the stumbling mystic

Seeing as I’m on something of a roll here, making up for all that lost blogging time, I have one more link to drop. This Quantum World is the website of Ulrich Mohrhoff, who teaches contemporary physics and quantum philosophy at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in Pondicherry, India. He is interested in the ontological implications of quantum physics, and has published a number of papers on this subject.

This is no “What the Bleep”, folks. Mohrhoff is the real deal, and knows what he’s talking about: he is one of those rare people who understands both spirituality (specifically Vedanta and the integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother) and science. (He’s also the editor of Anti-Matters.) I’ve had some delightful conversations with him on his blog. I would recommend reading his entry commenting on a recent article by Paul Davies on science and faith.

I am currently reading the skeptic Taner Edis’s book The Ghost in the Universe: God in Light of Modern Science. I wasn’t interested in most of the book as it was an attack on religion, and not being religious, it didn’t apply to my own views at all. However, I was interested in chapter 7, entitled “Of Mystics and Machines”, which was a criticism of mysticism.

I’ve barely made it through the first two pages, and it is already clear to me that Edis is your run-of-the-mill skeptic who is often a good critic of religion, but doesn’t have the foggiest clue what he’s talking about when it comes to mysticism. I wanted to read this chapter because I think not enough of us in the spiritual-but-not-religious camp converse with atheists (no doubt there are anxieties on all sides), which I think is sad, because most atheists and agnostics are actually quite spiritually receptive. Secondly, I find that reading skeptical points of view keeps my ego in check, disciplines me intellectually, and also allows me to write down a few responses to show that most skeptics are just not aware of what real mysticism is. They are attacking a strawman, a version of mysticism that is just human egoism again in a “New Age” packaging, translative (as opposed to transformative) spirituality couched in nonreligious language, the ego dressed in drag. This distinction is so subtle that it really requires a deep experience or two to even start developing the inner discernment to be able to tell the difference.

However, it must be said that while I know plenty of spiritual atheists and agnostics, professional skeptics are another crowd altogether. People who are debunking in order to make a living can be very dogmatic, and frustratingly so. They can be arrogant and territorial, and see themselves as crusading to save the world from superstition. I grant that such groups are playing a valid role — indeed, as long as New Age naivete and undisciplined spiritual practitioners exist (such as myself, no doubt! ), skepticism is a much-needed antidote and we ought to graciously accept it (and the Mother said that atheism has to exist to counter organized religion). But skeptics can be an unnecessary obstacle for sincere seekers at times, too. To Taner Edis’ credit, I don’t think he’s really a “professional skeptic” per se, but he’s still too rigid for my taste.

Reading this chapter has reminded me of a post I have been meaning to write for ages now; it lies half-written, waiting for me to complete it. This post is meant to be an essay of how I arrived at my faith after being an agnostic. Actually, even after my first kundalini awakening, which was very intense, and involved a brief descent of Ananda, I still became skeptical again. How and why did I refuse to return to skepticism in the long term, then? This is the subject of that essay. I haven’t been able to finish it because it ended up becoming so long — I started looking at everything from a lot of different angles.

My position is that intellectually one is forever stuck at radical agnosticism. One can’t say that the transrational consciousness of the mystics isn’t real; one can only say that it might be real, it might not, but one can never be sure. I am not an aspiring mystic because I became intellectually convinced about mysticism; I am an aspiring mystic because something higher than the intellect took hold of me, and currently still has a firm grip over me (mystics call it Divine Love ). So I am always somewhat disappointed by the hubris of skeptics who don’t even know what they are denying. My aim is never to “convert” anyone — that isn’t my responsibility — but merely to point out the limitations of the rational intellect. So here are some of my initial notes on Edis’s book. The page numbers are given with each quote, followed by my comments. The chapter is entitled “Of Mystics and Machines”.

Mystics, or at least some of them, claim a direct experience of God. They also produce exasperatingly verbose poetry about their indescribable God, but that is part of the mystique of mysticism. The more incomprehensible the verbiage, the surer the sign of an encounter with a God wholly other than us. (p. 211)

Comment: Immediately Edis demonstrates that he does not understand mysticism or spirituality. The God experienced through mysticism is in NO WAY wholly other than us. Quite the opposite! We find that God is our true Self, an underlying existential unity that is behind the appearances of division in the physical manifestation.

However, when we study mystical experience rather than sit around being impressed, we learn about our brains — not some sort of ultimate reality. For all our sublime experiences or powers of reason, we are biological machines. (p. 211)

Comment: It’s telling here to read Sri Aurobindo’s tongue-in-cheek comment about materialism . . .

‘. . . the whole world is a marvel; every operation of thought, speech or action is a miracle, a thing wonderful, obscure, occult and unknown. Even the sneer on the lips of the derider of occultism has to pass through a number of ill-understood processes before it can manifest itself on his face, yet the thing itself is the work of a second. That sneer is a much greater and more occult miracle than the precipitation of letters or the reading of the Akashic records. If Science is true, what more absurd, paradoxical and Rabelaisian miracle can there be than this, that a republic of small animalcules forming a mass of grey matter planned Austerlitz, wrote Hamlet or formulated the Vedanta philosophy? If I believed that strange dogma, I should no longer hold myself entitled to disbelieve anything. Materialism seems to me the most daring of occultisms, the most reckless and presumptuous exploiter of the principle, Credo quia impossibile, I believe it because it is impossible. If these minute cells can invent wireless telegraphy, why should it be impossible for them to precipitate letters or divine the past and the future? Until one can say of investigation “It is finished” and of knowledge “There is nothing beyond”, no one has a right to set down men as charlatans because they profess to be the pioneers of a new kind of Science.’

Can’t help but smile at that.

God should have been a necessary being; declared by the stars above, revealed by prophets, heralded by miracles. Unfortunately, as we learn more about the world, God disappears from public view. We might still feel a hint of an infinite power in an inspiring church service, or lose ourselves in a Quran recitation. But such feelings are fragile, ready to evaporate when we step back into a world of speeding automobiles and noisy children. (p. 211)

Comment: Two points here. One is that Edis is confusing “feeling” or “emotion” with awareness of the soul or a wider Reality. People who have had mystical experiences know fully well that the two are very distinct. Authentic spirituality is really quite the opposite of sentimentalism; it requires tremendous self-control and self-discipline. Learning to control one’s passions and emotions is one of the earliest things one realizes one has to do in order to prepare oneself for the cultivation of an awareness of higher realities. Make no mistake about it: authentic spirituality is hard, few have the courage to start the process, and very, very few actually reach the destination (or at least that has been the situation up until now in human history; it may be changing with so many people now having spontaneous psychospiritual emergencies).

Secondly, a person who is fully enlightened is always enlightened, period. Whether moving among noisy children or speedy automobiles or caught in a war-torn situation, they never lose that inner calm. Now Edis will not accept any of my examples but for what it’s worth, people like Sri Aurobindo, the Mother, Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Ramana Maharishi, were in a constant state of calm, as reported by them and recorded in their writings. A related phenomenon is that when “normal” people enter the vicinity of people with this sort of spiritual presence, they experience their minds going unusually silent automatically. I have experienced this myself — whenever I have entered the presence of a great soul, my mind has automatically gone quiet. It requires a bit of receptivity on the part of the devotee, but it is indeed something that a lot of folks experience around people and places that are said to have an authentic spiritual presence.

More palateable examples for Edis might be recent neuroscientific research showing that longtime Buddhist meditators are able to keep their brain activity to a minimum even in extremely noisy situations.

Having said this, genuine, complete enlightenment is extremely rare and always has been. Most people will glimpse those higher states of calm and equanimity but will fall back into the old consciousness which seeks to perpetuate itself and prevent a full transformation. Again, this is commonly acknowledged and understood in mystical phenomenology.

Emotion is, of course, vital to religions; many strive to make even everyday life a religious experience. We may not always feel the spirit, but religions still weave all that is significant to us into a whole way of life. Our Gods are never just ways to explain the world. Moreover, an intense religious experience is psychologically compelling in a way no involved analysis can be. (p. 212)

Comments: As I said above, emotion is vital to religion (which is indeed quite neurotic), but the control of emotions is CENTRAL to spirituality.

Moreover, an intense religious experience, by the way, is not only meant to be a pleasurable or pleasant sensation, it is a way to make meaning out of the tragedies and traumas of life. It is indeed explanatory and analytical in its own way, as many people who have suffered traumas and had healing experiences will attest to. In fact I often say that what I learned from my spiritual experiences, I could not have learned from even a lifetime of reading books. I developed an aspiration for self-giving and a willingness for self-sacrifice — what book or scientific experiment could have ever taught me that? The whole task of spirituality is to help us deal with our relative knowledge, our attachment to both pain and fleeting pleasures, and the limited, imperfect perception that we have, while showing us a way out of all these limitations.

And as far as analytical, painful precision goes, one only has to read Sri Aurobindo’s Record of Yoga to see how precisely he records his spiritual experiences and maps out what he is “seeing”. The precision with which mystics train their attention and learn to control it is quite frankly superhuman, and is no different from a scientist studying a quark with a microscope in a laboratory. The only difference is that mystics turn that microscope inward, and observe themselves with an attention and precision that is perhaps even more intense (and certainly far more painful — for who can honestly look within and face their limitations for a sustained period without going crazy?) than that of the scientist.

The trouble is, while vital to spiritual life, religious experience is rather feeble as an argument. A prophet may feel an inner certainty that the Space Brothers are watching over us from their flying saucers, but this does not add to the credibility of her claims. She might reach the heights of rapture when contemplating the coming fleet of UFOs, but her hopes are still wildly unlikely. If anything, beliefs backed up by rapturous emotions are doubly suspicious — it is too tempting to accept them uncritically. (p. 212)

Comment: Two points here … First, note that Edis cites what would be considered very low-grade spiritual experiences. This is because of his anti-mysticism bias right at the outset. Very conveniently, he would much rather mention UFOs and Space Brothers and what-not, instead of the poetry of William Blake, the literature of Marcel Proust, Sri Aurobindo’s unparalleled contributions to esoteric philosophy and poetry, and a whole host of genius-level accomplishments that many spiritual realizers, mystics and spiritually-awake people have attained. Not only “professional” mystics, but also numerous remarkable individuals have had profound spiritual/mystical experiences: Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Gottfried Leibniz, J. S. Bach, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rene Descartes, Franz Kafka, Walt Whitman, Honore Balzac, G. W. F. Hegel, William James, Plato, Simone Weil, and so on. Even the prophet of the death of God, the mystic of will-worship, Nietzsche, might have had a borderline spiritual experience which turned psychotic. I highly recommend that everyone read the chapter on genius in Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century for more details on the relationship of mysticism to genius. From my own experiences, I can tell you that authentic spiritual experiences often do increase intelligence, memory, and one’s capacity for creativity, as that is what I’ve subjectively experienced as happening to myself.

Heck, even arch-skeptic Richard Feynman used to say that he would feel himself ascending into a world of Platonic forms, and from that intuitive experience, he would abstract away a mental equation (now Feynman would probably not call this a “mystical experience” but for mystics this sort of thing is often a precursor to authentic spiritual experiences). So the experience of a wider consciousness that seems to inspire us isn’t even exclusively the purview of the mystics!

On the other hand, the experiences of things like UFOs are widely regarded as being a kind of immature literalism or the result of encounters with lower-grade astral forces.

Secondly, NO serious spiritual teacher ever tells you to accept your initial spiritual experiences uncritically. It is widely documented in mystical phenomenology and understood that beginners will experience ego inflation and immediately get “puffed up” as they experience truths that are too vast and too wide for them to assimilate and express. The lower being tries to take over the experience and corrupts it. This happens to almost everyone except the most spiritually gifted who might achieve enlightenment through just one or two experiences. So at least while humanity is still stuck in animality and in its lower nature, the mental noise, the passions and emotions will obscure and corrupt the clarity and direct knowing of the higher nature or experience. You MUST be skeptical of your initial experiences; this is part of the spiritual journey and without this kind of healthy skepticism one can easily fall into all sorts of delusions. If Edis had familiarized himself with mystical literature he would have found out that this is well-known among the spiritual giants.

I will have to take a raincheck and continue this later, as it’s now nearly 3 a.m. But I’ve flipped through the chapter and frankly these are well-known skeptical objections to spirituality and they are easily answered by anyone with even a minimal amount of gnosis. All these objections do for me is demonstrate that the rational mind is limited and that both its affirmations and its denials of the Divine are equally metaphors for the present state of the manifest universe.

Oh, lord help me, I think I’m going into fits right now …

Mike Myers (of Austin Powers fame for those who are even more out of it than I am) is playing a spiritual guru in an upcoming movie called The Love Guru. Myers plays a man who was abandoned by his American parents at an ashram in India and was raised there. Now he’s going to America to make his name in the world of New Age self-help and narcissism. A brief clip of Myers playing Guru Pitka:

As if Guruphiliac and similar sites weren’t enough, Myers’ comedic genius and sardonic wit is sure to chip away at the egos of self-proclaimed gurus and charlatans everywhere in the spiritual supermarket.

Personally, I’m not really a big fan of the Austin Powers style of humour — it’s a little too crude for me — but judging from the trailer and Guru Pitka’s YouTube channel, the satire in this film is much more witty and palateable than that. It’s even more timely now that gurus have started putting up videos on YouTube and even giving darshans and initiating people via YouTube! Now, I don’t think that the Internet can’t be used to transmit spirituality (it can, and in my own experiences it often has), but the crass commercialism and mass appeal of some of these YouTube gurus makes me pretty skeptical and also makes me think that the potential for delusion is quite high here.

I haven’t laughed this much since I read this Onion-style parody of spiritual enlightenment some time back … comedians are literally the prophets of the postmodern age, where nothing makes sense anymore and humor helps us believe in a purpose and meaning to life.

By the way, in the video above, Myers keeps chanting “Mariska Hargitay” … this is not a Sanskrit chant, but the name of a very attractive actress who plays Detective Benson on the show Law and Order … gosh, I’m laughing again now!

Addendum: By the way, Guru Pitka’s definition of “guru” is most likely incorrect and is usually something that frauds and charlatans say. For more information, see Alan Kazlev’s page The Meaning of the Word Guru.

My heart has become capable of every form; it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks, and a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Ka’ba, and the tablets of the Torah and the book of the Koran. I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love’s camels take, that is my religion and my faith.
— Ibn al-Arabi

I don’t know if I have linked to this before, but The Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society is an excellent resource for those who wish to get a deeper understanding of Islamic mysticism.

The podcasts in particular were really informative for me, as were the thematic articles. The podcast I enjoyed the most was The Globalisation of Consciousness by Peter Yiangou.

There is an interesting presentation up at the Perceiving Reality website. This is a Kabbalah site, and teaches Jewish mysticism, a fascinating subject. Some of their videos are quite funny and insightful, so I would definitely give this a go! I include one of my favourite ones in this post below:

It’s interesting that the parent site, Ari Online Kabbalah Education Center, is based on the teachings of Rabbi Isaac Luria. Isaac Luria was probably the greatest Kabbalist mystic, and taught that the world could be physically redeemed — this is the concept of Tikkun — and therefore he was not that different from Sri Aurobindo. But as I always say to people, the remarkable thing about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is their lack of ethnocentric mythologizing and religious distortion, and their marvellous intellectual clarity. Rabbi Isaac Luria and his followers, for all their insights, could never really get away from the romantic conception of Israel as the chosen nation, and from a rigidly Judaic framework. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was similarly limited by the theology of his time.

With that caveat in mind, I heartily recommend some of these videos.

In my cognition course this semester, we recently studied memory systems. This was an interesting experience for me, because I was reading my assigned texts, the chapter on memory from the marvellously thought-provoking book Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century published by the scholars at Esalen, and Sri Aurobindo’s chapters on memory from his magnum opus, The Life Divine.

I won’t get into all the details here, but this has been quite an eye-opener for me! Alan Gauld, who authored the memory chapter in Irreducible Mind argued quite convincingly, in my opinion, that most modern theories of memory never really answer the actual question — what is memory? Modern theories of memory see memory as something encoded in the physical synapses of various areas of the human brain, i.e. the experience of memory is reduced to electrophysiological “traces” in the brain. To sum up Gauld’s argument against this view very briefly, the question he raises is: how do memory-images differ from images of immediate sense-perception in our minds? How do we know that a particular “image” happened in the past? Most theories argue that different images are contiguously associated with other images or coordinates that help us locate that image in the past. But this, according to Gauld, leads to an infinite regress. Those temporal “coordinates” are themselves memory-images, and so you always end up in a situation where memory-images are used to explain memory-images, which are used to explain memory-images, and so on. In short, the prevailing scientific theories on memory are purely descriptive, and really explain nothing about what memory is and why we experience it at all. We know that certain parts of the brain are associated with certain types of memories, and we know that certain types of chemicals can destroy certain memories, but whether the brain and these chemicals are causing the experience of memory or merely mediating it is a question that science is not able to answer at this point.

Someone might argue that an “image” corresponding to a “current” sense-perception involves a feedback from the environment, and is thus perceived as being in the present moment, whereas a memory-image doesn’t involve environmental feedback and so is perceived as being in the past. But this idea also has its flaws; how do we then distinguish between memory-images (in the past) and imaginary images (that have never concretely existed in the environment at all)?

To sum up: why on earth should we even experience memory in the first place? Why should we be able to situate our experiences in time? And how is memory distinguishable from other mental phenomena such as imagination? Modern cognitive science and neuroscience simply has no answer for these questions. If all you have are electrophysiological traces in the brain, that explains nothing about these phenomena.

Now let’s look at what Sri Aurobindo has to say on this subject. This is a quote from the chapter, ‘Memory, Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance’ in The Life Divine:

Memory, in the dividing consciousness, is a crutch upon which mind supports itself as it stumbles on driven helplessly, without possibility of stay or pause, in the rushing speed of Time. Memory is a poverty-stricken substitute for an integral direct abiding consciousness of self and a direct integral or global perception of things. Mind can only have the direct consciousness of self in the moment of its present being; it can only have some half-direct perception of things as they are offered to it in the present moment of time and the immediate field of space and seized by the senses. It makes up for its deficiency by memory, imagination, thought, idea-symbols of various kinds.

Which brings us back always to the key point, the central message of spirituality. My friend Bob, on being shown the above quote, said to me: “The purpose of life, including eternal life, cannot be attained by a granular spatiotemporal self, but always in a present moment that partakes of the perception of all that is and not all in a general sense, but every thing in particular and every particular thing as it participates in the vastness that we belong to.” There is a wider Reality free of the limitations of time and space (although it is also immanent within that limited manifestation of itself), and it’s that Reality, that Eternal Now, which when realized, can give us the unlimited, complete perception we all desire so ardently.

In general, the current fad in cognitive science and neuroscience to try to reduce all mental phenomena to neural substrates in the brain is in my opinion completely baseless. I think we have become very excited by our neuroimaging technologies and are getting totally carried away — all this brain scanning is purely descriptive and it doesn’t really prove anything or answer any of the big questions.

The larger question for me is whether psychology can ever be a true “science” in the sense that physics is. Here I think the answer is clearly “no”. The objective methods of science are hugely effective on extremely small scales when working with inanimate matter. They are less effective with living beings, and are the least effective with sentient, self-conscious beings like human beings. Applying objective science to human behavior has led to absurdities like Skinner’s behaviorism, which just ignores subjectivity altogether (bringing to mind the statement of Kashmir Shaivism that for a conscious being to deny his consciousness is like using your tongue to say you cannot speak).

My new hero in this area is William R. Uttal, whose book The New Phrenology: The Limits of Localizing Cognitive Processes in the Brain I’m currently reading. In this and other books, Uttal deconstructs neuroreductionism, arguing that it is little more than a modern form of phrenology, and that in many ways psychology can probably never be a real science as the mind is impossible to measure. The description for The New Phrenology reads:

William Uttal is concerned that in an effort to prove itself a hard science, psychology may have thrown away one of its most important methodological tools — a critical analysis of the fundamental assumptions that underlie day-to-day empirical research. In this book Uttal addresses the question of localization: whether psychological processes can be defined and isolated in a way that permits them to be associated with particular brain regions.

New, noninvasive imaging technologies allow us to observe the brain while it is actively engaged in mental activities. Uttal cautions, however, that the excitement of these new research tools can lead to a neuroreductionist wild goose chase. With more and more cognitive neuroscientific data forthcoming, it becomes critical to question their limitations as well as their potential. Uttal reviews the history of localization theory, presents the difficulties of defining cognitive processes, and examines the conceptual and technical difficulties that should make us cautious about falling victim to what may be a “neo-phrenological” fad.

I think the key is to understand these research methods and technologies more deeply, and articulate clearly what they do tell us while acknowledging that they are ultimately pretty limited as far as answering any of the big questions goes — i.e. consciousness, free will, meaning/semantics, etc.

Addendum: A related, useful article from Anti-Matters is called Memory Without a Trace, and it’s by the longtime researcher of the paranormal, Stephen Braude. Another good discussion of this subject; a must-read if you’re interested in memory.

A few weeks back, a friend took me to see the art exhibit I Want to Believe by Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang on display at the Guggenheim Museum. It was a powerful, electric exhibit, with the artist’s works arranged all around the rotunda of the Guggenheim. His art incorporates Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and even Maoism. A review from The New York Times can be read here.

Here I want to focus on the piece that moved me the most. It was entitled “Head On”, and it consisted of a train of ninety-nine life-sized wolves shown running ferociously toward some sort of perceived goal. All wolves are shown to be running, galloping and jumping up into the air, until eventually they hit an unyielding, invisible wall at the far end of the exhibition hall. The wolves meet the wall “head on”, and as the wolves right in the front go crashing down, those following them go down with the same force and determination with which they were originally running. The falling wolves start piling up, and the wolves in the lower ranks seem to be blind to this, caught up in the momentum, and rushing at the wall nonetheless.

The piece is an indictment of ideological thinking and mob mentality. Cai is alluding to the Berlin Wall with the invisible wall that the wolves crash into. In his commentary on this piece, he talks about how he is trying to show that every ideology is bound by time and space. Within the appropriate context, each ideology has the potential to generate momentum for change, but when an ideology tries to persist after its time is over, it inevitably hits its limitations — the invisible wall — and all those who are unable to stop running along with the movement will also hit those limitations and come crashing down. This is a cycle that humanity seems to be perpetually caught up in, led by its intellect and its passions, and it is a cycle that is very difficult to break out of.

This piece was rather breathtaking and awe-inspiring for me. And how true his commentary is. This is precisely why we, bound by the mental and vital beings, are so limited. It is only the cultivation of the psychic being that can liberate us from the chains of intellectual ideology and passionate sentimentalism.

Sri Aurobindo writes in The Human Cycle:

A religion of humanity means the growing realisation that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all one, that humanity is its highest present vehicle on Earth, that the human race and the human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here. It implies a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about a kingdom of this divine Spirit upon earth. By its growth within us oneness with our fellow-men will become the leading principle of all our Life, not merely a principle of cooperation but a deeper brotherhood, a real and an inner sense of unity and equality and a common life. There must be the realisation by the individual that only in the life of his fellowmen is his own life complete. There must be the realisation by the race that only on the free and full life of the individual can its own perfection and permanent happiness be founded. There must be too a discipline and a way of salvation in accordance with this religion, that is to say, a means by which it can be developed by each man within himself, so that it may be developed in the life of the race.

A spiritual oneness which would create a psychological oneness not dependent upon any intellectual or outward uniformity and compel a oneness of life not bound up with its mechanical means of unification, but ready always to enrich its secure unity by a free inner variation and a freely varied outer self-expression, this would be the basis for a higher type of human existence.

Ma, Sri Aurobindo: deliver us from the limitations and deceptions of our lower nature! Our bodies cannot fly, but our souls are already soaring. All we need is to cultivate a greater awareness of this.

The following is a quote from Debashish Banerji’s excellent talk, Detachment and the Integral Yoga:

Detachment in a spiritual sense is the development of another dimension within us, a dimension which coexists with our active personality but is outside of it. It is to find an inner freedom, to discover a part of the being that cannot be touched by external circumstances or by the outer being’s activities — a separation within between what we know as ourselves in the world and something which is intrinsic and connected to an infinite being, a sort of an immutable witnessing. That is detachment.

The whole article is well worth reading. He describes a lot of things in detail — how to develop a spiritual practice, how to actually cultivate a level of the mind which is free of thoughts or disidentified with them even as they occur in the outer mind, and how to learn to take the poise of the witness, the Purusha, which is the part of us that is already free. Most importantly, there is a spiritual transmission that comes through his words, and that had a really calming effect on me.

Last Thursday was Eid-i-Milad-un-Nabi, the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad. I attended an intense four-hour dhikr (dhikr means “remembrance of God”) session at the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order. For me it was a truly inspiring and rejuvenating experience. I can go into my head too much at times, and the rhythmic chanting of dhikr got me right out of my head and back into my body with a focus on the heart. I felt much more grounded after this session.

The ceremony was quite moving. First we offered salat (and if anyone wants to read the meanings and understand the deeper secrets of the Islamic prayers, look no further than the site of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order). For me it was doubly rewarding because I was able to reconnect with Muslim circles without the anxiety I usually feel (owing to my not-so-positive history with the Islamic religion in its outer manifestation). I also offered the Islamic salat for the first time in years — I had to revise the Arabic as I didn’t remember it in its entirety. That felt good!

After the salat, we heard inspiring talks from Shaykha Fariha al-Jerrahi and her guest from Turkey, Ismail Baba, who had been a contemporary of the founders of the Order. We sang mystical songs (I wish I could remember the words as some of them were so profound!) and read some of Lex Hixon’s powerful interpretations of the Quran and the biography of Prophet Muhammad. After this, we were engaged in a long dhikr session, which consisted of chanting “Hu” while holding hands, in tune with a rhythmic drum beat while Shaykha Fariha and others sang. Some people got very emotional during the dhikr, and started crying. Others started whirling, like the Sufi dervishes, but personally I didn’t have the sense of balance to do that without feeling dizzy! I have attended Sufi dhikr sessions in Pakistan as well — they are always incredible, like a rhythmic accapella performance.

Finally, we had a huge feast! Free food is always welcome as far as I’m concerned!

I also got a chance to speak to the Shaykha personally. She was incredibly warm and loving — she gave off a vibe of tenderness that you know can only come from the soul because of its spontaneity and sincerity. She instantly had a calming effect on me. I explained some of my history to her, and she was quite firm that what Sufism teaches is a direct spiritual transmission from the time of the Prophet Muhammad, passed down from heart to heart, and that this is, in fact, true Islam, not what I had been raised with. Moreover, she knew about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and so we had a good conversation. All in all, a very healing experience for me.

I ought to explain the symbol I’ve posted above. It is a symbol of two “Hu’s” juxtaposed against each other as mirror images, found inside Rumi’s tomb in Konya. “Hu” is the symbol of the thundering, powerful, ineffable silence of the Divine Presence — the idea is that if you chant “Hu” from the heart, you will find yourself immersed in that Presence. When I saw this image, I immediately perceived it as trying to transmit a nondual picture of Reality, showing that there is ultimately no distinction between Time and Eternity, and Creation and Creator — and that all the divisions and fragmentations are created by our own limited minds.

With the chants of “Hu” still ringing in my ears, I reached home and was compelled to read a poem by Sri Aurobindo entitled “Who” (interesting coincidence, no?). Here it is for your reading pleasure:

Who
Sri Aurobindo

In the blue of the sky, in the green of the forest,
Whose is the hand that has painted the glow?
When the winds were asleep in the womb of the ether,
Who was it roused them and bade them to blow?

He is lost in the heart, in the cavern of Nature,
He is found in the brain where He builds up the thought:
In the pattern and bloom of the flowers He is woven,
In the luminous net of the stars He is caught.

In the strength of a man, in the beauty of woman,
In the laugh of a boy, in the blush of a girl;
The hand that sent Jupiter spinning through heaven,
Spends all its cunning to fashion a curl.

These are His works and His veils and His shadows;
But where is He then? by what name is He known?
Is He Brahma or Vishnu? a man or a woman?
Bodied or bodiless? twin or alone?

We have love for a boy who is dark and resplendent,
A woman is lord of us, naked and fierce.
We have seen Him a-muse on the snow of the mountains,
We have watched Him at work in the heart of the spheres.

We will tell the whole world of His ways and His cunning:
He has rapture of torture and passion and pain;
He delights in our sorrow and drives us to weeping,
Then lures with His joy and His beauty again.

All music is only the sound of His laughter,
All beauty the smile of His passionate bliss;
Our lives are His heart-beats, our rapture the bridal
Of Radha and Krishna, our love is their kiss.

He is strength that is loud in the blare of the trumpets,
And He rides in the car and He strikes in the spears;
He slays without stint and is full of compassion;
He wars for the world and its ultimate years.

In the sweep of the worlds, in the surge of the ages,
Ineffable, mighty, majestic and pure,
Beyond the last pinnacle seized by the thinker
He is throned in His seats that for ever endure.

The Master of man and his infinite Lover,
He is close to our hearts, had we vision to see;
We are blind with our pride and the pomp of our passions,
We are bound in our thoughts where we hold ourselves free.

It is He in the sun who is ageless and deathless,
And into the midnight His shadow is thrown;
When darkness was blind and engulfed within darkness,
He was seated within it immense and alone.

Who we are will always remain a mystery . . . and we must let go of our lust for certainty, because the only rock-solid certainty is the ineffable Divine Presence beyond thoughts and beliefs.