Spiritual Life is Writing Off the Self: Philosophy and Mysticism as Practices of Learning to Die to Live

person supplicating at night time in the desert.

 

Muhammad Maroof Shah
Kashmir

Abstract

What is life divine or spiritual life about? It is a life in which one is free, no longer slave to the dictates of desiring self or attachment to passing things. How do philosophy, religion, mysticism ad poetry contributes to this task of living life authentically or soulfully. That requires engaging squarely with the problem of death and overcoming fear of it. Let us explore this issue of finding meaning or joy in life in the face of death and the attachments of the self.
Keywords: spiritual life, Philosophy, mysticism, Ghazali.

Preparing for Death

In Plato’s Phaedo Socrates makes the claim that philosophy is preparation for death. How many of us including professional philosophers and the parents of students choosing philosophy would seriously concede or welcome the suggestion that when the university requires their children to take a number of courses in philosophy, rather than preparing them for life, that is, a job, they intend to prepare them for death? Heidegger famously said that his advice is for world is for visiting graves. Sufism defines itself in terms of learning to die every moment.
Philosophy, mysticism and religion all have an interface in preparation for death. About the greatest work of Ghazali who was a Master in all these disciplines, it has been aptly observed:
His greatest work is the iḥyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn (Revival of the Religious Sciences), which is a comprehensive work of forty chapters which can be called a preparation for death. What al-Ghazālī teaches is to help man to live a life in accordance with the sacred law, by a sanctification of the whole life so that he is ready for the meeting with his Lord at any moment. It thus brings the lover into the presence of his eternal beloved and thus fulfills the longing of the soul, which had finally found eternal peace (Schimmel, 1975:95).

Philosophy for ancients has been transformative discipline culminating in theosis or darsana or vision and that follows one’s readiness to face death. Art/poetry understood as an escape from personality or letting the other be itself in all its singularity would help us to script our lives as works of art. Cultivating beauty or perfection that Ihsan in Islamic Sufi framework is said to be the end of faith, also involves perfection of discipline of attention or living for the glory of the other. Philosophy and Poetry have, in line with mysticism, traditionally emphasized to cultivate or realize the ecstasy or joy of existence (living outside oneself) as all joy is grounded on the other side or ruins of the empire of self. Contemplation that is treasured so highly by both philosophy and mysticism is losing oneself/mind in the other. A philosophical life is pre-eminently a life lived fully conscious of death or a movement towards death. Not only in Buddhism but elsewhere do we find attention to death as a gateway to authentic life.
If philosophy is a preparation for death as Socrates said and philosophy in Indian tradition as darsana involves seeing or being consumed by truth, Martyrdom may be construed as a quintessential philosophical position idealized by the great philosophers of divergent cultures. In Islamic tradition love and life of wisdom consists, in line with the Prophet’s prayer, in seeing things as they are – non-egotistically, detachedly, contemplatively or as if one is dead to – If, as Aldous Huxley noted, the task of life is to overcome the fundamental human disability of egoism, martyrdom may be seen to represents the ultimate and most dramatic expression of man’s loyalty to God or Truth. If as theologians have affirmed, as Huston Smith notes, that establishing an abiding relationship with God is possible without being sensibly aware of God’s presence (Cousineau, 2003:97) and it consists, for Sufis, not in altered states or ecstatic adventures but altered character traits/virtues/stations martyrs can be considered quintessential Sufis who have identified their supreme end or eudemonia with perfecting ethics/abiding by the Norm/obedience to God/ living for the Other and consented to die before death for the sake of Love/Beauty that is God.

Aspiration for Martyrdom

Winning martyrdom is an important aspiration and objective of religious and spiritual life across traditions or cultures though it has been most dramatically embodied in Islamic tradition. It isn’t to be simplistically identified with bloody killing in battlefields in holy war. It embraces this as well but isn’t limited to it and involves fundamentally a new orientation to live in truth and sacrifice even life for it. Since God or the First Principle affirmed in various traditions is the Measure and the End, man’s felicity or salvation lies in bearing witnessing to Truth that is God’s denotative attribute or God as Gandhi would state/the truth of being as Heidegger would phrase it. This witness is given by consent to risk everything including life n the path of truth. Various kinds of trials and tribulations borne in the struggle of life or life of love and while facing death are reckoned as various forms of martyrdom. Shiite sect in Islam has especially focused on the salvific economy of martyrdom. Sufism in Sunni sect may be read as an approach that aspires for and cultivates a special form of martyrdom for seekers. Islam envisages its perfection in what it calls Ihsan (from creating beauty or doing anything as it should be done in a style or with an eye on beauty or doing any action with the awareness of God in mind) implying living a life dedicated to unveiling beauty of God which is best or most dramatically illustrated in consenting to die for the sake of higher life that is divine life.
Raimon Panniker has stated:

The “end of Man,” then, is not individual happiness but full participation in the realization of the universe—in which one finds as well one’s “own” joy . . . You need not worry about your own salvation or even perfection. You let live, you let be. You don’t feel so much the need to interfere with Nature as to enhance, collaborate, and “allow” her to be (Panniker, 1993: 132).

Nothing constitutes better attestation of our full participation in the realization of the universe than consent to be a martyr. And to be a martyr is to love fate, to embrace life to its hilt, to consent to die for the sake of life or what makes life worth living, to clear the path for the Being to manifest or life to unfold its great treasures. It is to be fully consumed by love so that not one’s but Heavenly Father’s will is done or one manifests greater glory of God. Martyrdom constitutes a test of our loyalty to truth which is divine or the name of God. It constitutes a measure of moral and spiritual excellence of man. And it involves violence against violence loving self – our animal part – and lets the Other/non-self be so that the transpersonal principle of life, Spirit, blooms.
The emphasis on martyrdom is another aspect of this emphasis of courting or conquering death or distancing oneself from ego and attachments which is what martyrdom requires. All things, save God’s Face/Being, are destined to perish. There remains a terrible beauty behind every event of which Yeats talks and Blake calls for in his “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” The cosmic dance appreciated in a Unitarian vision “justifies” all and our task remains both of contemplation of the unity/transcendence of opposites and joining the dance and siding with justice at the dualistic plane on which drama of unity unfolds. “Lives become petty and laughable to the extent that they shy away from the presence of the tragic. And to the extent that they participate in a sacred horror, they become human. It may be that this paradox is too great and to difficult to uphold: still, it is no less the truth of life than blood is.” Disciplining the desiring self or self will so that God’s will is done and all things are done for the glory of God/Beloved/Other/non-self constitutes the sum and substance of all religious/mystical ethical traditions. It is the commandment of religion. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing noted: “There can be no greater sorrow than the truly wise man can feel, than to reflect that “he” is still “someone.” Why? Because everything perishes and what stays is God’s Name or divine face (Al-Quran 28:88) – the Being in beings. Be attuned to Being. Surrender. Contemplate. See the other and witness the seer that sees. He only can be free who is no longer anyone.” With Simone Weil we need to understand the pathology of being somebody and invitation to martyrdom as an offering of “I.” and should have no hesitation in smashing oneself as if “using a hammer to strike a nail with all the force one can muster, a nail whose tip rests on the self” (Weil, 1952: 82) – a process in which martyrs excel.
Simone Weil has beautifully put forward the thesis how one creates the meaning in life by renouncing all personal meanings/interests, by complete acceptance of submission to the order of the world (Sufi stations of sabr and raza). “Where there is complete, authentic, and unconditioned consent to necessity, there is the fullness of love of God” (Weil, 1956: 267). One recalls Spinoza’s view of love of God by renouncing every vestige of personal interest. Freedom lies in recognizing our utter dependence on Totality, on God. We are not asked to do something against which our heart or head rebels but just shifting the perception in accordance with the nature of things which is what truth connotes. Truth understood both in terms of what is the case or unveiling of Being presupposes the distorting lens of ego/ruse of conceptual intellect has been overcome. One is just asked to accept or recognize the obvious fact that there is the order called necessity, which exists prior to us and which is there for reasons not necessarily understandable in human terms. Reality is there that transcends all our estimates, evaluations, desires and constitutes the given and man has no choice but to accept it by renouncing that which would have led him to rebellion – the sense of individuality and freedom outside God. Faith is itself consent – consent to the good according to her. To have erased the claim of autonomy and getting consumed or transfigured by love and thus witnessed the truth or rights of the Other is martyrdom that mystical traditions espouse and this may or mayn’t be manifested in physical battleground where forces of gravitation and transcendence confront each other. Great epics/major myths and many a classical tragedy narrate versions of this martyrdom.
Sufism as self transcendence
Iqbal defined Islam as entry into the battlefield of self sacrifice (shahadat gah-i ulfat). The Sufis have consistently defined divine life (baqa/subsistence in God) as other side of fana (annihilation of the illusory self). In fact the key practice of attention to breath results in sharpening of awareness in whose light one sees the world as against the fog projected by an illusory ego that construes the world as an object of appropriation or conquest. Nund Rishi realized the meaning of the fundamental doctrine of faith after sacrificing the self for the Only Existent, the non-self.
La Illāhā ṣahih korum
Waḥi korum panun pān
Wūjūd travith mūjūd myūlum
Adu’ bu’ votus lā makān (Saqi, 1985: 29).
I decided on “There is no god but God”
And made of my self a site of revelation
Abandoning existence, I found presence
Thus have I reached the place-less place
Underhill quotes Kabir as stating that “When the I, the Me, and the Mine are dead, the work of the Lord is done,” and explains why the self must be put to sword:
The substance of that wrongness of act and relation which constitutes ”sin” is the separation of the individual spirit from the whole; the ridiculous megalomania which makes each man the centre of his universe.
So it is disinterestedness, the saint’s and poet’s love of things for their own sakes, the vision of the charitable heart, which is the secret of union with Reality and the condition of all real knowledge (Underhill, 2004: 108-9).

In The Meccan Revelations, Ibn Arabi succinctly states:

Now you must know that if a human being (al-insān) renounces their (own personal) aims, takes a loathing to their animal self (nafs) and instead prefers their Sustainer/Teacher (rabb), then the Real will give (that human being) a form of divine guidance in exchange for the form of their carnal self… so that they walk in garments of Light. And (this form) is the sharī‘a of their prophet and the Message of their messenger. Thus that (human being) receives from their Lord what contains their happiness – and some people see (this divine guidance) in the form of their prophet, while some see it in the form of their (spiritual) state (Qtd in Morris, n.d. 20).
Ibn ‘Arabî’s statement in The Kernel of the Kernel: “You will be all when you make nothing of yourself” reiterates and sums up this point. As Marcel would put it, “I belong to myself only as I do not belong to myself, as I give myself to otherness, and create myself, come into being, and so belong to what I am”(Cain, 1995: 94). “We study the self to forget the self,” said Dogen. “When you forget the self, you become one with the ten thousand things.” (Qtd in Oldermeadov: 281). To be a Muslim is to surrender the will or the illusory empire of the self to the Other/Tao/Cosmic Will – or to be open to the revelations of the Other/Universe, to take heed of signs. Belief in Revelation is, in the last analysis, translatable in terms of being available to the Other, to what reveals itself, to what is the case. It involves writing off the self that obstructs, frames or interprets the Word/the Other. Religion and Mysticism are methodologies of unburdening, of learning to travel light in the world, living as if death is so near or under the shadow of eternity. It is to die before death so that one lives without fear of this supposed oblivion. It is to live, truly live having written off the self that fears death or unknown.
Given the distinction between soul (with which mind and personality are identified) and spirit, we need to recall shocking call for denying the soul by Jesus. Al-Ghazali calls the soul (the self we are here required to lose to find the true self/Self) “the greatest of your enemies.” Elsewhere we are also told to slay the tempter soul. Abu Sa’id asks: “What is evil, and what is the worst evil?” and answers, “Evil is ‘thou,’ and the worst evil ‘thou’ if thou knowest it not.” Ananda Coomaraswamy remarks here that Abu Sa’id, therefore, called himself a “Nobody,” refusing, like the Buddha, to identify himself with any nameable “personality” (Coomaraswamy,n.d). Personality (from persona or face mask) is a mask that is not to be identified with. It is the nameless colourless light of being, the luminous centre of awareness, the Spirit that is in us and not ours that constitutes our true being and salvation. We transcend all the roles or actions and masks. We are the celestial children of Light and accordingly our dignity is far higher than due to anybody on earth.

The desiring self or soul is worthless hard twisted piece of wood which needs to be burnt by self discipline of sha’ria. It is a dog which doesn’t leave oneself. It is like unchained mad elephant. It is hell. It deserves sword. Iqbal chooses as an epigraph to his The Secrets of Selflessness (Rumiz-i-Be-Khudi), the famous verse of Rumi.

Strive hard in the ways of selflessness to discover and realize your self
Push on in right earnest and God knows what is meet and best

The Cross in Mystical Traditions

It is a fact that “man cannot find happiness within his own limits; his very nature condemns him to surpass himself, and in surpassing himself to free himself.” Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is, as Camus noted. Ever seeking to transcend himself and the world, “By his very birth, man is a being that tends to surpass himself, who aspires to everything else but himself” (Bies,2004: 123) and as Marcel says, “We do not belong to ourselves: this is certainly the sum and substance, if not wisdom, of any spirituality worthy of the name” (Marcel, 1962:pxiv). For Eric Voegelin, who has been called a modern Plato, the most fundamental human experience is, in the words a Voegelin scholar, “an experience of tension toward the divine, which finds its expression in symbols, which lie at the root of all the mythological, religious, philosophical and even political worldviews ever produced by mankind.” This means we are not alone or in an indifferent universe but dialogic selves hounded or sought by the Other/non-self/God.

All traditions from Far Eastern to Indian, Judeo-Christian, Islamic, African and Native American unanimously privilege the other in relation to the self. In fact all traditional philosophers – including representative figures such as Lao Tzu, Nagarjuna, Plotinus, Shankara, Ibn Arabi, Meister Eckhart from six traditions – are unanimous in putting non-self at the centre stage and take supramental supraindividualist view of the Self. Salvation/enlightenment consists in transcendence of the illusory autonomous self. God/Godhead or equivalent term for the First Principle can be understood as the non-self or Other. All mystical philosophers agree that the thinking self or thought must be transcended to commune with the other, the Reality (Al-Haqq) because conceptual intellect divides and posits dualism of subject and object. The ego which divides part from the whole, man from Existence or Divine Environment must be annihilated in the process of fana. Hell as retreat into the cocoon of individuality that accepts separation from the Real because of inability to love. Thus hell is refusal to open for dialogue – which might include total transformation of the self and taking divine robes. The problems – political, social, economic – over which modern world is in perpetual conflict arise from the wrong view of self and our vacation in the world. Religious, mystical and traditional philosophical traditions demand taking loathing of the self and thus rejection of the received definition of man as Homo economicus and individualist Capitalist mindset.
Our greatest celebration is one of losing oneself as the ecstasy or joy of this is immeasurable. Religions are means for this end. Folktales and myths celebrate it. We congratulate others for undoing their illusory empires of selves. The self is our dearest possession and to lose it the only commandment of scriptures or the deeper meaning of all commandments. There seems to be no exception to the rule that joy lies in renouncing the empire of ego and love without condition all that is non-self. Not even the selfish gene thesis is an exception as the self finds its fulfillment by dying and giving birth to the other – the community in which it lives truly not as itself but the other. Life affirms itself. Our redemption lies in letting it be. Animals, similarly, live best as part of life – our life included. If we truly acted as stewards. We celebrate life’s multifarious hues and dialectical play. None is killed and none kills as one scripture informs us. God works or shows His glory in countless forms. Religions call for live more meaningfully or soulfully or face its terrors and the supreme “terror” death. Nietzsche asserted that the key to the meaning of life is to make life a work of art. Religious traditions encourage their adherents to script life in the image of higher life of spirit or surrender the projects of ego and let the Other/non-self/Self be sovereign. The heart of ethics, as expounded in Levinas, is putting sword to the self in the interests of the Other. Living God conscious life is living as if death is a perpetual possibility and it isn’t my will but the will of the Other/Father counts.
If to say ‘I’ is a lie, as Simone Weil noted (Weil, 1970:132), and if joy consists in knowing Truth/Reality (and sorrow separation from It), it follows that it would require giving up this lie of ‘I.’ If joy requires health and the basic pathology is one of being somebody, one needs being nobody. Iqbal said, “Strive hard in the ways of selflessness to discover and realize your self.” God framed in the Vedantic ternary of Sat, Chit and Ananda or Platonic ternary of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty or Islamic ternary of Wuju¯d–Wijda¯n–Wajd, “Being–Consciousness–Ecstasy,” grounds/connotes superabundant joy. Heaven is, in every tradition, pre-eminently a space where spirit blooms and that is manifested in joy. Nirvana is the highest joy as is the Self according to Buddhism and Upanisads respectively. Union/proximity with the Source/Origin which is God/Being is always manifest through joy and that is conditioned on losing the dear self that apes the real Self.
The cost of joy is a readiness to lose our very dear self. All those who are ready to put the other before the self or lose themselves in pursuit of excellence or perfecting style are more ready to access latent reservoirs of joy. Artists, children, saints, players, devoted workers – karma yogis, lovers, have especially little resistance for losing themselves or losing the sense of time in work/play/rest and no wonder they live more meaningfully or joyfully. The secret of attraction of watching a play, as Ahbinavagupta long back explained, is the universalization of consciousness. We treasure those moments in which we aren’t or time is not, moments in which the subject loses himself in the object and in fact there is only experiencing and not experience an object by a subject. The formula remains valid in religion, in philosophy, in literature and art and in such pursuits as crafts and sports that when unity is realized, joy follows.
Whenever and wherever the sense of time which is in fact the principle of sorrow and a measure of our attachment to the ego, due to separation from the Real/Consciousness/Self is lifted, we touch eternity which is heaven here and now. Unity means there is no other to Self/Consciousness and thus ananda has to manifest. Riccour’s expression Oneself as Other has analogues across thinkers Eastern and Western. We also need to look at the paradoxical statements that we find in as diverse source as Upanisads and Plato where everything is said to dear for the sake of the Self and our eudemonia is said to lie is realization of the Self and enlightened self interest. Do what we may, we can’t do away with the idea of the self for the sake of which some ape of it has to be loathed. One has to lose the self we ordinarily identify with and to subsist in God one has first to be annihilated. Dean Inge and many other philosophers including Maritain and Iqbal (and mystics as well) have made it clear that we needn’t fear loss of personality though we must distinguish persona that is imposed from distinct individuality we inherit as a robe from the Divine Personality that is our deepest ground. The following formulation is here reproduced to clarify the point further.

The paradox is that the “I” ceases to be “I” and yet continues to be “I.” “I” finds that the dissolution of “I”, its disappearance, is not the extinction of “I” but on the contrary is the “I’s” only true life.” The fear of loss of personality is quite unfounded. The loss of personality (if so it were) is “the only true life” as Ternyyson once remarked. With theists, we can maintain the difference between God and the finite self but reject their rejection of their identity. The paradox of identity in the difference has to be underlined. It implies that future life as a loss of separate individuality while at the same time the “I” is not annihilated but enjoys in ultimate peace.

Conclusion

We are here to prepare for death, for going there where time and self are no more, and we are free and this is what enlightenment is about. Panniker has observed, “The more we are the other, the more we are ourselves . . . to be our true self we must transcend our ego and become also lily.” (Panniker, 1992:207). We read in Weil’s essay on Personality “Everything which is impersonal in man is sacred, and nothing else.” “Perfection is impersonal. Our personality is the part of us which belongs to error and sin. The whole effort of the mystic has always been to become such that there is no part left in his soul to say “I.” Krishnamurti would note that education consists in crossing letter I in live to make it love. Writing off the self is the odyssey of soul making for which we are here.

References
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Qtd in Morris, n.d In introduction to Ibn ‘Arabi’s Book of the Quintessence Concerning What Is Indispensable For the Spiritual Seeker .
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Weil, Simone, 1970, First and Last Notebooks, tr. Richard Reese, Oxford University Press, New York.
…………….. The Notebooks of Simone Weil, 1956, tr. Arthur F. Mills, 2 volumes, Putnam (referred as N).
……………. Gravity and Grace, tr. Arthur F. Willis, Putnam, New York, 1952.