Hakim Maleki Tabrizi on Self-knowledge

The intuitive Self-knowledge is one fundamental discussion in practical mysticism. As per the principles of theoretical mysticism such as “personal unity of existence”, “epiphany”, “annihilation in God”, “the incorporeality of the soul”, and “the correspondence between the subjective and objective worlds”, Maleki Tabrizi has given his specific account of self-knowledge. He holds that a mystic wayfarer might observe the incorporeality of his soul obviously in an immediate vision in some stage of self-knowledge. According to his view, man enjoys imagined, intellectual and super-intellectual stages. Man’s true ego appears only in the light of actualization of his intellectual world. The highest stage of our soul is that a wayfarer can see neither himself nor his imaginal nor intellectual worlds, not even his annihilation in God, since he has left those stages behind; i.e. man is annihilated in man’s annihilation. At this stage, a wayfarer observes his poverty in existence and the fact that his true soul is the very need for God -rather than something in need of God- obviously and in an immediate vision. In his article, the author has come to reexamine Maleki Tabrizi’s theoretical principles on intuitive self-knowledge in the light of a synthetic-intellectual method.