I never cease to be amazed at how the politicians and their propagandists in the mainstream media never seem to deal with the real problems but only look at the surface? Is this simply a problem of Empiricism or does it go even deeper. I’ll let you decide. And please don’t fall for the sop “It’s all about the money”! Another Empiricist spin- as money can be counted lol. No-the ignorance goes way deeper than greed. Even greed, itself, is another form of ignorance. As if money alone can bring you happiness?! So here are a few concrete examples! I know how much people like concreteness lol After all we were educated that way! Who needs Truth when you have numbers, right?Lol So here are a few examples 1) Everyone is yelling about abortion rights but no-one is talkin g about the real problem-promiscuity (Adultery and Fornication in Biblical terms).2) Everyone is concerned about student debt relief but no-one is talking about the outrageous fees of American Universities. Out of line with the fees in any of the “civilized” world! “Civilized” does not apply to America>you might rightly argue lol And 3) Just saw a report on Commercial Real Estate and the rate of vacancies. But no-one is mentioning that ALL these buildings (sealed windows and recirculated air) are sick buildings and accounting for innumerable health effects! ” It’s always been this way” you might argue -falling for another specious argument “if it’s always been this way, it must be normal” Don’t fall for it! Ignorance surrounds us on all sides! Be vigilant and do your homework .Salaams, Sufi Ibrahim
Category Archives: Metaphysics
Epistemology-Based Medicine
Epistemology-based Medicine:
A Superior Formula to “Evidence-based” Medicine.
Everywhere one goes in the field of medicine, and in science in general, we find the term “evidence-based”. They are even trying to use the term in politics and business. And mostly, if it isn’t an outright lie, it’s almost invariably a manipulation. For one thing it is a theory that has never been tested-a kind of medical catechism! For those who say it’s too difficult to test, that too is a lie.
Here is the simple protocol in my own field of psychiatry. Take one group, the experimental group and require that all the physicians justify each decision on the basis of a published article in the peer-reviewed literature-especially the prestigious ones like The American Journal of Psychiatry or The Annals of Psychiatry or the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry or the British Journal of Psychiatry (plenty to choose from lol).Then have the control group use just what they already know, their previous clinical experience and their clinical judgment. Then compare the results in a relatively simple diagnosis- like Major Depression where the rating scales are both valid and reliable.
But, just like the vaccine-mandate issue, which took more than 30 years to study! in the obvious format(anti-vaxxers vs. full CDC protocol vaxxers) no one wants to do this simple design study. They are afraid of the results! Personally, I would predict that the results would be more or less equivalent. But it is also quite possible that the docs using the evidence-based approach would do less well because of the rigidity implied by the model. That would destroy the entire church of “evidence-based science”! And no-one wants that-least of all the McGill University “expert” who completely lost it on me when I dared suggested this model. So much for objective science lol.
I first came in contact with this problem in the 1980’s when I was asked to teach a course on psychiatric research to the McGill Psychiatry residents. I came across a brilliant researcher who had reviewed the previous 10 years of psychiatric literature. What he did was study the career trajectory and theoretical biases of the lead authors (biological psychiatry, pharmacologically oriented, psychoanalytic and CBT mostly). Without reading the article he came to a conclusion about the authors’ preferred therapeutic approach. Not one of the published articles came to a conclusion contrary to what the bias of the lead author was expected to be! So much for objective science! And I am sure this is true in many other areas of medicine and science as well! Som what like asking a Democrat whether he would prefer Trump or Biden in the next election lol
In fact, there are many, many serious problems with this “evidence-based” approach. One of them was highlighted by a well-known researcher in ADHD who presented at the Canadian Psychiatric Conference ( I will protect her anonymity for now as we have to protect these brave, outspoken members of our medical community!). She stated clearly and courageously: ”Give me a break with evidence-based medicine! We will never have enough well-done studies to cover all the myriad decisions we need to make on a daily basis in medicine” Spot on! Bingo! In fact there are not enough resources in all the research funds available in all the world to do all those studies.
Other serious problems with “evidence-based” approaches include the following:
- Ideological beliefs of the researchers
- bias due to the funding of the research. This is probably the most universally recognized issue. Yet little is actually done about it.I know that at Psychiatric Conferences there is a ritualistic practice of citing all potential conflicts of interest. Then the presenter continues as if nothing he stated about his funding had any relevance! Pure and utter hypocrisy!
3) the constant statistical bugaboos of “selection bias” (look at the benzodiazepine studies in my field- almost all designed by anti-benzo activists) and “confounding variables” (no matter how much the researchers say they control for them!)
4) the difference between the study group( especially the exclusionary criteria )and the clinical groups where doctors have to treat every patient -not just selected ones. This was a big issue in psychiatry where research clinics had their set patient groups who were regularly used to test out new drugs. Psychiatrists were complaining that these groups didn’t correspond well to their own patient populations with multiple pathologies.
The list goes on and on..
In the end, these “gold-standard” studies are much less useful than most clinicians and researches believe. In my estimation, anecdotal evidence- (so disparaged by the fundamentalist scientific mind-set) from patients and other clinicians are far more useful. But that is heresy in the medical, scientific world lol! And if there is heresy, there must be religion hiding under the layers of “objective” science!
Before we proceed to some possible solutions to this dilemma, I would like to add in another data point-another anecdote, actually a series of anecdotes.! When I was working as a full-time psychiatrist, I was called upon to be an “expert witness” for a number of my clients-mostly about salary insurance issues . I noticed something very counter-intuitive as I watched the court proceedings unfold. The judges seemed to understand what was going on with the patients much more than the “expert witnesses” who were almost all doctors! How odd?! These people had legal training but they understood more clinical reality than the people with medical training?!
I thought long and hard about that one and in a way this article is, at least in part, the fruit of that reflection. How could this be?! Then I realized that the judges were taking account of many variables that the doctors were not. They were listening to the patients and their relatives (disparagingly looked at as “subjective” by the scientific community), they were taking account of the individual reports (“anecdotal evidence” as the scientific-minded would be inclined to reflexly think)and they were listening( how unempirical- for those bound up in Scientific Materialism).And yet, they were coming to the right conclusions more often than not. And why is that? And here is the punchline! Their Epistemology was much better and more comprehensive than the docs. They were not burying their heads in the sand of “randomized controlled trials published in prestigious medical journals.” What a relief!
By this point, you are probably catching the drift of where we are going in this discussion. We need a new Epistemology in medical science. When a patient comes out of the doctor’s office and says: ”He or she didn’t get at all what I was saying” we know we need a new approach. When the management of the Covid pandemic was so dysfunctional and chaotic, we know we need a new approach. And yes, there is a financial factor in all of it but in my estimation the ignorance factor is even greater than the greed! If you can imagine that.
Before I get into what that would look like I want to share an iconic episode that occurred during my psychiatric practice. At one point I was seeing a lot of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients. We lived at the time in a cottage with an in-law extension from where I did my practice. The children were not allowed on the clinical side but one day the cat escaped to the clinic and my youngest daughter ran over to catch it in the waiting room.
When I had finished my day’s work, I went over to the other side and she asked me: ”Daddy, who was that patient?” ”You know I am not allowed to tell you that, Sara , but why do you ask?” “She looked so sick”(she meant physically). I responded: “You are totally right about that(the patient in question had a cadaveric-green-gray colour to her skin tone)-but you know what is really amazing, Sara.? Two days ago, this lady went to see her G.P. and he looked at her test results and said: ”Madame, you are in perfect health. It’s all in your mind” As if that would help?!
So Empiricism has infected the entire enterprise of medicine so that contemporary doctors are no longer use their ears and eyes skilfully.. Instead they rely on blood tests and imaging! Which leads me back to the question of Epistemology .
What is this arcane Greek term anyway?! Epistemology is the Science of Knowledge. It refers to how you go about ascertaining what is true and what is real. Modernist Epistemology disproportionately favours Empiricism, “objective data” ,huge amounts of it preferably. And it loves statistical analysis and numbers. A recent article in the Lancet(a very prestigious medical journal) about Covid and its treatment had to be retracted because the data had been falsified. This is a rare event for peer-reviewed journals -until Covid at least! But the fraudulent researchers had tempted the editors with huge numbers (over 90,000 patients I believe). It was like candy to a baby. They were salivating at the numbers involved- like prospectors seeing a vein of gold in the rocks. Unfortunately, it turned out to be fool’s gold. Like a horny adolescent boy seeing a young lady with large breasts, the temptation was too strong lol!
Ok. Let’s get serious! What is the Epistemology I am recommending- for Medicine. It has to be much more comprehensive then it now is. The randomized placebo-controlled large scale studies could be part of the mix as well as non-randomized smaller studies( as were so useful in early Covid treatment) but both would have far less importance than they do now. Clinical experience is a far better indicator of what is going on. In my case, when a new psychopharmacological agent came out on the market after using it on 10 patients or less, I had a good idea of what it could do, what it couldn’t and what the problematic side effects were. The big numbers used in studies are used in order to generate statistical significance more than anything else. After all, how many times do you need to drink water to conclude that it relieves your thirst? Or how many friends do you need to question to feel confident that Puerto Vallarta is a good place to vacation in the winter lol?
On the other hand I once had a patient who was very preoccupied about which neighborhood in Montreal was the best place to live.So hev began his research. He visited them all, read all the data about the demographics, thought about it long and hard and eventually became very anxious and totally confused. Sounds like the management of the Covid pandemic to me. Too much information and too much data leads to confusion! The economists call this “the Law of Diminishing returns” The medical scientists haven’t caught on to that one yet. They still glory in large numbers!
My own spiritual epistemology has three doors: 1) hearing, 2) seeing and
- feeling/intuition.
The Zen Buddhists have come to much the same conclusions. Yes doctors have to start being “mensch”(to use a Yiddish/German term) and stop being robots and bureaucrats applying pat formulas and algorithms.They have to learn to listen. Not to be dismissive of what patients are saying-especially if it doesn’t fit their allopathic, Aristotelian models. They have to learn to see subtleties-like the pigmentation on the skin of the aforementioned patient. In fact, if you read accounts of 19th century physicians and psychiatrists you will see that they were much better observers than doctors nowadays. They didn’t have all those lab tests and imaging studies to rely on.
And last but not least doctors have to develop their feeling functions and their intuition. With those three in place we should have a much more effective medical practice. And then we can then study, if we are still in doubt, whether that works or not lol. My bets are that both Hippocrates and Galen would be on board .And we would all be the better for it!
Salaams, the prodigal doctor, Dr. Ibrahim Kreps
Bullet-Points: from Swedenborg
Emmanuel Swedenborg was a philosopher and Christian esotericist (that’s the way I would describe him)of the 18th century. With the current revival of interest in the after-life, at least in part stimulated by the copious literature of n.d.e.(near-death experience) accounts, the interest in his works has dramatically increased. He claims to have easily travelled into the heaven and hell worlds and had discussions with angels and spirits over a thirty-year period. You can make up your own mind as to the relative validity of these experiences, but I will present here some of the Truths he uncovered that as far as I am concerned are indisputable.
N.B. We will exclude, for the sake of brevity and usefulness, all the areas in which Swedenborg got it wrong( for example that heaven and hell are simply states of mind?!) due to his copious “mind-productions”. Oy, those European intellectuals?! They have contaminated the entire planet with their hyper-cerebrality. Instead we will focus in this brief article on his valid contributions to spiritual clarity.
♦ God is Love AND Wisdom. (N.B. Not love alone which would move us into the ‘”Peace and Love” movement which was basically a disaster!.We need the wisdom/discernment as well!)
♦All who do good in accordance with the Truth of their religion will be accepted into heaven (Take that on the chin all narrow-minded Muslims and Evangelical and other fanatical Christians! Our Quran says as much Surat2:62 and elsewhere but many scholars choose to distort the meaning to promote Muslim nationalism!)
♦Suffering is necessary for transformation. Ultimately God will bring good out of it! God is optimizing things for your benefit. It’s better than you think! God is working things out for the best!
♦Religious teachings have to make sense(i.e. have to agree with your intuitive sense of how things must be. Nicean-creed Christians may have a problem here lol)
♦Free will is a God-given right. More good, in terms of personal transformation, will come out of it than evil.
♦Spiritual crises help free you from your ego.
♦It is in this world that we can do the best spiritual work. That is why we are here!
♦In the after-life there is nothing you can hide. Your good and your evil are apparent to all. Islam says more or less the same thing in numerous ways, talking about how your limbs and your tongue will betray you.
♦The theory of Reincarnation represents a misunderstanding. In fact,our consciousness is both permeable and moveable in time and space.So we can occupy someone else’s consciousness without that being us. Hazrat Inayat Khan said more or less the same thing. The Advaita Vedantists, some schools of Buddhism and Krishnamurti go even further, stating that individual consciousness itself, is a myth!
There is an important corollary to this point about the permeability and displacement of consciousness. And that is around the troublesome theological issue of Divine Incarnation. We see this in Christian theology where many Christians believe that Jesus IS God; we see it in the Hindu idea of the avatar(a Divine incarnation) and we see it in the story of Mansur al-Hallaj in Sufism.The confusion is in the “dimensional” area-for lack of a better term. We can assume that Jesus a.s. and the authentic Hindu avatars as well as Mansur al Hallaj had the experience of Divine Consciousness. That is in the experiential (the philosophers call this the “phenomenological” area).However they do not therefore become God in the “ontological” dimension-the dimension of “being”. So for Muslims, who are very adamant on this point, and rightfully so, Mansur al Hallaj was not God. He just experienced himself as such. His confusion cost him his life. Yes, the stakes are very high! Sorry for all the Greek terms but they do help us to avoid confusion in these theologically important areas. I hope that is helpful!
♦We should be working to be in the stream of providence (i.e consistent with the will of God. “Thy Will be done” The secularists would call this “being in the flow” but it is actually more holy than that!)
♦The Bible is about correspondences. Everything in this world has correspondences in the other world and vice-versa. Think Garden and gardens. Think the Divine Light, in the other world, and the light of the sun in this world! But don’t get confused and worship the sun! That is heresy!.
♦Philosophy is a discipline that” darkens the mind, blinds us and wholly rejects faith”. Amen!
♦God chooses our life( and Islam tells us we agreed on the Day of Promises!) not us- as many modern occultists would have us believe.
♦Swedeborg disputes 1).the Nicean doctrine of Trinity(as do Muslims).He states that God is One( tawhid) not three personalities..He calls that Apostolic Christianity ( i.e. the Christianity of the early Church before the theologian bishops gained dominance over basic Christian beliefs.) He also rejects Vicarious Redemption( Jesus took on all of man’s sins on the cross) in favour of individual repentance and redemption. Again Muslims would concur .Remember, religion has to make sense, in his viewpoint!
What is an expert?!
Many of you are probably wondering why the so-called “experts” got it so wrong during the Covid pandemic. This definition should help relieve some of your confusion!
An “expert” is someone who knows so much about a subject-its data and its theories- that he can defend any hypothesis about it, no matter how absurd and unlikely. Also, despite his/her vast knowledge almost invariably they defend the standard narrative in their field without feeling any need to critically examine it!
My advice if you are trying to figure something out, is to do your own research and if it is still not obvious then consult a non-expert lol, preferably someone of insight and wisdom. Salaams and Happy Truth-seeking to you all, Sufi Ibrahim
Global Climate Normalization!
Watching the Canadian winter( first principle of science lol-Observation!)it became obvious!.The geologists tell us (Alley RB 2004, Paleoclimatology report) that 6,100 of the last 10,000 years have been warmer than today. The last interglacial period was 8 degrees warmer than today and the polar bears did just fine lol.
So… the climate is actually normalizing!! ( returning to the mean!).Whenever there is a transition, in anything for that matter, there is some turbulence. Its another law of nature! But, bottom line, we are heading in the right direction rather than the wrong one- as the fear-mongering echo-chamber politicians are signaling. Got it wrong ,once again!! What else is new?!
So relax, a little adaptation is necessary but we will be just fine. It’s all in the hands of God, anyway so trust in Him (tawakuultu ilayhi).
Salaams,Ibrahim
Empiricism and Rationalism-The Two Scourges of Modernism
Empiricism and Rationalism-
The Two Scourges of Modern Times
( Why our Educational System fails us)
Preface. This subject is close to my heart! One of the most powerful triggers for my own spiritual journey was a confrontation about this very subject. Here is the backstory! Prior to my conversion to Islam, like all able-bodied Canadian males lol, I had girlfriends. One of my first girlfriends, while I was still at University, was an attractive, artistic, literary-minded young lady who had a problem with depression. While we were together she was seeing a psychiatrist who invited me in for a session. I am not sure why?! Maybe he thought I was part of the problem or maybe he thought I was part of the solution! God only knows.
Being a pure scientific type at the time ( how embarrassing lol?!) I refused -saying psychiatry was” pure bunk” ( meaning no empirical basis) and there was no point. Boy, can life be ironic! Who would have thought at that point that I would spend 45 years as a psychiatrist later on?!
My girlfriend was legitimately pissed-off with me and went to see a good friend of hers-another artistic, literary type.to discuss the situation. When she returned, she looked me in the eye and said “Me and M. decided that you are a positivist”. I had no idea of what “a positivist” was but it felt like an attack at the core of my being. It turns out that “positivism” is one of the forms of Empiricism. Websters Dictionary defines “positivism” as “a system of philosophy basing knowledge solely on data of sense experience” Sound familiar?! Every “scientific expert” on the television or radio is a positivist and proud of it to boot!
Not my case fortunately! I took it on as a challenge and thought: ”O.K. I’m too stuck in the scientific mind-set. I’m going to investigate the arts(Spirituality was still very far from my mind at that point) And so I decided to take a sabbatical to explore the arts. I was in medical school at the time and everyone told me that McGill Medical school would never accept taking off a year for such exploration. But they did! And so my spiritual search had just begun. Boy can destiny bring us to places we never imagined! Alhumdulillah.
Let me continue with another relevant anecdote before continuing the exposition . Those who know me know that I love anecdotes lol. I even believe that there is more reality in anecdotes then in randomized, controlled studies. What a heretic?!
Once upon a time, we lived in a large single-family dwelling with an annex that had been used as an in-law suite and earlier on as a dentists office, I believe. I did my psychiatric practice from that annex and my children were not allowed to come there while I was working. Well…one fine day the cat escaped from the family side of the dwelling to the professional side. My youngest daughter ran over to bring the cat back and ran into one of my patients in the waiting room.
When I returned back to the family side after work, she asked me; ”Daddy, who was that patient? ”I answered; “you know I am not allowed to tell you that but why do you ask”. She responded: ”She looks so sick”. She meant physically not psychologically in that instance. ”Interesting that you noticed” I said. In fact that patient had what I call a “cadaveric”(green-gray) complexion. ”You know, ,Sara, that lady just went to her general doctor two days ago. He looked at her tests and her imaging studies and said: ”You’re in perfect health madam .It’s all in your head” As if that would help lol.
That is precisely what I am talking about in this article. That doctor was trained in Empiricism. ”Objective” testing(that’s what they call it!) showed that she was in perfect health. But she wasn’t! She was very sick. It just didn’t show up in the tests.
So where does this mind-set come from? You’ve probably guessed! From our schooling! As early as they can (Piaget says you can understand these kind of concepts at around 7 years of age i.e. grade two of elementary school. It starts soon after that although I am sure that if they could somehow integrate this thinking via a vaccine, they would start even earlier!
Let’s start with a definition here. Webster’s Dictionary says: ”A search for knowledge by observation and experiment”. Please note that the experiment itself is based on observation and measurement. Basically what we are talking about is what is observable to the five outer senses. Everything else is discounted.
Nowadays we have a whole litany of terms that are more or less identical to Empiricism or derive from its philosophical perspective. They include “objective”, ”measurable”, ”scientific”, “evidence-based, ”data” ’facts”….The list goes on and on. Ultimately what is being underlined is that what counts, what is reliable is the “Outer”. Everything else is “subjective’ the biggest curse word in the Empiricist lexicon-the “s” word lol. Your feelings, your insights , your intuitions, your beliefs- forget it. They are all subject to distortion and error. Only the facts count! How many times have you heard that one recently lol?
( Btw for those who need philosophical references for these ideas , the Father of Empiricism was the English Philosopher named John Locke and the Father of Rationalism was the Greek philosopher Aristotle, probably more influential than any other philosopher in history as all the major religions of the West including Judaism, Christianity and Islam have adopted and integrated his ideas into their traditions. Matter for another essay!)
One of my favourite quotes on this subject comes from the famous Swiss psychoanalyst ,C.J. Jung: ”many scientific-minded persons have even sacrificed their religious and philosophical leanings( I would add their hearts and their souls!) for fear of uncontrolled subjectivism (The ‘s’ word lol in the Empiricist lexicon).By way of compensation for the loss of a world that pulsed with our blood and breathed with our breath( how unobjective lol)we have developed an enthusiasm for facts-mountains of facts far beyond any single individual’s power to survey( he hadn’t met the flood of modern-day barbarian hordes of statisticians lol)We have the pious hope that this incidental accumulation of facts will form a meaningful whole”.
Jung is also implying a reality which modern Empiricists and Statisticians have not yet understood! The latter believe that the more facts, the more data the merrier. After all it makes the statistical analysis” more powerful” they say. Yes, more powerful to detect insignificant differences. Actually there is a “law of diminishing returns” with respect to data. Too much data ends up confusing the picture rather than clarifying it. Ask the jurors in the O.J. trial about that one!
We witnessed a stark example of this phenomenon in a study published early on in the pandemic in the prestigious journal The Lancet about hydroxychloroquine use in Covid. The numbers of patients were astounding1 Tens of thousands. The editors got all excited! Wow, such big numbers. Statisticians paradise! It was like a red flag to a bull or big breasts to a horny adolescent boy-irresistible. Only one problem. The data was fraudulent and the journal had to retract the article -something relatively rare in these “prestigious “ journals. But how could you blame them . The data wee enormous lol
The other side of this twin-horned demon of modernism is Rationalism-the ghost of Aristotle. Websters says: ”the principle or practice of accepting reason as the only authority in determining one’s opinions or course of action”. I think Websters is being kind here to the Rationalists. It should read: ”as the only authority from which to determine all of reality” That, at least, is what the Rationalists believe.
There are numerous terms we hear on a daily basis associated with Rationalism. Terms such as “The Age of Rationalism”;The Age of Enlightenment” (as if!); ”coherent”, ”consistent” (ever hear any politicians being accused of inconsistency? So what?!) ;”systematic”( another accusation to people of insight-your argument is not systematic”) “contradictory” (And so what again).Reality does not correspond to the laws of logic ! Only mental models do!
Time for another anecdote here. Oops anecdotes are haram(forbidden) in the scientific model as being too unreliable Too bad! I personally get more from anecdotes than from scientific studies and that is true of you, as well, probably. But you may not have seen through this element of Empiricist propaganda.
I was a student in a second-year philosophy course. Thank God our medical school program allowed us to study other subjects besides medicine! We were reading The Socratic dialogues. I was irritated by how compliant and obsequious the other interlocutors of Socrates were in these dialogues. I thought to myself: ”He would never get away with this in contemporary world.” So the paper I wrote was entitled “An Alternative Socratic Dialogue: A discussion between Socrates and American Joe” ( no connection to my original nickname Joey lol!).In this dialogue the simple American argued back in a persistent way so that the dialogue ended in a stalemate! American Joe was not going to be a pushover like the other Socratic participants!
I was proud of my work. “How creative!” I thought. And I was shocked when the teacher gave me a grade of 65 (yes we used proper centiles in those days lol).When I looked for his comments it said the following: ”Your argument is not well-developed enough(i.e. not logical, rational enough).But that was the whole point, no? Old Aristotelians never die. They just lose their neuronal connections”!
Before exploring the implications of this philosophical premise and all its extensions in the modern world let me underline the “fatal flaw” here. Reason exists in one’s mind. It forms mental models and plans based on this methodology. Then it tries to apply these models and plans to Reality. This poses the age-old “map vs. territory” problem. The map (or in this case the model) is never the same as the territory. It is always a pale imitation. And so is the model. Ever noticed how the models of both climate change and of the Covid pandemic never panned out?! But Reality never changes the mind of these believers. And they have a lot of support-both moral and financial. The studies, the committees, the commissions, let alone the ideologues- they are all ready to hire an applaud these modellers and planners! After all who needs Reality when you have convictions to replace it with lol?!
Now, we find examples of the applications of these two approaches all over the modern world-in medicine as in the example at the beginning of the text, in Law where for example the Supreme( read supremely logical!) Court of the U.S. argues that billionaires have the right to give as much money to election campaigns as they wish because this is “consistent”(another one of those ugly Rationalist words ) with the First Amendment of free speech. So in this case money is associated with speech! Only in America! But not really The Canadian Supreme(I like to say Supremely foolish court) concluded that the “danse a dix” where the client was allowed to touch the stripper for an extra five dollars was “consistent” with Cana dian values. Really?! Have we sunk that low in Canada?!
All that being said, I think that the Rationalists have had their most troublesome effects in the domain of religion. Once the theologians get to work with their logical extensions of scriptures one gets to all kinds of distortions , misunderstandings and conflicts. So the Jews become convinced that they alone are Chosen Ones, the Christians begin confusing God with His Creation( “the only begotten son of God” Really?!) and the Muslims conclude that a woman should only go outdoors in a tent lol. None of this is in the original revelations. All of this is a result of mind-productons i.e. a result of Rationalism! A lengthly article could certainly be written about how mental elaborations(read logic) have distorted the religious impulse but that will have to wait for a later time.
Now all the practical people( May Allah have mercy on them lol) are going to ask: ”So what do we do about it?” So as not to disappoint them, I will try to answer the question. But before I do I would like to share an insight I gained from the philosopher and mystic, Krishnamurti, whose works I read extensively and met in Ojai in 1973..He said that consciousness, awareness was enough. If you are fully conscious of something, it begins to change immediately. But that is too deep for most of us caught in the cause and effect paradigm. If you want to further explore that illusion ,you will have to shift from John Locke to his fellow countryman David Hume -one of the first non-mystical people to understand that cause and effect are not necessarily related to each other. Matter for a later discussion. We don’t want to ruffle your ”scientific” mind-set too much at this point.
The simple answer to the inevitable question: ”So what do we do about it?’ is “ We develop an awareness of our inner world- the world of inner sight, of hearing the ring of truth, the world of insight and intuition and feeling”. This is no small matter. The schools have not figured it out yet. Some theorists would say they don’t want to because it would go against their agenda of producing submissive workers and citizens. I will leave these speculations for others, but it is clear that despite 50 years of research into other forms of intelligence beyond the scientific and the outward, they have not even begun to succeed at this most important project!
And yet, there are methods. Anna Freud proposed to set up group therapy for all the children in elementary school in London. To its credit, the British government actually considered it! (highly unlikely anywhere in North America especially now). But eventually it was refused because of the expense of paying so many competent professionals for the service. ”Mindfulness” would be another tool. Someone must have thought about integrating it into the academic curriculum but I still haven’t heard of any concrete examples(if you know of any please inform me) .Then there is art and music therapy. No, not art and music! That is still outward. Art therapy connects the art to your inner feeling states(your internal psychodynamics if you will) as does music therapy. And so our schooling systems are still putting out “inner world illiterates”. Instead of exploring ourselves we hear talk of A.I. (automated intelligence) and social media controls (as if?) and transhumanism(as if the answer lies in transcending our humanity rather than embracing it).
So we are far from the solution. Our best chance, in fact, is setting up our own homeschooling and experimenting with different forms of education. If we wait for our-large scale educational institutions to do anything different we are likely to end up in “Extinction Revolution” with Greta Thunberg and her woke transhuman acolytes lol.
A shout-out here for all attempts at home-schooling. It appears to be our only hope although it may already be too late. God help us!
Salaams, Sufi Ibrahim
Answer to a high-school buddy now mired in “Wokeism”È
You have swallowed the koolaid ,my friend.! I guess you never looked back to question the brain-washing we received with our schooling. I, on the other hand, have been exploring the world, practicing various spiritual disciplines and questioning everything I was being told. So what I say is coming from a depth that is inaccessible to you, unfortunately! It’s OK,I guess. Most people are products of their social conditioning, so if you take any solace in being part of the majority, you are doing just fine. But for me such level of blind faith( in your case in the liberal, progressive agenda) is unacceptable. What is most troubling about the liberal point of view is that liberals don’t realize that it is an ideology( a theology actually) but rather consider themselves open-minded and objective! What a delusion?!
The Mechanics of False Epistemology!
Once again, don’t get scared by the Greek term epistemology lol.It just means how you get to the Truth or Reality of a situation-“The Theory Of Knowledge “according to the Philosophers.
In an “ordinary” conversation, when someone hears a statement made by another person, they immediately compare it to what is already in their head and respond accordingly. If it conforms to what is in their mind, they say: “You are right” and if it doesn’t they say: “You are wrong” or “I disagree”. Sometimes they don’t say it out-loud out of politeness and diplomacy. Wrong, wrong and wrong! This is the totally wrong epistemology! Unfortunately the most popular type lol. It can go quite far. The more clever, sophisticated people will then go do some research to cherry-pick the literature or the media to prove the point that is in their heads. They then claim not only are they right but science is on their side. Tsk,tsk,tsk. Dishonest brokers of the Truth?!
“So what is the right way?” you may and should ask. Remember the triad of perception-hearing, seeing and feeling .That is hearing with the Ear of Truth, seeing with the inner eye and feeling with the subtle heart. Doesn’t matter what is in your mind. It is all “batil”(falsehood-either untrue or so theoretical that it is detached from Reality.)Once you learn to use and develop the three tools of Epistemology, the world starts looking very different! The people you thought were good begin to manifest their evil, the people you criticized now seem to be speaking the Truth and the people you admired are now creating discomfort in your heart. Welcome to the world of reality! Salaams, Sufi Ibrahim
Husn Al Dhann and Radical Positivity!
Husn Al Dhann (having a good opinion) is a much vaunted Islamic virtue. It is based mostly on the Quranic ayat 49:12 where we are encouraged to “avoid suspicion” and to not back bite. However, most of the scholars go well beyond the text and encourage us to have a good opinion both of our Lord and our fellow man. Noble aspiration, no doubt! In this article, we will go into the idea of Husn Al Dhann regarding our Lord. As I mentioned in my previous article on this subject having universally and systematically a good opinion of man seems to fly in the face of much life experience and even of the Quran and hadith themselves. So let’s stick to our Creator for now.If we return again to the Quran 2:30 we find the angels, who are created to be obedient, objecting to Allah’s creation of man. “Wilt thou place therein one who will make mischief therein and shed blood?’ They are truly clairvoyant! Ever noticed the veracity of their prediction lol?! They see what is going to happen on Earth, as we also can now see it, and protest! So what does Allah respond? “I know what you know not”. And as opposed to most people they do not argue back lol. They submit! Wouldn’t it be nice if men wee like that-submitting immediately to the Truth?! But don’t hold your breath. For the Quran itself tells us that ‘insan’ is disputatious. He keeps arguing his opinion no matter what Truth is put forward-most of the time anyway.
Most of us, unfortunately, are still in the state of the angels before Allah’s clarification. So there is a serious level of hypocrisy going on-even in the hearts of the believers?! They say they have a good opinion of Allah and His creation but as soon as things go wrong, they assume that Allah has made a mistake! Estagfirullah. The examples of this are legion: “This child should not have died so early”; “This car accident should never have happened”; “This war is a mistake”. The examples in our minds and hearts are multiple. We want to be the correctors of Allah. WE know better! Allah should conform to our beliefs rather than to HIS Wisdom. The believers, at least, don’t formulate it that way since it sounds wrong but once you get into the nitty-gritty you will see that is what they are thinking!.
So what is the opposite point of view? It is that Allah is in charge. Everything is happening from His Will and with His permission. No exceptions! Then we must submit. But instead our nafs rebels “This( (the war in Ukraine, the killing of American children in their schools, the establishment of the state of Israel, the American invasion of Iraq-take your choice. It’s all a big mistake! It shouldn’t be” it screams mostly inside our heads.
Btw one of the groups that understands this point well are the Advaita Vedantists. We do not agree with most of their theology but on this point they are spot on. Here is a quote from one of their great teachers, the American Robert Adams -who was a direct disciple of Ramana Maharshi, a remarkable Hindu saint “Nothing is wrong. Everything is right just the way it is.(“I know what you know not” says Allah) Do not try to figure it out Leave it alone(tawakuul in our language) And also.” Be aware of yourself, always(muraqaba).The world goes through its own karma(the Divine plan) It has absolutely nothing to do with you. You belong to God( ina lillahi) Everything you see is God (wahadat al wujud).What a ‘hal’ this man possessed. We need to learn from this!
So let me begin to lay out an alternative approach beginning with a few anecdotes. The first involves a defrocked psychoanalyst who gave up on his practice, finding that the results were few and far between. Instead he developed a very successful program for schizophrenics called “Case Management” In that program instead of using expensive, over-trained mental health professionals, people with a simple university bachelor’s degree were hired to be available(read humans as opposed to the professionals lol) on a full-time basis, a bit like parents)and to respond as needed instead of during office hours with long-delayed appointments-the usual M.O. of health care systems. They were assigned to have 6-8 people to watch over and help in a practical way over a period of time. The results were so remarkable that this program became the standard of care in most mental health systems-at least those that were front-line and competent!
But the real point of this story is what the psychoanalyst responded when asked by a member of the audience whether his psychoanalytic experience had been of any use whatsoever. And he responded: “What I learnt from my psychoanalytic therapy was to be brutally honest with myself” Can we, as believers, say the same thing? Do we have the same capacity for self-observation as this psychiatrist. If we do, then we will acknowledge that we are regularly opposing the actions of Allah .i.e. Reality!
Before we address some possible remedies to this situation let me tell you another story-the story of Sheikh Hashimi. Before he passed on the great sheikh and Sufi Ahmad Al Alawi named muqaddams(representatives) to be assigned to most of the surrounding Arab countries. Representatives were sent to Morocco and Tunisia a nd Syria amongst others. And the representative he sent to Syria was an Algerian man named Muhammad al Hashimi. For those who are cognizant of the world of Sufi silsilas(chains of transmission) Sheikh Hashimi was the sheikh of Abdur Rahman Shaghouri who was the sheikh of Sheikh Nuh.
Sheikh Hashimi was well beloved of the Syrians. When he died after 40 years of teaching them and serving them, they were missing him and so they went to his “khadim*(servant) and asked him what he remembered of Sheikh Hashimi’s teachings. He responded: “I only learnt one thing from the sheikh but it sufficed me for my entire Life”! “Only one thing .During fourty years of service?!” They were astounded but asked the inevitable follow-up question: “Alright, So what was that one thing?” “Fi kooli shay khareen”(In every thing there is goodness).A fitting explanation if not a complete one, to the ayat where Allah tells us that He knows what we do not. That there is goodness in everything-A Divine Plan and Divine Wisdom!
Before we get to the solution to this dilemma, let me tell you one more story-from my pre-Islamic days. I got into my real spiritual search somewhere in the early seventies while I was still a Marxist -albeit an unconvinced one(discernment even then lol).I read a lot and visited where I could. One of my earliest visits(1973 I believe) was to Ojai ,California to see Krishnamurti, I was hoping to connect with a fellow psychiatrist named Shainberg I believe but Allah had other, more relevant plans in mind.
Instead, I met with an “ordinary Joe” American. I asked him what he was doin g there (seemed so out of place) and then he told me his story .He was a Korean war veteran.(It is 1973 so the Korean war had finished 20 years earlier.)It was the worst possible situation. In the trenches- filled with mud and dead bodies and blood and gore. You can just imagine or maybe you can’t! And then he was hit by an artillery shell of the Communists. At that moment the sky opened up and he saw another scene of battle but that one was Luminous and Glorious and Ecstatic! In that dimension everything made sense and more. Then he lost consciousness.
When he awoke, he was in intense pain from the wound he had incurred. He required constant pulmonary drainage and opiates and round the clock nursing! But he survived. It was now 20 years later and he was still looking to retrieve his “hal”(spiritual state) that he had experienced in Korea. That is why he came to see Krishnamurti. Amazing, eh?
So now, after all that preamble ,we get to the heart of the matter. How do we stop disputing with our Lord and begin accepting His Will- not in theory but in actual practice. I have a few recommendations and perhaps together we can discover more. Inshallah. So this is the program I propose for arriving at Husn Al Dhann which is also “rida” (acceptance) and “tawakuul” (trust in Allah.
1- First let us remember the famous statement of Ali Jemal r.a. of Fes “Everything to you is from you” i.e. it is a specific response to your situation, your actions, your educational needs, your merits and defects. Nothing is random! Everything is purposeful! That is what Allah is saying when he states that He knows what the angels do not!
When the horrible tsunami hit East Asia in 2004 I saw an Islamic scholar on public television saying: “this is just a geological event(tectonic plates moving) not a theological one”! I couldn’t believe my ears! Does he not understand in any way the workings of our Lord?! Clearly not.
As is my habit, I then started researching what was going on in those areas.The worst hit places turned out to be Aceh province in Indonesia and the Tamil areas of Sri Lanka. Aha! In both places there were civil wars going on. Clearly not pleasing to Allah who encourages us in the Quran itself to accept all peoples and nations. Then the Earthquake hit Pakistan in Muzaffarabad and Belokot in 2005.What do you know?! Al Qaida was organizing in those areas. According to the Indian army sources, they still are! Could that be the reason for these disasters? Only Allah knows but it would be reasonable to arrive at those conclusions. Just remember, nothing is random.
The same is true on a personal level. But most people don’t want to go there. The “bala”(misfortune) is either a consequence of some bad behaviour or a stimulus to growth through the purification effect of suffering. Admittedly not always obvious which of the two it is!
When Muhammad Ali may Allah be pleased with his efforts and sincerity was asked if he thought his Parkinsonism was a consequence of his boxing career he answered humbly: “No. I made a grave mistake in saying ‘I am the Greatest’ when the only great One is my Lord. This is the consequence!” Humble man. Mashallah. So whenever something “negative” occurs to you, look deeply into yourself. Is there anything you did wrong? If so, ask forgiveness and begin correcting it. If not, praise the Lord for elevating you still higher.
2-Ask yourself “What is good in this apparent evil?” What is the silver lining in the cloud?” How can I see this as the glass half-full rather than half-empty?” Hamza Yusuf tells the story of a Moroccan man who had a stroke and was paralyzed on one side of his body. When people would meet him, he would point to the side that was still working and say something like: “Look how merciful is Allah. He left me with this entire side that works” Or the story of the great wali of the Tablighi people, Maulana Zakariah, who was dying of terminal stage 4 cancer and saying on his deathbed: “Ya Karim’, Ya Karim” These are very high levels of faith but we can take learnings from these examples.
3-Think about how it could have been worse. A few years ago, I had a knee injury. When I finally got to a competent orthopedist, he diagnosed me with an “insufficiency fracture”- something I had never heard of in medical school. He told me I had to take all pressure of the knee(i.e. I needed to sit for salat) and it would cure itself over several months .Which is exactly what happened! I thought to myself: “Thank God it wasn’t progressive osteoarthritis as the G.P. had thought because then I would be looking at a knee-replacement(very painful!) down the road. Don’t feel too bad! I am not always that good about my Husn Al Dhann lol.
My father when he was still alive would taunt people with the statement:” We have the best weather in the world here in Montreal”. People would think he was crazy! “What?! – the terrible cold and snowstorms in the winter and the hot ,muggy days of the summer! How could you say that?” He would answer” We don’t have hurricanes, we don’t have volcanoes. Tornadoes are very rare and we have almost no earthquakes. What’s a blizzard in the winter. You hunker down for a day. Then you take out your shovel the next day and you’re good to go”.
As you watch the weather trends nowadays, you can’t help thinking that he had a point. The massive heat waves in southern USA, the hurricanes in Florida and the West Coast, the drought in the mid-West and the wildfires in California and the West Coast! We are doing pretty well in Montreal lol.( For the nit-pickers and naysayers and contradiction detectors -the people I love to hate lol-yes there was an ice-storm in 1998 that did considerable damage-not many deaths however. The exception that proves the rule.
So my father was practicing Husn Al Dhann about the weather. He would have been shocked to learn that he was performing an act of piety lol. Like the time I caught him resonating with the Hare Krishna crowd at Philip’s Square! “But Dad I thought you don’t believe in religion” I said. “I Know. But I like this music. It gets to me” Too bad he didn’t go further in his spiritual quest!
4- Seeing the compassion in the pain. You have a chronic pain condition. But it comes and goes. Your skin is burning and itching. But then it disappears enough for you to get a decent sleep. Your money is running out. And suddenly a source of ‘risq’ occurs. None of this was predictable. None of it even makes sense! If you have no cartiledge at the knee joint or between the vertebrae why does the pain come and go?! Shouldn’t it be there all the time. No doctor can explain that. It is from the Mercy of Allah. And He is micromanaging our experience on a moment by moment basis. See if you can observe it!
5-What is this difficult experience designed to teach you. There is almost always a heuristic component to every hardship. I remember a social worker who told me about ending up in the hospital with acute appendicitis. Only then did she realize she was in an abusive relationship and needed to get out. Or the Kashmiri businessman from Sri Nagar who found out that his partner was emptying the cash register every night which led to the bankrupcy of their enterprise. He came running to the Naqshbandi Mujaddid sheikh in Gutlibagh(Mir Alam) and said that was the best decision of his life.
So “hold your horses” before saying “this shouldn’t be”, exercise self -restraint and above all remeber:”fi kulli shay khairin(in everything is goodness) and praise the Lord. Alhumdulillah Rabbil Alamin. May Allah help us all in this challenging task of having a good opinion of His actions-always!
Addendum: The “elephant in the room” here is doubt! “Shakk”-the fifth klesa if you wish. The doubt comes from us believing in what is in our minds rather than in what Allah is doing. It is the cause of much of our errors and most of our anxiety! The only way to deal with it is to become acutely aware of it and to defuse it with tawakuul as soon as it comes up.
As Muslims we know the story of our Prophet saws with Abu Bakr Siddiq in the cave as they are fleeing to Madina. Abu Bakr r.a. is worrying(i.e. doubting), for one of the few times, about the safety of our Prophet saws who responds;” Are you not aware that Allah is with us on this journey” the Noble One explains. If Abu Bakr.one of the great ones, the Siddiq has doubts ,what about us.
The opposite of doubt is certitude -“Yaqin” but that is a very high state in Reality. As mentionned in the article most believers have that certainty in theory. But in Reality ,especially when being tested, that is another matter.So let us continue working on it.! Inshallah. Sufi Ibrahim
“
“The Fog of Data”
We have all heard of “The Fog of War’. I believe it was first popularized during the war in Vietnam by Robert McNamara.But “The fog of data” has now become an even greater problem-often leading to many forms of misery and miscalculation including war!
C.G Jung noticed this problem more than 50 years ago .He said “Many scientific-minded persons”( now he could say almost all scientific-minded persons lol) have even sacrificed their religious and philosophical leanings( of course -they have embraced the new religion of Empiricism) for fear of uncontrolled subjectivism. By way of compensation for the loss of a world that pulsed with our blood and breathed with our breath(who needs blood and breath when you have facts?!),we have developed an enthusiasm for facts-mountains of facts far beyond any single individual’s power to survey(Ever noticed lol ?)We have the pious hope that this incidental accumulation of facts will form a meaningful whole”(and by extension an effective decision-making process). Nothing could be further from the Truth! Reference: Psychology and the East, Princeton University Press 1975) Couldn’t have said it better myself lol.
So,.. if we take the time to follow what our “scientific, evidence- based” “decision -makers do, we will discover the following stages of the process;
1-The Accumulation of Data-any and all data-relevant and irrelevant, some of it in the form of charts, others in graphs all organized in a way to allow numerical and statistical analysis.
2-The data is the “crunched” analyzed meticulously by experts and statisticians and epidemiologists and an army of modern intellectuals and technocrats.
3-From this process is generated a few concepts and theories which then become articles of faith(e.g. “Vaccines are safe and effective” or “man-made climate change due to burning hydrocarbons.” ) articles which are no longer to be questioned or challenged for fear of being denounced as anti-vaxxers or climate change denier.
4-From this toxic soup of procedures, principles, rules and regulations and protocols are laid down(vaccine mandates ,limiting the production of hydrocarbons etc,.)Nothing is to be challenged or put into question any longer. These have become religious catechisms.
Poor old Francis Bacon, the discoverer and promoter of the Scientific Method, must be rolling over in his grave lol. This is not at all what he intended. His protocol also involves four stages-but very different from what is called “science ” in the modern world. Let us have a look at them:
1- Observation; This required an insightful observation in the course of one’s regular work. So seeing that mould could kill microbes led to the development of antibiotics like penicillin. And noticing that animals with pancreatic pathology had sugar regulation problems led to the discovery of insulin. None of this is based on data collection. It requires subtle ,inspired observation not obsessive fact-checking.
2-Hypothesis.From this observation one can develop a plausible connection that needs to be explored and investigated .Not a fixed theory that one defends by manipulating,suppressing ,hiding and even inventing(as in the famous Lancet article on hydroxychloroquine) data.
3-Experimentation With an open mind trained in objectivity and with no comnflicts of interest,one then designs an experiment to test out one’s hypothesis .This is about testing out theories not operationalizing pre-set ones!
4-Conclusion: One generates a conclusion based on the experimental data -always tentative, always subject to being disproved and always open to further research. A far cry from what is happening in modern profit-driven” science”
This model can be used effectively in many areas of our life, including (God forbid lol) in medical practice where in fact each patient is a new experiment requiring the doctor to actually sort out the specifics of each case . But we have strayed so far from the original model! Now instead we have protocols and procedures and algorithms which MUST be applied as “the standard of care” for fear of losing our jobs and our livelihoods. God help us!