Worry is a cloud which rains destruction.
~ Idries Shah
The institution of teachership is there for this reason, that the learner must learn how to learn.
They asked Abboud of Omdurman: 'Which is better, to be young or to be old?' He said: 'To be old is to have less time before you and more mistakes behind. I leave you to decide whether this is better than the reverse.
It is no accident that Sufis find that they can connect most constructively with people who are well integrated into the world, as well as having higher aims, and that those who adopt a sensible attitude towards society and life as generally known can usually absorb Sufi teachings very well indeed
The main 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 repetition 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.
There is a succession of experiences which together constitute the educational and developmental ripening of the learner, according to the Sufis. People who think that each gain is the goal itself will freeze at any such stage, and cannot learn through successive and superseding lessons.
Show a man too many camels' bones, or show them to him too often, and he will not be able to recognize a camel when he comes across a live one. (Mirza Ahsan of Tabriz)
He was everyone and every living creature in one ecstatic motion.
~ Soroosh Shahrivar
Saying of the ProphetDesireDesire not the world, and God will love you. Desire not what others have, and they will love you.
Talking to the Divine is possible when you have your knowledge, thoughts, mind & body in line, remembering God with every breath. In Sufism, it is called ‘Sama’. But in reality, it should be called ‘Self realization’, I think.
~ Taranpreet Singh
The Sufi must be able to alternate his thought between the relative and the Absolute, the approximate and the Real.
Many people who are in reality dead are walking in the streets, many who are in their graves are in reality alive.
The Sufis,' runs the saying, 'understand with their hearts what the most learned scholars cannot understand with their minds
When a belief becomes more than an instrument, you are lost. You remain lost until you learn what 'belief' is really for.
Ali, Son of the Father of the SeekerAli said: 'None may arrive at the Truth until he is able to think that the Path itself may be wrong. This is because those who can only believe that it must be right are not believers, but people who are incapable of thinking otherwise than they already think. Such people are not men at all. Like animals they must follow certain beliefs, and during this time they cannot learn. Because they cannot be called “humanity”, they cannot arrive at the Truth.
I have made You the companion of my heart.But my body is available to those who desire its company,And my body is friendly toward its guest,But the Beloved of my heart is the guest of my soul.
~ Rabia Al-Adawiyya
Almost every day I am reminded of Saadi's reflection that there is no senseless tyranny like that of subordinates.
Inheritance and culture obscure people’s higher capacities.
Be a dog, but don't be a younger brother.Proverb.
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaBribe Substitute for law, which is a substitute for justice.
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaSupporter: Someone who will say anything.
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaAdherent:Someone who will believe anything except what he should.
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaPatience: A support for the disappointed.
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaCommunity: Irrationals unified by hope of the impossible.
From the beginning, from the age of Adam to the time of kingship: from the powerful, pardon: from the poor, sins.
Forms are vehicles and instruments, and vehicles and instruments cannot be called good or bad without context.
Virtually all organisations known to you work largely by means of your greed. They attract you because... they appeal to your greed.
Forms have changed through the centuries in obedience to the external world to which all forms belong.
...most systems end up by making imagined humility into a form of vanity, so they end up with vanity just the same.
Virtually all organisations known to you work largely by means of your greed.
Has it not occurred to you that, conversely, other people do not have your difficulties because they do not react as you do to what happens?
Take the wheat, not the measure in which it is contained
Our heads are filled with ‘knowledge’, a knowledge that in some areas pre-empts our seeing anything at all.
Presence and AbsenceA certain person may have, as you say, a wonderful presence: I do not know. What I do know is that he has a perfectly delightful absence.
People carry on whole conversations in proverbs. But they are not LIVING the proverbs.
Trust is needed before lessons can be learnt.
Proverbs and truisms are for this reason dangerous, because they produce blindness or non-thought.
The significance of the dwelling is in the dweller.
Rumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.
Why do people always wonder whether books are any good, without wondering whether they are themselves in a state to profit from them?
