What Is the Relationship between Self-Forgetting and Forgetting God?
Have you ever missed yourself or felt lost in your daily routines and no longer recognized yourself? Or, have you ever felt a part of you is missing and nothing in this world can fill its void?
Sometimes, we experience such feelings and cannot get rid of them. The deep sadness within us can be compared to a thousand things, and can hurt us so much that we want to escape from ourselves. But the more we get away from ourselves, the more restless we become.
We all have experienced such situations, especially when our sweet dreams come true one after another, but after a while, we feel deceived! It is as if these dreams were not what we wanted or thought they would be. We gradually become desperate and wish we were not alive or at least we could close our eyes like the People of the Cave (Aṣḥāb al-kahf) and go into a long sleep!
People deal with such situations differently. Some are so weak that, instead of solving the problem, they decide to erase the problem by committing suicide. Some consume drugs, antidepressants, and alcohol to forget themselves for at least a moment. Many other people also create a virtual identity for themselves and make up a fake world with the help of their followers, so that they can feel happier and peaceful for a little while, even if it is not real.
Self-forgetting is a sense of inner restlessness, heart hardness, and chronic anxiety that has its roots back in forgetting one’s true needs. However, most people refuse to accept this truth and prefer to alleviate this restlessness by actualizing the potentials of their inanimate, vegetative, animal, and even intellective dimensions. For example, they think if they have more money, a more beautiful face, higher education, or a better spouse, they will be happier and more peaceful, but this perception is fundamentally wrong. If someone could quench their thirst by drinking salt water, or treat their heatstroke by turning on the heater, then they could calm their true self by actualizing their animal potentials! As mentioned, our true self does not feel calm by actualizing any of these existential potentials.
What Is the Relationship between Self-Forgetting and Self-knowledge?
No matter where we look in the world, no matter how many reasons we come up with for our spiritual disorders, in the end we will be back to square one, which is self-knowledge. The root of all spiritual problems ultimately comes down to a lack of self- knowledge which causes all the restlessness and inner problems.
What is the relationship between self-forgetting and self-knowledge? In previous discussions on self-knowledge, we discussed that our soul has different degrees or dimensions, and each of these degrees has its own special beloved and deity with which it is in harmony and finds peace in them. For example, our sensate dimension enjoys being paired with sensory forms, and our intellect enjoys being paired with rational matters, but our true self does not pair with any of these beloveds because it is not of their kind.
The key point is that only those who know the dimensions of their existence and have achieved self-knowledge can identify this mismatch. Others are unable to distinguish between their ‘true self’ and ‘false self.’ Therefore, they go the wrong way and try to calm the restlessness of their true self through actualizing their inanimate and vegetative potentials or with sensory, imaginal, and estimative beloveds. But they do not succeed and sometimes do not realize why their efforts are futile until the end of their lives, and this is the greatest suffering of humanity.
Self-forgetting is the direct result of forgetting God. Our true self has a divine essence, and anyone who forgets God has actually forgotten themselves. This point is one of the most important mathematical laws of creation, and there is no escape from it!
Self-Forgetting Has no Relation to Being Religious or Not
True belief in the statement of “There is no deity but Allah” and having the conviction that humans have no beloved but Allah produce three clear and evident results in people’s lives: happiness, inner peace, and love.
Of course, being happy does not mean being frivolous! It means that a person has lasting inner joy, and he is not impatient, sensitive, nervous, irritable, hateful, jealous, or selfish; in short, “He neither suffers nor causes suffering!”
A Person who, after years of worship, is still depressed, anxious, impatient, sensitive, hateful, arrogant, jealous, and selfish suffers from self-forgetting even if he appears very religious. Therefore, it is wrong to assume that self-forgetting is only the characteristic of those who do not believe in God and religion. Someone who cannot stay happy and calm after years of being in contact with God has not really benefited from that relationship. All these years, he has been praying with his inanimate, vegetative, animal, and intellective dimensions, not with his true self. Whenever he has prayed, he has only asked for inanimate, vegetative, animal, and intellective perfections and kept his true self poor and hungry. Such a person is not a holy human being, but at best a holy plant or animal.
Return to Our True Self
If any physical or mental illness reaches advanced and severe stages, it is no longer treatable. Self-forgetting is the result of the improper functioning of our supra-rational faculty or our heart. If we do not recognize and treat it in time, it will end up in a hardened heart. Those who suffer from advanced stages of hardness of the heart have hearts as hard as stone; no worship, advice, or divine words can break down this impenetrable barrier and penetrate deeply into their hearts. These individuals may confirm many truths with their intellect, but no spiritual breakthrough will happen within them until their hearts accept these truths.
The heart is the most delicate element of human existence, and maintaining its purity and vitality depends only on building a proper, continuous, and permanent relationship with God. We talked about ways to recognize self-forgetting earlier. Here, as a solution for the prevention and treatment of this disease, it is worth noting that building a proper and loving relationship with God is a skill. So learning it, like any other skill, depends on three vital factors: practice, mental imagery, and repetition. To stay away from self-forgetting and return to one’s true self, we need to use practice, mental imagery, and repetition to deeply instill the true meaning of “There is no god but Allah” in our hearts so that we truly come to this belief that there is no beloved except the Holy Essence of Allah.
In this article, we became familiar with the meaning of self-forgetting, its roots, and the ways to prevent and treat it. Since articles on self-knowledge are the foundation of other articles, we highly recommend reading them.