Lataif-e-Sitta

Latifa, plural lataif, means a subtlety or a fine thing, and in Sufi psychology it names a centre of perception in the human being that is not the physical organ it is located at. The scheme usually meant by lataif-e-sitta, the six subtleties, is the one elaborated within the Naqshbandi order, where five of the centres are assigned to the alam al-amr, the world of command, and one, the nafs, to the alam al-khalq, the world of creation. That distinction carries weight inside the system, because it separates the centres held to belong to the divine command from the self that has to be worked on.

The five of the world of command are qalb, the heart, ruh, the spirit, sirr, the secret, khafi, the hidden, and akhfa, the most hidden. Their usual placement is on the chest, with qalb below the left breast and the others distributed across it, and the nafs at the brow. Ahmad Sirhindi, the seventeenth century Naqshbandi shaykh known in the tradition as Mujaddid Alf-i Thani, is the figure most associated with the elaboration of this arrangement, and the branch of the order that follows his formulation is called the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi after him.

Correspondences beyond the names vary by lineage. Colours and prophetic associations are taught for the centres in a number of Naqshbandi branches, and the tables do not agree with one another closely enough to be set out here as a single fixed scheme.

The lataif are approached through muraqaba, a word usually rendered as watchfulness or vigilant attention, in which the practitioner directs sustained attention to one centre while occupied with dhikr, the remembrance of God through a divine name. The order in which the centres are taken up, and the point at which a student moves from one to the next, is not a matter of personal choice in the traditions that teach it. It is directed by a shaykh within an initiatic chain, and Naqshbandi literature describes the shaykh's tawajjuh, his directed attention towards the student, as part of what opens a centre. This is a guided practice inside a living order, and the atlas describes it rather than setting it out as instructions.

Comparison with the chakras of Indian yogic anatomy is made often enough to be worth being precise about. Both are schemes of subtle centres worked in a fixed sequence, and at that level the resemblance is real. But the lataif are not laid along a spinal axis, five of the six sitting on the chest; they are not connected by channels answering to nadis; and their purpose within the system is the purification and reorientation of the self towards God rather than the raising of an energy. Historians of Sufism have discussed possible contact between the two traditions in the Indian subcontinent, where the Naqshbandi order and Indian yogic practice were both present, without that discussion producing an agreed account of influence in either direction.

The scheme is best read as a map of stages of purification rather than as an anatomy, which is also how the orders that teach it present it.