The Space within Us. | Sahar Azeemi | TEDxKingston College Lahore

Sahar Azeemi opens her talk by reflecting on the vast, unseen dimensions of human existence that most people overlook while living outwardly focused lives. Using a childhood memory of playing in the mud and watching caterpillars, she illustrates how closing one's eyes allows the mind to travel through time and space — raising the question of whether such mental travel constitutes a form of time travel. She argues that the mind holds unlimited, largely unexplored possibilities.

Azeemi identifies a central tension in human knowledge: the silos of science on one side and spirituality/religion on the other. Her personal journey was motivated by a desire to find where these two domains intersect, believing that this overlap holds the key to understanding human reality and potential. As she matured, her childlike questions evolved into deeper inquiries about life's purpose, freedom, and love.

In her search for answers, she consulted books, elders, scholars, psychologists, and sociologists, but found the most resonant knowledge in the Sufi tradition of spirituality and metaphysics. She read classical Sufi thinkers like Ibn Arabi and Imam Ghazali, and eventually found a living guide in Khawaja Shamsuddin Azeemi, author of a work on Sufi meditation and parapsychology. Under his tutelage, she entered a Sufi school of spiritual sciences to study aspects of the mind that conventional science has yet to explore.

She poses a thought-provoking question to the audience about dreams: when our bodies lie still in bed, what part of us travels, experiences emotions, tastes, smells, and sensations during dreaming? She uses this to argue that there is a living, experiential aspect of human beings that operates beyond the physical body and remains largely ignored in everyday life.

Complementing her spiritual studies, Azeemi also pursued neuroscience at a center for applied neurosciences, where she learned that the mind has multiple dimensions and that humans are shaped by both genetics and environment. She emphasizes the importance of daily self-assessment — asking what drives us, what sparks curiosity, and what we are passionate about — questions she believes people ask in youth but abandon as adults.

She describes a daily Sufi meditation practice called murakba, which involves wakeful mindfulness: closing the eyes, allowing inner space to expand, and observing the thoughts and questions that arise. She argues that attention is generative — whatever we give attention to grows. She closes by inviting the audience to explore the vast inner space behind their eyes, promising that doing so will reveal their true purpose and potential, leading to freedom, love, peace, and meaningful contribution to the world.