In one stream of Zen Buddhism, it is customary for the teacher to offer the student a koan – a seemingly unanswerable question, like “Show me your face before your mother was born,” or “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” on which the student chews relentlessly for years on end until, with a soundless pop! understanding dawns and life is seen in a completely different way.

Sufism does not make a specialty of this ‘sudden’ approach, but there are one or two Sufi ‘koans’ that have a similar effect. One of these is “A Sufi has two points of view, his or her own, and that of the other person.” The typical first reaction is a smile of appreciation for the open hearted attitude of the Sufi. ‘Yes, yes, we are all in this together,’ we might hear, ‘and you see? The Sufi does not impose any dogma! Very commendable!’ But if one stays in the vicinity of the Sufis for any length of time, there gradually comes a feeling that one should oneself try to manifest this attitude, and then we begin to discover the difficulties.

The point of view of the other person is not so challenging if it is somewhat in harmony with our own. Members of our family are often – but not always – people with whom we can, on a good day, feel that we can open the doors of our mind and heart. We may not exactly agree with their point of view, but we can at least see why they think the way they do. It is possible for us to let them have the run of the house, so to speak. And therefore, there can be a stage in which we try to see the other point of view, but we avoid people whose views seriously challenge our own, or that in some way threaten our concept of ourselves.

And there we find ourselves stuck, tied to a rope that stretches up over a wall, on the other side of which hangs the other person, with their irascible, irreducible opinion; we can’t pull the other person to our side of the wall, we can’t climb over, and we don’t know how to let go.

The solution, of course, is to somehow pull the wall down. As long as we feel separate from others, there will always be this dilemma of who to admit and who to exclude. When the Trojans were at war with the Greeks, they were separated by years of battle and opposition, and the downfall of Troy came when they allowed another point of view to enter their gates in the form of the wooden horse stuffed with Greek warriors. But if we look on those around us as other versions of ‘me,’ it becomes possible to understand them from within. This is not the same as abandoning our own point of view – we may still need to defend out home and our family, for example – but we will be able to do without fear.

There are two methods by which the wall may be pulled down. One is to keep digging in the heart until the stream of love begins to flow. This is an effort in which our idealisation of God, God as Love, is essential. And the other method, which can certainly be operable at the same time, is by keen, honest self-observation, through which we sober up from our life-long self-intoxication. We habitually live in a dream of delusion, and when we wake up and pull aside the curtains, we discover that we have all the faults and defects that we criticise in others, and more. Then, when we look over the wall, we see that the other is just ‘me’ in another form, and there can be sympathy and compassion instead of rejection. In this way we make a reality of the saying in Gayan Boulas : He who makes room in his heart for others, will himself find accommodation everywhere.