Category
Mysticism & spirituality
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Reading group: Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle, one set of dwelling places a week
I would like to read Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle (1577) together over four weeks, starting Monday 19 October. It is short, vivid and much more argumentative than its reputation. Teresa wrote it for the nuns of her order, at the request…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska4 replies -
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 replies -
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 replies -
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 replies -
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 replies -
What do Sufis mean by “tasting” (dhawq) as a way of knowing?
I love the Sufi poetry that has been sung in Yogyakarta 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 took this as a beautiful…
Started by Ratna Wulandari4 replies -
If ātman already is brahman, what is left for liberation to do?
Recently I started on Advaita Vedānta, and one idea has stopped me cold. As I understand it, the claim is that the self (ātman) already is ultimate reality (brahman). "Tat tvam asi", you are that, as Uddālaka tells his son in the…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
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 someone who spent his…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies -
Taking the meditation without the metaphysics is fine: most people never wanted the path
Meditation helped me through a bad year 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 is no self. I keep reading that this is a…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
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 replies -
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 replies -
Reading Rumi as love poetry without the path is reading something he did not write
I grew up in Shiraz 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 the best-selling poets in the…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies