Mystical traditions

Doris Lessing, a South African novelist I happily stumbled across browsing through the British Council library (no longer in existence) when I was teaching there, says this about encountering Sufism for the first time:

"I had exhausted what I have described as "the intellectual package" of our time, which consists of material, both philosophic and that assumption of our culture that creature comforts must be everyone's chief aim in life; then, belief in one of the churches of Marxism; a belief that politics or a political party will solve everything; science in the place of God. I was by no means the only one to have tired of this "package." In my case it was writing The Golden Notebook that taught me I must look again."

You can read the full article here Lessing is talking about her encountering "The Commanding Self" by Idries Shah in which it is explained that "his task is first of all to supply information to a culture starved of it, information that is about a genuine mystical tradition. It is an astonishing fact, and one that I first encountered thirty years ago that someone may have gone through many years of our education or--as in my case--be pretty well read within our own literary tradition, and yet have not heard much more about the great spiritual traditions than that they exist."

If we all took the trouble to look into the world's great spiritual traditions, I venture to say the world would be a gentler, more understanding and forgiving place.