In the Islamic worldview, nothing could be more preposterous than to suggest that reality as we perceive it is just what it appears to be, or that human beings have at their disposal the means to plumb the ultimate depths of the universe and to solve all its mysteries. The basic given is that an inexhaustible richness of meaning and significance lies beneath the surface and beyond appearances. The Qur’an is full of verses that speak of the invisible realities that permeate the visible realm, realities that include God, angels, and spirits; indeed, the very foundation of Islam is “faith in the unseen” (cf. Qur’an 2:3). The primary unseen reality is God, who knows himself and, as the Qur’an tells us repeatedly, “all things.” God alone, in Qur’anic terms, is “knower of both the Unseen and the Visible.” As for human beings, “They encompass nothing of His knowledge save as He wills” (2:255).
Precisely because people are ignorant, they must search for knowledge. But this is not just any knowledge, nor is it information. Real knowledge takes as its object God and the doings of God (knowledge of reality as it is in itself), and God’s guidance and instructions (knowledge of how human beings should act and be). Knowledge of both of these realms comes by way of the “signs” (āyāt), which the Qur’an locates in three broad domains: scripture and prophetic activity, natural phenomena, and the human self. The Qur’an’s repeated use of this word announces that even though the significance of things and events is hidden, what we perceive gives hints and intimations of their meanings.
The fact that reality as we perceive it speaks to us of something far deeper and far more real follows directly upon tawḥīd, “There is nothing real but the Real.” God alone truly deserves the epithet “reality,” and everything else has an ambiguous status. God alone is Truth, and everything else simultaneously conceals and reveals the Truth.
The goal of the seeker of wisdom is to actualize and realize intelligence, which at its pinnacle is a transpersonal reality, fully aware of all of existence and dwelling at the very core of the human substance. Only by accessing intelligence can people find an eye adequate to wisdom, which is an attribute of God, the All-Knowing, the All-Wise.
Nowadays, something of the difference between the intellectual knowledge that aims for wisdom and the transmitted knowledge that depends upon imitation is reflected in the approaches and methodologies of the academic disciplines. Fields rooted in mathematics incline toward intellectual understanding, and fields having to do with history, social science, and the humanities are firmly grounded in transmission.
If mathematics was traditionally considered an intellectual science of sorts, this is because its principles can be discovered within oneself without the need for transmission. The special sense of certainty that comes from mathematical knowledge was seen as deriving from the fact that mathematics is an expression of the unitary, intelligible order that underlies apparent reality and forms the bedrock of the soul. Unlike transmitted knowledge, mathematical truths, once understood, are seen to be necessarily so, because they conform with the reality that shapes cosmos and soul. Nonetheless, to the degree that mathematics operates on the basis of data coming from outside the self, it was not considered a pure intellectual science. It partakes of a lesser degree of certainty and was commonly considered “intermediate” (mutawassiṭ ) between transmitted and intellectual.
Most religious knowledge is transmitted, but most nonreligious knowledge is also transmitted, because practically everything we know has been learned from others, not discovered within ourselves. Modern science inclines toward discovery, but what is discovered is typically thought to lie in the outside world, not in the inner world of the discovering self. Scientists would like to achieve firsthand knowing, but their general knowledge of science is necessarily transmitted. Given the takthīr that drives the accumulation of data and the proliferation of theories, scientists are by definition specialists, and even in their own fields, they discover nothing without building on the findings of their predecessors.
In short, modern science, especially its mathematical forms, has an “intellectual” proclivity, but at the same time, good scientists are the first to recognize that they stand on the shoulders of giants. To reach their goals, they take the received knowledge as given. It may happen that at a certain point, a large number of scientists question the transmitted theories to such a degree that they bring about a “paradigm shift.” Then some of the authorities from whom they draw their transmitted knowledge and theoretical understanding will change.
True intellectual knowledge is altogether different. It is not achieved by standing on anyone’s shoulders. Only what is known in the depths of the soul, without intermediary, is intellectual in the proper sense of the word. No one can pass such knowledge on to someone else, nor can it be found by reading and study. It must be realized within oneself through a long process of mental training and inner purification.
One of the fruits of intellectual learning was to understand – or rather, to see and realize – that the so-called “object” out there and the “subject” in here are essentially the same. To think of the two as separate is to falsify the meaning of cosmos and soul, to distort the relationship between things and self. Such falsifications inevitably lead to wrong relationships with self, people, and the world. The very structure of the intellectual quest stressed not only the achievement of right knowledge through the unification of subject and object, but also the actualization of sound moral character and the cultivation of virtue. The quest aimed at overcoming the soul’s selfcenteredness, to train it to detach itself from its individualistic tendencies, and to point the way toward bridging the gap between self and other.
Aspiring philosophers studied ethics as a standard part of their training, and Sufis considered the achievement of virtue and the avoidance of vice as the first priority. Ethics was not just a theoretical endeavor, but the guidebook for becoming a better person. At the same time, it was always taken for granted that correct activity – ethical, moral, and virtuous action – depends upon correct knowledge of the world, and correct knowledge of the world depends upon knowing the contingent and convergent reality of soul and cosmos.
How exactly the split between subject and object came to be firmly entrenched in the modern worldview has been much discussed and debated by historians and philosophers. Whatever the detailed reasons may have been, the result was that a separative, divisive epistemology gradually appeared and became crystallized with Descartes. For centuries, seekers of wisdom had understood that the highest purpose of knowledge was to achieve correct understanding of God and the world in tandem with self-understanding and self-realization. This approach was eventually abandoned and replaced almost entirely by another outlook. Knowledge came to be understood primarily as an instrument for control and manipulation. Certainly, many scientists remained ethical and moral human beings, but they could no longer address the necessity for virtue in the context of their own quest for knowledge of the natural world.
Originally, the search for wisdom went hand in hand with the attempt to perfect the soul. Philosophy, as Pierre Hadot has shown, had always been a way of life and a spiritual discipline.27 Eventually, concern for the inner realm was relegated to theologians and moralists. Ethics was turned into an afterthought to “real” knowledge, and fact was disjoined from value. The premodern traditions had sought knowledge in order to cultivate and perfect the self, but the modern scientific enterprise abandoned the self to its own subjective realm and sought to manipulate and exploit the other. Few have explained what happened as well as Appleyard. In drawing a few conclusions, he remarks,
Science trapped us all in our private reasons. It divided us from our world, locked us in the armored turrets of our consciousness. Outside was an alien landscape which was either illusory or meaningless, inside was the only possession of which we could be sure – the continued, anxious chattering of our self-awareness. Our souls were removed from our bodies.28
The intellectual tradition held that the goal of study and learning was not to achieve a specific knowledge or to solve specific problems. Individualistic and specifying motivations were seen as diversions from the cultivation of the soul and the realization of selfhood. One could not love wisdom – which was none other than the Wise – by aiming to understand this or that, by attempting to achieve limited and defined goals. This is precisely what Avicenna means when he says, “Knowers desire the Real, the First, only for His sake, not for the sake of something else.” Only accessing the intellect, the radiant light of the infinite God, allows for full actualization of the self and full understanding of the world.
What then is this “selfhood” that seekers of wisdom were striving to realize? This is the question I now need to address, with the caveat that true and real knowledge of selfhood is inaccessible to any but self. There is no object out there to be known. In knowledge of self, subject and object, knower and known, are the same thing. Moreover, any oral or written expression of self-knowledge can only be received by way of transmission. The only locus of intellectual knowledge is the knowing self. Transmitted expressions can at best point the soul in the right direction.
To suggest the nature of the self, we need a context in which discussing it makes sense. This is precisely the role of a worldview. The modern-day outlook on things – whether or not we accept the common idea that it is collapsing – does not provide an overview of the whole of reality, since real knowledge has been reduced to what can be verified empirically. Such verification, however, depends upon establishing some control over the object, a control that can only be obtained when subject and object are seen as distinct. Only external, controllable realms of reality are considered real, which is to say that “reality” has been reduced to the visible realm. The infinitely vaster realm of the Unseen is simply ignored.
Traditional worldviews are marked by a grandeur of scope that puts the invisible dimensions of reality at center stage. Their cosmological schemes have either been open-ended or could easily be understood as such by those who appreciate the language of symbolism and signs (contra the opinion of those who see the medieval, Christian universe as “closed”). In traditional worldviews, there are no limiting horizons, because any depiction of things must be recognized as a visible and inadequate representation of the Invisible. Phenomena are not opaque; rather, they are transparent, because they point to the Infinite – whether it be called God, Brahman, the Buddha-nature, or Tao.
From the standpoint of the intellectual tradition, the intuition of tawḥīd drives every quest for knowledge. All seekers of knowledge already understand at some level of their being that things are coherent, intelligible, and interconnected. Any healthy mind knows that the universe is held together by a single reality – the very word “universe” points to this intuition (even discussion of a “multiverse” is rooted in the unifying vision of human intelligence). The modern scientific enterprise illustrates the omnipresent intuition of tawḥīd, because it is built on the assumption that knowable laws govern the universe. Any talk of laws and knowability presupposes the notion of interconnection, interrelatedness, and ultimate wholeness. If some scientists choose to deny ultimate unity, they do so because it cannot be proven empirically, but their endeavors belie their words.
For the intellectual tradition, tawḥīd provides the only sure and certain point of reference, precisely because it announces the reality of the Absolutely One, the only reality that is truly real. Knowledge of the cosmos can then be derived by observing cosmos and soul while recognizing God as First and Last, Alpha and Omega. The most typical word used to designate the Absolutely One in Islamic philosophy is wujūd, which, as we have seen, means not only being, but also finding, perception, awareness, consciousness, knowledge, joy. Consciousness is an essential attribute of the Real Being, which is to say that Being and Consciousness are exactly the same in the Ultimate Reality. It is this Being-cum-Consciousness that brings forth the phenomenal universe – that is, creates the world – by means of various attributes that are self-evident in our experience of ourselves and the universe, such as life, power, and love.
The Hindus tell us that Brahman is sat–chit–ananda, “being– knowledge–bliss.” Seyyed Hossein Nasr has remarked that we can see an equivalent of this Sanskrit expression in the three Arabic words wujūd–wijdān–wajd, “being–consciousness–ecstasy,” all of which derive from the same root w.j.d., though each word stresses a different implication of Ultimate Reality.
To say, as the philosophers do, that God is “the Necessary Being” (wājib al-wujūd) means that by his very essence he is and cannot not be, but it also means that he is conscious and aware and cannot not be so, and that he is blissful and joyful and cannot not be so. These three attributes – being, awareness, bliss – then give rise to all the existential qualities that cause the world to coagulate out of nothingness.
The first reality that the Supreme Reality brings into existence, the Intellect or Spirit, is as similar to that Reality as any contingent thing can be. It is aware with a contingent awareness of all that may possibly be. The Real gives rise to multiplicity by means of this first, contingent reality. But the universe appears gradually and, as it moves further from its origin, becomes ever more diminished, just as the intensity of light decreases in keeping with its distance from its source.
This diminution of reality occurs in a series of stages that are enumerated in a variety of ways. The basic understanding is that the cosmos is coherent, ordered, layered, and directional. There are degrees of reality, some closer to Real Being and some further away. Closeness to the Real is judged in terms of the degree of participation in its attributes, that is, by the intensity of a level’s unity, life, consciousness, power, will, compassion, wisdom, love, and so on. Distance from the Real is judged by the weakness of these same attributes. Ultimately, the traces of Being–Consciousness–Bliss become so attenuated that the process can go no further, so it turns back upon itself.
Muslim cosmologists see the universe as bi-directional, eternally coming forth from the Real and eternally receding back into the Real. It is at once centrifugal and centripetal. The Real is Absolute, Infinite, and Unchanging, and everything else is moving, altering, and transmuting. All movement is either toward the Real or away from it. The direction of movement is judged in terms of the increasing or decreasing intensity of the signs and traces of the Real that appear in things.
In this universe that is forever coming and going, there is no place for the stark dualisms that characterize so much of modern thought. In the more sophisticated cosmologies, reality is understood in terms of continuums, spectrums, complementarities, equilibriums, balances, and unities. Spirit and body, heaven and earth, past and future, local and non-local – all are understood as relative and complementary terms. Moreover, whenever a duality is discussed, there is typically a third factor, intermediate between the two, which plays the role of an “isthmus” (barzakh), something that is neither the one nor the other but allows for interrelationship. There was no terminology to express the stark dichotomies that Western thought has seen between “natural and supernatural” or “mind and body” or “spirit and matter.” Everything natural has supernatural dimensions, and everything bodily is permeated with spirit; on every level the universe is infused with signs and intimations of unseen things. There can be no absolutes in any realm of observation – the only absolute is God, the One, who is Unseen and Unobserved by definition.
From the perspective of the philosophical tradition, the deepest root of the human self is the First Intellect, which knows every potentiality of phenomenal existence. It is this Intellect that gives birth to the universe in a centrifugal process analogous to the diffusion of light. As for the simultaneous centripetal movement, it appears wherever we look, especially in plants and animals, both of which show forth life and awareness.
Life, it needs to be remembered, actualizes a more intense degree of reality than lack of life. Life is an attribute of the Real, and among its traces are coherence and integration. In contrast, lack of life pertains to relative dispersion and incoherence. Moreover, life does not exist on the same plane as dead, inert, material things. We cannot analyze life per se, only its activities, signs, and traces. Life is already, in a profound sense, unseen and spiritual. Because life escapes fixity, it is less amenable than bodily things to mathematical analysis and technological manipulation. Its essential invisibility helps explain why biology can never be a “hard” science and why medicine will always be faced with the problem of determining the moment of “death.”
Our only real knowledge of life is firsthand, inside ourselves. But where exactly do we know life? Life is essentially invisible and non-localizable, and this is even more true of awareness, which embraces the reality of life but simultaneously pertains to a higher level of being, further removed from inanimateness and closer to the First Real. Animal awareness, however, has severe constraints that become apparent as soon as we meditate upon the differences between human and animal possibilities. In effect, animals cannot transcend non-reflexive awareness of their environment. In contrast, human beings have the potential of moving beyond the limitations and constraints of the animal plane and of reflecting on the self that knows.
In other words, human beings can aim for “freedom” from their environmental limitations – not just physical limitations, but also social, political, and psychological limitations. Much more profoundly, they can strive for freedom from all limitations and all constraints. To do so they need to extirpate what the Buddhists call “the three poisons” – anger, greed, and ignorance. The basic impediments to freedom are the imperfections of the self, its failure to actualize its own reality. Ultimately, as Hindus well know, “freedom” (moksha) is the name of true and realized human selfhood. This is precisely realization, which is achieved by “freeing” or “disengaging” (tajarrud) the self from everything less than itself.
Inanimate things, plants, and animals are limited and therefore definable. Human beings are definable only inasmuch as they live beneath themselves. Any definition of human nature pertains to a level of being that lies beneath true selfhood. Definition pertains to realms that are essentially limited, such as the inanimate, the vegetal, the physiological, the animate, and the psychic.
Consciousness is not essentially limited; it itself is the subject that perceives limits, boundaries, and definitions. Strictly human modalities of being pertain to pure consciousness and pure awareness; the true human selfhood cannot be defined, yet it gives rise to every distinction and differentiation. Those human beings who fully realize their own selfhood – their innate, unlimited intelligence and consciousness – thereby gain freedom from every constraint.
It can also be said that there is no definition of the human self adequate to taking control of it and putting it to use. The self, in itself, is always free, despite the external constraints and controls that may be placed upon the bodily and animal planes of human nature, and despite the internal ignorance and illusion that typically veil the self from seeing things as they are and knowing its own freedom. Epistemologically, this means that true human selfhood cannot be the object of transmitted knowledge. It can only be known by direct, unmediated knowledge. We cannot know ourselves by reading about ourselves, carrying out controlled experiments, listening to what other people have said about us, or examining what we perceive of other people’s selves. We can only know ourselves inside ourselves and without the intermediary of any instruments. These “instruments” include not simply scientific devices, but also the five senses, imagination, and thought, all of which are tools of the self.
In short, the human self per se dwells in a realm of being that transcends its own instruments. With even more reason, the Source of the self, which is the First Real, is inaccessible to the instruments of the self and even to the self itself. As the Sufis put it, “None knows God but God.” Any real knowledge of God is simply the omnipresent God knowing himself through the human self, which is ultimately the First Intellect, the radiance of the Divine Light.
Let me now turn to the question implied by the title of this chapter: how does one search for meaning in the intellectual tradition? It needs to be stressed that “meaning” is found by the knowing self inside itself, not outside. There is no “meaning” out there, over and apart from the observer. It is absurd to suppose that anything in the world can have a meaning apart from a self that is observing and understanding.
The connection between observer and observed goes back to the rootedness of all reality in the One Reality, which is Being– Consciousness–Bliss. We can understand this as signifying that God is object (Being), subject (Consciousness), and the living union of subject and object (Bliss) at one and the same time. In the universe, we initially perceive these three aspects of the One as distinct. The goal is to see all things as they truly are, and this demands reuniting the three aspects.
In the universe as we normally perceive it, subject and object are disjoined. The fact is, however, that the universe as object independent from a subject is not even there. I do not mean to suggest that the universe is contingent upon us as observers; rather, it is contingent upon the Necessary Being, the Real Knower, Brahman/Atman. The very being of the universe derives from the qualities and characteristics of the Real, whose traces it displays. The universe exists only as a “sign” of the Real, who knows it, perceives it, and understands it at every stage of its unfolding. In the last analysis, the universe has no existence save as an epiphenomenon of God’s knowledge and consciousness. As some Sufis put it, the universe is God’s dream, and as the Vedantists say, all is Maya.
The question of the search for meaning then comes down to this: can we know the meaning of the universe or of any object within it without knowing the meaning of the Real? Can we know the meaning of the dream without knowing the Dreaming Subject? Can we know our own selves anywhere else than within ourselves? Certainly, we can know the meaning of some things in relation to other things – all our disciplines provide this sort of meaning, though of course they provide it to those who understand the meaning, who find it within themselves. But what about the meaning of things as they really are – not in relation to other things, to this observer or that observer, but to the Absolute Observer, who is Being–Consciousness–Bliss? What about the meaning of things as they are situated in the infinitely complex web of intersecting journeys coming from the Real and returning to the Real? What in fact is the meaning of the individual jewels that stud Indra’s net?
Given that human selves cannot be defined, they have no fixed standpoint within themselves. They have the potentiality of defining and understanding everything beneath their own level, and they have the ability to choose their standpoint in trying to understand. This means that people can look at the universe and themselves from a vast diversity of perspectives. The historical proliferation of cultures and worldviews is more than enough to show that the possible viewpoints allowing human beings to address the world and to search for meaning are beyond count. The proliferation of viewpoints, however, shows that the viewers are not in fact constrained in any essential way or confined to any specific viewpoint. Hence it is possible to step outside all viewpoints, all the ways of looking at the world that are conditioned by history, culture, religion, and science.
The great spiritual and contemplative traditions – traditions that are “intellectual” in the way I am using the word – are unanimous in declaring that it is indeed possible to become free of limitations and to act as the vehicle through which the Unobserved Observer observes. Human possibility transcends time, space, history, physicality, energy, ideation, the angels, and the gods themselves (though not “God” in the proper sense of the word). It is precisely this possibility of transcendence that marks the highest human calling. Indeed, when a tradition acknowledges this calling, it also acknowledges that this alone is the truly human calling. Every other calling turns people away from their root selfhood, which is the image of the Supreme Reality, if not that Reality itself. Every other calling represents misdirected love.
In short, the intellectual tradition maintains that the human self has the potential to go beyond every standpoint and every perspective, to step outside culture, history, and even the universe. The tradition sometimes calls the selfhood that achieves this freedom from all constraint “the standpoint of no standpoint” (maqām lā maqām), or “the Point at the Center of the Circle of Being–Consciousness–Bliss” (nuqṭa wasaṭ dā‘irat al-wujūd). This ultimate standpoint is nonspecific and indefinable, so it encompasses every specific and definable standpoint. But, in order to reach the standpoint of no standpoint, one must harness the various dimensions that make up the external manifestation of the self’s reality – body, soul, mind, thought, imagination – and attach them to the centripetal movement going back to the Center.
Despite these two movements – centrifugal and centripetal, descending and ascending – intelligence per se never leaves its own invisible and transcendent reality. In its deepest nature, the human self is indistinguishable from intelligence, so it remains indefinable and nonspecific. Every specific thing and every specific viewpoint tells the self what it is not. The self knows that it is not limited by the objects of its knowledge or by the finiteness of things, nor by the limitations of this standpoint or that science; it also knows that it has the potential to perceive and comprehend all definitions and all limitations. Hence it knows – if it is aware of itself – that it has no inherent limitations. It is free, not of this or that, but of all things, of everything less than the Real.
Reattaching oneself to the First Intelligence is the goal of aspiring “intellectuals.” They want to make actual what is potential within themselves. But in order to achieve full realization, they must abandon dependence upon transmitted knowledge and come to know for themselves. To the degree that they do so, they rejoin the intelligence from which the soul departed at the outset and they achieve omniscience, though not in a differentiated way. This is a unitary understanding, an awareness of all things at their root. It is a spontaneous knowing, a blossoming of consciousness, an awakening to reality – all without reflection or thought. It is to see things as they are seen by the First Intellect before their appearance as coagulations in the universe.
From the standpoint of the intellectual tradition, every search for meaning that takes a specific standpoint – physics, medicine, sociology, theology – is constrained and limited by its premises and presuppositions. The discovered meaning will always be defined by the starting point. In contrast, in a purely intellectual quest, the only presupposition is the unity of the Infinite, Absolute, and Unknown Reality, which has no specific definition and stands in no standpoint. It is this non-specific goal that is sought by the seeker. The quest can have no closure, because the Infinite and Absolute can never be reached, though it reaches everywhere. As long as human beings take finite things, or a defined and known God, as the object of their quest, they can never know the true and final meaning of the universe and themselves.
Conclusions are inextricably linked to premises. Only the premise of tawḥīd – the transcendence, infinity, and absoluteness of the One Reality – allows the achievement of the full potential of the self. The conclusion of the quest will be the same as the first step, for no real steps can be taken without already being aware of the goal. At the beginning, however, tawḥīd is simply an inchoate intuition. It is then awakened and articulated by transmitted knowledge. Gradually it can grow into an actualized understanding, then a rational certainty, then a supra-rational comprehension of the way things are, and then a vision that transcends the vision of the eyes just as ocular vision transcends blindness. All these, however, are preliminary stages of consciousness. The goal is to realize tawḥīd for oneself and in oneself. One must find oneself and all things in their total context. The soul must come to recognize itself as a ray of the absolute and infinite Light. The beginning, then, is intuition and innate perception, and the end is the realization of being, knowledge, and bliss.
From the standpoint of this tradition, any search for the meaning of things and objects that does not allow seekers to open themselves up to the depths of their own selves will be an obstacle in the task of learning how to be human. It is impossible to know the meaning of anything without establishing a standpoint from which to speak of meaning. As long as the standpoint is determined by transmitted knowledge or theoretical frameworks, it will be limited by its givens. Only a standpoint of no standpoint can allow for transcending standpoints and arriving at the meaning behind all relative and situational meanings. The standpoint of no standpoint is available only in the transcendent realm that gives rise to the universe in the first place. True meaning can never be grasped by dogma, doctrine, theories, theorems, or any other mental construct. It can only be found by going beyond the operations of the mind, actualizing the unitary awareness of primordial intelligence that lies beneath the mind and behind the world, and integrating the human self back into its transcendent Origin.