In Islamic tradition, the Ṣirāṭ is described as a very thin bridge, finer than a hair and sharper than a blade, suspended above Gehenna.

Believers cross it:

• some quickly as lightning;

• others with difficulty;

• still others crawling.

Many fall.

The bridge represents the possibility of remaining in the real Being without the support of egoistic illusions.

During earthly life, the nafs continually provides man with “artificial supports”:

• pleasures;

• identifications;

• social role;

• prestige;

• sensuality;

• possessions;

• self-image.

• etc.

Man feels he “exists” thanks to these things, but in the eschatological passage, all of this is “stripped away” because it simply dissolves.

Only that which possesses real ontological weight remains.

Why those dominated by the nafs “fall”

The sinner does not fall simply because “God punishes him arbitrarily.” He falls because he has built himself on that which has no substance.

He had made his interiority a system dependent on:

• approval;

• desire;

• immediate satisfaction;

• the constant feeding of the ego;

• etc.

But on the Ṣirāṭ, all this disappears, and then the real emptiness of the interior structure emerges.

The nafs can no longer promise:

• pleasure;

• domination;

• compensation;

• distraction.

Because there is no more world to consume.

There is no more time.

There is no more social theater.

There is no more possibility of feeding the false self.

And it is then that the soul dramatically discovers that what it called “life” was often only a centrifugal movement around its own ego.

The believer crosses because he was already internally “inappropriate”

The authentic believer, on the other hand, crosses not because he is morally perfect in the superficial sense, but because he had already begun to detach himself from the illusions of the nafs in life.

He had learned:

• not to absolutize desire;

• not to identify totally with the ego;

• to let go;

• to remember God in the midst of impermanence.

In Sufi terms, he had already begun to die before death. Therefore, the bridge is not entirely foreign to him: he had already walked that precariousness internally.

He had already experienced that:

• the world passes;

• desire changes;

• the ego is unstable;

• only the Real endures.

The Fall as Spiritual Truth

Hell, in this reading, is not merely an external punishment. It is also the truth of attachment when it is deprived of its objects.

The nafs burns because:

• it wants to consume but can no longer;

• it desires but does not obtain;

• it seeks support in the ephemeral that has now dissolved.

And here the “Iblisic” mockery almost returns: everything for which man had lived proves incapable of sustaining him at the decisive moment.

Like ashes dispersed by the wind.

Like a mirage.

Like a dream upon awakening.

The Ṣirāṭ then becomes the place of ultimate truth: it is not traversed with the ego, but only with that in man which is already oriented toward the Eternal.

This scene, read superficially, might appear to be a simple moral reminder of individual responsibility. But from the perspective of Islamic esotericism and traditional spiritual psychology, it contains a much more radical teaching: inferior evil has no autonomous ontological consistency; it thrives on seduction, fascination, and projection. It does not truly create anything. It suggests, embellishes, promises, excites. But it does not coerce.

Ad it is here that the parallel with the lower nafs becomes extraordinarily fruitful.

The "whisper" of Iblis and the dynamism of the nafs

The Qur'ān describes satanic action primarily through the term waswasa: the insinuating whisper. Iblis does not appear as an absolute ruler of evil, but rather as an insinuating force operating in the interstices of human consciousness. He suggests possibilities, fuels illusions, amplifies desires, and embellishes what is transitory.

Now, the lower nafs—especially in its form as the nafs al-ammāra bi-s-sū’ ("the soul that commands evil")—operates according to a surprisingly similar logic.

It promises satisfaction, suggests self-affirmation, fuels attachments, induces identification with passions, roles, and images, and pushes toward the world as if it possessed definitive substance.

But its strength derives largely from our identification with it.

The lower nafs does not truly dominate the spiritually awakened human being. It only dominates those who forget their own Center.

Just as Iblis will say he only invited, so the lower nafs, at the end of the earthly journey, will reveal itself for what it truly was: a collection of contingent impulses, a temporary coagulation of desires, fears, automatisms, and identifications.

The Dissolution of Illusion

One of the most striking aspects of Islamic spirituality is the insistence on the evanescent nature of the lower world when it is absolutized.

The Qur’ān uses powerful images: ash dispersed by the wind... a mirage in the desert... vegetation that blooms and then dries up... foam floating on the surface... a shadow destined to vanish.

These images do not only concern the external world. They concern above all the psychic structure of fallen man.

The lower nafs continually constructs "forms" (identities, ambitions, egoistic narratives, resentments, vanity, fantasies of possession and control, etc.), yet, from the Islamic metaphysical perspective, all of this is radically unstable.

Humans spend much of their lives serving these internal constructions as if they were ultimate realities. But at the moment of death—or sometimes even during profound spiritual crises—they begin to dissolve.

The nafs seems to say:

I was nothing stable. It was you who attributed absolute reality to me.

Just like Iblis.

Spiritual Responsibility and the Drama of Identification

In traditional Islamic psychology, the central problem is not the existence of passions per se. Passions belong to created human nature. The problem arises when the subject identifies with them. The tragedy of the fallen human being consists in mistaking the nafs for one's true self.

When this happens, desire becomes identity, the emotion of the moment becomes truth, impulse becomes criterion, the ego (whether exalted or wounded) becomes the cosmic center.

But the lower nafs possesses no true permanence. It is a mobile, changeable, unstable whole.

This is why many masters speak of the need to "die before dying": not in the physical sense, but in the sense of disidentification from the lower egoic structure.

Biological death, in fact, violently strips from man all the illusions of permanence constructed by the nafs.

What he called "myself" often reveals itself to be a simple psychological stratification.

The almost "parasitic" nature of the lower nafs

There is another interesting point.

Iblis, in the Qur'ān, creates nothing. He deviates, distorts, and exploits possibilities already present in human beings.

The lower nafs also often acts parasitically: it appropriates legitimate energies, distorts authentic needs, transforms natural desires into absolutes, and converts the search for the infinite into a hunger for possession.

Even religion can be captured by the nafs: spiritual pride; desire for moral superiority; need to appear pious; quest for power through the sacred, etc.

This is why the great Islamic masters considered the fight against the nafs much more difficult than the fight against an external enemy.

The external enemy is visible.

The nafs, on the other hand, speaks with our own voice.

The final mockery: the nothingness of identifications

All this also has a tragically ironic dimension.

Man sacrifices years, energy, relationships, and spiritual possibilities chasing promises of the nafs—prestige, domination, sensuality, recognition, self-exaltation, accumulation, etc.—but ultimately discovers that all this has no real substance.

The lower nafs decomposes along with the contingent psycho-corporeal structure, and what remains is the naked consciousness before the Truth.

In this sense, the Qur'ānic scene of Iblis also becomes an interior scene.

The human being could almost hear his own nafs mockingly say:

Why did you serve me as a god? I was only a passing movement!

Here emerges one of the most profound insights of Islamic metaphysics: the false does not possess full being.

It lives on loan.

The lower nafs draws strength from the consciousness granted to it.

When that consciousness retreats toward the Real, the ego loses substance.

The Positive Function of Awareness

However, Islamic spirituality does not encourage neurotic self-hatred. The spiritual path does not consist in annihilating the psychic structure, but in purifying it, ordering it, and reintegrating it under the guidance of the spirit.

The lower ego becomes destructive when it demands absolute centrality.

When, however, it is relativized and transfigured, the human being rediscovers its axis and realizes its completeness in all "worlds" (body, soul, spirit).

This is why the Qur'ān continually insists on dhikr, the remembrance of God.

Remembrance dissolves hypnosis, while forgetfulness fuels illusion.

Conclusion

The parallel between Iblis and the lower nafs illuminates one of the deepest cores of Islamic spiritual psychology.

Both operate primarily through insinuation, fascination, embellishment of the ephemeral, exploitation of unawareness, false promises of fulfillment... and both, in the end, reveal their ontological inconsistency.

The human being then discovers that what he had sacrificed his heart to was similar to a mirage.

The tragedy does not consist only in having committed moral errors.

The deepest tragedy consists in having mistaken the shadow for the Sun.

Yet, this very discovery, if it occurs in life, can become the beginning of liberation, because when the illusions of the nafs begin to dissolve, man can finally discover what within him is impervious.

Not the ego, not desire, not the image (or the shadow of the Idea, to use Plato's term), but the heart oriented toward the Real.

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METAPHYSICS OF SCUBA DIVING

Scuba diving could be interpreted, from a “traditional” perspective, almost as the inverse complement of mountaineering, as evoked, for example, by Julius Evola.

If the mountain represents the ascending axis, the conquest of the high, the rarefaction of the earthly element, and the symbolic approach to the solar, uranic, and divine principle, the deep sea instead opens to the telluric, nocturnal, preformal, and psychic dimension. No less metaphysical: simply opposite.

The two movements—ascent and immersion—could be understood as two different symbolic paths of the experience of the limit

.

1. Inverted verticality

The mountaineer ascends toward the light.

The diver descends toward the darkness.

But this opposition is not purely physical: it is ontological.

In traditional symbolism, the high usually corresponds to the higher states of being: transcendence, pure intellect, Olympian dominion, detachment. The low, on the other hand, refers to the world of primordial waters, of the indistinct, of the cosmic subconscious, of still-formless powers.

Scuba diving thus appears as a catabasis: a descent into the lower strata of being.

It is no coincidence that almost all traditional cosmologies associate the deep sea:

• with original chaos,

• with undifferentiated matter,

• with pre-cosmic potential,

• with lunar and psychic forces,

• with the realm of “monsters”.

The diver, symbolically, abandons the solar world of terrestrial man and enters a region not meant for him.

2. Water as a symbol of the subtle world

Water often signifies the subtle levels of existence: the domain of the psyche, of fluidity, of forms in constant transformation.

Water has no form of its own, but takes on every form.

For this reason, it symbolizes becoming, instability, psychic plasticity, but also the dissolution of individuality.

The deep sea then becomes an image of the intermediate world: neither corporeal nor spiritual in a higher sense.

It is the ambiguous realm of subtle influences.

Here, the analogy with immersion is powerful: loss of spatial references, absolute silence, suspension of weight, perceptual alteration, isolation, dependence on breathing, increasing pressure.

All this produces an almost initiatory state: the ordinary self is dislocated.

The terrestrial man, entering the abyss, experiences a desacralization of the usual coordinates of the human world.

3. The metaphysical allure of the abyss

The abyss exerts fascination because it symbolically represents the return to the undifferentiated.

In traditional terms, every deep descent contains two possibilities: dissolving regression, or heroic and initiatory crossing of chaos.

Here, an essential distinction emerges.

The Passive Way

The individual loses himself in the element: fascination with darkness, exhilaration of danger, dissolution of the ego, attraction to the monstrous and the formless... a “lunar” immersion, passive, almost mediumistic.

The Active Way

The individual descends while maintaining the center, entering the chaos without being absorbed by it.

Like the traditional hero who descends into the underworld—Orpheus, Aeneas, Dante, Ulysses—diving becomes an initiatory test: not escape, but mastery.

The sea is not “suffered”: it is crossed.

4. The Symbolism of Breath

In mountaineering, breathing becomes rarefied as one ascends; in scuba diving, breathing becomes artificial as one descends.

Both imply a disruption of ordinary human equilibrium.

But in diving, breathing takes on an almost yogic centrality: slowness, control, economy, internalization.

The diver lives through a continuous breathing discipline.

Metaphysically, this may recall the fact that pneuma (spirit-breath) is the true thread that prevents consciousness from being swallowed up by the lower element.

As long as breathing is mastered, man maintains his center.

When breathing is interrupted, panic ensues: psychic chaos invades the being.

5. The “Monsters” of the Deep

Every tradition places monstrous creatures in the abyss—Leviathan, Tiamat, Kraken, ocean serpents, sea dragons…

In traditional language, the monster always represents something formless yet powerful, a pre-individual force.

The abysses represent real levels of cosmic being, not mere internal projections.

Diving is therefore also a confrontation with the anguish of the formless, the attraction to nothingness, the risk of losing the individual principle.

This is why the deep sea simultaneously evokes fear, peace, vertigo, and sacredness.

6. The Experience of Silence

Underwater, the human world disappears: no city, no language, no historical noise.

What remains is the heartbeat, the breathing, the pressure, the darkness, the distance... a silence that has an almost pre-cosmic quality.

Not the “celestial” silence of the snow-capped peak—clear, vertical, Apollonian—but a uterine and abysmal silence.

It is a silence that precedes form.

This is why many deep dives are described as almost religious experiences: man feels he has entered a region prior to civilization and even humanity.

6. Conclusion

However, a deeper—and more disturbing—difference emerges between mountaineering and scuba diving.

The mountain, however extreme, remains a “cosmic” environment compatible with humanity.

Man can scale it with his own body: he suffers, he toils, he risks, but he remains organically within the terrestrial order. Even when he conquers the heights, he continues to breathe the air of the world.

The marine abyss, however, is radically alien; man cannot naturally inhabit it... but we will discuss this in Part Two.