The Three Selves

So the first nafs is called nafs al-ammārah:

There is an interesting book by Robert Bly — some people cannot stand him, but he has his admirers — called The Sibling Society, which is about modern America, because he has this idea that Americans are turning into big babies: that they have lost this kind of sense of moving into maturity. And he uses the Islamic model in saying that many of us have become this nafs al-ammārah. Ammārah means the commanding self. It is the self that is commanding us to do things that we should not do. And if we submit to that self, we become a slave of our passions. And this, in the Arabic language, is called ʿabd. The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: wretched is the slave of the dinar and the dirham — of gold and silver. Wretched is the slave of his clothes. Wretched is the slave of his riding beast. People who become slaves of stuff, of the world. So nafs al-ammārah is the commanding self.

Now, the next move up is called nafs al-lawwāmah:

This is the blaming self, the reproachful self. The self is moving out of its abject nature, and it is beginning to recognise a type of moral imperative. The nafs is still doing wrong, but it is saying: I should not be doing this. And this is consciousness. This is moving out of a completely bestial state, and into a state now where there is a tension between the bestial and the angelic nature of the human being.

And this is best related to the idea of Adam (peace be upon him) being created from earth and water. Water is a purifying element by its nature. Water, in many traditions, is related to consciousness. In the Chinese tradition, water is related to consciousness — the element of water itself. Earth is density. Now, water allows light through. Light can penetrate water; but light does not penetrate earth. So the human being is mixed with these two admixtures of earth and water: we have one aspect of ourselves that does not want to let the light through, and another that does. And this is where one goes into the nafs al-lawwāmah, the reproachful self: you should not have done that. Some modern people have put this into the idea of the id and the ego and then the superego; the id is more like the nafs al-ammārah, the compulsive self.

And then the final self is called nafs al-muṭmaʾinnah, which is the self at peace:

This is the self that has submitted. This is the self that has submitted its being completely to God. And this self is no longer in this conflict. It is no longer in the religious state of "I should do that" or "I ought to do that". But now it has moved into Kierkegaard's kind of ethical self. It now realises that this is the right thing, and it wants to do it. It wants to do the right thing, and it does the right thing now by nature — not by compulsion, not by feeling that one has to do this thing.

So the human being has two choices: to submit to the low self and take himself into alienation, which is wrath — which is transcendence; which is to literally place himself in a relationship to God in which God is absolutely other, disconnected from God completely. And this is epitomised by the idea of jahannam, the idea of hell: that this is the ultimate alienation. Now, fire is a very interesting element, because it cannot rise above its nature. It has an upward motion, but it cannot rise above, because it is bound to the earth. The fire only exists because of earth; and yet it has this upward motion. It wants to… it is moving up, but it is held down by… And this is the idea of being pulled down. Being pulled down by fire. And fire is very similar to light. It is not light, but it is very similar to the concept of light. There is light in fire, but it is not the light that we relate to the spiritual light, luminosity. The other is an upward movement.