NOTE: This article is a heavily revised and edited version of the original, which was published 9 years ago.
Do not be ashamed of your pain, for it shows you the way to your heart. Now that you are aware of your state, what will you do? In reality, there are only two paths to take: the path of distraction or the spiritual path. The spiritual path is the path of self-realization beyond the false self, whereas the path of distraction leads to the opposite of this, which is a descent into self-ignorance and the cascading maze of illusions that define the false self. The journey of the spiritual path is how we heal beyond our self-identification with being wounded, with being a victim, with being abandoned, with being incomplete and broken. This brokenness is what exists beneath the complex array of psychological complexes that define the many socially acceptable personae of modern society. This identification with what is false, with ephemeral form that fades, is the false self that we have walked around as up till now, neurotically chasing in order to feel a sense of arriving at last. But that moment never comes, and we are left only with false promises. It does not lead to the Divine but rather only to a place of darkness and illusion that the false self calls home. If we do not travel the spiritual path, then the only other option for us is to continue to distract ourselves with a lifestyle that, if we are honest with ourselves, is largely a complex coping mechanism meant to distract us away from our inward pain and the disquietude of that overarching sense of incompleteness. But this neuroticism is the perfect fuel for the consumption that moves the cogs in the machinery of consumer society. Technology, especially through smart phones and the magical effect of its screen upon our soul as we scroll from one spell to the next, has heightened this neuroticism that saps the life force of the heart. But magic like this is only as powerful as we let it be through consent and permission. Are we consenting to the theft of our life force in exchange for distractions?
Shaykh Abdal Qadir al-Jilani, a man regarded as the greatest mystic in Islam, instructs us to not run away from affliction for you cannot do it anyways. Rather, we must join our affliction with patience. All of the pain that we experience in this world, in all of its myriad manifestations, are connected at bottom to the death of the ego.
On the Islamic spiritual path, we are instructed to have patience [sabr] with our pain instead of engaging in avoidance. Patience is not about doing nothing. Patience does not imply idleness, a mere enduring of suffering, although that is certainly a part of it. Rather, it is about stillness, which requires a sort of inner activity that removes the extraneous from the mind in order to confront the pain directly at the depths of our being. It is the active practice of inward striving to abide in a state of surrender, humility, dependency, and servitude before God [ubudiyyah], which uncovers the underlying wisdom at the heart of our experience. This is not simply wisdom pertaining to the pragmatic outcome of our tribulation or even about its lessons, it is fundamentally about perceiving the true nature of reality itself as it appears through this looking glass of subjective experience; that is to say, it is about uncovering who you really are. As Shaykh [Dr.] Umar Faruq Abdallah said about the spiritual path, it is about discovering the real you, and as the Naqshbandi teachers have said, about uncovering your real name(s), which pertains to the secret of your being that God has uniquely created you out of. The realness of the essence of our own being, expressed through the unfolding vehicle of the self as it manifests as the experience of the present moment, in its particularity, is rooted in The Real. Only God is The Real, The One, and the existence of contingent being is a borrowed quality of Necessary Being. In this way, it is as Shaykh Abdal Qadir al-Jilani taught, that “the finite points to the infinite”, that everything is a sign that points to God, ultimately revealing in its totality our complete servitude and overwhelming subjugation before Divine Will. At bottom, there is only surrender and submission to God in every moment. This pertains to the secret of the true self. In this, there is the letting go of tension, as if we cease going against the tide of the cosmic wind. In this is the negation of the destructive energy of the [inverted] will that lashes out against reality. By negating these destructive energies, this destructive will, the negative emotions and the negative thoughts and beliefs that assault our heart daily, we may affirm the fullness of The Real within the depths of our heart. It is an inward battle against the cognitive distortions that reject this. It is how we learn to cultivate value from within, for our sense of value and self-worth is predicated on our sense of reality, our own realness, which is rooted in the presence of God who alone is the source of everything. In the absence of this, we will crave the gaze of those who betray us and who mistreat us.
"Truly in the heart there is a void that can not be removed except with the company of God. And in it there is a sadness that can not be removed except with the happiness of knowing God and being true to Him."
The truth is that we all have pain, we all have cracked hearts, a soul that is wandering a desolate wasteland, looking for a place of belonging. But a cracked heart is not an imperfection, for the world itself is imperfect as it was always meant to be, most exemplified in all its examples, permutations, and manifestations of impermanence. And we are part of the world, fading away along with each moment of experience. As the poets said, “what is man but a few numbered days? Each day that passes, a part of you has gone.” We are perfect for what the world is and our purpose in it; therefore, it is not a flaw, rather it is the path of realization that leads beyond the heart itself to The One who is The Perfect. In Islam, the world when perceived through the prism of the false self, is called the dunya, which denotes the illusory world. But the world that is seen through the prism of the true self is called al-‘alam, the world as an instrument of knowledge. We are the world, and we are either dunya or al-‘alam; we are either a creature in the shadows of ignorance or an instrument, a sign, that points to the reality of God. As Rumi said, the cracks are where the light enters, and this is absolutely true because we were created to know God, to become immersed in the Divine. Our souls are searching for the Lote Tree that stands at the farthest precinct of existence at the border of reality, which we intuitively recognize as the entry point into the Divine Presence. All souls are in a state of returning and journeying. The death of our loved ones is a reminder of life, yet a powerful proof of the dream state of the soul; its reminder is a blessing, a temporary dispelling of Mara’s magick, a refutation of Iblees’s lie. We are instructed to reflect on those who have passed away long before us. Keep going, expanding this awareness, this reality.
"Hidden from all, I will speak to you without words. No one but you will hear my story, even if I tell it in the middle of the crowd"
Our lives here in this world are meant to cultivate the provisions for that long journey. Like in a dream, our life events are physical manifestations of metaphysical events: traumas, difficulties, painful experiences and disappointments, all moments that contain hidden wisdom in order to nourish and mature the soul and enable it to continue that journey home. In each moment, in every breath, there is an underlying wisdom. And what is found in bitterness cannot be found in sweetness. The pain provides a direction for the intellect to be focused on, and since the pain is emanating from the depths of the spiritual heart, we begin to enter that dimension of the heart. And as we enter the pain while contemplating God, while turning to God, the experience transforms thereby revealing the treasure that is God within the heart. What is also occurring on a higher level of being is that our soul is reorienting itself towards God and navigating the void. From this inner movement, wisdom manifests within the heart, even giving us an understanding of its meaning and purpose such that it satisfies us and removes from us any resentment or regret. The geography of the heart is a reflection of the geography of the world beyond this, as Ibn al-Qayyim said, if you wish to know the state of your soul in the next world, then look to the state of your heart while alive in this world. As we cultivate the path to our hearts, we are cultivating our path to God. This clears our vision in this world, we see the Divine in all moments and in all acts as the Source of all reality, as the independent cause of all dependent effects. In this perception, the belief that others have power over us vanishes. Our heart expands, the anxiety is lifted as we sever our self-identification with illusions, and those illusions simply vanish from within our hearts since that is the nature of illusions. They are self-contradictory, and this vanishing unveils their true nature in relation to our true nature through our subsistence beyond those pains. From a neuro-psychological perspective, we can say that this is about retraining yourself to remove the patterns by which we internalize on an existential level external outcomes, especially the opinions of others.
Awareness of that pain within the heart has to do with a higher spiritual awareness because it pertains to awareness of the human condition itself, which is beyond all aspects of superficiality and into the uncertain depths of existentialism. These depths, like a dark ocean, can feel truly overwhelming when we lack the spiritual light to navigate it. However, it is really at the heart of becoming human, which is needed in a world of superficiality that is striving to dehumanize us, to reduce us to consumers whereby we are emptied out of all praiseworthy qualities that ennoble the human being. We are forced to ask, what does it mean to be human? Our fear and avoidance of death is a chief poison according to the Islamic spiritual path called al-wahn. It denotes the fearful hatred of death and its contrapositive state, the fearful clinging, as a false love, to the ephemeral forms of the dunya. That is the crisis of the modern world and why consumerism encroaches upon our lives so deeply. In the absence of those spiritual tools from which we draw light that illumines the soul, we are desperate even simply to cope. The premise of consumerism is a materialist ontology, that everything about the human being, especially the very reality of meaning and value and purpose is reducible to the physical, and thus, ultimately without value, meaning, and purpose. It leaves us feeling sick, neurotically chasing after the consumption of things in order to pacify our pain, but all it does is instigate the cravings and the insecurities of the ego, like drinking from a fountain that only makes us thirstier. A normalized addiction, we thus become commodities, predictable, usable, disposable, compulsive, resembling the very algorithms that ensnare us in the first place.
This is recognition of man’s true nature, that in the world, we are not slaves to anyone because existentially we have only one Master, which is God the alone who is The Real. Submission to this reality places us within a true vertical hierarchy and frees us from false hierarchies, which breaks our healthy esteem within the self and confidence, and which subjugate our inner states to the oppressive rule of those who lack rightful authority. While inverted paradigms of materiality seek to invert us, a true spiritualizing system orients us correctly, vertically. This rearranging of the cosmic hierarchy reflected within is to perceive experientially that the reality of this world is at a lower level than the reality of our hearts, which we conceptualize as the doorway into the transcendental realms of the macrocosm leading ultimately to the Divine Presence. It is to say that the spiritual is greater than the material. When you have glimpses of that state you will learn that all of these destructive emotions have been added and compounded onto you by the later false perceptions of innate servitude to the material wrold. But through the practice of effacement and detachment, we see that when these effects that were added onto us from outside the heart were to vanish, you would see clearly that your essence still remains, and so in this subsistence of our essential being we realize that those delusions, those false beliefs about ourselves, were extraneous and illusory the whole time. In this realization, there is a sense of relief and release from tension and judgement as the heart expands, as if its bindings have suddenly become removed.
The more that this is learned experientially, the more easily and readily these delusions are dispelled. We made perceptions about ourselves that are so subtle that we do not even notice them consciously, which is largely because we have self-identified with them, and yet they guide our lives so powerfully and make us behave so predictably. There is a pattern, and the only way to break that pattern is by addressing the underlying causes upon which these patterns arise. The negative voices of that internal critic are superadded onto us, typically through childhood conditioning but also through our continual cultivation of its patterns, especially when it produces the same repeated outcome after outcome, reaffirming itself within us as a reality, as an essential part of us that is ultimately inescapable. The negative energy from it characterizes our experience, and so we end up re-experiencing it constantly, cultivating it by dwelling within it, distracting ourselves from confronting it, and by letting it fester and become toxic within us, not realizing the subtle beliefs that are growing out of its toxic soil until we are older and consumed by their narratives.
But by removing those perceptions of ourselves, by “dying before you die”, which is what the practice of non-attachment is ultimately about, we can emerge newly reborn. Even if we are not that much different form before, there is still change, there is still progress and growth along the ascending path. You keep on “dying before you die”, confronting all of the colors of death within you, the red death and the black death, until God has freed you from every sort of fetter. As this occurs, although subtle, your emotional well-being will change for the better, to something more authentic and in line with our spiritual nature. By removing the desire for praise, now the aversion to blame has vanished. By removing the desire for status and fame, the pain of not being praised, and thus the humiliation of servitude to other than God, has vanished. This is what opens you to true happiness, contentment, and success, even if materially you lack the sort of outcomes that society defines as success. At the end, everyone finds death anyways. But what is the state of your heart at that moment? Having a sound heart is said to be true success, but this requires us to learn how to sever our self-identification with the negative energy of the lower realms that corrupts and abases consciousness and that keeps us in a cycle of attachment and chasing and devaluation.
This is a beautiful post, thank you very much for sharing. Your blog has helped me a lot in dealing with mental pain. Do you know anything about anhedonia (and anything else along those lines like lack of motivation, no energy, etc)? As a Muslim who suffers from this issue, I’d prefer to find Islamic perspectives on it but I’m having difficulty. Most advice I come across for depression/anxiety seems to fit in a binary. Secular advice is generally materialistic (in the sense of philosophical materialism, not obsessive consumption) so it is incomplete. Religious advice isn’t much better, generally focusing purely on performing rituals without any mention of spirituality (or worse, blaming the person with the disorder). Your writings are a refreshing difference from that.
Thanks for the comment. As with any phenomenon related to experience, it can be incredibly complex. Our bodies and our minds are intrinsically linked to one another, and so the external dynamics of our physical lives, from our diets to our physical activity to our work environment, can impact our inner spiritual lives. For instance, we’re seeing a lot of new research in the effect of diet on depression due to a greater understanding of the complex pathomechanism involved. That being said, resilience is something that enables us to expose ourselves to difficult external circumstances without being destroyed by them internally.
Can you explain more about your situation and who you are? Family dynamics plays a huge role too.
Thanks for the reply. 🙂 In my case, I do think family dynamics are probably the cause or at least a major factor. I was raised an only child in a single mother household. I was not raised in any religion, I’m a convert to Islam. My mother has a lot of mental issues and I felt the brunt of it since I was a young child. While she hasn’t been formally diagnosed with it and I can’t say definitively, after a lot of reading I’m 99% sure she has borderline personality disorder as she fits those symptoms exactly. She’s extremely sensitive, finds fault with everything and anyone she comes across, lies constantly, and is self-pitying. She’ll say the most nasty things (even when I was a kid) and then wail a few minutes later and play victim. There’s no way to say those things without being harsh, but those are really the best descriptors to describe the behavior. She also has a very codependent and strained relationship with her mother/my grandmother (who is very open to me with her frustration towards my mother), and from what I’ve heard my great-grandmother is also very abusive so I guess it’s been a generational cycle.
I was discouraged from socialization as a kid. If I wanted to go to to someone’s house or have them over, she’d make up excuses on why we couldn’t do anything for the next few weeks. I spent a good chunk of my childhood sitting in her office. I was simultaneously both infantilized and parentified. I was never taught any useful life skills, but at the same time was expected to do emotional labor for her before puberty. Once I got into my teens, I realized I didn’t have a normal mother and would not be able to look up to her for any real advice or guidance. I knew she was mentally/emotionally more like a bratty preteen than a well-functioning adult.
So yeah, I think it’s easy to see where I could get anxiety and depression symptoms from (although I’m not sure about the brain fog and anhedonia I often experience, I guess there’s no reason that couldn’t come from trauma as well), but the problem is knowing exactly how to fix it. Especially considering I’m actually still living with her. Since reading about abusive parents (especially those with BPD), I know a bit more how to navigate it (and practicing Islam more seriously also helps me cope a lottttt) but she is unpredictable and I’m only human, I sometimes reach my limit with it. I’m legally an adult, but I’m only a freshman in college and don’t have my own money or anything like that. Everything feels so overwhelming. I’m far from independent and worry about being trapped well into my twenties or even older.
It is because we are not our identities. Identities are material or physical concepts whereas the essence of Being is metaphysical. When we understand that our identities are not ends in and of themselves then we can recognize them as a means towards experiencing life and coming to know God. It is important to not conflate the concept of self with identity otherwise we end up shrinking the concept of self to material categories of Being. One thing you’ll notice in some religious-spiritual literature is the distinction between Self and self; the Self is a reference to our existence in this world as a means for knowing God, when we view ourselves as manifestations that express the metaphysical reality behind our existence. The self is a reference to our existence in this world as an ends, where it is perceived that what we are is ultimately defined by and limited to in the most existential sense to the physical qualities of Being – from our bodies to our unconscious traumas and sensations to our outward identities and labels. These compose what we call the ego, and so in order to shed the ego we must sever attachment to these labels.
This is so beautiful 🙂
Your posts and perceptions are really soothing. Thank you very much.