Inquiry · “You Are Not Your Thoughts”
Working with a Teaching-Story
Read and re-read a single Sufi teaching-story not for one fixed moral but as live material, watching how your own reactions and understanding shift each time you return to it.
Take one Sufi tale. Read it slowly; don’t fix a single moral. Notice your first reaction — that’s the data. Return to the same story over weeks and months and watch how your understanding drifts. The story is the fixed mirror; you are what moves. “For every decade we live, we will find another meaning in each story” (Shah).
What it is
Idries Shah, the 20th-century populariser of Sufism in the West, presented the Sufi teaching-story not as a fable with a tidy lesson but as working material — something to be lived with rather than decoded once and shelved.
In Tales of the Dervishes (1967) he gathered stories spanning roughly the 7th to the 20th centuries, attaching to each a short postscript on “its origin, use, and place in the tradition of Sufism,” and described many of them as providing “nutrition on many levels.” The practice is simple in form and patient in spirit: you take one story (a dervish tale, or a Nasrudin story) and return to it repeatedly over time, noticing not “the answer” but how your own reactions change.
Shah’s frequently quoted remark frames the attitude: “for every decade we live, we will find another meaning in each story.” This is distinct from ordinary moralising. It treats the tale as a fixed mirror and you as the moving variable — what you see in it this month tells you where you are this month.
The Method
Distilled from how Shah presents and uses the stories; offered as honest practice, since he deliberately avoids reducing a tale to instructions.
- Choose one short tale and read it slowly, once, without straining for the meaning. Let it sit. Resist the urge to immediately say “ah, this is about X.”
- Notice your first reaction. Did it irritate, amuse, confuse, or seem trivial? That reaction is the data — often it points at exactly the assumption the story is touching.
- Do not settle on a single moral. Where you would normally extract one lesson and close the book, deliberately leave the story open. Shah holds that a tale “may be understood at any one of many depths.”
- Return to it later — days, weeks, months on. Re-read the same tale and ask: does it land differently now? What do I notice that I skipped before? 5. Track the drift, not the destination. Keep a light note of how your readings change over time. The practice is in observing the movement of your own understanding, not in arriving at the “correct” interpretation.
- Let it work on you between readings. Shah’s claim is that the story keeps operating after you put it down; the discipline is to let it, rather than forcing closure. (Sourcing note: the stories, postscripts and “many levels” framing are Shah’s; the structured re-reading routine is the practice his presentation invites, not a numbered method he himself lays out.)
Source & Lineage
Idries Shah (1924-1996), of Afghan-Indian descent, became the most prominent populariser of Sufism in the English-speaking world. Beginning with The Sufis (1964) and continuing through collections such as Tales of the Dervishes (1967), he framed Sufism less as a historical religion than as a practical “science” of human development, with the teaching-story as a central instrument.
He argued such tales bypass the analytic, conditioned mind, planting ideas the everyday intellect cannot immediately rationalise away. He is a contested figure — scholars have questioned the sourcing and authenticity of some of his presentations — so he sits here as an influential transmitter and reframer of a much older oral corpus rather than a traditional lineage-holder.
Common refinements
Decoding once and closing the book. The whole point is repetition over time; a single “solved” reading defeats it.
- Forcing a hidden meaning. Straining to find the secret level usually produces a clever projection. Let the story act; don’t interrogate it.
- Treating your reading as fact. What you see reflects your present state, not a universal truth — and certainly not a verdict on other people.
- Skipping the reaction. Your irritation or boredom is often the most useful signal; don’t edit it out.
- Collecting tales instead of working one. Breadth defeats depth here; one tale, returned to, beats fifty read once.