The Book of Immortality Read online

  The off-kilter detachment inherent to Sufism is radically different from the stability that accompanies knowing something. When I tried to copy and paste one Sufi treatise into an e-mail, my browser translated the word knows as !wows. It felt meaningful. In Sufism, to know is to attain an exclamation point of pluralistic recognition.

  Sufis, calling themselves the Lovers, follow the Creed of Love. They greet each other with the Arabic word ishq, which means “love.” The analogy of love gets close to the heart of Sufism, but the love they speak of both is and is not familiar love. For them love is God. In Sufism, the feeling of love can, when pursued beyond the ordinary, bring with it ecstatic glimpses of the beyond, resulting in reassurances about one’s own postmortem prospects, a certainty that, though we presently belong to the world of dimension, we come from and return to nondimension. Rather than ignore death, the Sufi way is to constantly stare death in the face, bringing about a state of indifference toward living or dying. Advanced masters, asked whether they are mortal or immortal, will respond thusly: “I know nothing, I understand nothing, I am unaware of myself, I am in love but with whom I do not know.” Something about the Sufic version of love yields a deeper awareness of our interrelation with nature. Just as inert matter is taken up by bacterial organisms, which feed plants, which in turn die nourishing animals, we, too, die as humans, only to rise again in another form.

  Their texts describe us all as fractions of the divine. In this view, the soul enters a body the same way rain falls upon the ground; then, at death, it evaporates back to the Universal Main. “Let us but see the Fount from which we flow,” concluded the poet Attar, “and, seeing, lose ourselves therein!”

  Empirical and nondemonstrable, the love that Sufis worship is a love that floods borders and washes words away. It is a mystery beyond understanding, they assure us, understood only by dying. Their literature speaks of a water that flows down from paradise, sparkling with grace. Its source is the Fountain of all purities, the Fount of Immortality. This overflowing water—the Water of Life, as poets calls it—can only be tasted through love, the mystical love that can’t be known through reason. Tasting it, we learn that supreme reality is inside one’s own heart. Each person’s heart is God’s throne in the water. To experience the fountain’s outpouring is to taste. And to taste is to know.

  * * *

  On a Friday around noon, shortly before prayer service, I strolled over to Montreal’s Naqshbandi Sufi Center, a mosque within a converted brick storefront several blocks from my home. The sign said ZAWIYA, meaning a lodge for Sufi assemblies. Inside the window display were books about purifying the heart, several thriving houseplants, and a framed poster listing Allah’s ninety-nine names. I walked in. Two dozen sets of eyes swiveled in my direction.

  The midday Jumu’ah hadn’t yet started, and most of the congregation, hailing mainly from North Africa (Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco), sat against the far wall, their backs propped up by decorative pillows. Floral incense perfumed the air. The large, open room was blanketed with Persian rugs. On the wall hung calligraphic inscriptions, framed images of holy sites, embroidered fabrics, a long scroll. Barefoot kids bounced around playfully. Five women in hijabs were speaking together in one corner. A turban-wearing, gray-bearded contemplative in an ankle-length, wool tunic smiled in my direction. I smiled back and took off my shoes. He nodded slowly.

  A younger man, in his early forties, greeted me. He was the imam, Omar Koné, the community’s leader. Originally from the Sahara in Mali, Koné cut a dashingly ascetic figure, his orange scarf draped over a dark, flowing, wide-sleeved robe. I asked him if we could speak about immortality in Sufism. Stroking his black beard, he said we’d be able to chat until prayer service commenced. His eyes—wise, serious, kind—looked out beneath a large green turban, an indication that he’d undertaken the pilgrimage to Mecca. In Sufism, I’d soon learn, the color green also represents eternal life.

  Koné gently cut short my jumbled attempt at explaining my book. “You can’t know what the questions are. The search is like that. Anyway, I can sense you want to be here.” He welcomed me as though I were treading the path myself, a murid-in-waiting rather than just a spiritual tourist.

  “Okay—so the concept of immortality,” he commenced, as we sat down, cross-legged, on sheepskin rugs. “The Sufi point of view is the Islamic point of view. And according to Islam, physical immortality doesn’t exist. It’s incontestable. The body cannot live forever. The immortality of the soul, however, is obvious. The soul is created for infinity. It has a beginning and no end. The soul is a most divine favor. Everything else in creation will perish.”

  As we spoke, he adjusted his ring, a lozenge-shaped, turquoise gemstone set in a silver band. “Our actions, too, are eternal,” he continued. “Everything we see, hear, say, act, think, intend, is registered for eternity and affects us in the hereafter. Eternity is granted to souls either in the heavens or in hells. That stay in hell can be temporary. And to this we must add, And God knows best. We pray that no one will ever enter hell, that it’s only a pedagogy. There’s already enough pain on earth.”

  Here he looked toward Mecca and uttered a silent prayer.

  “It is said that every human being has a fixed amount of time to live.” Koné turned to me. “When humans reach the end of their life, no matter what age, within what we call the seven last breaths, time is stopped, a space is opened, and humans are taken on another track to live and complete their life until they reach the age of 137. This is a fixed standard for human life spans. Even a child who passes away will be granted 137 years to live their entire life.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by an “other track.” “Where are those remaining years lived out?” I asked.

  “In a part of life that can’t be seen by humans.”

  * * *

  The belief in a supramundane unity beyond all material perceptions has been with humanity since prehistorical times. It’s not a “primitive” belief; it is the “perennial philosophy.” Every cultural tradition refers to another plane of existence alongside our own from the time documenting began. This other world can’t be apprehended by the instruments of rationality. There’s no way to demonstrate the veracity of something apart from “this world.” It’ll never be proven, yet, in some form or another, it’s a crucial fact of life for the majority of humans. The sheer quantity of testimonials by mystics who’ve participated in the phenomenon is the only indication that it exists.

  Mysticism is the ability to expand regular perception and attain what’s defined as “a direct experience of ultimate reality.” All religious systems pivot on the idea of a unity behind all appearances, a single suprasensible Reality. It takes a certain equipoise, or binocular vision, to even accept the notion there is more than one plane of being. Whatever’s beyond the sphere of logic cannot be reasoned about; it is, after all, outside the reach of the human mind. Still, most people consider it an essential truth that part of us is connected to (and derives from) an indestructible world. We cannot discern this spiritual plane with our eyes, let alone apprehend it through everyday thinking.

  The essence of mysticism is that we can approach it by cultivating a state of inner receptivity. By love God may be gotten and holden, the Sufis say, but by logical understanding, never. “Sufism is about attunement with true reality,” Koné told me. “It is a discipline, the science of the fight of the ego. The aim is extinguishing the self, removing the ego, which is an impediment to understanding.”

  The mind and the senses cannot approach ultimate reality. Only our mystical faculties can. The very word mystic stems from a Greek term meaning “to close the eyes or the mouth.” Mysticism is inner sight, blinding insight, seeing through shut eyelids. The Jesuit visionary Ignatius of Loyola spoke of his interior eyes, of the eyes of his mind, of eyes that can envisage the unseen.

  All the Romantic poets versified their half-seen intimations of a something beyond mutability. Wordsworth used something he called an “obs
cure sense of possible sublimity.” Obscure though it may be, it’s a sense that comes as naturally to us, he claimed, as the gift of reason—which it has nothing in common with. Keats told of the “sensual ear” picking up unheard melodies, of seeing with awaken’d eyes, of sight in blindness. Fusing senses, Coleridge invoked a kind of aural-vision, a composite seeing-hearing, a light made of sound, a soundlike power within light. His couplets repeatedly attempted to convey “the attainment through the visible world of an insight into the invisible world beyond.” The eternal speaks, Coleridge wrote, whether we can hear it or not, whether droplets of incommunicability melt enough to trickle into our imaginations, or whether locked up in frozen muteness. Such is the secret ministry of frost.

  * * *

  Because Sufic beliefs are deeply mystical and cannot easily or completely be explicated, murshids developed a system of imparting wisdom by means of something called the “scatter” dissemination. They use stories, anecdotes, poems, and jokes to help readers see from different perspectives while also letting them fill in the blanks. In scatter, the aim is to bombard the unconscious mind with multiple impacts, seeding it with new growth.

  Many Sufi tales revolve around a trickster character named Nasruddin, who shares complex truths. In one famous example, a beatific-looking monk walks into a teahouse where Nasruddin is hanging out with some friends. “There is nothing which cannot be answered by means of my doctrine,” announces the monk, dreamily.

  “And yet just a short time ago,” replies Nasruddin, “I was challenged by a scholar with an unanswerable question.”

  “If only I had been there!” the monk says. “Tell it to me, and I shall answer it.”

  “Very well. The scholar said, ‘Why are you trying to get into my house by night?’”

  End of story. This koanlike tale conceals layers of implications. First off, the notion of a house at night refers to the subconscious parts of the mind, those not accessible to the powers of cognition. It is upon these nonrational regions that Sufism operates. Their teachings can’t be apprehended rationally; they can only take hold in the unthinking stillness.

  The “joke” also mocks the idea that any system of thought can possess all the answers. To Sufis, the assumption that everything is comprehensible rationally is a flawed viewpoint hindering the possibility of spiritual growth. “Man’s ignorance of his own ignorance is the real enemy,” writes Idries Shah. “Man has been taught that he can understand everything by the same process, the process of logic. This teaching has undermined him.” Only by getting away from thinking that we understand can we begin to understand. For Sufis, understanding immortality requires accepting that there are limits to what can be known. It requires faith, practice, and devotion.

  * * *

  Positioning themselves on prayer rugs, the Montreal Sufis knelt and prostrated themselves toward a semicircular mihrab at the far end of the room, indicating the direction of Mecca. As they prayed, I sat in a green leather armchair taking notes and wondering what life would be like were I to become a Sufi. Not that it would happen. I didn’t have the commitment, or the inclination, to align myself with any faith. Maybe I was too lazy? Or maybe I was just a writer working on a book, happily lost in the forest.

  When the Jumu’ah was over, Omar Koné invited me to stay for lunch with the brotherhood. They spread a thin, scarlet sheet over the rugs and placed tagines and platters of couscous on the sheet. We sat down and started conversing about Koné’s tariqa, or spiritual order. The Naqshbandi are known variously as the Silent, the Masters of the Diagram, or the Painters. They practice sober Sufism. “In our order, you have few visions,” Koné clarified. “We are not about entrancement and the opening of spiritual states.”

  “But other orders are?”

  “Yes. Between the divine presence and humans there are seventy thousand veils. Other orders attempt to lift the veils from the human side heading toward the divine presence. In this order, the veils are removed from the divine presence’s side. The thickest veil is the one on our side. That’s why we aren’t so much about unveilments. In other orders, when a veil is removed there are experiences.”

  “Ecstatic?” I asked.

  He nodded. “In every unveilment, there’s a danger of becoming lost in one’s own illusions. Once you start seeing things, you think you’ve become something. Being in the delirium of a mystical experience is lifting a veil, which means one is still one or seventy thousand veils away. On that path, states will occur, it can happen that you enter into a realm of ultraperception, but we will not speculate on that.”

  For all Sufis, visionary inebriation is only a developmental stage, not the final aim. The ecstatic breakthrough is a bud that hopefully blossoms into an experience of “the hidden dimension beyond the metaphorical drunkenness.” The goal is not sacred intoxication, but rather tasting True Reality, being transformed by it, and then, instead of staying absorbed in the effulgence of nonexistence (called ‘adam), returning to tell others about the truth of immortal life.

  Despite sharing a name with nonexistence, I’d never experienced it myself, but something about the idea of True Reality clicked with me. Whatever we can’t prove, we can believe in. And just because something can’t be nailed down doesn’t mean it isn’t there. One of the last things Koné said to me was that a skeptic is like an unrequited lover who assures himself that love doesn’t exist.

  * * *

  My time among the Sufis left me burning to speak with a priest about the biblical connections between water and eternal life. While pondering whom to contact, I remembered my former professor Father Marc Gervais. A Jesuit priest, he taught film-studies courses at Concordia University in Montreal. I admired him so much, I enrolled in six different Gervais courses, even becoming one of his teaching assistants. We hadn’t seen each other in a decade or so, but I still had Father Gervais’s number. It led straight to an unidentified voice-mail box. I left a message after the beep. Having a mysterious answering machine wouldn’t be uncharacteristic of him.

  * * *

  1. This was several months before a WikiLeaked Guantánamo Bay document deemed it one of the nine “top Al Qaeda recruiting zones” in the world, allegations the mosque (where over two thousand faithful show up for Friday sermons) dismissed as defamatory.

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  Lessons of the Teachings

  The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something—an object or ourselves—and drop it into the confusion, make an offering to it, so to speak, to the life force.

  —Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

  A teacher affects eternity.

  —Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

  IN UNIVERSITY, my classmates and I thought of Professor Gervais as an avant-garde cinema scholar rather than a Catholic priest. We were less interested in any personal encounters he may have had with the Lord than those he’d had with film gods such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut (whom he was occasionally mistaken for). Based on those meetings, Gervais wrote a thousand-page dissertation about the French New Wave for his doctorate at the Sorbonne. He’d also published the first-ever book about Pier Paolo Pasolini, an Italian, communist, homosexual director whose films were as out there, and seemingly unpriestly, as possible.1 Sure, Gervais said mass and heard confessions, but we students knew nothing about that catechist side. Each week, he screened art films in the basement of a stone chapel on school grounds.

  A beloved professor, Father Gervais was also a recognized figure in the international cinematic milieu. He attended Cannes each spring, and his final grades invariably arrived late because he was busy hobnobbing on the Croisette. Film cognoscenti knew him simply as Le Jésuite. Directors considered him an éminence grise and hired him to consult on such movies as The Mission. Father Gervais was also an authority on the work of Ingmar Bergman. The reclusive Swede had even asked Gervais—our teacher!—to do the audio commentary tracks for his DVDs.

  Gervais’s one-room cell in the Jesuit resid
ence on campus was filled with books and films. “I live not so much in a cell as I do in a celluloid world,” he liked to say. With that wave of silver hair and his star-studded extracurricular activities, he was as cosmopolitan as a man of the cloth could be. The other Jesuit teachers at school were uniformly stern, and while Gervais had a grave side, he was often humorous, speaking more about love than God. “The soul that beholds beauty becomes beautiful,” he’d repeat almost every class, quoting some Neoplatonist we’d never heard of.

  * * *

  I liked him from the start, even though Father Gervais and I weren’t exactly cut from the same swath. He lectured in tweed suits and ascots; I took my fashion cues from the Ramones. During those first years of university, I spent far more time and energy on my punk group than on my studies. My bandmates and I formed a small church of like-minded obscurantists who listened exclusively to garage music recorded between 1967 and 1978 and tried to ape that trebly sound in our own analogue recordings. Clear boundaries were demarcated at our all-night jam sessions between the very, very few bands we deemed cool and everything anybody else had ever heard. It was rock ’n’ roll fundamentalism.

  Where we were naïve, Gervais was idealistic. He believed that art’s main role is to connect us with the unseen. For him, watching films was the greatest form of prayer. “Through art,” he’d say, “one comes across the question of the sacred, of the ineffable, paradoxically expressing itself in a most dialectical and ambiguous manner.” Cinema helps us know ourselves, he’d say. But for him, knowing oneself meant knowing one’s connection to the divine. This mystical truth cannot be grasped by the mind, Gervais assured us in class. It enters our lives like a spring gushing from the earth. As he spoke about it, I didn’t even understand that I couldn’t understand.