or "The king who divined his fortune"
A king who was also an astrologer read in his stars that on a certain day and at a particular hour a calamity would overtake him. He therefore began to stockpile all manner of raw ingredients such as flour and eggs and milk and posted numerous guardians outside, stacking the materials from floor to ceiling until he could no longer leave the warehouse he had built-up. By this time he was beginning to have second thoughts about the whole matter, but he could no longer conceive of any means of escape.
Then one day a Sufi, passing by, looked in through one of the remaining small openings, took in the situation and called to the King:
'Friend, if you wish to escape, you must first of all use some of these provisions to bake me a cake.'
The King could make no sense of what the Sufi was saying. Besides, he had read such a lot about the dangers of going out and baking one's own cakes, let alone the dangers of forming groups of people to learn and discuss the craft.
The Sufi continued: 'You must have the constituents, they must be mixed correctly, and then they must be cooked correctly. You cannot go on amassing the raw materials without finally making a useful attempt to bake a cake.'
'What a load of absolute bollocks! What have cakes got to do with my predicament? I remember now why it was that I chose to seclude myself in here: to avoid such raving maniacs as you!'
And with that, realizing from within that he could still see daylight, he found an opening, which he filled up, to prevent further misfortune entering. In blocking this door he made himself a prisoner with his own hands.
And because of this the king died.
~ ATTAR OF NISHAPUR (Idries Shah, The Way of The Sufi), ever-so-slightly rewritten, with due regard to time, place and people.
~~~oOo~~~
One of the reasons for the split between Idries Shah and Omar Ali-Shah after their jointly-run group work in Paris, when they “agreed to differ” and go their own ways, was that Omar Ali-Shah thought, rightly or wrongly, that Shah was addressing his students as if they were “computers”, and Ali-Shah was all for going ahead and “baking cakes”.
Image: Cake decorator displaying deluxe fruitcake on baking line / JmanningCSB / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0.
