Inquiry · “You Are Not Your Thoughts”
Learning How to Learn
Before chasing a teaching or result, examine and set aside the conditioning, hopes and false expectations you bring to it — and check whether the time, place and company are right — so that what you seek can actually be received.
Before you chase the teaching, clear the way. Name the hidden hope or fear driving you; surface the conditioning and “shoulds” you’re importing; drop the false expectation (not the aim); and check whether the time, place and company are right. “Desires, hopes and fears” wrongly drive development (Shah) — set them down first, then seek.
What it is
Most people approach a teaching, practice or goal by reaching straight for it. Idries Shah’s contention, set out in Learning How to Learn (1978), is that this is backwards: the obstacles must be cleared first. He argued that much of what we take for thought “is in reality little more than chains of habit or conditioning,” and that “the power of desires, hopes and fears that wrongly drive personal development” are among the chief barriers to it.
Reach for a result through those distortions and you simply install the distortion deeper. So the practice is preparatory and diagnostic rather than aspirational. Before serious study you take honest stock of three things:
(1) the conditioning and automatic assumptions you bring; (2) the hopes, fears and expectations secretly driving you (the wish for status, comfort, reassurance, a quick fix); and (3) whether the time, place and company are actually suitable — what Shah called the vital role of “right time, place and company in higher studies.” Only with the obstacles named does seeking have a clear channel.
Shah’s well-known image: assuming all development must come through conditioning “is as unnecessary as to imagine that because a tomato can be force-ripened that there is no other way for a tomato to ripen.”
The Method
Distilled from Shah’s account; offered as honest reflection, since he teaches largely through stories and exchanges rather than a fixed worksheet.
- Name what you actually want from this — beneath the stated aim. Is there a hidden hope (to feel special, safe, advanced) or fear (of missing out, of being ordinary) driving the search? Shah holds these “wrongly drive” development.
- Surface your conditioning. What assumptions are you importing — about how learning “should” feel, what the answer “should” look like, what a teacher or method “must” be? Treat these as habit to be examined, not facts.
- Drop the false expectation, not the aim. The point is not to stop seeking but to stop seeking through the distortion. Set the expectation down so the thing can be met as it is.
- Check time, place and company. Is now the moment? Is this the right setting and the right people for this study? Shah treats fit of context as a genuine prerequisite, not an afterthought.
- Match method to person and situation. Recognise that what suits one person, time or place may not suit another; resist one-size-fits-all. Choose the approach that fits this learner now.
- Then, and only then, proceed — and revisit the inventory whenever you begin something serious, because the obstacles reassemble. (Sourcing note: the prerequisites — conditioning, hopes/fears, right time/place/company — are Shah’s; the numbered self-inventory is the practice his teaching invites, not a checklist he prescribes verbatim.)
Source & Lineage
Idries Shah (1924-1996), the foremost 20th-century populariser of Sufism in the West, used the language of Western psychology to explain Sufi learning.
Learning How to Learn (1978) collects teaching stories, anecdotes and question-and-answer exchanges to illustrate the barriers and prerequisites to study — automatic thinking, conditioning, and the distorting pull of desires, hopes and fears — and introduced into wider culture the idea of “learning how to learn” and the importance of right time, place and company.
Shah is a contested transmitter — the sourcing of some of his presentations is disputed — so he appears here as a reframer of an older tradition rather than a traditional lineage-holder.
Common refinements
Using “I’m not ready” as a permanent excuse. The inventory is meant to clear the channel and then act — not to defer effort indefinitely.
- Confusing dropping expectation with dropping the aim. You keep seeking; you let go of seeking through distortion.
- Skipping the hidden-motive step. The hopes and fears are precisely what hide; a comfortable, flattering self-account usually means you haven’t found them yet.
- Ignoring context. Time, place and company are real variables in Shah’s account — forcing study in the wrong setting wastes the effort.
- One method for everyone. Shah is explicit that fit matters; transplanting someone else’s exact approach ignores person, time and place.