How to be a Punditt
A number of people have asked about how to learn the knowledge of the Punditts. This is not easy, for a number of reasons. It has taken me over twenty years to learn, I am still learning, and I do not expect to stop learning. I cannot expect students to have that level of commitment, however advantageous it may seem. However, I realise that I have to find ways of teaching that are not necessarily the same way as I was taught. Punditt is a Silent Sufi, the rarest, and most powerful Sufi one can find. I didn’t know that that was what he was until recently! Punditt taught in silence, whereas I will have to use words, which are by definition very limiting.
The first question is, what is a Punditt? This question is best answered in many ways in a negative form. Punditts do not have rigid dogma. Beyond a belief in God, and the Power of God, and the knowledge that all knowledge, and power, and healing comes from the Agents of God. Punditts work in all systems of Spiritual Belief, and Spiritual Belief Systems. During my apprenticeship Punditt gave me experiences of just about every magical and spiritual system known, plus others that have no categories. What this means is that a Punditt is able to work and communicate in the spiritual system required at that moment. Of course, there are no absolutes; there are many variations and versions and expressions of spiritual experience that are cultural, temporal, religious, etc. What is critical here is the ability to understand the relationship of a person to their spiritual and material beliefs and be able to help them in the form of advice, spiritual healing, or some other way of assistance.
Idries Shah and Sufism
Idries Shah summed up this concept in terms of Sufism:
“Sufism is the experience of life through a method of dealing with life and human relations. This method is based on an understanding of man, which places at one’s disposal the means to organize one’s relationships and one’s learning systems. So instead of saying that Sufism is a body of thought in which you believe certain things and don’t believe in other things, we say the Sufi experience has to be provoked in a person. Once provoked, it becomes his own property, rather as a person masters an art.”
Interview by Elizabeth Hall, Psychology Today 1975
In a nutshell, this is what Punditt did to me. He invoked the experience of these spiritual, magical and religious systems within me. Punditt continually challenged my perceptions, my beliefs, my knowledge, my understanding. He challenged me in so many ways, particularly by not acting in the way I expected Punditts to act, not that I had any real idea.
