A collection of entertaining anecdotes and "parables in action" illustrating the eminently practical and lucid approach of Eastern dervish teachers. Distilled from the teachings of more than one hundred sages in three continents, it offers an extraordinary variety of underlying themes, from "the inner significance of outward service" to "real and imagined desire".
A book of enormous breath and depth it emphasizes experience over theory and it is this characteristic of Sufic study which provides its impact and vitality.
Valuable as it is, this book's publication in the West has only recently become possible, because only recently has the West been able to accept the fluid thinking of the East and to reject the old rigid systems that have only appearance of wisdom. As a master teacher says in these pages, "The wisdom which is invisible but which sustains is a hundred times better than the appearance of wisdom, for that has itself to be sustained."