Category
Mysticism & spirituality
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If only the transformed can know, how could a mystic ever be shown to be wrong?
I teach science in Mangaluru and campaign against superstition, so let me say first that I'm not asking this to sneer. I read Sufi poetry with real pleasure, and I've learned from discussions here that the Sufi claim is subtler than "feelings…
Started by Arvind Poojary0 replies102 views -
Reading group: Suhrawardi’s Philosophy of Illumination, introduction and Part One
Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi (1154–1191) was executed in Aleppo, still young, after falling foul of the authorities. His Philosophy of Illumination (Hikmat al-Ishraq), completed in 1186, founded a school that shaped Persian philosophy for centuries, Mulla Sadra included. The first part is a…
Started by Reza Tehrani2 replies3 views -
Al-Ghazali says some knowledge has to be tasted. Is that an argument, or a way out of one?
Last month I read al-Ghazali's Deliverance from Error in an English translation I found online, and one part keeps bothering me. He goes through the theologians, the philosophers and the Batinites, finds each of them lacking, and then turns to the Sufis.…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies163 views -
Mystical experience can count as evidence for what it reveals
William Alston, in Perceiving God (1991), argued that mystical experience is a form of perception, and that beliefs formed through it are prima facie justified in the same way perceptual beliefs are. Richard Swinburne's "principle of credulity" says that if it seems…
Started by Reza Tehrani7 replies260 views -
Is fana in Sufism the same as nirvana in Buddhism?
My grandmother used to read Sufi poetry about fana, the annihilation of the self in God. Now I've started reading about Buddhism and nirvana, which also seems to involve the end of the self. Are these basically the same experience described in…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies164 views -
What do Sufis mean by “tasting” (dhawq) as a way of knowing?
I make batik in Yogyakarta and I love the Sufi poetry that has been sung here for centuries. My teacher, an old woman who learned from her father, often says that certain things cannot be known from books, only "tasted". I always…
Started by Ratna Wulandari4 replies196 views -
If ātman already is brahman, what is left for liberation to do?
I burnt out running a startup in Mumbai last year and have been reading my way back, mostly the Gita and the Stoics. Recently I started on Advaita Vedānta, and one idea has stopped me cold. As I understand it, the claim…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies170 views -
Reading group: William James’s Varieties, from ‘Religion and Neurology’ to the mysticism lectures
James gave the Gifford Lectures here in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, and they became The Varieties of Religious Experience. I have walked past the building for decades without reading the book, which seems a poor show for a retired GP who…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies202 views -
Taking the meditation without the metaphysics is fine: most people never wanted the path
I'm a startup founder in Mumbai, recently burnt out and reading my way back. Meditation helped me more than anything else. I did it with an app, then a weekly class. Nobody mentioned rebirth, and nobody asked me to accept that there…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies188 views -
Arjuna sees the universal form and begs it to stop. Is that the sublime, or something else?
I reread the Bhagavad Gita when I burned out last year, and the chapter I keep returning to is the eleventh. Arjuna asks Krishna to show his universal form. Krishna gives him a divine eye, and what Arjuna sees is unbearable: countless…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies222 views -
My brother’s conversion: can an experience be real and its interpretation wrong?
My younger brother is an engineer, a careful and slightly dry man, raised like me without religion. Last spring he spent a week at a Benedictine abbey, mostly because a colleague recommended the silence. He came back saying that during the night…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies211 views -
Reading Rumi as love poetry without the path is reading something he did not write
I am an architect in Shiraz, and I grew up hearing the Masnavi read aloud. Its opening, the lament of the reed cut from its reed-bed, longing to return, is perhaps the most famous passage in Persian. Abroad, Rumi is one of…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies182 views