Spiritual insights from the book "10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World" by Elif Shafak

 Elif Shafak’s novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World offers a profound exploration of human consciousness, resilience, and the interconnectedness of souls. The narrative hinges on a fascinating scientific and spiritual premise: after the heart stops beating, the human brain remains active for exactly 10 minutes and 38 seconds. During this fleeting threshold between life and the afterlife, the protagonist, Tequila Leila—a sex worker in Istanbul—recalls her life through sensory memories.

When read through a lens of spiritual exploration and inner growth, the novel yields several deep insights into the human condition, grief, and the nature of the soul.

1. The Liminal Space as a Sanctuary of Truth

The entire first half of the book takes place in a profound liminal space—the threshold between the physical plane and whatever lies beyond. Spiritually, this suggests that the mind possesses an innate capacity for deep, unburdened reflection when stripped of immediate worldly distractions. In those final minutes, Leila is not defined by her trauma, her social status, or the violence inflicted upon her; instead, her consciousness becomes a sanctuary where her essential truth is preserved. It implies that our inner life holds an enduring sanctity that the external world cannot corrupt.

2. "Water-Families" and the Spirit of Belonging

One of the book's most moving spiritual frameworks is the distinction between "blood-families" (biological relatives) and "water-families" (the chosen families we bond with through shared suffering, love, and understanding).

• Leila’s biological family rejects and fails her due to rigid religious dogmatism and patriarchal shame.

• Her "water-family"—a marginalized group of five outcasts in Istanbul—embraces her fully.

From a perspective of spiritual intelligence, this highlights that true spiritual kinship is rooted in empathy, mutual recognition, and unconditional acceptance rather than mere biology. It suggests that healing from profound alienation occurs when we find souls who align with our inner essence, creating a sacred space of belonging where dogma failed.

3. Sensory Memory as a Gateway to Gratitude and Presence

Each minute of Leila's remaining consciousness is triggered by a specific sensory memory: the taste of spiced goat’s stew, the scent of lemon and sugar, or the smell of cardamom coffee. This structure offers a poignant lesson in mindfulness and presence. It suggests that the sacred is often found in the ordinary, fleeting moments of physical existence. Even in a life marked by severe hardship, the soul clings to these sensory anchors of beauty and connection, illustrating an inherent capacity for resilience and gratitude.

4. Dignity in Marginalization and the Cemetery of the Companionless

Shafak takes the reader to the Cemetery of the Companionless (Kilyos), a real place in Istanbul where the forgotten, the unidentified, and the socially outcast are buried without headstones or names—only numbers.

The spiritual insight here is a stark critique of institutional or rigid moral structures that strip humans of their inherent dignity. By giving Leila and her friends a vibrant, deeply compassionate voice, the novel asserts that every soul possesses sacred value. True spiritual wellness demands that we look past societal labels to honor the unseen and the marginalized, recognizing that dignity is an birthright, not something granted by social conformity.

5. The Continuity of Love Over Material Reality

In the latter half of the book, Leila's chosen family risks everything to give her body a proper, dignified burial. Their actions demonstrate that love is a powerful spiritual force capable of transcending fear, legality, and even death itself. The physical body may fail, but the ripples of love and devotion left behind in the hearts of others create a form of continuity. It beautifully illustrates how communal grief, when channeled into collective action and honoring a loved one, becomes a path toward healing and sacred closure.

A Core Takeaway: Ultimately, the novel suggests that while the physical world can be incredibly harsh and fragmented, the human spirit possesses an extraordinary capacity to synthesize meaning, find beauty in the margins, and achieve a state of wholeness before it returns to the source.

I give the book 4.5 out of 5 stars. It might be a good book club discussion book.

 

Reading books can help fulfill a need for increased spiritual awareness.

What I do know, or think I know, is that children, like adults, read to fill psychic needs. Perhaps they get comfort and reassurance from reading about happy families; perhaps they want to read what’s scary in order to realize the safety of their own situation; perhaps they yearn for vicarious adventure. Long after the time when they insist that caregivers reread their favorite books and then reread them some more, many children reread for themselves the works that offer them security.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. On Rereading (pp. 52-53). Harvard. Kindle Edition. 

I have long intuited that I read to fulfill my psychic needs. The psychic needs I read to fulfill are curiosity and concern. Fiction describes a moral universe that sets up certain rules, norms, attitudes, motivations and decision making. These components of a moral universe have consequences that can benefit or harm.

I have always been interested in what makes people tick and why they do the things that they do starting with myself, my family, my friends, my neighbors, my country and society, and then cultures and people totally different from myself and my world.

This reading fiction to better understand myself and others serves me very well in developing my skills in empathy and compassion in my personal and professional life. If I read about moral universes I am unfamiliar with and didn’t understand as well as I would like during the first read, this lack of understanding would be a good motivation for me to reread.

Two of the twenty one skills in Cindy Wigglesworth's model of spiritual intelligence are #6 Awareness of Interconnectedness Of Life and #7 Awareness Of The World Views Of Others. Reading books, both fiction and nonfiction, is a way of increasing one's spiritual awareness of self and others and the universe we are living in.

I will be posting some book reviews here of books, both fiction and nonfiction, that highlight spiritual themes.

Wisdom: Knowing what you don’t know

Zan Boag wrote in issue 50 of the New Philosopher “ While intelligence can be demonstrated, expertise displayed, and opinions aired with confidence, wisdom is much harder to spot. It often appears as hesitation rather then decisiveness, silence rather than speech; a refusal to act when action is expected.” p.3

I would tell my Social Work students that one of the most important attributes of a good Social Worker is to know what you don’t know. If you know what you don’t know you are motivated to do some research, seek consultation, refer to a resource more appropriate than one’s own service competence.

I also remind my psychotherapy clients that sometimes not doing something is doing something. Knowing when to act and when to retreat is one of the hallmarks of wisdom.

Knowing what you don’t know allows a person to investigate and inquire out of curiosity and a search for new information, meaning, purpose, and truth.

Socrates taught that one of the hallmarks of wisdom is to become increasingly aware of how much one doesn’t know.

To act with certainty, rigidity, and the need to be right at all costs can do great harm to individuals and relationships.

Boag writes further “Modern life doesn’t appear to reward wisdom. We are encouraged to decide quickly, speak confidently, and defend our views. Yet wisdom often requires the opposite: the willingness to pause, to revise, and to accept that the situation at hand may not fit our preferred narrative.” p.3

The need to be right makes people do stupid things. Rather than admit doubt which they think may show weakness, they try to fit round pegs into square holes frustrating themselves and damaging the things around them.

Admitting doubt, tolerating ambiguity, recognizing and acknowledging when one is wrong, or could be wrong is a sign of a special kind of strength called “resilience.” Resilience allows a person to be flexible and bend rather than be brittle, fragile, and shatter.

People deserve second chances, third chances, fourth chances and the encouragement to search for a better way. The ability to shift gears, to consider options, to be open to other possibilities is another of the hallmarks of wisdom.

Peter asked Jesus, “How many times do I need to forgive my brother, seven?” Jesus replied, “No. You need to forgive 70 times 7.” Matthew 18:20-22

Jesus was very wise.

Wisdom is knowing the difference between what you can control and what you can’t.

According to Stoic philosophy what will make a person happy is not money, status, power, possessions but virtue. The Stoic philosophy describes four cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. I add a fifth which is kindness.

For next several weeks Nurturing One’s Interior Spiritual Life will be exploring descriptions and practices which facilitate the development of these virtues in one’s life starting with the virtue of wisdom.

There are many factors that contribute to wisdom, the most significant might be discerning what one can control and what one can’t control. This idea was first described by the Stoic philosopher Epictetus which he taught to Marcus Aurelius who describes it in his famous book, Mediations. Today we know it as the Serenity Prayer which is taught in twelve step groups.

Give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

A corollary of the Serenity prayer is knowing what matters. Some things matter more than others. The third of twenty one skills of Spiritual Intelligence according to Cindy Wigglesworth’s model is “awareness of values hierarchy.” When one is aware of one’s values hierarchy they are better able to set priorities. Sometimes I ask my psychotherapy clients, “Finish this sentence: ‘The three things that matter the most to me in my life are __________, ___________, and ____________.’”

Wisdom is knowing what ultimately matters and is most important. Osho taught that there are some things that are essential to a person and many more things that are nonessential. I suggest to my psychotherapy clients that they pick their battles carefully. Some things are worth fighting for, but most things in life are not. How do you tell the difference? In answering this question we circle back to where we started in this article: What can you control and what can you not?

Do you believe in love?

To premise your mattering on your poetry, flaying yourself raw so that you can touch the world skinless the better to take it in and transmute it into art . . . and then never to know whether anything you wrote was any good? To live out every day in the presence of such doubts is to live with unease, your whole life at the mercy of your art.

Goldstein, Rebecca Newberger. The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us (p. 17). Liveright. Kindle Edition.

Not knowing whether your work matters is a common feature of artists and human service workers. We do our best and never know where efforts land. This is where faith comes in. We continue to work not because we see and enjoy the product of our labors, but because of faith.

Do you believe in love? How do you know that it matters? Does knowing whether it matters or not influence the degree to which you are willing to love?

What is wisdom?

 Belief in personal control over circumstances that in reality lie beyond our control represents a second category of positive illusions. Locus of control is a well-known construct in psychology that refers to the more generic belief in how much personal control we have over life events, whether or not that belief is accurate.

Pierre MD, Joe. False: How Mistrust, Disinformation, and Motivated Reasoning Make Us Believe Things that Aren't True (pp. 18-19). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition. 

The second of the three lies we tell ourselves according to Joe Pierre in his book, False, is “I am master of my own fate.” People want to maintain control over their own life that’s why incarceration is a major form of punishment in just about all societies.

However, we learn in twelve step programs that the first step is “We admitted we were powerless over _____________- that our lives had become unmanageable.”

One of my favorite jokes is “If you want to hear God laugh, tell God your plans.”

When did you have to admit that your life was unmanageable and you couldn’t control things?

Wisdom is knowing what you can control and what you can’t. The concept is well known in twelve step meetings as the Serenity Prayer.

Annual spiritual wellness check-up indicator two: wisdom

The second indicator on the annual spiritual wellness check-up is wisdom. Wisdom is knowing what you can change and what you can’t.

This idea first showed up in the philosophy of Epictetus who was the teacher of Marcus Aurelius who writes about it in his Meditations. It is known today as the Serenity Prayer.

God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

To what extent do I exercise the wisdom to change what I can and accept the things I can’t and strive to tell the difference?

Put a hash mark on your level of wisdom.

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Who will you discuss your score with and how you can grow in this spiritual skill?