Impatience for spiritual wisdom drives us towards distant horizons, blind to the reality that true enlightenment only ripens when the seeker is ready to receive it.
“There was once a woman who had heard of the Fruit of Heaven. She coveted it.
She asked a certain dervish, whom we shall call Sabar: ‘How can I find this fruit, so that I may attain to immediate knowledge?’
‘You would be best advised to study with me,’ said the dervish. ‘But if you will not do so, you will have to travel resolutely and at times restlessly throughout the world.’
She left him and sought another, Arif the Wise One, and then found Hakim the Sage, then Majzub the Mad, then Alim the Scientist, and many more…
She passed thirty years in her search. Finally she came to a garden. There stood the Tree of Heaven, and from its branches hung the bright Fruit of Heaven.
Standing beside the Tree was Sabar, the First Dervish.‘Why did you not tell me when we first met that you were the Custodian of the Fruit of Heaven?’ she asked him.
‘Because you would not then have believed me. Besides, the Tree produces fruit only once in thirty years and thirty days.’
Idries Shah in his celebrate book Wisdom of the Idiots
More such stories at https://idriesshahfoundation.org/
Idries Shah was an Indian-born British author and teacher who dedicated his life to collecting, translating and adapting traditional Middle Eastern and Central Asian teaching stories for the Western world. Through foundational works like The Sufis, he stripped away cultural and religious dogmatism to present Sufism as a universal, timeless form of psychological wisdom aimed at awakening human potential.