Science of Sufism

BioIslam is post-Sufi. It applies a pro-science filter to traditional Sufism, tassawuf. It accepts those parts of tassawuf that are consistent with the emergent fields of neuroscience and consciousness studies. This pro-science tilt elevates certain undervalued Sufi concepts like hayra, a cosmic awe, and hayba, the expansive joy of bewilderment (about the true nature of reality).

Sufism is often misunderstood, misrepresented, or exploited. It is said that a true Sufi does not claim to be a Sufi1, since he or she cares not about labels, but instead seeks to see & know – via imagination & intuition. It is to truly see the invisible divine, ihsan, not with the eye but with heartfelt imagination. It is to deeply know the infinite divine through mystical intuition – this is gnosis, irfan or marifa, a subtle faculty higher than reason or knowledge, aql or ilm.2 Sufism began with tahannuth, the Prophet’s private practice of meditation.3 Over fourteen centuries, Sufis transmitted mindfulness exercises to enhance the powers of imagination and intuition. We share these goals, but with a pro-science tilt.

Misunderstandings

Sufism is often misunderstood by most Muslims, just as Islam is misunderstood by non-Muslims. Even the best of scholars have noted that it is a very difficult topic to write about, using phrases like ‘impossible’ or ‘dauntingly difficult’.4 A big misunderstanding: many Traditional Muslims instinctively dismiss Sufism as saint worship, or more accurately, veneration of saints.

Veneration was not part of the early centuries of Sufism. Indeed, Sufism was once lauded by the best of Traditionalist scholars as righteous. Ideally, the famous Traditional scholar al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111) ‘would have liked to see every Muslim act and think as a Sufi’.5 Veneration is a popular syncretic practice, which emerged centuries later, especially in Asia and Africa. It is a misguided attempt to get closer to the Prophet ﷺ. As time marches on, and the further we move away from the Prophetic period, the more laypeople venerate to connect with him spiritually. Abuse of Sufism abounds, but do not throw out baby with the bathwater.6 The post-Sufi filters out impure aspects of tassawuf with a pro-science filter.

Pro-Science View

Ours is an unconventional view. Refer to the Reading List for rich conventional views, which describe tassawuf as the inner dimension of Traditional Islam. BioMuslims share the goals of tassawuf – to truly see and deeply know our Creator, ihsan and irfan – albeit with a pro-science tilt. However, the majority of ulama do not embrace Sufism. They view it as superfluous, noting you should be merely a slave to Allah ﷻ by scrupulously following the Sharia, a limited field of vision.7

Unconventionally, a pro-science person can crudely categorize traditional Sufi practices as either ‘uppers’ or ‘downers’. To preview our conclusion, we endorse most of the Uppers and disregard most of the Downers, since that is most consistent with BioIslam’s inside pillar of Potentiality..

1) Uppers – to get high. To get closer to the Creator, induce altered states of consciousness.

2) Downers – to ‘die before we die’. To escape corruption, kill our appetite for consumerism and concupiscence.

Get High – To alter consciousness in a way that feels closer to the Creator, Sufis engage in esoteric meditative practices. They induce ‘mindful’ pleasure, which for some eventually produces a lasting mystical feeling. The practices include repetitive chanting (zikr), soulful music (sama) and collective dance (also, sama). The goal is to achieve a mild high with zikr or an ecstatic high (haal or wajd) with sama. Zikr is typically centered on a catchphrase (wazifa), such as the shahadah or one of the 99 names of Allah ﷻ, and chanted either silently and solitarily (zikr-e-qalbi or zikr-e-khafi) or chanted aloud in unison (zikr-bil-jahr). Some Sufis believe zikr is the most important of pillars, relying on Quranic verses 17:110, 33:40, 13:28.

The above practices are often performed in a multi-hour gathering (hadra) or at a secluded retreat (chilla) that may last as long as forty days. It is led by a Shaykh who is part of an order (tariqa) and who might claim to have received esoteric secret knowledge via a chain of preceding Shaykhs (silsila). Some seasoned Shaykhs claim to have achieved an unveiling of mystical insights (kashf) and others claim to possess intercessory powers to deliver blessings (baraka), such as help with financial success, or ability to perform supernatural miracles (karamat), such as heal the sick. Sufis attempt to decode the Quran’s inner latent meaning (batin), by indexing on select mystical verses and figuratively interpreting others, as opposed to the mainstream methods of reason and literalism that are based on exoteric meaning (zahir).

Die Before We Die – Sufis practice fana, self-negation, and baqa, subsistence or contentment in Allah ﷻ alone. To achieve this, they use ascetic techniques to suppress the appetitive soul, especially our desires for consumerism and concupiscence. Sufism began with tahannuth, the Prophet’s pre-Islamic meditations, during the month of Ramadan, which led to the Quran’s revelation.8 According to Traditionalist sources, a few decades after the demise of the Prophet ﷺ, when the imperial Umayyads (40-132 AH / 661-750 CE) ruled a vast empire, some pious second-generation Muslims (tabiun) bemoaned materialism and preferred ascetic renunciation, (zuhd or zuhd fi l-dunya) through the virtue of abstinence (wara). The most notable was Hasan al-Basri (d. 110/728), the ‘patriarch of Muslim mysticism’, who was ‘deeply steeped in the sadness and fear so typical of ascetics of all religions’. Although fana and baqa, the hallmarks of asceticism, were not part of early Islam, they emerged in response to the excessive materialism of empire. These zahid ‘constantly weep’ at the corruption that had set in and experienced ‘permanent sadness’. The weepers (bakkaun) yearned to get closer to God as an escape.9

Your Spiritual Niche

BioMuslims are post-Sufi in that they appreciate those aspects of Sufism that are validated by neuroscience, and the related fields of neuro-theology, neuro-endocrinology, consciousness studies and quantum biology. These areas of science are nascent but rapidly progressing; in a generation or two we will be far better at understanding which Sufi practices concord with neuroscience. In particular, we don’t know the answer to the key question of attribution – does the lasting mystical feeling (induced by mindful Sufi practices like zikr) have a yet-to-be-discovered biochemical explanation? That would be a reductionist or materialist view. Or does it actually transport us closer to our Creator, akin to a personal miraj? If irfan or marifa is attained, is this a truly elevated state of being, or is it merely an imaginal state, perhaps somewhat similar to the ineffable aesthetic high of refined art or music? Our lack of comprehension of these mysterious effects is somewhat similar to our ignorance about the strange-yet-true placebo effect in medicine.10

The ‘Get High’ practices of zikr and sama are likely to up-regulate the levels of hormones that induce feelings of pleasure. They shift the biochemistry of the brain, trigger the production of uniquely pleasurable gamma waves, perhaps as a byproduct of boosted levels of dopamine and serotonin.11 In a suitable ‘set and setting’, these practices induce emotions of a ‘radical love’ of an unseen higher power.12 Thus, although the neuroscience on this is far from complete, there are sufficiently strong indicators that some traditional Sufi practices induce positive emotions. The result – an immersive love of the unseen Creator and an expansive love of humanity, i.e. the Creation.

The ‘Die Before We Die’ practices of fana and baqa are likely to down-regulate the levels of appetitive hormones. For seasoned practitioners, they induce extreme mystical contentment, also known as subsistence (baqa). These practices suppress our appetite for food, sex, and ego (praise), the primal roots of our desires. As an example, the practice of long intermittent fasting, which requires great mental strength, suppresses the secretion of the hunger hormone, ghrelin. As another example, certain breathing techniques allow our body to handle extremely cold weather. Long-term meditators have been observed to have down-regulation of the genes responsible for inflammation, which improves health outcomes.13

Which of the above methods, uppers vs. downers, a Sufi chooses depends on temperament. This is also true of whether a Traditional Muslim practices Sufism at all, or limits him/herself to the practice of the Traditional five outer pillars. This ‘argument from the temperament’ is advanced by scholars who believe that ‘people do possess different psychological dispositions and, therefore, are likely to seek congenial environments to nurture them’, i.e. people practice religion in a manner that befits their ‘temperamental niche’.14

A Transliminal Trick?

Your spiritual temperament might depend on transliminality, where feelings and thoughts cross (trans) thresholds (limines), in and out of consciousness. It is altered consciousness, shifting from ‘normal’ to ‘transcendent’ states, for varying durations.15 A small fraction of Sufis (and mystics of other traditions) report mystical states such as a lightness of being, of time standing still, dissolving into their surrounds, melting into an ocean of bliss, merging with the light, traveling through a tunnel of light, etc. Some describe these elevated states as noetic, beyond the power of human language. What is behind these fantastic claims? Is this a mind trick or genuine contact with the divine?

Our mind constructs a virtual reality, operating as a selection device or ‘reducing valve‘, allowing only one-trillionth of ordinary reality to enter our mind through our sensory system.16 Small adjustments to this valve, through esoteric practices or psychoactive drugs, can result in large changes to our perceptions and inner experiences, i.e. a shift in consciousness from a normal to transcendent state. Since the full spectrum of reality is vast and overwhelming, our perceptions have evolved to hide reality from us, a simplified ‘graphical user interface’ of sorts.17 Over millennia, humans evolved to become the most advanced species, partly because we set up barriers, boundaries and thresholds in our mind to be better at information processing in a complex environment. As an aside, from a religious viewpoint, where reductive explanations cannot account for the ’emergence’ of positive complexity, such as the human mind, this marvelous evolutionary outcome is credited to the guiding hand of God/Allah ﷻ. The reducing value critically relies on these barriers/boundaries/thresholds. How open or closed the valve is varies by individual; although the science is immature, it likely comes down to genetics. These barriers/boundaries/thresholds are key to regulating emotions, positive disposition and even physical health.18 But they are porous, which makes transliminality possible; the thinner they are the more we can transition across barriers.

Transliminality is a subfield of consciousness studies. Since the latter is a nascent science, we must be careful not to approach the topic with certitude, and it might take decades of scientific progress before we can articulate with conviction. Most people have moderate levels of transliminality, to the extent it is measurable.19 A person with higher transliminality is more likely to cross barriers, and is more inclined to be spiritual.20 Those with the highest transliminality levels might experience a deep sense of connection, which makes one feel closer to God/Allah ﷻ. They might identify as stronger Sufis since their efforts at meditation or asceticism appear to shift them into a transcendent realm, where they experience the fantastic feelings cited above. The big question: is such transcendence a mind trick, or a real connection with some divine presence. Neuroscientists see it reductively as an illusion, which religious believers dismiss as a myopic materialist explanation.

Thin-barrier people score higher on an absorption scale; they are able to immerse themselves in imaginal worlds, where they get an expansive feeling which feels like they are with God/Allah ﷻ directly, as if He were a close friend nearby, a phenomenon observed by Sufis, mystics of other traditions, and amystical Christian Evangelicals too.21 Sufis, following Rumi, commonly refer to God/Allah ﷻ as ‘Friend‘. Thins are more likely to be spiritual, and more likely to be female. They are more likely to merge their sensory experiences, while those with thick ones tend to compartmentalize better. Thins experience more connection between waking and dream states, and spend more time in half-awake or half-asleep states (hypnopompic or hypnagogic). Thins are more hypnotizable and more likely to experience ego dissolution, a merge between their sense of self and their environment. They are more likely to experience hypesthesia, a heightening of stimuli, or synesthesia, a blending of the primary senses. They are more likely to sense time dilation, a sense that the past, present and future have blended, and that the present moment extends to infinity, a common reflection in Sufi poetry. They are more likely to have paranormal experiences, such as a sense of being visited by angels or receiving divine communication. In sum, they are more likely to feel an external presence of God generated through internal phenomena of absorption, expansion, and dissolution. That, of course, is the goal of the Sufi, to see the Friend, and know the Friend, via imagination and intuition.

How can consciousness shift between normal and elevated states? This could occur spontaneously, when there is a big change in external stimuli, whether planned or unexpected, such as a sudden car accident, or inversely, a feeling of awe induced by a sunset or mountains.22 It could also shift in response to altering stimuli via psychoactive drugs, which we discuss below in A Spiritual Shortcut?

But how to do it the old fashioned way, without chemicals? The Sufis achieve this with esoteric or strenuous spiritual practices that have been discovered through a trial and error process over centuries. Sufi practices can invoke altered states, even hypnotic trance states, through fasting, chanting, whirling or breathwork. Depending on which practices are employed, the resulting state is either in the category of Get-High or Die-Before-We-Die. In such states, transliminality is elevated, and a person feels closer to God through the mechanisms of absorption, expansion and dissolution. Once again, whether this is a mind trick or a real divine connection remains an open question given the nascent state of consciousness studies.

Hayba, Joy of Cosmic Awe

Post-Sufis have an amystical temperament that coincides with a pro-science mindset and is consistent with the inside pillar of Potentiality. They reject the mystical, mysterious or self-effacing concepts of popular Sufism, such as fana, baqa, baraka, kashf, karamat and silsila. Instead, they elevate consciousness by adopting traditional Sufi practices of zikr and fikr, chanting and contemplation, sometimes enhanced by breathwork. Most uniquely, BioMuslims do deep-fikr, a form of science-led fikr, which sparks hayba or cosmic awe. An easy way to do deep-fikr is to ‘must watch’ the prolific documentary series, Cosmos, A Spacetime Odyssey. To abbreviate, these spiritual techniques are fana–baqa, zikr–fikr and deep-fikr.

For the traditional Sufi, deeper consciousness is achieved via fana–baqa to negate the ego. The post-Sufi does not negate the ego, since it is essential to maximize human potential. Instead, he/she recalibrates it, by engaging in zikr–fikr meditation, which places the ego in service of the Big Five problems. Also, he or she goes beyond the ego by sparking expansive hayba – by physically exploring the majesty of nature, and intellectually exploring the strangeness of science, especially quantum physics and quantum biology. The goal is to achieve a dual consciousness, one self-centered, one cosmic. The former is enhanced by zikr–fikr practices, and the latter through deep-fikr, which cultivates a sense of cosmic depth perception.23

The Sufi-like practices of BioMuslims will result in elevated states that revitalize us to deliver on the pillar of Potentiality. However, they diverge from traditional Sufis in knowing that such transcendent states may not necessarily be a genuine contact with a divine power, and are mindful that such claims have led to spiritual arrogance and social abuse. As pro-science believers, we must show intellectual humility and acknowledge it is beyond our power to decipher whether transcendence is merely a mind trick or a genuine divine connection.

Five Sufi Types

One simplified way to think about Sufis is that there are five major types — Somber, Sober, Sama, Syncretic and Secular. 

  • Somber Sufis are most depressed about the tragic reality of the human condition, similar to the aforementioned bakkaun of the first Islamic century, and most likely to engage in ascetic zuhd. Examples: Hasan al Basri (d. 728) and Rabia al Basri (d. 801 CE).24
  • Sober Sufis rely on the Sharia alone to navigate tragic reality, and are most like to retreat in silence (samt) using zikr-e-qalbi, the silent and solitary zikr. They follow a middle way or a ‘just mean’ (wasat) between somber and ecstasy. Examples: Ahmad Ghazali (d. 1126), Abdul Qadir Gilani (d. 1166), ibn Arabi (d. 1240) and Baha-ud-din Naqshband (d. 1389).
  • Sama Sufis seek out ecstatic spiritual highs to escape the tragic reality, through practices such as zikr-bil-jahr, which is group zikr aloud, or perhaps a geometric group dance (in a whirl, circle, or chain). Examples: Rumi, aka Maulana Jalaluddin (d. 1273) and his teacher, Shams-i Tabrizi (d. 1248).
  • Syncretic Sufis combine spiritual practices from Islam and other religions, especially baraka and karamat, the blessings and miracles of saints (wali, pl. awliya). To them, the external form of the faith matters little, and our Creator can be approached on any imaginative path. To the Sharia purist, who is necessarily a radical monotheist, many syncretists are seen as heretics, since they incorporate practices that appear to validate polytheistic or animistic belief systems. Some exploit people’s suffering with supernatural baraka promises. Examples: Moinuddin Chisti (d. 1236) and Kabir (d. 1518) are respected figures from opposite poles of syncretism, and are free of the exploitative behavior of other syncretists.
  • Secular Sufis are a recent phenomenon in the West where spiritual-but-not-religious people embrace some Sufi practices to achieve transcendence. Often they may not identify as Muslim, a label that they might associate as loaded with dogmatic baggage, but might incorporate some Muslim characteristics that overlap with Sufi practices, such as zikr. For them, it is not what you believe, but what you perceive. Examples: Robert Ornstein, and his teacher Idries Shah, James Fadiman, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee and his teacher Irina Tweedie.

Which of these five types of Sufism appeals to you depends on your innate temperament.

Tickle Your Temperament

BioIslam’s post-Sufism is compatible with the first three and fifth types of Sufism, that is all but the Syncretic type. Temperament, or psychological disposition, is often the deciding factor on which one is practiced. BioIslam’s preference is to prioritize a pro-science temperament but selectively engage with those Sufi practices that meet your psychological needs for a holistic connection with the Creator or Creation. The above categories are not precise due to some overlap – a syncretic might also engage in sama practices or practice somber asceticism, and a sober sufi might go through somber periods but not engage in either sama or syncretism. What is common to all four types of Sufis is a ‘radical love’ of God, beyond the adoration of prayer and other practices recommended by the Traditionalist’s Sharia. While all Muslims believe we will see God/Allah ﷻ on Judgement Day, the Sufi is impatient and wants to see Him (or Her or It) in this lifetime.

The Sufi tradition is vast with dozens of notable figures, but the two who perhaps had greatest impact, and are consistent with BioIslam’s pillar of Potentiality, are Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) and his younger contemporary Rumi, aka Mawlana Jalaluddin (d. 1273). Ibn Arabi represents the ‘way of knowledge’ and Rumi the ‘way of love’. Although it is possible that Rumi met Ibn Arabi briefly in Damascus, he did not become his student.25 Decades later, Rumi takes inspiration from Ibn Arabi, through intermediaries like Qunawi (d. 1274), a friend of the former and disciple of the latter, and Shams-al-Tabrizi, a pivotal but mysterious figure in Rumi’s transition from a Traditionalist teacher to a mystical poet.

ibn Arabi was erudite and prolific, leaving us a treasure of 500 prose books and 20,000 verses of poetry. But he was inscrutable to the uninitiated – and the initiate is biased by adab, excessive courtesy and decorum. Adab is valued in Muslim societies (and perhaps all tradition-bound ones), and is central to the Sufi experience.26 Ibn Arabi’s critics believed he was cleverly smuggling in Neoplatonic doctrine into Traditional Islam and was a dissimulating Ismaili thinker.27 However, an accusation of foreign origins is broadly leveled by insecure Traditionalists against Sufi ideology, but must be largely ignored due to the Quranic claim of non-originality,28 and since we lack knowledge of 1) the nature and extent of the Prophet’s pre-Quranic tahannuth practices, 2) the true meaning of key mystical verses, and 3) of the cryptic role of Khidr in the Quran.29

Rumi was perhaps the greatest poet of any tradition, with over 60,000 verses.30 Both were grounded in the Traditionalist sciences of Quran and Hadith,31 yet ascended to a higher dimension; they employed their superior imaginative faculties to envision a cosmology of peace and love (sulh-e kul),32 a reprieve from the political chaos and religious dogmatism of that era.

Common Goal: Escape

The human condition is tragic, as discussed earlier in Another Mass Extinction, hence both traditional Sufis and post-Sufis attempt to escape this suffering by climbing a spiritual ladder to the divine. But their approach differs. The former attempts a permanent lifetime escape via mysticism, since the material world is too corrupting to contend with. The latter seeks temporary and refreshing escapes through meditative practices. The post-Sufi uses the reenergized self to engage with science, and the pillar of Potentiality, to try to improve the human condition.

The traditional Sufi approach is a passive search for personal truth, i.e. is inwardly directed. The traditional Sufi’s goal is to retreat from the meanness and messiness of the material world, and enter the ethereal realm, with the aid of mystical practices. He/she believes that he can climb closer to the Creator and perhaps even achieve kashf, a total unveiling of the supernatural mysteries. To get there, he/she must pierce through the 70,000 veils that are believed to separate us from the Creator, and thus achieve irfan or marifa.

For both physicists and Sufis, our optical system does not capture true reality. For the physicist, color is not real, it is merely a particular frequency and wavelength on the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. Also, objects that appear solid are not, since the underlying atoms are composed of mostly empty space and, at the lowest level, vibrating strings of energy. For the Sufi, our optical vision is like watching a play in a theatre, a temporary creation on a scrim (a painted background on the stage), and the scrim veils true reality. ‘We tend to see the world as if it were solid, permanent, substantial… When our vision pierces the scrim, we begin to see life as it is, through the eyes of the Creator. Only then can we see the real human… Each time we pierce a veil, we come a little closer to our own spiritual center.’33

In contrast, the BioMuslim forsakes the above passive mystical path for a proactive and pro-science path, i.e. is outwardly directed. The post-Sufi selectively engages in a few Sufi-like amystical practices to recharge from, and reengage with, the material world, but does not chase the dream of achieving kashf. As noted earlier, these are zikr-plus and deep-fikr practices. Although these practices are amystical since the goal is not kashf, they can nevertheless be viewed as spiritual since they are grounded in the acceptance of a Creator-God and the presumption of an afterlife.

The post-Sufi is wise enough to be occasionally depressed by the tragic reality of our human condition, as were the earliest Sufis, the bakkaun. He/she acknowledges the limits of human capacity to cope with the cacophony of the modern materialist age, and accepts that there is more to life than being a cog in the capitalist machine. But he/she is also skeptical about kashf, the search for a supernatural personal truth, since there is no earthly method to verify such claims of truth. From a neuroscience viewpoint, could kashf be nothing more than an altered state of heightened awareness, coupled with lucid dreaming, attained by tuning down external sensory inputs (via skin, sight, sounds), and amplifying sensory inputs from internal sources (via breath, pulse, heartbeat).

The Sufi practices involve decentering, deautomatization and dishabituation. They dissolve our ego and blur the boundary between our sense of self and the material world. This could lead to a more fresh, vivid, luminous experience of reality, which when coupled with a deep desire to see the divine, could deliver a delightful sense of unveiling. Even if that experience can be explained reductively by transliminality, coupled with heightened imagination and intuition, it nevertheless feels like a real transcendent one.34 Such an awakened state is valuable to recharge and reengage, and attunes the mind to a different face of reality. However, it might stop short of unveiling any new reality beyond the measurable natural laws of science, with the caveat that we don’t yet have the fine-grained tools to reliably measure transliminality, or the specific brainwaves associated with imagination and intuition.

Regardless of the exact underlying mechanisms at work, the recharged post-Sufi engages the potential that the Creator has endowed humans with, and helps solve the Big Five problems faced by the ummah, in alignment with the pillar of potentiality. This combined spiritual-material approach contrasts that of a diehard materialist who will seek a temporary escape only through secular activities like art, music, dance, sports, etc.

A Spiritual Shortcut?

How else can we escape the suffering of our human condition? Both Sufis and post-Sufis agree that neurotoxic shortcuts, such as the use of alcohol or recreational drugs, are poor escape paths; they exacerbate our predicament eventually. The one exception might be the clinical use of some psychedelic drugs like psilocybin and LSD. Since they are extracted from mushrooms and ergot, respectively, they are plant-based medicine. There is increasing scientific evidence that they dissolve our ego, guide us toward a higher reality, and offer a surprisingly degree of prosocial benefits, which we believe can alleviate the Big Five problems. There is a lot of misinformation about these drugs, especially since they were once identified with the countercultural hippie movement of the 1960s, the bane of Traditionalists of all faiths. The word psychedelic simply means ‘mind revealing’. And research by reputable scholars shows they are non-toxic, non-addictive and prosocial, especially when carefully used in a clinical setting. As such, their clinical use would not contradict the anti-intoxication admonition of the Quran.

Advocates of psychedelic ‘medicine’ emphasize a conducive ‘set and setting’ to achieve a good ‘trip’ – if such a trip deepens taqwa, a close connection with our Creator, and raises rahma, compassion for those who suffer from the Big Five, then where is the harm in pursuing this spiritual shortcut, on the condition that the profession of psychology substantially agrees on the prosocial benefits? When psychedelics are used to increase spirituality they are called entheogens, and have been widely used, and sometimes abused, by shamans in traditional cultures. If they are regulated and administered under the supervision of trained professionals in a clinical setting, there is much to gain from their prosocial outcomes. A community which would benefit greatly from prescription-psychedelics is the prison population. If we approach prisoners with utmost rahma, we will acknowledge that many or most landed up in prison due to adverse interaction between their genetic predispositions and harsh life circumstances, as the best of scholars suggest.35 Hence, they deserve rehabilitation not retribution. Given the high recidivism rates, and socio-economic costs of incarceration, offering prisoners access to entheogens could alleviate an endemic social blight.

Caveat: At the time of this writing, psychedelics remain illegal in most countries, but are likely to become regulated psychoactive medicines with a decade or a generation, depending on which country you live in. The author has not experimented with psychedelics, so the opinions here are based on a careful review of the research by reputable non-Muslims.

Is Everything One?

Is God/Allah ﷻ completely apart from Creation or is He (or Her or It) somehow additionally embodied in Creation? Nobody really knows, i.e. only Allah ﷻ knows (allahu alam). Yet ibn Arabi hypothesized the latter, contradicting the view of the Traditional ulama. In his view, there is a cosmic ‘oneness‘ (wahdat al wujud), since there are Quranic verses that suggest both transcendence and immanence.

This ‘ocean of infinite oneness’36 is a ‘monistic’ assertion and is viewed by mainstream Traditional Muslims as sacrilege since it contradicts the ulama’s ‘dualistic’ interpretation: that God/Allah ﷻ is too transcendent and abstract to be immanent in material objects. The details of the monism vs. dualism debate are abstruse, but one way to resolve it is to step away from theology and apply a pro-science filter: modern science favors the monist.37 Another abstruse debate is whether God is Truth (al-Haqq), or is Truth merely an attribute of an infinite God, not his essence. One prominent Sufi, al-Hallaj (d. 309/922) believed God cannot be other than Truth, and desired a metaphysical union with Him (al-wisal bil haqq); he eventually claimed to become one with the Truth (ana al-Haqq), anathema to diehard Traditional monotheists in its plain meaning, but a statement of utter humility in its deeper meaning.38 Hallaj was executed for heresy, as was Socrates.39 A union implies a oneness of matter and energy, and since God/Allah ﷻ is the source of all energy, it indicates monism is at play.40 Monists are often equated with pantheists, and the latter often overlap with animists or polytheists, and thus in strong opposition to the Traditionalist’s view of pure transcendental monotheism.41 Since monism is advocated by three great sources of wisdom – modern physics, the ancient Greeks, the Vedic Indians – we cannot easily dismiss it without thinking carefully about how it relates to Islam, due to the Quran claim of non-originality.42 Hence, a more nuanced understanding is recommended – monism implies not pantheism but panentheism, but the distinction is subtle.43 Pantheism implies immanence alone. Panentheism balances transcendence and immanence – where the spirit of God/Allah ﷻ (ruh al-qudus), which could well be a mysteriously ‘entangled energy’ from a pro-science viewpoint, unites all objects in Creation.44

Hayra, Joyfully Bewildered

Sufis believe this simultaneity of God’s transcendence (tanzih) and immanence (tashbih) is entirely plausible but cannot be understood purely rationally;45 it is better to see & know it experientially, through intimate worship or ihsan, aided by mystical zikr-plus practices, and resulting in irfan. To those non-Sufis who are groomed to be slaves to strictures, which is what a Traditionalist in the strongest sense is (ahl-e-hadith), any stand that contradicts strict transcendence is suspect.

For the few Sufis who attained irfan or marifa, it was an ineffable experience, i.e. difficult to describe, so they relied on sincere but cryptic phrases or stories, akin to a koan in Zen Buddhism. ‘If you seek Him, you will never find Him. But if you do not seek Him, He will not reveal Himself to you’ exemplifies this approach. Bewilderment (hayra) was welcomed as a state of existential honesty, the inverse of the rational philosopher’s goal.46 ‘Hayra is a state of finding and knowing God and of not-finding and not-Knowing Him at the same time’.47 Such a state implies fallibilism, which is the opposite of Traditional Islam’s cult of certitude. Sufi scholars find joy in narrating moments of bewilderment. ‘He is near and far, both transcendent and immanent, both absent and present, both this and not that’. ‘True understanding of God/Allah ﷻ ‘can only be achieved through perplexity and bewilderment’ and ‘incapacity to perceive is perception’.48 Reality is viewed as illusory and the veils need to be shed. ‘The gnostics see without knowledge, without insight, without information received, and without observation, without description, without veiling and without veil’.49 But is there a point to all this? ‘The thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it’.50

Unveil with Science

How to unveil reality, to truly see and deeply know? A downside of irfan or marifa is that it is impossible for an unbiased observer to validate the Sufi’s claims. This has led to many charlatans. Some Sufis appear legitimate since they possessed exceptional creative talents, publishing prolific prose and profound poetry, as with Ibn Arabi and Rumi. Due to their prodigy status, their legitimacy is sustained despite some fantastical claims, especially in the case of Ibn Arabi.51 Other Sufis appear legitimate since they displayed extraordinary powers of empathy, effortlessly attracting many disciples, despite no formal output or outreach, as in the case of Abdul Qadir Gilani (d. 1166), Moinuddin Chisti (d. 1236), and Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (d. 1986). But how can we validate a claim of irfan, of a higher knowledge, in the absence of extraordinary talents?

Post-Sufis acknowledge some mystical practices are not without merit, for those temperamentally inclined, and are especially helpful in boosting holistic mental health. However, God/Allah ﷻ also self-discloses via verifiable science for our benefit. Hence, whenever feasible, the cultivation of a pro-science temperament, and the pursuit of aql and ilm, especially in the counter-intuitive subfields of modern physics, should be a preferred path to unveil reality, and will ultimately help in solving the Big Five problems.

Footnotes

  1. Even ibn Arabi, the patron philosopher of Sufism, did not claim to be a Sufi. See Chittick, W.C., ibn Arabi, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online. Rumi is popular as a paragon of Sufism, but in Shiite Iran, where Sufism is disapproved, Rumi continues to be celebrated as a gnostic (an arif who attains marifa). See Knysh, A., Sufism, A New History of Islamic Mysticism, 37-38.
  2. The definitions of ihsan, irfan, marifa differ by scholar, with the latter two being roughly equivalent.
  3. MJ Kister, Al-Taḥannuth: An Inquiry into the Meaning of a Term, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 1968.
  4. Schimmel, A., Mystical Dimensions of Islam, xiii – xxiii
  5. Knysh, A., Sufism, A New History of Islamic Mysticism, op. cit., 143
  6. The exploitation of Sufism by pretenders was widely known, and in the 11th century it was often said, ‘Today Sufism is a name without reality, but formerly it was a reality without a name.’, Schimmel, op. cit., 20-22.
  7. Ihsan is ‘not discussed by the most vocal of the scholars who speak for Islam, that is, the jurists (fuquha). By self-definition they limit their field of vision to the Sharia…’. See Chittick, W. C., Sufism, A Beginner’s Guide, 5.
  8. Did the ascetic-mystical practices of tahannuth continue after the Quranic revelation? There is no scholarly consensus on this. Early Sufis believed the Prophet ﷺ continued his tahannuth privately, and passed on his esoteric methods through his son-in-law, Khalifa Ali, which explains why most Sufi orders, even in the Sunni world, trace their silisila back to Ali (except the Naqshbandi who trace back to Khalifa Abu Bakr). The non-Sufi Traditionalists believe tahannuth ended, and was replaced by itikaf, which is solitary meditation performed by his pious companions (sahaba) in the mosque. Scholars believe the origin of the word Sufi might lie in these early in-mosque meditators who were poor; they wore coarse wool (suf) clothes and often sat on a mosque bench (suffa).
  9. Schimmel, op. cit.., 30-31.
  10. The placebo effect’s role in both physical and mental healing is widely acknowledged by scientists but is poorly understood. It is possible that whatever mysterious processes cause the placebo effect also influence the impact of Sufi practices on the human mind. However, that is not to say that such practices are secular and limited to the placebo effect.
  11. Goleman & Davidson, Altered Traits, 232-36.
  12. Radical Love, the title of Omid Safi’s excellent book, best describes the high that Sufis experience as they turn inward toward the unseen.
  13. Goleman & Davidson, Altered Traits, 176-78.
  14. Marshall Hodgson, a widely respected scholar, advanced the temperament thesis. See Knysh, op. cit., 19-20.
  15. ‘Normal’ is that subset of reality this is evolutionarily adaptive; it differs substantially between humans, and even more so across species. For example, when it comes to color perception, some species, like human males, are partially color blind, while some like the octopus are almost entirely so, while others like the hummingbird see richer ultraviolet colors.
  16. Robert Ornstein, God 4.0, p. 124. The concept of a ‘reducing valve’ originates with Aldous Huxley, who believed our mental reducing valve delivers us a ‘Mind at Small’, a small fraction of reality, in a normal waking state. However, we can open up that valve a tiny bit more to access a greater fraction of the ‘Mind at Large’ through psychoactive drugs. Sufis, and mystics of other traditions, believe the valve can be opened up without chemicals, through esoteric practices.
  17. See Donald Hoffman’s TED Talk, Do We See Reality As It Is?
  18. Jawer M. and Micozzi M., Your Emotional Type, p. 9.
  19. Measuring transliminality and its impact on religious belief is difficult and imprecise but has been attempted by researchers via questionnaires. See Thalbourne, M. and Delin, P., Transliminality: Its relation to dream life, religiosity and mystical experience, International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 1999.
  20. Ornstein, p. 225-235.
  21. Tanya Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, p. 195-202.
  22. Ornstein, p. 167.
  23. This extra dimension of depth leads to the realization that a ‘full-grown’ Sufi is a personification of the The Tree of Life, with its metaphorical roots in Heaven. See Lings, M., What is Sufism, 14.
  24. Rabia is widely respected as a ‘second spotless Mary’ and one who ‘introduced the element of selfless love and gave Sufism the true hue of mysticism’. Schimmel, op. cit., 38-40, 426. Her supplication (dua) is adored, ‘O God! If I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise. But if I worship You for Your Own sake, grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.’
  25. Safi, O., Did the Two Oceans Meet, p. 87, Jl. of the Muhyiddin Ibn °Arabi Society, vol. xxvi (1999): 87.
  26. Knysh, 139, 151-52. It often takes years or decades of guidance from the Shaykh of your tariqa to advance to the higher stations of the mystical path. A mentor-disciple (shaykh-murid) bond develops, where the mentor is often demanding (shaykh al-tarbiya), the murid checks his ego at the door. The murid ‘must love his Shaykh with extraordinary love’ and ‘submit unconditionally to the will of their mentors’. Thus it is unlikely that there will be objectivity in assessing the mystical teacher.
  27. Knysh, 148.
  28. The Quran modestly claims to be merely a reminder of revelations to a very large number of prior Prophets, that were lost or corrupted by prior generations, albeit customized to address the dire social evils of 7th c. CE Arabia. The core ideas in Traditional Islam can be traced back to the pre-Quranic and non-Abrahamic era; for example, the idea of dunya being merely a brief test for an everlasting akhira appears to originate both in Christian and Neoplatonic schools of thought. In the latter, Plotinus (d. 270 CE) speaks of worldly life as ‘a rehearsal for life after death’. For Plotinus, who is a ‘faithful interpreter of Plato’, the path to the afterlife and the divine absolute, The One, is a ‘flight of the alone to the Alone’, and achieved through a combination of pure reason and love (eros).’ See Knysh, 125-127.
  29. Knysh, 130, 134, appears to lean toward the foreign origin hypothesis, but fails to assess whether any residue of tahannuth might have influenced Ibn Arabi. Asserting such links is surely speculative, but we must not reject the possibility, since we just do not know. Knysh notes that there are surprising coincidences between Sufi and Hellenic thought, and in particular between the thought of Ibn Arabi and the Syrian-Christian Neoplatonist thinker Pseudo-Dionysius (d. 500 CE perhaps). The latter, who writes about 700 years prior to Ibn Arabi, advanced allegorical-esoteric interpretation and taught that ‘the mystical secrets of sacred scripture… can only be revealed to the “real lovers of holiness”, because their longing for God is stronger and purer than that of the “lower strata” of people’.
  30. Chittick, 76. Rumi is commonly viewed as Turkish, but is the pride of Persia. He is of Afghan-Tajik heritage in present terms, and of Khorasan in medieval terms (the eastern end of the Persian empire). He wrote primarily in Arabized-Farsi.
  31. Rumi’s father, Bahauddin, was a noted theologian, Rumi taught Traditional Islamic sciences before gaining fame as a mystic and poet, and his son Alaudddin, was the ‘pride of professors’. Schimmel, op. cit., 311-13.
  32. The term sulh-e kul, an Arabic term meaning peace and love to all, or universal peace, may not have been popularized until a few centuries later in the Indian Mughal Empire (the Turko-Persian arm of the Mongol empire).
  33. The scrim analogy is owed to Fadiman, J. and Frager, R., Essential Sufism, p. 45. This notion of reality being illusory has parallels to Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ and to the ‘Red Pill’ in the movie The Matrix.
  34. ‘The Sufis are the precursors of modern psychology’s conceptions of awareness… meditation, among other exercises, is a way of turning down the restrictions that normally limit awareness’. The aim is to remove the ‘automaticity and selectivity of ordinary awareness’. See Ornstein, R., Meditation and Modern Psychology, p. 60-61.
  35. Sapolsky, Robert, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
  36. The ocean motif is popular in Sufi thought. Ibn Arabi prayed ‘Enter me, O Lord, into the deep of the Ocean of Thine Infinite Oneness’. See Lings, op. cit., 11
  37. Monism is compatible with physics, dualism is not. If mass and energy are interchangeable (they are), and if all energy had a common origin in the Big Bang (it did), and if the laws of physics underpin all other laws (they do), and if physicists don’t really know how those laws took hold to begin with (they don’t), then it is likely that whatever our unknowable God/Allah is, He (or She or It) is the source of that initial energy and those laws. Since that same energy and those foundational laws are present in nature today, and we are inevitably a part of nature, we arrive at the immanent view, and are obliged to support monism.
  38. Rumi believes Hallaj’s claim of ana al-Haqq reflects utter humility since it really means: I am nonentity, I am nothing. See Chittick, W.C., The Sufi Doctrine of Rumi, 79. If so, it would resemble the not-self doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism, which is a subset of the broader doctrine of emptiness, even though it is unlikely that Sufis of that era were familiar with Buddhist thought. See Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True, 203.
  39. In the execution of both Hallaj and Socrates, some scholars believe the real cause may have been political; it was not what they said but the size and composition of their audience, and the potential for social instability, i.e. a threat to the ruling elite.
  40. Science supports the ‘oneness’ of matter and energy at the subatomic level, with the concept of mass-energy equivalence, and this is consistent with monism.
  41. al Biruni (d. 1048) proposed that polytheists are really monotheists if you dare to dig deep enough, since they posit a single Creator God, e.g. the Brahman in Hindu tradition, who has lesser deities who assist him, a system of henotheism. See Sachau, E.C., Alberuni’s India. He (or She or It) appears to humans in a variety of forms, including relatable idols. However, diehard monotheists, which all Traditional Muslims are, find this hypothesis absurd, but it is no more fanciful than, say, the mysterious role of the jinn in the Quran. Centuries later, a syncretic Mughal prince Dara Shikoh echoes this, observing that Sufism and Advaita Vedanta are essentially the same, with a surface difference of terminology. See Lings, op. cit., 99, and Schimmel, op. cit., 387.
  42. The term monism originates with monad, depicted by a dot inside a circle, to denote the first metaphysical being, as proposed by Pythagoras (d. 495 BCE). But since we now know that Pythagoras likely studied in India, and the famous Pythagorean theorem was used in India centuries prior, it begs the question – did Greek monism derive from the original Vedic concept of the Brahman? This would be hard to prove, just as it is hard to prove another likely conjecture, that the Greeks derived a lot of their wisdom from the prolific Egyptians nearby, as Martin Bernal, the author of Black Athena, controversially attempted to do.
  43. ‘Panentheism considers God and the world to be inter-related with the world being in God and God being in the world… offers an increasingly popular alternative to classical theism’. See Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online. Other systems of thought that are compatible with panentheism include Taoism and the Jewish tzimtzum. See Reza Aslan, God: A Human History, 277.
  44. Entanglement is a mysterious phenomenon. Einstein famously called it ‘spooky action at a distance’. Yet it has been validated by recent experiments. However, the exact mechanism at play, and the question of whether it involves any energy transfer remains a hot research topic.
  45. ‘To break the ink-pots and to tear the books’ was viewed as a prerequisite for gnosis. See Schimmel, op. cit., 17. But BioMuslims disagree; in the light of God’s self-disclosure through science, and the resulting explosion of knowledge, the post-Sufi must instead redirect his/her reason.
  46. Almond, I., ‘The Honesty of the Perplexed: Derrida and Ibn Arabi on Bewilderment‘, Jl. of the American Academy of Religion, Sep. 2022.
  47. Knysh, op. cit., 132.
  48. Chittick, W.C., Sufism, A Beginner’s Guide, 42.
  49. Schimmel, op. cit., 43.
  50. Fadiman and Frager., op. cit., p. 37
  51. The young Ibn Arabi cultivated super-sensory experiences, including spending long hours in cemeteries communing with the dead. Also, he claims a meeting with God where he is told he is the seal of sainthood. During his travels to Makkah, he has another vision where he is told the same. There he also has a meeting with a mysterious ‘eternal youth’ who is a fusion of opposites and in whose wholeness all tensions are resolved. See R.W.J. Austin, Ibn Arabi: The Bezels of Wisdom, 3, 6.