A Perfumed Scorpion by Idries Shah

Author:Idries Shah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ISF Publishing
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE SYMPTOMS

The following passage indicates one side of the situation which then obtains.

Someone asked a wise man, “I have heard that humanity is suffering from an ailment which prevents men and women from seeing truth, from knowing themselves. What is the main symptom?”

He answered: “The first symptom is to believe that one is not suffering from this illness at all. But when it really starts to take hold, the patient may agree that he is ill, but now insists that the disease is anything other than actually it is.”

This disordered perception is very marked in heroic but ill-considered attempts at obtaining esoteric knowledge, which really means “simultaneous” knowledge, all over the world today.

Sufi teaching takes place within a system which is much more often than not indirect. It is sometimes unperceived at the moment of its operation, though not always in its externals. The thirteenth-century teacher Jalaluddin Rumi refers to this indirect operational quality of stories which one often observes in action, through an actual tale – a tale explaining how a tale can work:

There was once a merchant who kept a parrot imprisoned in a cage. When about to visit India, on a business trip, he said to the bird:

“I am traveling to your homeland. Can I give any message to your relatives there?”

“Simply tell them,” said the parrot, “that I am living here in a cage.”

When the merchant returned, he said to the parrot:

“I am sorry to have to tell you that when I found and informed your wild relatives in the jungle that you were caged, the shock was too much for one of them. As soon as he heard the news, he dropped from his branch, no doubt having died from grief.”

Immediately he had spoken, the parrot collapsed and lay inert on the floor of his cage.

Sorrowfully, the merchant took him and placed him outside in the garden. Then the parrot, having got the message, sat up and flew away, out of reach.

We must not think either that this exhausts the symbolism of this story, or that it will necessarily appeal to everyone. Rumi himself once said that counterfeit gold is only to be found because there is such a thing as real gold to be copied. And there is a true story, of something which took place in Britain not so long ago, which verifies our experience that many of our stories (and especially the events in them) appear on the surface to be so trivial to so many people that they reject them completely.

A jeweler in Birkenhead, Cheshire, in England, wanted to get people into his shop. 5 He handed out 3,000 stones to people in the street. They all looked like real diamonds, but all but four of them were glass. He explained, in a leaflet given to each recipient, that there were real diamonds among the give-away stones. Whoever got a stone of any kind was invited to visit the jewelery store, to find out if they had been lucky. Out of the 3,000 people getting the stones, only one – a woman – actually turned up at the shop.

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