Part I - Ibn Arabi
Chapter I - Dream & Reality
So-called 'reality', the sensible world which surrounds us and which we are accustomed to regard as 'reality', is, for Ibn Arabi, but a dream. We perceive by the senses a larger number of things, distinguish them one from another, put them in order by our reason, and thus end up establishing something solid around us. We call that construct 'reality' and do not doubt that it is real.
In others terms, such a thing is not Being (wujūd) as it really is. Living as we do in this phenomenal world, Being in its metaphysical reality is no less imperceptible to us than phenomenal things are in their phenomenal reality to a man who is asleep and dreaming of them.
Should we abandon once for all this illusory world and go out of it in search of an entirely different world, a really real world?
Ibn Arabi does not take such a position, because, in his view, 'dream', 'illusion' or 'imagination' does not mean something valueless or false; it simply means 'being a symbolic reflection of something truly real'.
Thus 'death' does not mean here death as a biological event. It means a spiritual event consisting in a man's throwing off the shackles of sense and reason, stepping over the confines of the phenomenal, and seeing through the web of phenomenal things what lies beyond. It means, in short, the mystical experience of 'self-annihilation' (fana).
What, then, is that Something which hides itself behind the veil of the phenomenal? The answer is given immediately. It is the Absolute, the real or absolute Reality which Ibn Arabi calls al-haqq.
In Ibn Arabi's view, if 'reality' is an illusion, it is not a subjective illusion but an 'objective' illusion; that is, an unreality standing on a firm ontological basis.
Reference must be made to the ontological conception peculiar to Ibn Arabi and his school of the 'five planes of Being':
The plane of the Essence (dhat), the world of the absolute non-manifestation (al-ghayb al-mutlaq) or the Mystery of Mysteries.
The plane of the Attributes and the Names, the Presence of Divinity (uluhiyah)
The plane of the Actions, the presence of Lordship (rububiyah)
The plane of Images (amthal) and Imagination (khayal)
The plane of the senses and sensible experience (mushahada)
There exists between the higher and lower levels such an organic relation.
In the eyes of a man possessed of this kind of spiritual capacity, the whole world of 'reality' ceases to be something solidly self-sufficient and turns into a deep mysterious forêt de symboles, a system of ontological correspondences.
The majority of people live attached and confined to the lowest level of Being, that of sensible things. That is the whole world of existence for their opaque consciousness.
How can a man cultivate such an ability for seeing things symbolically? What should he do in order that the material veil covering things be removed to reveal the realities that lie beyond?
As a necessary first step, one has to go down to the most elemental level of existence in imitation of the heavenly Enoch who went down to the earth and began by living at the lowest level of earthly life. As suggested above, one must not stop halfway. Abandoning all activity of Reason and not exercising any longer the thinking faculty, one fully realizes the 'animality' (hayawaniyah) which lies hidden at the bottom of every human being.
Watertight compartments into which Reality is divided by human Reason lose their ontological validity in such an 'animal experience'.
A man who has thus gone all the way to the furthest limit of animality, if he still continues his spiritual exercise, may rise to the state of pure Intellect where its activity cannot be impeded by anything bodily and physical. The eye of the pure Intellect itself, even ordinary things around him begin to disclose to him their true ontological structure.
Such a man is in the stage of the Divine Names and Attributes.
Only 'half' of the cognition of the Absolute reality.
A man of this is certainly tamm (complete) but not yet perfect (kamil). In order to that he might be kamil, he has to go further and raise himself to a point where he sees that all, whether the permanent archetypes or the things of nature or again he himself who is actually perceiving them, are after all, nothing but so many phenomenal forms of the Divine Essence on different levels of Being; that through all the ontological planes, there runs an incessant and infinite flow of the Divine Being.
How, then, does the Perfect Man, that is, a man who has been completely awakened, see the world? That will be the main theme of the following chapters.
Chapter II - The Absolute in its Absoluteness
In religious non-philosophical discourse the Absolute is normally indicated by the word God or Allah. But in the technical terminology of Ibn Arabi, the word Allah designates the Absolute not in its absoluteness but in a state of determination.
The Absolute in this sense is unknowable to us because it transcends all qualifications and relations that are humanly conceivable.
It is forever a mystery, the Mystery of mysteries.
Thus the phrase ankar-nakirat means "the most unknown of all unknown".
In this respect the Absolute at this is the One (al-ahad).
It means the essential primordial and absolutely unconditional simplicity of Being where the concept of opposition is meaningless.
The Absolute Reality in itself remains for ever "a hidden treasure", hidden in its own divine isolation.
As a famous Tradition says: "God hides Himself behind seventy thousand veils of light and darkness. If He took away these veils, the fulgurating lights of His face would at once destroy the sight of any creature who dared to look at it."
The Mirror Analogy
That which is seen in the mirror of the Absolute is the form of the man who is looking; it is not the form of the Absolute. To be sure, it is no other than the very Essence of the Absolute that discloses itself to his eye, but this self-manifestation is done in his (the man's) form, not in its (the Essence's form) - al-Qashani
The image reflected in the mirror of the Absolute has two different aspects:
It is, in the first place, a self-manifestation of the Absolute in a particular form in accordance with the demand of the 'preparedness' of the locus.
But in the second place, it is the Form of the Divine self-manifestation, however much it may be particularized by the demand of the locus.
Through the profound experience of 'unveiling' the reflected image ceases to be a veil, and the man begins to see not only his own image but the Form of the Absolute assuming the form of his own.
This, Ibn Arabi asserts, is the highest limit beyond which the human mind is never allowed to go.
Even for the Perfect Man there can be no spiritual stage realizable at which he is able to know the Absolute as it really is; in its absoluteness. Yet, such a man is in position to intuit the Absolute as it reveals itself in himself and in all other things.
