SaturdayDec 21, 2024
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
The Names . . . have existed from all eternity: these Names are designated as 'Lords' (Arbab), who often have all the appearance of hypostases though they cannot strictly be defined as such. We know them only by our knowledge of ourselves (that is the basic maxim). God describes Himself to us through ourselves. Which means that the divine Names are essentially relative to the beings who name them, since these beings discover and experience them in their own mode of being. . . . Thus the divine Names have meaning and full reality only through and for beings . . . in which they are manifested. Likewise from all eternity, these forms, substrate of the divine Names, have existed in the divine Essence (A 'yan thabita). And it is these latent individualities who from all eternity have aspired to concrete being in actu. Their aspiration is itself nothing other than the nostalgia of the divine Names yearning to be revealed. And this nostalgia of the divine Names is nothing other than the sadness of the unrevealed God, the anguish He experiences in His unknownness and occultation.
The image of the God whom the faithful creates is the Image of the God whom his own being reveals. Thus it is psychologically true to say that 'the God created in the faiths' is the symbol of the Self. The God to whom we pray can be only the God who reveals Himself to us, by us, and for us, but it is praying to Him that we cause the 'God created in the faiths' to be himself enveloped in the Divine Compassion, that is, existentiated, manifested by it. The theophanies of the 'Gods' manifested to the heart or to the faiths are all theophanies of the real One God (Haqq Haqiqi). When we are the musalli, this must be borne in mind; he who knows this is the gnostic who has untied the knot of closed, limited dogmas, because for him they have become theophanic symbols.
The 'God created in the faith' manifests Himself no longer in order to impose Himself on the faithful, but in order to express His limits, for these limits are the condition which makes possible one among the many divine epiphanies. The gnostic does not receive a ready-made Image of his Lord, but understands Him in the light of the Image which in the course of his manajat, his intimate dialogue, appears in the mirror of his heart as subtle organ.
... the Divine Being is not fragmented, but wholly present in each instance, individualized in each theophany of His Names, and it is invested in each instance with one of these Names that He appears as Lord.
Questioner: How do you know God? Abu Asa`id al-Kharraz: By the fact that He is the coincidentia oppositorum. Corbin's commentary: ... the entire universe of worlds is at once He and not-He (huwa la huwa). The God manifested in forms is at once Himself and other than Himself, for since He is manifested, He is the limited which has no limit, the visible which cannot be seen. This manifestation is neither perceptible nor verifiable by the sensory faculties; discursive reason rejects it. It is perceptible only by the Active Imagination (Hadrat al-Khayal...) at times when it dominates man's sense perceptions, in dreams or better still in the waking state (in the state characteristic of the gnostic when he departs from the consciousness of sensuous things). In short, a mystic perception (dhawq) is required. To perceive all forms as epiphanic forms (mazahir), that is, to perceive through the figures which they manifest and which are the eternal hexeities, that they are other than the Creator and nevertheless that they are He, is precisely to effect the encounter, the coincidence, between God's descent toward the creature and the creature's ascent toward the Creator. The 'place' of this encounter is not outside the Creator-Creature totality, but is the area within it which corresponds specifically to the Active Imagination, in the manner of a bridge joining the two banks of a river. The crossing itself is essentially a hermeneutics of symbols ..., a method of understanding which transmutes senosory data and rational concepts into symbols (mazahir) by making them effect this crossing.
Paraphrased: The devotee who is faithful to the divine Name that is His Lord recognizes his Beloved in every Beloved and in every divine Name the totality of Names, because among the divine Names there is a sympathetic union.
... in Ibn `Arabi's own terminology Al-Lah is the Name which designates the divine Essence qualified and invested with the sum of His attributes, whereas al-Rabb, the Lord, is the personified and particularized Divine in one of its attributes (hence the divine Names designated as so many 'lords', arbab).
... Ibn `Arabi distinguishes between Allah as God in general and Rabb as the particular Lord, personalized in an individualized and undivided relation with his vassal of love. This individualized relationship on both sides is the foundation of the mystic and chivalric ethic of the fedel d'amore in the service of the personal Lord whose divinity depends on the adoration of his faithful vassal.... {It is the passion that the fedele d'amore feels for his Lord which reveals the Lord to Himself.} And this always individually, in an 'alone to alone,' which is something very different from universal logic or from a collective participation, because only the knowledge which the fedele has of his Lord is the knowledge which this personal Lord has of him.
All {the divine Names} refer to one and the same Named One. But each one of them refers to an essential determination, different from all the rest; it is by this individualization that each Name refers to the God who reveals himself to and by the theophanic imagination.
Ibn `Arabi was above all the disciple of Khidr {an invisible master}... such a relationship with a hidden spiritual master lends the disciple an essentially 'transhistorical' dimension and presupposes an ability to experience events which are enacted in a reality other than the physical reality of daily life, events which spontaneously transmute themselves into symbols.
He who is the disciple of Khidr possesses sufficient inner strength to seek freely the teaching of all masters. Of this the biography of Ibn `Arabi, who frequented all the masters of his day and welcomed their teachings, offers living proof.
Each person is oriented toward a quest for his personal invisible guide, or ... he entrusts himself to the collective, magisterial authority as the intermediary between himself and Revelation.
All those among the Sufis who had no visible murshid (guide), that is, an earthly man like themselves and a contemporary, called themselves Uwaysis. One of the most famous was abu'l-Hasan Kharraqani (d. 425/1034), an Iranian Sufi, who left us the following saying: I am amazed at those disciples who declare that they require this or that master. You are perfectly well aware that I have never been taught by any man. God was my guide, though I have the greatest respect for all the masters.
All these are matters that cannot be taught uniformly to all, because each man is the measure of what he can understand and of what, in accordance with the 'economy' of esoterism, it is fitting to set before him.
When Sufism was at loggerheads with the legalitarian Islam embodied by the doctors of the Law, known as the fuqaha', according to Henry Corbin: ... Ibn `Arabi made no secret of his disgust at their stupidity, ignorance, and depravity, and such an attitude was not calculated to win their favor. The tension rose, giving rise to denunciations and arrests; our shaikh was in mortal peril. At this critical moment the irreducible antagonism between the spiritual Islam of Sufism and legalitarian Islam became patent. Saved by the intervention of a friendly shaikh, Ibn `Arabi had but one concern, to flee far from Cairo and its hateful, bigoted canonists. Where was he to seek refuge? He returned to Meca (1207).
... the 'Sigh of Compassion' flows through the things of the world like the waters of a river and is unceasingly renewed.
His creation springs, not from nothingness, from something other than Himself, from a not-Him, but from His fundamental being, from the potencies and virtualities latent in His own unrevealed being.
Everything we call other than God, everything we call the universe, is related to the Divine Being as the shadow to the person. The world is God's shadow.... The shadow is at once God and something other than God. Everything we perceive is the Divine Being in the eternal hexeities of the possibles.
The mystic Ka`aba is the heart of being. It has been said to him: 'The Temple which contains Me is in your heart.' The mystery of the Divine Essence is no other than the Temple of the heart, and it is around the heart that the spiritual pilgrim circumambulates.
The Beloved becomes a mirror reflecting the secret face of the mystic lover, while the lover, purified of the opacity of his ego, becomes in turn a mirror of the attributes and actions of the Beloved.
O marvel! a garden among the flames... My heart has become capable of all forms. It is a meadow for gazelles and a monastery for Christian monks, A temple for idols and the pilgrim's Ka`aba, The Tables of the Law and the book of the Koran. I profess the religion of Love, and whatever direction Its steed may take, Love is my religion and my faith.
God epiphanizes Himself to the soul according to the essence of that soul, which is at once physical and spiritual. Then the soul becomes aware that it sees God, but through Him, not through itself; it loves only Him, not through itself, but in such a way that it is He who loves Himself; it is not the soul which loves Him; it contemplates God in every being, but thanks to a gaze which is the divine gaze itself. It becomes aware that He loves no other than Himself; He is the Lover and the Beloved, He who seeks and He who is sought.
When the Divine Being is epiphanized to the believer in the form of his faith, this faith is true. He professes this faith in this world. But when the veil is lifted in the other world, the knot (`aqd), that is to say, the dogma (`aqida) which binds him to his particular faith, is untied; dogma gives way to knowledge by direct vision (mushahada). For the man of authentic faith, capable of spiritual vision, this is the beginning of an ascending movement after death.
Indeed as Jalaluddin Rumi also says, each of our eternal individualities is a word, a divine Word, emitted by the Breath of Divine Compassion. When this Word penetrates the mystic's heart... that is, when the 'secret of his Lord' unfolds to his consciousness, when divine inspiration invests his heart and soul, 'his nature is such that there is born within him a spiritual Child (walad ma`nawi) having the breath of Christ which resuscitates the dead.'
The totality of our being is not only the part which we at present call our person, for this totality also includes another person, a transcendent counterpart which remains invisible to us, what Ibn `Arabi designates as our 'eternal individuality' our divine name.
The total being is the union of this Lord and of His vassal. The two dimensions refer indeed to the same being, but to the totality of that being; one is added to (or multiplied by) the other, they cannot negate one another, one cannot be confounded with, or substituted for the other.
The Image is not outside him, but within his being; better still, it is his very being, the form of the divine Name which he himself brought with him in coming into being. And the circle of the dialectic of love closes on this fundamental experience: 'Love is closer to the lover than is his jugular vein.' So excessive is this nearness that it acts at first as a veil. That is why the inexperienced novice, though dominated by the Image which invests his whole inner being, goes looking for it outside of himself, in a desperate search from form to form of the sensible world, until he returns to the sanctuary of his soul and perceives that the real Beloved is deep within his own being; and, from that moment on, he seeks the Beloved only through the Beloved ... the active subject within him remains the inner image of unreal Beauty, a vestige of the transcendent or celestial counterpart of his being....
The divine Names are shared by the Lord and His vassal. The Lord is the vassal's higher self; it is the Lord who acts in him and through him: 'When you see the creature, you see the First and the Last, the Manifested and the Hidden.'
He who knows himself knows his Lord. This Lord is not the impersonal self, nor is it the God of dogmatic definitions, self-subsisting without relation to me, without being experienced by me. He is the he who knows himself through myself, that is, in the knowledge that I have of him, because it is the knowledge that he has of me....
He who is the servant of a divine Name is the shadow of that Name, his soul is its epiphanic form (mazhar). But in recognizing that this is so the servant does not negate his own existence. There is indeed a hadith concerning the servant who never ceases to move closer to his Lord; his Lord says of him: 'I am his hearing by which he hears, his eyesight by which he sees... ' This servant does not become what he was not; what happens is that the 'luminous shadow' becomes increasingly transparent. Moreover, the possessive adjective 'his' refers explicitly to the reality of the servant or rather presupposes it.
God (al-Haqq) is your mirror, that is the mirror in which you contemplate your self (nafs, anima), and you, you are His mirror, that is the mirror in which He contemplates His divine Names.... Here we have a reciprocal relationship as between two mirrors facing one another and reflecting the same image back and forth.
The personal Lord speaks only in symbols; his eloquence is all in enigmas. And at a mysterious sign of recognition the visionary is overwhelmed by such a power of love that he loses consciousness. When he comes to himself, his Companion reveals to him: 'I am knowledge, I am he who knows and I am what is known.'
Averroes (an integrist Aristotelian master): What manner of solution have you found through divine illumination and inspiration? Is it identical with that which we obtain from speculative reflection? Ibn `Arabi (a young man about 20 years old): Yes and no. Between the yes and the no, spirits take their flight from their matter, and heads are separated from their bodies. Averroes (in a private interview with Ibn `Arabi's father): Glory be to God who has let me live at a time distinguished by one of the masters of this experience {i.e. Ibn `Arabi}, one of those who open the locks of His gates. Glory be to God who has accorded me the personal favor of seeing one of them with my own eyes.
The Lord to his devotee: Love me, love me alone. Love yourself in me, in me alone. Attach yourself to me, No one is more inward than I. Others love you for their own sakes, I love you for yourself. And you, you flee from me. Dearly beloved! ... if you approach me, It is because I have approached you. I am nearer to you than yourself, Than your soul, than your breath. Who among creatures Would treat you as I do? I am jealous of you over you, I want you to belong to no other, Not even to yourself. Be mine, be for me as you are in me, Though you are not even aware of it.
'Neither my Heaven nor my Earth contains me, but the heart of my faithful believer contains me,' this because the heart is a mirror in which the manifested 'Form of God' is at each moment reflected on the scale of the microcosm.
God is not limited to the manner in which He is epiphanized for you and makes Himself adequate to your dimension {to receive Him}. And that is why other creatures are under no obligation to obey the God who demands your worship, because their theophanies take other forms. The form in which He is epiphanized to you is different from that in which He is epiphanized to others. God as such transcends (munazzah) all intelligible, imaginable, or sensible forms, but considered in His Names and Attributes, that is, His theophanies, He is, on the contrary, inseparable from these forms, that is, from a certain figure and a certain situs in space and time.
Every servant professes a special belief in his Lord, of whom he asks assistance according to the knowledge he has of himself. Thus the faiths differ with the Lords, just as the Lords differ, although all the faiths are forms of the one faith, just as all the Lords are forms in the mirror of the Lord of Lords....
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