Sufism and Jungian Psychology: Ways of Knowing and Being

Abstract: This work introduces the teachings of theoretical Sufism vis-à-vis Jungian psychology. Many religious scholars versed in Islamic psychology believe that Sufism differs from the major branches of the Islamic faith, such as jurisprudence or philosophy, because it stresses on ma’rifa—a direct mode of knowing the world, the human soul, and God. Similarly, Jungian psychology, which places great emphasis on knowing the personal shadow to the archetypal or transpersonal aspect of the psyche, has been dismissed by the scientific community and traditionalists. The following illustrates the Sufi path to spirituality using a Jungian approach. Identifying parallels and outlining the soul’s journey, the discussion draws similitudes from the inverse relationship of the Sufi notion of the soul’s descent and ascent to Jung’s model of the individuation process. This interdisciplinary framework is not only significant to the contemporary understanding of Sufism, the esoteric dimension of Islam, but also contributes to the expansion of Jungian psychology. © 2024 Inner Opus. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Psychology as conceived by Swiss psychiatrist, C. G. Jung (d. 1961 CE), takes us on a journey inward towards the unconscious mind. Imbued with aspects of spirituality, paranormal phenomena, and symbolism, Jungian psychology allows for integrating religious traditions into psychological discourse. Several scholars have noted parallels between Islamic traditions and Jungian analytical psychology (Spiegelman, Khan, Fernandez, & Spiegelman, 1991; Vaughan-Lee & Tweedie, 1998; Nouriani, 2017). Sufism, the metaphysical branch of Islam, applies to Jungian psychology as both frameworks rely on similar metaphors of inner reflection to describe the processes leading to psychological wholeness. Rooted in the Qur’an, the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), and the Shi’a Imams, Sufism is a discipline and a body of knowledge that is anchored in Islamic jurisprudence, theology, and philosophy (Hasan, 2012). While Jungian psychology and Sufism share common goals, the path to psychological unity is slightly different. This work discusses the areas of similarity and the differences between these two approaches. In doing so, the work of Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240 CE), the Andalusian metaphysician and theoretician who is known as al-sheikh al-akbar, “the greatest master” in Sufism, is of particular importance.

A Note on Methods of Inquiry

As evidence obtained through laboratory experimental data cannot capture the essence of meaning in metaphysical enquiry, empirical knowledge within Sufi perspectives is primarily attained through the analysis of symbolic images that constitute feelings, metaphors, dreams, visions, and revelations. These ways of knowing and being have been cultivated in the Islamic world for centuries. In fact, the concept of mundus imaginalis (or imaginal world) which was introduced into Jungian analytical psychology by James Hillman was borrowed from Henry Corbin, the French philosopher and scholar of Islam, and originally coined by Ibn ‘Arabi in the twelfth century. While Hillman’s conceptualization of the imaginal world was limited to the unconscious aspects of the psyche, in Sufism, it is viewed much more expansively as it encapsulates spiritual realms that are beyond the individual psyche. “Sufis believe that the world was created out of Divine love and that the entire cosmos is the result of God’s primordial imagination. From this perspective, imagination is not in us; rather, we are in imagination. When we are engaged in actively imagining, from the Sufi perspective, we are emulating God and engaging in a co-creative process on a microcosmic level” (Nouriani, 2017, p. 14). While modern neuroscience technologies have provided psychologists with the ability to study subconscious phenomena through brain waves and somatic responses, for Sufi mystics, empirical evidence pertaining to the nature of the psyche is primarily attained through philosophical hermeneutics (ta’wil).

Ta’wil (a term that occurs in the Qur’an seventeen times) is a psychological process of discernment to discover, interpret mystically, and explain esoterically (Chittick, 1989; Corbin, 1969). This method includes not only reason as the scale from which everything is weighed, but also the realities of dreams, visions, feelings, and revelations which are relative to the person who experiences them. The principle goal of Sufism is to experience or “taste” (dhawq) the divine reality (haqīqah) within the human experience by specific ways (tarīqah; pl. turuq) set by the Islamic law (sharīah). Thus, Sufi psychology is not concerned with absolutism, only self-determination in its particular phenomenal form. Within this perspective, the inner self in Sufi gnosis (ma’rifa) and the deeper aspect of the psyche in the Jungian sense, may both be representations of God’s reality envisioned through the unique conceptualizations of each theoretical framework (Corbin, 1969; Edinger, 1972). Although the archetypal reality of Sufism is historically much older than the religion brought by the Prophet Muhammad, it is important to bear in mind that Sufism and its proponents are rooted in Islam, and that Islam, as a world-religion (dīn), is itself a third branch of Abrahamic monotheism.

Jung’s Model of the Psyche

From the Jungian perspective, the human psyche is a mini universe made up of two principles: consciousness and the unconscious. Consciousness is a subjective part of the psyche, namely the rational ego that has separated or differentiated itself from the unconscious. The ego is aware of itself and thus, as the experiencer, the ego often considers itself autonomous. In Jung’s theory, the unconscious is separated into (1) the personal unconscious, which is closer to the ego-consciousness and holds experiential memories and complexes, and (2) the collective unconscious, a deeper layer that comprises the universal memories across all human experiences. The collective unconscious, for Jung, is not only the container of archetypes (archai), which are psychic images, but also, a projector. These images appear as symbols, pregnant with meaning, appear to the ego across cultures through art, literature, myth, and religion.

According to Jung, the psyche is a self-regulating system. Like the human body, that seeks to achieve homeostatic equilibrium between elemental opposing forces as it strives for growth, this system as a process, which he termed ‘individuation,’ creates tension between the ego-consciousness and the unconscious. However, in Jung’s psychology, the unconscious holds a greater influence on the psyche. The ego is an emergent phenomenon within the psyche which is a part of consciousness where human awareness lives. Jung (1954/1969b) states:

Everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future things which are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness: all this is the content of the unconscious (p. 185).

We can say that the unconscious for Jung is a symbol for the unknown, unseen, arational, or dark reality. This conceptualization imparts a scientific context to the manifestations of the transcendent reality, a reality beyond human consciousness. In fact, the collective unconscious—the transpersonal or archetypal aspect of the psyche or soul—is considered immortal from the perspective of the ego-consciousness.

In Jung’s model of the psyche, both the ego-consciousness and the unconscious have their own archetypal or spiritual nucleus within them. Like the yin/yang, two opposing principles within the one, both parts of the psyche have psychological systems (i.e., organs and their functions) that reflect one another in a compensatory dynamic. It is important to note that much of Jung’s psychology was not focused on curing the mind, but rather on providing a new way of looking at gnosis and/or the Gnostic myth. “The main interest of my work,” says Jung, “is not concerned with the treatment of neurosis, but rather with the approach to the numinous [emphasis added]” (Ribi, 2013, p. 280). Jung borrowed the Latin term “numinous” from Rudolf Otto’s book The Idea of the Holy, first published in 1917, to refer to qualities and states of mind that are holy but not necessarily associated with goodness. In 1940, Jung described the numinosum “as a dynamic energy or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will. On the contrary, it seizes and controls the human subject, who is always rather its victim than its creator. The numinosum—whatever its cause may be—is an experience of the subject independent of his will. At all events, religious teaching as well as the consensus gentium always and everywhere explains this experience as being due to a cause external to the individual. The numinosum is a quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness” (Jung, 1940/1969a, p. 138).

As a concept, the numinosum is difficult to capture in words. It makes sense to me to say that it is a state-specific form of knowing and being. Without going into the philosophical, let’s think about a dream in which you have found the answer to a problem, with which you have been struggling, but upon waking, the answer eludes you. It was right there in your dream, but in the waking state of consciousness, like the alchemical Mercurius, it slips out of reach. Hence, as the dream from which one wakes, the numinosum is experienced on a plane of existence that is intangible, just out of reach of the ego-consciousness. The numinosum is also a paradox because it contains both positive qualities such as bliss, rapture, and sublimity, and negative qualities such as fear, haunting and bewilderment—both of which are likely to be encountered with the divine names. Objects like trees, mountains, and rivers, for example, may be numinous for indigenous peoples who consider them holy. Our planet itself may exude numinosity for those who consider her a goddess. The numinosum, thus, takes multiple forms in images that inspire awe—images that may be personifications of archetypes, symbols, the formative principles in the collective unconscious that are set by energic laws which function in the psyche in the same ways that they function in the physical world.

The Nature of the Soul in Sufism

The Arabic word for Sufism, used by Muslims to describe the spiritual path of knowing and being, is tasawwuf. Sufi wisdom (which is referred to as al-hikmat) is the divine wisdom that a seeker (mūrad) aims to achieve after being initiated by a spiritual master (murshid) on the path. This knowledge has been divided into two, namely, al-tasawwuf al-‘ilmī (theoretical Sufism) and al-tasawwuf al-‘amalī (practical Sufism). Sufi teachings model the Prophet’s nocturnal ascension (al-mi’rāj)— the night journey where the Prophet was taken by the archangel Gabriel to the highest degree of God’s manifestation and his descent back to the human world. Therefore, Sufism is concerned not only with knowing God in the Heavens but also being with God’s commands on Earth. The Sufi way of spiritual development is a psychological move from the outer everyday physical reality to the inner divine one. Sufis theorize energic laws using the Qur’anic idea of fitrah, which is used by Sufi sages to denote the nature of the psyche or soul. In Sufi metaphysics, angels and jinns correspond to creatures of the spirit and body, respectively. They are conceived in the mind and are invisible to physical eyes. The human ego-self can experience both directly because of its ontological position in the middle of both types of energies. In Islamic gnosis, the soul (al-nafs) is trapped between the spirit (al-ruh) and the body (al-jism). It can not only think and feel but also sense and intuit, which allows it to unite the inner and outer realities. In other words, al-nafs is the experiencer, experiencing itself as it moves through higher and lower energic states of knowing and being. Self-understanding, thus, requires one to unite body and mind, bringing human consciousness closer to the divine realm. In this way, the totality of the psyche can convey both spiritual and embodied principles of the soul.

This is different from the dualistic or Cartesian view of the self, which positions the mind as a separate entity (res cogitans) from the body or extended reality (res extensa). For both Jung and Ibn ‘Arabi, the image of God is not a different reality cut off from human consciousness, but rather a representation of the bi-unity of the soul (Corbin, 1969; Edinger, 1972; Izutsu, 1984; Chittick, 1998) which reflects the components of tawhid, or the Oneness of God, within Jungian psychology. Sufis often use the Qur’anic concept of death and rebirth metaphorically to show the psyche’s natural processes: its resurrection, development, or transformation. Despite going through these differentiating processes or stages in the physical world of phenomenal reality, the psyche’s essential nature, the spiritual reality, remains unchanged. It retains its divine purity throughout its life and death.

For Sufis, this innate and undifferentiated nature of the soul is the sacred potential of the psyche, the divine within. In the Islamic sense, it is God’s power (qudrah) in the human being as fitrah given to Adam, the original man, anthropos; (Corbin, 1969). The Qur’an (2:31) states that God taught Adam all His Names (Chittick, 2000), which implies that God’s knowledge multiplies in the human soul. This movement of the spirit to the body is the starting point of all suffering and agony, because in the knowledge given to human beings, there is a conscious moral dilemma of good and evil. The spiritual qudrah is born in the human soul as the bodily fitrah. The soul desires this body (jism e nafs), but also calls human beings to the remembrance (dhikr) of God, providing an inborn religious instinct to return to its spiritual roots. In Sufism, the nature of the soul (al fitrat al nafs), therefore, necessarily holds a memory, a habitual tension between spirit and body.

Comparing Sufi and Jungian Conceptualizations

In comparing the Sufi model of fitrah with Jung’s model of the psyche, we can envision the outer ego-conscious aspect of the psyche to be the soul in a weaker energy state, while the stronger unconscious aspect of the psyche is akin to the soul in its inner spiritual state. The unconscious fitrah encourages bodily instincts and Freudian sexual impulses to disturb the intellectual mind away from its spiritual affinity, pulling spirituality down to the unconscious level when unconscious forces have more energy than the ego-consciousness. When this happens too much, the spiritual fitrah compensates to bring balance to the psyche, manifesting its subtle shaded images, revealing its own desires in dreams, visions of angels, or producing religious nostalgia. On the other hand, when the soul is spiritualized too much in the pursuit of intellectual or religious endeavor, the neglected darker shades of bodily desires emerge, often with a powerful force to balance the mind. The key in both Jungian psychology and Sufism is to make the unconscious contents conscious by going into the inner world, by realizing ego delimitations, and experiencing the nondelimited numinosum. This way the psyche is altered and expands via self- analysis or knowing of the self.

In Islamic literature, self-knowledge is the journey of the soul to knowing the human-God relationship, which has been discussed for centuries connecting Sufi teachings with ancient philosophies such as Hermeticism, Astrology, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Alchemy. Muslim philosophers in the Persian and Arab world wrote a great deal about the journey of the soul. They described different methods of healing the psyche by way of spiritual alignment, and to this day, modern interpreters such as the perennial philosophers continue to investigate various psychic states connecting religious traditions (see Sotillos, 2013). But Sufism is unique in a way that it focuses on unification with the essential nature of the psyche, the divine attributes within. Egyptian Jungian psychologist, Mohammed Shaalan, defines Sufism as an understanding of reality through Islam of what is essentially the universal mystical essence of all religions (Spiegelman et al., 1991). The word “mystical” here implies becoming one with God. However, for Ibn ‘Arabi, this would be a misleading definition. Instead, Ibn ‘Arabi would define mysticism as knowing one’s self by being in the presence of the divine secrets. Knowing and being are thus two different but interrelated constructs. They deal with the dynamics of our epistemologies and ontologies. Our existence itself speaks to our being. What we know affects our behavior. Knowing, thus, is about becoming. This knowing and then becoming is mirrored in Jung’s concept of the process of individuation. Becoming individuated or in-divisible is about becoming whole through the knowl- edge of one’s self or the totality of the psyche. It is a process by which the ego-consciousness approaches the numinous unconscious, and/or vice versa.

As Sufism is rooted in the Qur’an, the self or soul (al-nafs) is divided into many levels: for example, nafs al-ammārah, nafs al-lawwāmah, nafs al- mutmaina, nafs al-ridiyah, and nafs al-kamilah, in a hierarchical manner. Although there is no restriction to the number of levels of the soul in Islam, these particular ones are the most commonly known. From outer to inner or from body to spirit, these levels contain archetypal forces that provide meaning to suffering in the world. They lead the ego to spiritual realization. In Jungian psychology, bringing these inner meanings up to the conscious level is also personified through hierarchical levels from lower animal instincts to the higher moral instincts, and ascending further to spiritual attainment, spiritual contentment, and finally, to complete conscious being. This is the soul’s journey. These inner forces of the human soul, which Jung calls archetypes, derive their existence from the deeper divine spirit (himma) within the human psyche. In the same way as Jungian analysis, Sufi rituals entail confronting these forces, starting with the “shadow”, the unwanted material traits. Sufis purge (tazkiyat an-nafs) and recognize ego desires (taqliyyat as-sirr) espoused by the dark nature or instinctual fitrah of the soul. In their spiritual practice, they reprogram their ego-defenses by identifying habitual patterns and reorienting the egoic interests using the inner eye (‘ayn al basira) of the soul.

Wahādat al Wujūd and the Jungian Process of Individuation

In Sufism, divine attributes are reflected in human beings and may be known by refining the soul. This knowledge is al ‘irfān or m’arifa. It is a monotheistic framework of wahādat al wujūd, which for Ibn ‘Arabi, contains two opposing poles of Being: (1) Al-Tawhīd or Oneness of God, which Ibn ‘Arabi preferred calling Al-Haqq or the Real, and (2) God’s multiple Divine Names or God’s manifestations in the world in which and by which human beings experience their present reality and move forward onto the spiritual path to seek nearness to the Real.

According to Jungian psychology, religious theologians who are concerned with dogmas and observance of religious doctrines have an extroverted attitude. Their aim is chiefly to achieve salvation, and so they look for the spirit of God outside themselves in the physical cosmos. An introverted orientation turns to the inner self to experience the spirit of God-image. Similarly, Sufism emphasizes both the exterior (zāhir) and interior (bātin) aspects of the spiritual path. The former is a broader path focusing on the shariah, or orthodox Islamic Law. The latter is a narrow path preferred by the heterodox mystics, which leads them inward to redeem the divine within. In this narrow path, the focus on the ego, the “I” principle is cleansed by “killing” the shadow (fanā) so that the soul may reunite with the Divine (Corbin, 2014). The ultimate goal for a mystic is thus to transcend the prison of personal individuality and become subsumed within the eternal presence of God who alone is the Real.

Ibn ‘Arabi’s concept of wahādat al wujūd can be understood as Jung’s notion of the psyche becoming whole or individuated. The psyche is the domain where all experiences, inner and outer, spiritual and corporeal, are perceived. Human psyches for Jung are the collective containers of all the images experienced in the past, their symbolic meanings, universal ideas, and archetypal forms, which take part in the individuation process. For Ibn ‘Arabi, this corresponds to the imaginal, where the knowledge of God’s Names takes place and cultivated toward the spiritual path of an ‘arif (the knower). Using Jungian psychology, we can symbolically interpret that the Names of God are to Ibn ‘Arabi what the archetypal images in the psyche are to Jung. Although the transcendent or metaphysical God, Allah, in Islam has no image, and cannot be known, all of His manifestations belong to His Names, which human beings can imagine in the imaginal field (alam al mithal or barzakh). We can say that God’s Names act as images to our knowing (‘ilm). They are living symbols, or signs (ayat ullah) to our minds and hearts as evidence of God’s existence. This is not a fantasy (wahm). On the contrary, the entire cosmos is witnessed by relating in this way with God (tashbih). For Muslims, in fact, God’s creation and everything in it, is an ayah, a sign of His Presence that glorifies Him. For He is, in the Qur’an, the All-Merciful (Al-Rehmān), All-Compassionate (Al-Rahīm), the Owner (Al-Mālik) and Lord (Al-Rabb) of the worlds (alamīn). However, He is also the Abaser or the Remover (Al-Muzil), the Inflictor of Death (Al-Mumeet), and the Preventer or Withholder (Al-Maani’). In Islam, and thus in Sufism, all the Names of God symbolize the Absolute Reality of God in the knowing of His Names. As soon as we say the word “symbol”, we have an image, and as soon as we have an “image”, we have human “psychology”, which means an understanding (logos) of the psyche, the domain of image-making, or soul-making.

Divine Reality and Psychic Reality: “No God but God”

The term “islam” has many meanings or images. The root word “s-l-m” is deeply related to the concept of wholeness, which in Sufi psychology, symbolizes submission of the ego-self to the Will of God. In that submission, a Muslim must verbally acknowledge the Absolute Reality of God through the formulaic declaration of the shahadah (witnessing): “There is no god, but God” (Murata & Chittick, 1994). For Ibn ‘Arabi, the key to understanding the metaphysical and phenomenological reality of God is in this formula. Exegetically, mystic philosophers interpret the first part of this formula as a negation (“no god”) and the second, as affirmation (“but God”). Sufi sages interpret no god to be the unreal that is to be annihilated (fanā) through God, who is the Real Being alone, but God (baqā). In the Jungian sense, the God-image is turned upside down where no god in the formula above can be associated with the hidden or misunderstood God, who remains a mystery in the unconscious per se, and the second part, but God, is a self-revealing God that comes into human consciousness as the manifestation of the Real. This inverse approach toward a divine reality acknowledges that the psychic reality of our world is not independent or detached from The Real. The God-image is reflected as if the human soul is a mirror. According to Izutsu (1984), “in between these two [no God and but God] is situated a particular region in which things ‘may rightly be said to exist and not to exist’, i.e., the world of the permanent archetypes, which is totally inaccessible to the mind of an ordinary man but perfectly accessible to the ecstatic mind of a mystic” (p. 48). From a Jungian perspective, therefore, archetypes have two sides: one facing God’s light, the Absolute Being, and the other facing nonexistence.

Archetypes (A’yan Thabita)

According to Jung, archetypes are formative principles of the psyche. They are universal images reflecting their patterns in the conscious world as they emerge from the collective unconscious. The conscious psyche is the medium through which archetypes display their existence and non-existence, their goodness and evil. Because they reside in the unconscious, or the unknown realm, their existence enters human consciousness directly when meanings enter through symbols, stories, art, myths, and religion. Archetypes actualize their potential in events such as birth, death, marriage, and through personified figures such as the hero, the devil, anima, animus, or the trickster, to name a few. Archetypes for Ibn ‘Arabi, a’yan thabita, represent all the possibilities of creation as determined by God. They are immutable entities in nonexistence. Archetypes are things latent in the Godhead without physical form. Creation is given form by God when He speaks to it, “‘Be’, and it is” (Qur’an, 2:117). Metaphysically we can say that God’s knowing of things comes before they exist in the world. In other words, even though they do not have existence, they are in God’s knowledge, in the nonexistent reality from the perspective of the creatures. The word “Be” thus holds archetypal meaning, the eternal ideas of God’s knowledge (loh-e-mehfooz). He gives form to the universe. Nonexistence becomes existence just as the unconscious becomes consciousness in Jungian understanding. The human psyche is thus like a mini cosmos where ideas are given existence by archetypes.

Like Jung’s archetypes within the human microcosm, a’yan thabita for Ibn ‘Arabi are a prototype of every created thing in the macrocosm. Psychologically, ideas in the mind are produced and crystallized by archetypes in this way, which for Ibn ‘Arabi are none other than God’s speech and the attributes of His Names, which “He taught Adam” (Qur’an, 2:31). That is why, in Sufism, the practice of invocation or remembering (dhikr) God’s Names is the fundamental sacred act of worship. By remembering God’s Names, Sufis archetypally reach the Divine Realm. However, the Names of God for Sufis have a dual aspect to them: the hidden (bātin) and the revealed (zāhir). Because God’s Names are infinite in their power, the psyche is only able to contain them as symbols. Although the Names are revealed to humankind, they remain always with God and belong only to God. This hidden aspect of God (pure Light, pure Spirit, the Absolute, or tanzih) can never be described (Chittick, 1998). For Jung, this aspect is the underlying reality of the imperceptible unconscious which is reflected in the psyche as much as humanly possible as the imago dei (God-image), an archetype which for Jung holds infinite possibilities of human experiences. It is the archetype of the Spirit, which is the all-encompassing archetype. It is the Self, or the archetype of meaning. It is God’s light within the human kernel that reveals itself to human consciousness through spiritual work. For Ibn ‘Arabi, it is the potential image of The Real which manifests itself as self-disclosure of God (tashbih). For “wherever you turn, there is the Face of God,” says the Qur’an (2:115). Thus, the world of permanent archetypes in Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious and Ibn ‘Arabi’s notion of a’yan thabita can be said to be the same reality from where all archetypes of humanity originate, a reality that has both positive and negative attributes.

The Archetypal Path

According to Ibn ‘Arabi’s metaphysics, the Divine Descent is in God’s word “Be”, through which the entirety of creation is realized. He describes this in several stages where God in His emanation from His isolated Oneness manifests Himself in multiplicity to Himself. This is called the Arc of Creation, or the Arc of Descent, which is depicted by the act of differentiation or separation. This arc or horn-like image symbolizes the first half of the soul’s journey from birth to the midlife crisis in Jung’s psychology. The second half of the soul’s journey is symbolized by the Arc of Ascent back to its original source as the soul returns to its Creator by doing beautiful work (ihsan). The Arc of Ascent represents the return of our earthly existence to the tip of the horn image, which is the point of Being, the Real Existence. According to most scholars who have studied Ibn ‘Arabi’s writings, this is the basic structure of the sheikh’s metaphysical vision of cosmic imagination and love (Fazeli, 2012; Faali, 2014).

We see a similar model of the soul’s journey in Jungian psychology; but here, the cosmos is inverted. Instead of going upward in its return to God, the differentiated soul or consciousness goes down into the depths of the human psyche, back to its undifferentiated self, seeking to reunite with the unconscious light through self- analysis. Here, the image of God is envisioned by the conscious psyche introvertedly because the divine spark or the original Adam or anthropos in the gnostic sense, is embedded within the human unconscious, and the work of the philosopher-mystic is to render the unconscious into consciousness using alchemical operations of purification (for more information, see Jung’s “Religious Ideas in Alchemy,” 1937/1968). The direction of this movement of the soul illustrates the subtle difference between Jung’s psychology and Sufi metaphysics. For Jung, instead of descending from the Heaven above, human consciousness emerges from the depths of the unconscious psyche—that is to say, from the body. Therefore, naturally it should return to the body. However, the conceptualization of the soul’s journey is similar to the Sufi notion of existence emerging from nonexistence (a hidden realm unknown to living creatures and to which only God has access)—what Jung calls the unconscious. As the container of all knowledge, past, present, and future, the collective unconscious is the “universal mind” or the “supra-conscious”. Jungian psychologists envision this through the image of a mandala (or circle) which is used to convey the outer/inner directionality and the dual nature of the ego/supra-ego dynamic. We can compare this directionality with the Arc of Descent and Arc of Ascent in Sufi terminology.

Like Sufi gnostics, Jung saw the God-image symbolized by the center of the mandala, which represents the archetype of the Self. This psychic center, for Sufi metaphysicians such as Ibn ‘Arabi, represents the undifferentiated divine psychic cloud where the knowledge of all things (i.e. “God’s Names”) belongs solely to God. For Jungians, this is the domain of the trans-psychic pleroma, where there is no inner and no outer because at this center point; there is no human-God relationship. According to von Franz (1980), the regulatory processes of the psyche are controlled by the Self-archetype, which lies at the center of the collective unconscious and is independent of and far away from ego-consciousness and human will. For Ibn ‘Arabi, this definition of the Self-archetype is akin to the Islamic principle of tanzih, God’s transcendent distance from humanity. Sufis represents tanzih in the mandala by a multitude of concentric circles that symbolize different worlds—physical world, imaginal world, spiritual world—each with God at the center. Some spiritual circles may come closer to God, while others are farther away; and even though all worlds have God at their center as the sustainer, they can never reach that center, because of their inherent incomparability with God.

Tanzih represents on of the two dichotomous poles that attempt to capture the nature of the human-God relationship, the other pole being tashbih, where humans are endowed with the attributes of God. In Sufism, it is imperative to understand both concepts which are referenced in the Qur’an. Tanzih appears in verses such as “Nothing is like Him” (Qur’an 42:11), and “Glory be to God, the Lord of Inaccessibility” (Qur’an 37:180). Similarly, tashbih is reflected in verses such as “To God belong the East and the West; wherever you turn, there is the Face of God; God is All-Embracing, All-Knowing” (Qur’an 2:115); “And indeed We have created man, and We know whatever thoughts his inner self develops, and We are closer to him than his jugular vein” (Qur’an 50:16). Tashbih is symbolized in the mandala circle by an infinite number of radii extending outward from the center to the circumference. We can say that a spiritual traveler therefore works on this path from the circumference to the center to reach the divine light directly. Each radius is a potential path on which a human soul gains its own understanding of reality.

Connecting Ibn ‘Arabi’s ideas to Jungian psychology, the metaphysical tanzih and the cosmic tashbih are the totality of the human psyche where the former symbolizes God’s transcended Self, and the latter represents His Names as the psychic realities of the collective unconscious and archetypal consciousness. Jung symbolizes the nature of the Self as being everywhere in the mandala image. Inasmuch as it is the center point of the spherical psyche, the Self for Jung is the entire image. Jung is not concerned with the metaphysical God, though we can see the individuation process follows a similar path to that which is described by Ibn ‘Arabi, namely, the tension between the two modes of knowing God, tashbih and tanzih. What for Jung is the emergence of the ego by separating from the unconscious as the psyche develops in the first half of life, for Ibn ‘Arabi, is the Arc of Descent, where the ego becomes separated and inflated from its original state of wholeness. The separated ego, in the second half of life, or the Arc of Ascent in Ibn ‘Arabi’s model, attempts to return to its original state through the process of active self-realization and self-cultivation. The individuation process, therefore, results in the tension between consciousness and the unconscious. This tension is a struggle (jihad) in Islam, which in Jungian psychology results in the inevitable suffering of the psyche during the process of individuation.

Unfortunately, many Islamic schools of thought and sects emphasize one facet over the other, which renders one-sided belief systems. By stressing tanzih alone, Islamic fundamentalists, for example, emphasize external aspects of religion, while the image of “drunken” Sufi mystics illustrates a lopsided leaning toward tashbih. Instead, Jung and Ibn ‘Arabi advocate for a psychological and spiritual realization that highlights both perspectives of the human-God relationship simultaneously. Balance is needed for a healthy psychic life. In Sufi psychology, the human soul strives to gain knowledge of God’s Mercy and His Wrath. The focal point of being separated from the divine root is not to attain individualism by the ego, but to realize human connection to the divine root via archetypal meaning in suffering. What Sufis call spirituality is in Jung’s psychology the goal of the individuation process. It is to achieve a conscious relation to the unconscious Self, which, as an archetype, contains both positive and negative, or light and dark. The process of integrating with goodness has been the goal of Sufi mystics throughout history, but not by ignoring the evil or dark aspect of the Self. Similarly, the individuation process in Jungian psychology does not result in an entity separated from others, but one that is integrated and connected with the human spirit and evil.

A Deeper Dive

The scholarly work of Henry Corbin (d. 1978) is important to the study of depth psychology and Sufism. Corbin met Jung in 1949 at the Eranos conference in Switzerland. They maintained a professional relationship until Jung’s death in 1961 (Cheetham, 2012; Kingsley, 2018). In Istanbul from 1939 to 1946, Corbin studied the writings of Shahāb ad-Dīn Yahya Suhrawardi (d. 1191). He also turned to the philosophical work of Ibn Sina (d. 1037) and metaphysics of Ibn al-‘Arabi (d. 1240), which led him to Ismailism and the Shi’a gnosis of prophetology, angelology, and Imamology (especially the doctrine of the Hidden Imam in Twelver Shi’ism—which for Corbin corresponds with the Gnostic Christ or C. G. Jung’s postulate of the Self). As a phenomenologist, Corbin (2006) realized that Sufis (the “people of turūq”, or those who organized congregational orders) faced difficulties from Sunni theologians (mutakallimūn) and Shi’a theosophists. While they practiced Islamic legal injunctions such as worship in the form of prayer (salah, dhikr) and fasting, Sufi orders (tarīqah) traced their spiritual lineage (silsila, meaning “chain”, referring to the line of succession in Sufi orders) back to the Shi’a Imams.

Although many Muslim philosophers attempted to address Sunni and Shi’a understanding of walayah (guardianship and the esoteric aspect of prophecy), Corbin (1986) was particularly interested in the work of Haydar Amuli (d. 1385), one of the few Shi’a Sufi masters who addressed walayah from a psycho-spiritual perspective. Supported by the Qur’an and hadith, Amuli (1989) explained the relationship between people of shariah (law or canon), people of tarīqah (way or path), and people of haqīqah (truth). For Amuli, shariah affirms the Prophet’s actions and behavior; tariqa is the realization of the Prophet’s deeds, his ethical intentions, and the methods behind his actions; and haqīqah is witnessing the Prophet’s revealed spiritual station and his closeness with God. Corbin (1986, 2006) recognized that Amuli’s three levels are not different in origin, but rather, are aspects of one reality, haqīqah Muhammadīyah or Muhammadan reality. This reality is like a pleroma expanded in existence and in time as the Muhammadan period until the appearance of the Hidden Imam, the Seal of the walayah. These categories (shariah, tarīqah, and haqīqah) correspond respectively to the psychological discussion of corporeal, imaginal, and spiritual worlds.

Twelver Shi’ism is the most common form of Shi’ism today, and focuses on the spiritual and political succession of the 12 Imams, beginning with Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, who are believed to be divinely ordained to lead the Muslim ummah, or community. According to Twelvers, the final imam in this chain is the twelfth imam who disappeared in the ninth century. This “Hidden Imam” is the Rightly Guided One (al mahdi) and is expected to return to begin the processes associated with the final days on earth (when Jesus is also expected to return) and the Day of Judgment (Newman, 2019).

Conclusion

Although Jung never claimed to be a metaphysician, only a psychologist who realized the light and dark aspects of the human soul, his theoretical framework of individuation closely parallels the religious elements described by Sufism. As Nagy (1991) points out, Jung’s philosophical approach “defends religious truths from the reductionist conclusions of scientists” (p. 265). Understanding Western and Eastern wisdom traditions with their sacred expression of reality, the exoteric and the esoteric, provides us with a language of discourse to examine principles such as the duality of good and evil from a psychological lens. In this way, I believe, we can illustrate the similarities that exist across faith systems and psychologies.

Certainly, a dogmatic purview of religion may declare Ibn Arabi’s theories to be outright heretical and pantheistic, in the same manner that a rigid view of social science can dismiss Jung’s work as “occult science” or “pagan cosmology”; but from an esoteric perspective, the similarities between their conceptualizations of the soul’s journey are undeniable. Integrating the Sufi concept of self-knowledge with Jung’s notion of the individuation processes provides a bridge across Islamic teachings and Western traditions. This is exemplified by some Sufi circles where Jung is considered a mystic and through the esteem in which Jungian scholars hold Ibn ‘Arabi’s psychological perspective (Nouriani, 2017). As the newest wave of psychologies focuses on balancing the duality of nature inherent in human experience, by connecting esoteric expression of Sufism with the language of Jungian psychology, we add to the discourse a meaningful exploration of the journey and struggle of the psyche, while providing a glimpse into the vastness of the Sufi body of knowledge where the wisdom deep within human beings can be tasted by understanding the spiritual path.

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