How Does Sufism Differ from Ritual Religion?

Freud is generally considered the father of psychology. What is psychology? Well, when Freud came along, all of a sudden people in the medical circles began to think about the psychological makeup of their patients and what they could do to help people who had no apparent physical ailments but had really difficult psychological ailments. They locked a lot of these people up. Of course, in the beginning a lot of this dealt with people on the severe end of these psychological problems. But as time progressed and as psychology progressed, they found that they could work with people to try and resolve some of their own internal conflicts and to make them more normal within the definition of normal that the society had. And now we have analysts and psychologists and all kinds of people for people to go to in order to get some kind of help with their own personal problems and situations.

I did a little looking into Freud because I was interested…I had an inkling of where he got his basic information from, but I wanted to dig a little deeper and verify what I had thought. And what I found was that his parents were Hasidic, which means, for those of you who don’t know, they belonged to a Jewish mystical sect. And there is literature that Hasidism joined with Sufism some time in the eleventh century in Spain when the Jews and the Arabs lived in Spain together. And the Hasidic thought came out of a milieu of mystical Sufistic thought. So, if he came from a Hasidic background, that meant that he had access to Hasidic ideas and Hasidic philosophy. He also was in touch with some other people who gave him some of this insight and some of this philosophy. What’s the point?

What he did was he took what had been existent for a long time and known for a long time and turned it into a Western science. And what happens when you turn things into science? You take God out of them. Now let’s go back to what is Sufism about. And this is really what’s interesting. One of the major understandings in Sufism is that to know your Lord, you must know yourself. Psychology is trying to get you to know yourself. But what’s the end of knowing yourself? To know yourself! What’s the end of knowing yourself in Sufism? To know God. So, what’s going on in Sufism is really a kind of psychology or an understanding of your own psychological makeup in order that you can go from the state that you are in now to the state of insan kamil or true human being.