Teaching stories in different Traditions are designed around certain assumptions. They may assume that we have a higher nature that we do not have regular access to, that we need to be made aware of doorways or gateways not in ordinary terms, but through metaphors, they even can assume that stories must be filtered through the heart before they can impact the mind.Sufi teaching looks at the purpose, potential and meaning of life, and recognizes that we have an essential nature that is spiritual; we are on an earthly journey in order to uncover this essential self. Yet, though the potentiality for transformation of the self lies within us, it is not usually accessible because of our limited perception and our strong identification with our everyday, surface selves.
Sufis have traditionally spoken of the need to develop of an "organ of perception" which, once developed, allows a person to apply himself or herself more completely and effectively to life. One of the ways this development is best achieved is through Teaching Stories, a term used to describe those stories and anecdotes deliberately created as vehicles for the transmission of wisdom. While such stories are collected and transmitted in almost every Tradition, the way of the Sufis is particularly significant to any story-lover or story-worker.
Idries Shah, through whose collections and translations these stories have become most accessible to us, wrote that Sufi teaching stories are “”works of objective art” - used to transmit to us a Higher Knowledge.
Usually, we cannot perceive this Higher Knowledge because we are not really prepared for it. Our preparation can be helped by not only getting to know the stories, but also by re-visiting them and familiarizing ourselves with them; by “soaking in story” so as to be ready for their meanings to be revealed to us, slowly, as we become ready for deeper knowing.
In workshops designed around such stories, I find that most people want to ‘crack open’ the meaning of these stories; they are eager and in a hurry to get at the core meaning. It is hard for them to understand that with these kinds of stories, the timing is different for each of us, and that the stories give up the ‘higher level’ insights only after a patient engagement with them, through reflection and contemplation.
When we decide “Ah, this is the meaning,” we could end the chance of further, deeper impact of the story on our inner being. Allowing our logical mind to deal with teaching stories in a way which is customary to it, and imagining we have understood all there is to understand, we can find ourselves in a situation like the boy in the story who had dismembered a fly into its components and then wondered where the fly itself had gone.
As is often done these days, many Sufi stories and poems may be interpreted as being related to psychological processes. That is a valid consideration which is often useful for developing one’s understanding, but this does not mean that its meaning is fully drawn out by this method. It may contain a great deal more. We are too easily satisfied with surface answers, mainly because the more profound ones are often revealed slowly, over time.
Robert Ornstein, the renowned psychologist, says that teaching stories, with improbable events lead the reader's mind into new and unexplored venues, allowing her or him to develop more flexibility and to understand this complex world better. Psychologists have found that teaching-stories activate the right side of the brain. The left side of the brain we mostly use provides the 'text', or the component pieces of an event or experience; the right side provides 'context', the essential function of putting together the different components of this experience.
The poet Kahlil Gibran once said, "The real teacher leads you not to himself, but to the threshold of your own mind." Teaching Stories are known to act as these Real Teachers.
Knowledge passed through the heart
The Celtic peoples, for example,
insisted that only the poets could be teachers.
Why? I think it is because knowledge
that is not passed through the heart is dangerous:
it may lack wisdom; it may be a power trip;
it may squelch life out of the learners.
What if our educational systems were to insist
that teachers be poets and storytellers and artists?
What transformations would follow?
~ Matthew Fox
