Rev Left Radio - Sufism: Islamic Mysticism and the Annihilation of Self in God

Episode Date: December 23, 2020

Adnan Husain is both a Medieval European and Middle Eastern historian. His work has focused on religious phenomena and social imagination in Medieval Catholicism and Islam, particularly on Franciscan spiritual and Sufi mystical traditions. He is also a co-host of Guerrilla History and the host of The Majlis podcast.  Also check out "Muslim Societies, Global Perspectives" Outro Music: "Mustt Mustt" by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan ----- Please Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's wonderful episode, we have my friend Adnan Hussein on to talk about Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, but we also talk about mysticism more broadly, the left's relationship to religion and these spiritual paths, the similarities between mystical branches within religions, and the dissimilarities, the problem, of trying to secularize or extract these beautiful mystical traditions from the cultures and religious foundations from which they arose.

And so it really is a different and hopefully incredibly engaging information and conversation about a topic that I've long been interested in. I've touched on a few times with Rev Left in our meditation episodes, our wonderful episode with Michael Brooks, et cetera. But I want to continue to drill down in this direction. and there's an obvious thirst for this sort of stuff. It's a huge monumental aspect of my life and how I spend my hours on this earth

engaging in deep practices of meditation and very much see myself as on the spiritual path and have been for over a decade at this point and I see my life being a continuation of that path. And so the connections and the similarities we could draw together between, the sort of Islamic, cultural traditions and histories with the Buddhist cultures and histories and Christian mysticism and even like thinking about Jesus as a mystic, right?

Or thinking about Jesus through the lens of St. Francis of Assisi, a famous Christian mystic. I think these things are profoundly interesting and are really doorways into deep transformations that we can all engage in. This is not, need not be at least, some hyper-obscure. a hypo esoteric thing that the average person can't access. These traditions are all over the world in every major religion and every major culture and they are accessible to each and every one of us. And so without further ado, let's get into this wonderful discussion on Sufism with my friend Adnan Hussein. Enjoy.

Hi, my name is Adnan Hussein. I teach at Queens University. I'm currently the director of the school of religion, but normally I'm a medieval Mediterranean and Islamic world historian in the Department of History. And you are also the co-host, my co-host on Gorilla History with Henry Hakamaki and We've put out many episodes. It's sort of gaining traction where people are becoming familiar with our work. And through that, I figured that I learned that you were into Sufism. You were raised in it, a practitioner of it. And I personally wanted to expand the show to these other realms. And I've talked about meditation and Buddhism before. And there's certainly a thirst for it out there. And I thought this would be a great sort of entry point into more of these episodes it's outside of just Buddhism. I want to talk about mystical Christianity and Judaism,

et cetera. And this is a beautiful place to start. And it's a branch of mysticism that I myself am not overly familiar with. So I'm going to sort of learn along with the audience in a lot of ways here. But first and foremost, for those who might not know anything about Sufism, can you just give us a basic summary of what exactly it is and anything you want to say for somebody who just has little to know understanding whatsoever of it? Absolutely. And thanks so much for having me on to talk about this. I'm really excited to talk more about Sufism or in Arabic Tasawu which is a kind of umbrella term really for a variety of devotional and spiritual currents within this global religious tradition and culture that has existed for 14 and a half centuries

and covers societies and cultures that extend from you know the west coast of Africa to central Asia and China, South Asia, and of course, more recently in the modern period, diasporic Muslim populations in Europe, Australia, North America, and so on. So there's endless variety in the cultures, and each of them has forms of spiritual practice within Islam that are local and connected to that particular culture. But I would say most broadly or basically, you could say that Sufism is the mystical or spiritual orientation within the practice of Islam. And what it's about on some level is, if anybody knows things about Islam, they usually know about, oh, Sharia law, right?

Or, you know, that's at best if they know something. You know, that's not just about, oh, this terrible terrorists who did this horrible things to us, et cetera, why do they hate us, right, since 9-11? But if you know anything about it, you tend to think about Islam as a religion of practice and of law. And so it's unfamiliar for many people to really associate Sufism with Islam as its mystical and spiritual current. And what it was after was moving beyond just the kind of diligent practice of prayers and following dietary restrictions and these kind of externalities of social and communal practice to trying to form. a spiritual, personal, experiential connection with God, a kind of intimate knowledge or knowing

of God. So it was called Marifah or G-N-O-S-I-S-S, this kind of idea of a sense of being and knowledge of that greater being that exists. And so obviously this is a monotheistic religious tradition, Islam is, like Christianity and Judaism. So it understands a creator God as having, you know, been responsible for the shape of the universe, but there's a sense in these religious traditions that God is transcendent and other, something different from creation in some way. So the individual believer, you know, is trying to find, how do I make a personal connection to this transcendent sort of reality? And they, in mystics, tended to interpret the important doctrine in Islam that you find in the Quran articulated, this doctrine.

of Tohid, the unique oneness and transcendence of God from creation, understood this to mean that, well, God was really the only true reality. Like the rest of the world was some kind of secondary construct from God's being. And so, you know, if you were after, you know, a sense of true reality, as they understood it, they wanted to have that connection with divine reality. And so that notion was called Huck or truth or reality. divine truth or reality and the the Sufism was the exploration then of one's own spirit as intimately and organically connected or related to that unity of being in the universe so the goal was some kind of union with

god and this is you find in all these different mystical traditions is the union the mystical union feeling of oneness with the oneness that is thought to exist and very often these Sufi mystics, early Sufi mystics, characterize this experience of union as fanat, or the loss or absence of self in God. That is the sense that your own personal, separate, isolated identity and consciousness was erased in a sense of emerging, you know, in this kind of oceanic sense of oneness and overcoming that feeling that people had, that we're somehow separate in our existence and that we've lost some kind of active, spiritual enlivening connection. And so that's what they were after. And they felt that they had to undergo some kind of journey of the soul towards

God with had its stages and its various experiences, be they visionary and in dreams or these sorts of things, but they would have these ecstatic experiences that they felt were bringing them closer to some level of true reality, where they would then achieve that state of mystical union. And but because Islam is a very social religion, and as we mentioned, it has rules and laws and external practices that people are supposed to commit to, whether that's fasting during the month of Ramadan or five daily prayers or, you know, giving, you know, tithing, a kind of form of time. So these kind of legal requirements of practice, because it's a very social, communal religion, there was some tension with this idea that you just, you know, have this flight of

spiritual fancy and mystical union with some otherworldly experience. And so some mystics said, well, that is an important experience, this fauna, this annihilation of self in God that leads to these ecstatic experiences. But the real kind of level, that's one level, the next level is or return to the self, return to sort of consciousness in your normal, earthly social existence, but subsisting still with a sense of that spiritual connection to reality, so that your life then is transformed by this awareness in your daily work. You're not actually distracted from, you know, what you're doing on a daily basis from a sense of presence with God. So they said that's a higher level. It's when you can, outside of those moments of

ecstatic union and loss of self and visions or a real, you know, feeling of connection. And then you return, but do you return and do you feel constricted and all you want to do is just get back to that kind of experience? Or do you now feel that you can abide with your life, but in a way that is a greater sense of wholeness in your life? That's what they, some mystics said, what you need to really be able to do and so while it started as individual seekers you know turning inwardly sometimes really in a kind of dramatic renunciation of the world that it's a corrupt distracting temptation uh in order to cultivate these mystical experiences and a sense of union over time they're developed kind of you know specific devotional practices like ascetic regimes of

periods of fasting or periods of withdrawal for contemplation and seclusion and meditation and self-scrutiny techniques like regularizing your breathing in chant and as I was saying meditation and sort of self-scrutiny you know of oneself and there even developed some distinctive practices distinctive clothing that the Sufis people who wanted to affiliate with this path started wearing and they might have and developed collective devotional rituals so like not just meditative chant but chant in collective form sometimes with music or recitation of poetry to try and take you out of your current sense of reality to to experience other things they developed a culture around commemorating some of the famous figures and they also really importantly i think something

we can talk a little bit more when we talk about the practice of Sufism is that they're developed this idea that you should attach yourself to the instructive discipline of a spiritual master who had traveled down the path and they organized themselves ultimately as a result of this social experience where you're supposed to have a bond with somebody you know in early periods there was mystics who just you know they just discovered these kinds of things on their own or they might have these intermittent experiences with people that shook their reality and that would turn them into following this sort of path. But what starts to happen is this idea that, you know, there is a kind of holistic method for this.

And so they develop these confraternities or orders or brotherhoods that are called the Sufi tarikas or the Sufi path. Literally, tarika means a path or a way. And there are numerous different ones. these and we can talk a little bit more about them and some of their differences, but people may have heard, for example, of the famous Mev Levy or whirling dervishes. They're well known in the West because of the importance of a figure Jalalideen Rumi, who's a very prominent Persian Sufi mystic and poet and scholar, who is the founder of this whirling dervish order, where part of their particular

practice was a form of whirling dance to music, religious sort of music that would then take them into an altered state or situation. So the point is that these did end up becoming from individual mystics kind of seeking something like a personal connection with the divine reality to more popular social movements of affiliation that could encompass everything, encompass everything from, say, a casual engagement in your local religious culture once a week to some seance or performance of a whirling dervish, for example, to people who really abandoned the regular world for periods of time for intensive spiritual training and discipline to things like occasionally going to the tomb of a holy individual

who was well known to, you know, pray and visit that as an act of piety. So you had this kind of broad range of practices that are all part of what we think of as Sufism. And it could even be like dedicated to a life of wandering, you know, wandering. Wandering, many. and just going from place to place and saying, I want to reject kind of the normal social life because I want to pursue this sort of path. So they're developed a comprehensive tradition that included devotional practices, doctrines about the nature of the world, mystical theosophy, you know, what you might think of as philosophy and mysticism kind of combined. So the theory about the journey and the stages of the practice, that sense of the macrocosm. You know, what is that kind of world of being that is out there and how do I connect with it? And then ideas of the individual self of a kind of psychology at the microcosmic level, of the work that you had to do individually or in direction under a master of how you overcome this divided self of having this sort of divine spirit, but also being connected with the carnal self, the sort of material, emotional,

feelings and that, you know, that they called the Nuffs, this, you know, complex of potentially anger, pride, selfishness, desire, how to put those into balance so that they were under control of your divine nature and that you were in a proper proportion and balance to achieve your full potential as a spiritual being, as a human being. So that's kind of what I would say is the broad synopsis of, well, what is, what is Sufism? Yeah. No, beautifully said, and you know, it's so interesting because I know that there are mystical branches in every religion. It's something I'm deeply interested. I myself have been on a mystical path for well over a decade at this point, but to hear you break it down to talk about the lack of a self or the

unity consciousness, it just fits so perfectly into these other traditions. I come from a Buddhist perspective, and we have concepts like Anada, right? No self. On the path you have a path you have things like unity consciousness where the individual self falls away and your your selfhood becomes universal everything is included in yourself um there's um dark nights of the soul right so i think any spiritual path includes this expansion this radical expansion of self into everything and then these periods of contraction where you you fall back into the little trembling separate sense of a self and it hurts and so and you get a see with increasing clarity how much that contraction hurts and how much you want to seek outward expansion of the self.

And so these things are incredibly interesting. In Buddhism, there's sort of a segment of practitioners called Bodhisattvas, right, who go through these processes of the mystical path, of these radical openings of attaining enlightenment. But as you said, return to the self in order to go out and help alleviate the suffering of other beings, right? And so this idea that you soar to the highest heights of spiritual awakening in Buddhism, we'd call it like enlightenment, but then there's a re-embodiment of that radical perceptual shift where it comes back into being and you come back into all your humanness. You don't live in the clouds your whole life. And then you say, okay, now that I've, it's sort of like, I heard somebody talk about like animals have a pre-self. And then as we grow up as humans, we develop a sense of self through our childhood and into our,

our teams in 20s, right? We have a very rigid vision of ourselves. It's social because our ideas of our self have to be defined by our social environment and how we think we stack up to everybody else. And these mystical paths, I think what they all do is point to a post-self way of being in the world, which I think is incredibly profound. And just to break down the basic idea for anybody still questioning, what do we mean by mystics? I think you said it really well, and I would just reiterate, there is like you can think of in every religion or whatever, there's mystical branches and there's Orthodox branches. And to be a religious person in the Orthodox sense, whether you're Jewish, Muslim, even Buddhist, right, there's Buddhism and Hinduism

have these sort of ways of being too where you basically engage in a set of beliefs, a set of rituals, the gods are up there somewhere else, right? And you pray to them and all this. And this is what we know as religion. But what mysticism, as you said, seeks to do is have this direct communion with God or even in a secular age, you could call it with nature itself. And it's that urge to fully lose yourself in the thing to get complete unity and communion with God or nature that I think sets mysticism aside from regular Orthodox religion. And of course, this gives rise to a whole bunch of conflicts within religions as the Orthodox believers will view a lot of what mystics say as blasphemy, you know, as being heretics. And so there is always this

this tension within those religions as well. And that's this true for Buddhism, I think, as other ones like Islam and Christianity. And then the last thing I would say before we move on, because we're kind of already talking about mysticism, so maybe we can go a little deeper into that and not wait several questions to get there. But the last thing I would like to put forward is this idea of omnipresent. So if you're in a religious tradition and, you know, call it God for now, and you believe that God is omnipresent, which I'm sure everybody who believes in a monotheist that God does believe,

you know, that means that not that God is up in the clouds looking down at you or standing over your shoulder judging you, but that literally God is you and other people, right? Hindus do this thing where they bow to the God and the other, et cetera. And so this idea of omnipresence can get very, very deep and can point toward the path of mysticism. Spinoza in the Jewish tradition was one of the first thinkers and philosophers to radically expand the conception of God into this omnipresent sense and to feel himself, I don't know how far he got down the path, right, but to feel himself as one with it. And he would do these things like he was very hermit-like. He lived by himself for long periods of time and he crushed glass to make a living into lenses. But he would like

put spiders or flies into spider's webs and watch the spiders attack them, right? And he just had this delight with nature and how it played out. And he saw God and everything. So these things go way, way, way back. They encompass everything. And I'm often, you often hear the question, all religions have something true about them. You know, we can pull something from every religion. And I always think there's the obvious answer of what all religions have in common. And that's mystical branches. And they're all getting at a very, very similar thing across space and time and culture and history. And I just think it's utterly profound. But I think that's what we mean by mysticism and how it differs from religion. Do you have anything else to say about any

of that? Well, no, I just think that those are very interesting reflections about how to understand that relationship between these mystical or spiritual currents and the applied forms, the social forms, the identities of religion, the institutions of religion. And this mystical tendency has often been, I just described how they ended up becoming sort of organized in various brotherhoods with their practices but one of the fundamental roots of this of Sufism and and what remains a vibrant and profound and important current within this diverse complex of practices spiritual practices of Sufism is this kind of anarchic anti-institutional sense of the true reality is not these social conventions it's not pleasing other people in your community by your orthodox and

pious observance and sometimes in fact maybe the path actually requires you to confront those social expectations and norms and incur the opprobrium and the blame of others as part of your practice to be humble to avoid hypocrisy avoid appearing to be pious devout religious and to reveal that we are all very weak people on the path and we have so much to learn so i'm going to remind myself by committing to, you know, being open about the fact that I have, like, these weaknesses. And so you find there's a very interesting story, for example, of this one mystic, 9th century, trans-Oxanian, so Persian world, Central Asian mystic, Biasid Bistami, one of these early great figures who's often held as the paragon of the ecstatic tradition, rather than that sober

return to self tradition but this ecstatic kind of seeking after mystical union sort of tradition that led to lots of ecstatic experiences and sometimes people saying things that reflected that experience of oneness so saying audacious things like he said for example one time playing upon a formula that's part of prayer you know which is glory to god right he said glory to me how great is my station Because at that moment, he was absorbed in the sense that there was no difference between him and the godhead. He was part of the divine at that moment. And so he says something like that. It sounds blasphemous to people, you know, to Orthodox people who are not in the know.

And other Sufis would later say, well, look, okay, that's a true state. But hey, you know, you're not supposed to say that in public. And that's just one stage. And so, you know, there's that tension. But that anarchic dimension, that dimension that of transcend. basic conventions. You know, philosophy also had, you know, Islamic philosophy, somebody like Al-Farabi, who was important in extending Greek philosophy in the Islamic frame, also posited that basic religion was necessary for social order, but it wasn't, you know, the true philosophical

truth, but there could be some relationship between these things, and it was an elite venture for those who are capable. And in some sense, there was sometimes the mystics would make their peace with the orthodoxy by saying, yeah, okay, it's important that we follow these practices. They're part of the disciplining of the self. But within them, the true point is not to get wrapped up in those forms and those externalities, but is to remember that this is all supposed to be designed to put you into some fulfilling, meaningful connection with the divine.

So the institutional forms of religion, maybe they have to be adhered to. And maybe there is wisdom in them and all of that. But the goal is not to just be observant in your practice. The goal is to enliven the self, right, with these broader connections. So there has definitely been that. And so when Sufism became a little bit more socialized and institutionalized in these Sufi orders and expanded socially that a lot of

people were participating. And Muslims today often don't understand and realize themselves how popular and widespread Sufism was in its more popular version of like the Sufi Brotherhoods and maybe once a week, everyone goes and attends a Zikr service of an invocation and chant. It doesn't mean you're a mystic, but it means that you're part of this spiritual devotional culture and that it has some value to you. That was so widespread. Almost everybody had some kind of connection to this sort of culture. But in the modern world, scientific modernity, the ravages of colonialism, people lost that sense and thought, well, we've got to revive Islam and get down to the basics and make it scientific or relevant to modernity. And these are superstitious kind of practices that are not going to help us.

So they suppressed these orientations with fundamentalist versions of Islam. and there was a lot of disruption in those traditions. And so now people think that it's some very eclectic or quirky, non-normative sort of experience. But of course, in a way, they're right, because to be a true Sufi is to reject sort of the conventions. And so you ended up having certain people during that period of the Sufi Brotherhood era of thinking that now Sufism was being lost, like the real meaning of it was being lost by it becoming part of just the fabric of society. So they turned to much more radical piety, the calander or extreme dervish piety, where they basically, you could think of them as like the punk rockers of their time,

because what they did was they confronted everything from the way you're supposed to dress and look as a response to what they thought was a debased culture that the nethered. needed to be rejected. So there was something called in dervish, this kind of extreme dervish piety, the four blows, where you shave your head, shave your beard, which is a big deal. You know, you're supposed to wear a beard in this, in the culture. That's the kind of image of masculinity and sober masculinity. Shave your beard, shave your eyebrows. And so just present this kind of strange visage, you know, that would look weird to people. There was interest in piercings and scarring and nakedness wearing animal skins, i.e. not woven fabric to kind of

reject, you know, labor and reproduction in society, alternative sexualities, non-normative orientations, everything from celibacy to everything else you can imagine, mendicancy, refusal to work, saying, I don't want to have a normal, regular life. I, you know, want to. And doing so, not by just withdrawing from society and going off somewhere in the wilderness to, you know, meditate but to do it in public as a provocation and to the urban environment and to incur that blame as a radical, spiritual othering from the material world and its social conventions. So you have everything from really extreme options to this kind of somewhat spiritually oriented form of Islam that's still very normative and everything in between. It's a very capacious

tradition. Yeah, beautiful. Absolutely fascinating. And I do, I mean, what you're getting at towards the end there is something inherently revolutionary in the extreme forms of mysticism. I mean, they're just by their very nature, almost revolts against any sort of orthodoxy, religious, political, or anything else. And certainly we could use some of that inward revolutionary energy in today's time. And it's interesting. I mean, maybe we won't have enough time to talk about people waking up across the world in various ways, but it does feel necessary on some level. But earlier you were talking about how the language of mysticism can bring blowback and sort of, you know, make people sort of wig out a little bit when you say something like, I am God. And it's funny because you

think of the Jesus story. I'm somebody who grew up Catholic, rejected it, became a rather evangelical atheist in my early 20s got deeper into religion and mysticism and sort of got way more nuanced about it, of course. But to think of Jesus as a mystical figure makes a lot of things make sense. Things like, you know, I am the son of God. Or when the Pharisees were harassing Jesus, asking them, you know, where is this kingdom of heaven? When does it come? He says, the kingdom of heaven is within you, right? And so you can think of Jesus as being in this ecstatic state. In Buddhism, we might call it something like unity consciousness and it is this it is this high spiritual static state before the bottom sort of drops out you return and you re-embody that you you bring it

into your life you weave it in you calm down a little bit right um and that's a no self phase or whatever but in this unity conscious stage language like that only makes sense from a mystical perspective because if an orthodox perspective you saying your your god is pure blasphemy um and you know So to understand the Jesus story as him having mystical experiences, but then trying to articulate it in the cultural verbiage of the time, right? He's going to use the dominant Judeo, well, it's obviously pre-Christian, but Jewish language of God and heaven and whatnot, to try to articulate this sense of being. And then he has these disciples. He tries to tell them to, they don't all fully get it, you know. And so whether that's objectively true or not, we can even debate whether Jesus even exists.

as a singular historical figure or not, but to interpret the Jesus story as a mystical one, I think brings lots of dimensions out of that story that previously didn't quite make as much sense as it does under the mystical lens. Do you have any thoughts on that? Absolutely. Well, no, I think that's very true, and that there were even attempts at writing gospels to bring out that mystic dimension. So you have the Gnostic Gospels rather famously that were later suppressed or held as non-canonical, but the point here is that for any sort of religious movement, there are going to be a variety of orientations. If it's actually going to appeal to a broad section of people, it has to have something for everyone. And there

are some people who can't accept just authority in the normal way or can't accept that you just do religious practices for the sake of your obedience, but it feels like, feel like they want something more from it. And he was speaking in many ways to that, that the way that you revive this religious law and this religious practice is infusing it with a sense of this greater reality that's behind it. And so I think, you know, there's a lot of opportunities in basically all of these religious texts. You can read them against the grain to see these moments where there is a mystical reality that's signaled in some ways. And that's what the mystics end up doing is finding in scriptural texts those sorts of moments. So for example, in the

Quran, there's this verse called the light verse. It's a famous verse. It's a strange allegory of light that's kind of kind of bursting into light and that it's light upon light. And, you know, people don't really understand, well, what is this, you know, really about? What does it mean? And so the mystics would go into that and say, oh, that's resonating with my sense of freeing and releasing from darkness of spiritual negligence and, you know, lack of self-awareness into a higher reality where I emerge and it seems like I feel lightness all about and that's the higher reality. So they took these kinds of moments or moments where God says, I'm closer to the believer than their jugular veins, right? So again, that idea of the omnipresence of God,

it's not just something outside of you as separate from creation. You know, that's always the problem, is how to make that kind of connection and what kind of vocabulary is possible to be able to articulate ineffable feelings, you know, within the vocabulary that's presented in these religious traditions and in the sacred scriptures and so on. But it's clearly something signaling that, you know, God isn't exactly what you think of as, you know, you may imagine as some separate being up in the celestial sphere, but that if God could be as close to you or closer to you, then your jugular vein means that there's something inside of you that connects to the divine. So they would look to those sorts of moments to ground

and explore this sort of sense of, this sort of sense of reality. Yeah. Again, completely beautiful. One of the things I think I was drawn to Buddhism about was, I think, because of various contingencies and history and culture, there was, you know, Asian traditions that allowed the Buddha to articulate the path in a particularly clear way. Like, as you say, some of the stuff, if you dive into Christian and Islamic mysticism, if you're not really into it, if you haven't had those experience, right, because it's not intellectual, it's experiential.

And if you haven't had those experiences, it almost makes clear. completely no sense at all on the intellectual level. I think one of the benefits of Buddhism, which is the same path, I think we're talking about the same exact path, but is this clarity with which he laid out the four noble truce and the eightfold path, giving you this sort of map and this very technical practice to do to open up these states of being. And also I think there's just differences in individuals and cultures that attract you to one tradition over another. So there's all those contingencies as well.

no tradition is superior to another right um i do want to mention the idea that just because before we move on uh st francis of assisi's somebody who i would completely consider a christian mystic he said one of the quotes he said was the greatest gift jesus ever gave us was the transcendence of self and so again that that that puts st francis in this tradition of viewing jesus as a mystic and taking that path incredibly seriously well that's i'm so glad that you mention that because, you know, that as a medieval historian who was interested in religion, religious culture, and the spiritual orientations, I gravitated completely when it came to medieval European culture to St. Francis of Assisi and wrote and studied a lot in my graduate career

trying to compare and think of Francis and Sufis and seeing these interesting correspondences between them, he seemed like a dervish to me. I mean, from what I was familiar with was this person calling into question all the religious truths and assumptions people had to call people to the imitatio Christi. Let's live exactly like we think Christ did and reject this world of corrupt money-making. He was from a mercantile family in the part of medieval Europe that was most absorbed in early commercial kind of activity on a broad scale. And, you know, he just was so disillusioned with that and thought that we needed a religious sort of revival. And he had all of these spiritual visions that gave him instruction.

And it called him to go and do dramatic things like one time he was preaching in a piazza to people. And he just somehow didn't feel good about this moment where everybody was idolizing him and, you know, clearly thinking he was some great. even in his own life, practically a saint, right? I mean, he attracted so many people to him because of his piety. So that he went back into the church, stripped naked, had one of his companion friars, bring a bowl of ashes, and lead him out naked and dump the ashes on top of his head so that he could abase himself in front of everybody and say, you think I am this great holy figure?

Guess what? two days ago I drank broth chicken broth you know like I did this terrible thing you think I'm so great I had chicken you know it was this like intense kind of fracture everything try and be your most frightened of the idea that you might be a hypocrite and not engage in this for the right reasons you're calling people to these things you're dramatically trying to upend their view of religion and yet at the same time you have to guard against people's, you know, valorization of you because that'll make you proud of yourself. You're not supposed to be doing it for yourself, but for the greater truth.

So these kinds of things reminded me of these extreme dervishes, doing things to confront people's expectations, being worried about the problem of hypocrisy, and how to, you know, really get themselves outside of the social norms of religion to a reality of spiritual truth. So Francis is really one of those mystical kinds of figures, and that's why he was on, you know, at Mount Alverna, received those stigmata, the wounds of Christ, right, in this vision. And it's so interesting because, in fact, actually, he wanted to be a martyr. He wanted to actually imitate Christ by, you know, being a martyr, actually dying. And so he tried to be a martyr.

He went during the period of the Crusades to the Middle East in a famous episode and ended up preaching. before the Sultan of Egypt, Malik al-Kamil, during the Fourth Crusade, the time of the Fifth Crusade, to have this kind of cross-cultural inter-religious encounter and to call the Saracen, the Muslims, as they were called, to the truth of this religion. But in fact, what ended up happening is that they had kind of an interesting spiritual conversation and who knows exactly really what happened. But he didn't get martyrdom. He went back. and then he had this spiritual vision that was really more related to his own practice

and not so much the conversion of others and certainly was read by many as a rejection of the crusading ideal, you know, as well. And so he's a very fascinating figure as an intersection with this kind of mystical tradition that you find in each of these Mediterranean religions. Yeah, yeah. I did not know all that.

That's amazing. We'll definitely have to have you back on just to have a whole episode on St. Francis. Francis, the idea of debasing himself so explicitly when he was beginning to be venerated as you say is like this gesture towards like, no, don't do, like don't do to me what you did to Christ, which is throw him up in heaven and worship him from afar, listen to what he's saying, go within yourself and you can be a Christ yourself. And I don't know if that's exactly how we thought of it at the time, but it makes me think of it. I have to ask you, is there anything

because I think this term comes from St. John of the Cross, the dark night of the soul. and in Buddhist literature and in the deeper ends of it when you're really getting onto the path they talk about the dark night of the soul they have you know people get messed there's a dark night of the soul project actually by somebody called willoughby britain i think in the buddhist tradition who started realizing that as people got into these retreats and got really intensely into meditation often under the pretext these are just like stress relief exercises right all of a sudden they'd have their mind blown their self would completely drop away and they would actually be terrifying to them, to the point where they thought they had a psychotic break,

they needed serious help. Nobody was there to tell them, actually, this is something that does happen along these paths. In all these traditions, there's something akin to the dark night of the soul. Here's how you get through it, et cetera. And that project's still going. I think it's called the varieties of contemplative experience that people want to look into it. Plenty of podcast with the people talking about these dark nights of the soul. And it just goes to show more broadly how these spiritual paths are not ones of pure ecstasy all the time. They are ones of high revelatory ecstasy followed by often these fall back down to earth. You're back in the little myopic self feelings. You have to face every neurotic thing within you. You become

more intimate with imaginations of your mind and your inner life and that can be ugly. You have to face the gross and cringy parts of yourself, including despair, including terror, including fear of death, right? Is there anything akin to that in the Sufi tradition? Absolutely. And this is what convinces one that there is a kind of unity of these different traditions because they're wrestling with similar experiences and problems along the path to enlightenment or self-realization or however we want to characterize it. And that is that the maqams, the stages, and the ahual, the states and situations, the mystics talked about this a lot and that they had different senses of what was patterned in relationship to one another, you know, they had different ideas about what followed

what and so on. But what they did seem to agree on is that, you know, any progressive sort of moment could and often would be counterposed by yet another kind of experience of darkness. So some of them talk about kush, the unveiling. They talk about that there are thousands of veils between you and the true reality. Those veils are, of course, yourself and your, you know, deficiencies and weaknesses and self-projections and insecurities and so on, that you interposed between yourself and a real connection with the divine, and that ripping those veils is not always easy, fun. Sometimes there's the ecstatic kushf, you know, unveiling of some, you know, divine gift to you where you feel so

connected. But other times, there is a real confrontation with the darkness of your ego. And that can take on these kind of visionary, you may have frightening, nightmarish visions that are projections of qualities and characteristics that you're struggling to overcome. And also there was a sense that you could do certain sorts of things through mystical practice. So, you know, trance, chant, breathing exercises, they can create an activity to other states of consciousness. Or sometimes, of course, the use of psychoactive drugs. And we see that also in native, you know, indigenous traditions.

and, you know, in the hippie culture of seeking enlightenment. And, you know, people were, you know, attracted to the possibility of altered states of consciousness. There was always a risk and a danger that you might be absorbed just with this playful, exciting. And sometimes you might have bad trips or bad experiences, but you'd be wrapped up with this as the reality. But actually, the idea was that these are veils that you need to overcome, go through, so that you can come to other side. So there was very much the sense, part of the reason why I think there developed this idea that you needed a spiritual discipline, like a control environment, and also much

like the project you just described, some points along the path of people who had had experiences that were analogous or gone through various experiences in confronting their own issues who could counsel you. And so that's why the idea of a spiritual director or a guide became really important as a way of making sure that you didn't just get lost on this journey or lose your mind. So a lot of the greatest mystics were thought to be holy fools or mad people. But they obviously were not teachers. They couldn't teach because they had lost their ability to come back into that subsistence with the divine in normal reality, but there were some who were able to. And so their vocation was to guide and bring people along the path so that they

could do so in a way that was healthy and achieved actual balance in the soul. Because you could definitely be unbalanced by immersing in these realities. And, and, um, that sense of the dark night of the soul that it was filled with dangers, if not handled properly, could unbalance you. So there definitely is a whole culture around that. Yeah, same in Buddhist and Asian traditions. There's this, you know, gurus, but also just normal teachers or sanghas, spiritual communities that you're in. People even just a little ahead of you on the path can be incredibly helpful. I look back at some of my stuff, never had any formal teacher or even really a community to meditate.

I was really on the path by myself for many years and still am in a lot of regards. But I look back now and I see that I hit periods of what could be called the Dark Night of the Soul. For instance, in my mid-20s, there was about a six-month period where I became obsessed, obsessive compulsively thinking about my own mortality. And it would be the first thought I had when I woke up. As I drove down the roads, all I saw was like future dead people and dead trees. And the last thought I had before I went to bed at night.

was, you know, I'm going to die one day. And it became, it wasn't really like a depression or anxiety. You can't just go get pills for this stuff. I had no idea what was happening to me. I was very scared that this is going to be a long-term thing where I could never get back to normal. And it took a huge toll. I would look in the mirror and try to say like over and over again, you're going to die one and try to like, almost like immersion therapy, like get used to it. You know, and I now realize that at the very end of that, how I broke out of that was this moment of high spiritual, what I would call selfless compassion, where all the, of my suffering and it got very, very acute. And I was driving and I was weeping and I just like,

I want to stop feeling these feelings. You know, I just want to enjoy my life. I, like, I turn on like a baseball game and see people just playing baseball. And I'm like, God, I wish I could be normal again. Like, I was very scared. And then by myself one day, it just cracked into this, I was weeping for myself, but then it turned into, no, I'm weeping for the human condition. My fear of death is the fear that every human goes through, and in that moment, something radically shifted in me, and I felt my pain not as individual egoic pain, but as selfless, universal pain. And ever since that day, that moment, my relationship with death has been radically altered for the better. And I now look back at it with a lot of the more technical aspects I understand now in my 30s and say, oh, I know what happened. that was something like a dark night of the soul and it's not just this one period and then you have the revelatory experience and then you're good but cycles you cycle sort of through it in Buddhism you talk about like the the dark night followed by an equanimity phase where you have a new relationship to the thing in question right and that's kind of what it did with death for me and yeah so it radically altered that for me psychedelics as you mentioned is also very big in the sense that my first experience of any sort of mystical experience that i can remember was when i was 15

and messing around my friends, I took a fourth of mushrooms, right, which is a huge dose for somebody who has no experience whatsoever. And I've talked about this in previous episodes on like meditation with Mexie. I talked about this in depth, so you can check that out if you want. But basically, I fell down to the grass at the peak of this moment. I looked up into the starry sky and I felt the stars as there was no distance, right? I felt the stars, the way I described at the time was they were raining into me and it was orgasmic. And my friends, I was making a scene. They pulled me up and it snatched me out of it. And I had a terror. terrible, horrifying trip of snakes and spiders, et cetera. But that was my first mystical experience

was actually on a high dose of psychedelics. And when I came down from that, I realized, oh, wow, there's whole different ways of being. There are states of consciousness that I wasn't even aware or possible. And that put me on the path proper, I think, to doing meditation and getting into Buddhism, et cetera. So psychedelics, they're not the solution. You can't just, I think, use psychedelics exclusively, but they can be a tool in the tool set on the spiritual. path. And as you said, indigenous communities have known this for millennia. So it's nothing new or, you know, post-1960s hippie nonsense. It's a deep human tradition. I also last thing I'll say, we're way off the script, but who cares? Last thing I'll say is Nietzsche. He's an interesting

figure. A lot of people will say that his collapse, his mental collapse at the end of his life was due to syphilis and perhaps that played a role where he broke down. This horse was being beaten in the street. He broke down completely. He ran and threw himself over it to stop the beating. And from that point on, he basically had a mental break. Now, Nietzsche talked about these interesting periods of like something like spiritual realization. If you read his words, these long walks he would go on where he'd reach these ecstatic states, right? But he didn't really have, he didn't study Eastern or mystical traditions as far as I know. He didn't really have the language for it. And it could be said maybe, and I'm not saying this is objectively true, but that he was a victim

of getting stuck, not having teachers or anybody to point him out of it, he kind of broke his brain on this stuff. And I don't know if that's true or not. It's just putting it out there as at least a way to understand these things. But to go back and read the Nietzsche story in light of these ideas, I think it points to something because surely he had some insight. You listen to his walks when he's out in nature and he feels this radical expansion of self and falls down on the ground laughing or weeping. These are mystical experiences, but I don't know if he had the framework through which to totally understand it. I don't know. I'm just throwing that out there.

No, very interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought. I mean, I read Nietzsche and I thought that he might be somewhat mystical in that, in that sense, that radical expansion. And as you say, it was very much related to nature. And clearly it was also this rejection of the normative forms of disciplining institutional religion. And this appeal to an Eastern wisdom narrative, even if it wasn't. you know, meant to be actually based in an Eastern religious tradition. But, you know, thus spake Zarathustra, framing it as a prophetic or visionary knowledge that might be able to come to the human being outside of the standard religious operating, you know,

modes and modalities. That's interesting. But definitely the idea that he was unbalanced by it, potentially. very productive because that's what you see in the history of this very much, as I mentioned, the holy fool, the mad person who actually, you know, Sufis would often think that they were basically just enmeshed in a visionary, mystical reality. It's just that it was unbalanced in their ability to communicate it or engage and connect, reconnect with the social world of forms. So there is definitely this sense that it's a human experience, a potentiality that's there, a kind of

energy that is within our consciousnesses and souls and spirits that can be unleashed, but it can be, you know, something that is dangerous or difficult to really master. So that is what the Sufi orders were sort of designed to do was to facilitate. some way of achieving this with some sense of community, with some sense of spiritual direction so that if you found yourself in one of those black, dark spaces like what you were talking about, that there were spiritual resources to make that productive rather than a dead end, right? Because that's the thing, is that there could be a lot of plateaus also along the way. And that itself could be very frustrating, is this feeling that I'm not feeling this

connection anymore. Like a few years ago, I had all of these ecstatic experiences. Why have they left? Is it something wrong? I'm not doing it right. Or why have I, you know, somehow taken a step back? And maybe it's not a step back. Maybe it's just the next stage is growing and maturing. And it's always this constant struggle. So that, for example, and this is why it's also, you can see how deeply embedded every vocabulary is specific and unique within these. religions and yet they also point to these shared kind of realities and processes. But so, for example, the Sufis liked this one hadith or statement that the Prophet Muhammad is said to have made that would be wisdom for Muslims, which is that the jihad, you know, this kind of, you know,

an intense term that everyone's heard. There's a greater jihad and a lesser jihad. And the lesser jihad is the involvement in martial or active struggle in the world. The greater jihad is the one that you have to do against yourself, against your own lower nature, selfishness, pride, anger, despair, all these destructive kinds of tendencies and emotions to try and improve and perfect oneself. But that is the greater struggle that one has. And so Sufis, Sufis, really felt that it was an endless, lifelong struggle of improvement and perfection in your balance with yourself to connect with divine reality and spirituality. Yeah, yeah.

So incredibly, incredibly interesting. Speaking about, because we're always on an hour, and I definitely want to have you back on it to follow some of these detours, some of these side paths that we've gestured towards, because, I mean, we could talk for literally hours about this. stuff. But maybe just talk a little bit about your relationship to Sufism, how it developed, what practices you engage in? And if you've had any sort of high watermarks along the path, given your practices? Well, I, you know, I am somebody who grew up with family tradition in this. As a teenager, I would say my family rediscovered in some sense. My family practice,

My grandfather was a dervish who I heard stories about, who had bits of wisdom and had an interesting, sanguine approach to life. And then I learned that he had actually been a wandering dervish for 12 years, that he traveled and wandered all over. Central Asia family was originally from the Fergana Valley, which is in today's Uzbekistan, on the Silk Route. And he traveled for 12 years across Central Asia, the Persian-Iranian world into the Middle East, performed pilgrimage, you know, in Mecca, Medina, and Arabian, the Arabian Peninsula, the Hajj. But all along the way went to different shrines, visited different Sufi communities and groups, and just sort of survived by like sharpening knives everywhere he went. He would sharpen knives, make a little, you know, enough to sustain him.

himself for that day, engaged and find shelter among different Sufi communities and groups. And he was part of a particular Sufi group, the Nakhshabundi Sufi Brotherhood or Sufi Order. And we sort of lost that after his death. But my mother sort of rediscovered the Sufi tradition in my teens. And it became an important part of our family. myself am not, I would say, actually very mystically, you know, I haven't had that many high or low points that I can really recall. My mother, however, was a really important influence. And she definitely went through a lot of these kinds of intense experiences. But I've continued along

with the practices. So I host, for example, a weekly invocation session, which is a collective or communal vicar, which is also translated as remembrance of God or invocation of God, where in the Nakhshabundi Sufi tradition, you recite passages from the Quran in Arabic as a sort of chant or some of the 99 names or attributes of God. And through that chant and breathing, you try and align yourself in those moments as a form of practice. And within all of these different Sufi orders, they have a recipe almost. you might say, for their particular path,

a distinctive set of religious practices, of doing certain formulas or liturgies of recitation each day and keeping up with that practice. And these might be designed or altered by one spiritual director, you know, to add more from this kind of tradition or these sets of formulas or chants or passages from the Quran and so on

that are designed to orient your, your practice in that way. And of course, everyone is encouraged, particularly the morning prayer, after the morning prayer that all Muslims are supposed to do, there's a period where, particularly in the Sufi tradition, is a good time or late at night, like waking up at night before dawn for some meditation and some other kinds of self-scrutiny, something that's called muhasaba, which is self-accounting, where you really meditate in the self-reflective way and go deep and try and take account of oneself, like, you know, and prepare yourself ahead for the day, knowing, you know, where you are spiritually at that moment. What have been the

challenges that you recently experienced that you need to reflect on and try and mobilize those resources to overcome experiences of anger? or selfishness or impatience or things like that. So that's self-scrutiny once a day to prepare yourself. That's kind of what I am familiar with. And there's endless varieties within these traditions. Different Sufi groups do different kinds of things. Yeah. So much of these mystical practices,

whether it's the whirling dervishes or chanting or meditation or deep prayer in the Christian tradition, so much of it has to do, I think, with the prolonged concentration and direction of attention. So anything can be an object of meditation. I think many people are familiar with like the Buddhist mindfulness, Phapasana meditation of following the breath, right? You follow the breath, you put your attention on it, you feel it. When your mind takes you off into thought, you recognize that, look for the thinker, find nothing, come back to the breath.

Chanting, there's also, in Hindu mystical traditions, chanting is very huge. They chant the name of their guru. or, you know, certain, certain phrases. Yeah, exactly. And it's, it's, it's the, the hyper attention to the chanting and the getting into it. And then whenever you get distracted by thought, you come back to the chanting, feeling it. You know, the same can be in prayer. People work with, like, visions, like, you know, trying to close your eyes and envision things and focus your attention on that.

And I think that that deep systematic direction and concentration of attention is something that is, it is similar to all these traditions. and they all have different objects of meditation, but that focus and that honing in is something like a doorway to these deeper mystical experiences and pathways. So it's just so fascinating how different cultures and different religions have these different ways of going about it, but the similarity across cultures and history and time and space is still there, you know? Yeah, that is interesting.

And I think really Sufis have always recognized that, even though this was very much formed within Muslim religious vocabulary and traditions of Islam. And I do have to say that, you know, some people who have discovered Sufism from the West and so on often try to, mostly from a perspective that Islam is some religion of the law, and so it couldn't really have this unique indigenous and, you know, form of spirituality. And so they think of Sufism as something separate from Islam and try and divide it through this orientalist sort of perspective on it. But the truth is that those correspondences that we've been talking about and sharing today do point to the fact that there are mystical and spiritual traditions that have a connection to one another and that perhaps what this has meant on a social level for Sufis who have tended to be the form of Islam that was successful if you want to talk about it and those terms of spreading itself. and adjusting to the concrete social and material realities of mixed religious societies,

of frontier or border zones, where you had Muslims, Christians, and Jews, for example, interacting in like the Balkans or where in further east in the Indian subcontinent, where you had Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims, that Sufism and the Sufi tradition recognized in some ways and understood that there was truth in these other religious traditions. and you find some of the great Sufi masters like Nizamuddin Oliah, who was a Chishti Sufi Sheikh in Delhi in the 14th century, having Hindu devotees as well as Muslims, and they looked at him as a guru. The Muslims looked as a Sufi sheikh or master, and for him, whether those distinctions mattered is a real open question. He was there to provide people guidance.

teaching upon the true spiritual path and the idea of meeting people where they're at okay they come from this particular cultural tradition but being able to see that okay that gets you a similar place or a similar idea and so you work with that Sufis were very the Sufi masters were adept at that and that's why kind of if you want to even think of it as conversion it didn't even have to mean that it led to conversion but as a result in places like Southeast Asia or South Asia or Central Asia, it was really, or the Balkans, it was really the Sufis that spread what you would think of as Muslim culture because it was something that accommodated and tolerated religious difference by seeing the unity within these religious traditions.

Yeah. Yeah, incredibly interesting. And I share your sort of frustration or suspicion at any attempt to separate these practices or traditions from the dominant sort of cultural and religious foundations from which they sprung. I mean, the analogy in Buddhism is this attempt by some to atheize or secularize Buddhism and just say, well, it's not really, don't worry about all this other stuff. It's really just about the practices themselves. Or you can even take that further into more vulgar territory where these meditation practices become, you know, something that corporations teach their

employees to enhance their productivity. And it's a slap in the face to these traditions. And I think don't extract them from their cultural and religious connotations and foundations. But recognize the similarities and also bow to the beauty and the diversity of these things. And in fact, if we want these practices to catch on in a broader way, I think letting them stay in their traditions and pointing to the importance of those traditions can give people a great inroad. So if you're a Muslim, well, the Sufi tradition might be much more accessible to you than Vipasana or Zen Buddhism. If you're a Christian, reading about Thomas Merton and St. Francis could do much more for you than reading about, you know, Narga Juno or some Hindu mystic, you know? And so acknowledging the

similarities, but allowing them to continue to blossom in their own unique cultural and religious frameworks, I think is that tightrope that we sort of have to walk. Indeed, I mean, you know, we connect with what we connect with and what we come across that might speak to us. So one wouldn't want to deny if you come across a roomy poem or something from the, you know, from the Upanishads or something in the noble truth in the Buddhist tradition and St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, whatever you come across, even if it's outside your cultural tradition, if it connects and it furthers your spiritual development,

that's great and wonderful. However, you don't have to appropriate it and take it out of its context. It should lead you to respect and engage with the broader culture rather than abstract it out and say, no it doesn't belong there it's something higher and that's why i can connect with it just be humble right just be humble and don't be appropriative say these people did develop something of great value and significance to humanity as a whole that universalizes their experience you can connect with that

but it doesn't mean that those particulars are eviscerated from how that tradition developed and expressed itself so um i think that was exactly right is that you don't want it's i think it's unethical to just sort of claim claim it and appropriate it but if it speaks to you explore it engage it that that's the that's the the you know these Sufi mystics and all these great sort of teachers didn't think about religious identity you know they weren't concerned about segmenting or separating truth is for this group and and not for that um there was a humanistic element to all of these projects. And so we would want it to be shared out. But likewise, we don't want to reproduce some kind of spiritual colonialism or this kind of thing,

you know, in our own practice and recognition. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. In my explorations of Hinduism in the various Buddhist schools, it actually was a doorway into fascinating explorations of Hindu and ancient Indian philosophy and how, you know, Buddhism morphed and evolved when it met Japan and they're already existing cultures. And so it's actually a doorway into learning so much about history and culture more broadly that to extract it from that is an act of violence, you know, it would be terrible. Yes, yes. For sure. Well, I think we're over an hour. I definitely will have you back on to talk more about this. I think hopefully it hits a note in many people that something very deeply true is being discussed here. And it transcends any one.

culture, but they're all uniquely blossoming within these beautiful cultures, and that is due respect as well. Is there anything that you would like to say to wrap this up, maybe any recommendations, anything you wanted to address that we didn't get to? Any loose ends you want to tie up before we end this round? Well, maybe just as a last note is that I did think it would be very interesting to do this on Rev Left radio. just because very often leftist thinkers and movements are avowedly, overtly, secular, and make that an express commitment, maybe in response to institutional religions, forms of authority and control that were regressive and retarded social progress. And so you can understand how that emerges.

I guess all I would say is that mysticism and spirituality don't have to be, apolitical or become a political withdrawals from the world exclusively, but getting back to that idea of baka or subsistence with God in your return to the world is transforming your engagement with it and recognizing not just on an ethical or philosophical intellectual level, but also on a spiritual and emotional level of solidarity that we all have, you know, a spirit that connects us to each other, to the universal living forces of the universe and the natural world that has meaning and sustaining meaning. Somebody like Ibn al-Aderby, for example, a great the theosopher and mystic sometimes called the greatest master in the Sufi tradition, really

revalued in some ways. While at the same time saying this isn't as real or real like the way the godhead is, but revalued that the way you would engage and approach it is revaluing your engagement with the material world as an object of contemplation and as an object of interest that takes you to the divine. And that, you know, many of the greatest anti-colonial movements, actually, in the history of Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, were led by Sufi sheikhs, Sufi masters. So Abdu Qadr a Sufi, you know, who led resistance for, you know, very long period in the 1830s against French colonialism in Algeria

or Withman Danfodio in West Africa so that they can be platforms for resistance and solidarity because I think you have to have some for a sustainable left culture and left project you have to have some sense of connection emotionally with one another

in order to deal with all of the losses, the setbacks, the way in which commitments go beyond just an intellectual ideal. You have to have something that organically keeps you connected and engaged with that. And I think somebody like I just want to invoke for a moment, somebody like Michael Brooks, and what a loss it is to left culture, because he was one of the few people, you know, apart from yourself, and a few others who I would know in public left media

who really could connect with some sense of spirituality, some sense of the emotional importance of that in your own process, in your own cycle. You know, maybe you can do it through psychoanalysis. Maybe there's a variety of ways. But having something that grounds you outside of just pure intellect and reason abstracted away from human social engagement and us as emotional and spiritual beings, we do have those needs and we need a left culture of those

that isn't just going to use those to withdraw from engagement with the world, but actually transforms and reinvests us into it. So we need something like a spiritual dialectical materialism or something like that, I think, to really be on the on on on a sustainable approach i think for the long term yeah beautifully said i like the invocation of michael brooks because one of the ways that i decided that i would try to help carry on his his legacy and his spirit in a humble quiet way was to continue to have these sorts of conversations sometimes against even my own self-doubt like people won't be into this this is too obscure it's too esoteric maybe it's not the right place maybe i'll do it in a different area

but you know through that and me thinking like you know michael brooks made this impact. He was about this. Our conversation, me and his, was about meditation, this precise stuff. It just gave me that extra urge. Like, you know what, carry forth that torch, come what may. And I also completely, completely agree with you about the dialectical aspect. And it's something I've given voice to before is like, you know, sometimes you do hear this rejection of politics from spiritual communities and vice versa, right? You hear the rejection of religion and spiritual communities from leftists. But I always want to bring these together. You know, outward transformation can take place simultaneous and parallel to inward transformation. You can be a revolutionary

outwardly to change these miserable conditions and change the miserable conditions that exist within you. Because if we build a new outside world, but we just populate it with the same old ego-driven, anxious, neurotic people, then it's going to provide an internal limitation on what we can possibly achieve. So I like to give voice to these and have these sorts of conversations to urge people. There are a million paths. There are a million techniques. There are a million sort of cultural nuances that you can follow into this general direction. And it radically transforms the way you relate to yourself, to other people. You know, I've found that I've become a more patient spouse, a more caring and in-tuned parent, a better friend, more generous human being,

not so much self-obsessed in thinking about myself 24-7. I mean, that is a weight around all of our necks. And to be able to release that, even in little chunks, even over long periods of time as we work outwardly to transform the conditions that we're all forced to exist in. These things are not either or. They're both and. And I think that's what we both agree with. I think that's what Michael agreed with. And hopefully we can all continue to carry forward that that specific torch. Yeah. Indeed. Indeed. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on. This has been one of my favorite conversations. We'll definitely do it again. I loved it. I loved it, Brett. I really enjoyed it. Awesome. And I'm sure there'll be rounds two, three, and four of these sorts of discussions.

And specifically, I want to have you back. We can just do a whole hour on St. Francis of the Sissi. I think that would be awesome. Well, I would love it. I would enjoy it so much and learn from it. And it was great conversing with you and learning more about the Buddhist tradition and just having that interaction about these things, the correspondences and the trading of insight and experience is wonderful.

So I really appreciate it. And I hope we'll have another conversation sometime soon. Absolutely. Yeah, I feel the same way. Before I let you go, where can listeners find you in your work? work online. Oh, well, they can find me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N. They can also listen to guerrilla history, of course, that we do together. But if they're interested more on Middle East, Islamic World, if this has sparked their interest a little bit, then they can

also listen to my other podcast that I co-host and have developed called The Mudgellis. That's M-A-J-L-I-S, and you can find it on all the usual outlets and platforms. And I'll link to that in the show notes. Thank you again, my friend. Let's do this again. Great. Take care, Brett. Sakhilal Kalandar Mast Mast

Sakhilal Kallandar Mast Mast Jule Lalaal Kandar Mast Mast Mast Klanther Mast Mast Klanndr Mast Myra Virda Tam Ali Ali Mare Virda Tamm Dami Ali Sakhilal Kandar Mast Mast Mast

Mast Mastrikananda, master, master, Dhammast, can't d'armast Khammast Kandar, Mastu, Mastu, Mastu, D'A, Mastu, Kandah, Mastu,

Mast, Kahn Mast, Klanandar, Mast, Mast, Dhamast, Dallan, Dharamaskol, Dhamast, Kallan, Mast, Dara, Mast,

Kallan, A, ha, Mast, Mast, Mast, Mast, Mast, Mala,

A, A, A, A, Dalli, Dany, Dany, Dada, Dada, Dara,

Dha, Dha, Dha, Dhan, Sahn, Dha, Mast, Dala,

la, La, Dha, Dha, Dha, Dha, Dha, Dha,

Dada, Mast, Mast, Mast, Dammast, Kandah, Paniida, Paniida,

Paniida, Paniida, Pahya, Gah, Gah, ma'a, ma'a, ma,

ma, n, n, n, n, d'alababab, da, da, da,

PAMCAPA Pha, pa, pa, pa, pa, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma'a, ma'am Gahdi, ma'a d'amast, canandar, mast, masts, ma'amast, can't, ma'amast, can't, marmast, ma'amast, Mathes. Bani, don't know, la, la, la. Many da, da-la-la-da-da-ma-na-da-ma-ha-da-ma-da-ma-a-ma-da-ma-a-ma-ma-da-ma-ma-a-ma-a-ma-ma-a-ma-a-ma-a-ma-ma-a-ha. M. Mastikabama,

Bha, D'amadda, D'A, Mast Kada, Mast, Mast, Mast,

Mast Mauda, Mauda, Mada, Mast Kahn, Mast Kahn,

Mast Kahn, I'm a lot of the I'm a manhurti, the body, my back, I'm, da da da,

da, da, da, da, da, I'm a Muslim, Malangha. Aki da Malanga, Aki da Malanga, Aki da Malanga, you, Ali, Ali, Ali,

Ali, Ali, Ali, Aki-go-Malanga Acki-da-Monga A-ha-Monga A-ha-Monga-Lang We'll take A-Khi-Monga-Sach, we'll see.

Alli-A-Li-A-Li-Li-Li-Keynge Mast-Mast-Mast Mast-Must-T-Tam. Aki-Mal-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Acki-ha-ha-Malang, Nakhkega, Mollonga, satcha, man, we'll take, Haki, Maulanga,

Sa'i, ala, today, all a lia, ali, ali, Mast, Mast, Kandar, Mast,

Kandar, Mast, Kallandar, Mast, Mast, Mast, Klam, Mast,

Klam, Mast, Kandar, Mast, Kandar, master, master, master, master, master, master, master, master, master, master, master, master, master, master, master, master,

master, master, master, master, master, master, master, master, master, master, master, master, master, Calendarmus, Hamas, Kalandar, Mast Kallandah,

Mast, Kalland, Mast Thank you.