As you probably guessed, with power intermittent and the subway shut down the Dervish Dance event scheduled for last night was a no-go. What doesn't change, however, is that every Saturday, we spend some time with the Sufis' "crazy wisdom." This story comes from Idries Shah's book The Magic Monastery, courtesy of Kathy K.:
"There is a story about a man who went to a dictionary-compiler and asked him why he was interested in money. The lexicographer was quite surprised and said, 'Wherever did you get that idea?' 'From your own writings,' said the visitor. 'But I have only written that one dictionary — that is my writings,' said the author. 'I know, and that is the book that I have read,' said the other man. 'But the book contains a hundred thousand words! And out of those, I don't suppose that more than twenty or thirty are about money.' 'What are you talking about all the other words for,' said the visitor, 'when I was asking you about the words for money?'So tell us in the Comments section, what is this story really about? And what is the dictionary meant to represent?
What the heck, I'll take a stab at it.
The dictionary is the world, money is truth. In his collection of knowledge, the lexicographer had happened on the truth but it was lost in the confusion of all the other things. Even when prompted, he doesn't recognize the thing that he already knows. He confuses knowledge with wisdom.
Interesting thoughts. Anyone else want to step in?
Sufi stories always work on multiple levels, with multiple meanings. How does this story relate to religion generally?
Well, now my thoughts on it might be partly affected by Buckethead's, which were interesting.
Looking at it from that angle, it possibly might be that the virtues embodied in a religion can get lost amid the rest.
However, I suppose I'll turn it around and suggest that it is not the lexiconographer who is losing the truth, but the visitor. How?
The lexiconographer - lets say the Prophet - has given a complete work embodying the whole - the complete compendium of words and their meanings. But the visitor who read the book choses only to focus upon a part of it, is fixated on one aspect of the whole and even when the lexiconographer tries to get him to refocus on the complete work, he will not open his eyes to the whole, but instead remains focused on one aspect, which, when detached from the whole, may lead him to faulty conclusions regarding what message the lexiconographer is trying to convey.
Of course, this happens not just in religion and interpretation of it, but also in, say, political debates. . .
I need to make one correction to my own post: the lexiconographer who created the dictionary would be the Divine Creator, not the Prophet.
Correction accepted, updated.
Nevertheless, we as creatures cannot know the Creator directly, so learn of the Divine Creator and Its characteristics through and only through, God-Made-Manifest in the 'Prophet'.
The Prophetic cycle may have ended with Muhammad, but the Lord of Hosts came exactly as foretold in Hadith, Quranic prophecy (1260 AH) and Christian prophecy (1844 CE)...
So that while reading "The Book of Certitude", we learn of the Visitor's distortional outlook, couching his lead question in clearly understood word-symbols, then turning away from that clarity as the Lexicographer seeks clarity...
There ARE mystic aspects of the religious experience, but there are also individuals of East and West who CHERISH obscurity, and dance frantically in the realm of obscurantism and elitism... to the tune of "I'm more holy, more spiritual, more subtle and more aware than thee..."
Heh. "To a little boy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
If you boil each man's words down to their essence, you have the following:
Man: You are interested.
Lexicographer: A small fraction.
The first of these is about passion. The second is about measurement. And that's it: art and science, not communicating.
I have read that the Sufis regard all organized religion as a shell, and that Sufism is the tasty nut inside. Idries Shah's book the Sufis says that there can be Jewish, Christian or Muslim Sufis. In this context, the Lexicographer could represent organized religion and its clerics, unable to recognize the essential truth that should underlie the forms of religious practice. The questioner is then the sufi, asking about that hidden core.
My priest would have two replies to this line of thinking - one, that that might be skating perilously close to the Gnostic heresy, and two, that following empty forms of religion are certainly not the totality of religious experience.
So, I would be interested in hearing more from Mr. Katzman, who may have tossed pearls before swine. Give us some enlightenment - what do you think the teaching story means?
out of a hundred thousand words, the only ones that existed for the young man were the ones that dealt with money.
he mis-read his own subjective reality to be the reality of the lexicographer.
likewise, we often notice only what we think is worth noticing while ignoring the majority of reality.