The Ruh, Consciousness & The Self | Mufti Abu Layth

i feel that consciousness the rule is not within us but that we tap into it so it is probably non-local consciousness i feel that the way the phone picks up a signal so we pick up a signal and then what happens is that signal obviously is picked up within us because we do pick it up but it's not restricted within us the interplay of that signal with this unique individual body and genes set of genes results in an

unique and individual personality so for example you could have in one family you could have two siblings five siblings six siblings same parents same set of you know genome structure same genetics dna their personality can be entirely different entirely different same environment i accept that some personality is socialized okay it is a product of it's nature versus nurture there is some which is definitely this epigenesis takes place

but there is an element of personality that is just unique and inherent to that individual that is what that is the nafs in the islamic term that self that emerges it's not just the physical self it is the personality with that self so a good example is the movie split incredible movie on did the dissociative identity disorder so you see this character who's the same character in the movie he plays so many different identities he has what used to be called

multiple personality disorder nowadays they call it dissociative identity disorder and when people have this they switch identity switch personalities they become an entirely different person so you can see this character that's the actor playing that so well that his whole personality changes the body is still him it's the same person but all of a sudden he's this boy he's acting like a boy he he speaks like a boy and then all of a sudden he's this man then he's this woman then he's this and he has these different uh personalities that he plays out this personality that we have is the nafs okay

and and that is unique to us because it is an integration of the meeting this physiology and then with some element of socialization as well taking place so and this is why consciousness is the most difficult thing to pin down in modern studies in modern physics or modern anything it's science it can't it does not know where to begin with consciousness truly speaking especially physicists and when i went to a lecture by it was bernard carr i believe but he's a

student of um and an associate of uh stephen hawkings and he is an amazing lecturer where he was where they they were trying to come up with he was trying to come up with he's a great physicist he was proposing a theory that could unite m theory with multiverse so if you go down into 10 dimensions m theory going into string theory possibly going right up to obviously from the galaxies to the universe to multiverse and

and to unite them all and he was proposing that the missing element and he had a he called it the universal uh i've forgotten the universal structure and he said he was working on it and he was proposing it as an official um um as in as official research that the missing element in all of these is consciousness is m for mind and that and he's hoping somehow to propose through mathematics and physics a astrophysics a structure that incorporates the m for mind in m theory and

multiverse theory to combine them and this is it this may just sound stupid to people but or it may sound i don't know like just like waffle but i hate to say but that's because because you just don't understand physics and you don't and that's the truth most people don't understand physics and they don't understand things like i mean does anybody truly understand quantum physics in the word of feynman richard feynman but they don't understand quantum physics and it's illogical according to aristotelian logic it doesn't work in

accordance to that they don't understand dimensions what are the ten dimensions they don't know what the ten dimensions are or the 11 dimensions that's the other alternate mathematics and some i know beyond that they propose 26 dimensions but it's not as stable mathematically so people don't understand these things so they to them it sounds silly like they think oh the consciousness is just like oh i'm conscious i'm awake that's not like in that sense in that sense even plants are conscious if you're using conscious to mean that they're just alive but i mean consciousness in the sense

that the lights get switched on all of a sudden you're not just acting on instinct and this is why the quran and i find this so majestically expressed that when the prophet is asked about the check this out they asked the prophet about this about the yes it would have been all too easy to say the is the spirit that inhabits the body

you see it would have been all too easy and everybody would have accepted it because back then i'm sure these kind of beliefs would have been very easy to accept if if the quran was to say oh it's just like a ghost-like figure you know how today people think of spirit they think of this kind of ghost floating inside you that comes out yes say it is like you inside you whatever this it could have said something because some people think it's a ghost version of you

but that's not what the quran said well like these are the things that really you know blow my mind when i look at the quran when people ask me about its miraculous nature it says look at the answer it just says this is a matter now people could say amur can mean command as well he can it can mean mata affair like that that this is fair enough it could be command or mata whatever of my lord

[Laughter] wow and you have only uncovered a small amount of knowledge about it what's so what's so difficult to say that it's just a ghost inside you that people could comprehend that easily they could understand that in fact that would have fitted in quite nicely but to say that that's yet you have only been given a very small understanding of this the knowledge surrounding it that

there's just too much of it that is incomprehensible for mankind yet that that is consciousness that is why today physics doesn't know where to begin with consciousness where did you begin with it goddamnit it's not the neural correlates of you know people think it's the neural coral it's pathetic i mean these people haven't even they can study the psychological studies i remember when i discussed with uh one of the atheists i think it was actually i think it was with abdullah gundam and he suggested it's the neural correlates oh he suggested it's in the brain which is the neural correlate theory

that's totally unfounded and in fact the study shows to the contrary you can just read the psychological studies neural correlates and even if they are neural correlates for consciousness you see it's there's no directionality just to say that look if because we're conscious of something certain parts of of the brain light up but that could be the reaction of consciousness what's to say it's causing consciousness do you understand so it's not that's that's like saying imagine something in my phone like the screen messed up on the phone

and so it's blank so you say oh well the phone doesn't work so it was the screen that was giving life to the phone but it wasn't how do you it's the phone that was making the screen you know light up but even let's say one of the common theories or if the brain gets damaged people lose consciousness that's true because that's the apparatus by which we can function and integrate consciousness now if the apparatus is gone then obviously we we can't integrate it that's like saying i take the battery out now the phone doesn't work say well tk the phone don't work he said well obviously so was the battery

creating the signal and the wi-fi no it wasn't so even in that view directionality is incredibly difficult to a causation you can't prove causation by neural correlates you can you can say there's some neural correlates but how do we know they're not a byproduct of consciousness which they most likely are and so roger penrose he has a lot of work on this one of the most leading mathematicians in the world today an absolute legend he he he's he's on he's been on joe rogan's show as well and many others he's absolutely just a legend of this era

he he has a theory as well that consciousness is picked up by the microtubules in the brain at a quantum level