Table of Contents

I. The Limits of the Modern Self

• What Is the Meaning of Life?

• Do We Need More Therapy?

• Liberating the Soul

• Why Islamic Philosophy?

II. Wounds, Illusions, and Inner Freedom

• Where Are the Elders?

• What Has Been Forgotten?

• The Paradox of Religious Trauma

• No Ego Death, Please!

• The Universal Wound

• Asceticism Is Not Despair

III. Recovering a Psychology of the Soul

• Al-Balkhī and the Myth of Newness

• The Movement of Ideas

• Ibn Sīnā and the Integrated Human Person

• Al-Ghazālī and the Crisis of Certainty

• Suhrawardī and the Illumination of the Soul

• Ibn ʿArabī and Seeing Reality

IV. Toward a Transpersonal Psychology

• What Might a Transpersonal Approach Include?

• The Seven Stages of the Self (Nafs)

• Case Study

• Sufism in Dialogue with Transpersonal Psychology

V. Returning to the Self

• Conclusion

• A Contemplative Exercise

• Suggested Readings

I. The Limits of the Modern Self

“If a wound has touched you, a similar wound has touched the other group. Such days We alternate among the people...”

Qur’an 3:140

Suffering is inevitable. It is also cyclical. Those who are wounded today may not be those who were wounded yesterday, nor those who will be wounded tomorrow. The same is true of those who inflict wounds.

We witness this pattern not only at the collective level, but also within families, where those who have been wounded may, consciously or unconsciously, wound those closest to them.

The invitation remains the same: to respond with wisdom, justice, and compassion, rather than allowing suffering to justify hatred or fear to corrupt the heart.

In the face of this, the question of what it means to be alive becomes unavoidable. It is an inquiry that has occupied artists, philosophers, theologians, physicians, and mystics across civilizations for centuries. Yet have we truly learned what it means to become fully human?

The question, then, is not only how we heal, but what we understand the human being to be.

What Is the Meaning of Life?

After decades accompanying the dying in hospices, Canadian author and cultural thinker Stephen Jenkinson remarked, “It is a particularly modernist dilemma to find meaning.” To speak of finding meaning suggests that it is somehow hidden, something elusive, waiting to be extracted from the circumstances of life.

Jenkinson became intimately acquainted with the existential questions that emerge when our ordinary illusions of control begin to fall away. Our predicament is not that these questions arise, but that we have become remarkably adept at postponing them. Yet they do not disappear simply because we refuse to face them or distract ourselves.

Perhaps the whole ordeal is simpler than we imagine: the meaning of life is to die, and the meaning of death is to live.

The meaning of life is revealed through death, and the meaning of death through the way it teaches us to live. Mortality gives shape to our lives, and remembering death teaches us to live with greater presence, responsibility, and gratitude.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ encouraged his companions to “remember often the destroyer of pleasures.” The invitation is not toward morbidity, but toward clarity. To remember death is to remember the precious and precarious nature of life, the limits of time, and the responsibility of how we choose to live.

Most of us long for our lives to matter. Whether we acknowledge that longing publicly or not, what ultimately endures is not what we profess, but who we are in the privacy of our own hearts, where appearances carry no weight.

That is the place of integrity.

Do We Need More Therapy?

In 1992, Jungian analyst James Hillman and writer Michael Ventura provocatively titled their book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy & the World’s Getting Worse.

Hillman’s critique was not simply that psychotherapy had failed. He questioned what happens when we locate the psyche primarily within the individual while leaving the world that individual lives in largely outside the frame.

There is something worth considering here. If you are anxious, regulate your nervous system. If your relationship is struggling, examine your attachment style. If you are angry, investigate your triggers. If you are overwhelmed, establish better boundaries. If you continue repeating a pattern, look to your childhood. None of these is necessarily a bad question. I ask many of them myself. But notice where the gaze continually returns: you, you, you.

It is you, of course. But it is never only you.

There is another difficulty. Psychological work assumes a certain willingness to be honest. But human relationships do not occur between people who are equally self-aware or honest.

If one person is sincerely examining their motives, questioning their perceptions, acknowledging their projections, and taking responsibility for their part while another person is not, the language of psychology can place an extraordinary burden on the person doing the deeper self-examination.

Is this my trauma? My attachment? My projection? Am I being triggered?

Sometimes, yes. And sometimes what we are responding to is not merely our own projection. Another person may, in fact, be lying, manipulative, or abusive.

Sometimes someone has behaved badly. Sometimes a family has organized itself around denial. Sometimes an institution protects itself. Sometimes suffering is produced by poverty, violence, displacement, racism, war, or loneliness. And sometimes several of these realities are operating at once.

Personal responsibility matters deeply, but it does not belong only to the person most willing to carry it. When one person is made to carry what a relationship, family, community, or institution refuses to acknowledge, we are entering the territory of the scapegoat.

The difficult middle lies in distinguishing responsibility from agency. We are not responsible for every injury we must learn to live with, and becoming conscious of our response does not make us the cause of what happened. Yet what is not our fault may still become part of our psychological task. We may have to reckon with consequences we did not create, patterns we did not choose, and conditions we cannot repair alone. This is not an admission of blame. It is the recovery of agency.

The essential questions, then, are not only: What is mine? and what belongs to the other person or to the world? There is a third: What is mine to do in response to what is not mine? Psychological maturity may depend upon holding all three questions at once, without using the outer world to evade self-examination or using self-examination to excuse the outer world.

A person can be genuinely wronged and still become bound to the identity, relationships, and patterns that form around the wound. Recognizing this does not transfer responsibility from the person or conditions that caused the harm. It acknowledges that suffering can acquire a psychic life of its own.

At the same time, the toxic dance between victimhood and martyrdom can become a kind of spell. Suffering becomes an identity, and self-sacrifice becomes proof of goodness. Breaking that spell requires looking within, but looking within is not the same as accepting blame.

This is part of what Hillman was pointing toward. If the psyche is located entirely within the individual, then the world itself escapes psychological examination. We become increasingly sophisticated at diagnosing individual neuroses while rarely asking whether some of what we call pathology might also be a response to pathological conditions.

Perhaps the paradox of modern therapy culture is that everyone gets to be neurotic, but each of us is expected to heal individually.

Psychology itself emerged from philosophy, but in becoming an institutionalized modern discipline, it increasingly separated itself from its philosophical and metaphysical roots. I discuss this further in Decentering Modern Psychology. Once we widen the frame beyond the isolated psychological self, an older question returns: What is psychology ultimately trying to help the human being become?

Liberating the Soul

Sarah Huxtable Mohr, writing from the perspective of Islamic liberation psychology, approaches this question through the classical concept of telos, the end or purpose toward which something is directed. For Mohr, the telos of liberation psychology is justice. Her work also challenges psychological approaches that isolate mental health from the social conditions in which suffering occurs.

But the question of telos is much older than psychology. What is a human being? What are we here for? What constitutes a good life? What does it mean to flourish? These questions occupied philosophers long before psychology became an independent discipline, and they run through many of the Islamic thinkers explored in this essay.

Within the Islamic philosophical tradition, however, human flourishing could not ultimately be separated from God. Nor does the human person inhabit a purely psychological or material universe. We live within relationships, communities, histories, bodies, and environments, but also within a cosmos containing both the seen and the unseen.

Human agency is real, but it is not absolute. We act upon the world and one another, and are ourselves acted upon. Much of what shapes a human life lies beyond the sovereignty of the individual self.

We certainly speak the language of psychology more fluently than ever before. But naming emotions is not the same as feeling them. Therapy speak does not cultivate consciousness. Like any language, it can be used to justify, conceal, or even facilitate harm.

This essay explores how the Islamic philosophical tradition understood the human person, what it understood human life to be for, and how those understandings informed psychological, ethical, and spiritual flourishing.

Why Islamic Philosophy?

Because it is the tradition from which I write. My intellectual and spiritual formation has been shaped by both the Islamic sciences and Western psychology. This essay is one attempt to bring these conversations into dialogue.

Many of the philosophical, medical, and psychological ideas that later shaped the Western intellectual tradition were preserved, developed, and transmitted by Muslim scholars. Yet Islamic understandings of the human person are still rarely engaged on their own terms within contemporary psychology.

II. Wounds, Illusions, and Inner Freedom

Where Are the Elders?

The ancients did not know everything, nor do I wish to romanticize a past made alluring simply by its distance. Yet many understood the world as more than a collection of inert objects. They saw it as ordered, meaningful, and alive with significance rather than merely a site of extraction or endless progress.

Across civilizations, many traditions described periods in which humanity would fall into profound forgetfulness, losing sight of what is sacred amid increasing preoccupation with the material world.

In Hindu cosmology, for example, history unfolds through cyclical ages (Yugas). Kali Yuga, the fourth and final age in the cycle, is traditionally understood as a period of spiritual decline, moral confusion, and growing estrangement from the sacred.

Not only that, but those who tried to remind society of what mattered most were not always celebrated. Prophets were persecuted, sages dismissed, mystics exiled, and saints condemned.

The Qur’an captures a strikingly familiar human response. When prophets warned their people of the consequences of injustice and spiritual heedlessness, they were met with dismissal: “You are pessimistic. You bring us bad fortune.” The reply came just as swiftly: “Your omen is with yourselves” (36:19).

Read psychologically, the exchange is profound. Rather than confronting what the messengers reveal, the people locate the source of their discomfort in the messengers themselves. The deepest misfortune is not the one announced by the messenger, but the condition that prevents a people from recognizing it. Every age struggles to perceive its own blind spots while living within them. Ours is no exception.

We have become remarkably adept at managing human experience, yet we continue to struggle to distinguish psychological suffering from spiritual crisis. At times, we confuse one for the other, to the detriment of both the individual and the culture.

The problem becomes particularly complicated when the institutions entrusted with preserving the sacred become sources of injury themselves.

Religious trauma remains both underdefined and widely misunderstood. It is often associated with those who have left religion altogether. But what of those who continue to believe in God while no longer trusting the institutions that claim to speak in God’s name?

In some cases, those institutions have also contributed to the dilution of the traditions they inherited, subordinating ethical and spiritual concerns to political, ideological, or geopolitical interests. The result is that many either turn away altogether or find themselves caught between competing extremes.

Organized religion can become just as disorienting as scientism when either claims exclusive authority over truth while leaving little room for mystery, humility, or complexity.

We fret over the branches while the deeper roots continue to rot.

At its heart, religious trauma is a rupture: a severing of our relationship with the sacred, with the self, with the world, and with the Source of it all.

We cannot keep patching over this wound.

What Has Been Forgotten?

The breath itself bears witness to a rhythm deeper than culture, ideology, or identity. It is not a trend but a deep structure of the human condition.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Inhale.

Exhale.

It will all pass.

How, then, might we make room for the ineffable, for humility, and for perspectives that challenge and transcend the more rigid tendencies of the human ego?

Life itself has a way of breaking our hearts.

One might even say that Allah sometimes allows the heart to break so that we may remember what we have forgotten. The ego is remarkably gifted at convincing us that we are self-sufficient.

That does not mean suffering is inherently good, nor that trauma should ever be romanticized. Trauma can become a site of profound illumination, but also one of profound darkness. It can soften the heart with love or harden it with illusion. Much depends on how we meet ourselves again and again.

Many traditions understand the heart not merely as a metaphor for emotion, but as a faculty of perception. We move between clarity and confusion, remembrance and forgetfulness, healing and repetition. Most of us live somewhere between these states. I explore this understanding of the heart further through the works of a Christian mystic and a Muslim mystic in The Metaphysics of Awakening the Heart.

I spent years moving in and out of the mental health system while slowly uncovering the impact of severe childhood abuse. I barely made it through. The worst part was the silence. Or perhaps I should say, it is the silence. Deafening. Oppressive.

If you choose to join me in these explorations, I invite you to remain open to different ways of understanding the human person. Perhaps some of those ancient trees have been neglected rather than lost.

Where are the elders? Perhaps they have been here all along, waiting for us to become still enough to listen.

The Paradox of Religious Trauma

Many have argued that religion is little more than a comfortable fear box. Marx famously called it “the opium of the people.” I understand the critique. Religious and spiritual bypassing can indeed become deeply regressive and dangerous. Yet psychology is not immune to the same temptation. Psychological insight, therapeutic language, and even self-awareness can become another way of evading the deeper work of transformation.

Earlier in my life, both religion and psychological insight became refuges from developmental tasks I was not yet ready to face. They gave me structure, certainty, and even a sense of moral superiority. But they also gave me places to hide. Whenever I bypass my humanity, spiritual growth becomes superficial and short-lived. I mistake escape for transformation while remaining fundamentally unchanged.

And then what?

Then comes tension, complexity, and mystery. Without the capacity to live with paradox, faith begins to crumble. Rather than learning to dwell with what I cannot immediately reconcile, I become increasingly sophisticated in the ways I resist it.

Paradox is not the enemy of faith. It is often where faith matures. The closer we draw to the Divine, the more deeply we encounter the mystery that always exceeds our understanding.

Many hearts are wounded in the name of religion. Yet those same hearts may sometimes discover healing through a deeper encounter with God.

Abuse, coercion, manipulation, humiliation, and spiritual exploitation committed in the name of religion remain injustices for which human beings are accountable. God does not sanctify them.

Yet it is often through these very wounds that we begin the painful work of distinguishing God from our projections of God. As those projections loosen, we may encounter not the deity fashioned in our own image, but Reality itself.

No Ego Death, Please!

It can be terrifying to surrender.

For the ego, yes.

For the soul, no.

When we sit honestly with our deepest fears—abandonment, rejection, insignificance, failure, even death—we often arrive at the same threshold: the fear of no longer being who we imagine ourselves to be.

What if the ego is not the problem, but simply terrified? What if it requires training rather than condemnation? What if spiritual maturity is not the destruction of the self, but its gradual reordering toward what is Real?

The Islamic contemplative tradition has long understood this. It does not begin by attempting to destroy the self; it begins by educating it. Mysticism is not simply the pursuit of extraordinary experiences or esoteric knowledge.

For the Muslim mystic, surrender to Reality is inseparable from the direct knowledge of God, unfolding through the disciplined transformation of the human person. The aim is not escape from the world, but freedom from illusion through the gradual refinement of the self.

The inner work unfolds through the refinement of the nafs, often translated as the ego-self. Shaped by fear, desire, attachment, and self-preservation, the nafs is nevertheless capable of profound change through discipline, remembrance, and love.

The rūḥ, by contrast, is the Spirit breathed into the human being by God, continually orienting us toward the Divine. The spiritual path is therefore not a rejection of the self, but the gradual harmonization of these dimensions.

For this reason, the language of “ego death” is often misunderstood. The Sufi masters did not seek to destroy the ego indiscriminately. They disciplined it. They refined it. They strengthened the vessel long before the symbolic annihilation known as fanāʾ could unfold.

One does not leap into the fire unprepared.

The encounter with the Divine is not for the faint of heart. For many, what is needed is not further dismantling, but greater integration.

Safety. Grounding. Discernment.

A self psychologically capable of bearing what it may encounter.

Where contemplative traditions once formed seekers through years, often decades, of discipline, accountability, and discernment, some contemporary spiritual communities have come to equate intuition with wisdom and charisma with maturity—transmission and lineage matter, particularly for those who undertake a serious contemplative path.

Ultimately, if someone has made their way through the distortions, forgetfulness, distractions, and wounds of ordinary human existence, yet still finds themselves searching for what is true, that impulse itself deserves reverence.

The task of the guide is not to mistake every defence in the seeker for an obstacle to God.

Sometimes what appears to be an obstacle is the very vessel that must first be strengthened before it can receive. This is why authentic guidance matters. For the sincere seeker, much unfolds gently and in due time.

Do not be careless with your soul.

The Universal Wound

Whether someone is Muslim, Christian, Jewish, atheist, agnostic, or none of the above, unbearable suffering confronts us with something profoundly human. Gender, sexuality, belief, and skin colour may shape how suffering is experienced, understood, and treated, but they do not make anyone’s pain less deserving of recognition and care.

We give our suffering different names. We classify it, diagnose it, theologize it, and reinterpret it. Yet the wound remains remarkably familiar. We instinctively resist pain, even though that resistance often deepens what we are trying to escape.

Religious trauma is one expression of this universal wound. It can emerge when religious teachings, authority, institutions, or practices become entangled with coercion, shame, abuse, or fear. Whatever we hold most sacred can also become entangled with our deepest wounds.

Before exploring where our beliefs diverge, it is worth recognizing where we already meet. We may arrive at different theological or philosophical conclusions while still sharing the realities of being human. Common ground does not require us to collapse our differences, treat distinct traditions as interchangeable, or claim that all religions are ultimately saying the same thing.

Human experiences may point in similar directions without being understood or expressed in the same way. Difference is not a failure, nor must it become enmity. There is nothing righteous about turning disagreement into dehumanization, violence, or senseless killing.

The Qur’an expresses this beautifully: “Come to a word that is common between us and you” (Qur’an 3:64). Without removing the verse from its particular theological context, we can also recognize in it an ethic of encounter: begin with what can be shared while remaining honest about where we differ.

Like young people in other religious traditions, many young Muslims grow up relating to God not as the Source of mercy, but as they might relate to a frightening or emotionally unpredictable caregiver: vigilant, fearful, and uncertain when love might be withdrawn.

It is a profound psychological injury when parents or teachers weaponize God as a means of control under the guise of knowing what is best for those entrusted to their care. This pattern is by no means unique to any one religious community. Such dynamics emerge whenever fear eclipses mercy.

It is also worth asking what lies beneath this form of control. It does not necessarily arise from malice. Sometimes parents genuinely fear for their children and believe that control is an expression of care. At other times, concern for a child’s relationship with God becomes entangled with fear of people: What will others say? What will the community think? What does my child’s behaviour say about me?

When our own relationship with God is organized primarily around fear and external judgment, we risk passing that same orientation on to our children.

There is another face of religious life that deserves equal attention: love. Love is expansive. This does not mean that love is without boundaries, reverence, or accountability. But if what we call love of God repeatedly manifests as contraction, control, and preoccupation with the gaze of others, it is worth examining what is actually moving us.

Not everything we call fear of God is taqwā (التقوى). Some of it may actually be our own fear projected onto our image of God: fear inherited from our parents, fear of punishment, fear of rejection, fear of the community, fear of getting it wrong.

So what, then, is taqwā?

The word itself offers us a clue. Taqwā shares its Arabic root with wiqāya (وقاية): protection, or safeguarding something from harm.

Perhaps, psychologically, we might understand taqwā not simply as being “afraid” of God, but as learning to guard what is sacred: our relationship with God, and the heart through which that relationship is lived.

The Prophet ﷺ made a striking gesture when speaking about taqwā. Pointing to his chest, he repeated three times: “Taqwā is here.”

To locate taqwā in the heart is not to make it private or invisible. In the wider context of the hadith, the condition of the heart is revealed in how we regard and treat other human beings.

What if taqwā, then, asks us not only what we fear, but what we are protecting? What are we cultivating in the heart? And what kind of relationship with God are we passing on to those entrusted to our care?

Fear of people also introduces an element of performance into religious life. When the gaze of family or community becomes the measure of faithfulness, it can become internalized. A person may continue performing even when no one is watching, or learn to live a double life: one self for the world and another behind closed doors. All the way into old age!

This can create a painful paradox. When someone has not learned how to relate to God inwardly, through the heart, beneath all the performance, the very relationship parents were trying so desperately to protect may eventually become fractured. What was intended to preserve faith can end up alienating a person from it.

Perhaps this is why some of the most important religious work parents can do for their children is their own inner work. One of the most profound reminders I encountered as a parent comes from Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson in his book, Owning Your Own Shadow:

I first encountered this passage almost ten years ago, and it awakened something in me. It helped propel me deeper into my inner life, particularly as I struggled to distinguish the nature of God from perceptions shaped by my unprocessed trauma. I also began noticing how differently those around me understood and represented God through their own experiences. (More on the shadow and Johnson here: Shadow Work: How Our Unlived Life Looms.)

Other people’s journeys may take very different forms. Mine required, and still requires, learning to separate truth from opinion, God from the projections placed upon God, and the tradition from what human beings have sometimes done in its name.

The Qur’an tells us that God has prescribed mercy upon God’s own Self (Qur’an 6:54), while the Prophet ﷺ relates the Divine words in a hadith qudsī: “Indeed, My mercy prevails over My wrath.”

Together, these texts provide a theological reference point for distinguishing the Divine from images shaped by coercion, abuse, manipulation, or unprocessed human fear. In Islamic, Christian, and Jewish contexts alike, religious trauma raises an important question: is a person rejecting the Divine, or reacting to the image they were taught to fear? These are not necessarily the same.

In moments of profound depression or suicidal despair, however, this distinction is not the immediate concern. For some people, the wish to die may be bound up with a desperate wish for unbearable pain to end. The first task is not to settle theology, but to help make the pain survivable. Questions of God, faith, and transcendence can be explored later, as healing creates space for them.

Not everyone begins from the same place. For some, the Divine is central to their experience of suffering. For others, that dimension has become inaccessible or is itself a source of distress. For still others, it is simply not part of their worldview.

Effective spiritual care and mental health support must meet people where they are. Neither a spiritual nor a secular framework should be prematurely imposed. The therapeutic space must allow questions of meaning, faith, doubt, and transcendence to emerge safely, if and when they become relevant.

Such complexity calls for psychotherapeutic approaches capable of engaging the relationship between mind, body, and soul without reducing one to the other.

Because pain that remains unspoken does not disappear.

Neither does the soul.

Asceticism Is Not Despair

Ascetic practices appear across many of the world’s religious and contemplative traditions. Although their meanings, aims, and forms differ considerably, they present an important challenge for psychology: detachment can look very different from the outside than it feels from within. What appears to be withdrawal, diminished interest, or disengagement may arise from profoundly different inner states.

Asceticism enters this discussion because religious and contemplative traditions have long understood detachment as a way of living with suffering and the instability of the world without being consumed by either. Some of the scholars discussed in this essay, who later came to be recognized as saints, did not merely theorize this way of being.

Many of them lived it, a subject I explore in Between Saints and Spirits. Nor is asceticism limited to the renunciation of material wealth. It can also involve our attachments to recognition, certainty, information, identity, and relationships. This does not necessarily mean abandoning these things, but loosening their hold upon us.

Within the Islamic tradition, this question is particularly visible in the concept of zuhd. The Sufi masters were often deeply detached from the world, but detachment did not mean indifference. Zuhd was not simply withdrawal from life. One could participate fully in the world, cultivate knowledge, serve others, appreciate beauty, fulfil one’s responsibilities, and remain inwardly free from what is transient. A person may loosen their attachment to the world while becoming more present to it, not less.

Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh al-Iskandarī expresses this beautifully in the second of his Ḥikam:

إرادتُكَ التَّجريدَ مع إقامةِ اللهِ إيّاكَ في الأسبابِ من الشهوةِ الخفيّة، وإرادتُكَ الأسبابَ مع إقامةِ اللهِ إيّاكَ في التجريدِ انحطاطٌ عن الهمّةِ العليّة

Your desire for detachment while God has established you among worldly means is a hidden desire, and your desire for worldly means while God has established you in detachment is a descent from lofty aspiration.

Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh al-Iskandarī, al-Ḥikam al-ʿAṭāʾiyya, Ḥikma Two

The wisdom moves in both directions. Detachment does not require us to abandon our responsibilities, capacities, or participation in the world when that is where God has placed us. Nor should humility become an excuse for diminishing what has been entrusted to us.

When a person has been granted a capacity for greater detachment, clinging to conventional measures of security, achievement, or worth can itself become a diminishment of aspiration. The task is not to play larger or smaller than we are, but to discern our place with enough honesty to inhabit it fully.

Do not misunderstand me. There are many reasons to despair when we look honestly at the state of the world. War, injustice, cruelty, loss, and suffering are real, and no spiritual teaching should require us to pretend otherwise. The distinction I am making here is not between those who despair and those who are spiritually evolved.

Rather, ascetic detachment and suicidal despair may appear similar from the outside while arising from profoundly different inner orientations. This kind of dialogue is hardly unprecedented. Buddhist contemplative traditions, for example, have been brought into sustained conversation with psychotherapy for decades. Islamic contemplative traditions may likewise offer conceptual resources for understanding states that outwardly resemble one another while differing considerably in meaning.

Asceticism (zuhd) is not a hatred of the world, nor a denial of beauty, joy, or love. Rather, it is the cultivation of inner freedom, the refusal to allow transient things to become ultimate.

Suicidal despair, by contrast, arises not from freedom in relation to the world, but from profound constriction. Suffering narrows the horizon of possibility until life itself becomes difficult to imagine as bearable. Although both states may involve a turning away from worldly concerns, they move in opposite directions.

When that constriction becomes overwhelming, particularly when someone is experiencing suicidal thoughts or feels unable to remain safe, spiritual interpretation should never replace appropriate psychological, medical, or crisis support. Seeking help is not a failure of faith, nor does it diminish the spiritual meaning a person may later find in what they have endured.

Asceticism loosens attachment to what is transient while deepening one’s capacity to engage life with presence and responsibility. Despair constricts the soul until hope, mercy, and meaning become increasingly difficult to perceive.

In contraction, we need compassion. In expansion, we need it too. Neither state is inherently lesser or greater. Both can become sacred when lived in awareness of the Divine Presence.

III. Recovering a Psychology of the Soul

Al-Balkhī and the Myth of Newness

During my postgraduate studies in Islamic psychology, I encountered the work of the ninth-century Muslim polymath Abū Zayd al-Balkhī (850–934 CE), whom I quoted at the beginning of this essay. Al-Balkhī articulated a remarkably sophisticated understanding of the reciprocal relationship between thoughts, emotions, behaviour, and the body. Readers familiar with cognitive behavioural therapy may recognize striking parallels.

In his work, Masāliḥ al Abdān wa al Anfus (Sustenance for Bodies and Souls), al-Balkhī distinguishes between illnesses of the body and illnesses of the soul while emphasizing their continual influence upon one another. He describes how patterns of thought can intensify emotional suffering and offers practical methods for cultivating healthier cognitive and emotional responses.

One example is his use of al-ʿilāj bi-l-ḍidd, treatment through the opposite. Rather than allowing a distressing emotional state to dictate one’s behaviour, the person deliberately cultivates a response that counters and gradually weakens it. The resemblance to behavioural principles, including what might today be described as acting contrary to an emotional impulse, is difficult to miss.

Yet these parallels should not tempt us to translate al-Balkhī into modern clinical language. His work reminds us that many insights we celebrate as distinctly modern have precedents within much older intellectual traditions that are too often overlooked. More importantly, similar techniques can emerge from profoundly different understandings of what it means to be human.

For the ninth-century physician Abū Zayd al-Balkhī, care of the body and care of the soul belonged to an interconnected understanding of human wellbeing. Psychological suffering could affect the body, just as bodily illness could affect the soul.

The technique may look familiar. The vision of the human person surrounding it is not necessarily the same.

The Movement of Ideas

Nostalgia alone is another form of bypass. Yet remembering the past can become a source of wisdom when it invites integration rather than idealization.

European intellectual life was deeply shaped by works transmitted through and further developed within the medieval Islamic world, just as Muslim scholars had themselves engaged earlier philosophical and scientific traditions, including those of the Greeks.

Institutions associated with the great translation movements, most famously Bayt al-Hikmah (the House of Wisdom) in Baghdad, fostered an intellectual culture in which works of philosophy, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, logic, and the natural sciences were not merely translated into Arabic, but studied, debated, critiqued, and expanded.

Muslim scholars did not inherit Greek philosophy uncritically. They engaged it with intellectual seriousness, preserving what they found compelling, developing what they could carry further, and challenging what they believed to be mistaken. Knowledge was not understood as the possession of a single civilization, but as something to be sought wherever it could be found and evaluated in light of reason, experience, and revelation.

The aim, then, is neither to romanticize the Islamic past nor to dismiss contemporary psychology. Rather, it is to recover a model of intellectual engagement in which traditions remain open to dialogue without surrendering their own philosophical foundations.

The familiar categories of East and West begin to lose their sharpness when we follow the movement of ideas rather than the movement of empires. Much of the intellectual tradition that flourished in al-Andalus, in what is now Spain and Portugal, is geographically Western while belonging to the medieval Islamic world.

What we now call modern Western thought emerged from a far larger civilizational conversation than is often acknowledged.

Knowledge rarely belongs to a single civilization. It is translated, debated, transformed, and handed on. Wisdom has never cared much for the borders we have drawn around ourselves.

Modern accounts of intellectual history have not always acknowledged the full complexity of these exchanges. As psychology emerged as a distinct discipline, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it increasingly developed within secular frameworks that placed older philosophical, metaphysical, and theological understandings of the human person outside its boundaries.

Contemporary Islamic psychology began to re-emerge during the latter half of the twentieth century amid broader efforts to reconsider the relationship between modern psychological knowledge and Islamic understandings of human life. Rather than simply rejecting modern psychology, Muslim scholars and practitioners have sought to recover and further develop a more integrated account of the human being, one that honours psychological, ethical, philosophical, and spiritual dimensions.

Ibn Sīnā and the Integrated Human Person

Few figures better exemplify the integrated intellectual vision of the medieval Islamic world than Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, 980–1037 CE). A physician, philosopher, theologian, and polymath, he continues to shape intellectual history through his contributions to medicine, philosophy, and what we would now recognize as aspects of psychology.

Among his most enduring contributions is the famous Flying Man thought experiment. Ibn Sīnā asks us to imagine a person created fully formed, suspended in space, deprived of all sensory contact with the external world. Such a person would perceive neither body nor environment, yet remain aware of their own existence. For Ibn Sīnā, this illustrated that self-awareness could not be reduced to bodily sensation alone, offering one of the earliest and most influential reflections on consciousness in the history of philosophy.

He distinguished between the potential intellect (al ʿaql al hayūlānī | العقل الهيولاني) and the Active Intellect (al ʿaql al faʿʿāl | العقل الفعّال). The human intellect begins in a state of potentiality and becomes actualized through experience, perception, reasoning, and the apprehension of intelligible truths. The Active Intellect plays an important role in this process, but knowledge does not simply descend upon a passive mind. The intellect must itself be prepared.

Ibn Sīnā also distinguished between discursive thinking, in which understanding develops through successive acts of reasoning, and higher forms of intellection in which something may be apprehended more immediately. Yet this more immediate knowing was not an abandonment of reason. It emerged from the cultivation of the intellect itself.

What might this mean for an ordinary person today? We can possess enormous amounts of information while remaining largely unchanged by what we know. I may understand intellectually that a particular pattern is harming me, for example, yet continue repeating it. The knowledge is present, but something has not yet been fully realized.

In more contemporary language, we might distinguish between knowing something conceptually and knowing it in a way that reorganizes how we perceive, choose, and live. This is not Ibn Sīnā’s own psychological formulation, but his account of the movement from potentiality toward actualization offers another way of thinking about human development. Knowing is not merely the accumulation of information. Human capacities themselves can be cultivated and brought more fully into actuality.

While Ibn Sīnā affirmed the immaterial nature of the soul, he also recognized the reciprocal relationship between body and psyche. His account of the soul and its faculties—developed long before psychology existed as a modern discipline—remained deeply rooted in the philosophical and rational tradition.

The movement described here is primarily intellectual: from potentiality toward actualization, from what can be known toward the capacity to know it. As we move through later thinkers, however, the picture begins to change. Reason does not disappear, but other faculties of knowing increasingly come into view.

Al-Ghazālī and the Crisis of Certainty

Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al Dīn (The Revival of the Religious Sciences | إحياء علوم الدين) remains one of the most influential works in Islamic spirituality and theology. Yet its enduring significance lies not only in its scholarship, but also in the profound existential crisis from which it emerged.

At the height of his career as one of the most celebrated scholars of the Muslim world, Abū Ḥāmid al Ghazālī (1058–1111 CE) suddenly found himself unable to lecture despite no identifiable physical illness. Al Ghazālī described the affliction as having descended upon his heart and then affected his physical condition. Beneath it was a crisis of faith, purpose, and sincerity. He began questioning not simply what he knew, but why he sought and taught knowledge at all.

Leaving behind his prestigious position, he entered a prolonged period of withdrawal, contemplation, travel, and spiritual discipline. From this period emerged the Iḥyāʾ, a work that sought to reunite what had become fragmented: Islamic law (sharīʿah), theology, ethics, and spirituality. In doing so, al-Ghazālī played a pivotal role in integrating the Sufi path into mainstream Sunni intellectual and religious life. The inward sciences were not presented as the concern of mystics alone, but as an essential dimension of the religious life itself.

He later reflected on this journey in his spiritual autobiography, Al Munqidh min al Ḍalāl (Deliverance from Error), often regarded as an unusually early first-person account of intellectual, existential, and spiritual crisis. After examining theology, philosophy, and other paths to certainty, he concluded that the way of the Sufis could not be grasped through study alone. What distinguished it was not merely what one knew, but what could only be realized through practice and experience.

For al-Ghazālī, intellectual brilliance was never enough. Genuine transformation required sincerity, humility, disciplined practice, and a willingness to let truth reshape one’s life. In the Sufi tradition, this path of inner refinement is known as sulūk, the gradual journey of the wayfarer toward God.

Suhrawardī and the Illumination of the Soul

Reality is woven from gradations of Light. Every level of existence reflects a different degree of its radiance, while the material world represents its greatest concealment. The spiritual path is not an escape from the world, but a return to the Source from which every ray originates.

Shihāb al Dīn Yaḥyā al Suhrawardī (1154–1191 CE), known as Shaykh al Ishrāq (the Master of Illumination), transformed the philosophical legacy of Ibn Sīnā through what became known as the Illuminationist (Ishrāqī) tradition. Drawing upon multiple philosophical and wisdom traditions, he described existence through a metaphysics of Light, with God as the Light of Lights (Nūr al Anwār).

The Qur’an proclaims:

“Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The likeness of His Light is as a niche (mishkāt) within which is a lamp...” (Qur’an 24:35)

Across Islamic contemplative traditions, this imagery acquired profound metaphysical significance. The mishkāt came to symbolize receptivity to Divine illumination. At the same time, later Sufi metaphysics developed extensive understandings of Divine Light and the Muhammadan Light (Nūr Muḥammadī) as the primordial disclosure of Divine guidance within creation.

For Suhrawardī, the journey toward knowledge was therefore not simply a matter of acquiring more concepts. It required illumination. Knowing became inseparable from the condition and capacity of the knower.

The highest form of knowledge was not merely conceptual reasoning but knowledge by presence (al ʿilm al ḥuḍūrī | العلم الحضوري): an immediate mode of knowing in which something is apprehended through its presence to the knowing subject rather than through a mental representation.

Within this contemplative understanding, knowledge (ʿilm) is not information alone. It is inseparable from the cultivation of perception and the transformation of the knower. To know truth requires becoming increasingly capable of receiving it.

Within the Islamic intellectual tradition, this encompasses both the outward, exoteric (ẓāhir) and the inward, esoteric (bāṭin) dimensions of knowledge.

For contemporary psychotherapy, this raises an important question.

Can psychological healing be reduced to technique? Research consistently demonstrates that therapeutic outcomes are influenced, among other factors, by the quality of the therapeutic relationship. Long before psychotherapy emerged as a formal discipline, many philosophical, spiritual, and contemplative traditions cultivated teacher–student relationships, recognizing that genuine transformation unfolds through relationship as much as through instruction. Presence itself becomes part of the medicine.

Yet these traditions also recognized the dangers inherent in such relationships. Human beings naturally idealize, project, imitate, and seek certainty in those they admire. For this reason, adab (skillful conduct) was required not only of the student but also of the teacher. Authority was never intended to replace discernment. The integrity of the guide was itself understood to be part of the path.

Transmission is neither blind obedience nor mere intellectual instruction. Ideas may be communicated through words, but wisdom is also conveyed through presence, character, and example. In this sense, the guide teaches not only by what they know, but by who they are.

Information alone rarely transforms us. Receptivity must also be cultivated, and becoming capable of receiving subtle realities takes time. It requires attention, humility, sustained practice, and the willingness to allow knowledge to reshape the one who receives it. In Suhrawardī’s language, illumination is not simply something we think about. It is something we gradually become capable of seeing.

Suhrawardī’s philosophy of Light did not shield him from darkness in this world. Accused of heresy and executed in Aleppo, he became known as al-Shaykh al-Maqtūl (" the Slain Master””)**, a poignant reminder that one’s own age does not always welcome those who bear Light.

Ibn ʿArabī and Seeing Reality

The visible world is never merely what it appears to be. Every outward form points toward a deeper reality, and every level of existence discloses another degree of the Real.

Widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of Islamic mysticism and philosophy, Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240 CE) articulated one of the most comprehensive metaphysical visions in Islamic thought. Later scholars associated this with the expression Waḥdat al Wujūd (Unity of Being), although Ibn ʿArabī himself never used the term. At its heart is the understanding that all existence derives from, depends upon, and manifests the Divine Reality.

The spiritual journey, then, is not one of becoming divine, but of awakening to the Reality that has always sustained our existence. As perception is transformed, so too is our understanding of ourselves, others, and the world around us.

Like Suhrawardī, Ibn ʿArabī regarded dhawq (“taste”) as a genuine mode of knowing. Certain truths cannot be reached through intellectual analysis alone, but must be tasted through lived realization. Closely related to this is his rich understanding of khayāl (the imaginal faculty), not as fantasy or illusion, but as a mode of perception through which spiritual realities become manifest in symbolic form.

Later commentators distinguished between the connected imagination (al khayāl al muttaṣil), arising within the human soul, and the separate imagination (al khayāl al munfaṣil), an objective imaginal realm mediating between the sensory and the purely intelligible. The French philosopher Henry Corbin famously described this as the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world, emphasizing that it is neither merely subjective nor simply physical. Rather, it is a distinct mode of Reality apprehended through a purified imagination.

His magnum opus, al Futūḥāt al Makkiyyah (The Meccan Openings), records a lifetime of insight shaped by worship, contemplation, study, travel, and unveiling. Mecca became particularly important to the work’s composition and spiritual landscape. Yet these experiences are never presented as ends in themselves. They are moments of unveiling that deepen one’s knowledge of God, oneself, and creation.

The Futūḥāt was the fruit of decades of disciplined study, spiritual companionship (ṣuḥbah), worship, ethical refinement, and rigorous inner work. Ibn ʿArabī was not writing for casual readers or spiritual consumers, but for those already immersed in traditions of scholarship, devotion, and spiritual discipline.

Today, many writings of the Sufi masters are available with a few keystrokes. This is both a gift and a challenge. Removed from the disciplines and forms of life from which they emerged, they are easily reduced to inspirational quotations, social media posts, AI-generated clips, or abstract metaphysical slogans. In the process, what was intended to transform the soul becomes fodder for algorithmically moulded content.

For Ibn ʿArabī, true knowledge does not merely expand the mind; it refines perception. We do not simply learn new truths. We gradually become capable of seeing Reality as it has always been.

From the perspective of contemporary psychiatry, some of the visionary and revelatory experiences described by Ibn ʿArabī may resemble phenomena that, in certain clinical contexts, could be interpreted as symptoms of psychosis or other altered states of consciousness. Yet resemblance does not imply equivalence.

Within much of the Sufi tradition, extraordinary experiences are neither dismissed as pathology nor accepted uncritically as signs of sanctity. Rather, they are discerned in light of a person’s character, ethical conduct, humility, and the ongoing formation of the soul.

Transpersonal psychology approaches these questions from a different, though often complementary, perspective. Rather than determining the metaphysical status of an experience, it asks how that experience functions within a person’s psychological life. Does it foster greater integration, compassion, humility, and meaning, or contribute to fragmentation, inflation, isolation, and impairment?

Jung’s understanding of symbolic imagery bears intriguing resonances with what Henry Corbin later described as the imaginal (mundus imaginalis) in his studies of Ibn ʿArabī. Yet the two frameworks are not identical. Both acknowledge dimensions of experience that exceed the individual ego. Jung explored these through concepts such as the collective unconscious and archetypes, while generally remaining within a psychological framework. Ibn ʿArabī, by contrast, understood imaginal perception as disclosing realities that participate in the Divine order of being and are therefore not reducible to subjective experience.

One might say that Jung is primarily concerned with whether an experience contributes to psychological integration, whereas Ibn ʿArabī is ultimately concerned with whether it draws the soul nearer to God.

Jung generally refrained from making definitive metaphysical claims about the ontological status of symbolic experience. Ibn ʿArabī, by contrast, situated such experiences within an explicitly theological and metaphysical vision of reality.

This distinction illustrates one of the enduring challenges within mental health care: distinguishing psychological illness from spiritual experience while recognizing that the two may, at times, interact.

IV. Toward a Transpersonal Psychology

What Might a Transpersonal Approach Include?

Transpersonal therapy is less a single modality than an orientation toward the human person, a distinction I also discuss in Decentering Modern Psychology. It recognizes that psychological healing extends beyond symptom reduction or behavioural change to include questions of meaning, identity, spirituality, purpose, and human flourishing.

The figures that follow illustrate different ways this orientation has found expression in contemporary clinical practice. Their approaches differ considerably in theory and method, yet each resists reducing the human person to symptoms alone.

However, a curious absence marks this history. Transpersonal psychology has engaged extensively with Jungian thought, Buddhist and Hindu contemplative traditions, psychedelic research, altered states of consciousness, and other approaches that challenged the boundaries of conventional psychology. Islamic thinkers such as Ibn Sīnā were sometimes acknowledged in passing, yet the conversation rarely continued much further.

This is striking because, as we have just seen, much more followed. Questions of consciousness, the soul, embodiment, imagination, spiritual development, direct experience, and different modes of knowing were developed across centuries of Islamic philosophical and contemplative thought. The thread was there. We did not keep following it.

Peter Levine | Somatic Experiencing works with the body’s innate capacity to process the effects of overwhelming experience. Rather than repeatedly reliving traumatic events, the emphasis is on restoring regulation through careful attention to bodily sensation, safety, and pacing.

David Treleaven | Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness reminds us that mindfulness is not one-size-fits-all. For people with unresolved trauma, certain contemplative practices may become destabilizing. Thoughtful adaptation allows awareness to develop without overwhelming the nervous system.

John Bradshaw | Inner Child Work helped popularize ways of reconnecting with neglected or wounded aspects of the self. In practice, some clients arrive at this work quickly, while others require substantial safety before younger parts of themselves are ready to emerge.

Carl Jung | Dream Analysis regarded dreams as one of the psyche’s most profound modes of communication and an important avenue on the path of individuation. Dreams reveal symbolic patterns, unconscious conflicts, developmental tasks, and unrealized potentials. For Jung, attending to dreams was not merely a technique, but a way of participating in the psyche’s movement toward greater wholeness.

Bessel van der Kolk | Embodiment and Trauma: Although not a transpersonal psychologist, van der Kolk’s work underscores the importance of embodiment in trauma recovery. As he emphasizes in The Body Keeps the Score, body-based practices can help restore a sense of safety and support a more compassionate relationship with difficult emotions.

Francine Shapiro | Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): Shapiro developed EMDR to help process traumatic memories that remain psychologically and physiologically unresolved. From a transpersonal perspective, EMDR may also create the spaciousness in which deeper questions of identity, meaning, and spiritual growth can emerge.

Natalie Rogers | Expressive Arts Therapy demonstrated that creativity itself can become a therapeutic language. Poetry, journaling, movement, painting, and other forms of expression can reveal dimensions of inner life that words alone may not yet reach.

Stanislav Grof | Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness is a pioneering figure in transpersonal psychology and psychedelic research. Together with Christina Grof, he later developed Holotropic Breathwork®, which uses accelerated breathing, evocative music, and focused bodywork to facilitate non-ordinary states without psychedelic substances. Such experiences can be deeply meaningful, but also psychologically intense, and are best approached with preparation, skilled facilitation, and integration.

The Seven Stages of the Self (Nafs)

Many Sufi scholars describe the development of the nafs (self) as a journey of purification, remembrance, and return to God. Although the stages vary among different orders and authors, the sevenfold model of the nafs has become one of the most widely recognized frameworks in Sufism, offering a practical map of psychological and spiritual development.

Although often presented as successive stages, the development of the nafs is better understood as an unfolding process than a simple linear ascent. Earlier tendencies do not disappear as the person matures, but are gradually disciplined and refined. From a contemporary psychological perspective, we might also understand this as a process of integration. Like nested circles, each stage enfolds what came before, drawing the whole person toward greater harmony with God.

The Commanding Self (Nafs al Ammārah)

The journey begins with the self governed primarily by instinct, desire, and immediate gratification. Spiritual work begins by recognizing these impulses and learning not to be ruled by them.

The Self-Reproaching Self (Nafs al Lawwāmah)

Conscience awakens. Individuals become more aware of their shortcomings and wrestle with guilt, shame, and inner conflict. Though often painful, this stage cultivates sincere self-examination and accountability.

The Inspired Self (Nafs al Mulhamah)

Through practices such as dhikr (remembrance) and tafakkur (contemplation), intuition and spiritual insight begin to emerge. Moments of inspiration complement ordinary reasoning, fostering greater receptivity to Divine guidance.

The Tranquil Self (Nafs al Muṭmaʾinnah)

As attachment to the ego loosens, the heart becomes more fully the centre of one’s life. This stage is marked by an abiding inner peace born of trust and surrender to God.

The Contented and Pleasing Self (Nafs al Rāḍiyah and Nafs al Marḍiyyah)

These closely related stages express a mature acceptance of the Divine decree. Personal desires become more deeply aligned with the Divine will, and one’s life is marked by gratitude, sincerity, wisdom, and service.

The Complete Self (Nafs al Kāmilah)

The final stage represents the culmination of the soul’s refinement. Rather than withdrawing from the world, the individual can participate in ordinary life with presence, mercy, wisdom, humility, and service.

Some Sufi authors describe this final stage as Nafs al Kāmilah (the Complete Self). Others prefer Nafs al Ṣāfiyyah (the Purified Self), reserving complete perfection for the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ. Although the terminology varies, both descriptions point toward profound purification from domination by the ego and a deepening orientation toward God.

Related to this journey are the Sufi concepts of fanāʾ and baqāʾ. Fanāʾ describes the passing away of egoic self-assertion and attachment before God, rather than the literal annihilation of the person. Baqāʾ, often described as subsistence or abiding in God, points toward a return to life and creation with a transformed relationship to the self. The person remains fully human and engaged in the world, but lives increasingly from remembrance rather than forgetfulness.

The following psychological parallels are illustrative rather than exact equivalents:

The journey of the nafs reminds us that psychological growth is more than the resolution of symptoms; it is the gradual reordering of the human person. While many contemporary psychological models rightly emphasize self-actualization as an important dimension of flourishing, the Sufi tradition ultimately points beyond it toward self-transcendence: becoming more fully human through the remembrance of God.

Subscribe now

Case Study

Presentation

In August 2023, a twenty-nine-year-old woman, whom I will call Sarah, entered my office emotionally shattered and on the edge of despair. With remarkable calmness, she told me she was ready to end her life. Sarah had long identified as an atheist and committed rationalist, believing science to be the only reliable source of knowledge. Yet it was during this profound psychological crisis that her carefully constructed worldview began to unravel.

Sarah’s presentation was serious, and I treated it accordingly. Once we had established her immediate safety, it became clear that our work could not end with crisis management alone. She had chosen to come to therapy. She had allowed herself to be seen and had entrusted another person with the depth of her suffering.

Rather than trying to persuade her that life was worth living, I gently offered another possibility.

“Perhaps you have already walked through hell,” I said. “Maybe the question is no longer whether you want to die, but whether you are ready to begin living differently.”

The fact that she had walked through the door suggested that, beneath the despair, some movement toward life remained.

Understanding the Wound

As we gradually explored her history, the roots of her suffering began to emerge.

Sarah’s heart had been shattered by two profound relational betrayals involving the people she trusted most. Over nearly a decade, she came to believe she was fundamentally defective, unworthy of love, and responsible for the suffering around her. What began as heartbreak gradually crystallized into an identity organized around toxic shame, relentless self-judgment, and existential despair.

As self-hatred dominated her inner world, she withdrew from life. She isolated herself from friends, abandoned activities she once loved, lost three jobs within a matter of months, survived largely on fast food, and often slept for days at a time to escape consciousness.

Living in her parents’ home, she became caught in volatile conflicts with her mother, saying things that shocked even herself and further reinforced her conviction that she was beyond redemption. As therapy unfolded, it became apparent that Sarah had long occupied the role of scapegoat within her family system. Much of the shame and rage she carried seemed to reflect not only her own suffering, but also unresolved dynamics within the family. Her long-term romantic relationship recreated many of these patterns, reinforcing childhood wounds and keeping her trapped in familiar cycles of trauma.

Her loneliness became all-consuming. The world felt empty of meaning, and she experienced herself as profoundly separated from other people, from hope, and from life itself. The daily cycle of rage, sadness, shame, and despair became so relentless that she concluded the most compassionate act she could offer those she loved was to remove herself from their lives.

With only a few hundred dollars remaining in her bank account, Sarah packed her car and began driving, intending to continue until she ran out of money and fuel. She planned to find the nearest bridge and end her life.

Yet beneath the intensity of her suffering, something within her continued to move toward life.

Although convinced there was no future, she allowed herself to reach out. She accepted an offer of a complimentary therapy session. When her mother reported her missing, and the police eventually located her, she answered their calls, accepted their help, spoke with a hospital counsellor, and ultimately returned home.

Looking back, Sarah recognized that these decisions did not arise from hope. They arose from something quieter and deeper: a small but persistent movement toward life that survived even when her conscious mind insisted there was none.

Therapeutic Process

Our work drew upon dream analysis, poetry, mindfulness, somatic awareness, contemplative practice, and transpersonal psychotherapy while remaining grounded in established clinical practice. Drawing primarily from Buddhist and Sufi contemplative traditions, we explored shared psychological principles without requiring adherence to either religious framework. Rather than viewing suffering solely as pathology to eliminate, we explored whether it might also become a catalyst for transformation.

Several months later, Sarah travelled to Nepal to volunteer. Having had little prior interest in spirituality or religion, she accepted a friend’s invitation to attend a ten-day Vipassanā meditation retreat in the Theravāda Buddhist tradition. For the first time in her life, she experienced the profound stillness of a quiet mind. Rather than removing her suffering, the retreat revealed that another way of relating to it was possible.

Over the following three years, psychotherapy, meditation, and a willingness to explore new ways of understanding herself transformed Sarah’s relationship to her inner world. The shame remained real, but it no longer defined the entirety of her identity. She began to recognize that the story she had believed about herself was only one part of a much larger narrative.

Transformation

As Sarah’s perspective widened, meaningful changes emerged in her daily life. She stopped smoking and drinking, replaced coffee with green tea, began exercising regularly, secured stable full-time employment, moved into a home with supportive roommates, rekindled old friendships and hobbies, and repaired her relationship with her family, whom she now visits regularly. Meditation, reading, and contemplative practice became enduring parts of her life.

None of these changes erased her suffering. Long-standing habits of self-criticism continue to arise. The difference is that they are no longer experienced as absolute truth. Alongside them has emerged something that once seemed impossible: greater awareness, spaciousness, and, at times, genuine compassion toward herself.

Clinical Reflection

Sarah’s story illustrates one of the central arguments of this essay. Psychological healing does not require adopting a particular religious identity. Throughout our work, she continued to identify as an atheist. What proved transformative was not assent to a theological system, but a willingness to encounter her suffering through perspectives that extended beyond a purely pathological understanding.

Her journey remains unfinished. Like all of us, she continues to wrestle with deeply conditioned patterns of thought and emotion. Yet where there was once only shame, fear, judgment, and despair, there is now also curiosity, resilience, and an increasing capacity to remain present with her own experience.

Healing, in her case, did not consist in becoming someone else. It began when she discovered, slowly and imperfectly, that she was more than the story her suffering had taught her to believe.

Sufism in Dialogue with Transpersonal Psychology

The Sufi tradition has developed a remarkably sophisticated psychology of the soul. While Sufism represents one dimension of the broader Islamic intellectual tradition, it remains deeply rooted in the Qur’an and the Prophetic tradition, offering some of Islam’s richest ethical, psychological, and contemplative frameworks.

Sufi scholars not only catalogued mystical experiences and extraordinary states of consciousness, but also developed a nuanced language for distinguishing between spiritual states (aḥwāl), enduring stations (maqāmāt), inner promptings (khawāṭir), inspirations (ilhām), unveilings (mukāshafāt), spiritual influxes (wāridāt), dreams, and the many subtle movements of the heart and soul. These are not isolated concepts, but dimensions of an integrated understanding refined through centuries of scholarship, spiritual companionship, ethical discipline, and lived experience.

Contemporary transpersonal psychology has likewise reopened important questions concerning consciousness, spirituality, mystical experience, and self-transcendence within modern psychology. Although the two traditions arise from different historical, philosophical, and theological foundations, they converge in recognizing that human flourishing cannot be reduced to symptom relief alone.

Their differences, however, are equally important. Transpersonal psychology generally remains concerned with psychological integration and human flourishing, whereas Sufism ultimately orients the entire process toward knowledge of God. Mystical experiences, contemplative practices, and states of expanded consciousness are therefore understood not as achievements in themselves, but as occasions for greater humility, ethical refinement, and remembrance.

It is here that Islamic psychology enters into meaningful dialogue with contemporary psychology. Rather than replacing contemporary approaches, it broadens the conversation by inviting us to consider the human person not only as a biological and psychological being, but also as an ethical and spiritual one.

V. Returning to the Self

Conclusion

Healing has never belonged to psychology alone. Across cultures and civilizations, it has also been understood as a philosophical, ethical, and, for many traditions, spiritual concern. Contemporary transpersonal psychology has helped reopen this broader conversation within modern psychology. Islamic philosophy, through its philosophical and mystical traditions, has cultivated these questions for centuries.

Although the thinkers we have encountered differ in important ways, they share a common intuition: healing concerns not only what we think or feel, but who we become. It is not merely the reduction of symptoms, but the gradual integration of mind, heart, character, and soul.

Expanding psychology does not require rejecting science. It invites us to widen the frame by including intellectual traditions that have long reflected on consciousness, ethics, suffering, and human flourishing. Science helps us understand the mechanisms of the mind. Philosophy asks what is true. Contemplative traditions ask how truth is to be embodied in a human life.

This essay has focused primarily on philosophical foundations rather than the practical development of therapeutic models. There is much more to explore: how these understandings of the human person might shape clinical practice, how they might enter into dialogue with contemporary therapeutic approaches, and where genuine integration is possible without collapsing one tradition into another.

These are conversations I hope to continue through Mishkāt Journals. For now, all essays remain freely available. If you would like to follow along, you are welcome to subscribe for free. Paid subscriptions are entirely optional and help support the journal's research, writing, and continued growth.

Within the Sufi tradition, this lifelong journey begins and ends with dhikr, remembrance. Not because God has forgotten us, but because we so easily forget who we are in relation to God, to one another, and to ourselves.

A Contemplative Exercise

Throughout this essay, I have suggested that the Islamic understanding of the human person offers a different way of thinking about the self. Although the terms are not exact equivalents, readers familiar with psychology may find it helpful to think of the nafs as encompassing many of the functions often associated with the ego. In this sense, the ego is not an enemy to be hated or destroyed. It is part of what enables us to survive, form an identity, establish boundaries, make decisions, and navigate the world.

The aim of the spiritual path is therefore not the annihilation of the ego, but its refinement. Islamic psychology understands the nafs as capable of transformation. Rather than remaining governed by fear, pride, anger, or the endless pursuit of control, it can become more receptive to truth, beauty, mercy, and ultimately to the guidance of the rūḥ. The journey is not from self to no-self, but from an ego that imagines itself sovereign to a self increasingly oriented toward God.

Set aside twenty to thirty minutes in a quiet place.

Take a few slow breaths and ask yourself:

Who, or what, has been guiding my life lately?

Has it been fear? The need to control? The desire to be admired? Shame? Anger? Compassion? Love? Trust?

Now write two letters.

In the first, allow your nafs to speak without interruption. Let it tell you what it is trying to protect. What does it fear? What does it long for? What burdens has it been carrying? What story has it been telling itself?

When you have finished, set the letter aside.

Pause for a moment.

Now write a second letter, not from the voice of the ego, but from the deepest place of wisdom, mercy, and truthfulness you can presently access. Write from a place of remembrance, as though your life were already more fully oriented toward God. What would you say to your nafs? What would you reassure? What illusions would you gently uncover? What would you invite yourself to trust?

Leave both letters untouched for a day or two before returning to them.

Then ask yourself:

• What was my nafs trying to protect?

• What fears seemed to govern its decisions?

• Where did I notice spaciousness instead of constriction?

• What would it look like to take one small step this week from egoic reactivity toward remembrance?

This practice is not about rejecting the ego or denying our humanity. It is an invitation to witness the gradual refinement of the nafs: a movement from fear toward trust, from fragmentation toward wholeness, and from self-centredness toward a life increasingly oriented toward God.

Suggested Readings

Islamic Philosophy

• Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World (Oxford University Press, 2016).

• Oliver Leaman, An Introduction to Classical Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

• Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present (SUNY Press, 2006).

• Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Three Muslim Sages (Harvard University Press, 1964).

Sufism and Islamic Psychology

• William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Metaphysics of Imagination (SUNY Press, 1989).

• William C. Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God (SUNY Press, 1998).

• Robert Frager, Heart, Self, and Soul: The Sufi Psychology of Growth, Balance, and Harmony (Quest Books, 1999).

• Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism (University of California Press, 1984).

Psychology, Meaning, and Transpersonal Thought

• Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Beacon Press, 2006).

• Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (Martino Fine Books, 2013 [1968]).

• Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person (Mariner Books, 1995 [1961]).

• Frances Vaughan, The Inward Arc: Healing and Wholeness in Psychotherapy and Spirituality (iUniverse, 1995).

• Carl G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Routledge, various editions).

• Stanislav Grof, The Adventure of Self-Discovery (SUNY Press, 1988).

The lover of God is not distracted by light or by darkness;
both are veils before the Face.

Rābiʿa bint Ismāʿīl al-Mahdiyya

Your remedy is within you, yet you do not perceive it.
Your ailment is from you, yet you do not sense it.
Do you suppose you are an insignificant entity,
while within you the vast cosmos is enfolded?
You are the Book made manifest,
through whose letters the hidden becomes known.
You have no need to look beyond yourself.
The truth you seek is within, if only you reflect.

Imām ʿAlī (عليه السلام)

Grant me the gift of a tongue of veracity
that can give expression to the witnessing of Truth,
and distinguish me with clarity and eloquence
from the all-inclusive Words.
Protect me in all my utterances from claiming
that which is not mine by rights,
and make me speak according to inner vision,
I, and those who follow me.

Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī

To encounter the lives of saints is to be invited into knowledge that is lived. Within the Islamic epistemology, ways of knowing have long been many, some lean on ḥadīth, others on reason, and still others on modern inquiry, but the path of ʿirfān, of gnosis, the path of the ‘awliya, the “friends of God,” is experiential: it unveils rather than explains, never limited to abstract theology.

My own orientation emerges from the Sufi tradition, whose concern has always been less about systematizing knowledge and more about embodying it. As a transpersonal psychology practitioner, I read these teachings not as abstract beliefs, but as living psychologies of wholeness, ways of being that cultivate balance, presence, and meaning.

Of the four epistemic paths, ḥadīth, reason, philosophy, and ʿirfān, it is the path of the ʿārif and the awliyāʾ that remains part and parcel of the tradition since its inception, moved by grace, not wrought memorization, dry ritual, or dense scholarship. It is a path open not to everyone, but to anyone whose heart is stirred by love, sincerity, and longing for the Real.

This piece arises from a wider collective turn toward the sacred, a return to the language of the Divine. I write as a way to contribute to that turning, to help cultivate discernment, lest the errors of earlier ages repeat themselves, only magnified in a world where knowledge waxes as wisdom wanes.

Sufi saints are first known as lovers of the Divine before they become scholars or writers. Many never sought to articulate what they had witnessed of Being. They lived in remembrance that the visible world is but a veil over an immense, invisible correspondence.

In contemporary spiritual and therapeutic circles, energetic portals once guarded by initiation are sometimes opened without lineage, integration, or ethical containment. At times these openings can fragment rather than reveal (see “The Nature of Madness”), leaving many vulnerable to what moves within the unseen, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

The topic of jinn, “entities,” or “black magic,” is often approached from two dichotomous standpoints: either from complete materialist skepticism that denies all unseen realities, or from fear-based superstition that obsesses over protection rituals bypassing necessary psychological work.

With sincerity and integrity, one may find connection to a more balanced and grounded approach rooted in an authentic tradition.

Simply put, whether metaphysical beings “exist” is not the point here. What matters is that people experience them vividly, consistently, across cultures and eras. Taken together, they form a kind of living phenomenology of the unseen, experiences that gesture toward a deeper dimension of consciousness, one that cannot be neatly reduced to hallucination or conflated with dogma.

After publishing “Jinn, Jesters, and DMT Entities,” I received messages from readers across the world sharing their encounters with subtle beings during both induced or non-induced altered states.

These subtle presences, at times deceptive, at times illuminating, may serve as mirrors, revealing the terrain of the soul as much as they reflect the worlds beyond it.

Introduction

In the Sufi tradition, the ‘awliya, the “friends of God” or saints, are those whose hearts have been purified enough to perceive the unseen (al-ghaib) order behind appearances. Their lives embody an ethics of presence and service. Across centuries, such figures have been regarded as custodians of spiritual balance.

And though the word walī belongs to the Sufi lexicon, saints appear in every tradition, those rare beings whose inner surrender becomes a conduit for mercy. Whether called ṣiddīqīn, bodhisattvas, tzaddikim, or holy fools. Some are hidden, moving quietly among ordinary people, their sanctity veiled from those around them. Others are known, recognized by communities drawn to their light. Some live as simple folk, unknown outside their villages; others are people of knowledge, wealth, and authority.

What unites them is not station or visibility, but alignment with the Divine will, a life lived in perpetual remembrance (dhikr).

Just as many Indigenous elders say that true shamans are rare today, many Sufis admit likewise that those who reach the stations of mastery are few. There may be countless saints—known and unknown—for sainthood belongs to God alone to bestow. Anyone may be a friend of the Divine. But those whose realization ripens into complete awareness (insan al-kamil) are rare.

It is from this station of cosmic stewardship that Ibn ʿArabī writes, not from mere speculation or intellectual philosophy, but from direct witnessing (mushāhada) of how spirit, matter, and consciousness interrelate in the vast architecture of being.

Before modernity and colonial disruption, such mystical unveilings were regarded not as superstition but as indigenous ways of knowing, a relational epistemology.

Scholars such as Vincent Cornell, Talal Asad, and Amira Mittermaier have shown that colonial modernity did not merely suppress and orientalize Sufism; it also redefined what counted as ‘real’ or ‘rational,’ pushing the imaginal (‘alam al-khayal, as Ibn ʿArabī called it) to the margins of human experience.

The seeming unraveling of taṣawwuf, the Classical Arabic word for Sufism, however, was not only imposed from without. There were also shadows within, betrayals, distortions, excesses, and practices that drifted from the Prophetic ﷺ core. Yet, as history continues to teach us, throwing out the baby with the bathwater has never been the path of wisdom.

With this spirit I turn to Ibn ʿArabī’s Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (“The Meccan Openings”), particularly his meditations on the nature of the arwāḥ—the subtle spirits of fire and light—within the vast cosmology of being. I read the original Arabic text and tried to systematize the author’s reflections. Any interpretive errors are mine alone.

The Futūḥāt is not a mere compendium of doctrines but a map of consciousness, a record of unveiling (kashf) that moves between cosmology, psychology, and ontology. Each chapter reflects not theoretical speculation but direct witnessing (mushāhada) of the spiritual worlds, described in the symbolic language of his time.

In approaching these visions today, I do not seek to historicize them but to listen, to read Ibn ʿArabī as a cartographer of the unseen, whose language of light, shadow, and reflection still speaks to contemporary experiences of altered consciousness and transpersonal encounter.

The Divine Contemplating Itself through the Eye of Creation

At the heart of Ibn ʿArabī’s vision, the purpose of the human being is Divine self-contemplation. Creation itself unfolds as tajallī, a theophany, so that the Hidden Treasure (al-kanz al-makhfī) might be known.

“I was a Hidden Treasure and loved to be known, so I created creation that I might be known.”

Humanity is the mirror through which that Knowing occurs.

The Insān al-Kāmil, the Complete Human, stands at the centre of this Divine drama as the eye through which creation looks back at its Source.

Through this being, Allah contemplates Allah, the mirror polished enough to reflect every Divine Name without distortion.

“The Whole Human is the mirror of the Real.”

All other forms of creation, mineral, plant, animal, angelic, or jinn, manifest certain attributes, but only the human being has that capacity to totally constellate them all.

Hence Ibn ʿArabī calls the human being al-kawn al-jāmi’, the comprehensive cosmos [Futūḥāt, II:2–6]. Imam Ali captured this truth in a single luminous saying: “You think you are a small entity, but within you the entire universe is enfolded.”

Through this completeness, the human becomes the place of Divine recognition (maʿrifa): the heart (qalb) becomes a sanctuary where the Real contemplates Its own Beauty and Majesty (see, Metaphysics of Awakening the Heart).

Thus, the purpose of human existence is not external service but interior witnessing through awareness, compassion, and love. Service is only one expression of it.

من عرف نفسه فقد عرف ربّه.
“Whoever knows their self knows their Lord.”

As Seyyed Hossein Nasr observes, this ḥadīth encapsulates the metaphysics of consciousness: “The universe is God’s self-disclosure, and man is the consciousness of that disclosure” (Knowledge and the Sacred, 1981). William Chittick similarly writes, “The Perfect Man is the mirror in which the Real sees Himself, and without that mirror, the cosmos remains a dispersed reflection without self-awareness” (The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 1989).

To live, then, is to participate in this Divine act of self-knowing, to be simultaneously the seeker and the seen, the lover and the beloved, the witness and the witnessed.

At the heart of this luminous order stands the Muḥammadan Reality (al-Ḥaqīqa al-Muḥammadiyya), the first radiance through which all creation was disclosed. The Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ is the archetype of the Insān al-Kāmil, the Complete Human, whose perfection every saint and prophet mirrors according to their capacity.

Through this Reality, the Divine Names are harmonized in the human heart, and through its inheritors the balance of the cosmos is maintained. Through the few who remember perfectly, the cosmos itself continues to see.

The Hidden Hierarchy of Saints

The awliyā’, the friends of God, are the luminous prisms through which Divine awareness circulates in the world. Their existence ensures that mercy continues to descend through living hearts.

Ibn ʿArabī describes this order of sanctity not as a hierarchy of authority, but as an architecture of presence, a living map of proximity to the Real. Each saint (walī) is a locus of a particular Divine Name, reflecting one hue of the Infinite Light.

At its heart stands the Quṭb, the Pole of the age, the Insān Kāmil of that time, through whom the balance of the cosmos is maintained. Around them move other luminous poles, reflections of their station, each sustaining a different sphere of existence.

The Awtād (pillars) uphold the four directions, the Abdāl (substitutes) maintain the flow of succession, and the Nujabāʾand Nuqabāʾ serve as guardians of hearts, lands, and communities. Their work is hidden, yet through them the world breathes.

These circles of sanctity correspond to the prophetic presences (ḥaḍarāt al-anbiyāʾ), spiritual lineages radiating from the realities of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, peace be upon them all. Each embodies a particular mode of Divine relation: creation, endurance, trust, law, spirit, and unification. The Muḥammadan presence ﷺ encompasses them all, the most complete and merciful orbit through which all others take light.

Such assemblies are not councils in space but gatherings of consciousness, dimensions where the realized souls meet in remembrance. In their collective invocation, the Divine beholds Itself through the many eyes of Its friends. Through them, rain descends, hearts find repose, and the unseen remains tethered to the seen.

Some walk among us unnoticed, their sanctity unrecorded; others burn so brightly that history itself bends around them. But whether hidden or manifest, they constitute the secret covenant between the Creator and creation: that the gaze of Love never withdraws from the world.

The Sufi–Gnostic and the Subtle Lineages of the Path

A Sufi is one who refines the ego-self through remembrance and love until the Real (al-Ḥaqq) discloses Itself within. The gnostic (ʿārif) is the one in whom that refinement becomes direct knowing. In Ibn ʿArabī’s language, the Sufi travels toward God, the gnostic travels in God. What begins as discipline becomes perception. Such illumination cannot be forced; it ripens only through surrender. When the heart yields, knowledge flowers into vision, what the masters called kashf, unveiling. Revelation, in this sense, is never achieved but received.

Within this living science of the soul, Ibn ʿArabī describes degrees of alignment among beings of the unseen. Some are born under Divine attraction (majdhūb min al-badʾ), others arrive through discipline (sulūk), but all share a single mark: immaculate surrender, and their wholeness is not in infallibility but in continual return.

The true walī is not the one who never errs, but the one who never stays estranged for long. Even when the heart fractures, the baraka can remain, sometimes shining more brightly, amplified and refracted.

Human knowing itself deepens through the ‘awliyāʾ, for they are the living vessels of taʾwīl, that sacred hermeneutic through which revelation continues to unfold in the heart. In them, meaning is not read but revealed, not argued but witnessed.

This mode of knowing has been largely severed in the modern age, replaced by commentary without presence, intellect without illumination. When I use the word indigenous, I mean this: a way of knowing rooted in the soil of the Real, transmitted through hearts rather than texts. The Awliyāʾ are the custodians of this epistemology, the inheritors of a living wisdom that bridges intellect and spirit, interpretation and unveiling.

Yet this same subtle realm—where meaning becomes power—has always drawn pretenders. Every tradition has its charlatans: those who mimic light but move from self, who perform sanctity while feeding on devotion. This is not new, nor uniquely Muslim. The terrain of spirit is vast, and wherever there is genuine grace, imitation follows.

Light endures by its Source.

The Rūḥānī, literally “of the spirit,” is one whose awareness has become attuned to the subtle realms. This sensitivity may appear as magnetism, receptivity, or inner sight, but it becomes true rūḥāniyya only when grounded in humility and remembrance.

Among the jinn, too, there are rūḥānīyūn aligned with the Divine order: luminous intelligences of fire and air who, like the saint, live in service to the Real. A rūḥānī jinn of this kind can also become walī min al-jinn, a friend of God among the subtle beings.

All awliyāʾ are rūḥānī, though not all rūḥānī are awliyāʾ.

The Sāḥir (sorcerer), whether human or jinn, mirrors the rūḥānī in access but not in orientation. Where the rūḥānī aligns with the current of Divine will, the sāḥir bends that current toward desire. Their manipulation of subtle forces for vanity, power, or mere material gain veils light with shadow, the condition Ibn ʿArabī calls fatḥ ẓulmānī, the dark opening born of ego-will.

The Saints of the Unseen

It is worth noting that the term rijāl al-ghayb, “the men of the unseen,” is often misunderstood when read through modern gendered lenses. In classical metaphysics, rijāl refers not to biological men but to those who have attained spiritual maturity and steadfastness (rujūla). The Arabic root r-j-l conveys grounding, stability, and presence, qualities of the realized soul, not the body.

In fact, many of the masters held that the feminine principle (quwwa al-qabūl, the power of receptivity) makes women of the unseen even more potent in their spiritual radiance, according to certain perspectives, for the womb itself mirrors the Divine receptivity that receives the Breath of the Spirit (nafkh al-rūḥ).

Thus, to speak of rijāl al-ghayb is to speak of the realized souls who sustain the unseen balance of the world, not men or women in form, but beings in whom the polarities of gender are reconciled in unity.

True Light (Fataḥ Nūrānī) vs. False Light (Fataḥ Ẓulmánī)

Light in the metaphysical sense is not the glow of photons, but a mode of being. As Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī, founder of the illuminationist (ishraq) school of philosophy, taught, everything exists by virtue of light; what is not light is darkness, a veil upon being. The visible brightness we call “light” is only a reflection of that deeper ontological radiance.

To be more real is to be more luminous.

Within this spectrum of light and being, the mystics speak of two kinds of openings: fatḥ nūrānī, the luminous unveiling that humbles and unites, and fatḥ ẓulmánī, the shadowed or fiery opening that inflates and divides. The first expands the heart’s capacity to receive; the second ignites the self’s hunger to possess. Both may appear radiant, but their fruits reveal their source.

In this cosmology, nūr and ẓulmah are not opposites but degrees of presence and veiling. Nūr is being itself, and ẓulmah—from the same root as ẓulm, oppression—is the self’s contraction against its own light. Saints, emptied of self, become clear vessels of the divine nūr; fiery spirits, still bound by selfhood, burn with their own reflection.

And it is toward these fiery spirits that Ibn ʿArabī now turns, unveiling the metaphysical psychology of the jinn.

On the Nature of the Fiery Spirits

In Al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Openings), Volume I, Chapter Nine, Section Twelve, titled “On the Fiery, Smokeless Spirits” (الأرواح المارجية النارية), Ibn ʿArabī turns his attention to the nature of the jinn. The Futūḥāt itself is his vast spiritual encyclopedia, composed after a series of mystical unveilings (kashf) he experienced in Mecca around 598 AH / 1201 CE.

The chapter referenced in this section is not simply a cosmological account of the jinn; it is a metaphysical psychology of elemental consciousness. His description of beings made of “a smokeless flame” mirrors what depth psychology might call archetypal energies, forces of passion, imagination, pride, and transformation that live both in the cosmos and in the human psyche.

From a transpersonal and Jungian lens, the “fiery spirits” can be understood as reflections of the same energies that the psyche (the soul) engages through the subtle faculties (al-laṭāʾif), movements of consciousness that bridge the instinctual and the Divine, meaning the living Reality of God (al-Ḥaqq), the meeting point of psyche and Spirit.

These sections are my English rendering of Ibn ʿArabī’s text, translated with reverence for its Qurʾānic, prophetic, and symbolic depth. Where the rational mind cannot grasp, the soul may listen.

Written eight centuries ago in Mecca, this work speaks a symbolic language in which revelation and cosmos exist in living correspondence. I note this because, like many of my readers, I am Western-trained and educated; and while that formation carries its gifts, it also confines the ways we know. To truly meet Ibn ʿArabī’s vision, we must soften that frame and allow the knowing of the heart to speak through us.

With that said…

﷽

The Nature of Creation

The Divine says:

“And He created the jinn from a smokeless flame of fire.”

[Sūrat al-Raḥmān, 55:15].

And in the sound ḥadīth:

“God created the angels from light, the jinn from smokeless fire, and the human being from what has been described to you.“

The Prophet ﷺ said, “from what has been described to you,” rather than elaborating, for he was given jawāmiʿ al-kalim (the concise speech that carries vast meaning).

God pointed us toward the diversity of human creation: Adam from clay, Eve from a rib, Jesus from the breath of the Spirit, and the rest of humankind from a mingling of water.

The Formation of the Elements

When God established the four elements, the smoke rose to the concave sphere of the fixed stars. He then separated that smoke into seven heavens, inspiring each heaven with its command, and proportioning sustenance within the earth, all this within four days.

Then He said to the heavens and the earth:

“Come willingly or unwillingly,”

“And they said, “We” come willingly.”

[Sūrat Fuṣṣilat, 41:11]

Thus, between heaven and earth there came to be a hidden bond, a mutual responsiveness through which minerals, plants, and animals are continually born. The act of creation is not a single event but an ongoing dialogue between spirit and matter.

The earth became as a mother, the sky as a father, casting down its rain as seed; and the earth, conceiving, brings forth forms according to Divine decree.

The Birth of Fire and Air

From the interaction of air and fire, the air grew heated and flamed like a lamp, the burning of fire itself. That very burning, that flame, is what the Qurʾān calls marij: the mingling of fire and air. For marij means blending, just as a marj (meadow) is where grasses of all kinds intermingle.

Hence the jinn are composed of two elements, fire and air, just as Adam was composed of water and earth. When water and earth unite, we call it clay (ṭīn طِين); when fire and air unite, we call it marij.

The Creation of the Jinn

Into this marij, God opened the image of the jinn. Through their airy nature, they can assume any form they wish; through their fiery nature, they are subtle, vast, and swift.

From fire comes their impulse toward domination, pride, and exaltation — for fire is the highest of the elements in station. Its power lies in its ability to transform and consume. Because of this, the jinn displayed arrogance when commanded to bow to Adam, saying:

“I am better than he; You created me from fire and created him from clay.”
(Sūrat al-Aʿrāf, 7:12)

Yet the jinn did not perceive that the power of water, from which Adam was formed, is greater, for water extinguishes fire.

Thus Adam was given strength and stability from the dominance of water and earth, while the jinn were given volatility and pride from air and fire. For this reason, Adam was naturally inclined toward humility, while the jinn were inclined toward arrogance, unless grace intervenes.

Their Sustenance

The Prophet ﷺ said that the bones are sustenance for your brothers among the jinn. And indeed, we observe that bones do not diminish in essence when flesh is consumed, which proves that God has appointed in them a provision for the jinn.

A saint once related that he saw the jinn approach bones and smell them as beasts smell carrion, then depart, nourished by that scent.

Truly, God is the Subtle, the All-Knowing.

Their Union and Nations

Their intercourse is like the intertwining of smoke, one current entering another, their pleasure being that mutual penetration. Their fertilization is by scent, as their nourishment is by scent.

They are tribes and nations, twelve root tribes from which many branches descend, and among them are wars and strife. The whirlwinds we see in the desert (zawābiʿ) are sometimes the visible trace of their battles, as two contrary winds meet and clash in circular motion.

When Spirits Take Form

When one of these subtle spirits assumes a visible form, the gaze of the human observing them fixes it, the jinn cannot escape that form while being seen. But when the gaze turns away, the spirit withdraws and the form vanishes.

This is among the Divine mysteries known only through unveiling. The form and the spirit are not separate; they are one reality appearing in many images, just as a single lamp spreads its light into countless corners.

The Angels and the Jinn

The difference between angels and jinn is not only their element but their nourishment. The angels do not eat, as in the story of Abraham’s guests, who reached not their hands to the roasted calf and he feared them (Sūrat Hūd, 11:70).

But the jinn are sustained by what the physical world carries in subtle form, aroma, vibration, and heat.

Thus their life is drawn from what we exhale and burn.

The Hierarchy of Creation

When God willed to create the jinn, He commanded the angels of the first heaven to descend and take from their deputies in the lower heavens what was needed for this new form.

They gathered the essences, shaped the frame, and then the Divine breath, the spirit from the world of command (ʿālam al-amr), was infused. The jinn stood upright, alive, praising their Lord with grandeur, not yet knowing before whom they would later bow.

Among them was one named al-Ḥārith, later called Iblīs, who, upon seeing Adam’s form, felt aversion and envy. When commanded to bow, he refused out of pride in his fiery origin and blindness to the secret of water, the source of all life.

Their Cognition and Character

Because their nature lacks the weight of earth and the softness of water, their reason is light and restless. Hence one says of a foolish person, “His mind is light,” for he carries the temperament of the jinn, and indeed, the Arabic word for madness, junūn (جنون), comes from the same root, meaning to be veiled or concealed.

Their thought is swift but without depth, quick to spark yet unable to dwell. From this came their error:

“I am better than him.”

Ignorance and pride united in that single claim. Whoever among them persists in such defiance becomes a shayṭān, from shaṭa (شَطَ), meaning to burn or to transgress in arrogance, one cast out from Divine mercy.

On Iblīs and His Progeny

The first of the jinn to be so banished was al-Ḥārith, whom God named Iblīs (the despaired one). From him came the shayāṭīn.

Yet not all jinn are devils, among them are believers, such as Hāmah son of Lāqīs son of Iblīs, who joined the faithful jinn. Those who persist in denial remain devils.

Some scholars said, “A shayṭān never becomes Muslim,” but others held that the Prophet’s ﷺ saying, “My devil has submitted,” means his shayṭān believed by grace, not merely ceased to tempt him.

Their Punishment and Elemental Nature

The jinn’s punishment in Hell is mostly by cold (zamharīr), not by heat (ḥarūr), for they are creatures of fire, the cold torments them more.

Humans, whose nature is watery and earthy, are chastised by heat.

Hence, Hell is both burning and freezing, and the name Jahannam itself denotes both terror of sight and depth of distance.

The Spiritual Parallel

The angels are spirits blown into light.
The jinn are spirits blown into wind.
Humans are spirits blown into bodies.

Thus the jinn stand between angel and man, half luminous, half shadowy.
Some say the first jinn was androgynous, self-fertilizing, from whom pairs later emerged, hence their ambiguous nature, resembling both male and female, both angel and beast.

The Inner Meaning

From all this, understand: the fiery spirits are not merely mythic beings, they are living presences between the dense and the subtle, between the seen and the unseen. Their fire is the energy of will and imagination; their air is the field of thought and fantasy.

They can ascend to light or fall into smoke.

Whoever within the human being subdues their fiery impulses and refines them through humility and remembrance transforms the inner jinn into an angelic force.

Whoever is ruled by them becomes a shayṭān unto themselves.

Ibn ʿArabī often concludes in this spirit: this is enough for now. There is way more in the Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, and I may continue reflecting on it as I move through its other chapters and various topics.

A Transpersonal Horizon Across Traditions

Carl Jung, in The Red Book, wrestled with his own fiery spirits. The parallel to Ibn ʿArabī is not one of equivalence but of structure: both recognized that consciousness is multi-layered and that the unseen speaks through images.

Though their languages differ, one psychological, the other metaphysical, both approached the imaginal (khayāl) as a real domain of experience. Jung expressed it through the psyche’s symbols; Ibn ʿArabī through the ontology of Being itself.

For Ibn ʿArabī, the psyche (nafs) and the cosmos mirror one another as reflections of al-Ḥaqq, the Real. Consciousness unfolds through divine self-disclosure (tajallī), and the goal of the seeker is realization, the polishing of the heart until it reflects the Divine Names without distortion. Jung, working in a secular age, mapped a comparable interior topography through the collective unconscious, archetypes, and individuation (differentiation versus individualism).

Where Ibn ʿArabī saw the soul’s journey as Divine remembrance, Jung understood it as the psyche’s movement toward the Self, the image of totality within. Both framed the imaginal as a real realm mediating spirit and matter: Ibn ʿArabī called it ʿālam al-mithāl, the world of images, while Jung described it as the archetypal or imaginal realm.

Writers such as Henri Corbin, James Hillman, and Robert Sardello have each, in their own way, bridged this terrain between the symbolic, the sacred, and the psychic, showing how imagination can serve as the meeting ground between worlds.

Across the Abrahamic lineages, the cosmology of subtle beings endures. In Judaism, the shedim and ruḥot were said to be made of smokeless fire, born at twilight, capable of both devotion and deceit. In Christianity, the early mystics and Greek Fathers spoke of the daimones, intermediary intelligences neither wholly angelic nor human. Later demonology flattened their metaphysical depth. In Islam, this lineage reached its most intricate articulation: the jinn as subtle, fiery presences, mirrors of the human psyche and its elemental tensions.

Beyond the Abrahamic world, these same presences appear in the yakṣas and asuras of the Indic worlds, the ancestral and plant-teachers of Indigenous cosmologies, and, in modern research, the “entities” encountered in DMT experiences. Jung would have called them archetypal energies or autonomous complexes, forms arising from the collective unconscious yet endowed with intelligence.

From the orientation of transpersonal psychology, spirituality is neither merely psychological nor merely supernatural, but profoundly participatory.

The Imaginal as a Participatory Realm

Whether we name them jinn, daimones, asuras, or archetypes, what we are meeting are the living thresholds of consciousness itself. The task is not to command them but to refine the heart so that it can perceive without distortion.

This, to me, is the true meeting point between Sufi gnosis and transpersonal psychology, not integration, but dialogue: witnessing rather than fear, reverent engagement rather than conquest.

Across traditions and contemporary research alike, the transpersonal dimension of subtle beings, archetypal energies, and altered states of consciousness is increasingly acknowledged. In transpersonal psychology, one finds well-documented accounts of “entity encounters” during psychoactive experiences (notably in research from Johns Hopkins published in Scientific Reports [Nature Portfolio], as well as studies in PubMed Central and Frontiers in Psychology), where beings appear, communicate, and reshape the experiencer’s worldview.

Shamanic, Indigenous, and ecstatic lineages speak of luminous spirits and threshold-walkers; Islamic mysticism of the jinn, the rūḥānī, and the walī, a vision of subtle life that is neither mental fantasy nor mere symbol, but living presence.

My hope is not to compare worlds, but to listen across them, to allow Ibn ʿArabī’s unveiling to illuminate what modern psychology only gestures toward. Between these languages, a bridge appears: from inner witnessing to outer inquiry, from remembrance to realization.

This is not to collapse traditions into one, but to recognize that human consciousness spans deeper terrain than what either materialist reduction or fearful superstition can admit. From a Sufi-gnostic vantage, the unseen is not a problem to be feared or dismissed, but a mystery to contemplate consciously, and in love.

Toward an Ethical Engagement with the Unseen

Perhaps this sounds too far out, but I often wonder what might shift in mental health if we invited more of the imaginal into mainstream psychiatry, a field that already uses language like “seizure aura” and “psychic seizure.” A close friend, who has recently experienced severe seizures, reminded me how much of what psychiatry calls “pathology” might also be subtle perception, an overwhelm of thresholds rather than their absence.

Psychotherapist Robert Falconer, in The Others Within Us, recounts the experiences of clients whose unintegrated openings resembled what earlier traditions would have called spirit intrusions. As an Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapist, he approaches these encounters not as pathology nor proof of the supernatural, but as processes requiring integration. Falconer admits he cannot offer definitive explanations, only an attitude of trust, humility, and careful containment.

Drawing on sources like Swedenborg and cross-cultural phenomenologies of spirit encounter, Falconer situates such phenomena within a wider field of consciousness, one that modern psychology has largely forgotten. Yet he cautions against fascination: these are not realms to chase but thresholds to recognize, respect, and revere, and for the uninitiated, not to meddle in or with.

Across many traditions, when times grow dark or oppressive, a loosening of the psychic order occurs. What older cosmologies called black magic, spirit possession, or soul illness may in truth mirror a collective imbalance, an ecological disorder of the unseen reflecting our ecological disorder in the seen. As Seyyed Hossein Nasr warned decades ago, long before such concerns were fashionable, the desacralization of the natural world is not merely environmental but metaphysical.

Before closing, I’ll leave a small note—perhaps a mixture of caution and wonder: In Islamic eschatology, a ḥadīth attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ recounts that some of the entities once bound by Prophet Sulaymān (Solomon) will be released near the end of time. As we stand on the threshold of artificial intelligence and synthetic consciousness, one must ask: what new forms of awareness might soon take shape, and what will they mirror back to us?

As I always say: take what serves, and leave the rest.

If you’ve stayed with me this far, then know, the next unveiling turns toward the women whose sanctity carried the axis itself.
For in the earliest generations, it was not silence that defined them, but station.

At their heart stands Fāṭimah al-Zahrāʾ, daughter of the Prophet ﷺ, regarded in many Sufi and scholarly traditions as a Qutb, the luminous heart of the Muhammadan Reality through whom the current of wilāya flows.
From her light emerged the lineage of saints, men and women alike, each a reflection of that first radiance.

In contemporary spaces, frankly, women remain an afterthought. It is a complex and multilayered reality. To speak of the women awliyāʾ is not to recover what was lost, but to remember what was never absent.

References & Suggested Readings

Primary Sufi Sources

Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥyī al-Dīn. Al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Openings). Ed. Aḥmad Shams al-Dīn. Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1971.

Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥyī al-Dīn. Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam (The Bezels of Wisdom). Ed. Abū al-ʿAlā ʿAfīfī. Cairo: al-Maktabah al-ʿArabiyya, 1946.

Al-Jīlī, ʿAbd al-Karīm. Al-Insān al-Kāmil fī Maʿrifat al-Awākhir wa-l-Awāʾil (The Perfect Human). Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1997.

Al-Shaʿrānī, ʿAbd al-Wahhāb. Al-Yawāqīt wa-l-Jawāhir fī Bayān ʿAqāʾid al-Akābir. Cairo: al-Matbaʿa al-Kubrā al-Amīriyya, 1891.

Ibn ʿAjība, Aḥmad. Miʿrāj al-Tashawwuf ilā Ḥaqāʾiq al-Taṣawwuf. Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿa al-ʿĀmira, 1320 AH.

Suhrawardī, Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā. Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq (The Philosophy of Illumination). Ed. Henry Corbin. Tehran: Institut Franco-Iranien, 1952.

ʿĀʾishah al-Bāʿūniyya. The Principles of Sufism (Al-Muntakhab fī Uṣūl al-Raḥma wa-Tawābiʿ al-Naʿma). Tr. Th. Emil Homerin. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Al-Qushayrī, ʿAbd al-Karīm. Al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya fī ʿIlm al-Taṣawwuf (The Treatise on Sufism). Tr. Alexander Knysh. Reading: Garnet, 2007.
Foundational manual of Sufi adab and ethics of the path.

Cornell, Vincent. Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.

Coloniality and the Transformation of the Unseen

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Mittermaier, Amira. Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Berrada, Omar. “The Coloniality of the Unseen.” Asymptote Journal, 2015.

Ernst, Carl W. Sufism: An Introduction to the Mystical Tradition of Islam. Boston: Shambhala, 1997.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Ahmed, Shahab. What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Reclaims Islam’s interpretive and imaginative plurality, bridging law, art, and gnosis.

Jungian and Transpersonal Perspectives

Jung, C. G. The Red Book: Liber Novus. Ed. Sonu Shamdasani. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009.

Burniston, Frederick. The Cunning Secret of the Wise: Jung, Mysticism, and the Imaginal World. London: Temenos Press, 2021.

Hillman, James. Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Sardello, Robert. Love and the World: A Guide to Conscious Soul Practice. Great Barrington: Lindisfarne Books, 2001.

Washburn, Michael. The Ego and the Dynamic Ground. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995.

Wilber, Ken. The Spectrum of Consciousness. Wheaton: Quest Books, 1977.

Grof, Stanislav. The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998.

Aziz, Robert. C.G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990.
Connects Jung’s archetypal model to metaphysical causality and sacred order.

Contemporary Explorations of Entity Encounters and Consciousness

Strassman, Rick. DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Rochester: Park Street Press, 2001.

Luke, David, and Jack Hunter (eds.). Talking with the Spirits: Ethnographies from Between the Worlds. Brisbane: Daily Grail, 2014.

Luke, David. “Discarnate Entities and the Paranormal.” In Breaking Convention: Essays on Psychedelic Consciousness, 2013.

Falconer, Robert. The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession. Self-published, 2021.

Kripal, Jeffrey J. The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge. Bellevue: Bellevue Literary Press, 2019.

Shanon, Benny. The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Winkelman, Michael. Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010.

Gallimore, Andrew R. Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Consciousness Continuum.Strange World Press, 2019.
A neuro-ontological model of “entity” encounters and extended mind theory.

The Longing for an Anchor

In my work as a transpersonal psychologist, clients rarely come in asking about philosophy. Yet beneath anxiety, disconnection, and the search for meaning, the question is often the same: What is the Source of my existence? Where is home? Where do I belong? Some call it God, some avoid the word entirely, but almost everyone longs for a tether, an anchor, something that provides coherence and integrity in life.

We live in a world where the word “God” has been used to justify harm, conflict, and even war. It is easy to understand why so many feel alienated from it. Yet across mystical traditions, the origin of the universe is described as Love, the force that sustains all that is.

This tension, between disillusionment with religion and the heart’s need for an ultimate Source, is where the work often begins.

Dr. Roy Casagranda’s recent interview (Al Jazeera, 2:22 m) is refreshing (full YouTube interview below). Here is a Western scholar speaking to the world about a rich chapter of Islamic intellectual history. The Arab and Muslim world is often misunderstood, from within, too, or only seen through the lens of conflict.

I share this with some trepidation. Any source or platform carries its own biases, and the act of speaking about the Islamic world through a Western lens is layered with complexity. Still, the insights are valuable, and this interview opens a window rarely seen.

This post is less a polished article than a curated list of resources for those interested in exploring further. Consider this a companion to Part I of my Healing the Soul series, with Part II currently in the works.

Casagranda, in the full interview, highlights how a thousand years ago, if you viewed the earth from space, the Arab and Muslim world would be the only place illuminated by lanterns fueled by petroleum. A millennium later, spirituality is still alive, but the metaphorical light is dim, though the legacy of that intellectual brilliance remains, if we are willing to see it.

From this luminous past arises one of its most profound contributions: Ibn Sīnā’s (980–1037) conception of the Necessary Being [واجب الوجود]. This idea, born from his engagement with Aristotle through al-Fārābī’s commentaries, became both a cornerstone of Islamic metaphysics and a bridge to later Western thought.

Ibn Sīnā and the Necessary Being

Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, 980–1037) articulated one of the most evident proofs for the existence of God: the Necessary Being [واجب الوجود].

He distinguished three ontological potentialities:

1. Necessary in itself [واجب الوجود] — exists by its very essence, requiring no cause.

2. Possible in itself [ممكن الوجود] — contingent, may exist or not, depends on an external cause.

3. Impossible in itself [ممتنع الوجود] — cannot exist in any scenario.

Everything in the world is possible in itself, a dependent reality borrowing its existence. A chain of contingent beings cannot regress infinitely. There must be a first source, a Necessary Being, whose essence is existence itself.

Dr. Roy Casagranda likens this to a metaphysical singularity, the Source from which all reality flows. Without the Necessary Being, nothing could exist at all.

Influence on Thomas Aquinas

Ibn Sīnā’s reasoning shaped Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). In Summa Theologica (I.q.2.a.3), Aquinas’s Third Way mirrors Avicenna:

• Contingent beings appear and pass away.

• If all were contingent, there would have been a time when nothing existed.

• From nothing, nothing comes. Therefore, a Necessary Being must exist.

In De Ente et Essentia, Aquinas explicitly cites Avicenna’s distinction between essence (ماهية) and existence (وجود), Christianizing the framework with creation ex nihilo.

From Logic to Mysticism

Ibn Sīnā’s proof seeded centuries of Islamic metaphysics and mysticism:

1. Suhrawardī (1154–1191) — reframed the Necessary Being as the Light of Lights.

2. Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240) — moved beyond proof into Unity of Being [وحدة الوجود], where all forms reflect the One.

3. Mullā Ṣadrā (1572–1640) — developed the primacy of existence [أصالة الوجود], seeing reality as a graded emanation of the Necessary.

Each of these authors is a world unto themselves, and will be writing about in more detail in my journal reflections.

Critique and Debate

• Al-Ghazālī (1058–1111) accepted the Necessary Being but rejected Avicenna’s Neoplatonism in Tahāfut al-Falāsifa.

• Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (1149–1209) cautiously integrated the logic into Ashʿarī theology.

• Ṭūsī (1201–1274) and Mullā Ṣadrā fully embraced and expanded his metaphysics.

The Necessary Being became a bridge between philosophy and theology, even amid tension with orthodoxy.

A Psychological Anchor

Ibn Sīnā’s Necessary Being is more than a metaphysical idea. It is a reminder that all contingent realities, including our own lives, borrow their existence. In a world hungry for meaning, remembering that there is a Source that cannot not exist can serve as an anchor, a return to integrity.

Behind all contingency stands the One who simply, necessarily, Is.

Mystical Heart Is Not A Metaphor

Is your heart at ease—or does it ache with questions no one has answered?

Is it numb? Hardened? Or still, quietly hoping?

Most spiritual traditions agree that the heart is not merely an emotional center. It is the seat of perception—the axis of truth-seeing. When veiled by grief, fear, unprocessed trauma, arrogance, or pride, our entire reality can become distorted.

In a fractured, overstimulated world, the condition of the heart is no longer just a mystical concern—it’s a psychological and existential one. It is a matter of survival, yes, but also of liberation.

From a transpersonal psychology perspective, the heart is a threshold where the personal dissolves into the sacred—where healing becomes awakening. Integral psychology may frame it as a convergence point of body, mind, soul, and spirit—a dynamic center of consciousness that must be cultivated, not bypassed.

The mystics have long practiced both psychologies, whether or not they named them.

This journal offers a distilled version of the complete and extended reflection—available here—exploring the metaphysics of awakening the heart through two intricate mystical lineages: Sufi Islam and Christian mysticism. Both traditions map the heart as a layered, dynamic vessel capable of love, the Beatific vision, and Divine union.

This is not pantheism. When I say the heart is not a metaphor, I mean it quite literally—the metaphysical heart is a real locus of perception, and it can become clogged by dense emotions like jealousy and envy and their many offshoots. For this reason, I’ll address the deeper question of annihilation and Divine union in a separate journal reflection.

Faith and the Weight of History

But what shapes that perception if the heart is where reality is revealed or distorted?

The monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam converge on universal truths: unity consciousness, the call to ethical living, and the promise of spiritual awakening. But history has polluted the traditions—not by the essence of the messages themselves, but through human imposition and misinterpretation.

Islam, in particular, has been cast into the global imagination as a distorted reflection of itself. The aftermath of 9/11 turned it into a geopolitical construct—an object of suspicion and fear.

A vast spiritual tradition was reduced to headlines, soundbites, and accusations.

9/11 was not just an attack on American soil; it was a rupture in how Western Muslims were perceived—and how they perceived themselves.

Overnight, the Muslim psyche was placed under siege.

The weight of collective blame, the pressure to justify or disavow one’s faith, and the internalized fear of being misunderstood fractured how many engaged with their spiritual inheritance.

I was a teenager when it happened. I remember CBC’s Peter Mansbridge, his sombre face on the screen, delivering what felt like a seismic shift. I went to my room and cried, torn between two thoughts: Muslims were the problem, or the West didn’t get it.

It wasn’t a sophisticated argument—but it made sense for a teenager. The absolute failure is that many adults never outgrew it.

9/11 created a wound—not only of identity but of faith.

This rupture reflects an ancient pattern. Muhammad ﷺ warned of the tendency to drift toward distortion and forgetfulness:

You will follow them step by step, even if they were to enter a lizard’s hole.

Before him, Moses and Jesus issued similar warnings—that humanity would lose sight of the essence and mistake the outer form of faith for its heart.

Today’s lizard’s hole might be the modern fixation on power, materialism, and control. Faith becomes ideology. Spirituality becomes performance. Revelation becomes a commodity.

But the purpose of revelation—whether framed as salvation or liberation—is to guide humanity beyond illusion into the vastness of the Real.

Islam offers tawḥīd, or unity of consciousness through surrender—breaking the chains of ego. Yet history has fragmented and ossified its form, turning what was meant to awaken the heart into a system of control.

The Qur’an warns against this:

But they divided their religion among them into sects—each faction rejoicing in what it has. (Qur’an 23:53)

Division breeds arrogance and arrogance breeds blindness. The heart that reflects Divine unity becomes fractured, splintered into tribalism and sectarianism—a regression back to the very thing Muhammad came to heal and stop.

The Sufi and Christian Maps of the Heart

Sufi psychology describes the heart in layers, from the outer ṣadr (the chest, where knowledge enters) to the qalb (the spiritual heart), then to the fu’ād (the burning heart), the sirr (the secret)—the innermost sanctuary where the seeker behold the Beloved, where union in the Divine occurs, and then finally the sirr-u-sirr (the secret of Divine presence) the refuge of the innermost sanctuary that is the secret only the Beloved beholds.

Christian mystic St. Teresa of Ávila envisioned the soul as an “Interior Castle” composed of seven mansions—each representing a deeper stage of purification, detachment, and intimacy with God.

Both traditions insist the path is not linear. It’s a spiral, a deepening, a fire, a mirror.

We strive, pray, and discipline the ego in the early stages. But eventually, we must surrender—not just our actions but our identity. What begins as a journey of becoming becomes a surrender into being.

A Personal Reckoning

Between 2019 and 2022, I shattered. I found myself in psychiatric wards—more than once—lost in the intensity of the psyche and complex content about early childhood trauma. My devotion didn’t protect me from despair. But it gave me a language.

My heart, though walled off, had never stopped burning.

“Give back your heart to itself,” wrote Derek Walcott.
“To the stranger who has loved you all your life…”

There it was. My heart. Still here. Waiting to be claimed.

Sufis speak of sharḥ aṣ-ṣadr—the expansion of the chest. Teresa calls it the first awakening. The shift from fear to the suspicion that something more is possible.

Have We not expanded your chest for you and relieved you of the burden that weighed so heavily on your back? (94:1–3)

This is where the journey begins: when the heart dares to ask, what if there's more?

The First Movement: Awakening

The first movement of the soul is rarely dramatic. It’s more like an ache—an awareness that something is missing. St. Teresa’s First Mansion is marked by distraction and the ego’s grip. The person senses God’s presence but remains tangled in worldly attachments. The Sufis call this ghaflah—heedlessness.

At this stage, the ṣadr opens, allowing Divine knowledge to enter—but it’s easily disturbed. It is not an entry from the outside; instead, it is more of recognition. Like Al-Ghazali's warning, the heart’s mirror is cloudy: distorted by compulsive desires, it cannot yet reflect the truth.

For me, this awakening came in my twenties. My father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I realized that my prayers were shallow. The Divine felt distant.

I was distant from my soul. But I knew, somehow, the journey had begun.

The Second Movement: Hesitation

In Teresa’s Second Mansion, the soul begins to wrestle. It hears the Divine call more clearly but hesitates. The pull of old patterns is strong. The Sufis describe this as the realm of nafs al-lawwāmah—the self-reproaching soul.

Awareness is growing, but surrender is not yet possible. The ego is undomesticated.

Spiritually and psychologically, this is the terrain of inner conflict. One moment, you feel grace. The next, you're engulfed by the inner critic. Shame, fear, and survival strategies manifest as self-sabotage.

In therapy, this looks like knowing your pattern—but not being able to change it.

We want to trust—but how?

The Third Movement: Discipline and Danger

By the Third Mansion, the soul has matured. Devotion is consistent. The seeker prays or meditates regularly, fasts, reads and serves. The qalb, or the heart of the seeker, is rooted.

But now comes a subtler danger: spiritual pride or ego. The Sufis call this nafs al-mulhamah—the inspired self. It’s a beautiful stage. The soul seeks good. But the ego isn’t dead; it’s just clever.

It quietly whispers, “You’ve done the work. You’re ahead.”

This is the temptation to confuse discipline with Divine favour. To think your sincerity earns you nearness. But nearness is not earned. It is given.

And sometimes, it is withdrawn—to teach surrender.

“O Allah, do not leave me to myself even for the blink of an eye.”*

The Threshold of Surrender

At the end of the Third Mansion, the heart softens even more. The seeker touches the edge of sirr—the secret heart. Here, striving gives way to silence. Doing gives way to being. And yet—the danger remains.

One might begin to crave mystical experiences, confuse spiritual gifts for progress, or try to hold onto stillness as proof of growth. This is why Teresa and the Sufis insist on humility.

Not performative piety—but radical transparency.

The willingness to admit: I am not in control. And I never was.

The Middle of the Journey: The Fourth Mansion

Teresa calls this the turning point—the place where striving turns into surrender, where the spiritual path moves from doing to being done.

The Sufis describe the heart here as fu’ād—burning. Longing. But not yet annihilated.

It is not willpower that takes the soul further. It is trust. Spiritual pride can still arise. The temptation to “own” stillness. To grasp at grace. But grace is not something you achieve. It’s something you receive.

The heart now begins to soften, and the ego loosens. It starts to trust the silence.

And silence becomes presence.

The full version of this article—here—provides more nuanced points and details, along with the remaining three Mansions.

From Psychological Insight to Mystical Unveiling

Jung called it individuation—the integration of the conscious and unconscious, light and shadow. But the mystics go beyond integration.

They empty.

Where psychology seeks wholeness, mysticism seeks transparency. It does not seek a strong ego but a permeable one—a vessel. Al-Ghazali writes that the qalb is a mirror that reflects Divine light—but only when polished, when ego and illusion are cleared.

St. Teresa warns that spiritual discipline can turn into ego inflation. The soul may feel advanced—but pride is subtle. Even your longing can become a possession.

Sufis call this a veil. And the only way forward is deeper surrender.

Where Jung speaks of wholeness, Teresa and the Sufis speak of integration.

Modern Relevance: Between Control and Trust

We live in a culture of hyper-effort—always doing, fixing, achieving. Even spirituality becomes a performance, and even stillness becomes something to optimize.

But the heart doesn’t open through force. It begins through attention. Through the kind of receptivity and direct perception that mystical philosopher Simone Weil describes as “the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

“Grace fills empty spaces,” she writes, “but it can only enter where there is a void.”

This is the fundamental paradox: only a broken heart can reflect the Real.

Paying attention—to truly hold reality without flinching—is an act of spiritual maturity. It’s what lets grace enter—not because it is shattered but because it is open.

She called it transubstantiation: when desire burns out and becomes stillness. When the ego’s hunger is finally exhausted, and what remains is space.

Weil emphasizes that the heart’s most authentic capacity demands a level of attention so precise and subtle that, eventually, one’s consciousness becomes a prayer.

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Imagine your whole being—your presence—becoming a prayer to the Divine.

Al-Būnī and the Esoteric Chambers of the Heart

No one maps this interior terrain more precisely than Aḥmad al-Būnī, the 13th-century master of esoteric Islamic sciences.

He teaches that the heart has three chambers:

1. The First Chamber |‘Ilm | Knowledge
   Here, lives form and sacred law, the outer world of actions, words, and rituals. Divine names touch the heart, but the knowing is conceptual.

2. The Second Chamber | Khayāl | Imaginal Perception
   This is the realm of dreams, symbols, and intuition. The heart sees through reality, discerning the unity beneath duality.

   Here burns longing, beauty, archetype, and depth.

3. The Third Chamber | Baṣīrah | Truth-Seeking Eye
   The heart’s eye opens. Perception becomes witnessing (mushāhadah).

   Duality falls away. There is no interpretation—only seeing.

This isn’t a theory. It’s ontology. The seeker does not “understand” God.

They become a mirror through which God sees.

The Heart Across Traditions

The concept of the heart as the seat of perception and unveiling resonates across spiritual traditions:

• Bhagavad Gita — In the Hindu scriptures, Krishna speaks to Arjuna’s heart, urging him to transcend fear and confusion by aligning with his truth. The battlefield is not only external—it is internal.

• The Gita (15.15) states: "I am seated in everyone’s heart, and from Me come remembrance, knowledge and forgetfulness." The heart, therefore, represents the core of being where the Divine resides, calling us toward inner harmony.

• Buddhist teachings — In Buddhist psychology, the heart-mind (citta) is central to spiritual awakening. The "jewel in the lotus" (Om Mani Padme Hum) symbolizes how compassion arises when the mind's clarity rests within the heart's tenderness.

• Jack Kornfield reflects on this dynamic: “The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it.” The heart holds emotional depth and wisdom—liberation comes when both are balanced.

• Jewish mysticism — The heart (lev) is where Divine commandments are inscribed—a covenant between the human soul and the Divine. Solomon wisely asks for "an understanding heart" (Binat HaLev) to judge the people by distinguishing between good and evil, innocent and guilty—discernment.

• In Jewish tradition, the heart is the seat of wisdom and the vessel of emotion. A midrash lists over 60 emotions of the heart: "The heart sees, hears, speaks, falls, stands, rejoices, weeps, comforts, sorrows..." (Ecclesiastes Rabbah 1:16). The heart, then, is the center of both moral discernment and emotional depth—a place where Divine wisdom and human vulnerability meet.

The heart is more than an emotional center. It is where wisdom and compassion fuse. Proper heart alignment is not just emotional or intellectual—it is spiritual, centred on the core of being.

If each of these sacred traditions—so rich in language for the heart—calls us toward mercy, stillness, and truth…

If the Gita, the Gospel, the Quran, the Torah, and the Dhammapada all point to a deeper intelligence woven into the heart…

Then why, in God’s name, do our differences still blind us?

Why do we weaponize the very truths meant to heal and librate us?

Why do we defend God with violence, instead of compassion?

Why do we leave behind the heart—when every tradition placed it at the center?

The Way Forward

If you’re reading this, you’ve already entered the castle. That in itself is grace.

Wherever you are—distracted, hesitant, disciplined, or quietly burning—your heart is already on the path. The maps are here. The mystics have always known the terrain. Not a cognitive knowing. An embodied one.

The question is not if the heart can awaken. It’s whether we will allow you or me.

But what comes next?

• The death or dissolution of the ego (fanā’).

• The quiet union with the Divine (baqā’).

• The sirr—the secret chamber—where God is no longer “other.”

• The return to the world is not as a seeker but as a vessel.

This condensed reflection ended at the Fourth Mansion—the spiritual midpoint where striving begins to yield to grace. The full version continues beyond this threshold.

As some of you requested, I am also working on turning all my reflections into audio.

If you're called to continue this journey into the burning, secret, truth-seeking heart, please head to my website and sign up for my newsletter—

👉 Read the full article here: www.integrativepractice.ca/the-salikah-alchemist

Beware of unearned wisdom.

— C. Jung, Letter to V.W.

The danger is that people become the victims of these psychic forces, falling under their spell and mistaking them for personal decisions or individual convictions.

— C. Jung, Man & His Symbols

Possession by an archetype turns a man into a mere automaton. He is no longer a conscious individual but a personification of the unconscious.

— C. Jung, Archetypes & the Collective Unconscious

If you have a sound intellect, a lofty aspiration, a firm character, and a strong heart, and you are well-versed in knowledge, then go ahead. Otherwise, beware of summoning them, for you will harm yourself. For they are great kings. And beware of looking at them, for it will bare all in your heart.

— Al-Buni, Shams Al-Ma’arif

Imagination is like the image that a human sees in the mirror.

— Ibn Arabi, Futuhat Al-Makkiyah

The sincere heart

serves as a mirror;

Mysteries are directly observed

through it.

— Hakim Sana’i, Diwan

DISCLAIMER:

This article is for informational and educational purposes only. It reflects personal insights and is not intended as medical, psychological, or legal advice. The use of psychedelics carries risks and may not be suitable for everyone. If you choose to explore these substances or related practices, please do so responsibly, with proper support, and follow the laws of your region.

I felt a sense of urgency to write this journal article, and it may not be the only time for three key reasons. First, I have often been approached with questions about DMT entities, jinn, and black magic. Second, while valuable, observing and partaking in discussions on these subjects in my immediate circles and across the collective—particularly on social media—often leaves much to be desired.

Third, I aim to offer an angle on alternative therapeutic modalities rooted in Islamic cosmology and cross-cultural spiritualities—a perspective much needed in mental health. (If you are interested in this part of the conversation, read my article Healing the Soul (1): Islamic Psychology and Transpersonal Therapy for Mental Wellness.)

A great deal of mystery and confusion continue to shroud these topics.

DMT, or dimethyltryptamine, is a naturally occurring psychoactive compound in certain plants and animals. It is the primary active ingredient in traditional brews like the Amazonian plant medicine ayahuasca, but surprisingly, it is not found in psilocybin (or what is known as magic mushrooms).

In ayahuasca, it is more commonly associated with vivid, otherworldly, cosmic-type visions and autonomous entities. While psilocybin in mushrooms typically fosters introspective and emotionally grounded experiences—though at higher doses, mushrooms can also evoke encounters with entities.

Despite its elusive nature, consciousness can be explored by anyone through meditation, breathwork, fasting, psychedelics, and so much more. Some of these tools are parts of sacred rituals in some contexts; in others, they are parts of interesting fads!

A pressing question arises: "Just because these consciousness tools are accessible to anyone, are they truly for everyone?" 

This question cuts to the core of the ethical, spiritual, and psychological complexities surrounding psychedelics and anything that may alter our states of consciousness. For some people, breathing exercises or even fasting can be very intense.

This caution upholds the profound potential for healing, sense-making, and transformation these tools offer. Readiness, intention, and discernment remain crucial because of those reasons.

Since 2019, I have been co-facilitating psychedelic integration groups, witnessing firsthand a need for proper harm reduction models that include frameworks that not only prepare but also assist individuals in making meaning of insights and complex revelations received from what may be defined as extraordinary states of consciousness.

An adept traveller of any spiritual path who becomes a healer, particularly one that includes shamanic aspects, usually learns and trains for years under an authentic teacher who belongs to a lineage ensuring necessary safety, vigilance, and humility.

Only some become healers, while most people seek liberation from their suffering. Choose your path wisely, find community, and avoid ego idolatry or spiritual materialism.

There is a fine line between evolving your soul and navel-gazing. One opens you to the expansiveness of love, both human and Divine, and the other is contractive and enslaves you to the machine or, worse, other people’s opinions!

Your soul is not a self-development project!

Introduction

Humanity has always sought to understand the unseen. In this pursuit, extremes often emerge: fear, outright dismissal, or fascination that borders on deification. Religious traditions frequently warn against engaging with entities or delving into the occult, portraying these forces as deceptive or dangerous.

Conversely, New Age movements often romanticize such encounters, treating them as experiences worthy of unquestioned reverence—an approach that can inadvertently lead to ego inflation and manipulation.

Scientific explanations, on the other hand, reduce these phenomena into mere hallucinations or psychological projections, which may offer relief to some but provoke debilitating anxiety in others, all while neglecting their potential to foster healing and deeper meaning.

The truth lies in neither extreme(s) but a balanced, nuanced approach. After all, it is wise to remain rooted in the world of the seen and ground oneself in the tangible—unless you are one of those individuals for whom the path has chosen you.

Despite my best efforts to avoid or minimize this aspect of human existence in my personal life, I am writing an article on a topic I never thought I would: jinn!

As such, I explore the enigmatic worlds of DMT entities and jinn, drawing on insights from psychology, magic, and mysticism to offer a holistic understanding of these phenomena.

Many wonder whether encounters with DMT entities, shadowy figures, or unsettling archetypal dreams are projections, interactions with external forces, or something more profound. 

These inquiries reflect a broader cultural tension: mainstream perspectives often frame such phenomena as superstition or external threats to be dispelled by some ritual or incense burning.

While energetic shielding is essential, some are even ancient. They can sometimes obscure subtle psychological vulnerabilities that require psychotherapy. This imbalance often leaves individuals disempowered and trapped in fear or avoidance.

My fascination with the unseen stems from a childhood filled with vivid dreams that reached beyond the personal into the collective unconsciousness. At one point, seeing apocalyptic-type dreams was part of my regular night routine!

As a young adult in my late teens, however, I managed to shut down parts of my inner self to reduce the intensity of my dreams and otherworldly encounters, dismissing them as the mere whimsy of a child with both a wild imagination and severe trauma. 

It worked until I experienced my first of many ego-dissolutive experiences in the Amazon. With years of research, education, and seeking exploratory healing, I aim to offer a thoughtful and accessible lens for understanding the interplay between the light (seen) and the shadow (unseen).

My reflections are an invitation to engage with the mysteries. Language cannot fully capture the liminal worlds, subtle planes, and the numinous. As you read on, I hope you get a taste of the deeper truths these realms may offer.

Machine Elves

Alex Grey’s “Machine Elves” piece depicts inter-dimensional beings often encountered in DMT space. They seemingly represent manifestations of cosmic consciousness that challenge our concept of reality by creating time warps.

Jinn & DMT Entities

In Islamic cosmology, jinn are part of the natural order of creation and are described as beings created from smokeless (mārijin 15:27) or scorching (samūm 55:15) fire. They inhabit a hidden dimension paralleling the human world. The root word of (جن) jinn is (ج ن ن) j-n-n, which means ‘to hide’ or ‘to conceal,’ emphasizing their invisible nature. It could also imply their capacity to veil or warp reality.

Jinn are described as free-willed beings, much like humans, with roles depending on their state of being. They can be malefic or mischievous, contributing to black magic and binding rituals, but they are also known to be benevolent and spiritually advanced. They often assist in breaking the effects of black magic and aiding in healing rituals.

Exoteric-leaning, more orthodox Islamic scholars unequivocally warn against engaging with jinn.

Sufi masters, such as Ibn Arabi, have written about them, acknowledging their existence and interactions with humans. In his Meccan Revelations, Ibn Arabi situates their rank in the hierarchy of creation as between humans and angels.

However, their nature of fire and air makes them proud, disobedient and intellectually unstable in the face of the strength, humility and intelligence of the human being’s nature, which consists of water and earth. Perhaps the question of whether the genie is superior or inferior to man is less relevant than the principle that all created beings represent a form of manifestation which must be internalized by man on his path to spiritual realization.

The Book of Jinn

The illustration depicts humanoid-type animal-like spirits, somewhat echoing certain DMT entities.

The Book of Jinn was initially published in 1282 by polymath scholar Al-Qazwini, a physician, geographer, and mystic.

DMT users often report encounters with entities—jesters, machine elves, humanoids, insectoids, or tricksters—that mirror the unpredictability and liminality of jinn. Both provoke profound emotional responses, challenge perception and sometimes offer insights or caution.

While jinn are deeply tied to a cosmological framework, DMT entities are often interpreted as projections of the unconscious or beings from inter-dimensional realms.

This table compares jinn and DMT entities, highlighting shared traits that reflect universal archetypal characteristics such as rebellion, malevolence, and neutrality. While thought-provoking, the table simplifies complex traditions, emphasizing thematic overlaps rather than equivalence.

Nonetheless, this sparks compelling questions about whether entity encounters reflect archetypal patterns, cultural conditioning, a shared metaphysical reality, or all of the above!

Roadmaps to Reality

Shawn Thornton, an artist influenced by a tumour in his pineal gland that evoked vivid, mystical visions that resonate with psychedelic imagery, wildly as the pineal gland is speculated to produce DMT.

Amazonian Encounters

My experience at an ayahuasca retreat in the Amazon in the summer of 2018 makes it hard to dismiss specific visions as mere projections. The machine elves’ maze I witnessed brought me down to my knees. The nature of reality collapsed, or realities! The only way out was utter surrender of any rationality. Only then was I given respite from the chaos, ushered into clarity, unity consciousness, and ego dissolution.

After that, dear reader, I must pause as language falters in capturing the depth of what I felt and sensed. Some experiences defy articulation. Of course, I also have to keep the juicier parts for the book I am currently writing!

Nonetheless, the sense of "I" -ness within my awareness was overshadowed by profound awe and reverential majesty. As reflected in the table below, both mystics and psychologists have endeavoured to articulate the qualities of what we perceive as mystical or religious experiences.

Despite my ego’s rumbling, and after much toil, I could access an inner state of silence—a profound stillness accompanied by the feeling that everything would be all right, reminding me of Julian of Norwich’s ecstatic utterances and visions that arose due to severe physical illness in Revelations of Divine Love, as she grappled,

...with the concept of sin and suffering; Jesus appeared to her and said, “Sin is behovely, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Campana Ayahuascana 

The Peruvian artist Pablo Amaringo, who also trained as an ayahuasquero, saw the flying saucers in his painting as spiritual entities visiting from other dimensions rather than UFOs despite their vast resemblance. This emphasizes the importance of considering the cultural lens.

When I felt that “all shall be well,” I began comprehending the essence of innate, basic goodness: a state of fitrah, the primordial, Buddha-like nature inherent in us. Many traditions allude to this universal truth, including certain denominations within Christianity(*).

What happens when extreme pain gets in the way of our life? Of love? Can trauma warp our inherent nature?

Panic Attacks

One of the visions that continue to haunt me involved a figure—Pan or the devil(ish), i.e. jinn, or perhaps something else entirely—emerging from the shadows, goat-hooved and grinning. Its wild, chaotic energy felt familiar and deeply unsettling, as if it held a mirror to something I didn’t want to see. It pointed toward things I held dearly at the time.

"Is this what you cling to?" it seemed to ask, though its mouth never moved. Its laughter wasn’t cruel but sharp, cutting through my defences and showing me how scared I was.

Pan, an archetypal figure from the collective unconscious, specifically Greek mythology, embodies primal chaos, creativity, and permeable boundaries.

It wasn’t lost on me that I, too, was a goat. Born in the Capricorn season, represented by the mythical sea goat, always striving for structure, discipline, and a steady climb upward.

Little did I know that one day, in the jungle, I would have to reckon with suppressed, untamed, and chaotic parts of myself. Pan challenged primal fears that have lingered since childhood by evoking the very panic states I tried hard to escape by dwelling in depression for years.

My psyche swung violently between the mocking figure and the writhing snake that I had noticed since the beginning of the journey. The serpent, also known as the spirit of the plant medicine ayahuasca, was the remover and cleanser, helping me shed layers of what no longer served me.

“You think you got this figured out, child?” 

When I returned home to the snow of Toronto from the sticky humidity of the Amazon, a friend lent me a book titled “Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences” by William Richards. Finally, I could put some of what I experienced in words that befit my Western-trained mind. A light bulb illumined somewhere in my brain when I came across the lines below,

A fascinating discovery in speaking with mystics from different world religions is how secure they appear in their certainty of the reality of a sacred dimension of consciousness and how little they care about what words one may choose to describe it. If you like the word “God,” that’s fine; if you prefer “Yahweh,” “Jehovah,” “The Christ Consciousness,” “Allah,” “Brahman,” “The Great Spirit,” or simply “The Higher Power,” that’s also OK. If you would rather verbalize the ultimate reality as “The Void,” “Nothingness,” “Nondual Awareness,” “The Pure Land,” or “Celestial Buddha Fields,” even that is acceptable. 

The passage poignantly encapsulates what it truly means to be a mystic, a person comfortable with paradoxes.

Subscribe now

What is an authentic mystical experience?

Consider the "Good Friday Experiment" conducted in 1962 by Walter Pahnke, the same researcher who developed the questionnaire to measure mystical experiences. In this study, seminary students were given psilocybin during a Good Friday church service to investigate whether psychedelics could induce authentic mystical states.

The results were remarkable: Many participants reported profound spiritual moments that mirrored classical accounts of mysticism—feelings of unity, ineffable joy, and a transcendence of time and space. Decades later, follow-up studies revealed that these participants continued to view the experience as one of the most meaningful events of their lives.

Scientists who rely solely on the quantifiable often dismiss mystical experiences as chemical reactions in the brain. Traditional skeptics may write them off as demonic or egoic. Transpersonal psychologists measure them!

Does the label matter? Yes and no. The essence of such experiences often surpasses the categories we impose on them. They only become dangerous when they cause genuine harm to the soul, fracturing rather than uniting the person.

For example, someone who experiences an intense vision of unity might misinterpret it as a mandate to isolate themselves from others, believing they have transcended the mundane world entirely. This disconnection can lead to alienation, delusions of grandeur, or even psychosis, severing the person from both themselves and their community.

It is no wonder that the master-disciple relationship has been emphasized since time immemorial. It is a necessary container for spiritual seekers who experience intense visionary states.

Archetypal Psychology and Trauma

Trauma is more than a psychological wound; it is a disruption in the soul's natural flow. Archetypal psychology, pioneered by James Hillman, offers a profound trauma framework by shifting focus from the personal to the universal. It situates human pain within the larger patterns of myth and image that shape existence.

James Hillman || Archetypal Psychotherapy & the Soulless Society (2010)

Archetypes—universal patterns and energies embedded in the collective unconscious—are at the heart of archetypal psychology. Trauma activates these archetypes, pulling us into a realm where everyday logic falters, and deeper, symbolic truths emerge.

For instance, Carl Jung's archetype of the Shadow Self embodies the rejected, feared, and unseen aspects of ourselves. This confrontation can feel chaotic, even evil, as if forces beyond our control are at work. You can read more about shadow work in another journal, Shadow Work: When Your Unlived Life Looms.

The Jester and the Trickster archetypes are not entirely separate but are overlapping expressions of energy that challenge norms and disrupt structures. The Jester leans toward humour, playfulness, and a lighthearted approach to subversion.

The Trickster is more chaotic, boundary-breaking, and destabilizing, frequently acting without regard for consequences. Both are agents of chaos and transformation that push individuals or systems to confront deeper truths.

The trickster and Satan are interconnected as figures that challenge norms and provoke transformation, embodying the shadow aspects of the psyche. 

Dr. Robert Moore's lecture, "The Trickster Archetype: Potential and Pathology, explores this relationship. " In it, he discusses how the trickster's disruptive qualities mirror Satan's adversarial role in psychological development.

Dr. Robert Moore || The Trickster Archetype: Potential and Pathology (1989)

Trauma is not merely a rupture but a sacred dialogue with the unconscious. Within the depths of our suffering lies the healing potential. Entire societies carry the weight of historical and systemic trauma, which often amplifies archetypal forces—just turn on your TV or look at your phone screen!

Magic and Alchemy

The discussion on jinn and DMT entities would be incomplete without discussing their third accomplice: black magic. A topic that requires a separate journal entry.

I am still determining, however, if I want to engage with this topic again!

Exoteric magic refers to outward, accessible practices grounded in cultural traditions, visible rituals, and tools for tangible outcomes like protection or healing. In contrast, esoteric magic delves into hidden, mystical practices requiring initiation and more profound knowledge, focusing on spiritual realization and cosmic alignment.

While exoteric magic can be community-oriented and symbolic, esoteric magic is more inward and metaphysical. Despite these distinctions, they often overlap.

Alchemy, considered primarily esoteric, often involves deeply symbolic, spiritual, and philosophical practices aimed at inner transformation.

Its metaphor of turning lead into gold represents the transmutation of the soul toward Divine alignment.

Exoteric alchemy exists in its practical application as early chemistry, focusing on material experimentation.

Historically, fear around the impact of such practices fuelled the witch trials, where individuals—often women—were persecuted. This period of human history may reflect society's mistrust of the unseen, even though the persecutions were rarely just about magic; they were often entangled with broader issues, including politics, social control, and the subjugation of marginalized communities.

No matter which way you look at it, psycho-spiritual manipulation of any soul is not only ethically problematic but fundamentally unacceptable, if not demonic.

Narcissistic abuse and casting a spell may feel strikingly similar—after all, verbal abuse relies on words, and to wield words, one must first "spell" them correctly.

This dynamic mirrors themes in the triad of dark psychology, particularly psychopathy, where manipulation and control dominate interactions. Similarly, lower forms of magic can exploit vulnerabilities for personal gain. One is rooted in psychological constructs, while exploitative magic operates within symbolic and spiritual frameworks.

Again, turn on your T.V. or look at your phone screen! (*)

When approached with discipline and integrity, this knowledge is framed as the path of the sage or the Gnostic—seeking a direct, transformative understanding of the Divine rather than mere manipulation of forces.

Misusing Sacred Knowledge

Ahmad al-Buni, quoted at the beginning of this article, lived during the 12th and 13th centuries, though exact dates are unclear. He is generally believed to have died around 1225 CE. His most famous work, Shams al-Ma'arif al-Kubra (The Great Sun of Knowledge), is a foundational text in Arabic esotericism.

He wrote extensively about the powerful interplay between the Divine Names, celestial forces, and jinn. Al-Buni emphasized the potential for his book to heal or harm, depending on the practitioner’s inner state of being.

The comparative table above briefly summarizes esoteric traditions across cultures, epochs, and examples of potential misuse.

Unfortunately, Al-Buni’s work is misunderstood by some Muslim internet evangelists, often described as a book of black magic spells, and some refer to the author as an apostate, not even a heretic. The book does contain specific talismanic formulas and amulets that are best left alone, but it is not for the non-initiate.

Still, no practice in the book goes without invoking some Divine name known to any average Muslim. One of the names Al-Buni calls upon a lot is,

Oh, Eternal One! Oh, Infinite. Oh, Allah!

Beseeching the Creator of creation while recommending intensive spiritual preparation, fasting, and moral discipline. He even uses Quranic verses after ritual cleansing and incense burning.

Regardless, Shams al-Ma’arif is not a bedtime reading. Some of the information the author disseminates is very potent and, under the wrong hands, can cause proper damage. I exaggerate, not!

It’s no different from someone recklessly diving into a psychedelic experience without preparation or respect, only to emerge scarred rather than healed.

Unsurprisingly, his work faced censorship throughout Islamic history, much like other figures associated with the Arabic Hermetic tradition, such as Jabir ibn Hayyan (c. 721–815) and Al-Kindi (c. 801–873).

Jabir ibn Hayyan

• Often called the "Father of Chemistry," Jabir focused on spiritual and material alchemy, emphasizing the transmutation of elements and the purification of the soul.

• His work reflects the Hermetic principles, such as the correspondence between the macrocosm (universe) and the microcosm (individual).

• Many debates were led about the authenticity and legitimacy of Jabir’s work in Islamic orthodox circles.

Al-Kindi

• A philosopher and scientist, Al-Kindi bridged Greek Hermetic texts and Islamic intellectual traditions.

• His work on celestial influences also reflects Hermetic themes, particularly the idea that the heavens shape earthly affairs (as above, so below).

• Al-Kindi faced political opposition and intellectual rivalry. Historical accounts suggest that during the rule of the Abbasid caliph Al-Mutawakkil, Al-Kindi’s library was confiscated, and he was briefly marginalized due to his association with philosophical ideas that were viewed as contentious.

I do not believe in censorship, but some topics demand gravitas. Ideas that carry profound complexity require careful handling to prevent harm or misunderstanding. Not to gate-keep but to honour the responsibility of the power of free thought.

Are You Over Forty Years Old?

Traditionally, Kabbalah was reserved for those over forty, reflecting the belief that spiritual maturity, life experience, and discipline were essential prerequisites.

Without discernment, power can lead to imbalance—a recurring caution across esoteric traditions.

These teachings align with Kabbalah’s insistence on humility and purity of intention. Accessing the unseen world should be done with reverence and readiness, as misuse could lead to spiritual corruption.

Similarly, in Buddhist Vajrayana, there is a warning against unprepared engagement with advanced practices.

The Demiurge & Gnosticism

Ignorance of Divine Reality:

In Gnosticism (a Christian tradition that focuses on inner-knowing, gnosis, that leads to enlightenment), the Demiurge, an archetypal representation of evil, mistakenly believes itself to be the supreme being, demonstrating arrogance and spiritual blindness.

Creation Without Wisdom:

The material world, crafted by the Demiurge, is seen as flawed and incomplete—a reflection of the Demiurge’s ignorance and distortion rather than enlightenment.

Trapping the Divine Spark:

The Demiurge imprisons the divine spark within human souls in the material world, perpetuating suffering. Similarly, misuse of sacred knowledge can entangle individuals in ego-driven pursuits, preventing them from realizing true liberation.

Dark Shamanism

In Psychology and Religion at the Millennium and Beyond, a collection of essays edited by J. Marvin Spiegelman, the concept of dark shamanism or assault sorcery is discussed through the story of Mary, who was raised Jewish, a California-based Jungian analyst whose journey reveals the psychological perils of engaging with ego-driven healers.

The analyst sought guidance from a practitioner who claimed to offer profound spiritual insight. Over time, however, Mary realized the arrogance underlying her personal choices.

According to Mary’s narration of her story, her abandonment of belief in God had left her vulnerable. She relied instead on a healer who lacked humility and exploited her trust.

Rather than providing true insight and medicine, the so-called shamanic practitioner vampirically tried to snuff out Mary’s life force. She recognized almost too late that she was drained emotionally and spiritually and that for most of her life, she was dealing with a sorcerer.

Is it not the purpose of a dark incantation to make someone fall under a spell, under the bind of illusion—an awareness that can easily remain outside the radar of the modern human psyche?

The news hit her hard when she discovered that other shamans did not want to work with this person she trusted. For years, Mary was kept sick and surrounded by inexplicable adverse events. She could not understand why she had not seen that before.

All was revealed, incidentally, by another Jewish clairvoyant, Mary adds, who helped her come back from the brink of death!

For the modern human, living in a world dominated by materialism and fragmented attention, this awareness of manipulative forces—psychological, spiritual, or archetypal—is often dulled.

The spell works because it plays on archetypal energies, those primal forces that dwell in the collective unconscious—a realm many may not know but is certainly felt. It manipulates fear, desire, and shadow aspects that remain unresolved or unacknowledged.

Among peoples of the Northwest Amazon, a person is not born with the powers of a sorcerer; rather, a person acquires knowledge about poisons and poisoning informally from other, more experienced sorcerers. Any person can use sorcery to take vengeance against an enemy. STILL, the true “poison-keeper,” as they are called, is one who has committed sorcery repeatedly until his or her only thoughts are to kill.

The main takeaway is that sorcerers not only summon evil forces but actively strip away their humanity to become an enemy spirit that is constantly adversarial.

To overcome anything that lurks in the dark, one must cultivate embodied awareness—not just intellectual understanding that can discern illusion from reality.

Without awareness, the psyche remains vulnerable to the pull of a labyrinth of its own making.

Context matters; practices one person deems dark or black may have been vital in a different epoch or are still needed in a different place.

Like war magic: the battle trance of ecstatic warriors!

The Dangers of Human Ego

A well-known Sufi teacher and master, Habib Umar Bin Hafiz, who is from a traditional lineage from the valley of Hadramawt, Yemen, once said in a public lecture, “The ego is worse than 70,000 demons.”

While seemingly hyperbolic, it highlights the dangers of an unchecked ego, which tends to be insatiable in its hunger and delusional in its attempt to control.

I said, "Show me the ladder, that I may climb up to heaven." 

He said, "Your head is the ladder. bring your head down under your feet.”

―Rumi

Pop psychology tends to focus on the ego in its inflated state, namely narcissism, but the ego in its deflated status is as problematic, if not more, not that it is race! Any individual thinking small or lowly of themselves can be as hurtful as someone who thinks highly of themselves since both represent relational disconnection.

Jesse Stewart is a Toronto-based writer on ancient esoteric traditions, especially ancient Egypt. Many traditions speak about transcending the ego to experience Unity consciousness, but he reminds us that this is often misread as entirely dissolving the ego. You can check Stewart’s YouTube series on the role of the ego and its diseases.

Yes, moments of ego annihilation can offer profound insight. Still, the real work lies in refining the ego—transforming it from self-serving to aligned with higher values, or what is known as tazkiyah in Sufism.

The essence of inner work is to know who you are in the present moment.

Internal Family Systems Therapy: Parts or Entities?

The Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy model offers a profound way to explore our inner landscapes. It reveals how our psyche consists of 'parts'—sub-personalities carrying memories, emotions, and burdens. Trauma, however, can fracture this delicate system.

For those who dissociate to survive overwhelming pain, the boundaries between internal and external often blur. Dissociation leaves the psyche porous, opening a gateway for what Robert Falconer, in his book The Others Within Us, refers to as "unattached burdens"—energies or entities that seem to exist outside the self but interact with it in deeply personal ways.

This porosity, born of trauma, creates a unique vulnerability. Survivors may unknowingly become vessels for symbolic, archetypal, or actual forces that challenge the conventional limits of psychology and science.

Falconer integrates principles of compassion and understanding into his approach to working with entities, whether they are understood as metaphysical beings or psychological parts. He emphasizes a non-violent, dialogic method that contrasts with traditional exorcisms, which often rely on fear and confrontation. His perspective advocates fostering healing through engagement and integration rather than perpetuating harm or division.

In his book How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion, David DeSteno warns of the consequences of neglecting these realms:

If we refuse to take these spiritual technologies seriously as a source of ideas and inspiration to study, we slow the progress of science itself and limit its potential to benefit humanity. 

Conclusion: Once You See, You Cannot Unsee

Throughout history, the idea of unseen forces—described as jinn, spirits, or any unseen entities—has transcended religious, mystical, and cultural boundaries. These phenomena reflect our shared human experience of encountering the ineffable.

While these forces are framed differently across traditions, they converge in their ability to challenge, transform, and deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Possession, when a spirit takes control over a human body, remains one of the most common human experiences of the unseen. It serves as a powerful metaphor for these encounters. In the Islamic tradition, possession is often viewed as a test of faith. Exorcism (ruqyah) invokes Quranic verses to expel jinn.

Buddhism focuses on chanting and meditation to expel negative energies. Christianity and Judaism use prayers and rituals, such as the Lord’s Prayer or Psalms, to confront demons. Hinduism uses mantras and fire rituals for purification.

In his magnum opus, Carl Jung interprets possession states as the ego's confrontation with the unconscious. In an archetypal possession, shadow forces take hold of the psyche in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious,

Possession, though old-fashioned, has by no means become obsolete; only the name has changed. Formerly, they spoke of evil spirits; now, we call them complexes.

These forces—whether shadow aspects of the self, repressed desires, or archetypal energies—can "possess" the ego, disrupting behaviour, thoughts, or emotions until they are integrated into consciousness.

The goal of therapy in these instances is to reclaim balance by making the unconscious conscious, fostering integration and self-awareness.

I highly recommend reading Jung’s warning—to the world—about unwise meddling with archetypal forces (read here).

Finally, I cannot claim a neat conclusion to these themes; the realm of the unseen resists tidy resolutions. I want to explore and branch out into certain branches of this topic, uncommonly possession, black magic, and the healing process from different traditions, including psychology.

Since childhood, my lineage, studies, and personal encounters have shaped this world. Avoiding it was never an option, and perhaps that is why I feel compelled to raise awareness about its complexity—particularly now, during the so-called third wave of the psychedelic renaissance, when discernment is critical.

In Jules Evans's interviews, Jinns, Trips, and Spiritual Psychosis, featuring two Canadians of Yemeni and Muslim heritage, the first story unfolds as a tragic heartbreak. It highlights the grave risks when extraordinary states of consciousness are mismanaged—risks to both sanity and life. Not everyone has the support systems or resources to recover from such an acute manifestation of ego disintegration.

The unseen demands reverence, not fear, and discernment, not recklessness. Authentic engagement with these forces is not about seeking control but balance—walking a middle path, honouring our existence and its mysteries. The soul finds wholeness through this balance and aligns with more extraordinary truths.

Thanks for reading! If you have any comments, questions, or corrections, please email info@integrativepractice.ca.

I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world.

I may not complete this last one

but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.

I've been circling for thousands of years

and I still don't know: am I a falcon,

a storm, or a great song?

—Rainer Maria Rilke

So many garish lamps in the dying brain’s lamp-show,

Forget about them.

Concentrate on the essence, concentrate on the Light.

In lucid bliss, calmly smoking off its own holy fire,

The Light streams towards you from all things,

All people, all possible permutations of good, evil, thought, passion.

The lamps are different,

but the Light is the same.

One matter, one energy, one Light, one Light-mind,

Endlessly emanating all things.

One turning and burning diamond,

One, one, one.

Ground yourself, strip yourself down,

To blind loving silence.

Stay there, until you see

You are gazing at the Light

With its own ageless eyes.

—Maulana Jalaludin Rumi

The ego person in us cannot transform itself by its own force or will or knowledge or by any virtue of its own into the nature of the Divine; all it can do is to fit itself for the transformation and make more and more its surrender to that which it seeks to become.

—Sri Aurobindo

INTRODUCTION

Mental health is soul health. It is about connection, community, creativity, and meaning, and yes, it is about spirituality, love, care, and safety. Despite capitalist-minded attempts, these can never become commodities. The soul cannot be bought and sold, although some may argue otherwise, usually the same ones running our world.

After nine months of intense study, I completed a postgraduate diploma in Islamic Psychology at Cambridge, UK, in the summer of 2024. When I mention these two words, Islamic Psychology (I.P.), side by side, they sometimes provoke confusion: How could religion or spirituality mingle with psychology?

Yet the question itself reveals something about modern psychology and the way it has gradually distanced itself from metaphysics, spirituality, and even the language of the soul.

Islamic Psychology emerges from a very different intellectual and spiritual landscape. Like other contemplative and religious traditions, it takes the inner life of the human being seriously: our impulses, wounds, desires, contradictions, capacities for transformation, and relationship to the Divine. Within the Islamic tradition, the human being cannot be adequately understood through the mind or psyche alone, but through an integrated understanding of the nafs, heart, Spirit, body, intellect, and their relationship to God.

The human being is therefore not a static psychological object but a being continually undergoing refinement, remembrance, struggle, and transformation.

Institutional religion, of course, has also left deep wounds in the collective psyche. Religious structures can become constrictive, divisive, abusive, and spiritually deadening. But the failures of religious institutions do not erase the profound psychological, philosophical, and contemplative knowledge preserved within religious traditions.

Mainstream psychology, particularly within its cognitive and behavioural branches, can still recoil at words such as soul or Spirit. As I discussed in a previous piece on psychosis and spiritual awakening, The Nature of Madness, the word psyche itself derives from the Greek psykhē (ψυχή), a term historically associated with “soul,” “spirit,” and “mind.” Over time, psychology increasingly came to refer to the study of the mind and behaviour, while questions once belonging to philosophy, religion, and metaphysics were pushed toward the margins.

This is not an argument for abandoning medicine, psychiatry, diagnosis, or evidence-based care. It is an argument for decentering them. No single field of knowledge should have a monopoly on people’s destinies, least of all psychiatry.

Suffice it to say that recent research has seriously challenged one of modern psychiatry’s most familiar explanations for depression: the “chemical imbalance” theory. A major systematic umbrella review published in Molecular Psychiatry found no consistent evidence that depression is caused by lowered serotonin levels or activity in the brain.

This does not mean that antidepressants never help, nor that psychiatric medication has no place in treatment. It does, however, complicate the longstanding narrative that such medications correct an underlying chemical deficiency and raises important questions about how confidently biological explanations of human suffering have sometimes been presented.

The medical model has offered indispensable forms of treatment and understanding, particularly in states of severe psychological distress. But no single framework can contain the full complexity of human suffering. Decentering modern psychology allows other psychological, philosophical, spiritual, and non-Western traditions to enter the conversation as equals, rather than as comparative detours from a presumed Western norm.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) can be useful as a system of classification and communication. Problems arise, however, when diagnosis moves from describing an experience to defining the person who is experiencing it. Within a broader biomedical culture, complex human suffering can easily become reduced to symptoms, disorders, and treatment protocols.

Diagnosis and trauma becoming central to one’s identity is therefore worth examining.

I include myself in this reflection. I received different mental health diagnoses, and while they informed my journey and at times helped make sense of what I was experiencing, I refuse to let them define me. Healing, I have learned, involves an ongoing movement toward self-understanding and acceptance while recognizing that diagnosis may be part of our story without becoming the entirety of who we are.

We are far more interesting than our clinical labels.

ISLAMIC PSYCHOLOGY & TRANSPERSONAL THERAPY

Islamic Psychology can benefit anyone, not just Muslims, because, after all, it offers a map of the human soul, one drawn according to different cartographical conventions.

Like other spiritual psychologies, Islamic Psychology offers ways of exploring suffering, meaning, character, relationship, and transformation. It draws from revelation, hadith, and a deeply rooted intellectual tradition encompassing Islamic philosophy, theology, medicine, ethics, and Sufism.

I write more about this intellectual history in Beyond the Self in Islamic Philosophy. Islamic philosophy did not develop in an intellectual vacuum. Muslim thinkers engaged extensively with Greek philosophy and medicine, while the broader intellectual world of Muslim civilization also encountered Persian, Indian, and other bodies of knowledge. These ideas were translated, debated, challenged, transformed, and situated within an Islamic metaphysical and ethical worldview.

Islamic Psychology does not need to function as a form of proselytization in the therapy room. Its insights into the human being can inform therapeutic work without requiring the client to adopt Islamic language or belief. Mentors in the field have advised practitioners to be thoughtful about when, or whether, the term “Islamic Psychology” itself is useful with clients. The task is not to impose a worldview but to draw creatively and ethically from a rich psychology of the human being while helping people navigate complex modern predicaments.

Transpersonal psychotherapy, meanwhile, emerged from transpersonal psychology in the late 1960s in the United States and is often described as psychology’s “fourth force,” following psychoanalysis, behaviourism, and humanistic psychology. Figures such as Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich sought to expand psychology beyond pathology and ordinary ego functioning to include questions of consciousness, transcendence, mystical experience, and human potential—areas that had historically belonged largely to philosophy, religion, and contemplative traditions.

Both transpersonal psychology and Islamic Psychology move beyond an exclusively symptom-focused understanding of psychological suffering. Each, in very different ways, makes room for the client’s broader existential and spiritual life and asks questions that may not fit easily within conventional therapeutic frameworks.

This does not make approaches such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) useless. CBT can be enormously helpful. But in my own consultation calls, I have repeatedly heard people describe reaching a point where cognitive reframing no longer touched the depth of what they were experiencing. More than once, clients have said some version of the same thing: “It worked in the beginning, but then I started to feel gaslit by my therapist.”

Sometimes a person does not simply need to think differently about their suffering. They need a framework spacious enough to ask what the suffering means, what it is asking of them, and how it belongs within the larger movement of their life.

CRITIQUE OF WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY

Modern psychology emerged largely within Western intellectual traditions, including the enduring influence of Cartesian dualism, with its separation of mind and body. The rise of scientism, an over-reliance on what can be quantified as “evidence-based,” and the dominance of psychopharmacology have all faced significant criticism.

In his book The Cognitive Behavioural Tsunami, British group analyst Farhad Dalal critiques the managerial and scientific claims surrounding CBT, particularly the tendency to reduce complex human suffering to measurable outcomes and standardized interventions. His critique raises broader questions about what gets counted as evidence, what gets excluded, and what may be lost when efficiency and quantification begin to determine how psychological care is delivered.

Other critical psychologists, including Ian Parker, have similarly questioned forms of psychology that isolate distress from the cultural, political, relational, and socioeconomic worlds in which people actually live.

Concerned with Western psychology and its blind spots, Dr. Malik Badri, often called the “father of modern Islamic psychology,” published The Dilemma of Muslim Psychologists in 1979. His work challenged Muslim psychologists to examine the assumptions they had inherited through Western psychological models rather than adopting them uncritically. Though his work has also been critiqued, it was groundbreaking and remains deeply influential in contemporary Islamic Psychology.

Badri’s critique was not simply that Western psychology was “Western.” The deeper question was what happens when one particular understanding of the human being becomes universalized and then exported as though it were culturally and metaphysically neutral.

Decentering Western psychology allows the indigeneity of Islamic Psychology and other non-Western psychologies to emerge in their own complexity. Islamic Psychology is rooted in the cultural, spiritual, ethical, and intellectual worlds of Muslim civilization. It is not merely Western psychology translated into Islamic terminology, nor an adaptation of an already complete psychological system.

Rather, it emerges from centuries of reflection on the human being through the Qur’an, Hadith, philosophy, medicine, theology, ethics, and Sufism.

To decenter Western psychology, then, is not to discard it. It is to remove its presumed position as the universal measure against which every other understanding of the human being must be judged.

FOUNDATIONS OF TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOTHERAPY

In 1968, Anthony Sutich published “Transpersonal Psychology: An Emerging Force”, helping to formally articulate a field that had been emerging through the work of Abraham Maslow and others within humanistic psychology. Maslow’s growing interest in peak and religious experiences increasingly moved his work beyond self-actualization toward questions of transcendence, higher human potential, and experiences that seemed to exceed the boundaries of the ordinary ego.

In fact, toward the end of his life, Maslow increasingly moved beyond self-actualization toward the concept of self-transcendence. Yet mainstream presentations of Maslow’s hierarchy still commonly stop at self-actualization, leaving this later development of his thought largely out of the picture.

Over the years, transpersonal psychology has resisted a single definition. Nonetheless, key figures in the field have identified several recurring themes, including beyond-ego psychology, integrative or holistic psychology, and the psychology of transformation.

“Beyond ego” does not necessarily mean the destruction or rejection of the ego. Rather, it refers to experiences and dimensions of consciousness that exceed our ordinary sense of being a separate, bounded self. The field has therefore taken seriously experiences that mainstream psychology has often struggled to accommodate, including mystical and unitive states, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, psi phenomena, and other non-ordinary states of consciousness.

An integrative approach similarly resists reducing the human being to cognition or individual psychological functioning alone. It pays attention to the body, relationships, culture, ecology, social context, meaning, and the larger existential questions that accompany human life. Transformation, within this framework, is not simply about reducing symptoms but about what a person may become through their encounter with suffering, consciousness, relationship, and meaning.

Unlike psychotherapies primarily concerned with resolving psychological conflict or managing symptoms, transpersonal psychotherapy also makes room for the possibility that some conflicts are multilayered, existential, and even transformative.

It seeks to engage dimensions of experience beyond ordinary ego functioning and may draw from approaches such as dreamwork, mindfulness, somatic practices, breathwork, and spiritual or contemplative practices.

This is part of what makes transpersonal psychology relevant to the present discussion. It reopened questions that modern psychology had increasingly relegated to religion, philosophy, and mysticism: What is consciousness? What lies beyond the individual ego? What gives suffering meaning? What constitutes transformation? And can a psychology of the human being remain complete if it excludes the possibility of transcendence?

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MODERN PSYCHOLOGY

Modern psychology emerged during a period in which the study of the human being was increasingly being separated from philosophy, theology, and metaphysics. Sigmund Freud, one of the central figures in the development of psychoanalysis, sought to establish a psychology that could operate within the scientific assumptions of his time, even while working with something inherently difficult to quantify: the unconscious.

Freud was deeply skeptical of religion and resisted explanations he regarded as mystical or metaphysical. Yet psychoanalysis itself ventured into hidden dimensions of human experience—dreams, symbols, repression, desire, fantasy, and unconscious motivation—that could not simply be observed from the outside.

Carl Jung eventually departed from Freud’s framework and developed analytical psychology, expanding the psychological imagination through archetypes, mythology, religion, dreams, and what he called the collective unconscious. Unlike Freud, Jung regarded religious and spiritual experience as psychologically significant and believed that questions of meaning and the sacred could not simply be dismissed as remnants of primitive thinking.

Other intellectual movements were also challenging increasingly reductionist accounts of the human being. Phenomenology turned attention toward lived experience and consciousness as they are actually encountered rather than reducing experience entirely to externally measurable phenomena. Gestalt psychology emphasized that human perception cannot always be understood by breaking experience into isolated components; the whole possesses qualities that cannot be explained merely through its parts. Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy likewise attempted to develop a more explicitly spiritual understanding of human development, education, and consciousness.

These movements differed considerably from one another, yet each resisted, in its own way, reducing the human being to a purely mechanical or behavioural organism.

Still, an important boundary remained. Psychology could investigate religious experience, symbolism, altered states, meaning, archetypes, and even transcendence while remaining hesitant to make metaphysical claims about what those experiences ultimately are.

Perhaps this is one of the important lines between modern psychology and religious or contemplative traditions.

Psychology may ask what an experience of God does within the psyche.

A religious tradition may also ask whether God is real.

THE DEATH OF GOD

When Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared that “God is dead,” he was not simply celebrating atheism or the disappearance of religious institutions. He was diagnosing a profound cultural rupture. The metaphysical and religious frameworks that had long grounded meaning, morality, and value in European life were losing their authority, and Nietzsche understood that their collapse would leave humanity facing the problem of nihilism.

After the “death of God,” humanity would have to confront the question of where meaning and value come from when the old metaphysical foundations no longer hold.

This question remains deeply relevant to psychology. When transcendence disappears from our understanding of the human being, meaning itself can become increasingly privatized: something the individual must manufacture, optimize, or construct alone.

Transpersonal psychology attempts, in part, to reopen this horizon. But transpersonal work eventually confronts us with something the modern psyche often resists: surrender.

I struggle with this still. Every time I think I have surrendered, another layer appears.

The modern psyche greatly resists surrender, and this resistance may be one of the sources of our suffering.

I see this in myself when forgetfulness seeps in, and I see it around me: the survival, fear, and grasping that often appear as anxiety. Religious or spiritual identification does not make anyone immune. Sometimes those who identify strongly with faith may find it particularly difficult to admit that they are anxious, uncertain, or that their sense of faith has temporarily weakened.

The Arabic word for human being, insān (إنسان), has traditionally been associated with nisyān, forgetfulness. We forget, and then we remember. Each return deepens the possibility of remembrance, or dhikr, while heedlessness recedes.

Perhaps this movement between forgetfulness and remembrance is part of what it means to be human.

When trauma, fear, or prolonged survival disconnect us from our emotions, our bodies, and the deeper dimensions of the self, the quality of consciousness changes. Life can become narrower and less alive. What was once experienced as meaningful becomes distant, and the Source of sustenance becomes increasingly obscured.

GOD NEVER DIED

Some of the intellectual roots of transpersonal psychology can be traced to William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1902. James took religious and mystical experiences seriously as dimensions of human experience worthy of psychological inquiry. Rather than immediately dismissing them as pathology or superstition, he examined what these experiences meant to the people who underwent them and how they transformed their lives.

This was a significant move. Psychology could investigate religious experience without first having to determine whether its metaphysical claims were objectively true.

Decades later, Stanislav Grof’s research into psychedelic and non-ordinary states of consciousness pushed these questions further. After years of clinical research with psychedelics, Grof and his wife, Christina, developed Holotropic Breathwork in the 1970s as a way of accessing non-ordinary states without psychedelic substances. Grof’s work challenged models of the psyche that treated ordinary waking consciousness as the outer limit of legitimate psychological experience. I will address psychedelic-assisted therapy separately.

Ken Wilber later developed an ambitious mapping of the spectrum of consciousness, attempting to integrate psychology, spirituality, philosophy, contemplative traditions, and theories of human development into a comprehensive framework.

Something is mesmerizing about Wilber’s work: the relentless classification and reclassification of complex ideas into stages, levels, states, lines, and structures. It is enormously alluring to the modern mind because it appears to make an immense and chaotic field of human experience intelligible.

But this desire for a universal map also became one of the major points of contention within transpersonal psychology.

Jorge Ferrer, particularly in Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality, challenged approaches that organize spiritual traditions and experiences according to predetermined universal hierarchies. His participatory approach emphasizes spiritual knowing as relational, embodied, pluralistic, and enacted through participation rather than merely discovered as a pre-existing hierarchy of consciousness.

The debate between Ferrer’s participatory approach and Wilber’s hierarchical framework points toward a much larger question:

Can the mysteries of human consciousness be mapped without reducing them to the map?

Wilber’s approach tries to preserve depth and developmental distinction, resisting what he describes as a kind of spiritual “flatland” in which every experience or worldview becomes equivalent. Ferrer, conversely, warns that universal hierarchies can privilege particular traditions, states, or interpretations as inherently “higher” while marginalizing other ways of encountering the sacred.

Both concerns matter.

Without discernment, pluralism can collapse into relativism. But without humility, developmental maps can quietly become metaphysical empires.

This tension is particularly important for transpersonal psychology because the field inhabits an unusual borderland. It wants to take mystical experience, transformation, transcendence, and expanded states of consciousness seriously while still participating in psychological and scientific discourse.

Perhaps the task is not to force one side to defeat the other.

Transpersonal psychology can remain in dialogue with neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychology, philosophy, and other empirical disciplines without reducing spiritual experience to neurological mechanisms. Likewise, taking transcendence seriously does not require abandoning critical thought or empirical inquiry.

The deeper question is whether psychology can study consciousness without assuming in advance that consciousness is nothing more than the brain, and whether it can encounter the sacred without immediately reducing the sacred to a psychological phenomenon.

The “death of God,” after all, was never the death of God.

It was the crisis of a particular human projection onto God.

"The greatest blessing granted to mankind comes by way of madness, which is a divine gift." 

- Socrates

INTRODUCTION

In this blog entry, I want to tackle the complex issue of madness. What does it mean to lose your mind? What does it mean to have your consciousness stretched and blasted open so that nothing makes sense anymore? Or, on the flip side, what does it mean when everything becomes overwhelmingly meaningful, especially after a life of apathy, so much so that it eradicates the intellect, challenges your inner belief system, and elicits a probable paradigm shift? Going "crazy," as defined by society, I argue, is an opportunity for growth and transformation.

It is a gift. It is a curse. It is a doorway to spiritual awakening.  

I am not implying that this is an easy process. It is messy. It is gnarly. It is terrifying in every meaning of the word. Many people do not make it to the other side. I have gone to the edge of my consciousness many times, and it was the scariest and most liberating experience. I can say this today as I reflect and write about the topic. There were times when I thought I would not emerge in one piece due to overwhelming psychological fragmentation. After months of trying different treatment modalities, I slowly started feeling like myself again.

Today, my deep need to comprehend my experience drives my passion for psychotherapy and healing.

Mental illness, these days, runs the risk of being romanticized. Trust me. There is nothing romantic about losing your mind. I use the term 'mental illness' with trepidation because I am skeptical of the psychiatric model, even though I believe in it to a certain level. Still, I agree with Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist who criticizes psychiatry in his well-known book The Myth of Mental Illness, whose famous statement declares, "Mental illness is a metaphor." A metaphor for what, you may ask. A symbol of an ailing soul? A sign of a sick mind? A reflection of distorted familial and societal systems?

Psychosis is an extreme state of mental health decline. The endpoint an individual may reach after severe mental and emotional pain. Metaphorically, it is a form of ego death and the breakdown of rigid defence mechanisms. Of course, one cannot hold and contemplate metaphor when one cannot get out of bed. When one is grappling with day-to-day functioning, psychiatry can help. Medications can save lives. It can also destroy lives. Therein lies the conundrum.

As modern humans, we have an incomplete understanding of mental health mainly because mainstream psychology stripped away words like 'Spirit' or 'soul' from the equation. In fact, the Greek term 'psyche' (psykhe) in 'psychology' means soul or the invisible animating entity that occupies the physical body. Ipso facto psychology is about the human soul - not just the brain. We are in dire need of a holistic approach to mental health that considers the soul.

Some psychologists have been addressing the gap between mental health and spirituality by studying the nature of consciousness, contributing to what is known as the fourth force of psychology. The first force is behavioural (B. F. Skinner), the second is psychoanalytic (Sigmund Freud), the third is humanistic (Carl Rogers), and the fourth force is transpersonal (Carl Jung). Some scholars find using the four forces as a classification obsolete. In contrast, others have added social justice, feminism, and multicultural perspectives to expand on the fourth force.

Currently, in the medical model, the two dominant paradigms are behavioural and psychoanalytic. Though primarily behavioural, with an emphasis on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Behavioural psychology and psychoanalysis view psychosis as psychopathology, a problem that needs pills. While that may be true on some level, there is more to consider about non-ordinary states of consciousness. My area of specialty is transpersonal psychology. Transpersonal psychology invites the human imagination to contemplate something Higher than itself. On the other hand, the word 'transpersonal' means to transcend the personality beyond the ego. I will be speaking from that perspective. 

This article is long, so I want to thank you for taking the time to read it. In fact, after writing this piece, I have decided to publish more material on psychosis, transpersonal psychology, and transpersonal psychotherapy, especially looking at more integrative treatment models. I also want to write about psychosis from the angle of mysticism and Divine madness and share more of my subjective experience. If you are interested, please email me at info@integrativepractice.ca, and I will add you to the mailing list.  

Before I delve further into the topic at hand, I want to highlight that I am speaking from a Western psychology point of view that is, in one way or another, informed by a Judeo-Christian worldview, even if it tries to be secular, objective, and scientific. A Judeo-Christian worldview falls under the 'Abrahamic' traditions, including Islam. Still, there are other ways to understand the human psyche from the perspective of Indigenous, Pagan, and Eastern traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, etc.) I refer to some non-Western concepts or practices through secondary sources, mainly Brant Cortright's book Psychotherapy and Spirit: Theory and Practice in Transpersonal Psychotherapy. Cortright is a clinical psychologist who combines neuroscience and depth therapy in his work. His book Psychotherapy and Spirit is one of few books that contribute to the emerging field of transpersonal psychotherapy. 

Back to the title of this entry, what is psychosis? From a strictly psychiatric perspective, psychosis is to lose touch with consensus reality. A psychotic break happens due to several factors, including trauma and abuse, extreme stress, life transitions, psychoactive substances, genetics, and mental health conditions like schizophrenia or schizoaffective. People may hear or see things that may not be audible or visible to others. Common themes include feelings of paranoia or grandiose delusions with religious ingredients.

Looking closely at psychotic experiences, they make total sense to the individuals going through them. So, if we move further away from the ‘mental illness’ model and do not deem everything as hallucinations, there is an opportunity to engage with the symbolism and metaphor coming through. Through meaning-making, mental health professionals may be able to guide patients back to 'sanity,' a healing process that invites higher self-awareness and a shift in consciousness—a spiritual awakening. Instead of the ego wanting to fix the problem, the problem is outgrown or transcended by the soul filled with the power of the Spirit. Many anecdotal accounts of patients who have recovered from psychosis reveal that they are now more whole than their pre-psychotic state. Some profess to have a deeper insight into themselves and the human condition.

From a Jungian psychology perspective, the psyche, like the physical body, constantly seeks a state of homeostasis. In essence, psychosis is the psyche's way of healing itself. If someone is in extreme distress and depression, possibly suppressing a complex trauma and carrying rigid defence mechanisms, the possibility of psychosis becomes inevitable. It may be the only way to process the pain and resolve the conflictual tension. In such cases, mental health professionals can provide low-dose medications in tandem with depth therapy to produce lasting results. I do not think we can relinquish the psychiatric model entirely. Instead, offering patients a safe, loving space (the hospital is not that) is conducive to healing—a place where patients can see the process to its conclusion.

In Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam Pandolfo quotes a psychiatrist describing the psychotic experience as

"involuntary addresses, petrified fragments of social commentary, or a collective speech, delivering themselves as impersonal statements in the saying of psychotic patients. They can't possess their own history and yet that history tells itself to us, a history that eludes them and concerns us, that makes us reflect on the status of our own history. How are we to receive that saying?"

The psychiatrist here invites us to see psychosis as a mirror for society to reflect on its ills. Psychosis is not just about the patient. It is about the patient's family and friends, neighbourhood, city, country, and the world. It is like this; we may be moving closer to the Truth inside the walls of a psychiatric ward more than any other place, maybe jails too.

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."  

- Jiddu Krishnamurti

In the documentary Crazywise, Phil Borges refers to society as psychotic and says that we are all in a permanent state of psychosis. Because in Indigenous cultures, people who have access to altered states of consciousness are considered the shamans and medicine people of the village. In modern society, however, we place such individuals in psychiatric wards and heavily medicate them instead of asking why and exploring the stories behind these non-ordinary states of consciousness deemed as ‘madness’ because they may offer us healing tools that are far more impactful than drugs, and far beyond what the modern intellect can comprehend.

“Psychosis or Spiritual Awakening” by Phil Borges

Stanislav Grof and Christina Grof coin the term 'spiritual emergence/emergency' to further explicate the depth of what psychiatry dismisses as psychosis. The Grofs highlight the connection between psychosis and mystical experiences. They argue,

"Although there are many individual exceptions, mainstream psychiatry and psychology in general makes no distinction between mysticism and mental illness. These fields do not officially recognize that the great spiritual traditions that have been involved in the systematic study of human consciousness for millennia have anything to offer. Thus the concepts and practices found in Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Sufi, and other mystical traditions are ignored and dismissed indiscriminately."

Similarly, David Lukoff, who talks about his spiritual emergency on YouTube, states that psychotic experiences and religious experiences have been associated since the earliest recorded history.  

Cortright further elucidates the different features of spiritual emergence vs an emergency. In a spiritual emergence, he argues, the experience is positive, and the individual can go through it to its conclusion and, with the right support system, emerges into a healthier, more whole personality. In a spiritual emergency, the experience is overwhelming, the individual becomes fixated, the self is fragmented, and it becomes hard to integrate what has happened.

He classifies spiritual emergencies into two main categories: consciousness alterations and the opening of subtle realms. Consciousness alterations include the awakening of kundalini energy, near-death experiences, episodes of unitive consciousness, renewal through the return to the centre, and past-life experiences. Opening the subtle realms includes the crisis of psychic opening, shamanic crisis, channelling or communication with spirit guides, possession states, and UFO encounters.  

CONSCIOUSNESS ALTERATIONS

The Awakening of Kundalini. Kundalini awakening is one of the most common experiences of spiritual awakening. According to the Hindu tradition, kundalini energy is located at the base of the spine. When that is opened, energy starts flowing through the chakras or energy centres, opening up and purifying consciousness. Some individuals may experience it as terrifying, while others may experience bliss. The body may react by shaking or any involuntary movement. One may emerge from this experience with a new perspective on life and its possibilities. 

Near-Death Experiences (NDEs). NDEs are the most documented and studied forms of experiencing pure consciousness. People report seeing ancestors and light after a long dark tunnel. It is as though the soul leaves the body, accesses a higher-frequency consciousness then comes back with a renewed sense of self and an openness to life. Most of the time, individuals find that it is not their time to die and that they have a mission to complete after an NDE. After all, what is there to fear after almost dying?  

Episodes of Unitive Consciousness. These are rarer forms of mystical experience. They can be one of the most destabilizing experiences for the ego. I have gone through them a few times. My ego shattered in ways I could not have possibly imagined. I was rendered immobile for months. I could not tell the boundaries between self and other, between self and the collective consciousness! Cortright declares, "The psychiatric establishment has usually diagnosed these as fusion states, loss of boundaries, fragmentation, or depersonalization." I have been through my fair share of hospitalizations and medications. People around me tried to offer support to the best of their ability; however, the experiences impaired my day-to-day functioning, and I needed more help than could be provided.

Unitive consciousness challenged my perception of reality, but due to my Sufi background, and exposure to hagiographies, I realized that what I was going through was a form of spiritual purification. My understanding of God changed immensely. It certainly does not mean that all is now purified. Being a spiritual seeker is a never-ending endeavour. The possibilities for growth are limitless. However, these experiences offered me a window into a higher state of consciousness that rendered my existential qualms minuscule. I now understand the concept of Divine union that the mystics talk about and the interconnected nature of existence, like Ibn Arabi's metaphysics of Unity of Being (Wahdat Al-Wujud) at an embodied level, not just cognitively. 

Many saints or sages throughout history, who have become soaked in Divine Love, and Oneness, operate outside of societal conventions, which may confuse the uninitiated. In the Sufi tradition, an individual in that state is called a majzoob. The word majzoob comes from the root word jzb, which means attraction, almost magnetic. Therefore, the majzoob or the attracted, is the one who is annihilated in Allah, and Allah is the Jazib or the one who attracts. No wonder Sufi poetry is replete with the metaphor of the lover seeking their Beloved.

The majzoob exists in contrast to the salik. The salik is the wayfarer who intentionally practices a way of life that may be ascetic so that they may reach that state of Divine union. After arduous inner work, the salik may achieve the same state as the majzoob or even higher. Scholars usually prefer the latter since one can bring the benefits of a spiritual life into the day-to-day function of society. 

Language is failing me tremendously. I shall defer to Maulana Jalaluldin: 

“What you seek is seeking you.” - Rumi

Renewal Through Return to Center. The British psychiatrist R.D. Laing is one of the biggest proponents of this view. It means that psychosis is the psyche's attempt to heal itself. The idea is that individuals going through psychosis need a supportive environment where they can see the process through to its end. For that to happen, the patients' hallucinations need not be dismissed since they hold meaning for the patient and the collective. 

Cortright also mentions John Perry, a Jungian analyst who brings,

"a transpersonal dimension to his work and sees the potentially healing process of psychosis as an attempt by the psyche to renew itself by activating the archetypal, spiritual energies of the Self."

Often, schizophrenic or schizoaffective patients are sensitive individuals who can see what's beyond the veil and have access to these energies, which, in some cases, psychoactive substances may trigger. On that note, what we deem as psychoactive substances in other traditions are considered sacred plant medicines used to commune with the unseen world and bring about healing. (Check out books like Entheogens and the Future of Religion by Robert Forte or The Immortality Key by Brian C. Muraresku - a topic deserving a separate blog entry!). 

Cortright writes,

"In this process the common themes are that the person experiences a death, followed by a regression in time back to the beginning (his or her own beginnings - birth or inside the womb - or even the beginning of the world's creation). As this is reenacted, there is a clashing of cosmic forces - a battle between Good and Evil, or God and the Devil.

Eventually, as the process unfolds, the individual finds the middle place where the realization is that all of this happened inside rather than in outer reality as the individual's ordinary consciousness comes back. Arguably, this can be very hard and costly to explore in a traditional psychiatric ward!

Past-Life Experiences. Another form of consciousness alteration is having past-life experiences, in which an individual can access oneself in another time and culture. It is fully experienced by the individual via vivid memories and insights into previous relationships, behaviours, and feelings. The situation becomes a spiritual emergency when these experiences intrude upon one's day-to-day living in this lifetime. People surrounding the individual may view it as bizarre and nonsensical. The formal diagnosis is that these are mere delusions or hallucinations. In reality, many ancient spiritual traditions touch upon this and give it context and meaning. 

OPENING TO SUBTLE OR PSYCHIC REALMS

The Crisis of Psychic Opening. Cortright explains,

"The opening of such psychic capacities as subtle vision, subtle hearing, telepathy, precognition, et cetera, can precipitate a spiritual crisis for the person who has no framework with which to deal with these new abilities."

I can speak to these experiences from a personal level. There were many instances where I could hear people's thoughts or what they were about to say before they said it, and, yes, it was scary to go through. 

There were other times when I could visually see people around me shape-shift. I cannot forget the encounter with the nurse who appeared to me with a head that looked like an octopus during one of my hospitalizations. Opening my psyche had blurred the boundaries between myself and the other. My sense of self disintegrated, and it felt like I had no ego. It is challenging to capture the experience for the reader even right now as I write this. Words fail me again. Precisely how William James puts it in The Varieties of Religious Experience, what happened to me "defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words." 

Looking closely, however, what does seeing a nurse with a head shaped like an octopus (tentacles and all) mean? Mere delusions? According to The Book of Symbols, "the image of the octopus symbolically depicts an encounter with the depth of the psyche, in all its ambivalence, suffering and seeming chaos," and chaotic is how I felt at that moment. I was being confronted with my madness, which is probably rooted in ancient preverbal trauma, and, at times, from an archetypal perspective, I was being confronted with the collective's madness. 

A ceremonial octopus mask with movable tentacles and hinged jaws manipulated by cords. By a Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) artist, wood, ca. 19th century, British Columbia.

Yet, the octopus is not all horror and monsters because, at the center of the chaos, this intelligent being carries much creative energy. It changes colours based on its emotional state and adapts to its environment. The octopus, according to depth psychology, represents the Great Mother. My experience was probably a nod toward my negative mother complex—an invitation to face my worst fears and heal childhood wounds. The Book of Symbols adds, "the image of octopus brings together extremely negative and positive attributes," a paradox out of which order can be born—the result of holding the tension of opposites. 

Shamanic Crisis. Anthropologists refer to this as ‘shamanic illness.’ Individuals find themselves in the Underworld, where they experience death, dismemberment, and rebirth. They also encounter ‘power animals’ and gain spiritual healing gifts. This type of state usually indicates that the individual is ready to begin studying and training as a shaman. 

Channelling or Communication with Spirit Guides. Cortright says, "Channeling involves contact with a supra physical entity by a medium or channeler, either telepathically or while in a trance...the information received is either spoken aloud or written down." However, Cortright warns that just because a ‘discarnate’ entity is a source of information does not mean it is a being that is "enlightened, evolved, or even particularly knowledgeable."

According to Cortright, some of the highest content that has been channelled include the Quran, the Book of Mormon, and a Course in Miracles. The material in each book has context and meaning of its own. It is interesting to elaborate here that Mohammed (peace be upon him), the prophet of Islam, used to enter into an altered state before receiving revelation. Some of those states would render him unconscious, or he would sometimes hear an intense ringing in his ear. After such incidents, the words of the Quran would flow out of him. The people at the time were stunned by the intricate language of the Quran. Some of his opposers called him a mad poet and a sorcerer.

Empirical research in transpersonal psychology illustrates that individuals who become channellers in the village and participate in healing shamanic rituals (e.g., the Brazilian Candomblé) carry an extensive history of trauma. They are the wounded healers using their dissociative states to travel between the seen and unseen realms and, therefore, turning their suffering into something positive—an example of why dissociative identity disorder is not always a psychopathology.

Channelling was prominent in the '90s. Many other books have been channelled with various topics ranging from divinations to descriptions of other realms. These books are received from another source, not just inspired works. Conversely, not all channelled content is coherent or valuable. 

Possession States. These are some of the scariest spiritual emergencies where the individual feels ‘taken over’ by another entity. The result may be bizarre behaviour and weird vocalization. Such states have been depicted in movies like The Exorcist. Many spiritual traditions speak about the dangers of possession, and different parts of the world have elaborate techniques to cast out demons from people's bodies. According to the Bible, Jesus was known to do that, and it was proof of Christ's divinity. 

Discernment is crucial. Many people make a connection between psychosis or schizophrenia and possession. Others may go as far as claiming that mental affliction is a punishment from God. That is a very dangerous statement. Not only does it undermine the pain of individuals reckoning with severe mental health conditions, but it also anthropomorphizes God. We will never comprehend how the Divine Intellect works. Unfortunately, there are many stories of traumatizing exorcisms. Some healers say they can differentiate between a schizophrenic patient and a possessed individual. Lots of question marks surround this area of human knowledge.

Cortright explains that possession states have been recorded since the birth of modern psychology, but it was often diagnosed as multiple personality disorder. However, in transpersonal psychotherapy, the psychological and the spiritual are not separate; these states are viewed with more complexity and nuance. 

UFO Encounters. These are one of the most documented forms of consciousness alterations. Individuals describe being taken by alien entities and board spacecrafts. These experiences cannot be literalized or concretized. In many cases, individuals are so traumatized by these encounters that they forget them, but memories can later be retrieved through hypnotherapy. There are many stories of jinn abductions and possession in the Islamic tradition (see possession states), and there may be some correlation here.

DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSIS

For clinicians to differentiate between spiritual emergence, spiritual emergency, and/or psychosis, Cortright writes, there are three criteria. The criteria for a spiritual emergence or emergency are that the client undergoing consciousness alteration can still form a functional therapeutic alliance, that there is a transpersonal emphasis, and that the client can see the process as psychological. The criteria for psychosis are when the client is incoherent, hallucinates, is delusional, and demonstrates grossly disorganized behaviour or catatonia. The requirements for a spiritual experience with psychotic features include an ecstatic mood, a sense of newly gained knowledge, and encounters with mythological themes.

"The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight."

- Joseph Campbell

Whether the experience is psychotic, spiritual, or both, these experiences fall under the realm of the psycho-spiritual journey. We tend to associate peak experiences with the mystical and dismiss everything else. I would argue that even purely psychotic states can also be mystical. Yes, the psychotic may drown for a bit, as per Joseph Campbell's quote, but with proper support and therapy, the psychotic can arrive at the same destination as the mystic. Both the nadir experience and peak experience can produce the same results. Unlike the peak, the nadir is extremely uncomfortable and depicts overwhelming disintegration. Yet, these states offer the individual, through self-compassion, the means to heal and create a more meaningful and peaceful life.

If you are a clinician interested in exploring the differential diagnosis of spiritual emergence, spiritual emergency, or psychosis further, I highly recommend reading Cortright's book.

TREATMENT

Cortright suggests that psychoeducation is the most powerful intervention in a spiritual emergency. Helping clients understand their experience can help them have a cognitive grasp of their condition and lessen the symptomatology. The second is to offer the client a solid, safe container. The idea is to minimize stimulation for the client since they are already very sensitive. Cathartic moments may manifest through vocalization, screaming, or crying. 

The third form of treatment is the therapist's presence and energy, which allows the client to navigate the difficult places in their psyche. It teaches the client that it is okay to be open and vulnerable. The fourth mode of treatment is grounding, which includes a specific diet, exercise and movement, walking, body work, medication, sleep, and possibly changing meditation. Finally, the most important mode of treatment is experiential therapy. Allowing the client to drop into their moment-to-moment experience can help them process difficult material.

SPIRITUAL EMERGENCE: A CASE STUDY

In this section, I will demonstrate an example of spiritual emergence. I will write about a client who is an amalgamation of real-life clients I have worked with in the past. These clients gave me permission to publish. I will change some details for confidentiality.

A client came to see me because he kept hearing a female voice that would talk to him. He attributed that voice to a woman who was a student at the school he attended at the time. This voice, while sometimes loving, was abusive. My client developed a very intimate and meaningful connection with this voice.

Tortured by the voice, my client thought he should approach this woman and ask her if she also felt the otherworldy connection between them that he was feeling. He bravely did, but the woman gently declined. After this incident, the client contacted me to seek transpersonal counselling. He was at his wit's end. He thought that he was going crazy. During the intake session, I ensured that he had a psychiatrist in case of an emergency. Together, we identified his childhood traumas, abandonment wounds, and the tense relationship with his mother. We also explored what the voice may symbolize for him.

Could it be that his Higher self was trying to communicate with him? Could it be that the mysterious woman's soul (to whom the voice belongs) and his soul were only allowed to meet in the subtle realms but never in this realm? Was this an unfinished love story from a past life?

Eventually, and in one of our most significant sessions, my client shared a visionary experience that contained images from the Hindu tradition. He saw Krishna, the god of compassion, protection, and love, embrace him. Keep in mind that my client grew up Christian, but who knows, he may have Hindu ancestors in his lineage. He could also have been tapping into the collective unconscious. The point is that our work together triggered an intense psychic opening.

After long periods of doubt, his understanding of God and the nature of consciousness shifted and deepened. By offering my client a suitable container to engage with his psyche and the visions it produced, he could create meaning out of his suffering and integrate the experience into his new life. What's more, the voice no longer taunted him. It left. Did it go forever? I do not know.

In our closing session, my client expressed insights of wisdom and subtlety. His existential issues were quelled. When he allowed his ego to let go of the story of victimhood, he could finally connect with the depth of his soul and the strength of his Spirit. However, none of that would have happened without first acknowledging the pain and trauma of the past—feeling it and then surpassing it. Ending therapy was a mutual decision, and my client left content with our work.

IMPLICATIONS OF SPIRITUAL EMERGENCY

More recently, there has been rising interest in the transpersonal approach to mental health compared to the old mechanistic paradigm. We are beginning to understand that mental health is a holistic approach, not just about the brain or behavioural patterns. We are also starting to understand the role of intergenerational trauma and psychedelic medicine —all of which challenge scientism.

When we understand that some people in the psychiatric wards may be undergoing a mystical experience and need more than just medications, treatment will look different. The healing process is not only about the individual. It is about raising the collective consciousness as well. Cortright refers to Sri Aurobindo, the well-known yogi and Indian philosopher, who reminds us that it may seem like consciousness is in the body, but the truth is that the body is in consciousness. Despite advances in modern psychiatry, people are still sick. Depression, anxiety, and suicide are on the rise. Why are there people choosing to exit this life? We must understand that mental health is a problem at a soul level and acknowledge our humanity along with its complexity.

“Sick or Gifted? Bridging the Connection Between Mental Health Issues and Spirituality” by Gogo Ekhaya Esima

Thank you for reading! If you have any comments or questions please email: info@integrativepractice.ca.

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

- Derek Walcott

According to astrologers, we are now in the age of Aquarius, which started dawning upon us around 2000. What does that mean? The positions of the planets and stars have an energetic effect that reverberates across the cosmos. Energy is the language of everything. It is how the Universe communicates through us and with us. For instance, the Moon affects the water levels on Earth and our physical bodies. In turn, this shifts our moods and, ultimately, our perception, our psychology, and consciousness at large. 

The Age of Aquarius describes the Earth's retrograde into the sign of Aquarius. There are many theories about what the Aquarian age entails, but the one common theme is that it is the age of finding love within oneself. Before the age of Aquarius, we were in Pisces. The Piscean age was more about searching for transcendental higher ideals marked by the birth of some major monotheistic traditions. In comparison, the Aquarian age calls for a turn inwards. It is no wonder that consciousness studies, self-development, and psychospiritual leanings are becoming the centre stage of our evolution. We are discussing more about self-love or self-compassion, bolstering boundaries, and healing traumas. People are continuously exploring all forms of alternative wellness therapies, including sound/hypnotherapy/past-life regression/reiki/psychedelics/breathwork/mindfulness and even plain old psychotherapy, amongst many other modalities.

There are many pros to the collective shift toward mental wellness. Firstly, there is no doubt that mental health is now one of our primary concerns. With the global pandemic unfolding, everything has changed. How we lived before lockdown looks drastically different than now! Mental health has always been an issue, but with the pandemic, emotions have become more amplified. Anxiety, depression, loneliness, and breakdowns of all sorts are rampant.

People are now taking their mental health into their own hands, and many are losing faith in the traditional medical model. A model that has served us well and continues to do so. However, our mental health crises are not just chemical imbalances in the brain. We have a soul that aches and yearns. If we do not tend to the matters of the soul, we become entrapped. Monkey mind takes over, as the Buddhists put it. 

Dr. Kirsten Neff wrote extensively on self-compassion and co-founded the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion. The idea is to become compassionate with oneself, much like you would be with a friend. To be gentle with the pains of your heart. How would you talk to your friends if they are having a difficult day? What would you do if your pet is having trouble sleeping or eating? In cultivating self-compassion, we tone down the voice of the inner critic. The voice that paralyzes and originates from an old system of self-care that no longer works. The old way of perceiving the world, usually tailored by our past negative experiences and traumas, has caused us to protect ourselves through unhealthy habits (e.g. addictions), which in itself is pretty paradoxical.

The healthier form of self-care is not only going for a massage or spending the day at the spa. While all those things are needed, other forms of self-care that we tend to miss are:

• Things like going out for a walk in nature.

• Seeing a therapist or a counsellor, mindfulness, journaling.

• Meditating.

• Having a warm cup of tea or calling a trusted friend.

When all else fails, the ultimate form of self-care is to be able to ask for help.

When does self-love become egoistic? There is the danger that amongst all this talk of self-love, narcissism may arise. In fact, narcissism is on the rise not because of self-love but primarily because of our perfectionism-driven society. On the one side, narcissism is about hating one's self to the point of inflating the ego (overt narcissism). Still, on the other side, it is about hating one's self to the point of ego deflation (covert narcissism). There is no authentic self-love with narcissism and other personality defence mechanisms (like borderline, codependency, and others). It is pure ego-love. Self-love comes from a place of expansiveness, while ego-love comes from a place of fear and contraction.

Even when we are bashing our ego, we inadvertently "love" it. The idea is, 'I will break my ego before someone else does,' a habit that stems from a myriad of parental complexes. Notice how I talk about breaking the ego. Our inner self always remains intact despite our traumas. It takes work to unravel the layers of protection we have built around it. How do we draw the line between self-love and ego-love? By working on our deep awareness through constant inner work and looking at our shadow side. The ego is not the culprit here. It just needs to be kept healthy and in check.

Finally, many spiritual traditions point out the importance of refining the ego. In Sufism, there is muraqaba meaning constant vigilance, a form of mindfulness. There is a special prayer that goes something like this, 

"O, God, do not abandon me to my ego, not even for a blink of an eye." 

Whether you believe in God, a Higher Power or Energy, or just your authentic higher Self, the prayer speaks volumes about the trickster-ey nature of our ego. 

Despite the birth of significant religions and hierarchies during the Piscean Age, many individuals within the monotheistic traditions (Kabbalists, Gnostics, Sufis, and many others) chose the path of finding the Divine within. Therefore, there is no real difference from one age to another. The reality is that being human is a mysterious process that we are only beginning to understand.

Thank you for reading! If you have any comments or questions please email: info@integrativepractice.ca. 

Open your eyes, for this World is only a Dream.

— Rumi

We dream—it is good we are dreaming—

It would hurt us—were we awake—

But since it is playing—kill us,

And we are playing—shriek—

— Emile Dickinson

We’re simply not trained to honour our dreams, and to realize that an amazing world is waiting for us in the stillness of the night.

— Andrew Holecek

Those who are well adept with spirituality know that dreams are an essential tool for any spiritual practitioner. Most spiritual traditions emphasize the role of dreams in one’s life. Dreams carry multiple meanings that manifest via symbols and images, which can give the dreamer endless self-insights. The Sufis, for instance, use dreams as tools to uncover truths about the practitioner’s spiritual state. Dream interpretation is an attempt to tap into the psyche and locate how far the practitioner is on their journey to the Divine. We can also say – a journey towards a life with an expanded state of consciousness, awareness, and knowing oneself better.

Carl Jung inherited his teacher Sigmund Freud's emphasis on dream analysis in psychotherapy, but Jung's school of thought took a more spiritual turn. Jung was troubled by Freud's narrow interpretation of the unconscious, which caused a rift between the two great thinkers. Unlike the Freudian school of thought, Jung goes beyond the world of uncovering childhood traumas or focusing on sexuality. His dream analysis methodology is an impressive body of work. Some refer to Jung as a mystic, a religious thinker, and a spiritual teacher. 

In his poignantly titled book 'Modern Man in Search of a Soul,' Jung gives us a peek into his dream analysis process. He states that if one understands the vital role of the unconscious in the formation of neuroses, one will realize the importance of dreams as an expression of these neuroses, which are a latticework of complexes, traumas, and unresolved issues. Jung asserts,

“…according to our hypothesis, the unconscious plays a causal part in the neurosis, and since dreams are the direct expression of unconscious psychic activity, the attempt to analyze and interpret dreams is entirely justified from a scientific standpoint. Quite apart from therapeutic results, we may expect this line of endeavour to give us scientific insight into psychic causality.”

His use of the term ‘scientific’ might appear dubious to some readers, but Jung beckons modern thinkers to stretch their perception of science.

Jung asserts that the initial dream of a person who is about to undergo psychotherapy foretells many aspects of the unconscious that are specific to that person. The dream can also predict how the therapy process will unfold by unveiling the relationship between therapist and client. He mentions a story of an anxiety-ridden man who complained of dizziness and displayed symptoms of mountain sickness. The man describes his dream as such:

“I am once more in the small village where I was born. Some peasant boys who went to school with me are standing together in the street. I walk past them, pretending not to know them. I hear one of them, who is pointing at me, say: ‘He doesn’t often come back to our village.’”

The second dream:

“I am in a great hurry because I am going on a journey. I hunt up my baggage, but cannot find it. Time, and the train will soon be leaving. Finally I succeed in getting all my things together. I hurry along the street, discover that I have forgotten a brief-case containing important papers, dash breathlessly back again, find it at last, and then run towards the station, but make hardly any headway. With a final effort I rush on to the platform only to find the train streaming out into the yards. It is very long, and runs in a curious S-shaped curve. It occurs to me that if the driver is not careful and put on full steam when he comes to the straight stretch, the rear coaches will still be on the curve and will be thrown over by the speed to the train. As a matter of fact the driver opens the throttle as I try to shout. The rear coaches rock frightfully, and are actually thrown off the rail tracks. There is a terrible catastrophe. I awake in terror”

Jung warned this client to avoid any further professional endeavours. However, the man did not heed those warnings. He didn't believe in dreams. He ended up pushing himself professionally, only to lose his track. The train wreck, according to Jung, manifested itself in real life. He states that the man's conscious ego did not give him any reason to stop. Outside of the man's dreamworld, everything seemed normal, despite his physical symptoms. The dream, therefore, not only uncovered the man's neuroses (fear of being poor, perhaps), but it also gave him a prognosis (failure of future business ventures).

Jung reaffirms not all dreams are easily interpreted and are 'causalistic' in nature. Other types of dreams include: 'prognostic,' 'anticipatory,' and 'compensatory.' Some fall into one category, and some into all of these categories. A client's initial dream may be easy to interpret. Usually, it is the one that sets off the treatment, and the dreams that follow might be more obscure. If the dreams that follow are equally as clear as the first one, the treatment is not going well, and other sides of the personality are not coming out! Eventually, the analyst must be straightforward and, at times, admit their limitations. However, clients usually project an image of perfection unto the analyst expecting so much, which might slow the treatment process. Together, the analyst and analysand have to take their time to understand a dream. Jung declares,

“nothing is unclear to the understanding; it is only when we fail to understand that things appear unintelligible and confused”.

The process of understanding a dream cannot be one-sided since it is subjective material. It certainly cannot come only from the side of the analyst. Most of the work depends on the client. The analysis of dreams has to be a mutual agreement between both sides. Jung beckons,

“we appeal only to the patient’s brain if we try to inculcate a truth; but if we help him to grow up to this truth in the course of his own development, we have reached his heart, and this appeal goes deeper and acts with greater force.”

The quote is fascinating, and its meaning applies to everything in life. When the truth is shoved down our throats, we learn nothing. Truth begins with the heart and ends in the heart.

If the analysis is one-sided, the therapist is using mere suggestibility. However, suggestibility can be deceptive and a makeshift way of relating to the client. Over time, it stunts the client's growth and does not empower the client to bring into light parts of the personality that still lurk in the dark. 

A seasoned analyst knows how to work with a widening consciousness and awareness skillfully and is aware that inner work not only involves bringing out the hidden parts of the client but also subjecting those parts to conscious reflection. To avoid any suggestibility in the analytic process, each new dream is to be treated as a unique insight into the client's condition. Furthermore, the client chooses the dream that will be discussed during the analysis.

I want to end this post by looking at dream analysis from other perspectives. For instance, in the Islamic Hadith literature, it is recorded that Prophet Mohammed ﷺ divided dreams into three categories: ones that stem from the ego, ones inspired by angels or God, and ones that are the whispers of Satan. He ﷺ also said, "True dreams are one of the forty-six parts of prophethood." He elevated the roles of dreams to such a high level. He used to ask his friends every morning about what they dreamt the night before and would proceed to interpret them based on Divine inspiration. Mohammed also warned against lying about one's dreams. 

One of the seminal books on dream interpretation was written by Ibn Sirin, who lived during the 8th century CE. From a spiritual perspective, not everyone can access Ibn Sirin's book, even though many people have physical access to it. Dream symbols, just like words, can be taken out of context. Traditional Sufi teachers know that dreams reflect the disciple's psyche and level of spiritual maturity.

Beginners often struggle to make sense of their dreams. With time, however, dreams become more symbolic and weighty. Some people are born with the ability to have intense archetypal dreams but may not know what to do with them. I know a few people, including myself, that have dreams that have the potential to be traumatic! In summary, dreams play a crucial part in the Islamic ethos. 

Dream interpretation may lose its potency if left at the hands of anyone, which explains why the process of becoming a Jungian analyst is long and laborious. Besides being well-versed in symbology, astrology, and cultural mythology, an individual who intends on becoming an analyst must also be someone who continually confronts their psyche and does their shadow work. 

Andrew Holecek (quoted at the very beginning) is a spiritual teacher and an author of dream yoga, an ancient Buddhist practice. Holecek focuses a lot on lucid dreaming, a whole different topic that I shall explore in another blog post. In short, lucid dreaming is a process in which the dreamer awakens inside their dream and is fully aware that they are in a dream while having some control over the events. The dreamer can manipulate the contents of their unconscious! Holecek argues that lucid dreaming is a form of self-exploration furthering one's development and may aid the dreamer on their path of spiritual growth.

Modern science is only starting to scratch the surface regarding the phenomena of dreams, even though there is a lot of data on the science of sleep. The scientific word for the study of dreams is called 'oneirology.' It is an accepted form of treatment in clinical psychology, perhaps because Freudian psychoanalysis is still used in psychiatry. 

The world of dream interpretation can be confusing, even terrifying, and it might be easier to toss the bizarreness out. We may fear the unconscious because it does not adhere to the laws of the physical realm. Yet, just as our conscious state carries our fears and fantasies, the unconscious does the same, but the unconscious is a limitless realm. Its unknowability continues to challenge the modern mind. 

Thank you for reading! If you have any comments or questions or would like to subscribe to the mailing list and receive announcements about similar content, please email: info@integrativepractice.ca. 

Winter Poem

The quivering wings of the winter ant
wait for lean winter to end.
I love you in slow, dim-witted ways,
hardly speaking, one or two words only.

What caused us to live hidden?
A wound, the wind, a word, a parent.
Sometimes we wait in a helpless way,
awkwardly, not whole and not healed.

When we hid the wound, we fell back
from a human to a shelled life.
Now we feel the ant’s hard chest,
the carapace, the silent tongue.

This must be the way of the ant,
the winter ant, the way of those
who are wounded and want to live:
to breathe, to sense another, and to wait.

— Robert Bly

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

As you tread onward in life, there are parts of yourself that you (sometimes intentionally and other times unintentionally) leave behind. Those parts do not go away. They accumulate. They are your shadow. One of the most essential aspects of honing your inner life is going into the dark and bringing out those parts into the light.

In this post, I would like to take you on a journey about owning your shadow-self by going through the first chapter of the Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson’s book Owning Your Own Shadow.

How do we create our shadow?

The author describes the shadow as the part of us we fail to know. He elaborates,

“We all are born whole and, let us hope, will die whole. But somewhere early on our way, we eat one of the wonderful fruits of the tree of knowledge, things separate into good and evil, and we begin the shadow-making process; we divide our lives. In the cultural process we sort out God-given characteristics into those that are acceptable to our society and those that we have to be put away. This is wonderful and necessary, and there would be no civilized behaviour without this sorting out of good and evil. But the refused and unacceptable characteristics do not go away; they only collect in the dark corners of our personality. When they have been hidden long enough, they take on a life of their own – the shadow life.”

Johnson’s description is steeped in biblical motifs (he did study at a monastery at one point); however, we can see the relevance of what he says about how the shadow originates. It seems that the shadow is made while we are trying to please other people. It comes out of our fears, desires, whims, and illusions. Shadow-making is an inescapable part of our humanity. It is a survival mechanism. However, if we are trying to elevate ourselves from survival-mode to, say, creative-mode, shadow work (facing our dark side) is an absolute requirement.

“The shadow is that which has not entered adequately into consciousness. It is the despised quarter of our being. It often has an energy potential nearly as great as that of our ego. If it accumulates more energy than our ego, it erupts as an overpowering rage or some indiscretion that slips past us; or we have a depression or an accident that seems to have its own purpose. The shadow gone autonomous is a terrible monster in our psychic house.”

The quote above is the nugget of Johnson’s book, which is an absolute eye-opener when read in its entirety. The idea that we refuse parts of our personality to fit into the ‘tribe’ or the ‘group’ is not necessarily a revelation; however, if we ponder that further, we realize that the consequence of rejecting parts of ourselves can be far-reaching.

“We divide the self into an ego and a shadow because our culture insists that we behave in a particular manner.”

The ego is our conscious self. It is the facade that we carry around. We usually work hard to maintain that facade. The shadow is the dumping ground of all our negative traits.

“One can make a forceful argument that children should not be subjected to this division too soon or they will be robbed of childhood; they should be allowed to remain in the Garden of Eden until they are strong enough to stand the cultural process without being broken by it.”

This issue can be controversial. It can be argued that school, the second form of a cultural institution after the family, can cause this initial internal split. However, Johnson continues, “It requires a keen eye to know when children are ready to adapt to the collective life of a society.” This topic is far too wide to be discussed here. However, we need to contemplate how unhealthy cultural constructs may cause internal divisions within individuals.

Further on, if we look around the world, what one country considers acceptable the other country does not, which means that the attributes that go under the ego, and the ones that go under the shadow, may differ from one country to another.

“It becomes clear that culture is an artificially imposed structure, but an absolutely necessary one.”

The sorting process may seem haphazard. Individuality, for instance, is a virtue in some societies and the greatest sin in others. The conflict between such views may cause internal and external mayhem in a world where an expansive communication network continues to bring everything and everyone closer.

“The shadow of one culture is a tinderbox of trouble for another.”

It is not all doom and gloom. We are reminded that the shadow is also the dumping ground of positive traits we are afraid to manifest; this will be explored further (keep reading!).

“Some of the pure gold of our personality is relegated to the shadow because it can find no place in that great leveling process that is culture.”

Johnson elaborates it may be harder to own the gold in the closet. People find it easier to bring out the skeletons. It is easier to admit that you are a ‘loser’ than it is to face up to your innate greatness and nobility. In reality, we carry the potential for both.

“The gold is related to our higher calling, and this can be hard to accept at certain stages of life. Ignoring the gold can be as damaging as ignoring the dark side of the psyche, and some people may suffer a severe shock or illness before they learn how to let the gold out.”

The intensity of an experience, such as an illness or losing a loved one, can be the vehicle that forces us to expunge the goodness within us. It echoes the archetype of the wounded healer who learns how to identify their ailment, discovers their wholeness, and then works to heal others.

Whatever the case may be, part of becoming an adult is to arrive with a sense of brokenness inside – humbled but fully aware of one’s potential to achieve wholeness.

“The religious process consists of restoring the wholeness of the personality. The word religion means to re-relate, to put back together again, to heal the wounds of separation. It is absolutely necessary to engage in the cultural process to redeem ourselves from our animal state; it is equally necessary to accomplish the spiritual task of putting our fractured, alienated world back together again.”

Interestingly, Johnson refers to ‘shadow work’ as a religious process. It is crucial to understand his nuanced explanation, especially since the role of religion can be ambiguous, sidelined, or manipulated for worldly gains!

The process of shadow-making is inevitable, and without it, there would be no culture. However, one must spend the second part of life recovering that division.

“Generally, the first half of life is devoted to the cultural process – gaining one’s skills, raising a family, disciplining one’s self in a hundred different ways; the second half of life is devoted to restoring the wholeness (making holy) of life.”

If we lose ourselves in this passageway, we may fail to individuate fully. We can say that the first half of life is unconscious, rushed, and unfulfilled. It seeks only the outward aspect of things, while the second half of life is the direct opposite. Being stuck between both is the determent.

“Unfortunately, many Westerners are caught in just this difficult phase.”

Johnson’s book was published in 1991. Almost twenty-six years later, we can argue that nowadays, not only Westerners find themselves caught up in this phase. In fact, due to the rise of a somewhat ‘homogenous’ global culture, more and more people are finding themselves stuck in this middle passageway. Especially since things like rites of passage, spiritual rituals, and communal living are deemed obsolete and, in some ways, are replaced by inferior options.

Balancing Culture and Shadow

“A cultured person is one who has the desired characteristics visible on the right (the righteous side) and the forbidden ones hidden on the left. All our characteristics must appear somewhere in this inventory. Nothing may be left out.”

Since “nothing may be left out,” Johnson showcases the personality as a “teeter-totter or see-saw” that balances the right side and the left side, and in our passage to wholeness, we must balance both of these sides. In some sense, wholeness is the fulcrum. Suppose one understands that their personality sways too far to the left; one must try to balance it out by assuming traits from the right and so on. For instance, if someone enjoys frivolity a bit too much in their life, they must try to consider some seriousness, but if someone is too severe in their life, they may need to assume some frivolity. Extremes appear when one side becomes heavier than the other side, and the seesaw flips.

“The alcoholic who suddenly becomes fanatical in his temperance, or the conservative who suddenly throws all caution to the wind…”

Taking the image of the see-saw even further, he argues that the see-saw may also break! “This is a psychosis or breakdown.” Just like the body seeks equilibrium through its temperature and its acid-alkaline ratio, the psyche does the same. Hence, the psyche is always seeking a state of balance. If someone cannot achieve balance, dire consequences may become apparent in one’s life – frustration, anxiety, depression, anger, or burnout.

Goodness and sainthood, the author argues, are not about living the right side and ignoring the left side. This one-dimensional view of a saint is a societal construct. Almost all authentic spiritual teachings relay stories of saints as regular human beings who had to go through their own “hero’s journey.” Who had to face their left side, or their dark side, to earn the right to pass on to wholeness. Authentic goodness acknowledges darkness and keeps it in check.

It does not mean that we go around parading our ‘darkness’, constantly.

“We must hide our dark side from society in general, or we will be a bloody bore; but we must never try to hide it from ourself. True sainthood – or personal effectiveness – consists in standing at the centre of the seesaw and producing only that which can be counterweighted with its opposite. This is far from the sentimental view of goodness that has been set up as our ideal.”

Johnson quotes St. Augustine, who says, “To act is to sin.” In the Hindu tradition, Brahma, the god of creation, is in juxtaposition to Shiva, the god of destruction, while Vishnu is the fulcrum. In the Sufi tradition, a genuine sheikh/mentor/teacher carefully guides the disciple through subtle inner work required to bring out the shadow. This universal process occurs in any authentic spiritual tradition; while it may be pretty uncomfortable, it is necessary.

“The balance of light and dark is ultimately possible and bearable. All nature lives in polarity – light, and dark, creation and destruction, up and down, male and female. It is not surprising that we find the same basic laws functioning in our psychological structure.”

To admit that there are more sides to us than we know is to acknowledge that we have no control over our lives. In a way, we have no control over who we are, but that’s not entirely accurate. We only have no control when our awareness is weak. The more aware we become, the smaller our shadow will become.

We can consider here how a culture steeped in social media creates its shadow. The shadow does not only build up on an individual level, but it also builds up on a collective level. People present themselves in a specific way. They capture the “perfect” moments in their lives. They get immediate feedback. Their sense of self or the illusion of their sense of self becomes bolstered with every ‘like’ and positive feedback, which perpetuates an image of perfection (light), which produces more shadow (dark) as compensation.

“To make light is to make shadow; one cannot exist without the other.”

Some people living out their creativity, preeminent artists, lead complicated private lives. Being admired and being in the public eye constantly is suffocating. Space is needed to expel the shadow side.

On another level, our technologically advanced society has its own collective shadow. While we are overly connected with everyone, we still suffer boredom and loneliness. The high ‘creativity’ of our modern society, Johnson argues, needs to pay out its shadow in an intelligent way.

On our path to wholeness, we must seek a more authentic way of being. Simple. Uncomplicated.

In relationships,

“Many a woman is burdened by paying out the dark side of a creative man; many a man is drained by carrying the dark side of a woman that is the byproduct of her creativity. Worst of all, children often have to carry the dark side of creative parents. It is proverbial that the minister’s child will be difficult and the wealthy man’s child is in danger of leading a meaningless life”.

It is interesting to consider the idea of projecting our shadow onto others, especially children. One of Jung's clients went to see him because he could not dream. Jung started analyzing the client through his client's son's dreams. Jung learned that the man's son had elaborate, vivid dreams. Further into analysis, the son stopped having vivid dreams, and the father 'reclaimed' back his nightly dreams. He reclaimed his psychic world.

Consider how much burden children carry when their parents are holding a dark shadow. Consider how much burden one partner has, even if it is on an unconscious level when the other partner carries a heavy shadow.

If the darkness within you is not acknowledged, it will turn up in different forms.

“Does this mean that I have to be as destructive as I am creative, as dark as I am light?”

The reader is called upon the ultimate question, “How, then, can one produce something of beauty or goodness without doing an equal amount of wreckage?” We must, therefore, ritually acknowledge this other dimension of reality.

“The unconscious cannot tell the difference between a “real” act and a symbolic one.”

Johnson gives examples of symbolic acts that may expel the shadow. If you were a writer, and – say – you just finished composing a piece of work of high merit. You, then, should let go and write something that seems ‘low-grade.’ Or if you were a classically trained musician involved in sophisticated compositions that are highly complicated and nuanced. Perhaps listening to some pop music or a piece that is out of tune is a way to “pay your dues” to the shadow side.

“Much of religious ceremony is designed to keep the left-hand side of the balance functioning in a compensatory way,” Johnson asserts. Religious acts seek to balance the mundane (dark) and the sacred (light). The author admits that, as modern people, we must always find new ways to seek wholeness.

A different perspective on the act of devotion. Some may choose to devote themselves to God, a Higher order, while others may devote themselves to a social cause or political belief. In devotion, we seek refuge in something Higher, which shrinks our ego. Devotion must expand our consciousnesses. It must nourish us intellectually, spiritually, and physically. If our devotion is a source of constriction and causes us to see ourselves as better than the ‘other,’ we must then question our intentions and authenticity. It means we still need more time with our shadow-self.

“To refuse the dark side of one’s nature is to store up or accumulate the darkness; this is later expressed as a black mood, psychosomatic illness, or unconsciously inspired accidents. We are presently dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshiped its light side and refused the dark side, and this residue appears as war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance. The front page of any newspaper hurls the collective shadow at us.

…

We must be whole whether we like it or not; the only choice is whether we will incorporate the shadow consciously and with some dignity or do it through some neurotic behaviour.”

To repair the ailments that plague society as a whole, we must, as individuals, ponder our interior life and seek to rectify its imbalances. The internal health of its people determines the health of a community. The person who seeks to amend their internal imbalance is not only helping themselves. They are also helping society as a whole.

Not everyone will be able to achieve wholeness. Not everyone is meant to earn it. However, those who have been able to reach it can handle relations with other people with more wisdom and grace since they have worked on removing their projections.

The Shadow in Projection

“Unless we do conscious work on it, the shadow is almost always projected; that is, it is neatly laid on someone or something else so we do not have to take responsibility for it.”

In our society, whole businesses target the projection of our (the consumer’s) shadow. We can look at the latest trends on TV shows or social media to see what’s being projected.

“We are left as less than whole personalities when we invest our own darkness into something outside ourselves. Projection is always easier than assimilation.”

Taking the concept of shadow projections into the collective consciousness, Johnson asserts,

“Men lay their shadow upon women, whites upon blacks, Catholics upon Protestants, capitalists upon communists, Muslims upon Hindus. Neighbourhoods will make one family the scapegoat and these people will bear the shadow of the entire group.”

Media is undoubtedly one of the primary business outlets that target the collective shadow. They always use a scapegoat or a bogeyman as a form of distraction, perpetuating a kind of intellectual numbness. A mere scan of current events reveals the ailments our society carries on an internal level.

It seems that this pathology can also manifest in children. One of the primary paths to individuation is for people to work on throwing off their parent’s shadow. A burden that some may carry from childhood comes in the form of a parent’s unfulfilled needs. The parent projects their internal disparities onto one particular child in the family (the black sheep). Sometimes the target is all the children.

“If a parent lays his shadow on a young child, that splits the personality of the child and sets the ego-shadow warfare into motion.”

The larger the shadow the parent casts upon the child, the harder it is for the child to lift the projection. As such, that child may grow up struggling with the cultural shadow and the parent’s shadow. When the child becomes an adult, they end up casting their shadow upon their children, a family pathology that perpetuates itself, creating intergenerational trauma.

“If you wish to give your children the best possible gift, the best possible entry into life, remove your shadow from them. To give them a clean heritage, psychologically speaking, is the greatest legacy.”

It is easy to belittle the amount of suffering handed from one generation to another, Johnson argues. The buck passes from one person to another. It is time to stop passing the buck around. It is time to stop passing on the shadow.

Johnson relays a story of one of his patients: a female whose husband retired. The woman was reduced to tears daily by her husband's shadow projection. Johnson advised his patient that she must deflect her husband's projection and not fight back or retreat into solitude. Just deflect the attacks like a matador deflects the bull. The shadow must then retract to its source, her husband.

“You can refuse shadow projection and stop the endless cycle of revenge if you have your own shadow under conscious control. To be in the presence of another’s shadow and not reply is nothing short of genius. No one has the right to dump his shadow on you, and you have the right to self-protection.”

Shadow projection is a subtle form of psychological abuse. Sometimes you may have to wait and let the shadow projection runs its course, and this can only happen when we have our own shadow reasonably well in hand, and we are not tempted to plan our retaliation.

Being able to shed our shadow helps us understand the meaning of what it means to love your enemy.

The Gold in the Shadow

Here the author takes us from the ‘bad’ side of the shadow to the ‘good’ side.

“Our hero-worshipping capacity is pure shadow; in this case our finest qualities are refused and laid on another. It is hard to understand, but we often refuse to bear our noble traits and instead find a shadow substitute for them.”

The author quotes Jack Sanford, an Episcopal priest.

“The ego is…primarily engaged in its own defense and the furtherance of its own ambitions. Everything that interferes with it must be repressed. The [repressed] elements…become the shadow. Often these are basically positive qualities.
There are, in my view, two “shadows”: (1) the dark side of the ego, which is carefully hidden from itself and which the ego will not acknowledge unless forced to by life’s difficulties, and (2) that which has been repressed in us lest it interfere without egocentricity and, however devilish it may seem, is basically connected to the Self.
In a showdown God (Self) favors the shadow over the ego, for the shadow, with all its dangerousness, is closer to the center and more genuine…”

The above quote is a fantastic summary of the concept of the shadow. However, Johnson admits that we live in a time that does not like to hear about the dark and light side of human nature. The modern human wants to tread on, make money, and live a dull life.

As long as we live in this state, suffering and conflict will remain a persistent part of our humanity. If you can get in touch with your own shadow, and do something out of your usual pattern, lots of energy will flow.

The Shadow in Middle Age

Johnson, here, discusses midlife crisis, a largely misunderstood topic. Why do some individuals find themselves stuck in midlife? Perhaps, we have finally grown sick of an imbalanced see-saw. The time has come to seek out a meaningful life and find the middle way. We may think that the middle way is a compromise, a dull grey zone when in reality, it is a place of ecstasy and joy!

Many wisdom traditions call upon the middle way. Taoism, for instance, which hails from ancient China, is about finding balance through “creative synthesis.” It is a form of art. One cannot stay in that perfect balance for a long time; however, moments of it or glimpses of it will suffice. 

The early half of life is about discipline and cultivating life. In the middle half of life, some people may choose to walk away from what’s familiar and take an entirely different direction. Johnson mentions another story of one of his patients who worked as an artist. He only drew eyebrows for various types of comics and was excellent at drawing expressive eyebrows. However, one day he looked at his work, swore out loud, and stormed out of his office and right into therapy. While this might sound like an extreme example, many people may feel the same way, but only a few act upon it.

“I told him he had totally exhausted that part of his life and would have to contact the unlived shadow if he wished to find a new vitality. Being a very nice person, he had a hard time making that contact.”

To confront their own shadow (their demons), many nice people may have to become a tad not nice!

The Ceremonial World

“Medieval heroes had to slay their dragons; modern heroes have to take their dragons back home to integrate into their own personality.”

We must live out the contents of the left side of the personality without damaging the right side. The psyche does not differentiate between the outer world and the inner world. It does not recognize linear time! Therefore, Johnson argues, symbolic ceremonies and rituals are an integral part of unveiling the shadow.

“Culture can only function if we live out the unwanted elements symbolically. All healthy societies have a rich ceremonial life. Less healthy societies rely on unconscious expressions: war, violence… Ceremony and ritual are a far more intelligent means of accomplishing the same thing.
Ceremonies the world over, and from every age, consist mostly of destruction: sacrifice, burning, ritual killing, bloodletting, fasting, and sexual abstention. … It is easy to fall into the error of thinking that we protect the culture by obliterating the destructive elements.
…
That is why a true religious ceremony has to contain as much darkness as light.”

We cannot deny that many spiritual traditions require ceremonial, ritualistic practices meant to serve the shadow in some way. These may come in various forms: joyous ceremonies, rhapsodies, devotion, and even bloodletting. Bloodletting or cupping is an ancient practice in Ayurvedic medicine, the Talmud, and the prophetic teachings of Mohammed ﷺ in Islam. A cup is placed on the skin after an incision, and blood is drawn out of the body at specific points and in a precise manner. It is supposed to remove ‘unclean’ blood or, in other words, negative energies of various forms, including physical ailments. The practice goes back to ancient Egypt, China, Persia, and Greece. Many scientific studies corroborate the benefits of cupping.

“All of this flies very much in the face of traditional thinking. Our present model seems to be that if we can do something sufficiently creative, that will overwhelm the dark forces and we will have triumphed. But a very different solution is required.”

Ritual devotion to something higher is a necessary spiritual medicine. Still, we must comprehend that what is meaningful to one person may not be for another, or else it becomes indoctrination.

Perhaps, the size of the shadow is so big, and its nature too ambiguous, and as such, we need to hold various form of sacred ceremonies that are meaningful to the individual and the collective.

The tension between dark and light, yin and yang, is a treasure that the modern human is unaware of.

“Our fate can truly be altered if we have the courage to embrace the opposites.”

And hopefully, this is how we tread toward the path of enlightenment and liberation.

Thank you for reading! If you have any comments or questions or would like to subscribe to the mailing list and receive announcements about similar content, please email: info@integrativepractice.ca. 

Permalink