Been reading a lot of Idries Shah lately. He was clearly a truly enlightened being and a con-man, and it's pretty clear from his works that he justifies the role of the Teacher as being to tell whatever lies are necessary to get the broad masses to accept the important stuff. You could call him the Lenin of Sufism, like Lacan is called the Lenin of Freudianism, with all the good and bad that entails.
Anyway, all his stuff is free to read online; I'd suggest you start with The Sufis, which is an interesting combination of "a good introduction to the literature" with "hilarious Robert Graves-style shaggy dog stories about how the entire Western Esoteric tradition is actually ripped off from Sufism, up to and including Gardnerian Wicca". (To someone who knows about this stuff, it comes off like that dude from My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Or virtually any Iranian person you speak to.) And of course Robert Graves, alongside J. G. Bennett the teacher of Robert Fripp, were just two of the i-want-to-believe Westerners who paid Idries Shah to know what they really thought.
Anyway, what I wanted to say is that Idries Shah seems to have had the same project with Western esotericists that Chaos Marxism has had with small Western communist groups. The purpose being to yell: wake up, bozos. You're not doing any good, you're just being a fanclub and jerking each other off, if not actively abusing each other. We've all got to learn how to learn.
