Triggering Spiritual Growth through Story

“The shortest distance between truth and a human being, is a story.”
Anthony de Mello, Jesuit Priest

Many cultures share a process of facilitating spiritual growth through story. Most of us are familiar with koans, stories from the Japanese Zen Buddhist tradition that require the listener to suspend the usual ability to process narrative, to confound rational or discursive thought and provoke the listener into a state of awareness. Not so familiar to some might be the teaching tales of the Sufis, adherents of the Islamic (some would argue pre-Islamic) mystical tradition.

Idries Shah, in his preface to his “Tales of the Dervishes”, says that “In Sufi circles, it is customary for students to soak themselves in stories set for their study, so that internal dimensions may be unlocked by their teaching master as and when the candidate is judged ready for the experience which they bring”.

Many, though by no means all, of the Dervish tales have a koan quality. The classic examples of this are demonstrated in that corpus of story that relate the exploits of the Mullah Nasruddin. The Mullah Nasruddin is both at once a fool, the butt of jokes, and a wise man who demonstrates his wisdom in naiveté and innocence. Idries Shah once again says it best “The Nasruddin stories, known throughout the Middle East, constitute one of the strangest achievements in the history of metaphysics. Superficially, most of the Nasruddin stories may be used as jokes. They are told and retold endlessly in the teahouses and caravanserais, in the homes and on the radio waves, of Asia. But it is inherent in the Nasruddin story that it may be understood at any of many depths. There is the joke, the moral – and the little extra which brings the consciousness of the potential mystic a little further on the way to realization.” (The Sufis)

Nasruddin’s morals are never explicit. They are inherent in the story structure. And his wisdom is never narrated. The fool slips by the mental defenses, and delivers the wisdom with a surgical precision that at once delights and confounds.

Key to the Sufi use of tales is this “soaking”, this immersion in the stories that Idries Shah refers to, along with the precise use of such tales by a Sufi master to trigger the student’s advancement at certain key stages along his path.

Similar stories are told within Jewish communities by Rabbi’s. Doug Lipman says “Hasidic stories are, intrinsically, healing stories. From the eighteenth-century beginning of this Jewish mystical sect, stories have been a key way to pass on the spiritual and emotional teachings of the movement’s masters.” (http://www.hasidicstories.com/Articles/Learning_From_Stories/wrestling.html) Indeed, in some strands of the Hasidic tradition, the stories are deemed to have the spiritual power to change the universe. “The tales have a specific therapeutic, cosmic function: They redeem souls from the empty space.”  (Arnold J. Band, http://www.hasidicstories.com/Articles/Hasidic_Theories/bratslav.html)

Are you sitting comfortably?

I once heard a story about a man who found a book that had been hidden by a messenger. From where this messenger came, and from whom, I do not know, although I have my thoughts. But she left this book for the man to find, and find it he did.

Now, this was no normal book. For one thing, it only had two pages. And each page was woven tightly out of wicker, in complex and intricate patterns. Somehow the man knew that there was something special about the book, but he didn’t know how he knew, and he didn’t know what.

For many months the man puzzled over the book. He began to notice that, as he puzzled, he felt the patterns with his fingers and knew somehow that they had meaning. He came to notice subtle intricacies of shade and shadow within the book and as his fingers ran lightly over the knots and weave he would hear gentle sounds.

Long days and long nights he studied. At night, he noticed that the use of different senses in still new ways of making sense seemed to allow him to understand different meaning. By day, he noticed he could look at the book in a new light.

Gradually he noticed a change. He noticed that his sense of touch had become more delicate and more discriminating. He noticed new patterns each time he read the book with his fingers. He became aware of a rhythm and a pattern to the sound of his fingers lightly brushing the pages and he discovered a depth and variety of colour he had not before known. And he noticed a change in himself.

He noticed how his life touched the lives of others in different ways, and how others touched his own life. He became aware of smaller and smaller changes, ever further away, still felt deep within. And he didn’t know how much of these changes came from the reading of the book, or simply from the action of learning to read the book. When asked, he would smile, and quietly say that it simply didn’t matter any more.

to be continued…