(This is the 100th installment in our weekly Sufi Wisdom series, which covers the practices Imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali described as Ihya' ulum ad-din, or "Giving Life to the Sciences of the Religion." T.L. James is moving, so I'm taking this on again for now.)
Our 100th installment in the Sufi Wisdom series comes from Idries Shah's "Knowing How to Know : A Practical Philosophy in the Sufi Tradition":
"If you damage the jail, you harm the captive. If you remove the prisoner, you bring the guard along too. If you touch the captor, you imperil the victim."
Whatever do you think he could mean by that? What is the jail? The prisoner? The guard? Give it some thought before you continue.
Idries Shah continued:
"Each human being lives in a jail. The prison is himself; and he is his own warden as well.
While the warder is the prisoner and the jail, it is not surprising that there are so few escapes, and rescues are so rare.
And the process of interweaving captured and captivity, not to say dungeon, is so effective that this reflection must inevitably sound like nonsense.
But then, everyone's sense is someone else's nonsense."
Didi you have a different take on what that first paragraph could have meant? Comments about the rest? Use the Comments section and tell us.
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