15.) If we
translate the effects of Sufi practices into modern terminology, don’t these
techniques allow people to tap into different energy centers associated with the human
body?
It would
be a mistake to make spiritual realms a function of various kinds of physical and/or
material processes. Energy is a concept of physics and chemistry and is an appropriate and
useful vehicle to use in describing such processes.
Extending
the idea of energy to the spiritual realm is without merit or even coherence. What do we
even mean by the notion of spiritual energy?
There are
subtle forms of energy which are associated with different centers of the body. Some of
these we know about through the discoveries of science, while other modalities of such
subtle forms of energy are alluded to in various treatises and accounts of spirituality.
Nonetheless,
one cannot argue that by uncovering more and more subtle forms of energy that, eventually,
we will come to something called spiritual energy. Spiritual principles and modes of being
can affect, shape, direct and constrain the manifestation and distribution of
physical/material energies without themselves necessarily being an instance of such
energies.
After all,
all things are encompassed by God’s knowledge, but this doesn’t make such
knowledge the same as the things which it encompasses - although, obviously, there is an
intimate relationship between the Hidden and the seen. The relationship between the Knower
and the known is one of mystery and not necessarily of physical/material processes and
concomitant energies.
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