Food for the Soul

Patrick Laude,Photo: Prabir Das

Spirituality is individual. Your relationship with your creator can only be defined by you and nobody else. All one needs to do is look within themselves, find their centre and concentrate on it to feel one with the powers above. That's what spirituality is all about, says scholar, author and teacher Patrick Laude.
Laude, born in France in 1958, has taught classes on mystical literature and poetry, comparative religion, including Christianity, Islam and Sufism at different junctures in his life. He is currently a Professor at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar. An expert on comparative mysticism, and Western interpretation of Islam and Eastern tradition, Laude has several published books to his name, including Pathways to an Inner Islam: Massignon, Corbin, “Guénon and Schuon,” “Divine Play, Sacred Laughter,” and “Spiritual Understanding and Singing the Way: Insights into Poetry and Spiritual Transformation,” among others. The Star Magazine caught up with the writer and teacher at the recently concluded Hay Festival to have a better understanding of what spirituality actually means.

What do you mean when you talk about inner Islam in your book 'Pathways to Inner Islam?'
There are three realities in Islam, so to speak. Islam, itself, which is the practice or the Shahadah, Iman which is the acceptance and total devotion to God, his prophets and angels and Ihsaan, which can be translated as excellence, which means to worship god as if you are seeing him as he sees you. In other words, Ihsaan is to live under the eyes of God, so to speak, or in the presence of God. Inner Islam would be the constant awareness of living in the presence of God. It is going beyond the Shariah itself, not rejecting it, but going through it to reach this inner being which is the ultimate goal of Islam. Islam is 'tauhid', which is unification. That doesn't only refer to the belief that God is one but that we have to become one, we have to unify our faculties, centre them on God. That's what you can call Sufism or Islamic mysticism and I call it inner Islam.

So you are trying to say that it's basically about exploring within yourself to find the spiritual being?
Yes, definitely. It would be called the 'aatman' or the 'paramatmaan', which is the self of all selves, in the Hindu culture. In Islam, it is a bit different though. In Islam, the focus is on the relationship between the servant and the 'Rab' or the lord. There is a duality here. In Sufism, at least, through the sincerity of his worship, the servant extinguishes into the one; he disappears, so to speak. Something that we would call 'fanaah.' Of course it doesn't mean that he vanishes into air but it means that his ego gives way.

You've often spoke of the “egolessness of self.” In today's world, how is it possible to reach that 'egolessness' without being a hermit living in forests?
Most Hindu gurus and Sufi masters teach that in principle you don't need to leave the world to attain egolessness. You could have a job and still be on a spiritual path. But it requires a certain disciple of the mind. You have to introduce some changes in your life, especially considering the modern life which is so complex and distracting. You have to set a time where you return to your centre. You have to meditate, practice so that these contemplating sessions drive you to integrate this spirituality into the rest of your life. Ultimately, of course, the goal should be to have an awareness of God at any time and situation. That would be perfection. But it's not something that you can force yourself to attain. However, you can take steps towards integrating spirituality into your life.
The norm in every tradition is - of course, there are always exceptions to the rule – to be able to find a guru and find that unique place within yourself. We are all different so our spiritual journeys will also be different. You can see the acceptance of that difference in the Hindu culture – each person has different combinations, so what might be suitable for one might not work for another person. The basic duties in Islam are the same but when you look at Sufism, there are different paths and methods that need to be followed. Some paths might be more intellectual, others could be more action centric and so forth. Not everything fits everybody.

When religion was first introduced, prayers probably were seen as the way to reach spirituality within oneself. But at present there's a tendency to take it more as a didactic ritual that you “have” to follow. Do you agree?
There is this formalism nowadays that is a creation of human beings. That's a danger and a problem but ideally, every person would look at spirituality from an individual point of view rather than following others. Initially, the purpose of prayers was, as you said, to reach spirituality within yourself. A hadith by Prophet Mohammad which when roughly paraphrased means that your prayer is the spiritual ascension of the believer. In principle, the prayer should be a means for spiritual ascension for any being. Of course it is very far from happening in practice (smiles). But in essence, any form of prayer is a return to God. In Sufism, the prayer is just not enough. There is more emphasis on what we call the 'inner prayer' that is considered to be the main way of accessing God or spirituality.

In your book 'Divine Play, Sacred Laughter and Spiritual Understanding', you say that laughter can be a way to understand spirituality. Could you please elaborate on this?
Laughter can play an important role in some traditions, circumstances and for some individuals. In a number of traditions, creation is seen as a kind of play of the supreme being, an illusion. If you free yourself from the illusion of the world and become aware of its spells, that results in a freedom within yourself. This freedom can sometimes be facilitated or expressed through laughter. Generally you laugh at yourself or at something or someone, and that comes when you suddenly feel free of some constraints and constrictions. Laughter is an explosion through which you realize that all of this is illusion. In Zen Buddhism, there are examples of many masters who've reached enlightenment through laughing because laughter expunges the negativity and opens the many knots of the soul.

A common perception is that when one is talking about spirituality, one is actually referring to religion. So the thought here is that religion and spirituality is interchangeable. Do you agree?
Many people today all over the world would want to be spiritual but not religious. What they mean generally is that they aspire some sort of inner peace or inner freedom but they are not interested or even reject the so-called institutional religions for various reasons. The modern world's conception of religion is very geography centric. Whether its Hindu nationalism, Islamism, Jihadism, Christianity, Zionism, you can find a kind of formalism and politicisation of ideology. That's why some people turn down the concept of religion.
That being said, the ideal situation should be very different from this. Ideally, religion and spirituality should go hand in hand because there's no true religion without spirituality and there's no spirituality without an anchoring in religion. There are always exceptions to the rule but in the immense majority of cases, spirituality requires the channels of grace that can be found in religion. And religion, if it were to live sincerely, requires some form of spirituality. A Muslim or Chiristian woman, who prays to please God, would be an example of an elementary form of spirituality.

Does proper, informed writing about religions like Islam, which is sometimes negatively targeted by the Western media, help to combat any discrimination against any particular religious group?
One can hope that it does. Anything that is written to unveil, so to speak, dimensions of any topic, here let's speak of religion, in a deeper, more spiritual, more intellectual, more ethical manner can in itself potentially contribute to combating the discrimination. The problem is that very often you find yourself preaching to the convert. People who read these kinds of books or articles are already predisposed to swing this way. Those who have a kind of prejudice will not normally read such literature. I believe in the Bhagvad Gita's philosophy that you need to do what you have to do without thinking of the fruit of the action and that holds true in this case as well.