By Sabnum Dharamsi ã
Talk given at St Ethelburga’s, London (2007) edited version (2009)
This talk is about intersections between knowledge, psychology and faith, and their role in understanding the nature of truth and knowledge and how these condition our actions. It does this by taking a journey from doubt to reason, through different aspects of oneself, and in doing shows how experience is inevitably shrouded in ambiguity. This process can lead to ‘the dark night of the soul’. From this ‘nothingness’, this inward place in which there is no goal, the process of real life and true understanding can begin, because it is as this point that one is truly open. The acknowledgement of doubt and ambiguity is therefore the beginning of knowing, and it is divinely ordained. It is from this place of recognition that a counsellor with faith and love can begin to help the individual to come to see themselves, and their journey. Through this relationship the client may perhaps even recognize that doubt has been an essential aspect of the route to knowing, and that this is part of Perfection.
This journey is subjective and experiential. So I am beginning this journey with you from a place of doubt – my own. The place of doubt is also yours, if you accept the implicit invitation of this article to bring yourself into this unbelieving unstable world of mine.
I begin with three examples.
EXAMPLE 1: If you see a woman scattering petals in the street, shouting to no-one in particular, “love in the name of God” is she mad? Does she need help? What kind of help? Can psychiatry or psychology help to understand it?
EXAMPLE 2: If you see a child who is misbehaving, would you pray for him, send him to a super nanny, blame a godless society or call in the counsellor, or would you read a self-help book?
EXAMPLE 3: If you are depressed because life no longer has meaning, it’s joys seem empty and unfulfilling, do you understand that life is constrained because you are hooked by absolute pleasure, and no thing or person or situation can quench that thirst, which is a thirst to recognise and prostrate before God? Or do you take a pill because that answer makes no sense, or do you realise that your situation comes about because of an inherent insecurity from childhood?
What do you do? How you see the world makes a big difference to what you do, and also to how society responds to you. There is no one answer to these examples – their purpose here is to highlight other questions; what is reality? how ‘real’ is imagination? which experience do we go by or prioritise? And what does that say about who we are, and what is important?
Psychology (the scientific study of behaviour and mental processes) epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and faith all consider aspects of these questions in different ways. Their importance as areas of study is evident and undeniable: it is important to discover the location of consciousness, the primacy of cognition or behaviour and whether mental imagery is dependent upon the senses. It is important to know the difference between visions, hallucination and belief in the after-life. It is important to know that the importance we currently give to imagination as a positive creative force has been heavily influenced by the Romantic Poets. However, the common ground that these diverse ‘disciplines’ highlight and reveal is, I believe, of blinding significance. Behind all of these is the story of contemporary society’s struggle with itself and its history to find its underlying truth.
It may seem obvious to the point of disingenuity to state that the purpose of these fields of study is knowledge. However, the context is this; studies from the fields of neuroscience, epistemology, psychology and theology all tell us that perception is selective, often illusory – not the whole truth. Indeed, the overriding message of the post-modern era has been that truth is relative, conditioned by culture and context (McNamee and Gergen, 1992). At the level of the individual, a post-modernist stance is that experience, the sum of our life’s experience, can be treacherous. For example, numerous psychological experiments show that the interpretation of our senses can be unreliable. (see Hilgard 1996 ‘Ames Room’) Not only that, it has been shown that we can act under the influence of emotions (being angry, for example) and be aware at the level of feeling, but not of thought (Zajonc 1984), (Lazarus 1991). Even more frighteningly, erstwhile reliable and influential ways of ascertaining truth, such as scientific methods of analysis as well as religious methods of knowing have all been shown to be badly wrong. Aspects of Abrahamic religions have been shown to derive from pagan myths. Freud ‘discovered’ the unconscious, but his discoveries have been tainted by evidence of his misogyny. Quantum mechanics has thrown basic premises of classical physics into question. How you see the world is dependent on many factors – culture, upbringing, genetics or what you are measuring. Influential post-modernist thinkers have shown us that the basis of knowledge itself is inherently selective and constantly changing. We can no longer trace neat lines of causality, or trust the body of knowledge we have, since:
“Recurrent Redistributions reveal several pasts, several forms of connexion, several teleologies, for one and the same science, as its present undergoes change; thus historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge, they increase with every transformation, and never cease, in turn, to break with themselves.” (Foucault 1989)
Post-modernism has helped us to see discourses and knowledge we held previously as flawed, but has also led us to collective, societal doubt. And this is not just historical, abstract, but evident perhaps in an individual’s (my own) inability to make decisions, noted in the beginning of this paper. The recognition of doubt plays out in fields of knowledge as well as the lives of individuals – not new, but perhaps more intensely in a post –modern society.
Evidence of this ambiguity can be seen in the therapeutic field. It is interesting to note how there is both a drive for more evidence-based, behavioural practice as well as hot debates about ‘therapy’s constraining and normalising “regime of truth’ (The British Psychological Society’s Special Review on Registration). While some studies indicate that it is not the type of therapy but rather the relationship that best predicts effectiveness for therapeutic outcomes[1] (Rozenzweig1936, Wampold et al 1997), NICE (National Institute of Clinical Effectiveness) firmly advocate CBT (cognitive behaviour therapy) as the most ‘effective of all forms of therapy’ based on clinically valid research (Cohen, 2008). Many objections have been raised around the validity of the pre-eminence of CBT and NICE’s claims, including that CBT is more amenable to be proven effective precisely because it is behavioural and therefore able to provide measurable outcomes, and also that there is no evidence of CBT’s effectiveness with Black and Minority Ethnic Communities (Cohen, 2008). However these objections are not the focus of this talk. The argument is presented to highlight how on the one hand The British Psychological Society is questioning the ways in which therapy’s ‘regime of truth’ can “perpetrate far more net abuse than the more overt abuse which regulation aspires to legislate” and on the other the UK Government have promoted CBT by funding it through the IAPT programme (Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies) with a budget of £173 million. I would argue that there is an inherent uncertainty here, which arises because of different ways of seeing the world.
So are we doomed to be chasing our own tails forever, never trusting our reality? Psychology and the sciences are traditionally pitted against religion, but is it true that we are not able to trust psychology science religion or even ourselves? This fear, that there is nothing and nowhere to go, if confronted, is terrifying. And in different forms, the debate has gone on forever, with evidence proving and disproving the territory in apparently ever-decreasing circles
Yet I invite you to look at this another way. From the perspective of the individual, doubt, uncertainty, and cognitive dissonance all can be stages on the way to inner resolution. In spiritual terminology, this might be called the “Dark Night of the Soul”, from which there often does come profound understanding. In his poem ‘Howl” Alan Ginsberg goes from devastating observations about how messed up everything is to:
“Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucina-tions holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss!
Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours!bodies! suffering! magnanimity! Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!” And from another tradition:
“The face of the Beloved appeared and shone in the early dawn.
His light pervaded my heart, so I prostrated myself in awe
He said to me: Rise – and ask of Me! You will have whatever you desire.’
I replied: You. You are enough for me! Away from you I can not live!”
The Songs of Shaykh Muhammed Ibn al-Habib
That ‘inward place’ is undeniable – undeniable. It’s experience, subjective, yet true beyond the relatively shallow and disintegrating frames of ratiocentric knowledge. It is individual, yet thousands of seekers, across religious divides, have witnessed this truth. It is the experience of faith, which becomes, to those who are transformed by it, knowledge, certainty; an experience which transcends other experiences, the ‘pearl of great price’ that is described in the Bible.
Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls:
Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.
The Bible – Gospel of Matthew (KJV)
Yet my point is not that faith is the answer.
If we look at history, then it is clear that science has also ‘offered’ religion much. Of course, science and religion are not necessarily opposites or mutually exclusive, but latterly Religion has had to come to terms with the discoveries of ruthless questioning into the heart of anthropomorphic traditions that upheld man as God’s chosen. Because the promise of science is that it delivers objectivity based on measurable and tangible realities, it seemed to offer truth that was not culturally biased or time limited. 2+2=4 never changes. Historically too, science and the age of enlightenment has offered a way out of the tyranny of entrenched religiously justified thinking, superstitions, and the interests of powerful despots.
Science also often serves its own nepotistic interests, is influenced by its paymasters and reflects the limitations of culture, our time and of thought itself. And this is where it gets interesting. It is those holes or limitations that make us doubt earlier ‘truths’, frame knowledge or understanding as perspectives, but also drive us onward to discover greater, more encompassing paradigms. Wilber, in his book ‘A Brief History of Everything’, passionately argues for an ‘integral’ basis for assessing the value of knowledge – i.e. that inner and outer perspectives, individual and collective, (for example psychological and sociological, mystical and scientific) should be combined. What is also interesting is that his theory follows on from his decrial of the value of post-modernism, which he calls ‘flatland’, and his openess to mystical ways of knowing. He states:
Are the mystics and sages insane? Because they all tell variations on the same story, don’t they? The story of awakening one morning and discovering you are one with the All, in a timeless and eternal and infinite fashion. Yes, maybe they are crazy, these divine fools. Maybe they are mumbling idiots in the face of the Abyss. Maybe they need a nice, understanding therapist. Yes, I’m sure that would help. But then, I wonder. Maybe the evolutionary sequence really is from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, each transcending and including, each with a greater depth and greater consciousness and wider embrace. And in the highest reaches of evolution, maybe, just maybe, an individual’s consciousness does indeed touch infinity—a total embrace of the entire Kosmos—a Kosmic consciousness that is Spirit awakened to its own true nature. It’s at least plausible. And tell me: is that story, sung by mystics and sages the world over, any crazier than the scientific materialism story, which is that the entire sequence is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing? Listen very carefully: just which of those two stories actually sounds totally insane?
Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything,
In other words, there is an interplay here of the mystic and the material, the infinitely reductive and infinitely expansive, outer evidence-based knowledge and the inner, subjective. These manifest in relation to each other and limitations inherent in each other. There are numerous realities, or paradigms, modes of knowledge, but all of these are contingent upon an absolute, never physically found, truth. Truth is the absolute undying reference point which all of our striving to understand is predicated upon. The universe is both myth and reality, and the lines between the two are increasingly blurred. Theories of the multiverse, of multiple dimensions, of consciousness and the nature of dreams and the impossibility to date of defining reality have now led us to search and long for theories of everything – the truth. For example, neuro-psychology has now spit out its baby teeth and developed beyond the realms of ‘what lights up where in the brain’ and is considering the issue of consciousness. Where is consciousness, and can we ever measure who we are objectively, when we are the one’s doing the measuring? But even in this perhaps we can see that Truth is an emergent property, whose traces can be seen through our interaction in the universe. Recent experiments at the University of Wisconsin, suggest, for example, that consciousness (by which they mean awareness) may emerge not from any one part of the brain, but arises from the interconnectivity of it.
In the Academy of Self Knowledge, Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri describes it thus:
“There is no great drama in it. Life is an infinite variety of resonances and consciousness, all interlinked, interactive, interdependent and yet totally dependent on the One Source, which is beyond time and space. While all existence is contained in time and space it is yearning for its origin. That is worship; all yearning for permanence and perfection.”
And so we return to philosophy, or God, or both. The same openness which made scientists like Galileo question established wisdom, is the openness through which we can maybe return to faith with a new humility. The root of this is a recognition that Knowledge wherever it lies, and turning away from the shadow or illusion or Shaitan[2], is a / the quest. Faith and timeless revealed teachings have answers within them. They witness that perfect truth and beauty has only been seen from within, experientially rather than analytically, by those lovers of God or Unity or Pure Consciousness. It is in the poetry of Rumi, the teachings of St John of the Cross, the sayings of Buddha and the contemporary teachings of the Academy of Self Knowledge. Psychology, counselling, being transformed by faith and or science are all processes of understanding ourselves, individually and societally, and finding solutions to those impossible questions of life. From any and all of these perspectives, for some people, for those perhaps who are humble or those who are touched by His Grace or who are stretched by their minds to the dawn of a new horizon, emerges some ineffable truth.
But the ways to that truth can be described. The impossible questions of life beckon us onward. If your child has been taken from you, or you despair of a world in which there has never been total peace, freedom from oppression or deceit, you can not make rational sense of that. You are, by nature, by design, trying to make sense of it, and the sense you are making of it is guided by divine psychology. Despite our apparent failure, within us all, there remains a longing for a complete truth. Cynicism and despair have not overtaken us so that the thirst for knowledge for a unifying theory, for truth and beauty in our world, has been relinquished. In the Islamic wisdom of the self, this happens because we are both ruh, (souls), with the breath of the divine, and nafs, (self), matter, aspiring to that. The journey of life, its purpose, is to discover who we really are, and the price of that is letting go of our attachment, what we most love, the idols in the kaaba of the heart.
How else does one hear and respond to what has been glibly called the ’ups and downs’ of life? How else does one make sense of fleeting joy and wrist-cutting sadness against an inner knowledge that only absolute pure total contentment for ever will suffice?
Deep in the jungle of our very own selves, we instinctively know there is a truth. We are referees of our selves, mostly haphazardly, often unconsciously, but sometimes from the clear light of our souls, of what it all means. If we decide with our free will, that fatalism is the answer, that is a choice we have made. But deep in the jungle, of our senses and of our clutching at convictions, when once transformation occurs, it is what our lives are dedicated to. We know the truth is important, that it is both in here, within our hearts, and out there. The best of religion and the best of science including psychology aim to describe this. We take on these tools because they describe (sometimes inadequately) and show the way to truths that we long for, that serve to describe reality which is beyond the reach of our very selves, and which we yet aspire to.
The journey of doubt brings me to this point of certainty: that our perception is inevitably limited. So therefore is ‘our’ psychology or even ‘our’ religion. The Qur’an is revealed truth, its message incontrovertible and its light immense, but we are limited and so we need to learn how to read its message, to open our hearts to its truth. We need to understand its meaning in our own lives. The questions of life do not stop – yet our longing is for sustainable and total truth. Where do we then find it? In both questions and Qur’an – in the process. It is a process designed by the Ultimate Designer, in which “We show them our Signs in the (furthest) regions (of the earth), and in their own souls, until it becomes manifest to them that this is the Truth. Is it not enough that thy Lord doth witness all things?” (Qur’an 41.53).
We are a limited self, seeking our perfect Lord. The interaction between the two is life, the dance between matter and antimatter, between movement and stillness, between mind and heart. It is because limitations exist within ourselves, so our conception of the world too is limited, and the limitations we experience contrast with, and are defined by an inner quest for perfection and purity.
What that means for psychology and religion is there is no consensus on reality. What is important is Allah, Truth, Ever-living Consciousness – and the state of my ‘self’ in each moment, that inner and outer evolution to knowledge. That is why the sacred teachings say the moment is forever. Where are you, right now, because this is it, now, at our death, in times of happiness and grief.
A person who is bereaved may not need a counsellor and they may not need an imam or a priest, but at one point, at some moment, they cannot help but follow the call of their own hearts to ask what is it that hurts me? Where am I going? What does it mean? Who hasn’t called out what have I done to deserve this? What am I doing that is so wrong? That is where the connection point is. By not denying that reality, by confirmation of that angst, by acknowledgement of fear and hope, one can connect to an aspect of divine love, a longing and a hope for better, for an answer. And who is it that can answer those questions? He Allah SWT has already answered those calls. And, furthermore, the confirmation of the answer can be shown to you in many ways. It may or may not be spoken by the therapist, or the religious person. But for certain, one of the ways is through counselling. The human being’s alienation from themselves, their intrinsic capacity both to doubt and have faith, can resolved by the person who does not distort that truth in their intentions or practice, and who ‘doesn’t get in the way’ of divine grace. This is not just through emotional development, but holding the hand of someone who hears someone’s alienation from their true self, their soul. Seeing yourself allows worship to be possible, but knowing the self is possible only through God. It is not so much what the counsellor does, as what the counsellor allows to happen. That takes faith, love, skill and humility.
Islam speaks of God’s nature as tauhid, of unity, of the dynamic of separation and gatheredness, these intrinsic majestic realities or forces that exist through us and in us, osmotically. Faith or whatever is the practice of moving between these two worlds consciously, so that the recognition is a constant worship, a thrilling and ever-present “witnessing of perfection” (Haeri 2008)
I would describe that truth thus:
To Allah belong the east and the West: Whithersoever ye turn, there is the presence of Allah. For Allah is all-Pervading, all-Knowing.
The Holy Qur’an 2:115
References
Al- Habib, Shaykh Muhammed, (2001) The Diwan of Shaykh Muhammad Ibn al-Habib 2001 Madinah Press.
The Bible, King James Version Gospel of Matthew 13:45-46
Cohen, Alan, (2008) Healthcare Counselling & Psychotherapy Journal, April 2008
Foucault, Michel. (1969) The Archaeology of Knowledge, p 5 (A. M. Sheridan Smith. Trans.) London and New York: Routledge 1989
Ginsberg, Allen (1956) Howl and Other Poems City Lights Books, San Francisco
Haeri, Shaykh Fadhlalla, (2003) Academy of Self Knowledge. Retrieved from http://www.askonline.co.za/
Haeri, Shaykh Fadhlalla (2008) Witnessing Perfection, O Books Alresford, Hampshire
Hilgard, Ernest R et al, (1996) Hilgard’s Introduction to Psychology Twelfth Edition pg177 Harcourt Brace and Co. San Diego
Lazarus R.S. Cognition and Motivation in Emotion American Psychologist 46, 352-367
The British Psychological Society’s Special Review on Registration
McNamee, S. and Gergen J. (1992) Therapy as Social Construction p 8-15 London Sage
The Holy Qur’an, (Yusuf Ali Trans.) 41:53 and 2.115
Rozenzweig, Saul (1936) Some implicit common factors in diverse methods of psychotherapy American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 6, 412-415.
Wampold, B. E., Mondin, G. W., Moody, M., Stich, F., Benson, K., & Ahn, H. (1997). A Meta-Analysis of Outcome Studies Comparing Bona Fide Psychotherapies: Empirically, “all Must Have Prizes. Psychological Bulletin, 122, 203-225
Wilber, (2001) A Brief History of Everything p 42-43
University of Wisconsin, from Horizon, BBC Programme ‘The Secret You” Tue 24 Nov 2009 02:40
Zajonc, R.B. (1984) On the primacy of affect American Psychologist 39, 117-123
[1] Known as The Dodo Bird effect, so named after the Dodo’s words in Alice in Wonderland “Everybody has won and all must have prizes.’
[2] Shaitan or Satan.