The Experience of Nothingness

Before the silent meditation tonight, I would like to say a few words about the experience of nothingness in Sufism (fana or nisti), or, as it is known in Buddhism, the experience of no-self.

The first question that comes to mind when thinking about the experience of nothingness is this: why would anyone want to experience nothingness or be nothing? I think some people come to a point in their lives where they realize that all their problems arise from their ego and its desires and wants, and so they look for a way to approach the world without their ego. The path of nothingness is not for everyone. I think most people are happy with themselves and their ego and wouldn’t want to go against it, much less eliminate it. However, for some people it becomes crystal clear that their ego or self is the source of all the troubles in the world—from the personal conflicts in their everyday lives to wars between nations.

One very important observation which has been made by the Sufis and the Buddhists, as well as more recently by evolutionary biologists and cognitive psychologists, is that at least certain aspects of what we call ‘I’, ‘ego’, or ‘self’ are illusory. 

There are many ways in which the ego or self presents itself, but I think it would be helpful to mention at least three aspects of self that seem to us to be real but are not. 

The first feature of the ego that most people are familiar with is as an agent that controls our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and ultimately our behaviour, driven by the need to come out on top. It seems to be like a pilot in a spaceship controlling and guiding our inner world, telling us when to seek pleasure and when to control our cravings, when to be greedy and when to control our greed.   Most people do not even notice this ego, and instead just go along riding in the spaceship wherever this pilot takes it. 

The second feature that we associate with the self is that it is the thing that knows our inner workings and our mind better than anyone else. But one thing we have learned from cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology is that most of the workings of our minds are unconscious, to which we do not have any access. 

The third aspect of self is thought to be that agent that tells us we are capable and clever, to the point that sometimes it provides an inflated view of ourselves. It makes up stories about us to impress others or to show we are mainly right and others are wrong. It wants to show off and tell others how important it is. 

There are ample reasons and evidence found both through introspection and experiments in cognitive psychology and neurophysiology which challenge the true existence of all the above three manifestations of ego. This is not the place to review such reasons and experiments. Suffice to say, to understand that the self is illusory is to realize that all three assumptions that we make about the existence of the self are false. Ultimately, it is the experience of no-self or nothingness that makes us realize that the self or our ego is a mental construct developed in our evolutionary history for our survival. As such, I think it is helpful to explain what it means to experience the world without the self or ego. 

There is a sense of self or ‘I’ that we have that is useful in understanding the self; that is, the ‘I’ as an observer of our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and emotions that seems to persist through time. One of the interesting facts about human beings that we share with other animals is that we are capable of experiencing thoughts and feelings without making any judgments about them or even ascribing them to us. Although it may be difficult and take practice, ultimately we are able to simply witness our perceptions and emotions without participating in them, just as we can see a movie without getting involved in the storyline. 

Once we are able to take the self to be a conscious observer of our inner world, we will take a detached view of our inner world. We will no longer think we are in control, or know the intimate workings of our mind, or have an inflated view of ourselves—we will not even feel that we possess these perceptions, feelings, and thoughts. We observe there is greed and cravings for pleasure, but we do not ascribe such feelings to ourselves, or feel that it is our real, concrete self that is greedy or seeking pleasure. This is the beginning of the experience of nothingness. The ‘I’ or ‘the self’ drops out when we do not identify with the experiences and feelings we are having, when we do not assume they belong to us or participate in their stories. In truth, there are only experiences of our inner world witnessed by us in the role of an observer. 

So far I have spoken about the experience of nothingness as if it can be achieved solely by one’s efforts and self-determination. At least some schools of Buddhism believe that this can be achieved by one’s efforts and practice. But in Sufism, an extra ingredient is also required. And this extra ingredient is love. Love in any shape or form makes the experience of nothingness possible. The experience of nothingness through love in Sufism goes further in the sense that even the self as a detached observer of our inner world drops out completely. The lover becomes unified with the beloved. 

There is a famous story in Rumi’s Mathnawi which makes the same point:

A lover knocked at the door of his beloved,
          His beloved replied, “Who are you, my friend?”
The lover replied, “It is I.”
          “This is not a good time to enter the house. No raw person can enter here,” his beloved replied.
Only the fire of separation can cook the raw
          And liberate him from duality and self-seeing.
The poor lover went travelling for a year,
          And was burned in the fire of separation from his beloved.
When he was cooked and burnt up,
          The lover returned to the beloved’s door.
He knocked at the door with fear and trembling,
          While careful not to say anything offensive.
His beloved asked, "Who is at the door?"
          The lover replied, "It is ‘you’ at the door."
"Now that you are me, come in," the beloved replied,
          "As this house cannot contain two ‘I’s’."

All the patterns that give rise to the illusion of self vanish through love. Love makes us realize that we are not in control of our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions; the beloved is in control. We no longer perceive ourselves to be infallible in relation to our inner world. Only our beloved is infallible. We cease having an inflated false notion of ourselves, and the only stories we can tell are about love and the beloved. 

As Rumi says,‍

The beloved is everything and the lover is a veil,
          The beloved is alive and the lover is dead.

However, there is a catch here, and that is the fact that love is not a self-induced state. As said by many, we need God’s grace to be in a state of love. However, until we are ignited by the fire of love, we need to practice detachment from our inner world and witness our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings without participating in them.

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