The Primacy of Life and Consciousness

Posted on February 11, 2014 by sufiways

by Navid Zaidi

All things are one.  —Heraclitus, On the Universe  (540-480 BC)

Classical physics proposes that the universe was, until rather recently, a lifeless collection of particles bouncing against each other. Life and Consciousness arose by an unknown process and then proceeded to advance under Darwinian mechanisms.

We assume a universe separate from us ‘out there’ into which we have arrived accidentally on a temporary basis. The standard view is that the universe would exist even if it were empty of Life and in absence of Consciousness.

George Berkeley (Irish-Anglican Philosopher, 1685-1753), for whom the town and the university campus were named, said: ‘The only things we perceive are our perceptions.’

Without perception by a conscious observer, there can be no reality. Without the act of seeing, thinking, hearing—in short, conscious awareness—we have got nothingness. Nothing is perceived except the perceptions themselves, and nothing exists outside of Consciousness.

The universe which seems to us to be a collection of things is not  solid stuff occupying a space. It is not a thing but a free creative movement. There is no physical universe outside of Life and Consciousness.

Says Prof. Sir Arthur Eddington (British astrophysicist, 1882-1944) in his book Space, Time and Gravitation:

‘Mind filters out matter from the meaningless jumble of qualities, as the prism filters out the colours of the rainbow from the chaotic pulsations of the white light……..Is it too much to say that the mind’s search for permanence has created the world of physics?’

The last sentence in this passage has a deep meaning. The passing show of the world of physics, which the mind has created in its search for permanence, is rooted in Life and Consciousness.

We are told that the laws of the universe somehow produced the observer in the first place! However, it seems that the observer creates reality and not the other way around.

Explains Robert Lanza, MD, one of the most respected scientists in the world today, in his book Biocentrism:

Consider the seemingly undeniable logic that our kitchen is always there whether or not we are in it. At night, we turn the lights off and leave for our bedrooms. We think that, of course, the kitchen is there, all night, unseen. But consider: the stove, the refrigerator and everything else are composed of shimmering swarm of energy. Quantum theory tells us that none of those subatomic particles actually exists in a definite place. Rather, they merely exist as a range of possibilities that are unmanifest. In the presence of an observer, that is, when we go back to the kitchen- each one’s wave function collapses and it assumes an actual position, a physical reality. Until then, it’s merely a range of possibilities.

So, while we may think that the kitchen as we remember it was ‘there’ in our absence, the reality is that nothing could be present when a consciousness is not interacting. What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness.

What this means is that when we do not look at the Moon, the Moon vanishes; that’s obvious enough. If we still think of the Moon and believe that it’s out there orbiting the Earth, all such thoughts are mental construct.

Sight, touch and smell- all these sensations are experienced in mind alone. None are ‘out there’ except by convention of language and utility. Everything we observe or feel is the direct interaction of energy and mind. The Grand Canyon or the Taj Mahal are real only when we go there!

In summary, Life is the fundamental fact of the universe. Its existence does not seem to be derived from physical laws and it has nothing to do with structure or function per se.

Says Sir Dr Allama Iqbal (Indian poet-philosopher, 1877-1938) in the introduction to his epic poem The Secrets of the Self:

Life is a forward assimilative movement. It removes all obstructions in its march by assimilating them. Its essence is the continual creation of desires and ideals, and for the purpose of its preservation and expansion it has invented or developed out of itself certain instruments, e.g. senses, intellect etc. which help it to assimilate obstructions.

Consciousness is a deflection from Life. It is not a substance but a purely spiritual principle of Life. This worldview calls into question the nature and reality of the universe. If the universe before us is ‘Consciousness’ then it shifts the focus from a cold, inert and external universe to issues such as how is your consciousness related to mine and that of the animals and, perhaps, plants as well.

Adopted From:

Robert Lanza, MD:  Biocentrism

Sir Arthur Eddington: Space, Time and Gravitation

Sir Muhammad Iqbal:  The Secrets of the Self

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Nasruddin’s Walk: How to Fail Better

Posted on February 4, 2014 by sufiways

by Modaser Shah

“We are still not where we are going, but we are still not where we were.”—Natasha Jasefowitz in 2500 Years of Wisdom by D.W.Brown

“Menschen werden als Originale geboren, die meisten sterben als Schablonen.”—Kierkegaard in Ganzheitlicher KALENDER by Ruediger Dahlike. I translate this as follows: Men are born (to be) original; most die as replicas (of others, of ideologies, of systems of behavior or thought or values).

Beckett somewhere says: try anew, fail anew, but fail better. (This seems to me to be Hegel’s whole philosophy boiled down to a few words.)

It can be said without excessive exaggeration, I think, that Mullah Nasruddin (the wise fool Sufis love so much) is always trying to fail better.

One day, goes the story, the Mullah was at home, getting on his wife’s nerves. She couldn’t stand it any longer and suggested that he might take a long walk. He jumped to his feet and started walking. He walked and he walked, perhaps a whole day, maybe two. He had been walking on a deserted trail. Finally he ran into a man going in the opposite direction. He stopped the man and asked him if he would check with his wife when he could end his walk and return home. This is where the story ends. On the surface, the story shows Mullah’s foolishness that, while far from home and continuing to walk away from it, he asks a man walking in the opposite direction to check with his wife for instructions. But the Mullah had a dilemma, the dilemma that he had instructions to walk but not to return. Unfortunately, the wife’s suggestion had not been specific enough. The Mullah was precise and objective in his approach. Recall the story (published in a previous post) when he asked someone for money to buy an elephant. When that person proffered advice that anyone who did not have the money to afford an elephant should not attempt to buy one, the Mullah was impatient with him: he had come for money, not advice. How stupid could that man be, not to see that precise distinction. (I often find myself wanting to tell my internist when receiving some health advice: I am not here for you to tell me what to do; just give me some medicine to make the problem go away.) Getting back to his wife, in sending her the aforementioned message, Nasruddin may have been upbraiding her for not being clever enough to be exact in her statements to a learned man like himself. To him, perhaps, life and communication were sciences; he had no patience with the art of these things.  Or it may be that Nasruddin was attempting to show the difficulties of applying a rigorous scientific and objective approach to the business of life, in other words, trying, again and again, to fail better. He may, like our modern day Beckett, be telling us that the secret is to keep failing better and better.

The Buddha is quoted as saying that each life has a measure of suffering and that often this suffering occasions awakening. The Mullah’s life certainly seems to have had more than its share of misery, but he seems adding awakening to it whenever possible, regardless of the cost. He also seems to want the same for others. In these attempts, is he a friend or an enemy to himself and to others? Rumi says that sometimes friends are enemies and enemies are friends (2500 years of Wisdom, op. cit.). But when are the former the latter and the latter the former. There is no way to tell except by failing better and better. In other words,thinking dialectically, there will always be something of an enemy in a friend and vice versa.

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A Sufi Thought for the Week (MLK)

Posted on January 26, 2014 by sufiways

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Contributed by Kamran Zafar

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Puzzled and/but Aware

Posted on December 29, 2013 by sufiways

by Modaser Shah

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Idries Shah says, “Religious thinking requires one to become worthy of something; magical thinking tries to cause or to create effects.” (Knowing How to Know)

The Buddha is reported to have said that life was not a puzzle to be solved but a reality to be experienced, or an experience to be embraced, or, one might add, declined.

“The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings,” says Martin Buber.

Is Nasruddin practicing religious thinking or magical thinking—as we see him doing things and responding to questions about the meaning of what he is doing—or is he just being lazy or stupid? For instance, when he is seen looking for a lost key under a street light when it was lost in a place without light, is he, in Idries Shah’s words, trying “to cause or to create effects,” or is he trying to “become worthy of something?” Is he trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, or embracing life? Is he experiencing the impossibility of knowing for sure, the impossibility of certainty and security, the security of being “right,” by seeming to be looking in the wrong place? Or is he just abandoning himself to the experience of confusion: knowing and unknowing, foolishness and wisdom, kindness and cruelty, love and hate, tragedy and comedy, and so on, the seemingly irreconcilable polarities that comprise life? At any one time, the amount that we don’t know far exceeds what we know. As in Nasruddin’s case, the area covered by darkness far exceeds the area that is lighted. Our comfort zones are puny compared to the vastness beyond.
In one tale, he claims that he can see in the dark. When people ask him why, then, he is seen frequently carrying a light at night on the streets, he has a ready answer: why because he doesn’t want others, who can’t see in the dark, to bump into him.
The above story raises this question about him: He wants to brag that he can see in the dark, so why does he choose to look in a lighted spot for his lost key, even though it was lost in the dark. If he looked in the right spot, in the dark, his boast about being able to see in the dark might be found to be empty and his pride hurt. Or, alternatively, if he can see in the dark, he may actually find the article, and that will then be that. He won’t be seen and questioned by others. And it seems imperative that he be seen and questioned. That is to say, he wishes to be seen and questioned, so that he can feel connected to others and receive recognition (see Hegel about the importance of this factor in human affairs). That would be the end of it if he were an ordinary Mullah. He is far from ordinary. He has to pass the flame on, of the Sufi teachings, of the hidden harmonies, of the identity of opposites, of the wisdom of nonsense and the absurdities of commonsense and, yes, wisdom.
Nasruddin asked a wealthy man for some money to buy an elephant. If you don’t have money, you can’t afford to keep one, he was told. The Mullah was ready: “I came to you for some money, not advice.”
The advice offered to the Mullah is eminently commonsense that many of us need to heed in our day to day lives. But the Mullah rejects it; he has other fish to fry; he is after big fish living in the vast, limitless, dark ocean that is the human heart. So let us, from time to time, let the Mullah’s actions and words get past our commonsense and acquired knowledge and wisdom, and reach deep within, without fear of loss of pride, or fear of looking stupid, ignorant, gullible, uncool. This is, admittedly, not without risk, and certainly not easy.
However, if we want to get away from magic and to learn to become worthy of that certain something, letting the Mullah fish, wordlessly, in our hearts makes sense, when we are ready, and not because we wish to seen to be looking in the right place. Pride is a huge obstacle; yet the wish to be recognized for seeming humility is possibly a greater block.

Essay by Modaser Shah; Photo by Ali Hammad

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A Sufi Thought for the Week (Angelou)

Posted on December 22, 2013 by sufiways

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
…Maya Angelou (American Poet)

Contributed by Kamran Zafar

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God and Dice: What Would Nasruddin Say?

Posted on December 14, 2013 by sufiways

by Modaser Shah

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“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” —Joseph Chilton Pearce

Mullah Nasruddin, as can be seen in the Sufi tales relating to his mis-adventures, embodied the creative life in this sense; he was almost always wrong. He didn’t fear being wrong. Yet it is clear that being wrong on one level doesn’t exclude being right on a different level. In the Mullah’s case, indeed, it can be said that he had to be wrong on the surface in order to point to the truth on a deeper level, thus showing the unavoidable connection between right and wrong, in the human heart, if not in the psyche, at least the conscious part of the psyche. In Aristotelian logic, one can’t be right and wrong at the same time. It is Hegel’s great achievement, particularly from a Sufi/Zen psychological point of view, that in his logic, such apparent contradictions, not just in language but the very structure of reality, are accommodated and developed. Mullah Nasruddin lived this logic.

Having grave doubts about the quirkiness surrounding the quantum theory, Einstein is famously quoted as saying that God doesn’t throw dice. Does He or doesn’t He? Niels Bohr’s equally quotable retort to Einstein was: Don’t tell God what to do!

Mullah Nasruddin reconciles, if that is possible, Einstein and Bohr. I have a fantasy that the Mullah, when confronted with a group of militant atheists, thanked them and told them that they were performing a great service for God and He loved them for that; indeed, that they were doing what they were sent to do. They were iconoclasts, attempting to smash the conceptual idols in the minds and actions of believers, a kind of purification.

Of course, the Mullah had no time or inclination to explain himself; he just said what he had to say and went on his merry way. But we may try to make sense of what he said or did. Even more than Kant’s “things in themselves,” the divine cannot be captured in language. At best, unfortunately, we can form inner concepts, and often external forms, such as idols, about it. So Einstein is speaking not about God but his conception of God, who is, of course, under no obligation to conform to it; in Einstein’s conception, throwing dice is ruled out (for now let us disregard the wager with the Evil One, in the Book Of Job). Bohr is also speaking from his idea of the Almighty, where the concept allows for the throwing of dice. If one grants in advance that any answer using words is bound to be wrong, or at most partly right, it might be said that God both does and does not throw dice. But the Mullah would not give this answer. The Buddha is reported to have refused to answer queries about God and other such questions. Zen masters are well known to resort to cryptic responses like Bodhidharma’s mu, NO or NOT or VOID, which is beyond yes and no.

So also, Nasruddin remains silent.

Essay by Modaser Shah; Photo by Ali Hammad

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A Sufi Thought for the Week (Mandela)

Posted on December 8, 2013 by sufiways

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.  The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear”… Nelson Mandela (1918- 2013)

Contributed to this blog by Kamran Zafar

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Rumi, Nietzsche and Superman

Posted on December 3, 2013 by sufiways

by Navid Zaidi

It is said that comparisons are extremely unpleasant. However, it is strange how the same idea affects different cultures differently and in the history of thought it is the points of contact and departure that attract our special attention.

Jalaluddin Rumi (Persian, 1207-73) and Friedrich Nietzsche (German, 1844-1900) stood at the opposite poles of thought but these two great philosophers seem to be in perfect agreement with regard to the practical application of their thought on life and saw the need for development of humanity both in mind and body.

Nietzsche observed the decadence of the human type around him, disclosed the subtle forces responsible for it and finally attempted to describe the type of human life adequate to the task of our planet.

“Not how man is preserved, but how man is surpassed” was the keynote of Nietzsche’s thought.

Nietzsche has the expectation that a recurrence of the combination of energy-centers in the universe would lead to the birth of that ideal combination which he calls ‘superman’.

But the superman has been born an infinite number of times before. His birth is inevitable in the future; such is Nietzsche’s doctrine of Eternal Recurrence.

It was the formulation of the theory of evolution in the world of Islam that was the source of Rumi’s tremendous enthusiasm in the biological future of man.

Rumi was born in the Muslim world at a time when enervating modes of life and thought were taking roots and literature was inwardly devitalizing. This sucked up the blood of Muslim Asia and paved the way for an easy victory of the Mongols.

Rumi was keenly alive to the poverty of life, incompetence, inadequacy and social decay around him. He explains the corroding disease of his society and suggests the ideal type of manhood in one of his poems. He says:

Last night the Sheikh went all about the city, lamp in hand, crying

“I am weary of beast and devil, a Man is my desire.

My heart is weary of these weak-spirited fellow travelers,

The Lion of God and Rustam Dastan are my desire.”

They said, ” He is not to be found, we too have searched.”

He answered, ” He who is not to be found is my desire.”

IQBAL ON DIVINE VICEGERENCY

In the Quran, God says to the angels, ” Lo, I will appoint a Khalifa (Vicegerent) on the Earth. ” (2:28) So, according to the Quran, Man already possesses the germ of vicegerency.

Allama Iqbal (Indian, 1877-1938) declared himself a disciple of Rumi and elaborated the Quranic view of Divine Vicegerency in his epic poem ‘The Secrets of the Self’.

Explains Iqbal: The Self in its movement towards uniqueness has to pass through three stages:

1. Obedience to the Law

2. Self-Control, which is the highest form of self-consciousness

3. Divine Vicegerency (Niabat e Elahi)

This Divine Vicegerency is the third and last stage of human development. The Khalifa is the vicegerent of God on Earth. He is the completest Self, the goal of humanity, the acme of life both in mind and body. He is the last fruit of the tree of humanity but he is not here yet; he is yet to come. And all the trials of a painful evolution are justified because he is to come at the end. The more we advance in evolution the nearer we get to him.

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Sufi Snaps: Unexpected (A photo)

Posted on November 29, 2013 by sufiways

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A Sufi Thought for the Week (Rumi)

Posted on November 17, 2013 by sufiways

Low in the earth

I lived in realms of ore and stone;

And then I smiled in many-tinted flowers;

Then roving with the wild and wandering hours,

O’er earth and air and ocean’s zone,

In a new birth,

I dived and flew,

And crept and ran,

And all the secret of my essence drew

Within a form that brought them all to view—

And lo, a Man!

And then my goal,

Beyond the clouds, beyond the sky,

In realms where none may change or die—

In angel form; and then away

Beyond the bounds of night and day,

And Life and Death, unseen or seen,

Where all that is hath ever been,

As One and Whole.

Rumi, as translated by Thadani, quoted in Sir Mohammad Iqbal’s “The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam”

Contributed to this blog by Navid Zaidi

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