For these reasons, instruments are needed which can contain knowledge and provoke experience while taking a form that is initially acceptable to the brain's word processor. And, if they're entertaining or funny, so much the better, because then people will tell and retell them, and the instruments will survive even when there is no specialist around to understand and employ their deeper applications. Eventually, there will be. But they are not ordinary stories. Now, let us return to the two stories given at the start of this article.
Most people stop there.
Some go further, and appreciate their wry humor and entertainment value, perhaps seeing their neighbors or co-workers' behavior exemplified by the lion or Nasrudin. Most of those stop there. But these stories have much more to offer. Thus, Sufi teachers provide students with stories to soak themselves in, stories that provide some information useful right away, and additional dimensions of potential value which become activated as and when the student is ready for them. Sufis do not indoctrinate, and, indeed, one of the things that most appealed to me when I began reading Sufi literature, as presented by the Afghan Sufi writer Idries Shah, is that the Sufis see conditioning as a widespread, often unsuspected, and nearly entirely destructive force in humanity's existence.