Life & Wisdom Quote by Idries Shah

Idries Shah’s line is a gentle rebuke to the modern thirst for instant transformation. “Enlightenment” gets marketed like a life hack: one retreat, one book, one viral insight and you’re reborn. Shah, writing out of a Sufi-inflected tradition that distrusts spiritual spectacle, flips that fantasy into a warning. If clarity arrives too fast, it doesn’t liberate you; it floods you. The ego doesn’t dissolve in a blaze of insight so much as it scrambles for new defenses, turning revelation into narcissism, dogma, or breakdown.

The key move is the phrase “must come,” which sounds less like encouragement than physiology. He’s implying a human limit: perception, ethics, and self-knowledge have a carrying capacity. Incremental change isn’t a compromise; it’s the only change that can be metabolized. The subtext is training, not epiphany: practices, friction, repetition, community, and the slow reshaping of attention. Shah’s broader project often targeted Western audiences shopping for “Eastern wisdom,” and this sentence reads like a quiet corrective to spiritual tourism. You don’t collect enlightenment the way you collect artifacts.

There’s also a political undertone. Sudden “awakening” movements, whether religious or ideological, can become overwhelming in the literal sense: they demand total allegiance, purge nuance, and punish gradualism. Shah’s sentence defends a different model of growth: one that respects the nervous system, the social fabric, and the hard truth that real insight changes your life only at the speed you can live it.