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Idries Shah Quotes

Browse 25 quotes about Idries Shah.

Idries Shah Quotes

“As in a harmonised group, once this ‘electronic’ link is established between people, a new person can be introduced, and as long as he or she can orientate him-or-herself correctly to the activity, what has taken many years for the group to learn can be picked up very quickly. For this to be possible it is essential to avoid hierarchies developing, because the attitude of feeling more important as a result of having been around longer makes this transmission impossible. (The Steganographer 6)”

LearningSufismSufisIdries Shah
Author:Oliver Hoare
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“[Idries Shah advised that if] the question is asked repeatedly and clearly: will it be healed or won’t it be? Can it be healed, or can’t it be? – a vibration is set up which is the right code for the computer. Thus the computer will become aware that the skin is damaged and will intervene to repair – since this is its function. Provided always that communication with it is coded in the correct way. (The Steganographer 6)”

HealingSufismIdries Shah
Author:Oliver Hoare
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“Humility cannot be taught by propaganda, though slavery can. Shouting for humility is a form of arrogance. One of my most abiding recollections is of a priest at a religious occasion once roaring, in the most threatening way imaginable: ‘O our Lord God, we most humbly pray…!’ Real humility is not always the same as apparent humility. Remember that fighting against self-conceit is still fighting: and that it will tend to suppress it temporarily. It does not cure anything. Remember, too, that humility itself does not bring an automatic reward: it is a means to an end. It enables a person to operate in a certain manner.”

WisdomSpiritualReligionHumilitySufismReflectionsIdries Shah
Author:Idries Shah, Reflections
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“Only later – much, much later, and after losing all hope and undergoing a seemingly interminable Dark Night of the Soul – would Louie begin to see how Shah’s own work tied in with others. Not only among Sufis, nor in the general fields of spirituality and mysticism, nor in the work of Shah’s own family, friends of Shah, and friends of friends of Shah, and people who quoted people quoting Shah, but in diverse fields and in the town’s marketplace, mucky alleyways and smoke-clouded taverns of everyday life. That was a whole new vista, a continent beyond Shah’s own island – vast, exotic, and apparently self-contained as it had been, and yet not all and everything. Looking back, this wonderful caravanserai had been a very necessary, and much loved, step or two along the way.”

SufismSufisSufi WayIdries ShahSecret Friends
Book:Secret Friends: The Ramblings of a Madman in Search of a Soul
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“As well as this, there were of course many sceptics and detractors, not only of Shah but of his students and his would-be or wanna-be students. They’d say things like “You’ve been studying for – what? – 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And where has it got got you, eh? Eh? Nowhere.” And there really was no answer to that, other than to simply try to show a good example, and hope that some might sense subtle signs of progress having been made. But no: they wanted to see Gandalf with his whizz-bangs. Unlike Rabia, we couldn’t magically produce an onion out of thin air – an incontrovertible act – and later retort: “What? Do you think that God is a greengrocer, or something?”

Idries ShahRabia
Book:Secret Friends: The Ramblings of a Madman in Search of a Soul
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