This is Maher's doing!

So Maher and I are writing back and forth because he's kinda going through a spiritual 'crisis' at this point in his life and i mentioned this experience that i had to him and he wanted to know the details of it. what follows is my response to his request. Enjoy!


oh geez maher, i knew you were gonna ask me this question after i said what i said to you. geez, it is personal and i don't normally like talking about it in detail with people, but your not just people. so i guess i'll talk about it in detail with you. briefly though, or at least as brief as i can be.

i've had several 'experiences' which have shaped my beliefs about religion and philosophy and how the universe and existence itself is structured, but there is one specifically that sticks out as 'the' experience and it is this one that i was talking to you about. i won't go into too many of the details, but basically i interpreted this experience as a direct contact with my soul. it was clear to me, at that time, that all of the things we have in our mind, all the ordinary mundane things we always think about all of the time, are complete bullshit and only hinder our minds from seeing the truth that our soul is always trying to communicate to us, but is unable to because we can't get past all of these other mental things in order to perceive that our soul even exists, much less that it is always trying to make contact with us. that was the first thing that struck me about the experience.

the second thing that struck me about this experience was that it seemed true, no, i knew that it was true, in a way that i have never known anything else to be true in my entire life. im sure being familiar with philosophy you know a little bit about epistemic justification what reasons we give for certain of our beliefs to be true and other ones to be false. their are different methods for justification. we can appeal to reason and logic and say this stuff is true because it follows these logical rules, it's a well-reasoned argument, etc., etc. another method is to appeal to what descartes called clear and distinct ideas. this is basically an appeal to our intuition, meaning that we believe it because it feels true, it is, at least to us, self-evidently true. the thing about my experience is that I got the feeling that what i was experiencing was, not just self-evidently true, but like self-evidentially true on steriods or like self-evidentially true times 5 or something like that. take the most self-evident truth you have, multiply the feeling of certainty you have regarding this truth by a factor of about 5 or 7 times, and that is the feeling i got regarding this experience. it just had an ontological realness to it that was head and shoulders above any other experience of reality that i have had before that day or after that day. this was the second thing that was impressed upon me that day.

the third thing that this experience contained was the idea that this experience was an experience of my own soul and the truth that we have direct contact with our soul through our conscience or 'inner voice' as a lot of people call it. i was doing my senior thesis at this time and it was on personal identity and i rejected the bodily identity theory and locke's consciousness theory and hume saying personal identity didn't exist theory and was looking for a theory of my own and then this 'experience' happened to me this night in which basically i found what i was looking for. hume was right in saying that it is a contradiction to assume we have any sort of identity while everything about us is constantly changing and shifting and what not. the conclusion i came to, because of this night, is that the only way to explain our identity because of hume's objections was that this sense of personal identity comes from our soul, which exists outside the spatio-temporal reality we experience in our everyday lives. i think i came to this conclusion a little bit later, but as far as the experience itself goes in this respect, i had the impression that i was experiencing my soul and that our conscience, our inner voice, is our soul communicating with us on this plane of reality.

the last thing, if i remember correctly, that i got directly from the experience itself, is that because of this direct contact of our souls with our earthly selves, there is no true religion nor any sort of objective morality from which all people can and should follow. well, let me rephrase that, there is a true religion and there is a true objective morality that we should follow, but it's different for every individual soul in existence. this is because the true religion and the true objective morality is your conscience, what your soul tells you you should do and what you should believe. i'm sure your familiar with objective and truth in ethics vs subjective and relativism in ethics, well, i realized that night that both are kinda true. their is an objective truth in ethics, but that objective truth is totally relative to your own individual soul. it's basically the idea of a sacred contract, to use caroline myss's terminology, that what is true and right for you is dependent upon your soul and is thus, different for every person in existence. it is because of this reason that i say things to you like listen to your heart and the only true religion is self-knowledge of the soul and stuff like that. it is because this idea of each individual soul as the basis for each person's religion and morality was, i think, quite literally, revealed to me by god that night.

geez maher, i could say a bunch of other things right now but i think i'll leave it at that. most of my other beliefs are things i've inferred from this experience or other experiences that i had or from stuff i've read. (like the idea of the oversoul and stuff and the perennial philosophy and stuff like that), but as far as the bare bones the things i think remember the experience imparting to me, these four stand out as more constituative of the revelation than other things i believe or say or write about or talk about. these are in no particular order either, i don't remember when i realized one or the other, but all of them i realized that night. 1) the cloudiness of our mind which prevents us from seeing the truth our direct contact with our soul, 2) the ontological and epistemic weight that this experience had (at the time it seemed much more real and true to me than me typing you this email right now), 3) the inner voice which is our soul trying to contact us and 4) that our soul is, or at least should be, the basis of our beliefs about religion and morality. i'm pretty certain that these are the four things that i believe were revealed to me that night.

geez, i can't believe i just did that, hmm, well now you know a lot more about me than you did before, so there. but if you want me to tell you some more things that i've extrapolated from these beliefs or any of my other experiences that have also contributed to what i believe i will be glad to share. as far as your lack of experiences since you lost your passion for islam, i think this has more to do with your loss of passion than with what your passion was directed at, which in this case was islam. you know as well, your probably just going through a dark time in your life right now. all true mystics have that period, st. john of the cross called it the dark night of the soul. i actually went through the worst time in my life for the next 3 months after i had this experience. i've just been through a pretty dark time recently because marie and i broke up after thanksgiving.

so i don't know maher, i rejected the religion i was raised with and a few years later, philosophy started bringing me back to religion and then i had this experience and know i'm a perennialist mystic who takes good truths from all the religions as my own and leave what doesn't feel right to me. i can't swallow christianity whole because i disagree with their theology, specifically the incarnation and the theory of atonement, so i like islams better with their emphasis on the unitary oneness of god and am totally a muslim, theologically speaking, but i don't like islam's lack of emphasis on agape love, and totally identify with christianity's emphasis on loving your enemies. so the thing i don't like in christianity makes me identify with islamic theology and philosophy but the thing i don't like in islam makes me identify with christian ethics and practice. and i can't even tell you how eastern thought fits in with all of this.

i don't know if any of this helps, probably not, but if you want to respond to any of it, that would be fine. thanks for making me write this, it may be the most succinct and concise statement of my mystical experience that i've ever written. i think i'm gonna put it on my blog. hope things are going better for you, if you want, let's keep dialoging, you keep giving me objections and telling me about your problems and i'll keep trying to come up with solutions to them and together maybe we can come to some sort of consensus or conclusion and maybe that will help you out right now. talk to you soon

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