The Conscious Soul: “That Which Breathes Fire into the Equations”

Abstract:

The question, “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” was posed by Stephen Hawking in his quest to “understand the mind of God.” We approached the question from the Islamic intellectual tradition by first considering who “man” is. This understanding of man is central because his seeing and doing are contingent on his state of knowing, being and consciousness. In this tradition, man is comprised of both body and soul, the latter of which is the “fire” that gives life and existence. Second, we focus on the soul—man’s real self, its nature, its knowledge of itself and its forgetfulness of itself. To be conscious of who he is, man has to strive, to “find”—for what exists is only what is found and experienced. The act of finding—perception, awareness, and consciousness is never absent from the fact of being found. Hence, existence does not simply mean living; true existence is his true finding and consciousness, so in the final section, we reflect on consciousness, not as a subject of study, but as the ground of being.

Keywords: science, rationality, consciousness, soul, spirit

“What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” The question was posed by Stephen Hawking[[1]] in his quest to “understand the mind of God.” Science’s approach would be to construct a mathematical model to describe the universe. But it begets the question as to why the universe exists at all in the first place. Huston Smith,[[2]] in his autobiography, mentioned that the world of science is not the world we live in. Theirs consists of either a world of extremely small, not directly observable micro-objects (microworld) or a world of enormous cosmic scales and speeds (megaworld), while our world, sandwiched between the two, is a lived-in, experiential and experienced, sensuous world (macroworld). In other words, science is the study of phenomena, things-as-they-appear; not noumena, things-as-they-are. Science is empirical reality based on phenomena, but our human reality is not solely phenomena. Empirical or physical reality offers only a “veiled” view of an underlying reality that science cannot access.

Furthermore, science uses the technical language of mathematics that is exact to depict or articulate the two worlds that flanked our lived-in world, but this language is not the same as ordinary human language with its many indeterminate meanings. Therefore, what is described by science and what is in reality are not necessarily synonymous.

So, can we know reality? And, what is it that breathes fire into the equations? To respond, we need to consider who we are, a being created by God who is both divine and human or one that is seen to be a product solely of matter and energy? From the Islamic intellectual tradition, God is the First and the Last, the Manifest and the Hidden. When God created us, He breathed of His Spirit into us (Q15:29, Q32:9, Q38:72), infusing us with the “fire” of consciousness giving rise to the soul—that which lies between the body and the spirit, which makes us conscious of who we are in relation to Him and fellow creatures. In this understanding, everything is rooted in the One Supreme Reality. Everything that exists comes from this Reality. In this Ultimate Reality, there is no distinction between subject and object or consciousness and existence for they are only the One Reality’s Names and Forms. Thus, everything in existence is conscious, aware, and alive, and this consciousness permeates all.

Modern Western thought, on the other hand, considers consciousness as an epiphenomenon of existence, reduced to its basic physical and biological elements, and is subject to study using the scientific method. So, the basis of every object is matter, evolving from simple to more complex ones. There is no transcendent, for this has been replaced with the “mind” responsible for cognition and thought. It is that doing away of a transcendent God that limits the response one can give to the question posed by Hawking for in doing so it has removed a gateway to other levels of reality, beyond what science can access.

In this article, to consider Hawking’s question, we first examine who man[[3]] is. Being Muslims, we use our religious take on the understanding of man because only religions tend to focus on the subtle, immaterial soul—the core of man. Modern disciplines like psychology and philosophy have nothing much to say about this deeply-felt core, they only refer to its manifestations in terms of personality and behaviour. For example, though philosophy is an ancient discipline, it should be noted that the term “philosophy” as currently understood is different from the way it was initially understood by the early scholars. Most people today would understand philosophy to mean “…the attempt of man to reach ultimate knowledge of things through the use of his own rational and sensuous faculties and [to be] cut off completely from both the effusion of grace and the light of the Divine Intellect…”[[4]] in contrast to philosophy as the gaining of certainty or the discovery of truth. In other words, for the early philosophers, philosophy was more than a rational or an investigative method. Admitting of a richer epistemology, it was also a spiritual discipline aimed at illumination, awakening and self-transformation—a quest for wisdom.[[5]] The same can be said for modern psychology, which is based on the limited epistemology of modern science, the results of the Enlightenment period, and hence, on logical positivism.

We acknowledge that our approach admits of a hermeneutic grounded in metholodogies and points of view that go beyond those advocated by conventional science. But it is one that we would like to emphasize precisely because this approach is seldom considered within modern scientific scholarship. ln this religious tradition which admits of transcendence and the sacred ground of reality, man is both human and divine; his physical body is a copy of the cosmic realities while his soul is the image of the Divine Names. He is a conscious being in a corporeal world, though his origin is not of this world. He has to traverse this world to actualize or fulfil a specific purpose before his return. We first focus on the soul—its nature, its knowledge of itself and its forgetfulness of itself, followed by a discussion on consciousness.

Soul as the “In-between”

God created man as a single entity that consists of a physical body (from the dust of this world) that is visible with the outward eye and the in-breathing of His Spirit into the body (Q15:29). This divine act of in-breathing results in the nafs (soul)—the essence of who we are, which is seen as a metaphor of God endowing man with life and consciousness. Various terms—qalb (heart), ‘aql (intellect), ruḥ (spirit)—have also been applied to this inward dimension of man, but they do not refer to distinct and autonomous entities, only to different qualities or degrees of levels of a single reality. The higher dimension of this inward human reality is the ruḥ while the lower dimension is the nafs. The former is the origin, while the heart and soul came into being only after the attachment of the spirit to the bodily frame.

Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali used the term “heart” to refer to the essence or reality of the human being, “spirit” to the source of perception and awareness, “soul” to the self that undergoes transformation, and “intellect” to the heart to the extent that it perceives the realities of things.[[6]] Similarly, Abu’l-Qasim Al-Qushayri states,

… the nafs of something is its existence. The Sufis do not apply the term soul to mean existence, nor the bodily frame. They only mean by “soul” those qualities of the servant that are defective and those character traits and acts that are blameworthy.[[7]]

Likewise, Najm al-Din Kubra writes on the soul, heart and spirit,

Soul, heart, and spirit give expressions to a single thing. However, soul is used when that thing is defiled and hardened, heart when it becomes purified, and spirit when it gains nearness to God…[[8]]

Hence, all four terms refer to the subtle reality of the human being, but from different vantage points. As these realities are within the inward or hidden dimension, where one ends and the other begins cannot be pinpointed. What is important to note, however, is that it is the inward, hidden dimension of existence that animates the outward, visible self.

But what exactly is the soul? It is man’s real self, what makes one person different from another. The soul is neither body nor spirit “…but a third entity constituted out of the two.”[[9]] Al-Attas explains that these entities—soul and body—predate the creation of man; the former relates to the articulate soul or the soul of the Covenant (Q7:172) before its attachment to the body, while the latter denotes the foetus that is similar to other animals before God breaths of His Spirit into it (Nafas al-Rahman, Q15:28-29; Q38:71-72). This spirit that is breathed into the foetus elevates its state of being to a new creation (khalqan ākhara) called “man.” This in-breathing of His Spirit also makes man entangled with God—bestowing upon him the recognition and consciousness of God as his Source of being. Hence, in this world, man exists as a single being, an actus essendi, an act of wujūd, not ens, an existent that appears to possess wujūd on its own.[[10]]

The soul is a subtle substance possessing attributes of both body and spirit and it lies “in-between” the two. Like the body that consists of the earthly clay of this world, the soul can be dark, unaware and ignorant, while at the same time like the spirit it can be luminous, aware and intelligent. Hence, the soul or the knowing subject is always in-between. Likewise, its knowledge of things is also in-between, and it cannot be separated from both the known object and the knowing subject. Because the domain of the human soul is always in between the earthly clay and the divine breath, human experience is always soulish or imaginal, wavering between darkness and light, sleep and wakefulness, ignorance and knowledge, etc.; i.e., polarity. Thus, it is always in a state of flux.

According to Ibn Arabi, the intermediate reality of the soul that lies within the realm of the imaginal (mundus imaginalis) is known only through the power or faculty of imagination (khayal)[[11]]which is a mode of knowing between sense perception and pure intellection. “Imagination” or the “imaginal” realm or world is not “imaginary,” for what is imaginary is the product of personal fantasy. The imaginal realm is also called the “world of suspended images” or the world of images. These suspended images can be compared to the image reflected in a mirror. Like the image reflected in a mirror, the imaginal forms are viewed as both real and unreal, existent and non-existent; i.e., the nature of the imaginal forms is always ambiguous owing to its in-between position. Nonetheless, it is a world that is ontologically as real as the visible world of the senses and the invisible world of the intellect, with its own faculty of perception.[[12]]

Put in other words, it is a world of “subtle bodies” where imagination gives substance to inner experience. That is why it Ibn Arabi said that “imagination has no locus except the soul.”[[13]] This in-between nature of the soul makes it ambiguous, undefined but with untold potential, for each soul has been given the knowledge of all things (Q2:31). In principle, the reality of the soul is infinite—it has a beginning (Q7:172) but no end. That is why it has been called “an ocean without shore,” in describing the soul as expounded by Ibn Arabi[[14]] and why it cannot be pinioned for it has no fixed identity. It is always in a state of vacillation, wavering between the passions of the body and the luminous qualities of the spirit.[[15]] It is only through imagination that these two opposing aspects of man meet, though neither can trespass into the realm of the other. For Ibn Arabi, this in-between world is

The barzakh…the junction of the two seas (Q18:60): the sea of spiritual meanings and the sea of sensory objects. The sensory things cannot be meaning (ma‘na), nor can the meanings be sensory. But the World of imagination, which we have called “the junction of the two seas,” gives meaning corporeal shape and makes sensory objects into subtle realities.[[16]]

In other words, all of creation is a barzakh or isthmus between light and darkness.[[17]]

…the heart is the meeting place between the world of the Spirit and the world of the body.

As the bridge between the bodily and spiritual aspects of man, imagination allows for analogical knowledge and overcomes the dilemma inherent in the mind-body dualism of Descartes that has so vexed the rationalists. This “storehouse of imagination” comprises of images from both the outward and inward worlds, for it is in the soul that invisible or spiritual realities become visible and bodily things spiritualized.[[18]] The spiritual realities are known in the heart and the soul manifest them by giving them forms and shapes while the bodily or corporeal things are perceived by the physical senses and the soul spiritualize them and subsequently store them in memory. Thus, the activity of imagination in this intermediate realm is to give forms to that which is formless as well as to spiritualize that which is bodily or corporeal.

[[1]]: Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (UK: Bantam Press, 1988), p. 174

[[2]]: Huston Smith & Jeffery Paine, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography (US: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 194

[[3]]: In the traditional usage, the term “man” refers to humanity as a whole. In this article we use “man” in this traditional gender-neutral sense

[[4]]: Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “The Meaning and Role of ‘Philosophy’ in Islam,” Studia Islamica, XXXVII (1973): 57–80

[[5]]: William C. Chittick, “Reason, Intellect and Consciousness in Islamic Thought,” in Reason, Spirit and the Sacral in the New Enlightenment, ed. Anna Teresa Tymieniecka (US: Springer, 2011), pp. 11–35

[[6]]: Sachiko Murata, The Tao of Islam: Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought (New York: SUNY Press, 1992), p. 257

[[7]]: Ibid., p. 256

[[8]]: Ibid., p. 298

[[9]]: Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas, The Concept of Education in Islam. Keynote address delivered at the First World Conference on Muslim Education, Makkatul Mu‘azzamah, March 1977

[[10]]: For this distinction between ens and actus essendi, see Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Existence (Wujūd) and Quiddity (Māhiyyah) in Islamic Philosophy,” International Philosophical Quarterly, XXIX, 4 (1989): 409–428

[[11]]: William C. Chittick, Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-'Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity (New York: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 24

[[12]]: Henry Corbin, Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal, https://www.amiscorbin.com/bibliographie/mundus-imaginalis-or-the-imaginary-and-the-imaginal/, accessed December 2022

[[13]]: In William C. Chittick, Imaginal Worlds, p. 25

[[14]]: Michel Chodkiewicz, An Ocean Without Shore (New York: SUNY Press, 1993)

[[15]]: William C. Chittick, “The In-Between: Reflections on the Soul in the Teachings of Ibn Arabi,” in The Passions of the Soul in the Metamorphosis of Becoming, ed. Anna Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), pp. 29–38

[[16]]: William C. Chittick, “Eschatology,” in Islamic Spirituality: Foundations, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 689

[[17]]: William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn Al-Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (New York: SUNY Press, 1989), p. 214

[[18]]: William C. Chittick, Imaginal Worlds, p. 72