Dhikr as Mindfulness: Meditative Remembrance in Sufism

Introduction

It is likely readers have encountered examples of contemporary mindfulness practices, techniques that originated primarily as adaptations of Theravada Buddhist meditation. Mindfulness is often described as yielding stress reduction, present-centeredness, and a greater sense of connection to oneself, others, and the world (cf. Kabat-Zinn, 2018). Less well known is the meditative practice in Sufism–the mystical path of Islam–known as remembrance (Arabic: dhikr). The Theravada term for meditation, sati, was first translated from Pali to English as “mindfulness” in 1881: like dhikr, sati literally means “remembrance” (Gethin, 2011). Meditative remembrance can be characterized as a mode of mindfulness, particularly as practiced among Akbari Sufis. “Akbari” refers to those Sufi lineages linked to Muhyiddin Ibn al-’Arabi (1165–1240 CE), perhaps the most influential Muslim mystic, whose controversial teachings influenced the theory and practice of spirituality throughout the Islamic world (Knysh, 1999). ¹

Both Buddhism and Islam critique the unreflective life characterized by self-centeredness. ² Both Buddhist and Sufi meditative paths aim at unitive experience. Jones and Gellman (2022) defined unitive experience as characterized by “the eradication of a sense of multiple discrete entities,” emphasizing that “the cognitive significance of the experience is deemed to lie precisely in that phenomenological feature.” This definition is a useful starting point highlighting meditators’ reports of the life-changing impact of such events. However, the Akbari view of unitive experience is more nuanced than “eradication” might imply, as will be addressed below. ³ This inquiry, undertaken from a broadly phenomenological perspective, aims to compare the stated objectives of depth Theravada and Sufi meditative practice and then contrast them with what Abraham Maslow termed “self-transcendence.” I will first outline what is entailed in phenomenological research, whether philosophical or psychological. I will argue that the primary procedures in phenomenological inquiry—the epoché, reduction, and free imaginative variation, which will be defined below—facilitate the comparison of Theravada, Sufism, and Maslow’s work. Through these procedures, the researcher recognizes and sets aside presuppositions—be they religious, psychological, or ideological—in the service of open inquiry aimed at yielding essential (eidetic) insights. From a phenomenological perspective, I will discuss the objectives of Theravada Buddhist and Sufi meditative practice as they bear on selfhood. Having established these, I will contrast them with the notion of self-transcendence in Maslow’s work.

These three sources–Akbari Sufism, Theravada, and Maslow’s humanism–are woven together in a comparative discussion regarding the meaning of being or “having” a self, and their varied calls to work with one’s selfhood. Phenomenology uses the expression natural attitude to describe “our default way of being-in-the-world” in which we take our selves for granted and take the world to be just what it appears to be (Staiti, 2015, p. 69). Sufism, Theravada, and Maslow argue that the default human condition suffers from an important degree of self-encapsulation that is to be overcome. Indeed, Sufism and Buddhism claim in different ways that humans’ default sense of selfhood is a fundamental misperception, a kind of sleep or dream from which one must awaken.

Buddhist doctrine in the main affirms that personal selfhood is strictly speaking an illusion. This is not the case for Sufism, which reflects Islamic assumptions regarding the unique and enduring nature of the individual human soul common to the Abrahamic faiths (Smart, 1996). The Akbari Sufis view individuated selfhood as not fundamentally illusory, but rather, simultaneously empty and full, as will be addressed below. Maslow is regarded in this context as an esteemed, founding figure in humanistic psychology whose notion of self-transcendence conveys an expansive vision of the further reaches of human nature. He is not, however, taken as representative of the full range of humanistic psychology. Finally, it should be noted that while this article focuses on meditative practice, meditation is but one feature of traditional Buddhist and Sufi spiritual disciplines, which are by no means limited to solitary meditation. Rather, both traditions aim at a comprehensive transformation of the whole person that includes their day-to-day practical, ethical, and reflective engagement in the world. ⁴ This comparative work is prefatory to a forthcoming phenomenological analysis of descriptive narratives gathered from practitioners of Sufi meditation.

Defining Phenomenological Inquiry

Philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) inaugurated the more than century-old phenomenological tradition in philosophy and the human sciences. Phenomenology inquires into “the structures of consciousness” examining “various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity” and has been applied in diverse ways in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other domains (Smith, 2013). The present inquiry is informed by the philosophical phenomenological method of Husserl and the Existential Phenomenological method in psychology, which was pioneered by Colaizzi, Fischer, Giorgi, Van Kaam, and von Eckartsberg (Churchill, 2021).

My aim is to bridge the phenomenological study of Buddhist and Sufi meditation with humanistic and transpersonal psychology. I propose to do this by clarifying essential (eidetic) similarities and differences between the meanings of selfhood and self-transcendence in Theravada Buddhism, Akbari Sufism, and the work of Abraham Maslow. This approach is complementary to yet distinct from Existential Phenomenology in two ways. First, while Existential Phenomenology is typically based upon the analysis of participant interviews, the present work is theoretical and comparative rather than empirical, exemplifying what Ihde (1977) termed “interdisciplinary phenomenology” (pp. 135–151). Second, Existential Phenomenological researchers typically focus on experiences given within a “natural attitude,” that is, within the attitude of everyday life (Englander & Morley, 2023). In a natural attitude, individual psychological selfhood and personal identity are taken for granted as self-evidently real (Davidson, 2021; Moran & Cohen, 2012). The exclusive focus on the natural attitude is arguably appropriate for the study of phenomena in which the boundaries of individual psychical selfhood are not in question for participants themselves. ⁵ However, meditative practice in Buddhism and Sufism, as well as Maslow’s exploration of the “transhuman” or “transpersonal,” propose to explore a ground of consciousness beyond the seemingly self-contained psychological subject. In so doing, they throw into question the factical sense of bounded human selfhood. As Davidson (2021) argued, a phenomenological psychology open to what Husserl termed the transcendental (constituting) layer of consciousness enables researchers to “overcome the naivete of a psychology that considers itself to be describing and analyzing a self-contained and autonomous subject matter” (p. 265). Phenomenological research open to the transcendental would thus parallel classic meditative traditions’ critique of the conception of personal selfhood as strictly bounded and self-subsisting, and is better suited for the examination of the domain Maslow (1969a) termed the “transhuman.” The present inquiry is informed by Davidson’s (2021) emphasis on layers of consciousness that transcend and constitute psychological selfhood and thus is complementary to yet distinct from Churchill (2021) and Englander and Morley’s (2023) presentations of Existential Phenomenology (p. 265), seeking to broaden the range of phenomenological research to include not only the personal ego of the natural attitude but also the layer of selfhood Husserl termed the “transcendental person” (Luft, 2005).

Primary technical terms in phenomenological inquiry originating in Husserl’s philosophy and central to Existential Phenomenological psychology include natural attitude, epoché, free imaginative variation, and reduction (Churchill, 2021; Giorgi, 2009; Moran & Cohen, 2012). ⁶ As previously noted, the default attitude of everyday life, in which the world and its meanings are taken for granted, is termed the natural attitude by Husserl (1970, p. §40). Husserl used the term reduction to signify a shift in attitude by means of which the phenomenologist frees themself from the reifications of their natural attitude. The word “reduction” does not mean diminishing something; rather, it relies on the word’s Latin root: to restore or return something to a more primordial mode (see Churchill, 2021). To accomplish this shift in attitude, the phenomenologist employs an epoché (ε’ποχή). The meaning of this term which Husserl appropriated from Greek philosophy is “to hold back” or “to withhold,” and in employing an epoché the researcher is withholding themselves from reflexively affirming or negating the factical status of what they see. That is, the phenomenologist withholds their assent to the ontological status of what they perceive: they “bracket” its facticity to view what is present as a meaningful presence rather than as an empirical fact. In this act, as Spiegelberg (1965) wrote, “the general thesis of belief in factual existence characteristic of the natural attitude is inhibited, suspended, bracketed . . . or turned off . . .” (p. 724). The phenomenologist then imaginatively varies the details of what is seen in order discern and articulate the least variant, essential meaning structure in which a phenomenon presents itself as itself (Mohanty, 1991). ⁷

As Ihde (1977) acknowledged, these technical terms can seem to be an “opaque,” “tribal language” comprehensible only to insiders (p. 20). However, for researchers these words refer to practical steps in research that yield felt shifts in attitude and “a new way of seeing” that facilitates essential (eidetic) insight into the phenomenon under investigation (Churchill, 2021; Ihde, 1977). Next, I will address the way these practices and the shift they yield are to be employed.

I have argued that phenomenology is well-suited for the study of religious experience because the epoché and reduction invite an attitude of scientific discovery unburdened by theological or philosophical presuppositions, including the positivist conception of psychological science (see Giorgi, 2019). By employing an epoché, phenomenological research begins in a shift of attitude from taking the world for granted to holding one’s own and others’ experiences as meaningful presences rather than empirical facts. In adopting this research attitude, Ricoeur (1967) wrote,

Consciousness rids itself of a naïveté which it has beforehand and which Husserl calls the natural attitude. This attitude consists in spontaneously believing that the world which is there is simply given. In correcting itself about this naïveté, consciousness discovers that it is itself giving, sense-giving . . . after the reduction consciousness continues seeing, but without being absorbed in this seeing, without being lost in it. (p. 147)

In the present inquiry, phenomenological epoché and reduction allow the researcher to bracket (temporarily suspend) the truth claims and underlying assumptions of Islamic theology and Sufism’s largely Neoplatonic ontology, on one hand, and Maslow’s humanistic, implicitly agnostic ontology on the other. ⁸ The researcher then imaginatively varies the meanings in the accounts given in premodern texts or contemporary data in the effort to discern and express what is most essential, “bringing back” the meanings in the data to their essential articulation in relation to the research interest (Churchill, 2021). The truth claims of both Sufism and humanistic psychology are held, within brackets, as offering possible insights into meanings that are present. Similarly, the reduction does not negate the explicit or implicit truth claims in accounts of meditative experience; rather, it frees the researcher to carefully attend to and articulate the meaningful texture of those reported experiences or types of experience, revealing essential commonalities or differences discovered through imaginative variation, without affirming or denying their factical status (Mohanty, 1991) As Ricoeur (1967) remarked, “the reduction is not doubting, since it leaves believing intact without participating in it” (p. 18).

Reading Sufi accounts of meditative experience phenomenologically—whether those accounts originate in premodern texts (Applebaum, 2019) or among contemporary practitioners—also makes use of the hermeneutic dimension of phenomenology. In this context, “hermeneutic” does not refer to a particular research method but rather, as in Churchill’s (2021) account, to the insight expressed in varying ways by Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur that meaning is intersubjectively situated—for example, in historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts. A phenomenological perspective does not require the strong constructivist position exemplified by Katz (1978) who posited that accounts of mystical experiences cannot be distinguished from the pre-interpretations dictated by the experiencer’s religious tradition. A phenomenological-hermeneutic standpoint, akin to Forman’s (1999) analysis, acknowledges the situated, interpretive contexts of mystical experiences while allowing that the varieties of unitive experience may provide evidence of important cross-cultural commonalities. In what follows, the claims of Theravada, Akbari Sufism, and Maslow—all of which are explicitly or implicitly experiential claims—are analyzed using an epoché and free imaginative variation, with the aim of discerning essential commonalities and differences.

Buddhist Mindfulness

Depth meditative approaches were historically practiced by only a minority of Buddhist and Muslim community members. Theravada meditation, for example, was practiced exclusively by monks until the advent of modern reform movements which sought to simplify and spread meditation among the laity (Braun, 2013). Contemporary American mindfulness meditation practices originated in the 1970s and 80s largely as American seekers’ adaptations of these popularized approaches to Theravada meditation (Wynne, 2018). As these pioneers adapted meditative practices for Americans, practices were further simplified, increasingly secularized, and thus to a great extent removed from their Buddhist context (Wilson, 2014). This trend accelerated in the 1990s as mindfulness techniques were embraced by holistic health practitioners and integrated into the suite of mainstream treatment offerings for conditions including anxiety and depression (Wilson, 2014). These adaptations—simplification, secularization, pragmatic framing as mind-body training intended to yield a greater effectiveness in everyday life—fit the individualist, pragmatic American mind-set (Wilson, 2014). Thus, American mindfulness can be broadly characterized as a form of self-help aiming at “an enhanced version of mundane experience” (Wynne, 2018, p. 50). This approach aims to improve the quality of practitioners’ lives, not question the existence of their selves.

But Theravada Buddhism’s claims regarding consciousness and selfhood are far more radical: As Epstein (1999) wrote, from a Buddhist perspective “the Western psychological notion of what it means to have a self is flawed” (p. 2). The concept of anattā in Pali (anātman in Sanskrit), which can be translated as “non-self” or “no-self,” dates to the origins of Buddhism and persists to the present day (Wynne, 2011). Anattā is a compound word which in Buddhist tradition, as Gupta (2021) wrote, came to signify the doctrine that “all things are ‘without a self,’” meaning lacking an enduring essence or soul (p. 120). Gethin (1998) argued that this non-self-doctrine originated in “a specific historical context . . . initially directed toward particular understandings of the notion of self” (p. 133). That is, the Buddha was critiquing the Upanis.ads’ affirmation of a single, eternal, indestructible, unchangeable divine Selfhood (ātman) held to be ultimately identical with the absolute reality (brahman) underlying every human self (for the Upanis.adic conception of selfhood, see Ganeri, 2007). The Buddha’s critique was not necessarily a negation of any meaningful conception of selfhood whatsoever. It is possible to interpret the suttas as the Buddha’s methodically highlighting of aspects of phenomenal consciousness that in themselves do not constitute a self, while abstaining in his famous “silences” from answering the metaphysical question: What is selfhood? ⁹ But there is little doubt that non-self, understood as the negation of selfhood as such, crystallized as doctrine and remains the majority position within Buddhism today (Wynne, 2009).

In alignment with mainstream teachings, Albahari (2016) explained that Theravada meditation aims at a “first-person realization that there is no self” (The Wright Show). Recognizing the non-existence of one’s self is understood as “the culmination of usually what is a very long practice towards undoing those visceral, lived-assumptions and emotions and attitudes and motivations which underpin the sense of the self” (Albahari, 2016). Meditative practice aims at a decisive breaking free of the illusion that one “has” an essential self in the first place (Wilson, 2014). To the degree that American mindfulness practice is framed as a self-help technique, the stark implications of the non-self-doctrine have been omitted: Self-help would be an odd motivation indeed, if there is no “self” to help!

But if there is no self, then who is conscious? Albahari (2006) argued that from Theravada’s perspective, non-delimited consciousness is always already present as sheer “witnessing,” which she defines as “the broadest mode of phenomenal apprehending,” that is, the basis of all perception as such (p. 8). The fruition of Buddhist meditation is claimed to reveal that what we take to be our personal perception firmly located in an ego-bound “spatio-temporal perspective” in reality derives from an “unconditioned,” pure witnessing that is not the possession of individual human subjects (Albahari, 2006, p. 8). Instead, human beings are but loci for an impersonal witnessing consciousness. Illusion results when one constructs upon this impersonal witnessing “the role of personal owner . . . a me . . . a subject with an identity,” and affirms the owner as real (Albahari, 2013, p. 84). By mistaking witnessing for one’s personal possession, an attribute one “owns,” one fabricates a self-subsisting “I” to serve as the owner of an awareness that was not ours in the first place.

Walsh and Vaughan (1983) described the psychological process whereby “consciousness assumes a thing to be a self” as ego “identification” (p. 401). In the attitude of everyday life, intrapsychic contents like a flash of anger are naively interpreted as being “my anger”—that is, an attribute belonging to a self that is imagined to be strictly bounded and self-subsisting. This constructed self becomes a fixed stance “from which all other mental content and experience are viewed” (Walsh and Vaughan, 1983, pp. 401–402). Eastern meditative practices like Theravada are an effort, they argued, to direct one’s attention back to witnessing consciousness itself, to simply note the contents of consciousness without seeking to own or act upon them, and thereby “dis-identify” from the consolidated sense of selfhood (Walsh and Vaughan, 1983, pp. 401–402). As will be seen, the idea that there is a “witnessing” feature of consciousness distinct from the usual sense of personal selfhood is of central importance for Sufism as well, though its implications differ significantly. ¹⁰

Sufi Mindfulness

As Shaikh (2012) wrote, “the goal of the Sufi path is to enable a human being, through the cultivation of virtuous excellence (ihsan), to communicate directly and experientially with her Creator,” these virtues simultaneously understood as the foundation of ethical human relations (p. 35). Dhikr or meditative remembrance in Sufism has been described as the “central method of spiritual realization based on the Qur’an” (Nasr, 1986, p. 197) and “the primary meditative practice” in Islam (Elias, 2013, p. 199). Schimmel (2011) noted that remembrance practices date back to at least the 10th century CE, observing that the two main varieties are vocal remembrance (dhikr lisani), and silent remembrance, or remembrance of the heart (dhikr qalbi). She notes that in Sufism silent remembrance “is usually recognized as superior” because it represents a deeper internalization of the meditative aim: that all but God falls away in the light of sheer witnessing (p. 171). Among Akbari Sufis it is this silent remembrance that is most often practiced (see Buehler, 2008).

The meditative journey from the seeker’s sense of themself as strictly separate, characteristic of everyday worldly life, toward the experience of God’s all-inclusive unity is classically described as an “ascending arc” in the direction of self-transcendence. This meditative journey culminates in the temporary “effacement” of the meditator’s separate “I,” “the extinction of the knower in the Known” (Chodkiewicz, 1993b, p. 39). This event is known as fanā,’ literally meaning “passing away from,” in this case passing away from the meditator’s sense of absolute separateness in all-inclusive, divine Oneness (A. Godlas, personal communication, 7 November 2022). ¹¹ This event is not held to be the end of practice or human development. Rather, it is followed by a “descending arc” in which the practitioner returns to an individuated life and personal agency, but with a deeply altered perspective (Chittick, 1979).

The event of effacement is regarded by Akbari Sufis as extra-temporal, a coming into contact with the timeless (qadim) origination of one’s own selfhood. From the perspective of what phenomenology terms “world-time,” effacement is a transitory event, a temporary unification and “passing away” from the condition of separation and multiplicity—passing away in a unitive event. That “passing away” (fana’) is followed by a return to “abiding” or subsisting (baqā’) in multiplicity as foreground, with a background sense of an inclusive unity. ¹²

Shafii’s (1985) text, an early effort to dialogue between Sufism, ego psychology, and Goleman’s (1977) comparative study of meditation, offers an account of remembrance in which the practice is reframed in explicitly psychological terms. Shafii (1985) wrote that silent dhikr

begins with the passive concentrative meditation of quietly and silently inhaling and exhaling one of the names of God. Thoughts, feelings, fantasies, ideas, and sensations are not actively suppressed. The meditator allows him or herself to experience feelings and then gently brings attention to the object of meditation (p. 93).

As the practice deepens from “active” to “passive mindfulness,” the practitioner “is totally free from concentration on zikr or specific sensory perceptions, feelings, or thoughts”; during a practitioner’s spiritual wayfaring, which is envisioned as lifelong, they may be graced by states that Shafii described as characterized by contentless awareness (p. 93). ¹³ A more traditional 11th century account, which can be taken as an essential Sufi description of the unitive aim in remembrance on the ascending arc, is offered by al-Qushayrī (2017):

Remembrance is the immersion of the one who is remembering in the witnessing of that which is remembered, and then it is being consumed in the existence of that which is being remembered until no trace remains of you doing the remembering . . . (pp. 115–116).

An example of an Akbari Sufi lineage continuing to the present day is that initiated by Pir Nur al-’Arabi (1813–1887) in the Ottoman Balkans, which shares to a significant degree earlier Sufi understandings of the meditative journey, such as the arcs of ascent and descent. ¹⁴ In addition, Nur al-’Arabi identified three primary experiential milestones, termed the effacements of actions, attributes, and essence (or personhood), followed by a comprehensive event of “gathering” (jam’) of the meditator’s consciousness in unitive experience. This was said to be followed by the meditator’s return to abiding in individuated consciousness in an importantly altered condition, bearing the trace of union, and termed “subsistence through God” (baqā’ billah) or simply “baqā.’” During the ascending arc, the experience of “separateness” (tafriqa) deriving from the seeker’s ego-identification with three principal constituents of separate selfhood—ownership of one’s actions, attributes, and essence or personhood—is said to be “effaced” (fanā’). Through the effacement of separateness at each of the three levels of egoistic identification, the “gathering” or union is actualized.

This account accords with Jones and Gellman’s (2022) definition of unitive mystical experience, with the nuance that the meaning of what they term the “eradication” of multiple entities would need to be qualified. Whereas the Akbaris hold that the taken-for-granted sense of one’s self-subsistence is decisively uprooted and the meaning of one’s selfhood radically altered, individual selfhood is not eliminated. Rather, “gathering” (jam’) is said to yield the recognition that one’s identity as a whole is an endowment rather than a possession, following which the individual human subject, transformed by these realizations, returns to individuated consciousness to a certain extent, while subsisting (baqā’) in the ground of union and being nurtured by it at each moment. No longer cut off, experientially, from the ground of union, the gravitational pull of egocentrism diminishes, and the Sufi’s ongoing character refinement is facilitated. In this view, the human realizes he or she is simultaneously both “empty” in the sense of entirely contingent and reliant on their divine Source for their very being and selfhood, and “full” as a unique locus (mazhar) of divine Self-manifestation. A comprehensive phenomenology of the descending arc and the re-inhabiting of individuated agency, which Sufism views as a further developmental journey, is beyond the scope of the present article.

Buddhism’s non-self-doctrine claims that meditative practice leads to the recognition that one’s personal selfhood is an illusion: Nothing exists but awareness itself. In contrast, it is useful to frame the aims of remembrance in Sufism as facilitating an enduring shift in the practitioner’s perceived “locus of identity” as a next step in human completion. ¹⁵ Akbari Sufism posits that one’s personal selfhood (Arabic: ‘ayniyyah or huwwiyah) has its own contingent reality as the relatively separate, ongoing manifestation of a singular, divine Source of being/awareness. Sufism’s meditative call to the seeker is to strive to discover and verify this personally. ¹⁶

What is discovered? Referring to the Divine as “He,” Ibn al-،Arabī (1980b) wrote, “Our embodied selves (nafs) are His shadow, nothing more. He is our selfhood/not our selfhood” (p. 106). ¹⁷ By stressing the relative existence of human selfhood as God’s shadow (zil) and the seeming paradox, “our selfhood/not our selfhood” (huwiyyana/la huwiyyana) he emphasizes that the human being has both an underlying continuity with and a meaningful, relative distinction from God. Akbari Sufism can be described borrowing Smart’s (1992) terms as a “qualified non-dualism” because it affirms the importance of the personal “I” in relation to God or ultimate Reality as a feature of “the identity-in-difference between the Lord and his creation . . . so God is the self underlying these selves” (p. 101). ¹⁸ Sufism depicts the human/divine relationship as supremely intimate, characterized by both union and separation, to be lived in a thoroughly experiential way, as noted by Shaikh (2012) above.

Speaking to this relatedness, the 15th century Akbari, Khwaja Muhammad Parsa (1975), referred to God using the Qur’anic divine name, “The Real” (al Haqq) in this passage on remembrance:

The purpose and aim of all acts of worship is the remembrance [dhikr] of the Real—may He be honored and glorified—and that a person reaches the greatest joy who leaves [the normal preoccupations of] this world, overwhelmed by the Real. Becoming overwhelmed by Divine intimacy and love can only occur through the ongoing remembrance of the Real” (30, translation by Robert Darr). ¹⁹

Contrasting Notions of Self and Self-Transcendence

Self-actualizing for Maslow (1962, 1967) is characterized by the flourishing of an individual’s unique capacities. Although Maslow (1943) is widely associated with the hierarchy of needs, Koltko-Rivera (2006) argued that the hierarchy, culminating in self-actualizing, “is inaccurate as a description of Maslow’s later thought” which had shifted to an emphasis on self-transcending (p. 302). Maslow’s later work distinguished between motivations aimed at satisfying deficiency needs related to survival and well-being—which map onto the hierarchy of needs—and meta-motivations directed toward the further step of self-transcendence (Sutich, 1976). Maslow (1969b, 1993) characterized the latter domain as metahuman, transhuman, or transpersonal, a condition in which “the individual’s own needs are put aside, to a great extent, in favor of service to others and to some higher force or cause conceived as being outside the personal self” (Koltko-Rivera, 2006, pp. 306–307).

If one brackets Islamic theology, Maslow’s account of self-transcending might initially appear to parallel the aim of meditative remembrance: For Maslow, self-transcendence includes an enrichment of embodied life that is meaning bestowing and perceptually, emotionally, and cognitively illuminative. The self-transcender is said to discover a new relationship to their personal qualities and capabilities. The implication is that one discovers a greater alignment between one’s personal qualities and a greater whole of which one is a part. In the “Theory Z” paper, Maslow (1993) wrote that transcenders are characterized by a “devotion to Being-itself” (p. 274). Maslow’s language seems to point toward a Being that transcends humans.

Similarly for Maslow (1983) one’s shift to other centeredness included a “fusion” with the object of one’s caring attention, which could mean other people, the natural world, or the cosmos. However, his use of the term “fusion” aligns with the term’s current psychological definition as a transient experience that need not imply a fundamental change to an individual’s locus of identity. ²⁰ His emphasis is on a profound deepening of relatedness, on the authentic humanizing of oneself that diminishes the grip of egocentrism and opens one up to awe and reverence, but without the ontological implications of Sufi or Buddhist practice. Like Sufism, there is a vision of greater human completion; unlike Sufism, this completion does not hinge upon the effacement of separate personhood.

A critical clue to the fundamental difference between the two trajectories of self-development is the fact that Maslow (1969b), uses the term “unitive” as a synonym for “B-cognizing” (p. 62). For Maslow (1983), “unitive” refers in a general way to one’s perceiving the realm of Being. But this picture maintains a subject-object distinction—that is, a bounded human subject perceiving a separate object. And it is precisely the dualism underlying this distinction that is claimed to be decisively overcome in unitive mystical experience. As Jones and Gellman (2022) noted, mystical unitive experience entails “the eradication of a sense of multiple discrete entities”: it is an event in which unification with God or Being as Such decisively overwhelms the previously taken-for-granted strict separation of self and other. Moreover, as noted above, “the cognitive significance of the experience is deemed to lie precisely in that phenomenological feature” because it announces itself to the experiencer as revealing a more fundamental reality (Jones and Gellman, 2022). Immersion in that more fundamental reality is said to permanently alter the meaning of the practitioner’s self-identity and relations, not only between themself and God but between themself and their fellow humans. Unitive experience is described as an ontological event with psychological and ethical implications. From a phenomenological perspective, claims of unitive experience exceed the domain of psychology to the degree that psychology is wedded to the standpoint of the natural attitude in which bounded individual selfhood is taken as an empirical fact. ²¹

Grounded in humanism, Maslovian “Being,” even with the capital “B,” remains exclusively for a separate human perceiver. However expansively human potential is conceived, the model is anthropocentric and dualistic: the self-transcender remains the same essential “I” as previously, personal boundaries and locus of identity intact, but awakened to a broader perspective that connects him more open-heartedly with others, the surrounding world, and, in a largely undefined sense, “Being.” Regarding mystical union, Maslow (1962) argued that experiences previously interpreted as connection with a Deity might be grasped empirically, provided that psychology overcame an unnecessarily truncated conception of human possibility.

This interpretation accords well with a secular-humanist perspective for which a transcendent, divine Other is better understood as a capacity fully contained within human being—that is, within an expansive vision of the psychical. In this vein Bugental (1978) wrote: “To me, God is a word used to point to our ineffable subjectivity, to the unimaginable potential which lies within each of us” (p. 139). This seems to echo Maslow’s reference in his letter to Sutich (1976) to the “higher nature of man,” implying that this higher domain is the possession of human subjects (p. 11). A sense of connection to the infinite could indeed be present–but construed as contained within human selves, in alignment with an agnostic perspective that recognizes neither a God or transcendent Being as Such, nor Theravada’s non-delimited witnessing consciousness.

In this regard, both meditative paths discussed above cannot be fully harmonized with Maslow’s understanding of transcendence, despite sharing a critique of egocentrism. Whereas Theravada negates the reality of personal selfhood tout court, Akbari Sufism asserts that the individual becomes more capable of fulfilling their humanity after the illusion of a strictly separate, self-subsisting ego is “effaced.” Transcendence in Maslovian terms is a break from psychological egocentrism–the privileging of my ego above other egos, a perspective “beyond individuality” as Maslow wrote to Sutich (1976)—bringing with it an attitude of service toward others, and a deep sense of integral connection to the cosmos (p. 16). Such experiences would meaningfully mature and humanize the “I” in relation to others. Yet Maslovian transcendence does not aim to radically de-center the human “I” as does Theravadan and Sufi practice.

For Akbari Sufism, the individual human person is a unique locus within which God or Being as Such (wujud), understood to be absolutely transcendent in Its essence as the only self-subsisting source of I-ness, finds and knows Itself immanently—through its attributes and relationships—by means of humanity. ²² For this reason, the 14th century poet Mahmud Shabistarī (2007), alluding to Qur’an verse 7:11–in which the angels are said to have been ordered to prostrate before Adam–wrote regarding the essential human being:

You’re the reflection of That worshipped by the angels,

Who for that reason prostrate before you. (p. 61)

The angels worship only God; hence the human being is a simultaneously empty and full reflection of “That.”

Sufism’s meditative claim is that the practitioner discovers himself to be “He/not He.” In such a unitive meditative path, the practitioner invites the event of effacement in the source of their own I-ness, which, it is claimed, is revealed to be utterly transcendent in relation to the human person who undergoes meditative transformation. Though Akbari Sufism presents an archetype of human completion (Chittick, 1994, chapter 2) and thus could be framed as a humanizing endeavor, the developmental process in Sufism is not narrowly humanistic. ²³

In a remark often attributed by Sufis to the Prophet Muhammad and frequently mentioned by Ibn ‘Arabi, God says: “My heavens and My earth embrace Me not, but the heart of My believing servant does embrace Me” (Chittick, 1989, p. 438). This indicates the way in which Divinity appears or becomes manifest in the form of the human being and arguably has common ground with humanism; however, it is God’s transcendence in relation to human being that would seem to exceed Maslow’s humanism. In other words, there is a radical Divine Otherness affirmed by Islam that cannot be granted by a humanism that is either agnostic or atheistic. That Otherness is what makes ongoing relationality between human being and God or Being (wujud) essential for the tradition, and thus a return to an important degree of individuated existence necessary.

Moreover, like the account of creation in Genesis 1:26 in which humankind is created in God’s “image,” Islamic tradition speak of humanity as created in the divine “form” (Arabic: surah), a term which for the Sufis conveys intimate relationship and mirroring. Ibn ‘Arabi, alluding to a remark attributed to the Prophet, wrote “God created Adam [meaning all of humanity] upon His own form,” and “Man becomes totally absorbed in the love of God because he is upon His form” (Chittick, 1989, p. 286). Individuated selfhood from an Akbari perspective is what makes human beings stand out as responsible individual agents who are called upon to properly relate to God and their fellow humans. Simultaneously, selfhood as such (‘ayniyyah or huwiyyah) is ultimately a Divine attribute—that is, an attribute only truly possessed by God. Therefore, being attributed with selfhood is not what makes each person human as opposed to Divine. Rather, for the Akbaris each person’s unique selfhood is a self-manifestation of Divine I-ness that grants the human person the opportunity, in a state of relative separation, to awaken to their ongoing, intimate relationship with their Lord. Sufism’s sapiential claim is that this reality is first fully recognized in the effacement of (bounded) personhood, and then reflected upon as the seeker returns to abiding in individuated life, which in Maslow’s terms would continue to be subject to pre-potent needs (Y. Toussulis, personal communication, 9 November 2022).

If we take the meanings found in premodern and contemporary accounts of meditative remembrance as both hermeneutically situated within a mystical tradition and phenomenologically descriptive of lived experience, then such reports provide evidence of meditative experience exceeding the bounds of psychological selfhood as the center of gravity. Phenomenological bracketing of the accounts’ implicit ontological claims still leaves the sense that for practitioners, their locus of identity shifts to an altered perspective. The new perspective announces itself as more real than their prior assumption of being strictly bounded, is implicitly unitive, and the unification is not neutral, but one that holds the practitioner in an embrace both enlivening and yielding a sense of the “really real.” Stace (1987) argued that this sense of the real is a recognizable cross-cultural feature of unitive mystical experience. To close with lines from a poem of the 19th century Akbari Sufi, Emir ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri, in relation to God:

O me, who am I, if I’m not You?

O you, who are You, if You’re not me? ²⁴