Transcendence and TikTok

At a first glance, social media seems to represent a new phase in the reign of the nafs. After all, the devices hosting it—smartphones—mark the apex of privatized technology, which was itself conceived as a means of liberating the individual from the confines of society (and ultimately reality itself). This technology was, from the very beginning, imbued with quasi-spiritual undertones. The pioneers of cyberculture in the 1980s, such as Timothy Leary and Douglas Rushkoff, embraced the personal computer as a vessel for self-liberation to the point of transcendence. Their project “opened the way for an affinity between high-tech and spiritual empowerment.”² The early “cyberpunk” culture spawned from their optimism that the PC could facilitate the exploration of boundless new horizons in the virtual realm. As it turned out, the privatization of technology paved the way for something more profane: an intensification of the same individualism that capitalist modernity has always thrived on.³ Moreover, much like psychoanalysis, privatized technology helped reintroduce notions of transcendence within an egocentric framework. It fed the modern appetite for self-gratification rather than the hunger for transcendence. 

Social science, through quantitative research, has shown how the personal device both creates and consolidates a sense of (worldly) self. For the majority of participants in a 2019 study, researchers found that smartphones serve as “ontological extensions of the self.”⁴ In providing an accessible archive of our personal photographs, calendar entries, and other memories, smartphones help craft a coherent narrative encapsulating our temporal life and identity. Far from engendering a transcendent version of the self as Leary and the other cyberculture pioneers envisioned, smartphones do little more than affirm the self as it exists “in the world.” Plugging the 2019 study in to the current analysis, it seems that smartphones essentially ontologize the nafs. This is especially so with social media, which both bolsters the ego through the desire to be “liked” and normalizes the submission to the lower self; for example, exposure to advertisements for instant delivery of food and carnal hedonism are commonplace.

By normalizing the precedence of the nafs,smartphones and especially social media are fortifying individualism at both the societal and spiritual levels. “Manifestation” on TikTok, it can be said, represents the convergence of the cultural preoccupation with subjectivity and a New Age emphasis on self-actualization through the use of technologies. This signifies yet another inversion of traditional mysticism, especially that of Islam, which is concerned with quite the opposite of self-actualization (if “self” can be deemed as referring to the nafs and not the rūĥ, the spiritual dimension of the human being). Indeed, central to taśawwuf or Sufism is the pursuit of purifying and ultimately overcoming the self; this is encapsulated in the concept of tazkiyah, often translated as “purification” and asserted in a Qur’anic verse regarding the soul: “Indeed he prospers who purifies [zakkāhā] it. And indeed he fails who obscures it” (91:9–10).

The Islamic mystical tradition abounds with literature alluding to tazkiyah and its exegeses. In Sufi poetry, for example, the motif of “polishing the mirror”—that is, purifying one’s internal constitution so it may reflect the light of God—can serve as a metaphor for tazkiyah, since it conveys the mystic’s ambition to rectify the impurities inflicted by the lower self and instead embody the divine attributes. Many instances of this path of purification can be found cloaked in the poetic lexicon of Rumi, with others appearing in more practical and prescriptive formats; the eleventh-century Persian Sufi Khwājah ¢Abd Allāh Anśārī, for example, provided a systematic account of the one hundred stages or waystations (al-manāzil) through which one must progress to purify the self, beginning with self-awareness and ending with self-annihilation (fanā’).

Perhaps the richest resources on overcoming the self can be found in the works of the eleventh-century mystical theologian al-Ghazālī. Several passages in his magnum opus, Revival of the Religious Sciences, allude to tazkiyah and the internal struggle against the sensory and appetitive faculties (jihād al-nafs), which constitutes a prerequisite to spiritual purification. According to his account, the self must be disciplined via the development of an equilibrium: “Goodness of character proceeds from an equilibrium in the rational faculty brought about through sound wisdom, and in the irascible and appetitive faculties through their submission to the intellect and the Law.”⁵

Some believe that such submission is at the very essence of Sufism. The mystic Ja¢far b. Muĥammad al-Khuldī, for example, asserted that “Sufism is to throw the ego into slavery, emerge from human nature, and gaze wholly upon God.”⁶

Egocentrism, a defining characteristic of digital spirituality, runs contrary to the Islamic mystical pursuit of tazkiyah. Viewed through the lens of Sufism, which perceives authentic spirituality as that which overcomes the self, the notion of “spiritual empowerment” as practiced through smartphones and social media appears not so spiritual—after all, such digital spirituality seeks to edify that which traditional mysticism seeks to “throw into slavery” or, at least for al-Ghazālī, subvert through a balanced equilibrium.

The overcoming of the nafs, it should be said, is not tantamount to the absolute denial of the self or its subjective dispositions; rather, it signifies the beginning of one’s spiritual progression. As Khwājah ¢Abd Allāh Anśārī affirms in his treatise on the one hundred waystations or maqāmāt (Manāzil al-sā’irīn ilā al-Ĥaqq), developing self-awareness—through the processes of awakening (al-yaqażah), repentance (al-tawbah), self-accounting (al-muĥāsabah), penitence (al-inābah), and contemplation (al-tafakkur), to name the first five waystations in his schema⁷—is a prerequisite for ascending to the stage of self-loss and ultimately to mystical union with God (fanā’). The first five waystations are part of the ten called “The Preliminaries” (al-bidāyāt); the ultimate goal is the annihilation of the self, but prior to this, an awareness of the self is indeed essential. The predicament of most forms of digital spirituality lies in the fact that they do not go beyond this stage of self-awareness—in such “spirituality,” self-awareness is the end, imbued with a quasi-mystical status, and not simply an early stage, a means to the mystical union with God.

As a corollary of their egocentric nature, many of the objectives of these digital spiritualities remain within the scope of the immediate physical experience rather than the longer-term, transpersonal aims of tazkiyah and, ultimately, salvation. Here the term “physical” applies not only to the body but also to the mental faculties, since the nafs—a product of the contingent material world—can itself be thought of as “physical” (distinct from the rūĥ, authentically spiritual). As Karim Douglas Crow succinctly put it, “the psyche [nafs] is sublimated matter [physical nature].”⁸ These physical objectives of digital spirituality practically manifest, as it were, in the form of rituals and practices performed to achieve wealth and other tangible rewards in the pursuit of pleasure. More subtly, however, they also manifest in the attempts to induce altered states of consciousness, a practice now known on TikTok as “reality shifting.”

Not unlike the trances induced by shamanic rituals and psychedelic drugs, reality shifting has gained traction in the virtual realm. On TikTok, “shifters” attempt ways to transcend mundane perception and mentally migrate to other realms, be they the astral plane of shamanic cosmology or even the settings of films and television shows. Like manifestation, reality shifting can take forms that seem limitless, an attribute of their postmodern context, wherein individuals become the sole arbiters of their spirituality and the means of cultivating it. However, shifting is always oriented toward a sensory arousal of some kind. The videos, for example, often have a filter of hallucination-esque multicolored flashing lights that are designed to evoke a “mind-bending” experience. They provide an illusion of transcendence but merely tantalize the nafs.

Curiously, several Islamic mystical theologians warned of the dangers posed by spiritual experiences that allure the mental and sensory faculties. They saw these experiences as deceptive because they engulf the individual in the illusion that they have transcended themselves and the world when they are merely experiencing an altered state of their own mind, which, being “sublimated matter,” remains corporeal and contingent. Another example can be found in the experiences attained through psychedelic drugs, which reality shifting seeks to emulate; in the New Age movement, especially in its 1960s countercultural context, the use of mind-altering intoxicants such as magic mushrooms and LSD was not uncommon. Under the influence, users felt they were transcending reality when really the sensations that the drugs produced were no more than projections of the mind and thus the nafs (albeit in an unrecognizable state, owing to the neurological disturbances caused by intoxication).

A remarkably detailed account of quasi-spiritual experiences and their power to deceive comes to us from the renowned Andalusian mystic Muĥyī al-Dīn b. ¢Arabī. His Book of Spiritual Advice (Kitāb al-naśā’iĥ) features a list of over one hundred “states” (aĥwāl) that imbue the subject with a feeling or sensation that may resemble divine encounters or instances of tajallī but are in fact purely mental and thus “not to be relied upon.” The list includes “the increase in a [subjective emotional] state [ĥāl] which doesn’t produce [spiritual] knowing”; “the ‘fresh inspiration’ [al-wārid] that results from a disorder of the bodily constitution”; “every affection/love [maĥabbah] which doesn’t cause the lover [the subject] to prefer the intention of the beloved [God] over his own intention”; and “the state of ecstasy [wajd] which occurs as a result of trying to achieve ecstasy [tawājud].”