by T.L. James of MarsBlog. Part of our weekly Sufi Wisdom series.
This week's tale comes from Shah's The Way of the Sufi, and concerns a fool and his bowl:Once upon a time there was a fool who was sent to buy flour and salt. He took a dish to carry his purchases.
'Make sure,' said the man who sent him, 'not to mix the two things -- I want them separate.'
When the shopkeeper had filled the dish with flour and was measuring out the salt, the fool said: 'Do not mix it with the flour; here, I will show you where to put it.'What is the lesson here? What are the flour and salt, and what is the fool's mistake?
And he inverted the dish, to provide, from its upturned bottom, a surface upon which the salt could be laid.
The flour, of course, fell to the floor.
But the salt was safe.
When the fool got back to the man who had sent him he said: 'Here is the salt.'
'Very well,' said the other man, 'but where is the flour?'
'It should be here,' said the fool, turning the dish over.
As soon as he did that, the salt fell to the ground, and the flour of course was seen to be gone.
The first that comes to mind is: "That you can't have it both ways".
Its amazing to me that the two faces of the "kingdom", are to be considered by the Administration as enough for us not to put sanctions or even worse into their "Kingdom".
They preach peace and cooperation while they send terrorists and money to the rest of the Middle East. They preach against violence and terrorism while teaching it in their schools.
Until they see that it can't work both ways, they will not do any more than try to stop violence in their "Kingdom".
We need to get our Military our of SA and into Iraq. We need to do that now. Then we need to tell the "Kingdom" that half or quarter measures against Islamic and Arab terrorism is not enough and give them a choice.
Either you stop the money and the teaching of hate and intolence or you will be brought to the top of "The List".
This is my post
On the simplest level, the lesson would seem that if one asks another to carry two things which may not be mixed, then one must provide two vessels; and this is true whether one speaks of the physical world or the world of the mind.
Only my appreciation of the Mulla Nasruddin stories prompts me to risk scorn by asking an additional question, with follow up: Just how many "fools" are there in this story? Should we add to the list of "fools":
- The man who sent the fool, with only one dish, to get two things which could not be mixed?
- The shopkeeper who appears not to have noticed that the fool, in making ready to carry the salt, had spilled the flour?
- And any passers-by who had nothing to say when they saw a man carrying salt in the upturned bottom of an empty dish?
In response to Papa Ray, I have to believe that Rumsfeld and the rest probably saw the utility of moving American forces from Saudi Arabia into Iraq before they launched OIF. That has already started. After the end of major combat ops, US forces started pulling out of Saudi Arabia. I don't know how many personnel are still inside the kingdom, but it's much smaller than it was in March 2003.
The downside to stationing US forces in Iraq is... they're in IRAQ. Air bases like Talil are targets for frequent mortar attacks. The international community is already up-in-arms about "enduring bases," which are the bases the US will allegedly use, even after the nation-building mission is over.
We will only be able to keep a military presence in Iraq for as long as the Shiite-dominated government will tolerate it. My feeling on the Shiites right now is that they want the US to leave, but they're patient enough to let us stay until the insurgency is broken. That's a completely understandable position from a nationalistic people. After they tell us to hit the road, we will need to scale back our military footprint in the region and limit it to countries like Oman, Kuwait, and Bahrain.
On the topic of being two-faced, Qatar has to be just as bad as Saudi Arabia. The people and the government claim to love the US, but the monarchs fund al Jazeera so they can tell the Arab world about "America the great white satan" and "Israel the little satan." I'd like to see a US pullout from Qatar as well, but I don't think it will happen anytime soon.
Great comments on 'the lesson to be learned'.
I'd like to try a guess at 'the flour and salt':
Extreme fundamentalism and extreme love?
disclaimer: I'm an armchair philosopher, and a young adolescent at that
The fool should have taken them next door to
the baker and when he returned home with the
bread he'd be a fool no more.
to Steel Turnman: now that's capitalism at its best! (Or worst?)
You just gotta love perspective, don'cha ;)
ps.: please dude, no offense, just joking :)
The lesson is that he who wastes time on strawmen places no value on hisself.
Flour and salt are body and soul. The soul is spread out in the body like salt in the flour when mixed. The spiritual path is the effort to extract the "salt" from the "flour" without injuring either.
See, I used to be all kind of loosy-goosy about this stuff. Arica, Gurdjieff, third-world philosophies. And then I would read stuff like this, and BAMN, as Emeril would say ... right back to reality.
What nonsense.
The point of all this is that the joke is on everyone trying to figure out this nonsense.