Ma`rifat Adyan

In the past two decades, Iran has witnessed the emergence of some quasi-religious and spiritual movements that have attracted the attention of sociologists, religious philosophers and experts in religious studies. The movement known as cosmic or Erfan Halgheh is one of these movements. It has built its theoretical and practical foundations on the "network of cosmic consciousness”. A close and careful scrutiny shows that cosmic mysticism is nothing but inharmonious and flawed fabrications and an eclectic mixture of the ideas of different schools of thought. However, drawing its inspiration from the literature of Iranian and Islamic culture, it has tried to present itself as a cohesive epistemic school. The most important method of the leaders of this movement for achieving this goal is basing their ideas on the teachings in the statements that have been confirmed by Islam. For example, the leader of this movement claims in his works that his network of consciousness is consistent with the divine mercifulness. This paper, which seeks to examine the network of cosmic consciousness and compares it with the divine mercifulness in Islam, investigates the degree of the similarity of the claims of this phenomenon with Islamic teachings. The research findings indicate that the network of cosmic consciousness presented in circle sources is incompatible with the divine mercifulness in Islamic sources and that this movement has failed to establish correspondence between its claims and Islamic sources.