Sufism

The distinctions that do the work

Dhikr, and the fact that it is a family of methods rather than one. The basic form is the repeated invocation of the divine name, and the order in which the invocation is done is the tradition's own curriculum: a comparative study of the practice sets out a progression from vocal recitation to mental, with the vocal form preceding the mental one and the mental form standing at the summit rather than the beginning. The scholarly literature on it is thinner than its centrality deserves, and one of the reasons is recorded plainly in a study of a single Istanbul order: accounts of the practice in the literature are rare, and psychological commentaries are scarcer still. A reader who arrives expecting a technique will find that the tradition has an initiatory structure instead, and the initiatory structure is doing the pedagogical work.

What the modern field adds, and it is the sharpest single correction on this page, is a claim about what remembrance is for. A study published in 2023 in a peer-reviewed journal of religion and health takes the practice in a Buddhist frame and then declines the frame. Mindfulness practices adapted from Theravada Buddhism have become widespread among people in Western societies who seek stress reduction and greater present-centredness, the argument runs, but mindfulness is often understood as a self-help technique, and the aim of the Buddhist and Sufi meditative paths is not limited to enhancing the well-being of a self that is envisioned as strictly bounded. Both aim at unitive mystical experience, which is held to transform the meaning of the practitioner's own selfhood. And then the sentence that matters here: whereas the Buddhist no-self doctrine is generally understood to hold that personal selfhood is an illusion, this is not the case for Akbari Sufism. Whatever else is contested in this tradition, its own most developed metaphysical school does not say that there was never a you there to be transformed.

Fana and baqa, and why the pair is one term. Fana is annihilation, the dissolution of the individual self; baqa is subsistence, remaining in God. They are habitually taught apart and they are useless apart, and a comparative study of the two traditions that claim comparable goals is explicit that moksa and fana are not two words for the same state. Moksa, in that account, is the individual self's identity with the absolute, reached through knowledge and the dispelling of ignorance. Fana is described as the complete dissolution of the individual ego in the presence of the Divine, and the qualification is the whole of the difference: it signifies a state of non-existence attained through intense love and mystical experience, in which the seeker is effaced while the Divine Essence remains distinct. Nothing is annihilated. Something is effaced, and something is not. A reader who has heard fana as a claim that nothing survives will find the technical literature more careful than the reputation, and the carefulness is the tradition's point.

Waqifa and waqiha, and why this is the distinction that earns the page. The state of stopping and the one who stops are not the same, and the history of Sufi metaphysics is substantially the history of what follows from noticing that they are not. The standard encyclopaedia lists the two great unities as separate subjects in their own right, waḥdat al-wujud, the unity of being, and waḥdat ash-shuhud, the unity of witnessing, and the fact that an encyclopaedia of this kind separates them is the clearest sign that the distinction is contested within the tradition rather than settled by it. A claim that the being of God is one, and a claim that the witnessing is one, are different claims with different consequences, and the tradition has argued about which it holds for centuries. This is a distinction worth more to a reader than any of the popular slogans, and it is the sort of thing a page exists to hand over.

The Perfect Human, the Pole, and the Muhammadan Reality. The idea of the perfect human, al-insan al-kamil, is a key concept in the history of the tradition, and the standard monograph on it does two things a popular account will not. First, it dates the idea: first discussed by Ibn Arabi, then treated in greater depth by al-Jili, leaving its mark on later Islamic mystical, metaphysical and political thought from North Africa to Southeast Asia and on into modern times. Second, it supplies the structure: the perfect human is a locus of divine manifestation, and alongside that concept sit the Pole, the qutb, and the Muhammadan Reality, the haqiqah al-Muhammadiyyah, with the identity of the perfect human worked out through them. The monograph then makes the consequence explicit, and it is the reason this belongs on a page comparing traditions: it shows how the view of the Prophet Muhammad as the archetypal perfect human developed within Islamic mystical thought, with major consequences of its own. A material that places Muhammad in a series of distortions is placing him in a series that this tradition regards as the summit.

And the method, which is the part a reader can actually use. A study of Rumi's great poem makes two claims that a reputation built on poetry will not supply. The first is that the nature of the Sufi doctrine of self-annihilation and subsistence in God is, in the scholarship's own words, a neglected area of research, often misunderstood or reduced to being one of the many themes in the poem. The second is that the poem's intention is that it should be used as a training manual, and that the formal design of the text is built to that end, with specific instruction offered to the wayfarer at every stage. The structure is a sequence, not an atmosphere. Self-effacement is not the theme; it is the procedure, and it is stated as a procedure with stages.

Where it meets this material

Start with the honest structural finding, because it governs everything in this section and it would be dishonest to bury it. The contact does not contain the vocabulary. Across all one hundred and sixty-five sessions, the terms dhikr, fana, samadhi, nishkama, ecstatic and ecstasy do not occur. The word Islam does not occur. The word Sufi does not occur. One name occurs, once, at 2.2. A page that reported a conversation between this material and this tradition on the strength of shared terminology would be reporting a conversation that has not happened. What exists instead is structural, and structural correspondences are weaker evidence and more interesting ones, because a resemblance in the shape of a claim is harder to produce by accident than a shared word.

The strongest structural correspondence is about the origin of a many. At 13.12 the intelligent infinity discerns a concept because of the freedom of will of awareness, the concept is finity, and finity is named the first and primal distortion of the Law of One; the one intelligent infinity then invested itself in an exploration of many-ness. At 13.13 each portion created a universe, and each individualised portion channelled the love/light into what the material calls intelligent energy, and that is what produced the natural laws of any particular universe. Read that as a description of a descent in which love is the agent of multiplicity, and it is recognisably the same operation the tradition attributes to divine love, and a general study of unitive mysticism in the three monotheistic religions puts exactly this at the centre: union, whether conceived as the uniting of God and human or as some form of identity with God, has been a key feature of the mystical traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and most mystics in all three claim that both knowing and loving are necessary.

The second is the material's own account of what it is made of. At 4.20 the Law of One is stated as everything being one with no polarity and no right or wrong and no disharmony but only identity, and then the one is named as love and light and light and love, the Infinite Creator. Read that beside the encyclopaedia's definition of Sufism as the search for divine love and knowledge, and the resemblance is close enough to be worth the reader's attention. It is also, on inspection, a resemblance in vocabulary rather than in structure, and the difference is exactly where the two accounts will part company three sections from now.

The third is the material's ranking of its own principles, which is the most surprising place to find a genuine overlap. At 15.21 the material names the first distortion as free will, which finds focus, and the second distortion as the Logos, the Creative Principle or Love, and says that this intelligent energy creates a third distortion known as light. A tradition in which love is literally the second principle, the one through which the one proceeds into many, has found the same thing in the same place. The material's other statements on the same theme are consistent: at 27.12 love is named as the focus, the choice of attack, and the type of energy that causes intelligent energy to be formed from the potential of intelligent infinity. That is a description of love as the mechanism of creation, and it is the strongest thing either account says.

Two further correspondences, one practical and one cautionary. The practical one is the material's insistence on the right of a complex to persist: at 105.16 each mind/body/spirit complex has an existence simultaneous with that of creation and is not dependent upon any physical vehicle, though the physical vehicles appropriate to each density are necessary for it to evolve, change, learn and manifest. Hold that beside the field's correction, that Akbari Sufism does not treat personal selfhood as an illusion, and the two accounts converge on a point neither shares with the Buddhist analysis. The cautionary one is 32.14, where the material records that the green-ray activation is always vulnerable to the yellow or orange ray of possession. A tradition that has spent centuries building careful apparatus around the authority of a master has its own account of what that apparatus is vulnerable to, and this is what the material says it is vulnerable to.

Where the material parts company, and where this library takes a side

The material's one statement about the founder of Islam, at 2.2, and the care this page takes with it. The passage is in the second session and it is the only place in the contact where the name occurs. What it says is this. The group describes contacting a pharaoh in what the material calls the Eighteenth Dynasty, a figure it calls small in life-experience, who received a name honouring a sun disc and then changed it, and who became convinced that the vibration of One was the true spiritual vibration and decreed the Law of One; that his beliefs were accepted by very few; that his priests gave lip service without the spiritual distortion towards seeking; and that the peoples continued in their beliefs. Then: when that entity was no longer in this density, the polarised beliefs in the many gods came into their own and continued so until the one known as Muhammad delivered the peoples into a more intelligible distortion of mind/body/spirit relationships. Two features of that sentence must both be kept, and the first is easy to lose. The word distortion is not removed. The material does not say that one of these is the truth. It says the last is a more intelligible distortion, and a more intelligible distortion is still a distortion, and a page that quietly promoted it to a more accurate one would be tightening the hedge the source put there, which is the one thing a reader of this material is entitled to rely on never being done to.

The second feature is the grammar, and it is the uncomfortable part. Aten-worship, which the material calls a close distortion to its own reality, and the one known as Muhammad, are placed in a single sequence by a single verb. The material is not making a theological claim about Islam. It is doing something more specific and arguably stranger: it is telling a story of spiritual history in which a run of distorted forms of the one is succeeded by a further distorted form, and in which the succession runs through Egypt. Read plainly, the contact's own account of its origin places it inside the Egyptian priestly tradition it has just called a distortion, and places the founder of Islam in the same grammatical series. That is a claim, and this library is going to state the limit of the claim honestly: a material that tells its own story this way has no standing whatever to adjudicate the spiritual history of a world religion, and the most it can establish is what it says about itself, which is that it regards itself as a further Egyptian distortion of an Egyptian distortion.

That is the position on the founder, and it is a small part of the page. The real conflict is about the self, and it is the one this library takes a side on. Put the tradition at full strength first. Fana is not a claim that nothing survives, as the technical literature is careful to say; it is a claim that the individual ego is dissolved in the presence of the Divine while the Divine Essence remains distinct, and its method is not dissolution for its own sake but a sequenced training whose aim is a selfhood that has stopped standing in the way. That is a serious discipline with a long pedigree, and this library does not think it can be answered by calling it an illusion. The tradition has already made the objection to that from inside itself, and has answered it.

Now the material. Its account of what a being is, and what it is for, is polarity, and polarity is a thing to be chosen and then kept. The passage the tradition would find hardest is 19.18, which is asked whether changing path becomes harder the further along an entity is, and answered that it is the opposite: the further an entity has polarised, the more easily it may change polarity, since the more power and awareness it has. Then the sentence that decides the comparison, naming the truly helpless as those who have not consciously chosen and who repeat patterns without knowledge of the repetition or the meaning of the pattern. Read fana from that side and it fails its own test twice over. A dissolution in which the one dissolving never chose, and cannot say afterwards what the pattern meant, is precisely the condition the sentence names. And the first half of the answer is worse for the tradition than the second, because a self whose selfhood has been dissolved has no polarity left to change, whereas the material holds that the further along a being is the more readily it can turn. That is not a small disagreement about vocabulary. It is a disagreement about whether the thing fana produces can still be worked on.

Which is why the material's own answer to the question is worth reading, because it is not dissolution. At 33.20 the fifth density is described as the blending into wisdom of the compassion learned in fourth density, and the sixth as the blending of wisdom back into an unified understanding of compassion viewed with wisdom. Neither term is cancelled. Compassion is not destroyed by wisdom and wisdom is not returned unaccompanied; each is carried forward in the other. That is a blend, and it is a very different operation from either effacement or retention. This library's judgment, and it is ours, is that on the question of what happens to the self the material has the better of it, for three reasons that can be stated rather than felt. It answers the question the tradition never answers, which is where the self came from. It supplies a mechanism for change that survives the death of the body, which the tradition's own method is careful to describe as a sequence and not as a permanent state. And it makes the result falsifiable, since a self that has been dissolved cannot be asked later whether it chose, whereas a polarity can be examined as often as you like.

And what a reader of this tradition is owed, said here rather than left to the reader to work out. A Muslim will recognise what the sentence at 2.2 is doing, and will recognise it as a dismissal, and the objection that follows is not a sentimental one. It is that a corpus which describes itself as a social memory complex of a sixth-density civilisation, which claims a figurative vocabulary supplied from the whole span of human religious history, and which elsewhere reserves its contempt for exactly this sort of dismissive genealogy, has told the story of its own origins in a way that flattens a tradition it plainly knows about and cannot evaluate. The material does not claim to be neutral here. It claims to be a further distortion in a line it dates and locates, and the honest report is that the line it draws runs through a civilisation whose theology it does not share, and that a reader standing in this tradition is being asked to accept a classification of their own history from a source with no purchase on it. This library does not think that request can be met by anyone, including the tradition, and it says so on the page rather than in a footnote.

And the limit of that judgment, stated as plainly as the judgment. The material pays for its insistence with a term it never defines. Polarity is its word for the thing, and across the whole contact it never says what a polarity is for. It says how to balance one, at 15.9, where love creating light streams into the planetary sphere through points or nexi of entrance and a balanced individual is one in whom each energy centre is balanced and functioning brightly and fully. It says what fails when it goes wrong, at 47.7, where a structure that is fully and perfectly crystallised will not splinter or break and is very strong without effort. It says what a healthy will is, and it never says what the will is for. A tradition that names the mechanism and the technique, as this one does, is in some ways more useful to a person trying to actually live it than an account that names the mechanism alone, and a reader who has spent time with the orders and their initiations will have noticed the same thing about them.

What it is not

It is not a practice this library teaches, and the reason is the material's own. At 15.13 it is asked whether exercises may be published and answers that each seeker must be allowed to enlighten itself, on the stated ground that otherwise the exchange becomes an imbalance in free will. Dhikr without initiation is not this tradition's dhikr, and a page that handed it over would be handing over the outer form of a thing whose whole claim is that the form is not the point. The same principle is why the practice pages in this library describe the four disciplines the material actually offers and do not add a fifth.

It is not a technique of calm, and the correction here is scholarly rather than devotional. Remembrance is a unitive practice. Its aim is not a better afternoon. The field is explicit that the aim of these paths is not limited to enhancing the well-being of a self that is envisioned as strictly bounded, and a reader who has encountered the practice mainly through the mindfulness literature has been given a version of it whose stated goal the tradition would call a preliminary.

It is not one tradition, and the versions of it that arrive pre-digested have usually been assembled rather than inherited. The orders differ from one another in initiatory structure, in discipline and in doctrine, and the same encyclopaedic entry that gives the definition also treats theosophy's reading of Sufism as a separate subject, which is a polite way of saying that a body of Western esoteric material has taken the name and used it for something else. A twentieth-century Western esoteric use of Sufi vocabulary is not a late branch of this tradition and should not be read as one.

It is not untroubled, and the internal critique has to be given its full weight rather than mentioned and moved past. The Deobandi argument is that Sufism as practised is ethical self-reform, which is a good deal less than the metaphysical claim, and that the festivals which mark the deaths of saints and the Prophet's birthday are additions to the religion. That is an argument made by Muslims about Sufism, from inside the tradition, with its own institutions and its own texts, and it is the reason a page that presented Sufism as a settled and harmonious thing would be misleading rather than merely incomplete.

And it is not a church, which is the misreading a reader of this site is most likely to bring. Its shrines are not congregational buildings and its masters are not priests; the authority of a shaykh runs through an initiatory relationship, and the shrines in India function as places where a saint is commemorated, visited and given food, in a social economy that a parish structure does not describe. The Mughal evidence on this page is the clearest correction available: seventeen pilgrimages to one shrine at Ajmer over seventeen years by the emperor of a world empire is a form of kingship, and reading it as congregational attendance is a category error that will make every subsequent fact harder to place.