One Pair of Eyes: Dreamwalkers
Этот текст когда-то лежал в сети в нескольких копиях, но вдруг поисчезал и мне удалось выкопать его только из архивов. Это транскрипт передачи Dreamwalkers, снятой Шахом на БиБиСи и показанной зрителям в 1970 году.
Transcript of One Pair of Eyes: Dreamwalkers
Idries Shah
A transcript of the documentary 'One Pair of Eyes:
Dreamwalkers' presented by Idries Shah, 19th Dec 1970,
on UK BBC Television.
First edition: 8 April, 2007
Dedicated to the Sufi Idries Shah and to the wonderful
friends I've met at the yahoo! groups caravansarai and
friends of fidelity, and through the web site
sarmouni.dyndns.org.
Thank you for being here.
[Shah is sitting in a circle of children at kindergarten. His
daughter Saira is by his side. The children are discussing
toy animals they've made, including an elephant, a flesh-
eating dinosaur and a leaf-eating dinosaur.]
SHAH: Shall I tell you a story about animals? Well now,
listen very carefully.
NARRATION: This isn't just a children's story. There's
much more to it than that. The story originates in the 13th
century and is really what this programme is all about.
SHAH: Once upon a time there was a lion who lived in a
forest, And he got very thirsty, so he thought he'd have a
drink of water. So he went through the forest and he found
a pool of water and he looked in it and in it he saw, as he
thought, another lion looking back out of the water. Why
was that?
SAIRA: Because it was him.
SHAH: Yes, but he didn't know, because he was rather a
silly lion. So he said 'Arrrr' which means 'get out of the
water because I want a drink.' He said that to the other lion.
But it wasn't another lion at all, so it couldn't get out.
SAIRA: Did the other lion say 'Arrrr'?
SHAH: The other lion didn't say anything.
SAIRA: It was a flection.
SHAH: Yes, it was a reflection. So all the other animals in
the forest gathered round and they started to laugh at the
lion because they could all see what it was. And the giraffe
laughed and the elephant laughed and even the butterfly
laughed.
SAIRA: 'Eh he-heh he-heh-heh'.
SHAH: A little laugh like that. Suddenly the lion got so
thirsty he said to himself 'I don't care who's in that water:
I'm going to have a drink.' So he put his head down into it
and he found there wasn't another lion there at all and he
had a lovely cool drink of water.
And that's how the lion learnt something that we can all
learn: that you shouldn't be afraid of something which you
don't understand. You must find out what it is, you see.
[A crowd of commuters are coming toward the camera,
walking as if in a dream.]
SHAH NARRATING: There is an old saying: 'Man is
asleep. Must he die before he wakes up?' I want to show
you some examples of the things I feel keep us all
dreamwalking.
[Shah is behind a desk in a study. In front of him is a
typewriter]
SHAH: We all think of ourselves as logical people: people
who are capable of changing our minds, for instance, if we
get superior information, more information which tells us
that our former beliefs or prejudices were untrue.
Doctor Ward Edwards of the University of Michigan
Engineering Psychology Laboratory has disproved this in a
most alarming manner. He has shown that 1/3 of people are
not able to change their minds once they have made them
up on the basis of inaccurate information, even if accurate
information is subsequently given to them.
[SHAH is sitting interviewing a boy who's nearly five. He
shows the boy several objects and pictures and asks for
their names. When the boy comes to a picture of an
elephant, he calls it 'an ephelant'. Shah picks him up on the
mispronunciation and he attempts to correct his
mispronunciation. His expression suggests that he realizes
himself that the pronunciation is wrong.]
SHAH [narrating]: At the moment, this little boy still uses
wrongly-learnt names for one or two objects. He agrees
that they are wrong and that it is illogical to persist.
Eventually he will put it right. But adults lose the honesty
and vitality of children and often settle into lives full of
contradictions.
SHAH [behind desk]: I had an interesting example of this
not so long ago. I was listening to the Jimmy Saville Show
on radio. Jimmy Saville asked his audience whether there
was anybody who objected to the presence of immigrants
in this country, and if so, why? And a lady stood up and
said 'I do.' Jimmy Saville said 'Why?' and she said:
'Because they're going to crowd us out. There are going to
be more and more of them and there won't be any room for
all of us.' So Jimmy Saville said 'Does anybody have
anything to say to that?' and another man stood up and said
'I have the figures here: emigration from this country is
much greater than immigration. And we are likely to be
less people here rather than more.' So Jimmy Saville said to
the lady: 'What have you got to say to that?' And she said 'I
don't believe it'. . . .
NARRATION: Too often we are unaware of the way we
disregard inconvenient information. Too often are quite
unconscious of the true origins of our behaviour.
SHAH [standing beside a row of second-hand cars, wearing
a pair of shades]: Labels can very often be more effective
than reason. There's a story in this [news]paper about it.
People often make decisions, decisions which will cost
them money, on the basis of irrational evidence. The Ford
motor company carried out an experiment in which they
got a bunch of hard-bitten Ford Motor dealers and they
asked them to make an offer for a used car. The highest
offer they got was £150 [sterling]. Then the Ford people
put a couple of labels under the bonnet and they sprayed
the upholstery with the smell of fresh leather. And they
called the dealers in again. And this time the car was
snapped up for £230 [sterling]: £80 for the smell of leather
and a couple of labels of not very great value.
The moral is that many of our decisions are triggered off by
stimuli by things like labels. These stimuli make us do
things which we haven't thought out at all.
NARRATION: We are all conditioned and mostly we're
unaware of the way in which we've been trained to react.
[A small girl is seen running innocently through the
gardens at Langton Green with someone following her,
accompanied by uplifting, melodious music]
NARRATION: It looks like a game of Hide and Seek,
doesn't it? Now watch the same scene with different music.
[The clip is re-run with tense, sinister music and it looks
more like something out of a Hammer Horror movie].
NARRATION: Most of our assessments are made
unconsciously. Pat Williams, South African writer. . . .
PAT WILLIAMS [sitting on a swing in the garden, with a
cigarette in her hand]: It was a great shock to me to
discover that I could be, in fact, conditioned without
knowing that I could be. And to conditioned in such a way
that what my real feelings were were absolutely the
opposite to what I had thought they were, my opinion about
what I thought. I was brought up in South Africa where one
is conditioned from the cradle into having a certain attitude
toward black people. One sees them round one as inferior
people, one is told that they are and the whole organisation
of the society makes it quite clear that these people are
different and less than white people.
Now, it seemed to me very young that this was ridiculous
and I grew up to be somebody who thought they had no
colour prejudice at all. And in line with that thought I took
an awful lot of political and social risks. I know, for
example, that I had been noticed quite often by the police
and had a file, which is a risk, though not a big one. I took
stances and said things and wrote things which were in line
with my not having any colour prejudice at all. And what's
more, I broke the law and had black friends. But it was all
in the framework of an idea that I thought this law was bad,
but I never examined myself to see if I really felt that way.
I kept it right out of awareness.
Then one day I left South Africa - and this is the interesting
bit - I went to a country where there was no colour
prejudice. There was no framework to hold me so that I
could have my opinion opposite. I went into a shoe shop to
buy a pair of shoes and a black man served me. Now this
was the first contact in my whole life - and by then I was
twenty four - which was a non-racial contact which had
nothing to do with me deciding this was going to happen.
And as that man came and fitted the shoe on my foot I felt
my whole body begin to shake because this was a free
contact. And I had to force myself to see what I had been
hiding from myself before, which was in fact that I was
conditioned not in a place that I could easily get at, which
was in my opinions in my head but in my very body. And
until I acknowledged that - and it was a painful
acknowledgement - I couldn't begin to try to exorcise it
from myself.
WILLIAM SERGEANT [speaking to Shah on settee]: The
people who can be got at are the normal people.
SHAH: Yes, yes.
SERGEANT: You are normal because you do accept an
awful lot of -???- of the people amongst which you live.
NARRATION: Doctor William Sergeant is Head of
Psychological Medicine at St Thomas' Hospital. He is well
known for his special study of conditioning and
unconscious brainwashing.
[SERGEANT]: I have no doubt at all that suppose Hitler
had conquered England and Hitler had then run all the
public schools and all the secondary education that perhaps
70% of the new generation in England could have been
brought up with Hitlerite viewpoints.
But although the normal people are get-at-able there are
always in the population a group of people who are either
mad, near-mad or what we call obsessive who can't be got
at by these techniques.
SHAH: So we have an interesting situation of paradox
really?
SERGEANT: Yes, but it is these people who are not going
to accept the group indoctrination who are going to make
the great advances. I mean Newton had to go on believing
for many years against all-comers that gravity was not God,
so to speak - although he was prepared to admit that gravity
might be God - but that gravity moved at g + 32. And he
said in this respect that he wished to point out that if God
was involved, God moved in g + 32.
But you see he was one of those extraordinary people who
really was a crackpot. His great interest was prophesies in
the Book of Daniel, the significance of the seven-headed
beast and that sort of thing and he would spend sixteen
hours a day in his rooms at Trinity going over and over this
Biblical prophecy. Now he looked on gravity as a mere sort
of sideline.
The point I want to make is that a person can have quite
mad ideas in one field and can make a big discovery in
another field. And this idea that you have to put all your
research money onto very sane, normal, balanced people. . .
You're going to get no results at all, because a sane, normal
and balanced person mostly believes what the group
already believes.
NARRATION: It's not that we'd all become Isaac Newtons
if we were less conformist, but we must surely come to
realize that our desire to co-operate and our fear of being
thought inadequate in trying circumstances very often
prevent us from seeing reality.
[Shah is sitting on a park bench interviewing a woman]:
SHAH [to woman]: We have two statements here: one was
made by a child of below average IQ, one by a child with
an above average IQ. And the first statement (below
average) is 'Children have a nice time because adults have
to deal with all the hard things, having to deal with naughty
children going to bed' and the above average IQ child says
'Maybe guinea-pigs play hide and seek but we don't know?'
SHAH: [seen asking his daughter Saira these questions
earlier]: Do they play? Do guinea-pigs play games?'
SAIRA: I don't know. Maybe guinea-pigs play hide and
seek but we don't know.
SHAH NARRATING: Now in fact both of these sets of
statements came from my daughter Saira. They's been
divided quite arbitrarily and the object of our experiment
was to see if anyone would say that there was insufficient
evidence to go on, or even to admit that they weren't
personally qualified to judge IQ differences.
SHAH [to Saira earlier]: And why do people have
mummies and daddies?
SAIRA: Well. . . people wouldn't be there if they didn't
have mummies and daddies.
SHAH [to woman on park bench]: 'People wouldn't be
there if they didn't have mummies and daddies'; 'People get
bored if they don't play games.' Now, what do you think
about those two statements? Can you see the difference in
their intelligence from their statements? And why do you
think there is a difference?
WOMAN: Well, 'Children wouldn't be there if they didn't
have mummies and daddies' is something rather brilliant,
because the child is probably is thinking of being looked
after by parents.
SHAH: That's the above average?
WOMAN: That's the above average, yes. Well, I suppose a
child gets bored with all work, school work, and they like
their games and feel better for them. A below average
child. . . Well, I should think they're rather naughty and
don't think about things a great deal. They just think what a
fine time they're giving their parents.
SHAH: I see. And can you see that in the two?
WOMAN: Yes, yes, yes.
SHAH: It's quite clear?
WOMAN: Yes.
MAN [presented with the same statements]: Well, the first
child, of course, is obviously a bit mixed up and thinks
grown ups have a nice time and then thirty seconds later
talks of 'naughty children going to bed.' And the second
child obviously understand the importance of mothers and
fathers and not being bored and maybe has got a guinea-
pig, I don't know.
SHAH: And attitudes. That's the understanding. How about
the attitudes towards things of the children with the two
different IQs?
MAN: Well, I suppose this first child associates things with
grown-ups always having a good time and naughty children
seems an unhappy sort of situation.
SHAH: So you're saying this child is less happy than the
other?
MAN: I would have thought so, just reading that, yes. And
obviously the second child immediately associates his own
being here with having a mother and father, and being kept
happy, not bored, playing games.
SECOND MAN [presented with the children's statements]:
Well, it seems to me it's too sophisticated.
SHAH: I see. Well, perhaps the test showed a difference
between the two?
SECOND MAN: It does: a marked difference. But, who
made the test? And how?
SHAH: I see. So there is undoubtedly a difference, but the
basis might be wrong?
SECOND MAN: Yes, unless you know who was making
the test. . . .
NARRATION: If we are awake to the reality of
conditioning, we need not be disadvantaged by it.
[Shah is walking from his home down the street. He meets
an acquaintance and passes the time of day]
SHAH: Hello, how are you?
ACQUAINTANCE: How are you?
SHAH: Well, not too good, you know. Well, I've had
bronchitis. . . .
SHAH [back behind desk]: Rituals. Most people think of
rituals as something connected with religion or something
bad. They use the terms ritual and ritualistic to mean
something, as we say, pejorative - something that they don't
like very much. But ritual is increasingly coming to be
understood as something which we all need in our life. In
fact we all practise ritual almost all the time: rituals of
greeting; rituals of buying and selling.
[Shah goes to the post office and passes the time of day
with the postmistress].
POSTMISTRESS: Good afternoon, Mr Shah. How are
you?
SHAH: Good afternoon. How are you?
POSTMISTRESS: Very well, thank you. And how are
you?
SHAH [narrating] The form of words which we use when
we meet people or when we say goodbye, even the meals
we have together - the whole family once a week or
something like that - these have a ritualistic quality. Ritual
is something which helps us to structure our lives.
SHAH [to post mistress]: I've had a bit of bronchitis, you
know, the last couple of weeks.
POSTMISTRESS: Have you? I'm sorry to hear that. I didn't
know.
SHAH: Pretty awful.
POSTMISTRESS: Yes. A miserable thing to have,
especially with the nice weather.
SHAH: Leaves you so weak, you know.
POSTMISTRESS: Yes.
SHAH: How are you getting on with the new dining thing?
POSTMISTRESS: Oh, very well.
SHAH: Are people learning to use the . . .
POSTMISTRESS: One or two of the old age pensioners are
finding it difficult to master, but it's very much nicer, I
think.
SHAH: Oh, yes. I think it's easier.
POSTMISTRESS: And much quicker.
SHAH: Saves time, yes. Um.
SHAH: Can you tell me the air mail - that's really why I
came in - the air mail to America. Have they changed
lately?
POSTMISTRESS: No, they're still the same.
---o---
SHAH [talking to comedy sketch artist Marty Feldman.
Both have cigarettes in their hand]: We've been talking
about ritual. I'm sure people are going to gain the
impression one is against ritual and it's got to be got rid of.
FELDMAN: I don't think it's got to be got rid of. My father
was an orthodox Jew. He used to love watching ceremonies
in Westminster Abbey and things like that on television
which have a kind of aesthetic value; it has a kind of
intrinsic beauty like opera has, but nobody believes that
opera is really what life is about, you know. It also provides
a kind of common ground. But we mustn't be used by ritual
we must understand what it is. . .
SHAH: . . . And take just as much as we need and no more.
Take it or leave it.
FELDMAN: That's right.
[Shots of horse guards parade and wedding ritual;
chancellor holding up his red briefcase in Downing Street;
funeral procession; Christening; striking a bottle of
champagne against the side of a ship being launched].
FELDMAN: There's very evident ritual in let's say the
comic form. You know, [Charlie] Chaplin- the small man -
defying authority. It's a ritual viewers want to observe.
Chaplin goes through it for them. [Buster] Keeton went
through it for them. They observe it vicariously.
[Comedy sketch with vicar sitting at a desk, hands pointed
in prayer, smiling benignly. He brings out a bottle of
whiskey and a soft-porn magazine and thumbs his nose at
authority.]
FELDMAN: A lot of comedy I do is kind of like anarchy
by proxy. You know, if I kick a policeman up the arse in a
sketch, I'm doing it on behalf of a lot of people who'd like
to kick a policeman up the arse.
SHAH: So, in a sense, they've had that experience, by
identifying with it, and they know what it's like?
FELDMAN: Yes. I think it's true of a lot of comedy, that
almost inevitably various comics work against authority
figures; violently against authority figures. They're doing
this really on behalf of the audience. Whether they're doing
this subconsciously or consciously is irrelevant. The
audience wants to do those things. They want to throw
bricks through windows, it wants to shout and scream and
tear its clothes of, and you're doing it for them.
[In the comedy sketch, the drunken priest is set on by his
peers].
SHAH: Does the audience want to do that to release
emotion, because the forms of release of emotion are not
available?
FELDMAN: Yes, yes. I think this is really true. I think the
current skinhead [gang] phenomena is because people have
no other forms of release for these kind of pent-up feelings
of violence, you know. One doesn't approve it, but one
understands it.
[Scene from soccer match, heavy police presence, trouble
at match, skinhead on train singing rowdy songs, broken
windows on train].
NARRATION: If violence is the result of pent-up feelings,
then we have to learn to identify those feelings in ourselves
and in others before they reach flash-point. Above all, we
have to have to give one-another more attention.
[Man walking through park with head down waving stick,
people laid out in park, sleeping rough, other people,
women and children relaxing and sunbathing in park].
Attention, the need for it, the need to give it and receive it,
is a sort of nutrition. People crave attention, as we know.
We all know people who want attention desperately badly.
Children call out in the night for a glass of water when they
don't really want a glass of water, they very often want
attention, they want reassurance. But the basic thing is
attention.
SHAH [back at desk]: People may say, well animals attract
attention or avoid attention or give one-other attention. . .
[Scene of primate grooming its young].
SHAH: . . . as for instance you can see monkeys grooming
one-another - it's called grooming - and so they may say
well, after all, this attention is just a lower-level sort of
activity. Yes it is: a lower-level activity like your heart
beating - just a pump - but without it, you'd die.
An animal is at the mercy of what attention he can get and
what attention he can't get. We don't have to be. You can
make it a matter of your own experiment, your own
experience, that very often if you find a person who is very
excitable, who keeps on about something and you give him
or her a lot of attention, you'll find that his views will
become a lot less pronounced. He may become much
calmer, a more interesting person. He may learn to give
you attention, too. And this is the basis of civilization. Not
just culture, not cultivated behaviour, but civilisation. It's
that important.
---o---
[More people walking through the city as if in a dream].
[Shots of news and weather reports on TV screens and
various radios at home, and of car radios and newspaper
stands in town, people buying and reading newspapers. The
scenes depict the plethora of information with which we are
daily bombarded, which suffuses our society].
NARRATION: Information which actually tells us striking
facts about our own behaviour pours out from everywhere.
But how much of a newspaper, for example, do we retain?
[Shah interviews various people who can remember little
more than the headlines of what they've heard on the news
or read in their daily newspaper, despite the fact there were
major stories breaking that day].
MAN IN STREET: …It's all lies, though, isn't it….
NARRATION: We remember what touches us, what we
recognise as interesting.
[Picture of a head containing a box full of simple shapes
such as a square block, a triangle, a circle, a crescent, a star.
When an external symbol matches one of the pre-arranged
shapes, there is recognition. When a shape or new snake-
like 'waveform' is not recognised, it does not register: it
slips through the 'net' of pre-arranged, known shapes].
NARRATION: We are looking for the familiar. We are
poorly equipped even to recognise the new, let alone to use
it. By and large, the new information passes straight
through us to end up perhaps like this:
[Scene of vast quantities of pulped paper and bales of waste
paper at a mill].
NARRATION: Will our society go down in history as one
that wasted all its knowledge?
Now let's talk about learning.
[Shah picks up one of his cats and walks through the
garden with it in his arms].
SHAH: Now, some very interesting research has been done
on cats. You know how difficult cats are to teach and to
train anything? Well, it's been discovered that if you get
some cats and train them how do something, and then you
get some other cats, and have these second lot of cats watch
the first lot performing their tricks, or whatever they are,
the second lot of cats will learn simply by watching.
Now this has such far-reaching consequences that all the
commonly-accepted theories of learning and how the brain
works in collecting information may have to be revised. It
is quite possible that we may discover that by simply
watching people do things we can learn.
NARRATION: Which casts doubt on a widespread belief
that you can only learn from personal experience. This
experiment verifies something about human education
which has been known and applied in the East for
thousands of years and was applied in the West during the
Middle Ages: the master has his apprentices; they learn
from watching him and from being in his presence.
[Picture of the front cover of a book on Mulla Nasrudin.
The book is opened to reveal Nasrudin sitting on his
donkey, facing the wrong way].
NARRATION: Another traditional means of passing on the
fruit of experience is a highly advanced form of story with
many levels of understanding. Hundreds of them are about
Mulla Nasrudin, a sort of Oriental Everyman. A[n
animated] film of him is in the making by Richard
Williams. Here, Nasrudin is hauled before the king,
accused of heresy:
Courtier: He has admitted going around saying 'Such wise
men as these are ignorant, irresolute and confused.'
King: Nasrudin, you may speak first.
Nasrudin: May I ask the learned ones a question?
King: Proceed.
Nasrudin: Oh wise men, what is bread?
Wise man: Bread? Stupid question.
King: Go on.
Wise men, in succession (1): Bread is a substance which is
for the purpose of nourishing people. It is in fact a food.
(2): Bread is a compound of flour and water mixed at a
certain ratio and subjected to a certain heat.
(3): It is a blessing which descends as manna from the
heavens. It is a gift from God, notwithstanding man's
iniquity and undeserving state.
(4): Bread is a substance from which man draws nutriment.
(5): Throughout the ages, servants and sages have sought
the answer to this question. But still, it has to be admitted
that nobody really knows.
Nasrudin: Your Majesty: how can you trust these men. Is it
not strange that they cannot agree on the nature of
something they eat every day, yet are unanimous that I am
a heretic?
NARRATION: Richard Williams has been living with
Nasrudin for five years.
WILLIAMS: With me, I just found them brain breakers. I
was going around heavily about it, then I kind of just
started to like them. I found that they'd pop up like people
here and you'd say 'That's like….' 'Oh, good heavens….'
And you'd quote the punch-line which relates to a situation
[in your own life] and gradually you'd like it more and
more. Whereas at first you'd say 'Mulla Nasrudin?
Whatever's that?' And then [later] you don't get rid of it -
you don't wear it out.
SHAH: That's the extraordinary thing about it [Nasrudin
stories] it has durability. It doesn't wear out. Why not?
Normally people get fed up with jokes and wisecracks.
WILLIAMS: And everybody says, you know, five years
you've been working on this thing. Surely, surely you can't
stand it: the same thing every day. I say 'Never!' I get worn
out on a one month job - commercial job, or something -
but not on Nasrudin.
SHAH: It is very, very strange.
[Shot of cover of The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla
Nasrudin by Idries Shah].
SHAH [narrating]: The Nasrudin tales which I have
published have proved their worth in ways in which few
scientists would have imagined. Doctor John Ermisch
specialised in choosing certain types of inventive brain for
the American Rand Corporation. This is the original Think
Tank, pioneering new ways of thought to solve industrial,
commercial and social problems. He made a textbook out
of the Nasrudin stories.
ERMISCH: The one which pops most readily into mind is
the one I remember where Nasrudin is looking outside his
house for something. Someone asks what he's looking for
and he says his key. They ask if he lost it there and he says
no, he lost it inside the house, but there's more light
outside, so it's better to look there.
That's one I tend to feel has a fair amount of significance,
since there are many people: some are professional
researchers, some just laymen, who tend to seek instantly
for the solution to a problem in the area which they're most
familiar with. I think this story points out the error of such
ways.
[Shots of a room with a line drawn diagonally across the
floor. A subject must reach a key on the floor in the centre
of the room without stepping over the line in the corner of
the room.].
SHAH: You're trapped in this room. There's a locked door
behind you. You're not allowed to go beyond this line. The
key to this door is there [in the centre of the room] and you
have these two short sticks. How are you going to get that
key without touching the floor, to get yourself out?
[The subject, a woman, makes a valiant effort, but finds
that the sticks are too short to quite reach the key].
SHAH [narrating]: In time she may realize that she can tie
the two sticks together with her clothing or with the string
supporting the picture on the wall, a picture she hasn't
noticed. But in a real life situation, is she going to notice
her own interests in time?
ERMISCH: During the years which I spent at the Rand
Corporation, I always that the most valid thing that its
people had contributed to the field of research was the so-
called inter-disciplinary approach. That is: don't rule
anything out when you're trying to solve a problem,
because you never know in which discipline, in which area,
the solution may lie.
[Back in the garden, Shah sets a test. On a table is a large
round bowl and three short sticks. The problem is how to
balance a glass of water over the bowl. The test subject
fails and so Shah shows him how it's done: by having the
three sticks pointing toward the centre of the bowl and
interwoven so that they support each other where they
meet. It's also interesting that yet again, the subject is
smoking, quite unconscious of the cigarette in his mouth].
SHAH: It's simple when you know how.
SHAH [sitting cross-legged on the lawn with a pile of
seventeen beans before him]: Confined thinking can even
be dangerous. Dangerous because even though it may be
logical, it may prevent you from knowing what a problem
is, and it may also prevent you from knowing how to solve
a problem once presented to you.
I'll tell you a story: once upon a time there was an old man
who didn't want his children, his three sons, to fall
permanent victims to confined thinking, so when he drew
up his will, he deliberately left a herd of seventeen camels
to these three boys with the instructions that the first son
should have one half of all these seventeen camels, the
second son should have one third of the total of seventeen
camels, and the third son should have one ninth.
Now, of course, when he died and these seventeen camels
were paraded in front of these young men, they discovered
that they couldn't that they couldn't do a thing about it,
because two doesn't go into seventeen, three doesn't go into
seventeen and nine doesn't go into seventeen.
So they wondered whether they could sell the camels, but
that would have infringed the terms of the will. They
thought if they cut the camels up, that would not only
violate their father's intentions, but it wouldn't be nice for
the camels either. And thus they had only one thing to do
and that was to find a wise man who could advise them.
After a lot of difficulty, they finally located a wise man and
he looked at the problem and instead of trying to divide
anything at all, he said 'I shall add one camel of my own to
this herd. . .'
[Shah adds one bean to the seventeen already there].
SHAH: 'Now we may proceed to discharge the terms of
your father's will.'
I have here beans to illustrate the herd of camels. The wise
man said one half of all the camels go to the first son. . .
[Shah sets 18/2 = 9 camels aside].
One third of the herd goes to the second son. . .
[Shah sets 18/3 = 6 camels aside].
And the third son was entitled to one ninth. . .
[Shah sets 18/9 = 2 camels aside].
Making a total of seventeen and leaving one camel, which
happened to be the wise man's camel. So he took it back
and returned it to his flock, having satisfied the terms of the
old man's will and having taught his sons something which
the father had intended from the beginning.
[Shots of dreamwalking people].
NARRATION: At times in our lives we've all felt that life
is rich in possibilities. But in our everyday life we make
elaborate preparations for misfortune.
A MAN IN THE STREET: I consider basically as far as
I'm concerned I'm a pessimist. And anything that which
goes on from there is obviously better.
INTERVIEWER: Is that your philosophy of life?
MAN IN STREET: Well yes, if one is an optimist and one
continually gets banged down, keeps getting banged on the
nose, if you like, so if one accepts the worst, anything on
top of that is pure bonus.
MAN IN STREET #2: I'm always an optimist about
everything, even when everything is going wrong, I tend to
be forcibly cheerful, I suppose, because even if things are
going wrong for a while, they're always going to improve
in the end.
WOMAN IN STREET: I tend to fear the worst, you know,
and hope for the best.
INTERVIEWER: To fear the worst: is this some kind of
insurance against the worst happening?
WOMAN IN STREET: Yes, it is slightly. I don't like to
hope for the best, because I feel I'll be so disappointed if it
doesn't come. You know what I mean?
INTERVIEWER: Does it work, or do you feel it works?
WOMAN IN STREET: Yes. I think I feel it works, yes.
[More dreamwalkers in the street; breaking the four minute
mile]
NARRATION: Man can further his own evolution by
breaking psychological limitations. For years and years and
years and years, the four minute mile could not be achieved
in running. Then somebody ran it in four minutes. How
many people have run it since?
SHAH [sitting in window]: Lots and lots of people. Did
those people not exist? Was there no such physiology? Was
their nutrition faulty? Or - have they transcended their
limitations because they know it can be done, or because
they think it might be done? What fascinates me about the
Western world is that notionally and theoretically,
limitations are there to be broken but in fact we get this
constant accretion of pessimism which effectively prevents
evolution in this form going ahead.
[More dreamwalkers]
NARRATION: Man is asleep. Must he die before he wakes
up?
---o---
Photography: Ian Hilton
Sound: Bob Roberts, David Brumber
Film Editor: David Martin
Producer: David Wheeler
Directed by: Michael Rabiger.
Transcript of One Pair of Eyes: Dreamwalkers
Idries Shah
A transcript of the documentary 'One Pair of Eyes:
Dreamwalkers' presented by Idries Shah, 19th Dec 1970,
on UK BBC Television.
First edition: 8 April, 2007
Dedicated to the Sufi Idries Shah and to the wonderful
friends I've met at the yahoo! groups caravansarai and
friends of fidelity, and through the web site
sarmouni.dyndns.org.
Thank you for being here.
[Shah is sitting in a circle of children at kindergarten. His
daughter Saira is by his side. The children are discussing
toy animals they've made, including an elephant, a flesh-
eating dinosaur and a leaf-eating dinosaur.]
SHAH: Shall I tell you a story about animals? Well now,
listen very carefully.
NARRATION: This isn't just a children's story. There's
much more to it than that. The story originates in the 13th
century and is really what this programme is all about.
SHAH: Once upon a time there was a lion who lived in a
forest, And he got very thirsty, so he thought he'd have a
drink of water. So he went through the forest and he found
a pool of water and he looked in it and in it he saw, as he
thought, another lion looking back out of the water. Why
was that?
SAIRA: Because it was him.
SHAH: Yes, but he didn't know, because he was rather a
silly lion. So he said 'Arrrr' which means 'get out of the
water because I want a drink.' He said that to the other lion.
But it wasn't another lion at all, so it couldn't get out.
SAIRA: Did the other lion say 'Arrrr'?
SHAH: The other lion didn't say anything.
SAIRA: It was a flection.
SHAH: Yes, it was a reflection. So all the other animals in
the forest gathered round and they started to laugh at the
lion because they could all see what it was. And the giraffe
laughed and the elephant laughed and even the butterfly
laughed.
SAIRA: 'Eh he-heh he-heh-heh'.
SHAH: A little laugh like that. Suddenly the lion got so
thirsty he said to himself 'I don't care who's in that water:
I'm going to have a drink.' So he put his head down into it
and he found there wasn't another lion there at all and he
had a lovely cool drink of water.
And that's how the lion learnt something that we can all
learn: that you shouldn't be afraid of something which you
don't understand. You must find out what it is, you see.
[A crowd of commuters are coming toward the camera,
walking as if in a dream.]
SHAH NARRATING: There is an old saying: 'Man is
asleep. Must he die before he wakes up?' I want to show
you some examples of the things I feel keep us all
dreamwalking.
[Shah is behind a desk in a study. In front of him is a
typewriter]
SHAH: We all think of ourselves as logical people: people
who are capable of changing our minds, for instance, if we
get superior information, more information which tells us
that our former beliefs or prejudices were untrue.
Doctor Ward Edwards of the University of Michigan
Engineering Psychology Laboratory has disproved this in a
most alarming manner. He has shown that 1/3 of people are
not able to change their minds once they have made them
up on the basis of inaccurate information, even if accurate
information is subsequently given to them.
[SHAH is sitting interviewing a boy who's nearly five. He
shows the boy several objects and pictures and asks for
their names. When the boy comes to a picture of an
elephant, he calls it 'an ephelant'. Shah picks him up on the
mispronunciation and he attempts to correct his
mispronunciation. His expression suggests that he realizes
himself that the pronunciation is wrong.]
SHAH [narrating]: At the moment, this little boy still uses
wrongly-learnt names for one or two objects. He agrees
that they are wrong and that it is illogical to persist.
Eventually he will put it right. But adults lose the honesty
and vitality of children and often settle into lives full of
contradictions.
SHAH [behind desk]: I had an interesting example of this
not so long ago. I was listening to the Jimmy Saville Show
on radio. Jimmy Saville asked his audience whether there
was anybody who objected to the presence of immigrants
in this country, and if so, why? And a lady stood up and
said 'I do.' Jimmy Saville said 'Why?' and she said:
'Because they're going to crowd us out. There are going to
be more and more of them and there won't be any room for
all of us.' So Jimmy Saville said 'Does anybody have
anything to say to that?' and another man stood up and said
'I have the figures here: emigration from this country is
much greater than immigration. And we are likely to be
less people here rather than more.' So Jimmy Saville said to
the lady: 'What have you got to say to that?' And she said 'I
don't believe it'. . . .
NARRATION: Too often we are unaware of the way we
disregard inconvenient information. Too often are quite
unconscious of the true origins of our behaviour.
SHAH [standing beside a row of second-hand cars, wearing
a pair of shades]: Labels can very often be more effective
than reason. There's a story in this [news]paper about it.
People often make decisions, decisions which will cost
them money, on the basis of irrational evidence. The Ford
motor company carried out an experiment in which they
got a bunch of hard-bitten Ford Motor dealers and they
asked them to make an offer for a used car. The highest
offer they got was £150 [sterling]. Then the Ford people
put a couple of labels under the bonnet and they sprayed
the upholstery with the smell of fresh leather. And they
called the dealers in again. And this time the car was
snapped up for £230 [sterling]: £80 for the smell of leather
and a couple of labels of not very great value.
The moral is that many of our decisions are triggered off by
stimuli by things like labels. These stimuli make us do
things which we haven't thought out at all.
NARRATION: We are all conditioned and mostly we're
unaware of the way in which we've been trained to react.
[A small girl is seen running innocently through the
gardens at Langton Green with someone following her,
accompanied by uplifting, melodious music]
NARRATION: It looks like a game of Hide and Seek,
doesn't it? Now watch the same scene with different music.
[The clip is re-run with tense, sinister music and it looks
more like something out of a Hammer Horror movie].
NARRATION: Most of our assessments are made
unconsciously. Pat Williams, South African writer. . . .
PAT WILLIAMS [sitting on a swing in the garden, with a
cigarette in her hand]: It was a great shock to me to
discover that I could be, in fact, conditioned without
knowing that I could be. And to conditioned in such a way
that what my real feelings were were absolutely the
opposite to what I had thought they were, my opinion about
what I thought. I was brought up in South Africa where one
is conditioned from the cradle into having a certain attitude
toward black people. One sees them round one as inferior
people, one is told that they are and the whole organisation
of the society makes it quite clear that these people are
different and less than white people.
Now, it seemed to me very young that this was ridiculous
and I grew up to be somebody who thought they had no
colour prejudice at all. And in line with that thought I took
an awful lot of political and social risks. I know, for
example, that I had been noticed quite often by the police
and had a file, which is a risk, though not a big one. I took
stances and said things and wrote things which were in line
with my not having any colour prejudice at all. And what's
more, I broke the law and had black friends. But it was all
in the framework of an idea that I thought this law was bad,
but I never examined myself to see if I really felt that way.
I kept it right out of awareness.
Then one day I left South Africa - and this is the interesting
bit - I went to a country where there was no colour
prejudice. There was no framework to hold me so that I
could have my opinion opposite. I went into a shoe shop to
buy a pair of shoes and a black man served me. Now this
was the first contact in my whole life - and by then I was
twenty four - which was a non-racial contact which had
nothing to do with me deciding this was going to happen.
And as that man came and fitted the shoe on my foot I felt
my whole body begin to shake because this was a free
contact. And I had to force myself to see what I had been
hiding from myself before, which was in fact that I was
conditioned not in a place that I could easily get at, which
was in my opinions in my head but in my very body. And
until I acknowledged that - and it was a painful
acknowledgement - I couldn't begin to try to exorcise it
from myself.
WILLIAM SERGEANT [speaking to Shah on settee]: The
people who can be got at are the normal people.
SHAH: Yes, yes.
SERGEANT: You are normal because you do accept an
awful lot of -???- of the people amongst which you live.
NARRATION: Doctor William Sergeant is Head of
Psychological Medicine at St Thomas' Hospital. He is well
known for his special study of conditioning and
unconscious brainwashing.
[SERGEANT]: I have no doubt at all that suppose Hitler
had conquered England and Hitler had then run all the
public schools and all the secondary education that perhaps
70% of the new generation in England could have been
brought up with Hitlerite viewpoints.
But although the normal people are get-at-able there are
always in the population a group of people who are either
mad, near-mad or what we call obsessive who can't be got
at by these techniques.
SHAH: So we have an interesting situation of paradox
really?
SERGEANT: Yes, but it is these people who are not going
to accept the group indoctrination who are going to make
the great advances. I mean Newton had to go on believing
for many years against all-comers that gravity was not God,
so to speak - although he was prepared to admit that gravity
might be God - but that gravity moved at g + 32. And he
said in this respect that he wished to point out that if God
was involved, God moved in g + 32.
But you see he was one of those extraordinary people who
really was a crackpot. His great interest was prophesies in
the Book of Daniel, the significance of the seven-headed
beast and that sort of thing and he would spend sixteen
hours a day in his rooms at Trinity going over and over this
Biblical prophecy. Now he looked on gravity as a mere sort
of sideline.
The point I want to make is that a person can have quite
mad ideas in one field and can make a big discovery in
another field. And this idea that you have to put all your
research money onto very sane, normal, balanced people. . .
You're going to get no results at all, because a sane, normal
and balanced person mostly believes what the group
already believes.
NARRATION: It's not that we'd all become Isaac Newtons
if we were less conformist, but we must surely come to
realize that our desire to co-operate and our fear of being
thought inadequate in trying circumstances very often
prevent us from seeing reality.
[Shah is sitting on a park bench interviewing a woman]:
SHAH [to woman]: We have two statements here: one was
made by a child of below average IQ, one by a child with
an above average IQ. And the first statement (below
average) is 'Children have a nice time because adults have
to deal with all the hard things, having to deal with naughty
children going to bed' and the above average IQ child says
'Maybe guinea-pigs play hide and seek but we don't know?'
SHAH: [seen asking his daughter Saira these questions
earlier]: Do they play? Do guinea-pigs play games?'
SAIRA: I don't know. Maybe guinea-pigs play hide and
seek but we don't know.
SHAH NARRATING: Now in fact both of these sets of
statements came from my daughter Saira. They's been
divided quite arbitrarily and the object of our experiment
was to see if anyone would say that there was insufficient
evidence to go on, or even to admit that they weren't
personally qualified to judge IQ differences.
SHAH [to Saira earlier]: And why do people have
mummies and daddies?
SAIRA: Well. . . people wouldn't be there if they didn't
have mummies and daddies.
SHAH [to woman on park bench]: 'People wouldn't be
there if they didn't have mummies and daddies'; 'People get
bored if they don't play games.' Now, what do you think
about those two statements? Can you see the difference in
their intelligence from their statements? And why do you
think there is a difference?
WOMAN: Well, 'Children wouldn't be there if they didn't
have mummies and daddies' is something rather brilliant,
because the child is probably is thinking of being looked
after by parents.
SHAH: That's the above average?
WOMAN: That's the above average, yes. Well, I suppose a
child gets bored with all work, school work, and they like
their games and feel better for them. A below average
child. . . Well, I should think they're rather naughty and
don't think about things a great deal. They just think what a
fine time they're giving their parents.
SHAH: I see. And can you see that in the two?
WOMAN: Yes, yes, yes.
SHAH: It's quite clear?
WOMAN: Yes.
MAN [presented with the same statements]: Well, the first
child, of course, is obviously a bit mixed up and thinks
grown ups have a nice time and then thirty seconds later
talks of 'naughty children going to bed.' And the second
child obviously understand the importance of mothers and
fathers and not being bored and maybe has got a guinea-
pig, I don't know.
SHAH: And attitudes. That's the understanding. How about
the attitudes towards things of the children with the two
different IQs?
MAN: Well, I suppose this first child associates things with
grown-ups always having a good time and naughty children
seems an unhappy sort of situation.
SHAH: So you're saying this child is less happy than the
other?
MAN: I would have thought so, just reading that, yes. And
obviously the second child immediately associates his own
being here with having a mother and father, and being kept
happy, not bored, playing games.
SECOND MAN [presented with the children's statements]:
Well, it seems to me it's too sophisticated.
SHAH: I see. Well, perhaps the test showed a difference
between the two?
SECOND MAN: It does: a marked difference. But, who
made the test? And how?
SHAH: I see. So there is undoubtedly a difference, but the
basis might be wrong?
SECOND MAN: Yes, unless you know who was making
the test. . . .
NARRATION: If we are awake to the reality of
conditioning, we need not be disadvantaged by it.
[Shah is walking from his home down the street. He meets
an acquaintance and passes the time of day]
SHAH: Hello, how are you?
ACQUAINTANCE: How are you?
SHAH: Well, not too good, you know. Well, I've had
bronchitis. . . .
SHAH [back behind desk]: Rituals. Most people think of
rituals as something connected with religion or something
bad. They use the terms ritual and ritualistic to mean
something, as we say, pejorative - something that they don't
like very much. But ritual is increasingly coming to be
understood as something which we all need in our life. In
fact we all practise ritual almost all the time: rituals of
greeting; rituals of buying and selling.
[Shah goes to the post office and passes the time of day
with the postmistress].
POSTMISTRESS: Good afternoon, Mr Shah. How are
you?
SHAH: Good afternoon. How are you?
POSTMISTRESS: Very well, thank you. And how are
you?
SHAH [narrating] The form of words which we use when
we meet people or when we say goodbye, even the meals
we have together - the whole family once a week or
something like that - these have a ritualistic quality. Ritual
is something which helps us to structure our lives.
SHAH [to post mistress]: I've had a bit of bronchitis, you
know, the last couple of weeks.
POSTMISTRESS: Have you? I'm sorry to hear that. I didn't
know.
SHAH: Pretty awful.
POSTMISTRESS: Yes. A miserable thing to have,
especially with the nice weather.
SHAH: Leaves you so weak, you know.
POSTMISTRESS: Yes.
SHAH: How are you getting on with the new dining thing?
POSTMISTRESS: Oh, very well.
SHAH: Are people learning to use the . . .
POSTMISTRESS: One or two of the old age pensioners are
finding it difficult to master, but it's very much nicer, I
think.
SHAH: Oh, yes. I think it's easier.
POSTMISTRESS: And much quicker.
SHAH: Saves time, yes. Um.
SHAH: Can you tell me the air mail - that's really why I
came in - the air mail to America. Have they changed
lately?
POSTMISTRESS: No, they're still the same.
---o---
SHAH [talking to comedy sketch artist Marty Feldman.
Both have cigarettes in their hand]: We've been talking
about ritual. I'm sure people are going to gain the
impression one is against ritual and it's got to be got rid of.
FELDMAN: I don't think it's got to be got rid of. My father
was an orthodox Jew. He used to love watching ceremonies
in Westminster Abbey and things like that on television
which have a kind of aesthetic value; it has a kind of
intrinsic beauty like opera has, but nobody believes that
opera is really what life is about, you know. It also provides
a kind of common ground. But we mustn't be used by ritual
we must understand what it is. . .
SHAH: . . . And take just as much as we need and no more.
Take it or leave it.
FELDMAN: That's right.
[Shots of horse guards parade and wedding ritual;
chancellor holding up his red briefcase in Downing Street;
funeral procession; Christening; striking a bottle of
champagne against the side of a ship being launched].
FELDMAN: There's very evident ritual in let's say the
comic form. You know, [Charlie] Chaplin- the small man -
defying authority. It's a ritual viewers want to observe.
Chaplin goes through it for them. [Buster] Keeton went
through it for them. They observe it vicariously.
[Comedy sketch with vicar sitting at a desk, hands pointed
in prayer, smiling benignly. He brings out a bottle of
whiskey and a soft-porn magazine and thumbs his nose at
authority.]
FELDMAN: A lot of comedy I do is kind of like anarchy
by proxy. You know, if I kick a policeman up the arse in a
sketch, I'm doing it on behalf of a lot of people who'd like
to kick a policeman up the arse.
SHAH: So, in a sense, they've had that experience, by
identifying with it, and they know what it's like?
FELDMAN: Yes. I think it's true of a lot of comedy, that
almost inevitably various comics work against authority
figures; violently against authority figures. They're doing
this really on behalf of the audience. Whether they're doing
this subconsciously or consciously is irrelevant. The
audience wants to do those things. They want to throw
bricks through windows, it wants to shout and scream and
tear its clothes of, and you're doing it for them.
[In the comedy sketch, the drunken priest is set on by his
peers].
SHAH: Does the audience want to do that to release
emotion, because the forms of release of emotion are not
available?
FELDMAN: Yes, yes. I think this is really true. I think the
current skinhead [gang] phenomena is because people have
no other forms of release for these kind of pent-up feelings
of violence, you know. One doesn't approve it, but one
understands it.
[Scene from soccer match, heavy police presence, trouble
at match, skinhead on train singing rowdy songs, broken
windows on train].
NARRATION: If violence is the result of pent-up feelings,
then we have to learn to identify those feelings in ourselves
and in others before they reach flash-point. Above all, we
have to have to give one-another more attention.
[Man walking through park with head down waving stick,
people laid out in park, sleeping rough, other people,
women and children relaxing and sunbathing in park].
Attention, the need for it, the need to give it and receive it,
is a sort of nutrition. People crave attention, as we know.
We all know people who want attention desperately badly.
Children call out in the night for a glass of water when they
don't really want a glass of water, they very often want
attention, they want reassurance. But the basic thing is
attention.
SHAH [back at desk]: People may say, well animals attract
attention or avoid attention or give one-other attention. . .
[Scene of primate grooming its young].
SHAH: . . . as for instance you can see monkeys grooming
one-another - it's called grooming - and so they may say
well, after all, this attention is just a lower-level sort of
activity. Yes it is: a lower-level activity like your heart
beating - just a pump - but without it, you'd die.
An animal is at the mercy of what attention he can get and
what attention he can't get. We don't have to be. You can
make it a matter of your own experiment, your own
experience, that very often if you find a person who is very
excitable, who keeps on about something and you give him
or her a lot of attention, you'll find that his views will
become a lot less pronounced. He may become much
calmer, a more interesting person. He may learn to give
you attention, too. And this is the basis of civilization. Not
just culture, not cultivated behaviour, but civilisation. It's
that important.
---o---
[More people walking through the city as if in a dream].
[Shots of news and weather reports on TV screens and
various radios at home, and of car radios and newspaper
stands in town, people buying and reading newspapers. The
scenes depict the plethora of information with which we are
daily bombarded, which suffuses our society].
NARRATION: Information which actually tells us striking
facts about our own behaviour pours out from everywhere.
But how much of a newspaper, for example, do we retain?
[Shah interviews various people who can remember little
more than the headlines of what they've heard on the news
or read in their daily newspaper, despite the fact there were
major stories breaking that day].
MAN IN STREET: …It's all lies, though, isn't it….
NARRATION: We remember what touches us, what we
recognise as interesting.
[Picture of a head containing a box full of simple shapes
such as a square block, a triangle, a circle, a crescent, a star.
When an external symbol matches one of the pre-arranged
shapes, there is recognition. When a shape or new snake-
like 'waveform' is not recognised, it does not register: it
slips through the 'net' of pre-arranged, known shapes].
NARRATION: We are looking for the familiar. We are
poorly equipped even to recognise the new, let alone to use
it. By and large, the new information passes straight
through us to end up perhaps like this:
[Scene of vast quantities of pulped paper and bales of waste
paper at a mill].
NARRATION: Will our society go down in history as one
that wasted all its knowledge?
Now let's talk about learning.
[Shah picks up one of his cats and walks through the
garden with it in his arms].
SHAH: Now, some very interesting research has been done
on cats. You know how difficult cats are to teach and to
train anything? Well, it's been discovered that if you get
some cats and train them how do something, and then you
get some other cats, and have these second lot of cats watch
the first lot performing their tricks, or whatever they are,
the second lot of cats will learn simply by watching.
Now this has such far-reaching consequences that all the
commonly-accepted theories of learning and how the brain
works in collecting information may have to be revised. It
is quite possible that we may discover that by simply
watching people do things we can learn.
NARRATION: Which casts doubt on a widespread belief
that you can only learn from personal experience. This
experiment verifies something about human education
which has been known and applied in the East for
thousands of years and was applied in the West during the
Middle Ages: the master has his apprentices; they learn
from watching him and from being in his presence.
[Picture of the front cover of a book on Mulla Nasrudin.
The book is opened to reveal Nasrudin sitting on his
donkey, facing the wrong way].
NARRATION: Another traditional means of passing on the
fruit of experience is a highly advanced form of story with
many levels of understanding. Hundreds of them are about
Mulla Nasrudin, a sort of Oriental Everyman. A[n
animated] film of him is in the making by Richard
Williams. Here, Nasrudin is hauled before the king,
accused of heresy:
Courtier: He has admitted going around saying 'Such wise
men as these are ignorant, irresolute and confused.'
King: Nasrudin, you may speak first.
Nasrudin: May I ask the learned ones a question?
King: Proceed.
Nasrudin: Oh wise men, what is bread?
Wise man: Bread? Stupid question.
King: Go on.
Wise men, in succession (1): Bread is a substance which is
for the purpose of nourishing people. It is in fact a food.
(2): Bread is a compound of flour and water mixed at a
certain ratio and subjected to a certain heat.
(3): It is a blessing which descends as manna from the
heavens. It is a gift from God, notwithstanding man's
iniquity and undeserving state.
(4): Bread is a substance from which man draws nutriment.
(5): Throughout the ages, servants and sages have sought
the answer to this question. But still, it has to be admitted
that nobody really knows.
Nasrudin: Your Majesty: how can you trust these men. Is it
not strange that they cannot agree on the nature of
something they eat every day, yet are unanimous that I am
a heretic?
NARRATION: Richard Williams has been living with
Nasrudin for five years.
WILLIAMS: With me, I just found them brain breakers. I
was going around heavily about it, then I kind of just
started to like them. I found that they'd pop up like people
here and you'd say 'That's like….' 'Oh, good heavens….'
And you'd quote the punch-line which relates to a situation
[in your own life] and gradually you'd like it more and
more. Whereas at first you'd say 'Mulla Nasrudin?
Whatever's that?' And then [later] you don't get rid of it -
you don't wear it out.
SHAH: That's the extraordinary thing about it [Nasrudin
stories] it has durability. It doesn't wear out. Why not?
Normally people get fed up with jokes and wisecracks.
WILLIAMS: And everybody says, you know, five years
you've been working on this thing. Surely, surely you can't
stand it: the same thing every day. I say 'Never!' I get worn
out on a one month job - commercial job, or something -
but not on Nasrudin.
SHAH: It is very, very strange.
[Shot of cover of The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla
Nasrudin by Idries Shah].
SHAH [narrating]: The Nasrudin tales which I have
published have proved their worth in ways in which few
scientists would have imagined. Doctor John Ermisch
specialised in choosing certain types of inventive brain for
the American Rand Corporation. This is the original Think
Tank, pioneering new ways of thought to solve industrial,
commercial and social problems. He made a textbook out
of the Nasrudin stories.
ERMISCH: The one which pops most readily into mind is
the one I remember where Nasrudin is looking outside his
house for something. Someone asks what he's looking for
and he says his key. They ask if he lost it there and he says
no, he lost it inside the house, but there's more light
outside, so it's better to look there.
That's one I tend to feel has a fair amount of significance,
since there are many people: some are professional
researchers, some just laymen, who tend to seek instantly
for the solution to a problem in the area which they're most
familiar with. I think this story points out the error of such
ways.
[Shots of a room with a line drawn diagonally across the
floor. A subject must reach a key on the floor in the centre
of the room without stepping over the line in the corner of
the room.].
SHAH: You're trapped in this room. There's a locked door
behind you. You're not allowed to go beyond this line. The
key to this door is there [in the centre of the room] and you
have these two short sticks. How are you going to get that
key without touching the floor, to get yourself out?
[The subject, a woman, makes a valiant effort, but finds
that the sticks are too short to quite reach the key].
SHAH [narrating]: In time she may realize that she can tie
the two sticks together with her clothing or with the string
supporting the picture on the wall, a picture she hasn't
noticed. But in a real life situation, is she going to notice
her own interests in time?
ERMISCH: During the years which I spent at the Rand
Corporation, I always that the most valid thing that its
people had contributed to the field of research was the so-
called inter-disciplinary approach. That is: don't rule
anything out when you're trying to solve a problem,
because you never know in which discipline, in which area,
the solution may lie.
[Back in the garden, Shah sets a test. On a table is a large
round bowl and three short sticks. The problem is how to
balance a glass of water over the bowl. The test subject
fails and so Shah shows him how it's done: by having the
three sticks pointing toward the centre of the bowl and
interwoven so that they support each other where they
meet. It's also interesting that yet again, the subject is
smoking, quite unconscious of the cigarette in his mouth].
SHAH: It's simple when you know how.
SHAH [sitting cross-legged on the lawn with a pile of
seventeen beans before him]: Confined thinking can even
be dangerous. Dangerous because even though it may be
logical, it may prevent you from knowing what a problem
is, and it may also prevent you from knowing how to solve
a problem once presented to you.
I'll tell you a story: once upon a time there was an old man
who didn't want his children, his three sons, to fall
permanent victims to confined thinking, so when he drew
up his will, he deliberately left a herd of seventeen camels
to these three boys with the instructions that the first son
should have one half of all these seventeen camels, the
second son should have one third of the total of seventeen
camels, and the third son should have one ninth.
Now, of course, when he died and these seventeen camels
were paraded in front of these young men, they discovered
that they couldn't that they couldn't do a thing about it,
because two doesn't go into seventeen, three doesn't go into
seventeen and nine doesn't go into seventeen.
So they wondered whether they could sell the camels, but
that would have infringed the terms of the will. They
thought if they cut the camels up, that would not only
violate their father's intentions, but it wouldn't be nice for
the camels either. And thus they had only one thing to do
and that was to find a wise man who could advise them.
After a lot of difficulty, they finally located a wise man and
he looked at the problem and instead of trying to divide
anything at all, he said 'I shall add one camel of my own to
this herd. . .'
[Shah adds one bean to the seventeen already there].
SHAH: 'Now we may proceed to discharge the terms of
your father's will.'
I have here beans to illustrate the herd of camels. The wise
man said one half of all the camels go to the first son. . .
[Shah sets 18/2 = 9 camels aside].
One third of the herd goes to the second son. . .
[Shah sets 18/3 = 6 camels aside].
And the third son was entitled to one ninth. . .
[Shah sets 18/9 = 2 camels aside].
Making a total of seventeen and leaving one camel, which
happened to be the wise man's camel. So he took it back
and returned it to his flock, having satisfied the terms of the
old man's will and having taught his sons something which
the father had intended from the beginning.
[Shots of dreamwalking people].
NARRATION: At times in our lives we've all felt that life
is rich in possibilities. But in our everyday life we make
elaborate preparations for misfortune.
A MAN IN THE STREET: I consider basically as far as
I'm concerned I'm a pessimist. And anything that which
goes on from there is obviously better.
INTERVIEWER: Is that your philosophy of life?
MAN IN STREET: Well yes, if one is an optimist and one
continually gets banged down, keeps getting banged on the
nose, if you like, so if one accepts the worst, anything on
top of that is pure bonus.
MAN IN STREET #2: I'm always an optimist about
everything, even when everything is going wrong, I tend to
be forcibly cheerful, I suppose, because even if things are
going wrong for a while, they're always going to improve
in the end.
WOMAN IN STREET: I tend to fear the worst, you know,
and hope for the best.
INTERVIEWER: To fear the worst: is this some kind of
insurance against the worst happening?
WOMAN IN STREET: Yes, it is slightly. I don't like to
hope for the best, because I feel I'll be so disappointed if it
doesn't come. You know what I mean?
INTERVIEWER: Does it work, or do you feel it works?
WOMAN IN STREET: Yes. I think I feel it works, yes.
[More dreamwalkers in the street; breaking the four minute
mile]
NARRATION: Man can further his own evolution by
breaking psychological limitations. For years and years and
years and years, the four minute mile could not be achieved
in running. Then somebody ran it in four minutes. How
many people have run it since?
SHAH [sitting in window]: Lots and lots of people. Did
those people not exist? Was there no such physiology? Was
their nutrition faulty? Or - have they transcended their
limitations because they know it can be done, or because
they think it might be done? What fascinates me about the
Western world is that notionally and theoretically,
limitations are there to be broken but in fact we get this
constant accretion of pessimism which effectively prevents
evolution in this form going ahead.
[More dreamwalkers]
NARRATION: Man is asleep. Must he die before he wakes
up?
---o---
Photography: Ian Hilton
Sound: Bob Roberts, David Brumber
Film Editor: David Martin
Producer: David Wheeler
Directed by: Michael Rabiger.