DHIKR · REMEMBRANCE THROUGH REPETITION
On the anchor word — and on the sequence every long repetitive session passes through, which most people quit inside.
At the centre of Sufi practice sits something anybody who has trained at anything recognizes immediately: the same thing, repeated, far past the point where it is interesting.
Dhikr means remembrance, and in practice it is a word or phrase, often tied to the breath, returned to over and over, in some orders for hours and over decades.
What makes it useful here is not the content but the structure, and the structure is the thing most people misunderstand about their own repetitive work.
A long repetitive session moves through a fairly predictable sequence, and it is worth knowing in advance because the exit point is always in the same place.
First there is attention, which is easy and feels productive. Then there is boredom, which arrives early and is unpleasant and generates a supply of reasons to stop or to vary the thing.
Almost everybody leaves there, either by quitting or by adding variety — and adding variety at that point is quitting with better manners.
Whatever is on the other side of the boredom is only reachable by going through it, and the tradition’s method is simply to keep going without irritation at the boredom, which it treats as a feature of the terrain rather than a signal.
The verse is about God, and I am not going to pretend otherwise or convert it into a general principle about attention.
What I am borrowing is narrower and structural: that a single thing returned to repeatedly becomes a place to come back to, and that having somewhere to return is different from having nowhere.
There is an anecdote that belongs here. A man calls on God through the night; a cynic asks whether any answer ever came; he stops, discouraged; and he is told that the calling was the answer — that the longing which made him call is the thing he thought he was waiting for.
I cannot give you a location for it. The version in English circulation is Coleman Barks’s “Love Dogs”, from The Essential Rumi, and I could not verify the passage in a scholarly translation to check what the Persian actually says or where it sits.
So the essay does not use it. A collection that opens by objecting to a re-rendered Rumi with the Islam removed cannot then retell a Barks poem as though it were a source. That would be the same operation, performed quietly, in the middle of the objection.
What can be said with a citation is duller and does the same work. The orders bound a short phrase to the breath and returned to it daily for years, under a teacher, as an act of remembrance — and their own literature treats the returning rather than the arriving as the practice.3
The nearest mechanism is attentional. A specified anchor — a word, a phrase, a point of contact with the breath — gives attention something to return to, and the return is what is being trained rather than the staying.
The mind-wandering literature is the relevant one: attention drifts constantly, drifting is normal rather than failure, and what distinguishes practised attention is the speed of noticing and returning, not the absence of drift.4
The meditation research broadly supports that something is trainable here, with the standing caveat this library has repeated: the mindfulness literature has documented quality problems, effect sizes are modest, and active-control comparisons shrink them further.5
What none of it supports is a claim about what the repetition connects you to. That is the tradition’s claim and it is not the kind of thing the research is about.
The objection is about what else this method is good for.
The case against
The mechanism does not care about the content. Repetition of a phrase, in a group, under a teacher, over years, is an extremely effective way of making something unquestionable, and religious orders of every kind have used it that way.
The tradition has internal restraints — dhikr is supposed to be given by a teacher who knows the student, and the literature is full of warnings about practices taken up unsupervised — but the restraints depend on the teacher being trustworthy, which is the structural problem the Not-Two collection sets out at length.
The version in this essay is deliberately thin: an anchor word, chosen by you, with no content you are being asked to believe. That is safer and it is also less than the tradition is offering, and I would rather say so than pretend the thin version is the practice.
Choose one word or short phrase. It does not need to mean anything; it needs to be yours and to stay the same.
Bind it to something that already recurs — a breath, a step, a specific point in a task you repeat. The binding is what makes it available later without deciding.
Return without irritation. The return is the practice. Being annoyed that you drifted is a second process and it is the thing that makes people stop.
And go past the boredom deliberately, once or twice, rather than varying the work when it arrives. Knowing where the exit is makes it possible not to take it.
The whole block installs a single habit.
The sequence is predictable and the exit is always at the same place, which is the single most useful thing in this essay. Boredom is terrain rather than signal.
What is trained is the return rather than the staying, and irritation at having drifted is the thing that ends the practice.
And the version here is thinner than the tradition’s on purpose. An anchor with no content you are asked to believe is safer, and it is less.
Choose one word and bind it to something that already recurs — a breath, a step, a point in a task. Do not change either.
Return without irritation; the return is the practice. And go through the boredom once deliberately rather than varying the work, because that is where everybody leaves.
Arabic and Persian terms are transliterated simply. Where a saying is of contested authenticity the essay says so. Modern research is cited by author and publication.