The Commanding Self

The Commanding Self, in Sufic terminology, is that mixture of the primitive and conditioned responses, common to everyone, which inhibits and distorts human progress and understanding. This audiobook was described by Shah as the key to understanding his entire corpus of work. While complete in itself as an anthology of hitherto unpublished work, it serves to illustrate and amplify Idries Shah’s preceding books on the Sufi Way. In its introduction, he writes, "Thousands of books and monographs have been written on Sufism and the Sufis, almost all of them from the point of view of other ways of thinking. The result has been chaos in the literature, and confusion in the reader. Over the centuries, some of the world’s most eminent scholars have fallen into the trap of trying to examine, access or consider the Sufi phenomenon through a set of culture-bound preconceptions". Do you command it? Or does it command you? The commanding self is the bundle of conditioned responses that we need to survive – but which holds most of us prisoner. Psychology and personal development are only just beginning to catch up with what the Sufis have said for hundreds of years. You can take control of your commanding self and choose how and when it operates. This book can set you free.