/lit/ - Literature

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Here’s Idries Shah in his book “The Sufis” (p. 360) on false tajalli (Arabic for what he translates “irradiation,” perhaps could also be translated as enlightenment):

>The false tajalli experienced by those who do not carry their development along in a balanced way may give rise to a conviction that it is a true mystical state, especially when it is found that supernormal faculties seem to be activated in this condition. Sufis discriminate between this experience and the true one in two ways. Firstly, the teacher will at once identify the counterfeit state. Secondly, as a matter of self-investigation, it can always be discerned that the gains of perception are of no exact value. There may be, for instance, an access of intuition. One may know something about someone — thought-reading is an example. But the actual function, the value of the ability to read thought, is nil [i.e., in false tajalli, the “miracles” are of no significant spiritual value, but rather something useless like predicting what someone is about to say in a mundane conversation — with the added negative, this faculty can so excite you, it increases your pride, or, perhaps even worse, causes you to feel you’re going insane if it’s frequent and undeniable enough]. The person suffering from a false tajalli will be able to report some fact or series of facts about someone else, indicating a breakthrough of the limitations of time and space. The test of the tajalli for anyone who cannot instantly recognize that it is genuine is whether the “supernatural” perception is unaccompanied by a permanent increase in intuitive knowledge — the seeing of things as a whole, for instance; or the knowing of the course which one’s self-development will take; or the course of that of another; or performing “miracles.”

More excerpts and interesting anecdotes upcoming.