From “The Commanding Self” by Idries Shah
“The major difference between Sufis and ‘believers’ is that belief is conviction, certainty without proof, while Sufi knowledge is factual. This is often disputed by theologians because they regularly confuse knowledge with belief. This is easy to demonstrate. If I know that it is ten past ten in the morning, or that there is a fly on the wall, it is absolutely unnecessary, lunatic, even, to describe this as a belief. On the other hand, the people who believe that something is true do not know it in anything like the same way. Why? Because if they knew it as a positive, objective fact they would not manifest any emotion about it: neither would they be so keen to make others believe. All human experience shows that it is only things about which there is doubt which are believed in this characteristic manner. Facts, true ones, are not subject to either emotion or proselytization. The theologically-centered people, then, are not wrong or deluded, they are feebly informed as to the difference between, say, ‘I know that this is a pencil’, and ‘I know that there are spiritual beings, because I have felt that it is true.’” (p.245)
“Displacement activity, sometimes called ‘exchange symptoms’, forms a most important part of human behavior. As an example, people who claim that they have no interest in metaphysics are often over-reacting against just such a curiosity. On the other hand, people who fevently claim that they are deeply concerned about such things are seldom in the right state to profit from them. Their excitement is used as a means of preventing them from going further. Their anxiety paralyses them: but this may well be inwardly intentional. You can see this, on a very ordinary level, when you look at agitated believers in all sorts of cults and systems. Because they ‘have belief’ they do not believe in learning. They use belief, in fact, to prevent learning. This is partly because the urgent ‘desire to learn’ is a low-level, emotional activity, a form of pleasurable agitation, a displacement. ‘Believers’, too, hold onto beliefs and do not allow them to be modified easily, certainly not by experience, because they really seek a systematic formula to make themselves feel stable. The space in their minds is there for system, not for truth. It is such people who imagine that there has been a great change in them when they merely exchange one belief-system for another. Then are not believers in the sense understood by a genuine belief-system, merely temporarily stabilised.” (p.250)
