A Sufi Story.
There was once a great tribe who lived in a valley between two mountains — one tall and snow capped, the other, low and cratered.
The people of this tribe had a saying, “When you can stand to the south, with Nostrodos to the west and Gustravas to the east…discern them correctly, but know them as one…you will have true knowledge”.
One peculiarity about this tribe is that they had amongst them a group called the Foogutoes, which roughly translated meant: “the fixers”.
The Foogutoes were an odd bunch, they were mostly useless except for one remarkable gift: they could easily find a solution to any problem. Whenever they looked at something, they would immediately start dissecting it to figure out how it worked. The elders of the tribe, knowing this, would call on the Foogutoes whenever they had a problem to fix.
As Foogutoes accumulated knowledge they were able to fix problems faster and faster, and their reputation quickly grew. Soon everyone in the tribe wanted to meet a Foogutoe and hear what they had to say.
This carried on for some time until the Foogutoes became arrogant and said to the Elders: “We should be leading the tribe! In fact, if we were in charge, we would be able to fix more things..even the ones you think don’t need fixing.”
The Elders had been expecting this from the Foogutoes. They calmly replied: “Blessed Fixers, we are grateful that you were endowed with the ability to see how things work. However, while you know the mechanics of living, you don’t know the art of it. If you were to lead the tribe you would make life so easy it would lead to our ruin.”
The Foogutoes were furious. They always believed that if they fixed enough things the Elders would step down and let them lead. When they learned the Elders had no such plans, they thought of them as arrogant hypocrites.
“We’ll start our own tribe!” the Foogutoes said.
And so they did.
It was not long before the Foogutoes became one of the greatest civilizations in the history of the world. At their peak, they even solved all of mankind’s problems. There was no pain, no doubt, no unfulfilled desires. Everything was perfectly designed to meet the Foogutoes’s needs. There wasn’t even a single wasted movement.
Everything appeared to be solved, everything but one very important question.
You see, the Foogutoes were so consumed by problems that they had forgotten to write down anything that wasn’t a solution. Thus, they had answered every question except the most important: Who are we?
Irritated by this, they decided to go back and see what had happened to the old tribe. By this time they were too lazy to travel themselves, so they sent their machines.
Years later, when the machines returned, they reported that without the Foogutoes the tribe had died off. However, when the data from the machines was extracted and analyzed it showed the village was primitive, but alive.
The Foogutoes would never know the Truth.