Evenings with Idries Shah collected by R. Easterling and Kamil Hafiz.

The Sufis have been using carefully constructed stories for teaching purposes for thousands of years. Though on the surface these often appear to be little more than entertaining fairy tales or folk tales, they enshrine — in their characters, plots, and imagery — patterns and relationships that nurture a part of the mind not reachable in more conventional ways, thus increasing our understanding, flexibility, and breadth of vision. In this little book, Idries Shah explains the nature of the teaching-story and how the reader might approach this amazing material.