The Four Journeys (al-Asfar al-Arbaʿa)

Held as a contemplative map laid over a long arc of practice, with the first journey done as repeatable inner work:

1. Name where you are. Before practice, locate yourself honestly on the map: are you scattered in the world’s multiplicity (pre-first-journey), turning inward (first), resting in stillness (second), re-entering daily life (third), or trying to act from a settled centre (fourth)? The map’s value is diagnostic before it is aspirational.
2. The first journey — turn from multiplicity toward unity. This is the practisable core. Sit quietly and deliberately withdraw attention from the “phenomenal deception” — the pull of a thousand competing concerns, images, and identities — and let it gather toward what underlies them. Ṣadrā’s seeker, in this journey, “moves away from multiplicity and phenomenal deception towards unity and an awareness of the underlying nature of reality.” Practically: notice the scatter; gently release each object of fixation; rest attention on the simple fact of being aware / being at all, beneath the contents.
3. The second journey — abide, don’t grasp. Where stillness opens, simply remain in it without trying to make it yield anything. In Ṣadrā’s frame this is “in the Real, with the Real” — contemplation resting in being itself. Held as a practice, it is non-grasping abiding: not chasing a state, not narrating it, letting it be what it is.
4. The third journey — carry it back. Crucially, the map does not end in withdrawal. Form the explicit intention to return — to bring the steadiness of stillness back into ordinary perception, seeing daily life in its light rather than abandoning it. This is the turn that distinguishes Ṣadrā’s map from a flight-from-the-world.
5. The fourth journey — serve from the centre. The destination is not solitary absorption but acting among people while inwardly abiding — “in creation, with the Real.” As a practice-orientation: let the settledness show up as patience, attention, and usefulness in real relationships and work, not as a private trophy. (Sourcing note: the names and order of the four journeys, the Sufi origin of the scheme, and the first journey’s “from multiplicity and phenomenal deception towards unity” are from the Asfar as summarised in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica. Rendering the first two journeys as a followable turn-within-and-abide is a faithful operational reading of what Ṣadrā wrote as metaphysical description; he did not present these as exercises.)

Mullā Ṣadrā (Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, c.1571–1640) wrote the Asfar as the central statement of his school, Transcendent Theosophy (al-ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya), synthesising Peripatetic philosophy, Suhrawardī’s Illuminationism, the mysticism of Ibn ʿArabī, and Shia theology.

The four-journeys scheme he adopted is Sufi in origin — a map of the wayfarer’s quest and return long used in the gnostic (ʿirfān) tradition. Ṣadrā’s distinctive move was to hang a complete metaphysics on it: the first journey treats being (wujūd); the second, substance; the third, God and the attributes; the fourth, the soul, death, and resurrection.

Treating the map as a ladder to climb fast. It is a diagnostic contour, not a set of ranks to claim. Most practice lives in the first journey.

• Stopping at the second journey. Mistaking absorption for the goal and abandoning the world is exactly the distortion Ṣadrā’s third and fourth journeys correct — the path is out and back, not out.
• Grasping at unity. Trying to force the “turn toward unity” produces strain; it comes by releasing the scatter, not by manufacturing a feeling.
• Confusing it with Avicenna’s “Stations.” Avicenna’s path (will → exercise → moments → arrival) charts an ascent of the knower; Ṣadrā’s is a circuit whose telos is return and service. Don’t collapse the two.
• Importing metaphysical certainty into a sitting. You can use the turn-within honestly without committing to the full ontology of substantial motion.