The very worst would be that of moralizing. To explain away is to forget. Thus, let the stories which you can remember do their own work by their very diversity. Familiarize yourself with them.
Namaste.
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