I have downloaded the story to clean up the page, as the website seemed to have some display problems. I think I read this story maybe 45 years ago, but I don't remember it, I remember the title. I won't have time to re-read it for a couple of days. I think I bought the paperback collection back then.
As for Sufi stories, I loved them, I used to have a large collection, now all gone. They have many levels of understanding, though they seem like a mild joke on a superficial level. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : Cool. I like these old Sufi and Zen stories, the ones with a punchline. But I'm not sure of this one's pedigree because I first heard this joke as a generic barroom joke. The owner's question was the same, but in the joke I heard, the job seeker replied that he'd gotten his experience in the Sahara Forest. The owner says, "You mean the Sahara Desert, don't you?" And the job seeker replies, "Well...it is *now*." :-) The appearance of this kind of story here strikes me as synchronicity-laden, so I'm going to pass along to you something that came up over dinner. We were talking about scifi, and opining about how hard it was to portray truly alien aliens. If you think about it, almost all of them in scifi have been anthropomorphized, and end up being pretty much like humans, only with bug eyes. As the talk went on, I remembered the best story that I remember reading in terms of capturing "alien-ness" -- it's by Terry Carr, and won both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1969. It's also very Zen. Or Sufi. It's about the conflict of two mindsets that in all likelihood will never understand each other, because the way their minds work is so different. I think you of all people on this forum will appreciate it: THE DANCE OF THE CHANGER AND THE THREE-PAGE 1 http://lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/carr/carr1.html http://lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/carr/carr1.html THE DANCE OF THE CHANGER AND THE THREE-PAGE 1 http://lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/carr/carr1.html This all happened ages ago, out in the depths of space beyond Darkedge, where galaxies lumber ponderously through the black like so many silent bright rhinoceroses.... View on lexal.net http://lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/carr/carr1.html Preview by Yahoo From: "anartaxius@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Monday, May 4, 2015 8:42 PM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Fwd: Nepal earthquake report from TM Center in Kathmandu This reminds me of the following story, from the Sufis: The plantation owner was surprised to see the unlikely figure Nasrudin applying for a job. 'I'll give you a chance, although you don't look like the sort who could fell trees. Where did you learn to cut down trees?' 'In the Sahara desert', Nasrudin replied. 'But there aren't any trees in the Sahara.' 'No, there aren't, now', replied Nasrudin. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : It must be tough in the yagya selling business. The only way you have to promote your wares is by saying astonishingly unconvincing things like "You know that Earthquake that didn't flatten your village yesterday? That was prevented by us" A sceptic might say that we've no real idea whether an Earthquake would have flattened anyone's village without the awesome yagya performance. But that's just got to be nonsense, how could a system of reality based on the mighty wisdom of the veda's possibly be in error? But it looks like something did go wrong - maybe some interference from that Hell Pit of Shiva agitation in Switzerland forced our normally strong grip on the laws of nature into abeyance for just a second? - and of course, once you've collected the money to pay for a prayer to make good things happen and then something bad happens, you need a ready explanation to get yourselves off the hook. And here it is: It would have been worse if it had happened the day before. Well, you've got to have something to rally round. And this is the trouble with superstitious thinking, your view of the world is based on a nonsense and when - surprise surprise - your dysfunctional iron-age model doesn't work the way you expected it to you need a scapegoat, no matter how obscene, or those all important donations for the next round of pointless prayers to non-existent gods won't be so forthcoming. But just this once, instead of giving money to the TMO why not give it to the Red Cross, at least they are actually doing something to help the victims and it won't seem like you are just throwing your money onto a bonfire...
