Fanaa (فناء)

Writing this post not about the movie Fanaa, but about the meaning of Fanaa itself.
Fanaa (فناء) is the Sufi term for extinction. It means to annihilate the self.

Persons having entered this state are said to have no existence outside of and be in complete unity with Allah. Fanaa is similar to the concepts of nirvana in Buddhism and Hinduism or moksha in Hinduism which also aim for annihilation of the self. Fanaa is a sort of mental, yet real, death. The person of the "Way" experiences it freely; it is the final passage which leads to the summit of the Stages. It liberates one from all contingency outside of their spiritual quest; the ultimate aim is the Truth.

Inayat Khan writes in his book A Sufi message of spiritual liberty

The ideal perfection, called Baqa by Sufis, is termed 'Najat' in Islam, 'Nirvana' in Buddhism, 'Salvation' in Christianity, and 'Mukhti' in Hinduism. This is the highest condition attainable, and all ancient prophets and sages experienced it, and taught it to the world.Baqa is the original state of God. At this state every being must arrive some day, consciously or unconsciously, before or after death. The beginning and end of all beings is the same, difference only existing during the journey.

Perfection is reached by the regular practice of concentration, passing through three grades of development: Faná -fi-Shaikh, annihilation in the astral plane, Faná-fi-Rasul, annihilation in the spiritual plane, and Faná-fi-Allah, annihilation in the abstract.After passing through these three grades, the highest state is attained of Bá qi-bi-Allah, annihilation in the eternal consciousness, which is the destination of all who travel by this path.

BTW The Movie Fanaa is just another bolly wood masala mish mash of love, trouble, separation and eventual get together. However the name of this movie captures why there are thousands and thousands of bollywood movies with the theme "Love". Love is that thing which spirals us into free fall into seemingly dangerous territory, the erratic flutter of two hearts never have known such delectable feelings, for once life seems to have some meaning! we let ourselves go gladly with wild abandon into the arms of the unknown, into self annihilation! Nothing, not even death surpasses the beauty of this moment. Hence our endless fascination for budding love. Tender, ruthless, violent....

chaand sifarish jo karta hamari deta woh tumko bata
sharm-o-haya pe parde gira ke karni hain hamko khata
zidd hain ab toh hain khud ko mitana hona hain tujhmein fanaa

teri adaa bhi hain jhonke wali chhu ke gujar jaane de
teri lachak hain ke jaise daali dil mein utar jaane de
aaja baahon mein karke bahana hona hain tujhmein fanaa

subhaan allaah subhaan allah subhaan allah
hain jo iraaden bata doon tumko sharma hi jaaogi tum
dhadakanen jo suna doon tumko ghabraa hi jaaogi tum
hamko aata nahi hain chhupana hona hain tujhmein fanaa

Richard Dawkins on Reality

In this talk notable evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins points out just how weird reality might be. He talks about how we have evolved to fit into a so-called “Middle World” where we can’t observe the very large or very small. The universe might just be a whole lot queerer than we suppose. Or, as Dawkins points out, than we even can suppose.

Are there things about the universe that will be for ever beyond our grasp but not beyond the grasp of some superior intelligence? Are there things about the universe that are un-graspable by any mind however superior?

Science has thought us against all intuition that apparently solid objects like crystals and rocks are almost entirely composed of empty space. The familiar analogy is that the nucleus of an atom is like a fly in the middle of a sports stadium and the next atom is in the next sports stadium.

Our brains have evolved to think that only solid, material things are real at all. Waves of electromagnetic fluctuations in a vacuum seem unreal. We find real matter comforting only because we have evolved to survive in middle world where matter is a useful fiction.

Quest for the "God Particle"

National Geographic Article on the Large Hadron Collider

We know things today that Einstein, Rutherford, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and the rest of the great physicists of a century ago couldn't have imagined. But we're nowhere near a final theory of physical reality. Molecules are made of atoms; atoms are made of particles called protons, neutrons, and electrons; protons and neutrons (which are the "hadrons" that give the Hadron collider its name) are made of odd things called quarks and gluons—but already we're into a fuzzy zone. Are quarks fundamental particles, or made of something smaller yet?

The standard model can't explain several towering mysteries about the universe that have their roots in the minuscule world of particles and forces. If there's one truly extraordinary concept to emerge from the past century of inquiry, it's that the cosmos we see was once smaller than an atom. This is why particle physicists talk about cosmology and cosmologists talk about particle physics: Our existence, our entire universe, emerged from things that happened at the smallest imaginable scale. The big bang theory tells us that the known universe once had no dimensions at all—no up or down, no left or right, no passage of time, and laws of physics beyond our vision.

How does an infinitely dense universe become a vast and spacious one? And how is it filled with matter?

What about the riddle of dark matter? Scrutiny of the motion of distant galaxies indicates that they are subject to more gravity than their visible matter could possibly account for. There must be some exotic hidden matter in the mix. A theory called supersymmetry could account for this: It states that every fundamental particle had a much more massive counterpart in the early universe. The electron might have had a hefty partner that physicists refer to as the selectron. The muon might have had the smuon. The quark might have had ... the squark. Many of those supersymmetric partners would have been unstable, but one kind may have been just stable enough to survive since the dawn of time. And those particles might, at this very second, be streaming through your body without interacting with your meat and bones. They might be dark matter.

By smashing pieces of matter together, creating energies and temperatures not seen since the universe's earliest moments, the LHC could reveal the particles and forces that wrote the rules for everything that followed. It could help answer one of the most basic questions for any sentient being in our universe: What is this place?

There's one puzzle piece in particular that physicists hope to pick out of the debris from the LHC's high-energy collisions. Some call it the God particle.

The first thing you learn when you ask scientists about the God particle is that it's bad form to call it that. The particle was named a few years back by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, who has a knack for turning a phrase. Naturally the moniker took root among journalists, who know a good name for a particle when they hear one (it beats the heck out of the muon or the Z-boson).

The preferred name for the God particle among physicists is the Higgs boson, or the Higgs particle, or simply the Higgs, in honor of the University of Edinburgh physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed its existence more than 40 years ago. Most physicists believe that there must be a Higgs field that pervades all space; the Higgs particle would be the carrier of the field and would interact with other particles, sort of the way a Jedi knight in Star Wars is the carrier of the "force." The Higgs is a crucial part of the standard model of particle physics—but no one's ever found it.