The Process of Deprogramming from the Cult                               

of the Intellect

(N.B. This article is going to be part of an upcoming book entitled: Getting it Right: Achieving Balance and Completeness on the Spiritual Path”. As we approach the date of publication, in order to protect copyright, only a trailer will be left on the blog. So if the content interests you, please print it up or copy and paste it somewhere now. Salaams)

I am writing this article because, often, when I use the phrases ”overuse of the Intellect”, ”The University as Temple of the Intellect” and “hypercerebrality”, I get these blank stares or responses that tell me that the other person has not got it at all. My tendency, in those situations, is to get impatient and think to myself: ”What’s the matter with these people? Why don’t they get it?” and feel frustrated and misunderstood. Then it came to me, after lots of soul-searching, that I have actually undergone a long process of deprogramming, yes “deprogramming” as this way of thinking, that prioritizes the intellect above all, in all situations, is an international cult that I, too, was part of at one point in my life. And that it has taken me 40 years, at least, possibly 50, to get to this understanding. So I should be more patient.

Now, how did this cult originate or, more to the point, how did it penetrate so deeply into our minds? The simple answer is our schooling although a deeper analysis would show us that our entire society is tainted, I would even say corrupted, with this mythology. It is endemic in our social institutions, in the political processes around us and most notably in the academic and legal processes which give rise to these political processes. For the purposes of this article, it is not necessary to highlight its’ history or even its’ present sociology. I will leave that to the intellectuals, historians and sociologists amongst others, to do lol. What is important, here, is to help people escape so they can come back to their senses and their common sense. I hope by outlining my own process, I will help others to do likewise. It can be a question of life and death, really. It certainly is on the political and military level.

So how did this all get started? My theory is that it begins with our early schooling.  It probably took me thirty years to realize that the brainwashing started in elementary school when we were being taught that the two greatest civilizations in the history of man were the Greeks, with the Golden Age of Athens, and the Romans because they built the best roads and set up some of the earliest codified legal systems. In fact, many thinkers of the so-called “Enlightenment” and “The Age of Reason” felt that they were bringing back the glory days of Athens and Rome .Up to today, it is considered “classy” to seed scholarly texts with Greek and Latin terms. Think for a moment about what this is saying. Philosophers (the Greeks were prolific in producing schools of philosophy and philosophers) and engineers (the Romans) are the great personalities of history. No mention, when I studied history, of the Islamic civilization that, besides its’ advanced science and mathematics for the time, also fine-tuned theology to its most accurate and articulate expression nor of the Hindu-Buddhist civilization that developed and refined the meditative process and mapped a methodology for escaping from this mentalist conception. No! They were confined to the backwaters of specialized university courses and ashrams. It is only much later, when I began exploring mystical traditions, that I realized what I hoax I had been victim to. But, without further ado, and without a thorough investigation of the nature of this historical distortion, let us proceed to the process of liberation.

I would date the actual defining moment of this process of undoing to the year 1975 but realize there were in fact precedents. In fact, I would have to give an initial credit to my own mother who had inklings, herself, of the problem. She would often say to me in my youth: ”You, know Joey, it’s not always good to be so smart”. I was not sure whether she was referring to me, herself, or some-one else who had done something stupid or evil, but on some level the point was taken. In my youth, when we were feverishly competing to be first in the class, she would say also: ”But, Joey, what is really important is to be a mensch!” a German/Yiddish word for being a good, decent human being. What a revolutionary teaching in such a materialist society! (Incidentally getting good grades in school is just another form of materialism.).Thanks, Mom. You did get me started on this philosophical ‘jihad’.

Then I got to high school and met my nemesis! He was the ultimate student. He got 1000% in every math exam and almost every science exam he ever wrote. He went on to be first in the province in the high school finals, first in the North American actuarial exams and then first at Harvard in molecular biology. No-one could compete with him. But at the same time, he understood little about life and even less about people. I met him again recently at our high school reunion. He is now a professor Emeritus at a prestigious Canadian University. But he could not understand why I would want to write a book about the meaning of life. Although I have a reasonable amount of training in science I cannot even understand the titles of the articles he has published in science journals! Yet he thinks that the study of epigenetics and the nocebo effect is more interesting that the inquiry into the meaning of life. So, thank you, Jack, as well, for the contribution to my spiritual journey!

The next step on this journey happened in university where I was still unclear about this question and enrolled in a course on 19^th Century German philosophy. I had quite enjoyed the first philosophy course I had taken-An Introduction to Philosophy– given by a charismatic philosophy professor who piqued my interest in the subject. I had no idea of what I was getting into, however, until we started reading Hegel’s “The Phenomenology of Mind”-mind-bending to say the least. If you want to quickly understand my point here, just pick yourself up a copy of this tome, or better still, borrow one from your library as you are unlikely to ever want to go back and read it a second time.

We were well into the semester when the teacher gave us an assignment to do about the first chapter. One of the best students in the class had written an 80-page essay on the first sentence. The debate then ensued between the teacher, who had given him a 79 on the paper, and the student who was convinced that this was an “A” paper i.e. was worth at least an 80.The debate went on for what appeared to be an eternity ( maybe it was only 20-25 minutes) and I decided to leave- in total disbelief and disillusionment. But, before I left, I jotted down the following inspiration: ”Philosophy is Man’s attempt to undermine the communicative value of language”. This was well before linguistics had become the philosophical fad of the day in  Universities. When I thought about this 40 years later, I felt proud of myself (Beware Ibrahim!).I was only 19 years old at the time. Not bad for a teenager!

Before we pass on to the spiritual journey, which is the crucial one here, I should mention psychology. I began studying psychoanalytic theory in the early 70’s, having enrolled in a psychiatric training program at the University of Montreal and working at an institute,  L’Institut Albert Prevost, that was still dominated by French psychoanalysts. I found their thinking so outlandish that I temporarily left psychiatric training telling myself: ”These people are crazier than the patients” lol. They were enjoying developing psychoanalytic interpretations of psychotic patients’ delusions- an interesting intellectual game but obviously completely irrelevant clinically. I was deeply disappointed. I, nevertheless, went on to deepen my understanding of analytic theory through a psychoanalytic psychotherapy program in the late seventies as a preparation to re-enter and complete my psychiatric training at McGill University in the early eighties.

There was still a very strong psychoanalytic influence, at that point in time, in our training. This was before psychopharmacology and Cognitive Therapy and DSM diagnoses dominated the field. I did run into some impressive people in the analytic tradition and gradually began accepting some, if not all of their theories. Two psychoanalysts of German origin with obvious Germanic accents did elegant interviews of new patients and made us feel, in one short hour, that we had really understood the subjects being interviewed. There were still, however, some crazies out there like my Kleinian supervisor who was convinced that autism was caused by “the refrigerator mother” but many others seemed to be of sound mind .For one thing they were by far the best interviewers and seemed to get to the heart of the matter more quickly and convincingly than their empirically, symptom-searching DSM- type colleagues.

Now, the psychoanalysts are a very interesting case in point because of their inherent contradictory positions. On one hand, they value the unconscious and primary process, associative thinking. On the other hand they are often extremely cerebral themselves. Their writings can be very intellectual and obtuse to the point that they can sound like philosophers themselves lol. The French psychoanalysts, Lacan, for example, can sound much more like Wittgenstein, the ultimate proponent of linguistics and one of the most difficult to read, than he sounds like Freud who is actually very readable in most cases. Long live the contradictions.

Before proceeding, and in order to indicate how the psychoanalysts help us to question our rationality, I would like to clarify the notion of “primary process”.  Most of our usual thinking is called “secondary process” by the analysts .It involves the kind of logical thinking in the form of: ”A=B;  B=C; therefore A=C( Aristotle’s basic syllogism).Whether we are aware of it or not, we all take this kind of thinking process for granted. The psychoanalysts oppose this with an Associative type of thinking called “primary process”. In this form of thinking, opposites are equal, before can be after and after before and the sound of the word can be as significant or more so, than its’ actual meaning. We are talking about something here that is more like poetry than prose and more like art than science. This associative thinking becomes very important in dream interpretation and also in listening to an analytic therapy session as the analyst prepares to interpret the underlying themes. In order to properly interpret, we need to suspend our usual way of thinking, loosen up, so to speak, and try to capture the essence rather than the details. In a dream, for example, you may be having a conflict at work with a short-statured colleague .In the dream , he could appear as a tall male or a short female. Now the”normal” mind-set would reflexly respond:”But he’s tall, not short”. ”Wrong” (to quote the Trump, lol). But it is wrong! The unconscious doesn’t care about tall or short. It cares about the category ”height”. This is, admittedly, a new way of thinking but also a potentially revealing one. This, itself, can begin the “crack in the cosmic egg” of logical thinking. Most psychoanalysts do manage to remain egg-heads but that is another matter.

In reaction to all this headiness, whether primary or secondary in nature, there developed several schools of psychotherapy that challenged the mainstream. Wilhelm Reich, for example, developed Bioenergetics to give the body more importance in the analysis. And Jung with Analytic Psychology developed his theories of archetypes and the Collective Unconscious .But the group I had the most contact with were the Gestaltists, of which I quote extensively in my first book. The way Fritz Perls put it on the front-piece of his major work: ”Gestalt Therapy Verbatim” is the following: ”Lose your mind and come to your senses”. (Obvious a play on words involving being sensible and being sensual. He mostly meant the latter, as he was a notorious rascal in therapy circles, well-before it became illicit to do so.) Perls, although he saw clearly the limitations of logic and was well-grounded in analytic thinking, refused to take the next step-to the spiritual. He was actively belligerent to the Yoga teachers at Esalen and never had a good word to say about religion, i.e he remained in the same vein as his mentor, Freud, before him. This, despite borrowing the essence of his approach, being in the present, from Zen Buddhism itself. I doubt very much that Perls ever engaged in mediation. But he liked the ideas and put them to good use in his therapy. The Gestaltists were even more rapid and more accurate than the psychoanalysts in getting g to the heart of the clinical matter, (Read my account of a session with Tom Munson in my last book ”Enlightenment is Not Enough” if you want living proof!)

Now, Freud, for all the criticism he has taken since he first developed his psychoanalytic theories, was onto this problem, the limitations of the rational mind, well before any of the other Western intellectuals. He understood well that man was much more than his rational mind as he developed the theory of the unconscious. Through his work and his writings, he has demonstrated, convincingly I believe, that motivation for action goes well beyond the rational thought processes. In his tripartite structure of consciousness, we have “the conscious”,”the unconscious” and the preconscious. The latter two may credibly be considered mostly irrational. However, when I examine modern thinkers, I see that even Freud’s theories, certainly part of Western intellectual history, have been poorly assimilated. Outside of psychoanalytic associations and the analysts couches, they have been largely set aside. So now we have cognitive therapy for example and of course psychopharmacology both of which rely almost exclusively on science and the rational mind.

To give a very immediate example of how Freudian insights have not been assimilated in the modern world, I will refer to the current political debate in the U.S.A. I saw early on that Donald Trump was speaking from what Freud would have called primary process, the language of the unconscious. That is why he struck a chord with so many non-cerebralized people (What Hillary called “The deplorables”) The commentator s,as intelligent as they may seem, have no idea what the unconscious means. It was never part of the political commentary during the election process. Possibly in psychoanalytic societies but not in the public discourse. There were a few DSM terms that emerged like “Narcissistic Personality Disorder-probably true!).But no-one talked of the unconscious. They simply see him as irrational. That is true. But it is not the whole truth. In that irrationality are truths the mind can never see. I continue to be surprised to see that people do not give that dimension its’ proper due. They continue to believe that things should be as they want them to be-rational and logical.

I learnt a lot from the psychoanalysts-ideas that I still use regularly in my personal and even in my spiritual life. The way I see it, we exist on three levels-the material level ( bodies, money, concrete things and behaviour); the psychological level and the spiritual level. Psychoanalysis, despite its inherent failings and all the criticism directed its way, is still probably the most accurate system to describe the psychological domain. Of course that in no way diminishes the importance and primacy of the spiritual. Allah Hu Akbar.

All of this preparation, however, was only preliminary .The watershed moment, and the beginning of serious reflection, began in San Francisco, of all places, in 1975. I was in a workshop in a large hotel in downtown San Francisco and the trainer was upfront in the hall. I had finally engaged on the spiritual path after years of political activism and some study of alternative psychotherapies. I had overcome the biases of my previous mentors- Marx and Freud and Perls!  The trainer, at the front, wrote on the whiteboard in dramatic fashion:” Reasonableness is the Lowest Level of Spiritual Development”. What he meant was that it was one level above animal instincts, but just one! That statement hit me like a lightning bolt! Everything we had learnt in school -20 years of it at that point, was just one level above the reptilian brain. The journey was going to be long, no doubt!

So EST was the first spiritual mini-step. Then I found Sufism-the path of Love. My first Sufi teacher was Pir Vilayat Khan, a mystic of mixed Indian and American descent. He was spreading the message of his father, Hazrat Inayat Khan and the Sufi Message of the West. There we did the Songs and Dances of Universal Peace. I remember one of them well. The men and women were in concentric circles and in alternation while moving in circular patterns we would sing a spiritual song. I could hear the difference so clearly-the feminine and the masculine. Another crack in the cosmic egg. We were so different! That’s not what we were taught in our Rationalist schools already imbued with feminist egalitarianism. The difference was beautiful but only the heart could understand. Pir Vilayat would tell stories of rishis in the Himalayas and Sikh mystics ,Hassidic Rabbis and Sufi saints. Each of the stories had its’ own loftiness. None were logical. Not even the logic of the scientists and their ’Aha’ experiences. It was “gate, gate, para sum gate” (going on beyond) as the Buddhists say, way beyond the comprehension of the ordinary mind.

At the same time as I was introduced to Sufism, I came in touch with the Hindus and Buddhists. I found a Tibetan lama who taught weekly sessions on Buddhism and listened to the stories of the Hindus, including the very popular Americans-Ram Das and Bhagavan Das. They were all talking about the illusory nature of the mind. The mind was now seen, not as our ultimate ally, but as the enemy-the greatest obstacle on the journey to Enlightenment. The Buddhists talked of ”mental formations”(skandhas) as one of the aggregates (khandas) that were the cause of suffering. The Hindus spoke of the soul (atma) beyond any thoughts and the Buddhists said there was no soul-no self(anatta).I kept hearing the theme that you could never get to your goal, nibbana, satori etc., except by transcending the mind. So why were we putting so much importance in it?!

In 1980, I met Bawa Muhayyiddeen. He was an ascetic Sufi who had been found in the jungles of Sri Lanka and recruited to be a teacher. Just meeting him, you knew he had transcended the mind. Paradoxically ,he was easily able to read minds! When I first met him ,he answered a question to me about marriage-without me even knowing that I had formulated the question!. It blew me away and left me so beyond mind for a few days that I couldn’t even make a cup of tea lol But that is another story for another time.

The last nail in the coffin of rationality, so to speak, was meeting the Sheikh I spent the most time with-twelve years in all-Sheikh Nazim al-Qubrusi- from Cyprus. Although the Islamic tradition is not as insistent on this point as are the Indian ones, Sheikh Nazim understood it well. He would regularly talk about “mind productions’. But, beyond talking about them, he would himself address us regularly  from the heart. His speech had an immediacy and a Truth-like quality that was unmistakable. Although he had never studied Buddhism he was more Zen, in being in the here and now than any Buddhist I had ever met! His speech didn’t sound at all like the Islamic scholars and it even side-stepped some of the better-known Sufi nomenclature. It was to the point, specific to the time and place in which it was being spoken and even to the person spoken to.. Sometimes, only that person understood its relevance, while to everyone else it sounded ordinary. For example, when I first met him it was prayer time but I wasn’t sure if I had done my ablutions and I was obsessing about it. He looked at me and said: ”Do you have your wudu(ablutions, Ibrahim?” To everyone else that was an ordinary question. To me, who rarely worried about these things, I knew he was reading my mind. How interesting! When your mind is empty and your heart is free, you can hear the contents of other peoples’ minds. Another advantage to transcending the mental.

By now, some of the readers may be asking the question: ”Can you really function without continuously using your mind?” And the answer is an unequivocal “yes!”. Many of the Sufi teachers I met were doing just that. Not only can they function, but their functioning is superior when they rely on their hearts and their intuition. But it takes training and lots of hard work. If more of our politicians and judges and even doctors were coming from that place, the society would be considerably more efficient and certainly more humane. May Allah help us to attain this state individually and collectively. I believe that is what is signified in the Lord’s  prayer when it says:

“Thy Kingdom come, On earth as it is in heaven” We’re all waiting…

P.S. Now, some practical person, and rationality demands that we be practical lol, is going to ask me: ”So how do we get there?’ That is a good question but I am not sure the Rationnalists are going to like the answer. First, as in all spiritual matters, we have to see through and condemn the falsehood of the mind. As in the” laillahha ilallah” of Islam. We begin by denouncing the lesser gods, the idols-in this case the ‘idol’ of the Intellect. So next time you watch a politician or hear the comments of a so-called ‘expert’ or go to a lecture, listen to the mind productions and see if you can make out the difference between reality and abstraction. It will not be easy at first but over time you can learn. At this stage, when someone gets really abstract, I get a bad smell in my brain lol. It literally stinks! Another sign is that you feel like your brain is being called upon to do gymnastics .It’s a “brain strain”. At the University, you should feel this regularly lol. But most people don’t even notice!

And then we learn to transcend it-through meditation , through mindfulness(watching the mind without believing in it) through prayer(where we understand that there is an understanding beyond our comprehension and even through the tests in life which often cause us to go beyond our usual ways of thinking. None of this is easy. It took us a long time to be trained in the Church of Rationality. It is going to take considerable effort to “Deprogram” ourselves. But, it is well worth the effort. And God will give us success if we are sincere. Salaams, Ibrahim