About Me

I was born in Tehran in 1980. From childhood, I was drawn to music, wonder, and stories, and from an early age I pursued music on my own, without a teacher: a melodica, a small accordion, and a small keyboard that I used as a piano.

During my years in secondary school, thanks to the opportunity to study at SAMPAD and to the guidance and encouragement of my physicist brother, I became deeply engaged with mathematics and physics. I took pride in them and devoted myself to them, and my aspirations at the time revolved around those fields and the Physics Olympiad. Yet during those same years, and even somewhat before them, another event entered my life. It was a concert of improvisational setar performance, Pāykūbi, by Hossein Alizadeh. Another of my brothers had attended the concert, and afterward acquired a setar so that he could learn the instrument. In this way, the setar entered my life unexpectedly and uninvited.

That setar remained in my hands, and I began learning the instrument on my own. In short, after finishing secondary school, I chose to take only the music entrance examination for the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran, and I was admitted on my first attempt. Thus began my life and pursuits as a university student.

During my years in secondary school, my growing involvement with the setar, together with the atmosphere created by recordings and videos of performances by Mohammad-Reza Lotfi, Hossein Alizadeh, major classical music ensembles, and others—which my brother would bring me—as well as his rich music archive, our home library, and one further event that I will mention shortly, gradually turned me away from the path of physics, which had once been my ambition. In the end, I chose music as my field of university study.

The other event I mentioned was this: one cold Friday morning, while I was at a nearby traditional bakery and no one else was there, the baker, as he placed loaves into the oven and drew them out, suddenly began reciting a poem with great passion. I remember nothing of it now except its remarkable meter and rhythm. In the cold air, amid the steam of my breath and the heat of the oven, that rhythm moved me and stirred something in my blood. After buying the bread, I ran all the way home, almost leaping as I went, repeating that rhythm and humming it to myself.

Once home, I turned to the library and began searching for a poem in the same meter as the one the baker had recited. I moved from one volume to another, looking for that rhythm, until my hand reached a book that, from that day to the present, has almost always remained within a meter of me: the Dīvān-e Kabīr of Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī.

There I found the meter—and with it, I found Rumi.

“For bread, a man ran toward the baker...”

I encountered this at the beginning of my years in secondary school. Later, during my university years—when, because of my distance from the musical community, my independent disposition, my sense of estrangement, the turbulence of youth, and the tempest of Rumi, I lived in a kind of inward and spiritual solitude—Rumi was always my teacher and my only friend and companion.

I remained at the Faculty of Fine Arts for about two years and then left academic music behind. After that, my engagement with music became deeper. I completed my military service. The period of military service, and some time afterward, passed for me in a kind of parenthesis, an inward suspension. During those years there was Rumi, there was the radīf of Persian classical music, and there were my studies in the philosophy of science and epistemology.

Gradually, all the strands of my past life came together, and I resolved to return to the university. The parenthesis closed.

This time, with a different mode of being, and in many ways a transformed one, I entered the University of Tehran again, this time as a student of philosophy in the Faculty of Literature and Human Sciences. There I attained a somewhat greater intellectual coherence, though I should say that I owed none of it to the instruction of the department's professors. As before, I continued independently and inwardly along my own paths of inquiry and interest. Much of my time was devoted to mathematical logic, methods of conceptual analysis, and the workings of language in thought.

Geyhān is now the gathering and convergence of all my life and work up to this point.

Gīhān is an old Persian form of the words kayhān and jahān. It denotes the world, the cosmos, existence itself. It is also the name I have given to a metaphilosophical project, one to which I have devoted myself intermittently over the past several years.

Its story is the story of how the human soul comes to possess a world, to find refuge, and to make a dwelling; and of how that world and dwelling are formed, and from what they are made.

Just as, in the words of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī of Ṭūs, the body requires food, clothing, and shelter in order to live, so too does the soul require its own dwelling, nourishment, and clothing.

The psyche—or, if one prefers, the spirit, the mind, the self, or the soul; for me these terms point here to a single reality—requires a home. That home is the world.

The psyche is blind, impoverished, wandering, and homeless. In its encounter with the outer world, it gradually forms within itself a conception of existence and of the nature of what exists. From this it constructs an imaginal and virtual world of its own. It sees that outward reality—which has no visible face or form in itself—through the woven image and inward form that it has fashioned within itself, and it grows familiar with it.

An image dwells within the soul as though it were real;

behold how one runs through a world made of imagination.

Within the limits of its own vision, the psyche raises the four walls of a “world.” Like a nest or a dwelling, this world serves as a refuge from harm, a place in which it may rest for a while and sleep.

The psyche seeks a place of rest and habitation. It is restless because it lacks rest. It must see a world even with closed eyes—and it cannot refrain from seeing one. It is as though the psyche can never remain suspended in the disordered death of bewilderment. It wishes to remain alive, and living requires a world.

For the psyche to come to rest, it must know where it lives, what it lives, what takes place in the world it inhabits, how it may make its way through that world, and how it may obtain what it desires. Beyond all this, the psyche cannot bear estrangement, exile, or lostness, and hastens to overcome them.

The restless psyche fashions for itself a cradle made of world. The world becomes its resting place, and within it the psyche dwells and endures.

This world resembles a poem. It is a system, a composition, an arrangement of beings and events that the psyche draws out from among other beings and events and infers from them.

In the eyes of the psyche, each being is referred to another being, and each event to another event. Likewise, one event is entrusted to another. These successive and interwoven acts of referral constitute the continual composition, reconstruction, and re-creation of the world within the psyche.

This reconstruction is what we call knowledge, or the explanation of the world.

The psyche is the lord of its own world. It is the shadow of the Creator of the cosmos, His representative, and its world is the shadow of His world. The psyche is a virtual divinity. Whatever He does, it too does, though only in a virtual manner.

Like its Creator, it creates a world; and thus creation is re-enacted.

It is as though God has willed that the human being should be His shadow, and that His act of world-creation should be reflected once again in the mirror of humanity.

Thus the psyche is the sovereign of its own world, the steward of the imaginal realm within, a realm that it has drawn forth from the silent face of the outer world.

The house that the psyche builds for itself is, like the psyche itself, imaginal. These imaginal dwellings may coexist at the same time, just as different accounts may be given of the same phenomenon. They may be built side by side, and each psyche may dwell in the one that is suited to it.

The houses differ from one another. Yet their being houses, and the fundamental principles according to which they are built, remain shared and common among them.

There exists, however, a map that may be called the map of maps. The blueprint of every dwelling is drawn and constructed in accordance with it. The principles of this greater map are reproduced in all other maps and shared among them.

That map is Gīhān.

Gīhān is the architecture of the dwellings of imaginal worlds and of the homes of the psyche.

...and Gīhān is the house of houses.

This is a way of looking at the psyche and at the human story that presents the human being as a painter, a builder of homes, a storyteller, a musician, and a dancer whose activity is entirely creative.

In this view, the most fitting name for the human being is creator: a creator who truly creates everything he possesses, though what he creates is wholly imaginal.

He is a creator whose nature is fundamentally without possessions, and whose possessions, like his very being, are imaginal, shadow-like, and derivative.

Possessions such as knowledge, goodness, and beauty.