Product Description

Described by the author as a key to the entire corpus of his work, The Commanding Self describes the mixture of primitive and conditioned responses, common to everyone, that inhibits and distorts human progress and understanding. This book is designed to offer a way to transcend the limits imposed by this "commanding self."

While complete in itself as an anthology of hitherto unpublished work, the book serves to illustrate and amplify Idries Shah's preceding books on the Sufi Way. Based on tales, lectures, letters, and interviews, it offers both an introduction to Sufi thought and further study for those already acquainted with Shah's writings.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #484890 in Books
• Published on: 1994-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 332 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780863040702
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From the Publisher
. . . a book unlike anything our own society has produced until recently, in its richness, its unexpectedness, its capacity to shock us into seeing ourselves as others see us.

From the Back Cover
THE COMMANDING SELF, in Sufic Terminology, is that mixture of primitive and conditioned responses, common to everyone, which inhibits and distorts human progress and understanding. This book, while complete in itself as an anthology of hitherto unpublished work, serves to illustrate and amplify Idries Shah's preceding twenty and more books on the Sufi Way.

About the Author
Idries Shah, the best known and most influential Afghan writer and thinker of modern times, author of more than 35 books, including 20 bestselling titles on Sufism (which have so far sold 15 million copies in 12 languages), Grand Sheikh of the Sufis, advisor to a number of monarchs and Heads of State, educator, scholar, world traveler and humanitarian, was born in Simla, India, on June 16, 1924, the eldest son of the writer and savant Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, the Nawab (the Mohammedan equivalent of Maharajah) of Sardana, near Delhi in India.
Shah's distinguished family has lived and reigned in Paghman in the Afghan highlands since 1221, has titles and prestige in India and Pakistan, and can trace its ancestry, through some of the most celebrated Sufi teachers in history, back to the Prophet Mohammed and the Sassanian Emperors of Persia, and. beyond that, to the year 122 B.C.--perhaps the oldest recorded lineage on earth.
Shah was educated in both the East and West, by private tutors and through wide-ranging travel and personal encounters--the series of journeys which in fact characterize Sufi education and development. He lived in London, in a large Regency house near Tunbridge Wells, was a member of the Atheneum and Garrick Clubs, and in speech and bearing seemed the epitome of an English gentleman. In keeping with Sufi tradition, his life was essentially one of service. His knowledge and interests appeared limitless, and his activities and accomplishments took place in many different countries and in numerous fields of endeavor.
Shah was Director of Studies of the Institute for Cultural Research, an educational organization established in 1965 to sponsor interdisciplinary and crosscultural studies of human thought. He was also the founder of Octagon Press, a publishing house; a founding member of the Club of Rome; and a Governor of the Royal Humane Society and the Royal Hospital and Home for Incurables.
Shah's landmark book, The Sufis, published in 1964, sightly ahead of the surge of interest in metaphysical ideas, pronounced that tradition alive and well, and more or less invited readers to approach its ideas and test them out. The evident sense, and common sense, most readers found made it clear that here was a sane, authoritative voice in the wilderness of the gobbledegookish mysticism of the sixties. The books that followed established a broad historical and cultural context for Sufi thought and action.
By 1974, university and college courses throughout the world were employing Shah's books, or works based on them, in a wide variety of disciplines including sociology, psychology and literature. In 1969, he was awarded the Dictionary of International Biography's Certificate of Merit for Distinguished Service to Human Thought. Other honors included a Two Thousand Men of Achievement award(1971), Six First Prizes awarded by the UNESCO International Book Year(1972), and the International Who's Who in Poetry's Gold Medal for Poetry (1975).
Idries Shah married the former Cynthia (Kashfi) Kabraji in 1958, and was the father of a son and two daughters. He died in London on November 23, 1996.
He was, it is said, the Sufi Teacher of the Age.

Customer Reviews

An Uncommon Approach to "Self Help"

Idries Shah's book, `The Commanding Self' stands out in sharp contrast to the "Me Generation" popular fads of the last two decades. It is written from a very different standpoint than that underlying the numerous books, seminars, videos, support groups, subliminal tapes and so forth that promise (though always at a price) an easy road to "self-help" and "self-development."

The message in "The Commanding Self' is not that we can develop and improve ourselves by these or any other similar means. It is not that we need to develop ourselves or create a more positive image of ourselves or learn to feel better about ourselves. It is not that we ought to learn better to express ourselves. It is not either that we ought to learn to love ourselves.

To the extent that `The Commanding Self' can appropriately be said to have a "message" at all, the message about the self is one that is quite shocking to our contemporary popular psychology. It is that what we take to be our individual self, far from being something to be developed, is more correctly understood as something to be overcome. It is that what one takes to be one's "self," one's apparent "personality," is in fact a relentless opponent, one's most severe obstacle to any real development.

From the perspective underlying `The Commanding Self," virtually all the Me Generation self-development schemes of the 1980s and 1990s amount to little more than fertilizer for the weeds that make up our false self, the false personality that chokes out our true possibilities for real growth. They flatter and encourage the very aspects of our false self, our commanding self, that most need to be seen for what they are: parasitical growths in the garden of the true self.

The form, however, of `The Commanding Self' will likely prove to be, to the reader who has not previously encountered Shah's writings, even more shocking than the content. In fact, just how shocking the content really is will very probably not be immediately apparent to a new reader of Shah's material. Rather, the content will initially remain concealed within the form. That form is one which many will find unsettling and unfamiliar on first encounter.

For Shah, like Rumi and others who have preceded him in the Sufi tradition, does not adhere to the simple, didactic, expository form to which we are already accustomed in ordinary books the way one is, as G. I. Gurdjieff once put it, "to one's own smell." You will find nothing in "The Commanding Self' along the lines of "Seven Simple Ways to Improve Your Life" or `Your Checklist to a Better You."

Instead, you will find what may at first seems to be a baffling mixture of brief expository sections, question and answer dialogs, stories and tales, poems, jokes and so forth. These are arranged in a sort of literary enneagon of nine sections, the plan and pattern of which is unlikely to be readily apparent to the casual reader. Only after considerable study of the material and a fair amount of "absorption time" is even a hint of the coherence of the whole likely to reveal itself.

In that sense, `The Commanding Self' provides both an introduction to and a summary of Idries Shah's more than 30 titles in print in English (with dozens of editions in other languages). Its publication comes virtually on the 30th anniversary of the publication of Shah's "The Sufis" which, in 1964, set in motion major reevaluations of assumptions in areas as disparate as psychology, theology, history and literature.
For one of the most fascinating incidental aspects of Idries Shah's work has been the way his books have been, for well over a quarter of a century, not only widely read but also hardly known. From the superficial perspective of mere literary phenomena, Shah is undoubtedly one of the most widely circulated, prolific and broadly appreciated but as yet "unknown" and "undiscovered" authors in the English language.

Despite that his books are assiduously read, appreciated and even quoted by diplomats, scholars, poets, psychologists, musicians, painters, ministers, rabbis and even rock stars, Shah nevertheless has somehow simultaneously managed to remain all but obscure to the general public. Despite that his books have been awarded numerous literary prizes of the most prestigious sort and have long been available in public libraries throughout the United States, relatively few readers have ever heard of him, let alone know something of what he writes.

My hunch is that `The Commanding Self' will very likely mark the transition of Shah's material into much wider recognition and greater popularity with the general reader. By its very nature, it is not likely to become a major bestseller (although even stranger things can and do happen with astonishing regularity). It does, however, provide a very accessible way into Shah's material for the new reader. I cannot think, offhand, of another of Shah's books that would be a better starting point for someone interested to learn about the real possibilities of human development yet who is not already familiar with Shah's work.

On the other hand, for the hundreds of thousands of people who already are familiar with Shah's books, `The Commanding Self' provides an indispensable "summa" that both incorporates and expands upon the essential material already available in titles such as "The Sufis," "Caravan of Dreams," "Learning How to Learn," "The Perfumed Scorpion," "Seeker After Truth," "The Magic Monastery," "Sufi Thought and Action" and Shah's numerous other books.

Shah once pointed out that the oft-repeated supposedly Chinese saying, "the journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step" fails to note directly that if one does not know in which direction to step (or, for that matter, why to undertake a journey in the first place) one can readily go badly astray. For those who are truly interested in their real possibilities and in the possibilities of their real self, however, to read "The Commanding Self' by Idries Shah is almost certain to be a useful step in the right direction.

The Commanding Self
Suggests ways to deal with the psychological barriers to spiritual progress. Shah emphasizes the need for people to discern their own emotional ebb and flow and come to an understanding of it, so that they operate it, and not it them. In particular, The Commanding Self helped me to develop honest and useful responses to issues of vanity, ambition, personal recognition and worldly success.

Makes You Re-think Your Assumptions About Spirtuality
Westerners are very sophisticated when it comes to knowing the difference between "the real thing" and a fake if we are talking about material goods. But in the area of knowing what IS and what IS NOT real spirituality, we still have a long way to go. This book, "The Commanding Self" will give the reader a tremendous opportunity to examine his/her own assumptions about what is spirtuality and to experience one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. Idries Shah is so practical, so funny, so filled with insight, that one can almost feel one's brain expanding while reading this book. His style incorporates lecture, question and answer and the magic of the Sufi teaching story. Just when you think you have wrapped your brain around a concept that Shah eloquently explains, he illustrates it with a teaching story and allows you to "grok" it in yet another way. I have read this book many times, and feel I have only scratched the surface of understanding everything there is in it.

What is especially appealing is that in this New Age of nostrums and the expansion of so-called spirituality into the entertainment industry, Shah's book offers a sane, refereshingly intelligent look at how we have to prepare ourselves for real spirtiual progress. Interestingly enough, we may need to understand more about how the brain/mind works in order to appreciate how the teaching story operates. To talk about it would be like "trying to send a kiss by messenger" so I suggest you take a look at this wonderful book.