Sufism | Dhikr, Transcending I-Thou, alone to the Alone

“As for the prayer of the heart, it is associated in Sufism with dhikr, or invocation of God’s Names.  This quintessential form of prayer begins with invocation of the tongue, then with the mind and with our imaginal faculty, and finally with and in the heart, where the Divine Spark has always resided… The dhikr is in the final analysis the act of God Himself within us.  In reality only God can utter His Name, and in the dhikr we become simply the instrument through which God utters His own sacred Name… In ordinary prayer men and women address God in an I-Thou relationship.  In the prayer that is intertwined with love, the I and the Thou melt into each other.  In contemplative prayer, the inner intellect or spirit, which is itself a Divine Spark to which Meister Eckhart refers when he says that there is in the soul something uncreated and uncreatable…is able to transcend the I-Thou dichotomy altogether.  This faculty is able to plunge into the Supreme Reality and, in drowning in the Ocean of Divinity, to know it.  It is to these realities that Plotinus was referring when he spoke of the flight of the alone to the Alone…As human beings, we have the ability to reach the state of extinction and annihilation and yet have consciousness that we are nothing in ourselves and that all being belongs to God.  We can reach a state of unitive consciousness prior to bifurcation into object and subject.”

– Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth

Sufism | Sacred Silence in Sufism

The following is a lecture from Seyyed Hossein Nasr on “Sacred Silence in Sufism.” In the original lecture, Nasr was paired with a conversation partner representing Vedanta. This audio can also be found with the site Audio Files.

Sufism | Unity and Multiplicity

“The world appears to us as multiplicity, and the goal of the spiritual life is to ascend from this multiplicity to unity, to see the One in the many and the many integrated into the One. Now the doctrine of the oneness of Being does not negate the reality of multiplicity. Nor does it claim that God is the world and the world in its totality is God, a position held by pantheists. How could a metaphysics that speaks so categorically of the transcendence of God be accused of pantheism? What the Sufis assert is not that God is the world, but that the world is mysteriously plunged in God, to use a formulation of Frithjof Schuon. Existence is a manifestation of Being, and all existence issues from and belongs to Being in the same way that the rays of the sun are finally nothing but the sun.

Some Sufis and Islamic philosophers have interpreted the doctrine of the oneness of Being to mean that all levels of being come from the one Being, that all the rays of light emanate from the sun, while many Sufis claim that on the highest level of understanding there is in fact only the one and absolute Being. Viewed from within the sun, there is nothing but sun…”

– Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth

I find the analogy of the Sun and the Sun’s rays to be helpful when thinking about unity and multiplicity in the context of the contemplative traditions. From the perspective of a ray of light, after it projects outward from the Sun, it can look around and see other “Sun-rooted” rays of light – the world of multiplicity. But from the perspective of the Sun, there is “Nothing But Sun.”

Unity and Multiplicity. Multiplicity and Unity.

The “Oneness of Being” is a core concept in much of philosophical Sufism.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr | In The Beginning Was Consciousness

Although he doesn't use the term "Perennial Philosophy," the worldview presented in this lecture is representative of the Perennial Tradition.  This is a fascinating lecture regardless of your religious viewpoint; it's worth listening to the whole thing if you have the time.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr is an Islamic Philosopher.  He teaches at George Washington University.