Knowing How to Know
About This Book
Contemporary esoteric systems almost always play on the desire of mankind to seek or acquire knowledge. All but universally neglected in such systems are the - often unrecognized - barriers which prevent knowledge and understanding. Before learning can take place, certain conditions and basic factors must be in place; in the individual or the group. Building on the foundations laid in Learning How to Learn and The Commanding Self, Idries Shah in Knowing How to Know illuminates those factors. Like an ultra-violet light shone onto the petals of flowers, it reveals concealed patterns, normally invisible to our customary modes of thought.
What You'll Learn
• Understand the epistemological dimension of the Sufi path: why 'knowing how to know' is presented as a prerequisite for genuine spiritual learning — what specifically must change in one's relationship to information and experience before the deeper content of the tradition can be received rather than simply read and categorised
• Grasp the specific obstacles Shah identifies: the conditioned expectation that spiritual teaching should look a certain way (solemn, mystical, systematic), the projection of one's own interpretive categories onto unfamiliar material, the emotional investment in existing beliefs that makes genuine openness to challenge impossible
• Recognise the teaching function of the stories Shah uses: how the brief stories, paradoxes, and character sketches that make up most of the book work on the reader's conditioned patterns of response rather than simply providing information — and what this form of teaching reveals about the Sufi understanding of how genuine change of awareness occurs
• Learn the qualities Shah identifies as prerequisites for Sufi study: the specific attitudes and capacities (freedom from presupposition, the ability to hold multiple possibilities simultaneously, genuine rather than performed humility) that make a student genuinely teachable in the Sufi sense
• Appreciate how Knowing How to Know functions as self-testing: how reading the book with genuine attention reveals specific things about one's own patterns of response and assumption — patterns that the book both illustrates and, in the act of recognition, begins to address
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