interview

WIE: What is Ego?

SHEIKH RAGIP: It's interesting that when Freud's writing was translated into English, what was translated as "the ego" is in German "das Ich" which means "the I." So our modern theories of personality are built on this notion that ego is the "I"; it's my sense of who I am. And Sufism would very much agree with this definition. Sufism explains that this sense of self, what it calls the "personal soul," is an outgrowth of our capacity to objectify ourselves, to see ourselves as objects. Now, our capacity to do that gives us tremendous power to act, to plan; it gives us tremendous control. But the problem is that when you begin to say, "There is an 'I.' Here I am, an object," then by definition you're also separating yourself from the world. If I say, "I" or "me," that immediately assumes dualism. Because there's "I," therefore there has to be "other." But from the Sufi point of view, we're seeking unity—and that dualism, which is so powerful, is one of the greatest blocks to attaining unity. Who wants to give up "I"? We don't want to give ourselves up; we're terribly attached to this sense of "who am I?"

So, fundamentally, the roots of the ego are this sense of separateness or individuality. We identify with this separateness instead of identifying with the soul, instead of identifying with the divine in us. And to the extent that we are attached to our self-content or self-image or separateness, that is one of the things that keeps us from truly pursuing a spiritual path. It holds us back from our deepest mystical experiences because often in those experiences that sense of a separate self dissolves. One of my old colleagues once said, "Everybody wants God but fights like the devil to avoid union!"

WIE: In your book Heart, Self and Soul, you also define the ego as "the collection of all those forces within us that lead us off the spiritual path." Is the ego, as you're describing it here, what in Sufism is called "the tyrannical nafs?"

SR: Yes. In Sufism, the lowest level of the nafs or self is the nafs ammara, or tyrannical nafs, which refers to all those forces in us that lead us astray. And at that level we are also unconscious of them, in denial that they exist, very much like an addict who says, "I have no problem with alcohol. I just have a little with breakfast, a little with lunch, a little something in between, but I have no problem." It's that denial, that unconsciousness, that makes the tyrannical nafs so incredibly powerful. And many of us are in that stage more than we'd like to think. I think it's a stage that one drops into, for example, when somebody cuts you off on the freeway, or when someone is rude, or when someone hooks your pride or makes you angry. We descend to that level of unconsciousness. So it's incredibly powerful.

Now Sufism speaks of the nafs as moving through stages or levels, and the second level is called the "self-blaming nafs" or the "regretful nafs." At this stage, you're more aware of it, but you're still caught by it. It's like, "I know I'm going to say the wrong thing, I hope I can stop . . . oh damn, here I go . . . ," and you start the sentence and you know you should shut up, but you can't; you just do it. In that particular stage, we at least realize that we're off-center—we're in the grip of something that is not our highest level of consciousness—but we still let ourselves do it even knowing that we're driven.

And then, as we continue to work and see it more clearly, as we try to substitute positive action and meditation on the names of God, which are positive qualities, little by little we ideally weaken those forces and move out of their domination. But even then, these forces can get revved up in certain situations. We may be under control of them ninety-nine percent of the time, but they're still there, except maybe in the very highest saints. There's a classic story of the prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him), where he goes out late at night to pray in the desert. And his young wife, Aisha, thinks he's going out to meet another woman. So as he's going out into the silence of the desert, she stomps out, and he looks at her and says, "Oh, Aisha, have you brought your little Satan with you?" And she says, "What little Satan?" He says, "Every human being has an imp, a little devilish part, their nafs." And she asks, "Even you, O Prophet of God?" And he says, "Yes, even me. However, I made mine a Muslim." Now, another translation of that is, "I brought mine into submission," because "muslim" means one who submits. So while the great saints often exhibit the most extraordinary patience and self-control in situations in which the rest of us know we would blow it, I think that in all but the greatest saints, theoretically that potential to be tempted is still there.

WIE: Does that temptation take on different forms as one progresses on the path?

SR: Yes. For instance, if we stay with the stages of the nafs, what happens next, after the regretful nafs, is that we come to what's called the "inspired nafs," the inspired self in which the wisdom of the heart, the wisdom of that inner light, begins to come more and more into the personality, into consciousness, so that we really have an alternative now to the forces of the ego—which is intuition, a sense of guidance, a sense of connection to truth. The problem is that the lower forces are still somewhat in action. The reign of the ego is not by any means over, and the biggest danger, of course, is that the ego can begin to use the wisdom and the light for self-aggrandizement, for inflation, rather than for self-diminishment. Ideally, one says, "This light isn't mine, this wisdom isn't mine. It's something that comes through me. It's something from another source." But the ego wants to say, "This is my wisdom. I know."

There is an interesting book that's just recently out by Mariana Caplan called Halfway Up the Mountain—which is a bad metaphor because it's probably an endless mountain—but it talks about many of the dangers of having spiritual teachers who are halfway up the mountain, but have somehow stopped at this stage. It's the most dangerous stage of all because if the ego gets inflated with real wisdom, real light, it's very hard to change things. Because the light is real, the wisdom is real. The only problem is that the ego begins to attribute it to itself, not to something greater than itself. And so the self gets firmer, crystallized even; but what we want, of course, is for the self to become more transparent, less of a "thing," lighter.

WIE: Sufism has a thousand-year legacy of saints, living embodiments of the divine who have demonstrated with their own lives the possibility of a life that is free from the ego's tyranny. How does the expression of the personality change in an individual who goes beyond the ego?

SR: They still have their personality, but one way to put it is that the personality doesn't run them. They run their personalities. Another way to put it is that somehow the personality is beautified. It's permeated with light and love. It's still a personality, and it doesn't mean they become generic, like a vanilla shake sheikh. They're all different. But there's a beauty there, because the personality has become like a vessel that holds the Divine. Like a clay pot that soaks up its contents, in holding the Divine, the personality becomes permeated with the divine qualities of love, light, generosity and divine compassion. And also, to push the metaphor, it doesn't leak anymore.

One of my teachers once said, "If you haven't got your basic life in order and have not begun to live a life of calmness, stability, service, honesty, practicing the basic virtues and then you meditate or do other spiritual practices, it's like having a cow that eats organic grass and gives wonderful organic milk, but when you milk that cow, the milk goes into a pail with a couple of small holes in the bottom." Terribly wasteful. You probably never get to use that milk. The personality is very much like that pail. Certain habits like dishonesty or lack of calmness are like holes that make it so we can't hold the state of love of the Divine. We lose it. And the great ones don't.

WIE: Throughout Sufi literature, the ego is often characterized as a kind of willful part of the psyche that actively opposes our spiritual progress. What is the driving force behind the ego's agenda? What is the raison d'être of the ego?

SR: Well, there are probably two answers. One is self-survival. The ego is scared of change, scared to death of deep mystical experience and transformation, because from its point of view, that kind of change is death. It doesn't think it's going to survive it. And it may not. So it's a survival mechanism. It is the part of all of us that wants to stay the same, a kind of inertial component in all of us that says, "Don't change."

Another aspect is that the ego is often talked about by the Sufis as connected to Satan, to the devil. And it's interesting, Jung says much the same thing about the shadow. On the one hand, it's that which we don't see or accept in ourselves, but he also says that it's connected with larger cosmic forces, what we call "Satanic forces." And no one likes to talk about this. It's not real popular. In fact I'm teaching a course in spiritual psychology to one of the new religious groups that is very focused on positive thinking, and whenever I bring this up, it's like I've poked one of their sacred cows. "How can you say evil exists? The universe is good, God is good!" And part of me tries to say, "Wait a minute. Whenever there's light, there's shadow."

It also seems like it's not inaccurate to occasionally refer to the nafs almost as though it is motivated, like a person. On one level it's a metaphor, but on another level, there's also a sense that it seems to act like an entity. Sheikh Tosun Bayrak has often referred to the nafs as "the thief," something that wishes to steal away that which is beautiful and valuable in our lives. It's almost as if it's a servant of Satan whose job is to test our faith. In fact, sometimes he has said to us as well, "Be especially careful after you've been on Hajj [pilgrimage to Mecca], after you've really done some spiritual work, because thieves usually don't go to empty houses, but if there's something there . . ." When you grow, when you change, in a sense almost a counterforce can be activated.

WIE: How does Sufism recommend that we guard ourselves against this undermining force within our own psyche?

SR: One way that Sheikh Tosun has spoken to this is: "What do you do when a thief comes into the house at night and you're in your bedroom, and you hear this thief creeping around, you hear the candlesticks going into his bag? If you charge downstairs with a knife in your hand, the thief will also have a knife. If you have a gun in your hand, the thief will have a gun. No matter what you've got in the house, the thief is going to have the same. It's going to mirror that power that you use against it, and it's going to be terribly destructive." So what do you do? The answer that he gave is, "You turn the light on!" Because the thief is a coward, and if you turn the light of awareness on the process, the thief will flee. You don't fight. You see, the stupidest thing in the world is to fight with Satan. There are lots of great stories in Sufism and elsewhere that show that when you try to fight with Satan, guess who wins? It's a very bad idea.

WIE: There is a famous passage in the Koran where, upon returning from battle, Muhammad says to his followers,"Now we leave the lesser holy war for the greater holy war—the war against the nafs." In light of what you've been saying about not struggling against the ego, what do you think about the Prophet's widely quoted metaphor of spiritual combat?

SR: I think it was a perfect teaching for the time. But you have to understand the context. The Muslims had just come back from fighting the Meccans who had more money, more cavalry, better equipment, better armor and better weapons. But by means of faith, effort and God's grace, they won. So they're coming back exhausted but feeling, "Wow, we did it! We're great warriors, look at what we did! We beat the crap out of them! All those Meccan nonbelievers, we kicked their butts!" And it was at that point that Muhammad said, "Now we're going to the greater war!" He was addressing that little piece of pride.

I think the problem is what we tend to do when we hear "holy war"—it's too easy for it to become black and white. In a war, you know who your allies are and you know who your enemies are. But the spiritual path is much more subtle. The nafs never says to you, "I am your enemy. I'm going to mislead you from your spiritual path. I want you to meditate a little less. I want you to do your work a little less. I want to nail you!" It doesn't do that. It says something like, "You've been traveling, so why don't you take it easy. Don't exhaust yourself; get a little more sleep. It's good for your health. I'm your friend. I have your best interests at heart." So this business is complicated.

I also think it's unfortunate that often we call it the "inner holy war" because war sounds very violent. I think it's far more sophisticated to say it's really an inner training—the way you train a beautiful, intelligent dog or horse or, in a way, a child. I think transformation through love is far more sane and sensible.

WIE: In Sufism, the relationship with the sheikh, or teacher, has always been considered to be essential in helping the dervish to go beyond the ego. There's a quote from Rumi that states, "Whoever travels without a guide needs two hundred years for a two-day journey." How does the relationship with the sheikh help the dervish in leaving the ego behind?

SR: One metaphor I've found very useful comes from a German psychologist who's also a Sufi. She said, "You can see yourself clearly enough to make trivial changes in yourself, just like if you have a cut, you can bandage yourself. But fundamental change you can't do for yourself because you're too close to it. You can't see the structure. You can't see the forest for the trees." She said, "While you can put a Band-Aid on your own cut, you can't take out your own appendix." And that kind of operation is equivalent to what the sheikh can help you with, which is fundamental change. Many things you can do for yourself, but there are certain levels of depth you just can't reach by yourself. You can't do it.

WIE: A growing number of spiritual practitioners in the West today are of the opinion that it's not necessary to have a spiritual teacher or guide. Fueled by the antiauthority teachings of Andrew Harvey and a number of others, more and more people are now attempting to guide themselves beyond ego, often selecting from various traditions the practices and ideas they feel will most benefit them in their quest. In Essential Sufism you write, "The ego is afraid of losing control, and even more afraid of dissolving, and comes up with reason after reason for refusing to let go. . . ." Do you think that, in general, this impulse to walk the spiritual path solo, without a teacher, is possibly just another manifestation of the ego's unrelenting agenda to stay in control of our life?

SR: Yes. I think that's one way of putting it. But there's a paradox. My teachers rarely told me what to do. At one level, I had to do the work myself. I had to do my own prayers. My beloved friend Haridas Baba many years ago said, "I can cook for you, but I can't eat for you." So the teacher can put a banquet out that you will then do the work with. Can you do that with the banquet that's available in all the wonderful paperbacks at $9.95 and $15.95? Well, some people would say yes. My own experience is that I have been so inspired by my teachers. I don't think I would have had the patience to stay with this path if it wasn't for the love, the acceptance and the example of my teachers. I'm not sure I would have had the courage to see myself honestly and clearly if it wasn't for the sense that they saw me clearly and still loved me and accepted me.

But I think, even more fundamentally, I see the teacher as a powerful role model, an example to show that transformation is possible. How do you know it's possible? There's somebody there whose personality has been transformed, whose vessel has been permeated by light and love. And I also think there are more esoteric aspects. I think certain practices frankly don't have any power unless you've been given them by a teacher. They won't work. So I think this business about being your own teacher ignores the importance of transmission, of lineage, of initiation. The spiritual path is not merely logical or mechanical. It's not psychological or spiritual bodybuilding. It's something much more subtle. I think there's an energetic connection with the teacher. We talk in Sufism about the rabita al kalb, the connection of the heart.

Now I think there have been cases where that connection was established without a living teacher. I think St. Francis did that through Jesus. But that's rare. How many of us are St. Francis? Very few of us. And also, my teachers have said, semihumorously, that it's much better to have a dead teacher than a live teacher because they don't give you much trouble. They don't speak up. They don't get critical. All they do is say, "Love, be happy, don't worry," because what else are they going to tell you in their writing? They can't say, "Now, you know what you're doing when you're doing your practice. Why don't you try not to do that anymore?" in a gentle or not-so-gentle way. When it comes to dealing with the subtle tricks of the nafs, it's very useful to have a teacher because some people start to go into the woods and don't know it. You really need someone to say, "Wake up, boy! You just took a ninety-degree turn and you don't know it."

WIE: Earlier you mentioned that the ego can appear to get stronger in response to our spiritual efforts. In Heart, Self and Soul, you also describe how your first conscious experience of the tyrannical nafs, or negative ego, in yourself came immediately upon your decision to formally ask to become a dervish [Sufi initiate]. Why is it that when one deepens one's commitment to the spiritual quest, the ego seems to become more visible?

SR: Well, I think most people, especially before they take up the spiritual quest, are absolutely under the domination of the tyrannical nafs. But if we use the metaphor of the pharaoh, the inner tyrant, who's the best ruler? It's not the ruler who has to call the troops out to keep order. It's the ruler who gives commands and everybody says, "We must obey." It's the ruler whose authority isn't questioned. And so it seems to me that until one gets onto the spiritual path, the ruler has it easy, because there's no opposition. There's no rebellion. But when we start on the spiritual path, there is a rebellion and then what happens is that, in a way, the forces of the tyrannical nafs that have been underground, that have been hiding, suddenly become revealed. That revealing is actually a weakening of their power because they're no longer unconscious. But what happens is that, paradoxically, very often when you start on the spiritual path, you suddenly see the power of the nafs, and you think, "Oh, my God! I'm in much worse shape than I thought I was." The problem is, you just didn't know what bad shape you were in before. You were run by this thing. You weren't fighting it. So when you first see it, there's a shock.

For us, one of the greatest blessings is to fast during the month of Ramadan from dawn to dusk. One reason is that it's an incredible mirror for the nafs. We get short-tempered. We say, "I don't want to fast. I want to sleep." Or, "I have to drive today. Maybe I shouldn't fast." We begin to hear the voice of the nafs. And one of the great blessings of fasting or doing any ascetic practice is to begin to hear the voice that's opposing, that's saying, "Don't do this. I don't like this." It's a bit like The Wizard of Oz. There's this big powerful voice and you think, "Well, obviously we have to follow that." But meanwhile there's somebody saying, "It's really just the little man behind the curtain." Because the more clearly you see it, the more you really see it is like a trickster, and the less power it has. But you have to see it.

You see, the danger is that ascetic practices don't always do that. Purohit Swami, who is one of the great Indian teachers of this century, has a brilliant translation of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, in which he says, "I have met many practitioners of hatha yoga, all of whom had strong wills and had developed great capacities and great power—and very powerful egos in the process." So if you just do ascetic practices without the context that this is a practice of looking at yourself, the danger is, of course, you're going to feed the ego—"I fasted for a month!" It's interesting that in Islam you can't fast for more than a month, and this came about partly to address this problem of self-inflation: "Well, you only fasted for twenty-nine days, I fasted for thirty-five!" So asceticism gives an incredible potential for ego inflation; but on the other hand, if we use it with this context of, "Watch what's going on, watch the process," then it really can reduce the ego tremendously.

WIE: In researching this issue, we learned that Orthodox Christian ascetics are often encouraged to soften their discipline when they have guests, so that they can't show off their feats of austerity to others.

SR: There is a tradition in Sufism that has a very powerful focus on reducing the ego in this way. It's called the Malami tradition or "the path of blame." What the Malamis will do, knowing that the ego wants to be known and thought well of, is they will either be invisible or deliberately soften their practice in front of other people, so that other people think they don't have much of a practice. The Malamis, for example, almost never wear special clothing. They don't even have a special meeting place. They avoid all the trappings, because they know that the ego loves trappings. I have one very dear friend who is a highly respected teacher in this tradition. And I have seen him walk into our mosque in Istanbul and look like somebody who just walked in from the street, not like a visiting teacher. And he's a wonderful, brilliant teacher. Many of the Sufis have this quality—as opposed to showing your practice to other people, almost deliberately showing that you don't have one and then running to do your prayers where they can't see you. So in that sense it is like war. It's almost like a war against the ego. It's very sophisticated. It's like, "Whatever you want, I'm going to go do the opposite. You want to look good? We're going to look bad. You want to be seen? We're going to be invisible. And any time we're gonna be visible, I'm going to make sure we don't look the way you want us to." It's an incredible discipline.