Week 1 – 17 October 2026, 1.00pm EST — What Is It Like to Be You?

In conversation with the participant

We begin not with a philosopher but with the participant. We will ponder together, each reaching to self-awareness of the contents of our experience and try to perceive if objects actually exist or comprehended at all independent of our consciousness. Then we further deepen the conversation into thinking about Qualia, first person encounters of the world and the felt reality of everything as objects of experience via using many metaphors, thought experiments, latest findings in quantum physics and beyond, all explored in an accessible way.

In the scope of modern neuroscience we see neat descriptions of the brain in minute details but a huge paucity of a true and satisfying understanding of the felt quality of being the experiencer of things. In other words, the hard problem of consciousness will be intuited from the inherent knowledge of the mind as reconcilable only under a consciousness centered paradigm of the participants. For that end, some of the insights of a couple of the modern philosophers and neuroscientists that dovetail with the Nursian and Gulenian openings regarding the subject matter will be explored. That convergence with Nursi and Gulen will be expounded in the coming sessions. In a nutshell, the science of the brain, arguably, is categorically different from the science of consciousness and our course will explore this very point as well.

Readings for better self-reflection and introspection:

• Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974) — fifteen pages, and the whole of it.
• David J. Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness” (1995) — the easy/hard taxonomy.
• George Berkeley, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, First Dialogue.
• Frank Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia” (1982) — Mary’s Room; eight pages, and the most efficient thought-experiment available to a first session.
• Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things — the chapters on attention, in extract.
• John Searle, the Chinese Room thought-experiment.

Week 2 – 24 October 2026, 1.00pm EST — The Quranic Vocabulary of the Inner Life

with Plato and Saint Augustine

The Quran as a book of multi-layeredness, simply rejects the flattened view of the human consciousness and rejects the current and deeply seated commitments of consciousness in contemporary thoughts being the offspring of neuronal, electrical, chemical and biological reactions and enables its readers a nuanced and subtler account of the primacy of consciousness over anything causally physical. In this week, these Quranic terms and its interpenetrations will be under everyone’s inner examination:

• The Fiṭra: As the foundational, primordial orientation of consciousness towards the divine that is not a blank slate to be created but an already given gift to be preserved.
• The Rūḥ: As the transcendent, divine spark breathed into humanity.
• The Qalb: As the seat of spiritual discernment that has a more holistic apprehension than discursive reason that is championed as the highest faculty in the modern world. A term that goes way beyond a simple understanding of pumping the blood or the seat of human feelings devoid of cognition in its own right.
• The ʿAql: Its usage as a verb as etymologically signifying a binding to different realities will be examined in the 49 different places used in the Quran as well as the other cluster of words in the Quran representing the reality of the activity of the ʿAql.
• The Nafs: Being the dimension of us that tastes death, the seat of desires, intentions and inner struggles.

Having received the lexicon, we open the door and widen the conversation more, though carefully. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave will be juxtaposed with what Nursi later means by ghaflah, and set beside what Plato says about the immortality of the soul: that we knew before we were born and now only recollect, and that the soul, being simple and akin to what does not change, cannot be dissolved as composite bodies are.

Saint Augustine is brought in for the shape of the inner life over time. The Confessions is the first book in the West to narrate the soul’s growth as a history of states — descent as a dispersion of the self into multiplicity, ascent as a gathering that moves inward before it moves upward — and so hands the course a first-person map of ascent and descent centuries before Al-Ghazālī drew the same terrain.

Readings:

• The Qur’an.
• Plato, Phaedo 78b–80b — the affinity argument, for the non-materiality of the soul proper.
• Saint Augustine, Confessions.
• Kerim Balcı, “Agents of Human Spirituality: Dominical Subtle Faculties of Man According to Said Nursi”

Week 3 – 31 October 2026, 1.00pm EST — Al-Ghazālī, the Physician of the Spirit

with Tolstoy and Pascal

Al-Ghazali meticulously synthesized the Quranic inner vocabularies into a dynamic and living synthesis founded on spiritual taste as irreducible to any theoretical or material reality. With his recognition of different modes of consciousness as gradations of light from sense perception all the way to the peak of prophetic mode we enrich the subject. His method of the spirit’s home is not abstract but experiential. Additionally the spiritual and intellectual lineage from Al-Ghazali to Bediuzzaman and Hoca Effendi will be highlighted as a continual tradition with their respective uniqueness in the coming weeks.

The convergence brought forward this week is structural rather than thematic, and is for that reason the most persuasive in the course. In the Munqidh, Al-Ghazālī does not argue his way out of the crisis. The certainty that was dismantled by argument is not restored by argument; it is restored by a light cast into the breast. Tolstoy, eight centuries later and with no access to that text, writes the same shape: a man at the height of his powers, undone not by any refutation but by a question his reasoning cannot hold, who finds that the way out is not a better argument.

Tolstoy’s inward drama of what his consciousness experienced given his inner proximity and distance from God is examined here, in the company of the physician who diagnosed the condition before him. Then touching briefly on Pascal’s insights regarding how experienced belief in immortality is a prerequisite to morality — and on his account of divertissement, which is the sharper of his two contributions for our purposes: the human being cannot sit quietly in a room alone, and every diversion is a flight from a self it is unbearable to attend to. That is a description of ghaflah written from inside it, by a man who could not name it.

Readings:

• Al-Ghazālī, Al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl — the section on the collapse of certainty, and the section on the way of the Sufis.
• Al-Ghazālī, The Marvels of the Heart (Book 21 of the Iḥyāʾ) — the similitudes of the heart, and the armies of the heart.
• Leo Tolstoy, A Confession.
• Blaise Pascal, Pensées.