reality and the likes

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 proph...

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 u...

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 cosmol...