Reflections

Received on time. Book in very good condition. price was nice. Thanks to all concerned.

- This is a most worthwhile little book for anyone of an ethical/spiritual frame of mind.

A replacement copy of a much loved book.

Great book

Idries Shah was a clear-eyed, nimble thinking outsider who came to settle among us. He noticed how the people he met lumbered under heavy, suffocating, restricting layers of cultural clothing, seeing the world through opaque, media-tinted glasses. In a book where words shape shift into many different forms he could also be direct and very forthright when necessary.This book was published over fifty years ago, but it is as relevant today as it was then, or more so. As he writes, ‘Water shrinks wool, urgency shrinks time.’ Shah understood attention needs. Today we live in an attention economy where our attention is continually sought for the main purpose of exploiting it. He mentioned denial, a subject receiving much attention today. ‘Denial and affirmation are games which people play.’ About problem solving, at a time when politics seems to present insurmountable problems, he affirms, ‘Solutions come through knowledge, so much so that, where there is real knowledge, there is no real problem.’ And a warning about the dangers of failing to develop tolerance:‘Tolerance and trying to understand others, until recently a luxury, has today become a necessity.‘This is because: unless we can realise that we and others are generally behaving as we do because of inculcated biases over which we have no control, while we imagine they are our own opinions, we might do something which would bring about the destruction of all of us.’Reflections is not a comfortable read. It attracts, but also irritates. It challenges you to think when you would prefer to lose yourself in a good story, and abandon the effort to try to improve and understand the world, or worlds. Then you accept that, ‘The human mind has capacities of “taste” which in contemporary societies are not satisfied at all.’ And:‘The people of our time are not employing their superior resources to retrieve and develop the remnants of wider knowledge possessed elsewhere and also at other times. This is because, while the tools and the general freedom are there for the first time, desire, resolution and breadth of vision are absent, also for the first time.’There are thoughts to be thought, and work to be done.

5 July 2015Format: PaperbackPut this book into your handbag or into your back pant's pocket or into your inside jacket pocket: as with pockets, so this book for the folded pockets of the mind. Reading and re-reading, clichéd attitudes of thought and expression begin to loosen their hold.‘Shut Doors.People often say a that a door to something is or has been shut. Do they however, go so far as to investigate whether it has been locked as well?When you really face a problem and see it clearly, you realise that it is not the door and its shutting which are significant, but the presence and condition of a lock.This is one reason for informing the pessimist-cultures which imagine that their heritage is optimism and

Sufi Wisdom sufi Wisdom wisdom Sufi sufi wisdomOn MankindLet me do what I want and give me approval as well.

It would be easy to dismiss this work as a mere collection of anecdotes and sayings, but what the author adds to commonly recognisable concepts and phrases, prevents the mind from falling into automatic patterns of thought. For example, many are familiar with the phrase 'It takes all sorts' .. Shah adds 'if that's so, where are they all?' ...