Everyone has a position on what the meaning of life is, whether they realize it or not. It’s impossible to be neutral, because whenever anyone does anything at all, they’re enacting some particular answer to that question. Even decisions as seemingly trivial as what to wear today or what to eat for dinner tonight can only be made based on what the person making that decision takes the meaning of life to be. An atheist and a devout Sikh, for example, will make very different decisions about what to wear or what to eat, and those differences follow from their different views on what the meaning of life is.
Since everything we do in life depends on how we answer the question of what the meaning of it all is, that question must be the most important of all questions, the one truly indispensable one.
Many people try to brush aside that question and its urgency in all kinds of ways. Some say that the meaning of life is unknowable, or that we can know for sure that there isn’t any purpose in life. Others will half-heartedly recite some platitude like “being happy” or “helping others,” both of which just beg the question of what makes you happy or helpful to others in the first place.
In any case, the behavior of such people all too often suggests that what they really believe is something they don’t want to say out loud, perhaps not even to themselves, because they know deep down that it’s grotesquely wrong: that life does have an identifiable meaning, and it’s to gratify one’s mundane, egoistic cravings, especially through making and spending money. Indeed, modern society as a whole, which officially tries to be neutral on the question of the meaning of life, is in practice largely based on that assumption.
Some answers to the question of what the meaning of life is evidently have more truth in them than others, because they produce more meaningful lives in practice. The materialistic answer, for example, must be mostly false, because it fails to produce much genuine satisfaction in the lives of its adherents.
The world’s religions, however, give a radically different, and radically truer-to-life, answer to the question of what the meaning of life is (regardless of how well or how badly their adherents live up to it, of course). Surely not coincidentally, they all give more or less the same answer, just expressed in different ways: the meaning of life is to get closer to the divine and, ultimately, to experience spiritual enlightenment.
Let’s now consider examples from several religions from around the world.
Hinduism
For thousands of years, Hinduism has taught that the meaning of life is to achieve moksha, “liberation,” the Hindu term for spiritual enlightenment. All living beings are continuously reincarnated in different bodies and circumstances depending on how much good or bad karma they’ve accumulated in this life and previous ones. Some of these positions in life are much more favorable than others, but in the end, they’re all hopelessly marred by pain and suffering. Moksha is the “liberation” from this cycle of rebirth.[1]
Although it’s technically possible to achieve moksha after you die, Hinduism teaches that the pursuit of moksha while you’re still alive is the whole point of being alive in the first place. To merely sit around and wait for moksha after death would be a colossal waste and a rejection of the meaning of life – and thus almost certainly wouldn’t lead to moksha after death, either. Rather, the best way to fulfill your purpose in life is to become a jivanmukti, a liberated living being. Those rare people who attain this supreme goal are venerated as saints and sages.[2]
This “liberation” is also union with the divine. The Upanishads, some of the central sacred texts of Hinduism, describe moksha as the realization of your true Self (Atman), which is also the Self of all other beings. All of the many Hindu gods and goddesses are different images of this same underlying Self. A few short quotes from the Shvetashvatara Upanishad illustrate the doctrine of the Upanishads as a whole on the meaning of life:
As a dusty mirror shines bright when cleansed,
So shine those who realize the Self,
Attain life’s goal, and pass beyond all sorrow.[3]
You are born to be united with the Lord.[4]
All your desires will be fulfilled in him
Who is One without a second.
Know him to be enshrined in your heart always.
Truly there is nothing more in life to know.
Meditate and realize that this world
Is filled with the presence of God.[5]
Likewise, the Bhagavad Gita, another cornerstone of Hindu spirituality among the religion’s many sacred texts, has Krishna, an incarnation of the god Vishnu, state simply and clearly, “I am the goal of life.”[6]
To fulfill the meaning of your life, therefore, it’s necessary to live in a way that’s oriented toward the eventual attainment of moksha. You can’t control when moksha happens. It may happen in your present reincarnation, or it may happen in a later one. But you can bring yourself closer to it by renouncing your petty, individual self (with a lowercase “s”) and offering up your life to the divine, universal, and transcendent Self (with an uppercase “S”).
The Paramahamsa Unpanishad articulates detachment from the self in this context particularly well:
The aspirant who is seeking the Lord
Must free himself from selfish attachments
To people, money, and possessions.
When his mind sheds every selfish desire,
He becomes free from the duality
Of pleasure and pain and rules his senses.
No more is he capable of ill will;
No more is he subject to elation,
For his senses come to rest in the Self.
Entering into the unitive state,
He attains the goal.[7]
But passively avoiding attachment to selfish desires isn’t enough on its own. You also have to actively direct your mind and your heart toward the divine, the Self, through meditation and worship. In the Bhagavad Gita, the main character, Arjuna, asks Krishna what true worship is. Krishna replies:
Therefore, Arjuna, meditate
on me at all times…
with your whole mind intent on me,
you will come to me – never doubt it.[8]
Two more brief passages from elsewhere in the Bhagavad Gita help to flesh out this answer:
Whatever you do, Arjuna,
do it as an offering to me –
whatever you say or eat
or pray or enjoy or suffer.[9]
When a man has let go of attachments,
when his mind is rooted in wisdom,
everything he does is worship
and his actions all melt away.[10]
That is, all his karma, all the fruits of his actions, “melt away,” and he attains moksha and fulfills the meaning of life.
Buddhism
What Hinduism calls moksha, Buddhism calls nirvana (in the Sanskrit language) or nibbana (the same word in the Pali language). This Buddhist term for spiritual enlightenment literally means “blowing out” or “extinguishing,” and refers to the quenching of the three “fires” of craving, aversion, and delusion that characterize normal existence in this world.[11]
And just as the attainment of moksha is taken to be the meaning of life in Hinduism, so the attainment of nirvana is taken to be the meaning of life in Buddhism. The Dhammapada, an early Buddhist text that serves as a lucid, poetic introduction to the Buddhist perspective on life, is quite blunt about this: “Nirvana, say the Buddhas, is the highest goal.”[12]
Buddhism also broadly agrees with Hinduism on the means by which you can fulfill the meaning of life. To quote the Dhammapada again:
When anyone mistakenly pursues only what is pleasant,
Avoiding the true path,
Forgetting their true purpose, attached to the senses,
When anyone sees another on the true path,
They will experience their loss and be full of reproach.Avoid attachment to both what is pleasant
And what is unpleasant.
Losing the pleasant causes grief.
Dwelling on the unpleasant also causes grief….People cherish the person committed to right action
And rich in understanding.
That person, knowing the truth,
Walks steadfastly on the path.The person who reaches the sacred, the inexpressible,
Who has permeated his mind with it,
Who is in control of his senses,
Is one bound upstream.[13]
With regard to that last line, Buddhist literature frequently uses images of traveling over bodies of water as metaphors for the spiritual quest, as in still another passage from the extraordinarily rich Dhammapada:
But only those who follow the carefully taught law
Can cross to the other shore,
Beyond the grasp of death, so hard to overcome.[14]
What, then, does that “carefully taught law” consist of? Buddhist doctrine lays it out systematically in the “Noble Eightfold Path.” While an in-depth discussion of the Noble Eightfold Path would unfortunately take us too far afield for our purposes here, it can be summarized with a simple list of the eight parts that comprise it and give it its name: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.[15]
Buddhist literature is fond of reminding its readers of the urgency of striving toward nirvana and thereby acting in accordance with the meaning of life:
Short is the life span of human beings.
The good man should disdain it.
One should live like one with head aflame:
There is no avoiding Death’s arrival.[16]
When someone who has reached nirvana dies, he or she doesn’t have to be reincarnated again like other beings are. Having fulfilled the meaning of life, that person can dissolve forever into parinirvana – total, unending nirvana.[17] However, some enlightened beings opt instead to allow themselves to be reincarnated again and again so that they can help others to reach nirvana for themselves – that is, to help others fulfill the meaning of their lives, too. Such a being is called a bodhisattva. Mahayana Buddhism, one of the main varieties of Buddhism, places particular emphasis on the bodhisattva path, and deems it to be the more meaningful choice.[18]
Christianity
The quintessential statement on the meaning of life in Christianity comes from a historically famous passage in the Gospel According to Saint Luke in the Bible. During the course of Jesus Christ’s travels among people on earth,
he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister
has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”[19]
So the meaning of life – the one and only thing in life that’s truly necessary – is to sit at the feet of Christ and listen to him. But what does that mean?
The traditional Christian answer to that question has been that the “one thing necessary” in life is to pursue union with God, which is how the Christian tradition typically refers to spiritual enlightenment.[20] Just as Mary (who, it should probably be pointed out, is not the Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene, but another Mary) sat still and opened herself up to God rather than being “worried and distracted by many things,” so for us, too, “the very best and noblest attainment in this life is to be silent and let God work and speak within,” in the words of the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart.[21]
The most prominent and influential Christian saints have repeatedly affirmed this view of the meaning of life down through the ages. To cite but a few examples, Saint Maximus the Confessor writes that “God has created us in order that we may become partakers of the divine nature.”[22] Saint Dionysius professes that God is “the goal of all yearning,”[23] and that “The sources and the goals of all things are in him.”[24] And Saint Thomas Aquinas holds that “The contemplation of divine truth… is the goal of the whole of human life.”[25]
When Aquinas says “contemplation” in that quote, he’s using the word in what used to be its main sense, but which has since been largely forgotten: not engaging in active thinking about something, but rather emptying one’s mind of every active thought and allowing it to rest in the simple, loving awareness of divine presence. It’s effectively a synonym for “meditation” in the most spiritual sense of that word. Christianity has called a life dedicated to such contemplation the “contemplative life,” and has cherished it above the more “normal” but still sanctified “active life” of outward piety, good works, and the like. Furthermore, it has often identified Mary with the contemplative life and Martha with the active life. The following passage from the anonymous medieval mystical treatise The Cloud of Unknowing is typical:
[I]n the Church there are two kinds of life, the active and the contemplative…. [T]he contemplative life is Mary’s part which shall never be taken away. The active life is troubled and busy about many things but the contemplative life sits in peace with the one thing necessary.[26]
So while the Christian active life is sacred and irreproachable in its own right, its ultimate purpose is to lead up to and into the contemplative life, and thus to help us to live in accordance with the meaning of life. Of course – still in Christian terms – whether we ever experience union with God is up to God’s grace, but our efforts predispose us to be better recipients of his grace – and are themselves subtle but powerful expressions of that very grace. In Eckhart’s words,
If anyone were to ask me, Why do we pray, why do we fast, why do we do all our works, why are we baptized, why (most important of all) did God become man? – I would answer, in order that God may be born in the soul and the soul be born in God. For that reason all the scriptures were written, for that reason God created the world and all angelic natures: so that God may be born in the soul and the soul be born in God.[27]
Islam
When the Qur’an, the sacred book of Islam, discusses the meaning of life, it says in God’s voice: “We were not playing a pointless game when We created the heavens and earth and everything in between; We created them for a true purpose, but most people do not comprehend.”[28] And what is that purpose? Another passage in the Qur’an gives the answer: “I created jinn [spirits] and mankind only to worship Me.”[29]
So, then, what does it mean to “worship God,” and thus to live in accordance with the meaning of life, in an Islamic context?
The meaning of the Arabic word Islam is “submission to God’s will,” and a Muslim, a follower of Islam, is someone who has submitted their own will to God’s.[30] Since the Islamic God (Allah in Arabic) is the sole creator and sustainer of all things, all things already submit to him passively and without realizing it, and are thus muslims with a lowercase “m.” But God has given humans a special “trust” (fitrah in Arabic) to be Muslims, servants of God, in the full, active sense of the word.[31]
On one level, this of course entails that the meaning of human life is to follow the outer teachings of Islam, such as the Five Pillars of the religion (the profession of faith, the five daily prayers, fasting during the month of Ramadan, giving alms, and making a pilgrimage to Mecca[32]) and Islam’s divinely-revealed Law, the Shariah. Shariah means “the broad path leading to water” and provides guidance for Muslims in all areas of their lives. The Qur’an often describes the heavenly Paradise as a cool, watery, lush place, much like an oasis in the scorching Arabian desert, and also uses water as an image of spiritual purification. This is surely what the “water” in the meaning of Shariah refers to: spiritual purification and ultimately Paradise.[33]
Just as Christianity makes a distinction between the “active life” and the “contemplative life,” with the latter being the ultimate purpose of the former, so Islam makes a distinction between the Shariah and the tariqah, a narrower “path” (the literal meaning of the word[34]) leading to spiritual enlightenment and an understanding of the inner meaning of the outer forms of Islam. The tariqah is essentially synonymous with Sufism, the mystical dimension of Islam.[35] A practitioner of Sufism is called a “Sufi,” and their position in traditional Islam is vaguely comparable to that of, say, monks and nuns in traditional Christianity and Buddhism.
What, then, do the Sufis have to say about what it means to worship/serve God and to thereby fulfill the meaning of life?
For one thing, when servanthood is taken to its logical conclusion, the servant loses himself or herself in that which he or she serves. In Hindu terms, the “self” with a lowercase “s” is lost in the “Self” with an uppercase “S.” The Sufi realizes – not just intellectually, but through firsthand experience – that he or she only exists inasmuch as he or she partakes of God’s existence; the separate, limited, human self is ultimately sheer nonexistence, an illusion, a veil over the face of God. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a prominent scholar of Islam and practicing Sufi himself, writes:
The highest meaning of servanthood is in fact the realization of our “nothingness” before God. It is only by passing through this gate of “annihilation,” or what the Sufis call fana’, that we are able to gain “subsistence,” baqa’, in God and to reach the root of our “I” and also therefore the Divine.[36]
Just as the perfect servant is “annihilated” in that which he or she serves, so is the perfect lover “annihilated” in that which he or she loves. Love is therefore pivotal to Sufi understandings of the meaning of worship and servanthood; love and worship are, in the end, two different ways of saying the same thing. In the succinct words of the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Baha Walad, “‘Worship’ is to offer love.”[37]
This theme of self-consuming love for God as the meaning of life permeates Sufi poetry. Here, for example, is what Attar has to say on the matter:
[T]he Beloved is your destination in both worlds.[38]
What use is a life if not as an offering
for love of the Beloved?[39]
If we discover even a trace of the Beloved,
that will be something!
If we don’t, then life will be a drab and useless thing.[40]
And Rumi:
God created the child, that is, your wanting,
so that it might cry out, so that milk might come.Cry out! Don’t be stolid and silent
with your pain. Lament! And let the milk
of loving flow into you.[41]
And Yunus Emre:
The rivers all in Paradise
Flow with the word Allah, Allah,
And ev’ry longing nightingale
He sings and sings Allah, Allah.[42]
Finally, the Sufis have often expressed the Islamic meaning of life in terms of the obtainment of knowledge – not factual or rational knowledge, of course, but the intimate knowledge of God that comes from firsthand mystical experience. They’ve cherished two particular hadiths or “sayings” of the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, in this context. The first is delivered from the perspective of God: “I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known, so I created humans and spirits (jinn), so that they would know me.”[43] And the second is, “Whosoever knows his self, knows his Lord”[44] – because the perfect worshiper of God realizes that he or she has no self apart from God, the Self.
The Lakota Sioux
The Lakota Sioux are an American Indian tribe from the Great Plains of what is today the United States. In the early twentieth century, one of their medicine men, Black Elk, gave a series of interviews to John Neihardt and Joseph Epes Brown in which he explained much of the traditional Lakota Sioux religion. Black Elk’s accounts, published in Neihardt’s book Black Elk Speaks and Brown’s book The Sacred Pipe, are full of statements of what the Lakota Sioux have understood to be the meaning of life.
Since these statements come from a religion different from those we’ve looked at so far, they’re naturally expressed in a different idiom. But the underlying theme is the same: the meaning of life is to live in a way that comports with, and leads up to, spiritual enlightenment, the direct experience of the oneness of all things in the immanent and transcendent divinity. For example, Black Elk says at one point:
We should understand well that all things are the works of the Great Spirit. We should know that He is within all things: the trees, the grasses, the rivers, the mountains, and all the four-legged animals, and the winged peoples; and even more important, we should understand that He is also above all these things and peoples. When we do understand all this deeply in our hearts, then we will fear, and love, and know the Great Spirit, and then we will be and act and live as He intends.[45]
Elsewhere, he adds that “nothing can live well except in a manner suited to the way the Power of the World lives and moves to do its work.”[46] And he quotes his friend High Hollow Horn as saying in a prayer, “O Father and Grandfather Wakan-Tanka, You are the source and end of everything”[47] – in other words, Wakan-Tanka, the Great Spirit, is the goal of all life.
Black Elk places particular emphasis on the moral aspect of the meaning of life, repeatedly expressing the spiritual purpose of treating others in a way that reflects their ultimate identity with the Great Spirit, as in the following passage:
In this rite we establish a relationship on earth, which is a reflection of that real relationship which always exists between man and Wakan-Tanka. As we always love Wakan-Tanka first, and before all else, so we should also love and establish closer relationships with our fellow men, even if they should be of another nation than ours.[48]
And Black Elk quotes a prayer from another Lakota Sioux man, Matohoshila, which is another beautiful expression of this same underlying point:
With all beings and all things we shall be as relatives; just as we are related to You, O Mother, so we shall make peace with another people and shall be related to them. May we walk with love and mercy upon that path which is holy![49]
The Maya
The Maya people, who are indigenous to large parts of Central America, have recorded many of their most important traditional myths in a book called the Popol Vuh. In the part of the Popol Vuh that recounts how and why the gods created humans, the gods say to each other:
“The time for the planting and dawning is nearing. For this we must make a provider and nurturer. How else can we be invoked and remembered on the face of the earth?… So now let’s try to make a giver of praise, giver of respect, provider, nurturer,” they said.[50]
The meaning of life for the traditional Maya, therefore, is to worship and serve the gods. This expression of the meaning of life is effectively the same as that of Islam, which we explored at length above. And even though the Popol Vuh doesn’t directly plumb the profound implications of that idea the way the Sufis do for Islam, the Sufis’ insights into what “worship” and “service” mean when taken to their logical conclusions largely apply here, too.
We can thus treat the ancient Maya religion as another example of the broad themes we’ve been examining here.
The Ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians
The ancient Mesopotamians of the first and second millennia BC recorded their creation myth in an epic poem called the Enuma Elish. Different groups within ancient Mesopotamia produced their own versions of the poem in which whatever god they took to be the highest was given pride of place as the central deity of the poem, but the basic structure and contents of the poem otherwise seem to have remained quite constant.[51]
In the Enuma Elish, after the high god – Marduk in the most famous version of the text – defeats the forces of chaos, he instructs the gods to build cities and temples on earth where he and the other gods can be worshiped. To make this task lighter for the gods, he creates humans to do the hard labor:
Arteries I will knot
and bring bones into being.
I will create Lullu, “man” be his name,
I will form Lullu, man.
Let him be burdened with the toil of the gods,
that they may freely breathe.[52]
Despite the almost comical mode of expression here, this story isn’t as absurd as it may initially sound to modern ears. To say that humanity was created to build the gods’ cities and temples is to say that they were created to serve and worship the gods, a way of expressing the meaning of life that we’ve now seen in both Islam and the Maya religion. What the Islamic mystics have said about what it means to truly “worship” and “serve” the divine applies here, too, once we “translate” it into the idiom of a religion that was outwardly wildly different from Islam, just as the ancient Maya religion was.
It’s therefore reasonable to say that the ancient Mesopotamians shared the common outlook on the meaning of life that we’ve been tracing across so many different religions here, even though the ultimate point is only implied rather than directly stated in this case.
Corroboration for this interpretation comes from a closely-related ancient Middle Eastern people: the Egyptians. One of the “Coffin Texts,” which record ideas that were prominent in Egypt in the second and third millennia BC, puts the following words on the lips of a creator god:
I have made each man the same as his neighbor
and have prohibited that they should do wrong.
But their hearts have resisted my commandment….I have ordained that their hearts cease to forget the West,
so that the local gods be brought offerings.[53]
In ancient Egyptian parlance, “to remember the West,” the direction of the setting sun, means to remember death and ultimate things more generally, which for the ancient Egyptians were deeply spiritual matters.[54] This is confirmed by the following line, “so that the local gods be brought offerings.” This poem therefore articulates the same notion of the meaning of life as that of the Enuma Elish, just expressed in what’s perhaps a more sophisticated way.
Conclusion
Naturally but unfortunately, it’s not realistic to cite and discuss examples from every single religion that’s ever existed. But hopefully this relatively small number of examples sufficiently illustrates the point that many, many religions from all around the world teach that the meaning of life is to live in a way that facilitates spiritual enlightenment, whether or not we get all the way there in this life.
The fact that so many different groups of people, living in so many different ways and in so many different places and times, have all reported the same underlying view on the meaning of life makes it seem as if they were all inspired by the same more-than-human source – so perhaps they really were.
Of course, strictly speaking, just because they all agree doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re all right. They could all be wrong in the same way. But if you live in accordance with their common view on what the meaning of life is, does your life become more meaningful in practice? There’s only one way to find out: to try it for yourself.
References:
[1] Rodrigues, Hillary P. 2017. Introducing Hinduism. Routledge. p. 65.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “Shvetashvatara Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 164.
[4] Ibid. p. 163.
[5] Ibid. p. 161.
[6] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). The Bhagavad Gita. Nilgiri Press. p. 175.
[7] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “Paramahamsa Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 292-293.
[8] Mitchell, Stephen (transl.) 2000. Bhagavad Gita. Harmony Books. p. 108.
[9] Ibid. p. 118.
[10] Ibid. p. 76.
[11] Gethin, Rupert. 1998. The Foundations of Buddhism. Oxford University Press. p. 75.
[12] Maitreya, Balangoda Ananda (transl.). 1995. The Dhammapada: The Path of Truth. Parallax Press. p. 52.
[13] Ibid. p. 59-61.
[14] Ibid. p. 23.
[15] Gethin, Rupert. 1998. The Foundations of Buddhism. Oxford University Press. p. 81.
[16] Bodhi, Bhikkhu (transl.). 2000. The Samyutta Nikaya. Wisdom Publications. p. 201.
[17] Gethin, Rupert. 1998. The Foundations of Buddhism. Oxford University Press. p. 76.
[18] Ibid. p. 226-228.
[19] Coogan, Michael D., et al (eds.). 2018. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. p. 1492.
[20] Eire, Carlos M.N. 2016. Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650. Yale University Press. p. 317.
[21] Walshe, Maurice O’C. (transl.). 2009. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart. The Crossroad Publishing Company. p. 33.
[22] Lossky, Vladimir. 1976. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. p. 80.
[23] Dionysius. 1987. Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. Transl. Colm Luibheid. Paulist Press. p. 120.
[24] Ibid. p. 101.
[25] Eire, Carlos M.N. 2016. Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650. Yale University Press. p. 140.
[26] Johnston, William (transl.). 2014. The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counseling. Image Books. p. 49-50.
[27] Walshe, Maurice O’C. (transl.) 2009. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart. The Crossroad Publishing Company. p. 177.
[28] Haleem, Abdel (transl.) 2005. The Qur’an. Oxford University Press. p. 322.
[29] Ibid. p. 344.
[30] Murata, Sachiko, and William C. Chittick. 1994. The Vision of Islam. Paragon House. p. xiv.
[31] Ibid. p. 134-138.
[32] Ibid. p. 8-20.
[33] Ibid. p. 22.
[34] Ibid. p. 345.
[35] Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 2007. The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition. HarperOne. p. 5.
[36] Ibid. p. 36.
[37] Chittick, William C. 2008. Sufism. Oneworld Publications. p. 135.
[38] Attar. 2018. The Conference of the Birds. Transl. Sholeh Wolpé. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 240.
[39] Ibid. p. 196.
[40] Ibid. p. 45.
[41] Barks, Coleman (transl.). 1997. The Essential Rumi. Castle Books. p. 157.
[42] Schimmel, Annemarie. 1975. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. The University of North Carolina Press. p. 332.
[43] Knysh, Alexander. 2024. Islam in Historical Perspective. Routledge. p. 123.
[44] Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 2007. The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition. HarperOne. p. 5.
[45] Brown, Joseph Epes. 1989. The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux. University of Oklahoma Press. p. xx.
[46] Neihardt, John G. 2014. Black Elk Speaks. University of Nebraska Press. p. 132.
[47] Brown, Joseph Epes. 1989. The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux. University of Oklahoma Press. p. 14.
[48] Ibid. p. 101.
[49] Ibid. p. 105.
[50] Tedlock, Dennis. 1986. Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life. Simon & Schuster. p. 79.
[51] Dalley, Stephanie (transl.). 2000. Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. Oxford University Press. p. 228.
[52] Jacobsen, Thorkild. 1976. The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion. Yale University Press. p. 180-181.
[53] Assmann, Jan. 2002. The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs. Transl. Andrew Jenkins. Metropolitan Books. p. 192.
[54] Ibid.