The Sufis in all ages have tried their best to train their consciousness. How did they train it? The first training is analysis, and the second training is synthesis. The analytical striving is to analyze and examine one's own consciousness, in other words one's own conscience; to ask one's conscience, addressing it, "My friend, all my happiness depends on you, and my unhappiness also. If you are pleased, I am happy. Now tell me truly if what I like and what I do not is in accordance with your approval." One should speak to one's conscience as a man going to the priest to make his confession, "Look what I have done. Maybe it is wrong, maybe it is right; but you know it, you have your share of it; its influence on you and your condition is my condition, your realization is my realization. If you are happy, only then can I be happy. Now I want to make you happy; how can I do it?" At once a voice of guidance will come from the conscience, "You should do this, and not that; say this and not that. In this way you should act, and not in that way." And conscience can give you better guidance that any teacher or book. It is a living teacher awakened in oneself, one's own conscience.

The teachers, the Gurus, the Murshids, their way is to awaken the conscience in the pupil; to make clear what has become unclear, confined. Sometimes they adopt such a wonderful way, such a gentle way that even the pupil does not realize it.

Once a man went to a teacher and said ,'Will you take me as your pupil?" The teacher first looked at him, and then said, "Yes, with great pleasure." But the man said, "Think about it before you tell me yes. There are many bad things in me." The teacher said, "What are these bad things?" The man said, "I like to drink." The teacher said, "That does not matter." "But," the man said, "I like to gamble." The teacher said, "That does not matter." "But," he said, "there are many other things, there are numberless things." The teacher said, "That does not matter." The man was very glad. "But," the teacher said, "now that I have disregarded all the. bad things you have said about yourself you must agree to one condition. Do not do any of these things which you consider wrong in nay presence." The pupil said, "That is easy", and went away.

As the days and months passed, this pupil, who was very deep and developed and keen, came back beaming, his soul unfolding every moment of the day, and happy to thank the teacher. The teacher said, "Well, how have you been?" "Very well", he said. The teacher said, "Have you done your practices I have given you?" "Yes," he said, "very faithfully." "But what about the habits you had of going to different places?" the teacher asked. "Well," he said, "very often I tried to go to gamble or to drink, but wherever I went I saw you. You did not leave me alone; whenever I wanted to drink I saw your face before me. I could not do it.'

That is the gentle way in which teachers handle their disciples. They do not say, "You must not drink, you must not gamble"; they never do. The wonderful way of the teacher is to teach without words, to correct a person without saying anything. What the teacher wants to say he says without saying; when it is put into words it is lost.