Sufism

Sufism and the Ultimate Difficult Task
by Joe Good

[C]onsciousness must confront the unconscious and a balance between the opposites must be found. [. . .] this is not possible through logic [. . .] (Job 106).

Every religion in the world has among its practitioners those who engage the faith beyond the common boundaries of doctrine and dogma, seeking an unmediated relationship with the divine. They are often isolated from the traditional communities from which their practices are derived. Their isolation can be voluntary or involuntary. They are the mystics. In Islam, the practice of mysticism is called Sufism and those who live its lifestyle, Sufis.

Sufism, as described by Henry Corbin, and as can be discerned from the writings of Ibn’ Arabi and Jelaluddin Rumi, can be discussed in the terms offered by C.G. Jung in his theories of the structures and functions of the human psyche. In Jung’s terms, Sufism can be seen as an example of how a healthy, integrated psyche might function, and what a living mythology might look like.
The psyche, as Jung describes it, is composed of two major divisions: the conscious and the unconscious. The conscious aspect of the psyche is that realm of which we are aware. Our noticed perceptions, that is, those stimuli which we take note of consciously, as opposed to the vast majority of stimuli that escape our conscious notice, are processed by the conscious components. The most notable component of the conscious zone of the psyche is the ego. The ego is that conscious structure which concerns itself with fact, form, concreteness, logos, sensibility, cognition, and identity. The ego communicates in

language forms which are adaptable to verbal and written communication whereas its psychic counterpart, the unconscious, communicates in an imagistic, impressionistic, affective language which is almost completely unrecognizable to the ego. The ego, then, often cannot, in its own terms, perceive unconscious communication and is often left to operate on the assumption of its own primary existence, often denouncing or refuting the existence of the substrata upon which it rests and even owes its very existence. The ego, over emphasizing the conscious aspect of living, can become so dominant that any suggestion of a reality beyond itself or beyond its modes of apprehension is dismissed as ridiculous or mere fantasy. This is essentially a psyche divided. The lines between conscious and unconscious have been severed. As Joseph Campbell puts it; “The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut, and we have been split in two” (Hero 388).
The task, then, is to unify the disparate halves of the psyche and render them in relationship with one another in such a way that the contents of the unconscious can come forth into consciousness in a healthy, rather than pathological, way. For a Western culture so given over almost completely to the rationality of the consciousness and ego, what would be an example of a unified psyche? How would one even conceive of achieving such a thing? Again, as Joseph Campbell phrases the ultimate difficult task before us:
“How render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? How represent on a two dimensional surface a three-dimensional form, or in a three-dimensional image a multi-dimensional meaning? How translate into terms of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ revelations that shatter into meaninglessness every attempt to define the pairs of opposites? How communicate to people who insist on the exclusive evidence of their senses the message of the all-generating void?”(Hero 218)

The question Campbell poses is this: How do we bring together the aspects of our being that are not readily apparent to the ego and to consciousness? Sufism, practiced as an esoteric form of Islam, is a fine example of a way to respond to that question.

The nature of mysticism is a very important aspect of the value Sufism brings to the project of psychic unity. Annemarie Schimmel characterizes the goal of mysticism as “the reality that is the goal of the mystic, and is ineffable, cannot be understood or explained by any normal mode of perception; neither philosophy nor reason can reveal it” (Schimmel 4). That is to say, the objects of mysticism are not accessible by the conscious mode of engagement with the