Souls Know Each Other by Smell

<p><strong>SPIRITUALRELIEF JOURNAL · No. 01 · SEPTEMBER 2026</strong></p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zI22!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffaeaf27e-7f9a-45e1-8166-a006e4ed5abd_1600x900.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zI22!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffaeaf27e-7f9a-45e1-8166-a006e4ed5abd_1600x900.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zI22!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffaeaf27e-7f9a-45e1-8166-a006e4ed5abd_1600x900.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zI22!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffaeaf27e-7f9a-45e1-8166-a006e4ed5abd_1600x900.png" width="1456" height="819" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zI22!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffaeaf27e-7f9a-45e1-8166-a006e4ed5abd_1600x900.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zI22!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffaeaf27e-7f9a-45e1-8166-a006e4ed5abd_1600x900.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zI22!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffaeaf27e-7f9a-45e1-8166-a006e4ed5abd_1600x900.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zI22!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffaeaf27e-7f9a-45e1-8166-a006e4ed5abd_1600x900.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zI22!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffaeaf27e-7f9a-45e1-8166-a006e4ed5abd_1600x900.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zI22!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffaeaf27e-7f9a-45e1-8166-a006e4ed5abd_1600x900.png"></a></figure></div><p>There are ordinary acquaintances.</p><p>You meet someone, learn their name, discover where they are from. Familiarity accumulates in the usual way. Conversation by conversation, year by year, a stranger becomes someone you know.</p><p>And then there is the other kind.</p><p>You sit beside someone at a dinner. You meet them in a queue, at work, on a train. Nothing remarkable has happened. You know almost nothing about them.</p><p>Yet somehow the distance is already gone.</p><p>It does not have to be romantic. Sometimes the person is much older than you. Sometimes you know them for only a few weeks. Sometimes you never see them again.</p><p>What is strange is the feeling underneath it:</p><p><strong>This does not seem like the beginning of the acquaintance.</strong></p><p>Nearly a thousand years ago, a Persian mystic offered an explanation.</p><p>It involved horses.</p><div><hr></div><h2>THE PASSAGE</h2><p>Abu Sa’id ibn Abi’l-Khayr was born in 967 in Mayhana, a small town in Khorasan.</p><p>He became one of the remarkable figures of early Persian Sufism. Stories about him describe a lodge filled with visitors, food, poetry and music. Ascetics arrived expecting austerity and found a teacher who could be surprisingly suspicious of religious performance.</p><p>Much of what survives about him comes through two Persian works written by his descendants generations later, especially the <em>Asrar al-Tawhid</em>, compiled by his great-great-grandson. The historical Abu Sa’id and the remembered Abu Sa’id therefore arrive together. (<a href="https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/abu-said-fazlallah-b/?utm_source=chatgpt.com">Iranica Online</a>)</p><p>Among the teachings preserved under his name is an extraordinary account of what souls were doing before human bodies existed.</p><blockquote><p><strong>Four thousand years before God made these bodies, he made the souls, and he kept them near him, and he shed a light on them. He knew exactly how much each soul took, and he favoured each one in proportion to what it had been lit by. They stayed there in that light until they were full-grown. And those who in this world live in joy and agreement with one another, they must have been near one another in that place.</strong></p><p><strong>These souls know one another by smell, like horses.</strong></p></blockquote><p>That final image is the reason the passage stays with you.</p><p>Smell.</p><p>Two horses meet in a field. They put their noses together and breathe.</p><p>Abu Sa’id chooses the sense that operates beneath explanation. Recognition arrives before biography has had time to make its case.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Zwix!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F51d94b6d-c260-4411-af80-9b238684b8fc_960x1280.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Zwix!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F51d94b6d-c260-4411-af80-9b238684b8fc_960x1280.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Zwix!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F51d94b6d-c260-4411-af80-9b238684b8fc_960x1280.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Zwix!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F51d94b6d-c260-4411-af80-9b238684b8fc_960x1280.jpeg" width="960" height="1280" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Zwix!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F51d94b6d-c260-4411-af80-9b238684b8fc_960x1280.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Zwix!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F51d94b6d-c260-4411-af80-9b238684b8fc_960x1280.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Zwix!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F51d94b6d-c260-4411-af80-9b238684b8fc_960x1280.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Zwix!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F51d94b6d-c260-4411-af80-9b238684b8fc_960x1280.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Zwix!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F51d94b6d-c260-4411-af80-9b238684b8fc_960x1280.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Zwix!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F51d94b6d-c260-4411-af80-9b238684b8fc_960x1280.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>Abu Sa’id ibn Abi’l-Khayr (967–1049), the Persian mystic associated with the teaching at the centre of this issue.</em></p><div><hr></div><h2>FROM THE ARCHIVE</h2><p>Abu Sa’id’s horses sit beside an older saying preserved in the Islamic tradition:</p><blockquote><p><strong>Souls are like conscripted troops. The ones that recognise each other unite. The ones that do not, stay apart.</strong></p></blockquote><p>The underlying saying is preserved in <em>Sahih Muslim</em>, where souls are described as troops gathered together, with affinity or divergence following their prior familiarity. (<a href="https://sunnah.com/muslim%3A2638b?utm_source=chatgpt.com">Sunnah.com</a>)</p><p>It is a surprisingly unsentimental image.</p><p>Conscripted troops are not lovers searching for one another.</p><p>They have already been assembled into units somewhere else. They arrive under an arrangement that precedes the present situation.</p><p>And notice what this explains.</p><p>It explains the other thing.</p><p>The person who has done nothing to you. Who is perfectly decent. Whom your friends like.</p><p>Yet something in you will not close the distance.</p><p>The old saying accommodates both experiences.</p><p>Recognition and its absence.</p><p>In the world imagined by these teachings, some relationships do not begin when two bodies enter the same room.</p><p>They arrive with a history.</p><div><hr></div><h2>BEFORE THE WORLD</h2><p>Behind all of this lies one of the great scenes of Islamic mystical imagination.</p><p>Before earthly life, humanity is gathered before God.</p><p>One question is asked:</p><blockquote><p><strong>Am I not your Lord?</strong></p></blockquote><p>And humanity answers:</p><blockquote><p><strong>Yes. We witness.</strong></p></blockquote><p>This became known as the primordial Covenant.</p><p>Persian mystical literature returned to it again and again. Longing could be imagined as the trace of something once known. Exile implied somewhere from which one had been exiled. The reed crying after being cut from the reed bed belonged to the same imaginative world.</p><p>But for our purposes, one detail is especially interesting.</p><p><strong>Everyone was there.</strong></p><p>Every person you would eventually meet belonged to that assembly.</p><p>And in Abu Sa’id’s telling, the souls were not simply an anonymous crowd.</p><p>Some had been near one another.</p><p>Recognition therefore becomes a matter of <strong>proximity</strong> rather than similarity.</p><p>Perhaps the strange person does not feel familiar because they are like you.</p><p>Perhaps, within this old cosmology, they feel familiar because they were standing close.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!db_E!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F548a1217-3e39-4bc4-bec0-78f30651f3b7_990x1905.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!db_E!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F548a1217-3e39-4bc4-bec0-78f30651f3b7_990x1905.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!db_E!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F548a1217-3e39-4bc4-bec0-78f30651f3b7_990x1905.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!db_E!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F548a1217-3e39-4bc4-bec0-78f30651f3b7_990x1905.jpeg" width="990" height="1905" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!db_E!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F548a1217-3e39-4bc4-bec0-78f30651f3b7_990x1905.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!db_E!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F548a1217-3e39-4bc4-bec0-78f30651f3b7_990x1905.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!db_E!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F548a1217-3e39-4bc4-bec0-78f30651f3b7_990x1905.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!db_E!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F548a1217-3e39-4bc4-bec0-78f30651f3b7_990x1905.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!db_E!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F548a1217-3e39-4bc4-bec0-78f30651f3b7_990x1905.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!db_E!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F548a1217-3e39-4bc4-bec0-78f30651f3b7_990x1905.jpeg"></a></figure></div><div><hr></div><h2>THE UNEQUAL LIGHT</h2><p>There is a line in Abu Sa’id’s passage that is much easier to overlook than the horses.</p><blockquote><p><strong>He knew exactly how much each soul took, and he favoured each one in proportion to what it had been lit by.</strong></p></blockquote><p>The light complicates the story.</p><p>The souls have encountered the same divine source, yet their relation to it is not described as identical.</p><p>In the reading followed by our film, recognition therefore becomes something stranger than shared temperament.</p><p>Two people might come from different countries.</p><p>They might speak different languages.</p><p>They might be separated by forty years, disagree about almost everything, share few interests and still experience that peculiar collapse of distance that normally takes years.</p><p>They are not necessarily alike.</p><p>Something else has registered.</p><p>The old teaching locates the cause before biography.</p><div><hr></div><h2>MARGINALIA</h2><p>Fortunately, the tradition contains its own skeptical reading.</p><p>Not every commentator took the saying about souls as permission to construct an elaborate account of prenatal relationships.</p><p>There is a simpler possibility.</p><p>People of similar character incline toward one another.</p><p>And a modern reader can go further.</p><p>A great deal of what feels like recognition may be pattern matching.</p><p>Someone has the cadence of your mother.</p><p>A stranger’s humour follows a rhythm you have known before.</p><p>Two people developed the same defenses in different houses and experience the shock of finding them reflected in another person.</p><p>A nervous system can recognize something long before a conscious mind can explain what it has recognized.</p><p>None of this requires two souls to have stood beside one another before birth.</p><p>That possibility deserves to remain on the table.</p><p>Because SpiritualRelief is interested in the strange claim, but the strange claim becomes less interesting if we protect it from scrutiny.</p><p>The question survives either way.</p><p><strong>Why this person?</strong></p><p>Why does the feeling sometimes arrive before we possess the information that should have produced it?</p><p>The horses, at least, are not explaining themselves.</p><div><hr></div><h2>FROM KONYA</h2><p>In 1244, almost two centuries after Abu Sa’id’s death, another encounter gave Persian mystical literature its most famous story of recognition.</p><p>Rumi was thirty-seven.</p><p>He was a jurist and teacher in Konya. He had students, a household, a reputation and an established life.</p><p>Then Shams of Tabriz arrived.</p><p>The accounts disagree about precisely what Shams asked when the two men first encountered one another.</p><p>What matters is what followed.</p><p>The settled life did not remain settled.</p><p>Rumi withdrew with Shams. His students resented the stranger. Shams disappeared, returned, and eventually vanished again.</p><p>And Rumi spent much of the remainder of his life producing the poetry for which the world remembers him.</p><p>He put the missing man’s name on one of its great collections.</p><p><strong>Shams.</strong></p><p>The story is useful because it ruins the sentimental version of recognition.</p><p>Some encounters do not make life more comfortable.</p><p>They rearrange it.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!LOAV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F302fbf23-a498-4a3d-a530-82c5adea54b4_1332x1776.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!LOAV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F302fbf23-a498-4a3d-a530-82c5adea54b4_1332x1776.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!LOAV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F302fbf23-a498-4a3d-a530-82c5adea54b4_1332x1776.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!LOAV!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F302fbf23-a498-4a3d-a530-82c5adea54b4_1332x1776.jpeg" width="1332" height="1776" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!LOAV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F302fbf23-a498-4a3d-a530-82c5adea54b4_1332x1776.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!LOAV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F302fbf23-a498-4a3d-a530-82c5adea54b4_1332x1776.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!LOAV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F302fbf23-a498-4a3d-a530-82c5adea54b4_1332x1776.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!LOAV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F302fbf23-a498-4a3d-a530-82c5adea54b4_1332x1776.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!LOAV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F302fbf23-a498-4a3d-a530-82c5adea54b4_1332x1776.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!LOAV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F302fbf23-a498-4a3d-a530-82c5adea54b4_1332x1776.jpeg"></a></figure></div><div><hr></div><h2>THE WARNING IN THE MARGIN</h2><p>There is a danger hidden inside all of this.</p><p>The conviction that we have known someone before can make ordinary evidence seem unimportant.</p><p><em>We knew each other before this.</em></p><p>It is a powerful sentence.</p><p>Powerful enough to make poor treatment look like a spiritual test.</p><p>Powerful enough to turn obsession into destiny.</p><p>Powerful enough to make every warning from friends appear to prove that outsiders simply cannot understand the connection.</p><p>So the feeling cannot be its own evidence.</p><p>Recognition does not tell you to trust someone.</p><p>It does not tell you to stay.</p><p>It does not excuse cruelty.</p><p>Whatever one thinks of the metaphysics, conduct remains evidence.</p><p>The old teachers were interested in what a spiritual state produced over time.</p><p>Duration matters.</p><p>Behaviour matters.</p><p>What happens when the other person is difficult, absent, disappointing or wrong matters.</p><p>Perhaps that is the most useful note to leave in the margin of the old teaching:</p><p><strong>Recognition may deserve attention. It does not deserve obedience.</strong></p><div><hr></div><h2>ONE LAST THING</h2><p>Most encounters of this kind do not become Rumi and Shams.</p><p>Nothing dramatic happens.</p><p>Someone sits beside you on a train.</p><p>Someone speaks to you at a wedding.</p><p>Someone appears briefly during a period of your life you will barely remember.</p><p>Then the train arrives.</p><p>You leave.</p><p>You may never learn their surname.</p><p>Thirty years later, for no sensible reason, you still remember them.</p><p>The old teaching does not necessarily make this a missed opportunity.</p><p>Perhaps nothing was supposed to happen.</p><p>Perhaps recognition was the whole event.</p><p>Abu Sa’id died in Mayhana in 1049, in the same place where he had been born. (<a href="https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/abu-said-fazlallah-b/?utm_source=chatgpt.com">Iranica Online</a>)</p><p>The world around him changed beyond recognition.</p><p>Cities disappeared.</p><p>Borders moved.</p><p>Libraries burned.</p><p>His own life accumulated legend.</p><p>Yet the strange little image survived.</p><p>Somewhere tonight, someone will sit beside a stranger.</p><p>One of them will say something completely ordinary.</p><p>And a distance that ought to take four years to close will disappear in the length of a sentence.</p><p>Neither person may mention it.</p><p>There may be nothing to mention.</p><p>And from the outside, nothing remarkable will have happened.</p><p>Two animals in a field.</p><p>Breathing.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!aF0u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e0e3f71-8409-46a5-8c81-a2f6e8eab392_1200x898.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!aF0u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e0e3f71-8409-46a5-8c81-a2f6e8eab392_1200x898.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!aF0u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e0e3f71-8409-46a5-8c81-a2f6e8eab392_1200x898.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!aF0u!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e0e3f71-8409-46a5-8c81-a2f6e8eab392_1200x898.jpeg" width="1200" height="898" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!aF0u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e0e3f71-8409-46a5-8c81-a2f6e8eab392_1200x898.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!aF0u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e0e3f71-8409-46a5-8c81-a2f6e8eab392_1200x898.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!aF0u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e0e3f71-8409-46a5-8c81-a2f6e8eab392_1200x898.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!aF0u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e0e3f71-8409-46a5-8c81-a2f6e8eab392_1200x898.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!aF0u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e0e3f71-8409-46a5-8c81-a2f6e8eab392_1200x898.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!aF0u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e0e3f71-8409-46a5-8c81-a2f6e8eab392_1200x898.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>The tomb associated with Abu Sa’id at Mayhana.</em></p><div><hr></div><h2>WATCH</h2><div><div><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/6XElkyhQ-F0?rel=0&amp;autoplay=0&amp;showinfo=0&amp;enablejsapi=0" frameborder="0" width="728" height="409"></iframe></div></div><h3>Souls Know Each Other by Smell | A Strange Sufi Teaching</h3><div><hr></div><h2>SOURCE TRAIL</h2><p><strong>Abu Sa’id ibn Abi’l-Khayr</strong></p><p>Abu Sa’id was born at Mayhana in Khorasan in 967 and died there in 1049. The principal accounts of his life and teachings come from two Persian hagiographical works compiled by his descendants, including Muhammad ibn Munawwar’s <em>Asrar al-Tawhid</em>. The distance between Abu Sa’id’s lifetime and these written accounts is worth remembering whenever individual sayings or stories are attributed to him. (<a href="https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/abu-said-fazlallah-b/?utm_source=chatgpt.com">Iranica Online</a>)</p><p><strong>Reynold A. Nicholson · </strong><em><strong>Studies in Islamic Mysticism</strong></em></p><p>Nicholson devoted the opening study of his 1921 book to Abu Sa’id, drawing heavily on the Persian biographical tradition. It remains a useful English doorway into the material, while modern scholarship provides important cautions about the historical sources. (<a href="https://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/siim/siim04.htm?utm_source=chatgpt.com">Sacred Texts</a>)</p><p><strong>“Souls are like conscripted troops”</strong></p><p>The saying is preserved in <em>Sahih Muslim</em> 2638a–b, attributed to the Prophet Muhammad through Abu Huraira. (<a href="https://sunnah.com/muslim%3A2638b?utm_source=chatgpt.com">Sunnah.com</a>)</p><div><hr></div><h2>AFTER DARK</h2><h3>The bookstore stays open.</h3><p><strong>SpiritualRelief After Dark</strong> is the paid side of the Journal: translations, source material, archival discoveries, audio and extended editions for readers who want to continue further into the material.</p><p><a href="https://spiritualrelief.substack.com/p/after-dark"><span>ENTER AFTER DARK</span></a></p><div><hr></div><h2>FROM SPIRITUALRELIEF</h2><p><strong>WATCH · SpiritualRelief Cinema</strong><br>New films every Friday.</p><p>SpiritualRelief - YouTube</p><p><strong>LISTEN · SpiritualRelief Records</strong><br>Long-form music for meditation, reading, prayer and quiet rooms.</p><p>SpiritualRelief Records - YouTube</p><p><strong>SUPPORT · Become a YT Patron</strong><br>Help support the films, research and music behind SpiritualRelief.</p><p>https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb2GDYQwKx6lYfvJCZCHx0w/join</p><p>James<br><strong>SpiritualRelief</strong></p><div><hr></div> <p><a href="https://spiritualrelief.substack.com/p/souls-know-each-other-by-smell" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/zZ1rF9X / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. 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