Beshara

by Peter Coates, 2014 

Peter Coates is the author of 'Ibn 'Arabi and Modern Thought: The History of Taking Metaphysics Seriously' Anqa Publishing, 2002

Preface

I think it would be useful to say a little about how I came across the work of  Ibn ‘Arabi.  And equally to say something about what prompted me to concatenate Ibn ‘Arabi  (a twelfth-century  Andalusian) with Nabulisi (a seventeen/eighteenth-century Syrian) and with William James (a twentieth-century American).

I came across the work of Ibn ‘Arabi in the late 1970’s through talking to a drunken sailor.  Improbable as it seems this is how it happened. I met him in a local pub and there was something about his manner, even when quite drunk, that led me to speak to him. In the somewhat bizarre conversation that followed I learned that he was going on a course the next day to look after some ducks (or was it chickens?). And that was basically it. That is, until sometime much  later when  I came across him again at the same venue. He came over (much more sober this time) and asked me what I thought of a book he was carrying called The Twenty-Nine Pages which he had been asked to read during the  course he had mentioned. Obviously, I thought, the course was not simply about ducks. The book was, in fact,  about Ibn ‘Arabi and his ideas.  And this was a beginning of a life-long acquaintance with the extraordinary writings of Ibn ‘Arabi. And it so happened over time that I accompanied a small group of like-minded people on a visit to Ibn ‘Arabi’s tomb in Damascus. It was here after one of our daily visits to the tomb that we wandered through the adjacent little market place and streets and came across (quite seemingly by chance) a gated courtyard situated along a rather imposing well-kept wall. Someone from inside the courtyard unexpectedly invited us in. And we learned later that this was the  dwelling place  and study of Nabulusi who was a quite famous eighteenth-century follower of Ibn ‘Arabi and a defender and expositor of his ideas. And also he was a moderniser who opened up Ibn ‘Arabi’s  mystical vision to the local public through the reading of some of Ibn ‘Arabi’s texts and public conversations.

Why then include in such company the deliberations of William James a famous twentieth-century  American psychologist and brother of the novelist Henry James? Because unusually, although one of the main inaugurators of psychology in America, James also set his task as one of defending the validity of mysticism in an age of scientific scepticism and an age in which he himself contributed to the emergence and importance of brain-science as a central part of Psychology. Personally, William James suffered a great  deal during his life sometimes from very severe  depression and this seemed to make him very tolerant towards alternative views of reality and inclined not to dismiss out-of-hand the alleged foundations and psychological significance of mysticism. So with what was a refreshing and disarming humility and honesty James delved into the whole area of the foundations of religious mysticism in his monumental The Varieties of Religious Experience. I therefore need make no excuse for including William James’s findings when discussing the Mystical Philosophy of Ibn ‘Arabi and Nabulusi.[i]

Willliam James:  Defence of the Mystical 

Some considerable time ago (at least twenty-five years, I think) I presented a paper on William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience to the Annual General Meeting of the Ibn ‘Arabi Society held in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. To this day I cannot remember any of the specific details of that paper of which unfortunately I did not keep a copy. But what I do remember clearly is that it drew on important parallels of content and focus which  exist  between the twelfth-century writings of Ibn ‘Arabi and the twentieth-century Gifford Lectures of William James. Recently I have had reason to re-visit James’s Gifford Lectures which, of course, themselves constitute the entire content of The Varieties.

In delving into the meaning of the term Unity of Existence  – a term  traditionally used to describe the mystical philosophy of Ibn ‘Arabi – it will be useful and interesting to re-consider the memorable insights into the foundations of religious and mystical experience elucidated by Willam James. Two of his Gifford Lectures (XV1 and XV11) deal directly with the topic of Mysticism. As far as I can tell James had not come across the work of Ibn ‘Arabi for in 1902, when The Varieties was first published, there was little (if anything) of Ibn ‘Arabi's writings available in English. Nevertheless, James does (in a couple of  passages) briefly acknowledge the Sufi mystical tradition in Islam. He quotes from Al-Ghazzali (the eleventh-century Persian philosopher and theologian) and reminds us that ‘We Christians know little of Sufism, for its secrets are disclosed only to those initiated. To give its existence a certain liveliness in your minds, I will quote a Moslem document, and pass away from the subject’.[ii]

In this respect times have certainly changed. There has been a considerable resurgence of interest in Ibn ‘Arabi in recent times including major translations of his works, numerous  conferences and symposia across the globe, the internationally recognised work of the Ibn ‘Arabi Society in Oxford and the establishment, again in Oxford, of the specialist Anqa Publishing house. These developments have  also coincided with the widespread interest in the mystical writings  of Rumi, particularly in America. In the UK there is also the Chisholme Institute in the Scottish Borders where I myself and many others where introduced to the mystical philosophy of Ibn ‘Arabi. 

Of course, all this development came well after the time William James delivered the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh. But we can surmise, given James’s self-professed openness to the mystical foundations of religious experience, that he would have found the writings of Ibn ‘Arabi  an indelible source of  information (and possibly inspiration) for his own investigations. 

James says  unequivocally: ‘In these lectures the ground I am taking is this: the mother sea and fountain-head of all religions lie in the mystical experiences of the individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense. All theologies and all ecclesiasticalisms are secondary growths superimposed....[but the original experiences]…..belong to a deeper region, and more vital and practical than the intellect inhabits’. [iii]

James further notes ‘that no adequate report’ of the contents of mystical experience ‘can be given in words’ and ‘it follows that its quality must be directly experienced’….one must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony…one must have been in love one’s self to understand a lover’s mind’.[iv]  Here James picks upon the necessary directness of mystical experience the value of which cannot be communicated to someone who has never had such an experience or some intimation of it. Ibn ‘Arabi says in similar vein: ‘Knowledge of mystical states can only be had by actual experience, nor can the reason of man define it, nor arrive at any cognisance of it by deduction, as is also the case with knowledge of the taste of honey, the bitterness of patience, the bliss of sexual union, love, passion or desire, all of which cannot be known unless one be properly qualified or experience them directly’.[v]

Whilst these two statements have some clear convergence it is important to note that William James and Ibn ‘Arabi stand in very different relationships to the material-content revealed in mystical experience. James emphasises that his own experience is second-hand[vi]; whereas for Ibn ‘Arabi it is decidedly first-hand. Biographically, James recounts that ‘his own constitution’ shuts him out ‘from their enjoyment almost entirely….But though forced to look upon the subject so externally, I will be as objective and receptive as I can; and think I shall at least succeed in convincing you of the reality of the states in question, and the paramount importance of their function’.[vii] This ‘externality’ of James’s viewpoint contrasts vividly with Ibn ‘Arabi’s own  biographical comment: ‘In what I have written, I have never had a set purpose, as other writers. Flashes of divine inspiration used to come upon me and almost overwhelm me, so that I could only put them from my mind by committing to paper what  they revealed to me. If my works evince any form of composition it was unintentional. Some works I wrote at the command of God, sent to me in sleep or through mystical revelation’.[viii]

But in spite of James’s admission of an almost entire lack of first-hand experience of mystical states his compelling treatment of mysticism outlined in The Varieties  leads him to conclude that the ‘existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe’. In spite of this important difference between the stance of James and Ibn ‘Arabi, William James undoubtedly seeks to validate the importance and authenticity of genuine mystical experience because of his personal  inclination towards it. And by mystical states here James takes a very broad view which would include not only religious mysticism but secular mysticism, (such as the nature-mysticism of a D.H. Lawrence or a Thomas Hardy or the ‘higher pantheism’ of an Alfred Lord Tennyson)[ix] and also a sense of ‘cosmic consciousness’ in general. James is dismissive of what he refers to as a reductionist  ‘medical materialism’ which insists that mystical states are no more than merely states-of-the-brain (even regarded as aberrant, neurotic states perhaps!!). If this were true, says James, it would  require us  to explain away science in the same manner. States-of-the-brain tell us little, if nothing,  about the meaning and value of our ideals. William James (as one of the most famous pioneers and advocates of the importance of brain-science) was well aware of this point. The first chapter of The Varieties deals with the question of religion and neurology largely along these lines.[x] 

James sees mysticism, in all its varieties, as the most personal and direct aspect of religious consciousness and adds that the founders of religion ’owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine’. He additionally says of this personal aspect of religion that ‘the individual transacts the business by himself alone:  the ecclesiastical organization, with its priest and sacraments and other go-betweens, sinks to an altogether secondary place.  The relation goes direct from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between man and his maker’.   At the heart of religious mysticism is an unmediated communication between God and Man.[xi]  This is reminiscent of the advice given to Ibn ‘Arabi  by Al-‘Uryani: ‘If you will shut out the world from you, sever all ties and take the Bounteous alone as you companion, He will speak with you without the need of any intermediary’.[xii]

It is abundantly clear that Ibn ‘Arabi’s whole corpus is premised on a universal  message of hope to human kind. Or, at least, to those who would benefit from it. It is a recommendation to self-knowledge: that kind of knowledge which requires us to delve deeply into the experience of our interior lives. This intrinsic process of self-knowledge is potentially transformative: it opens up like a discovery new vistas of ourselves and ‘unto the horizons’. For James, such new vistas  can only be authoritative for the person who has them. While this may be true for some, nevertheless for Ibn ‘Arabi  the situation is not a closed-book: such a possibility of transformation is at the very core of what it is to be human and embraces man’s totality and not just a part of man. Of course, there may be ‘different views’ from ‘different mystical windows’. On consideration of this point I quote William James in full:

[This] wider world….would have its celestial and infernal regions, its tempting and its saving moments, it valid experiences and its counterfeit ones, just as our world has them; but it would be a wider world all the same…..we should be liable to error just as we are now; yet the counting in of that wider world of meanings, and the serious dealing with it, might, in spite of all the perplexity, be indispensable stages in our approach to the final fullness of truth’. [xiii]

The final fullness of truth would be another way of describing of what Ibn ‘Arabi’s  invitation to self-knowledge is centrally about. If one wants an account of the extraordinary vicissitudes of the mystical journey you could read nothing better than the poetry of Ibn ‘Arabi’s  Tarjuman Ashwaq : Interpreter of Ardent Desires.[xiv]

But all these journeyings of the mystic constantly circle around the centre point of the circle from which they issue. They are all Self-disclosures of God[xv] in His love to be known and although unique to each they are, in principle, realisable by others ‘who would look further into the depths of [their]own interior’.[xvi] 

James himself was very much influenced by the concept of the ‘Subconscious’[xvii]  which he saw as the repository from which all religious phenomena sprang. He asserts that  ‘In persons deep in the religious life.. the door into this region is unusually wide open’ and he further remarks ‘That the further limits of our being plunge into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely “understandable” world’. In this subconscious dimension we have the source of religious visions, dreams and feelings as well as the source of pathological states like delusional insanity, paranoia and the like. His philosophical pragmaticism leads him to conclude that the difference between the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ – between ‘the pathological and the truly divine states of mystical consciousness’ is to be assessed by its consequences or ‘fruits’  – “by their fruits ye shall know them”. For Ibn ‘Arabi, by contrast, the only fundamental and axiomatic safeguard against all forms of falseness, self-deception and the fruits of egoism is that, as we read in his Bequest, “I entrust to you a bequest, and I wish [with all my heart]  that you may safeguard it. It is my way with God the Most High, and it is that you should never ever ever abandon your servanthood……’[xviii]". And this applies to whatever state we are in or whatever circumstance, be it regarded as mystical or non-mystical. In fact, because Ibn ‘Arabi regards the whole of reality as being revelatory or theophanic the difference between mystical and non-mystical awareness takes on a more subtle, even ambiguous, meaning than suspected by William James. But James does recognise that generally mystical states have a ‘pretty distinct theoretic drift’: towards optimism and monism and ‘they appeal to the yes-function more that the no-function in us’.[xix]

One of the most interesting parts to me of his whole book is when he quotes Dionysius the Areopagite:

‘The cause of all things is neither soul nor intellect; nor has it imagination, opinion or reason, or intelligence; not is it reason or intelligence, nor is it spoken or thought. It is neither number nor  order, nor magnitude, no littleness, nor equality, nor inequality, not similarity, not dissimilarity. It neither stands, nor moves nor rests…It is neither essence, nor eternity, nor time. Even intellectual contact does not belong to it. It is neither science nor truth. It is not even royalty or wisdom; not one, not unity; not divinity or goodness; nor even spirit as we know it,’ etc., ad libitum’ [xx]

The ultimate ‘cause of all things’ does not exclude any of the above but, as James puts it, it ‘infinitely excels them’: it is no-thing. These series of negations point to a ‘higher affirmation’ – a higher “Yes”. We have similar allusions in the mystical writings of Meister Eckhart where he refers  to (again cited by James) ‘the still desert of the Godhead’ where there is ‘neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost’. We see this again in Ibn ‘Arabi’s constant assumption, as Ralph Austin puts it, of ‘the undifferentiated and inalienable reality of the Oneness of Being, in which the whole dialectic of self-other is fused into the unimaginable and inexpressible experience of Reality.’ There is a very strong  statement of this matter in the synopsis of Affifi’s  delineation of Ibn ‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Unity known as The Twenty-Nine Pages where we read: ‘There is but One Reality, which however you multiply it (in thought) or try to conceive it, now as a multiplicity of existents, now as one Essence characterised by innumerable attributes and names remains in itself ultimately inconceivable and unalterable. All our knowledge of it is subjective and vain. There is no multiplicity, not even of Attributes or Names – no passivity or activity. These are terms which we ourselves have coined and found convenient to use for expressing what we choose to understand by Reality.’[xxi] In the Fusus al-Hikam of Ibn ‘Arabi this inconceivability and unknowability is referred to as Uniqueness of Essence: ahadiyyat al ‘ayn. 

This, however, must never be taken to imply that for the would-be ‘mystic’ there is no ‘path’ or no ‘way’ to be followed. Ibn ‘Arabi  himself was one of those rare individuals whose revelations came upon him without any formal training or study or even teacher. This is very rare but always a possibility. He himself became known as the Greatest Sheik (or teacher ) and in fact helped innumerable people on this path: past, present and future, through his writings if nothing else. In fact, for this modern era Ibn ‘Arabi’s writings (for us, translated writings) take on a special status and role – a situation which was directly acknowledged and perhaps anticipated by Nabulusi a 17th/18th-century follower of Ibn ‘Arabi. Nabulusi was writing at the time of the embryonic emergence of the European Enlightenment and its radical challenge to the established ideas of religion. But more of this later.

We are informed in Haqqi Bursevi’s  Kernel of the Kernel (which is a translation of and commentary on passages in Ibn ‘Arabi’s Futuhat al-Makkiyah) that for any aspirant wishing to follow the ‘path’ of self-discovery there is ‘an absolute necessity’ for such a person, if they are to reach their aim, to know the general spiritual landscape which is their ‘place of beginning’ and their ‘place of return… and this knowledge is tied to three journeys’[xxii] and, further, from Ibn ‘Arabi’s  Unveiling from the Effects of the Voyages, we are informed that when  you come to know yourself  ‘you will know that you are everything, in everything, and from everything’.[xxiii] So although there may be as many potential windows onto the mystical as there are people there is a general spiritual landscape[xxiv] and there is a requirement to know certain ‘things’ as a prelude to their full realisation. We are not left bereft – we are given a compass of spiritual orientation so that the would-be voyager can begin to discern important features of the spiritual terrain in search of union with God (as conveyed in the radical monotheism of Ibn ‘Arabi) and ultimately known as ‘the private face’. This spiritual journey originates before our temporal worldly-appearance ‘wrapped in flesh and bone’. But prior to elucidating further the meaning of the term ‘Unity of Existence’ and its spiritual landscape we are not yet quite done with William James’s  phenomenology of religion.

As you may have already gleaned James was a wonderful writer with many memorable turns of phrase like ‘healthy-mindedness’, ‘the sick soul’, ‘the divided self’, ‘first born and second born’ and  the fascinating concept of ‘mind cure’[xxv]. It is useful to say a little more about James’s  discussion of the ‘mind-cure philosophy’ in its religious context as it reflects certain aspects of  Ibn ‘Arabi’s own recommendations. Consider the following:

“The great central fact of the universe is that spirit of infinite life and power that is back of all, that manifests itself in and through all… is what I call God. I care not what term you may use, be it Kindly Light, Providence, the Over Soul, Omnipotence… so far as we are agreed to the great central fact itself. God then fills the universe alone, so that all is from Him to Him, and there is nothing that is outside Him... He is the Infinite Spirit, including us... and though we differ from Him in that we are individualised spirits… yet in essence the life of God and the life of man are identically the same, and so are one. They differ not in essence or quality; they differ in degree”.[xxvi]

And James goes on to cite a statement of a personal friend as a kind of implicit or (even overt) conclusion of ‘mind-cure philosophy’: “The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or depression is the human sense of separateness from the Divine Energy which we call God”.[xxvii]  The mind-cure movement does not deny the existence of evil, suffering or selfishness. In relation to this there have been those like Alexander Pope who did deny the existence of evil and argued that  there  is only the appearance of evil, an appearance resulting from ‘our imperfect and partial knowledge of creation’. But not so for ‘mind-cure philosophy’ which  insists that we ‘don’t spend time in worrying over evil as a ‘mystery’ or ‘problem’ rather, as Dante says, (cited by James) ‘give a glance and pass beyond’. Neither is the mind-cure movement a ‘mere silly appeal to the imagination to cure disease’. It is perhaps a practical (rather than simply theoretical) way of concentration on the whole-hearted attention vital to ‘spiritual’ development. There is a story recounted by Ibn ‘Arabi which well illustrates the vital practical importance of the direction of concentration in this matter of spiritual attitude and growth: 

“After the prayer the Shaikh said that we all return to town. He mounted his horse and set off. Along the way he talked to me of the virtues and miracles of Abu Madyan. As for myself, I was so absorbed by what he was telling me, looking up at him all the time, that I was completely oblivious to my surroundings. Suddenly he looked to me and smiled and, spurring his horse, made me run more quickly to keep up with him. Then stopped and said to me,  ‘Look and see what you have left behind you!’ When I looked back I saw that all the way was waist-high with thorn bushes and the whole ground was covered with thorns. Then he told me to look at my feet and clothes, and I looked and found not a single trace of the thorns. Then he said, ‘This is the result of the spiritual grace engendered by our talking of Abu Madyan; so persevere on the Way, my boy, and you will surely find salvation.’  Then he spurred his horse and left me behind.....”. [xxviii]

We have mentioned here the human sense of separateness from God which is, for the religiously inclined and maybe many others, often accompanied by a personal sense of unworthiness. This whole issue is given an extraordinary reconfiguration in the mystical philosophy of Ibn ‘Arabi. Let us firstly set the scene by considering how William James delineates this issue from his  psychological point of view. For his purposes James utilises F. W. Newman’s  distinction between ‘the once born and twice born’. The once born see God “not as a strict Judge, not as a Glorious Potentate. But as the animating Spirit of a beautiful and harmonious world, Beneficent and Kind, Merciful as well as Pure....[such a group]......do not look back into themselves....they are not distressed by their own imperfections; yet it would be absurd to call them self-righteous; for they hardly think of themselves at all.....of human sin they know perhaps little in their own hearts and not very much in the world; and human suffering does but melt them to tenderness.”[xxix]  

The intrinsic optimism of the ‘once-born’ is given a further impetus, according to James, by the mind-cure movement which developed a system of mental hygiene based on the regenerative power of optimism: this is the doctrine of surrendering to a higher power, of ‘letting go’ and giving up the ‘feeling of responsibility’ and personal will. On this view, all the intense conscious effort of any previous moralistic and judgemental understandings of religion leads to nothing but failure. Rather, the mind-cure movement insists one dies in order to be truly born. The recommendation, therefore, is not an intense inner struggle with sin and evil: ‘evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease’. Its methods are meditative and recollective and can be practised in the market-place or even the busy office – it is a return, in silence, to the ‘still center of the turning world’, as T. S. Eliot so famously expressed it. It bears several similarities to ‘Salvation by Relaxation’ and the view that we are already whole if we did but know it. It seeks a return to ‘the  springs of a higher life’ often, if perhaps not always, independently of dogma and institution. It need not necessarily accrue any particular religious colour and yet it is fundamental to the general archaeology of all human experience. If we follow James in this matter its practice can be extremely efficacious in the search for human happiness and completeness. It addresses a widespread feeling (which many moderns have) that their lives are not satisfactory and that there is something amiss with them. In some sense it can also be described as a ‘process’  of liquefaction  – a softening of the heart. As an essentially  practical and optimistic philosophy it is well-suited to dealing with the personal mental consequences generated by the vicissitudes of  modernity. Applied in a spiritual context its optimism counters and addresses directly ‘the human sense of separateness from the Divine’.

All in all and in practice this religious optimism and freeing-up has much in common  with the universal appeal of the writings of Ibn ‘Arabi. But for many people such hope and optimism seems to run counter to many of their  pivotal human experiences and insights and is of little consolation, to quote James:  “All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish”.  And also for many James further suggests “a little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and the descent of the pain threshold will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. The pride of life and glory of the world will shrivel”. [xxx] Life is no longer working as it used to for such people: despair and sadness and flatness prevail. A state perhaps nowhere more vividly presented than in Hamlet’s  declaration ‘I have of late (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, lost all custom of exercise: and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory.....and to me... what is this quintessence of dust?...man delights me not nor woman neither....’[xxxi] 

For them there is no mind-cure or, at least, its optimism seems superficial and to be no cure at all.  Of course, many writers delineate the positive significance of such despair and suffering and the possibility of its ultimate spiritual transformation.[xxxii]  But even when such transformation works James interestingly concludes “healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest level of truths”. 

For the ‘first-born’ life (and peace in particular) is keeping on the plus side of things and minimising or eliminating the minuses: it is almost an arithmetic view of happiness. For the ‘twice-born’ there can be no final arithmetic balance: life simply isn’t like that and it is that very conception that  ‘keeps us from our real good’. 

Of course, these radical extremes ‘first-born’ and ‘twice-born’ are idealisations, but they do suggest a recognisable and often mixed-feature of many ordinary  peoples’ religious musings.  And for James, the first-born (‘sky-blue-healthy-minded’) type look with disdain and aversion on what they regard as the ‘diseased subjectivism’ of the ‘twice-born’. They reject the view that the paradox of dying-to-live represents ‘the essence of God’s truth’ and  regard it as being an unacceptable inversion of the natural state of affairs. Alternatively, for the ‘twice-born’ the ‘natural’ has to be ‘lost’ before we can be reborn into the truly ‘spiritual’. Consequently, the character of the ‘twice-born’ tends to be ‘discordant’ and ‘incompletely unified’ and has to undergo a process of unification: the divided self has to become undivided. It is a journey to unity of a kind and often involves a great personal struggle: ‘the one way gradual, the other sudden in which inner unification may occur’. The source of this desire for unification and the source of the conflicting forces at work reside, for James, in the archaeology of the Subconscious which Itself seeks wholeness and balance. But the necessity of this personal process of unification is summarised in the remark of Saint Paul “What I would, that I do not; but what I hate, that I do”. James overall view is that human life has ‘its more’ and ‘its less’: its joys and its sufferings and moments in which ‘radical evil gets its innings’.

The pivotal importance and role of evil in the human scheme of things is, of course, well documented by Ibn ‘Arabi who presents us with a very broad canvass of what constitutes evil, for example, ‘physical pain, failing health, animal cruelty......ignorance, falsehood, disharmony, sin, infidelity, incompatibility of temper’[xxxiii] and so on. One meaning of Evil, for Ibn ‘Arabi, is ‘absence of good’ and this absence constitutes a kind of non-existence. Evil, from this point of view, is certainly confined and relative to ‘creation’ and to the human sphere and has no existence  in Being itself  or in God as the absolute Good. If the description ‘pure evil’ is be intellectually  posited as the opposite to ‘pure Good’ this is simply and entirely a speculative notion: it is not the opposition of two principles. Evil has no ultimate ontological  existence in Reality: it does not go back to Him. That which suffers evil is to that extent deficient in Being and it may be that what is judged evil is because we are blind to the good in it (like unpleasant tasting medicine) or ignorant of its true purpose. But equally declares Ibn ‘Arabi  ‘....It is part of the perfection of Being that there is imperfection in it’.[xxxiv] The existence of evil in the world, for Ibn ‘Arabi, allows the full extent of God’s positive qualities to be exercised out of love and mercy for His creatures in accordance with their individual natures, sometimes according to personal need, request and circumstance and at other times freely given without any limit or request. It is useful to recall in this connection, Gurdjeiff’s aphorism ‘Two things are without limit: the Mercy of God and the stupidity of Man’. As Ibn’Arabi informs us ‘Good belongs to the Cosmos in its essence’ but the cosmos also contains  human possibility and that includes the possibility to err from what is good: that is the possibility to choose evil, to turn from good and in so doing often suffer pain. In this respect people bring both good and evil down upon themselves but not by the Self-Gift of His existence to us, but by disobedience, forgetfulness and self-will. And no doubt sometimes God extracts from us a deeply felt cry for help.

But this is how it may appear from man’s point of view but from God’s point of view  ‘everything is on the straight path’. This is the path of Self-Realisation and God only decrees what He knows will take place in relation to what God knows of our original individual natures which natures critically determine what God decrees. Hence, it is possible in one way to say that God is responsible and in another way to say we are responsible. And this is the actual situation of ‘vision and trial’, even of those who have been brought close – consider the following from Niffari:

"When thou seest Me, nothing will concentrate thee upon Me but vision and trial. If thou abidest in my vision, I try thee in every way, and I support thee with resolve. And thou slippest not: but if thou abidest not, I try thee with part of a trial, and disable thee for resolve and thou taste of the food of farness. Then I extract from thee in thy weakness, because of My mercy towards thee, a cry for help: and I bear thee because of that cry for help, to My vision."[xxxv] 

We are faced here with a profound and great mystery: the mystery of individual human destiny.  And following on from Niffari’s mention ‘of the food of farness’ it is clear that for  Ibn ‘Arabi   ‘Hell means distance or farness, and the real hell lies in imagining that there is a real chasm between you and God and not realising your essential oneness with Him’.[xxxvi] And this conclusion is not a million miles away from the statement by a ‘mind-cure’ advocate and personal friend of William James: ‘The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or depression is the human sense of  separateness ... from God’. 

The major difference between the two seems to be that the elucidation of evil given by Ibn ‘Arabi follows from a unitive viewpoint [xxxvii] which renders its own metaphysical insight into the meaning and significance of what William James calls ‘those evil facts [which form] a genuine portion of reality, and may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth’ whereas the mind-cure view, according to James, seeks to avoid this challenge.

I think that the possibility  of a unitive view of reality was not one which James considered could  deal with (or accommodate) the facts of evil in the world. As far as I can see  he was simply theoretically mistaken in this and also because its accommodation is experiential not theoretical: what is sometimes pronounced theoretically impossible is, in fact, according to Ibn ‘Arabi, the way things actually are.

Ibn ‘Arabi:  The Landscape and Metaphysics of Unity

Let us turn now to the overall term The Unity of Existence which has traditionally been used to describe Ibn ‘Arabi’s world-view. This descriptor was first introduced by Ibn ‘Arabi’s ‘foremost disciple’ Sadr al Din Qunawi (1210-74). Many of Ibn ‘Arabi’s later followers over the centuries  have taken this term for granted, including Nabulusi (1641-1731). In more recent times there are some notable modern Arabic Scholars and Ibn ‘Arabi specialists who have utilised it as an apt descriptor for Ibn ‘Arabi’s perspective. This would include  Ralph Austin in his translation of Ibn ‘Arabi’s Fusus al-Hikam and Toshihiko Izutsu, who devotes a  whole chapter of his book Creation and the Timeless Order of Things to a compelling analysis of the term. Sometimes the description is formulated as ‘The Unity of  All Existence’ which clearly and helpfully emphasises its universal, absolute and all-inclusive nature which embraces all ‘forms of belief’ (religious and secular)   beyond tendencies to dogma, opposition and exclusion. It is likened by Izutsu to the ‘Water of Life... eternally flowing through all. Each thing is in itself a unique existent, yet it is immersed in the limitless ocean of life’[xxxviii] and the Life bestowed on each is in accordance with its own nature, need and preparedness. In an intimate converse with an unknown traveller on the Way Ibn ‘Arabi  sums up some of his basic ideas in answer to the salik’s question concerning the spiritual journey:

"I am replying, oh my dearest friend.....to the question you asked me about....the journey.....the arrival in His presence, and the return from and through Him, to His creatures  – a return which involves no separation, for nothing exists other than God, His attributes and His acts. Everything is He, through Him, proceeds from Him, returns to Him; and were He to veil Himself from the  universe even for the space of the blinking of an eye, the universe would straightaway cease to exist, for it survives through His protection and His care."[xxxix]

And it is salient to  remind ourselves here that at the fulfilment of the ‘journey to God’ and the return ‘journey’ to the creatures, and dressed in a Divine colour, the Gnostic sees ‘Everything is He’. But he, the gnostic, remains always in complete servanthood and acts as a ‘bridge that at the same time links together and separates the creature and the Creator’ and thereby recognises simultaneously that everything is both He and not-He. Another way of expressing this situation, in so far as it can be expressed, is in recalling the possible stages of a salik’s  evolution: the first form of which is  ‘He is me I am no other, though I am not He.’ The word  ‘He’ here is not gendered, cannot be gendered one might  say, as it always refers, in this context, to the Singleness of Source or the Ipseity. Overall therefore the general description the Unity of Existence has traditionally had a very impressive and pervasive lineage. It is equally true that the whole point of Ibn ‘Arabi’s  writings, in one way or another, is fundamentally about ‘realisation’ and ‘union’ with the Divine: it  is not deployed as a piece of theoretical metaphysics.  It has been pointed out that Ibn ‘Arabi does not use the term Unity of Existence (or maybe he uses it only once) throughout  the vast corpus of his available  work. It has been suggested this was because of Ibn ‘Arabi’s  wish to avoid the natural tendency of the human intellect to systematise and codify and classify. It is difficult to say whether the term does in fact do this, although it is agreed that one cannot subject Ibn ‘Arabi’s view of reality to systematic rational fixity. But it may also be the case that Ibn ‘Arabi wanted to avoid  any such truncated description because, at least theoretically, it could appear to differentiate Ibn ‘Arabi’s view of reality from the conventional exoteric Islamic theology of his time. However, Ibn ‘Arabi himself always meticulously conformed to the letter and the deeper meanings of the Koran. Ibn ‘Arabi’s view of reality, particularly as presented in the Fusus al-Hikam, is, however, undeniably radical and does not fit in easily with more conventional Islamic understandings. This situation is further compounded by the fact that Ibn ‘Arabi informs us  that this (now famous) synoptic work was given to him by the hand of  Muhammed (the Apostle of God) with the instruction ‘take it and  bring it to men that they might benefit from it’. So, it may be Ibn ‘Arabi was necessarily treading carefully here with regard to the Islamic authorities of his day.

Further, consider the way Ibn ‘Arabi’s vision unfolds an architecture and universal landscape of reality from which, and through which, Ibn Arabi delineates and contextualises the meaning of   ‘union’, ‘realisation’ and ‘human perfectibility’ in a profoundly original and radical manner. Also, as far as I am aware, in all those myriad accounts of human perfection potentiality scattered throughout the history of ancient and modern thought none has understood or delineated the term ‘human perfectibility’ in the extraordinary way in which Ibn ‘Arabi understands the term, including the self-understandings of the religious orthodoxies of monotheism. For example, the idea of the established prototypes or essences (known as the ‘ayan-al-thabita’) which  reside in the mind and essence of God  and which play such a fundamental role in his metaphysical vision are quite original and unique to Ibn ‘Arabi’: they  permeate his whole metaphysical basis and understanding of self-knowledge. And it is his whole vision of the movement of God’s love to be known, from its source to its most exterior manifestation known as the ‘universes’ whose spiritual landscape is  documented in Haqqi Bursevi’s translation and commentary the Kernel of the Kernel. In Chapter 5 he summarises what the man of gnosis ‘should know’ concerning his place of beginning and his place of return; where he come from and where he is going.....and this knowledge is tied to three journeys’.[xl]  What we are presented with is an outline of a primordial spiritual journey and accompanying spiritual landscape.[xli]

Even an initial cognitive encounter with Ibn ‘Arabi’s overall metaphysics can itself be a great eye-opener – as it was for me and many others. Ibn ‘Arabi himself ‘cannot withhold his profound admiration for the beauty and grandeur of this structure’ – a ‘structure’ which includes ‘all and everything’.[xlii]  It is an invitation to realise, with certainty, that the greatest of the universes  is hidden in Man. But as Ibn ‘Arabi carefully  brings to our attention, the  vision which is required  to penetrate this hidden mystery necessitates a ‘Divine Eye’. So the term the Unity of Existence both alludes descriptively to an all-inclusive spiritual topography and also essentially invites to a realisation of the ‘hidden universe’ which exists in the core potential of Man, both as a species and individually. It is the realisation (or full- fruiting) of this potential which is the reason for there being ‘creation’ at all: that is, God’s love to be known. Mercifully, as we have seen, Ibn ‘Arabi does not leave us in the dark about this overall structure and how the unity of the situation permeates all existence.  

It has been noted that ‘there is virtually no page in the Shaykh’s voluminous  oeuvre that does not deal with the voyage (safar) and its movements and destination’.[xliii]  The voyager is defined as  having a destination but when one-seeming destination is reached another opens up. So that in reality, the voyage has no end even though it is possible to consider the matter as tied to three primordial spiritual journeys. These essentially spiritual journeys[xliv] are simultaneously and infinitely co-present.  As transportations of the voyager these journeys are essentially clothed in that limitless movement of Beauty known as Love. [xlv]

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Footnotes for text so far:

i  The title of this article was also particularly inspired by pictures of the Living Bridges of the Cherrapunji of Meghalaya in India which are grown, not built, and can last for centuries and take 10—15 years to develop. They are made by local tribesman who allow the trees roots to grow in the right direction. These living bridges are absolutely ecologically intelligent and simply visually amazing: often seen high in the trees and stretching  across rocky ravines and streams. These could easily been seen as an exterior image of our own interior roots and as images of the living bridges which connect us all. As the poet Philip Larkin  states ‘Always it is by bridges that we live’. And more importantly perhaps for the present discussion is to note that Ibn ‘Arabi reminds us that the purpose of all his writings is to act ‘as bridges and passageways set up so that we can cross over them...into our own essences/selves and particular states’.
ii  Willliam James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, (London and New York, 2008) p.282
iii  Willliam James, The Varieties, p.xxi
iv  Willliam James, The Varieties, p.267
v  Ibn ‘Arabi, Muhyddin. The Bezels of Wisdom, Trans. of the Fusus al-Hikam by R.W.J. Austin, London, 1980. p.25
vi  Willaim James,  Biographical Note.  Britannica Great Book Series,  Vol 53 of 54. (Chicago, 1987). We read in a letter to his wife that ‘In a vacation climb in the Adirondacks in 1898....It seemed as if the Gods of all the nature-mythologies were holding an indescribable meeting in my breast  with the moral Gods of the inner life – Doubtless in more ways than one, things in the Edinburgh  lecture will be traceable to it’ p. iv
vii  Willliam James, The Varieties,  p.266
viii  Ibn ‘Arabi, Muhyddin. The Bezels of Wisdom, Trans. of the Fusus al-Hikam by R.W.J. Austin, London, 1980. p.1        
ix  William James, The Varieties, p.269: 
‘Moreover, something is or seems
That touches me with mystic gleams
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams –
Of something felt, like something here;
Of something done, I know not where;
Such as no language may declare’
Alfred Lord Tennyson
x  William James, Britannica Great Book Series, Vol 53 of 54 (Chicago, 19870) Introduction:  Section Two Jeremy R. Carrette writes ‘plotting electrical activity alone did not show anything  unless a correlation could be established with reported experience’. p. iv
xi  Willliam James, The Varieties,  p.27
xii Ibn ’Arabi, Muhyiddin. Sufis of Andalusia. Trans. R.W.J.Austin. Gloucestershire, 1971. p.63
xiii Willliam James, The Varieties, p.300
xiv Ibn ‘Arabi, Muhyiddin. The Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, trans. R.A.Nicholson. London, 1911
xv  William Chittick. The Self-Disclosure of God. Albany, NY, 199
xvi Rauf, Bulent. Addresses 2. Roxburgh, 2001. p.21
xvii As noted by Jeremy Carrette in the Introductory Section 2  ‘The Gods of Neuroscience’: in the twentieth century the ‘decade of the unconscious’  has been replaced by ‘the decade of the brain’. See note ix above.
xviii  Ibn Arabi’s  Bequest. MIAS website.
xix  Willliam James, The Varieties, p.292
xx   Willliam James, The Varieties, p.293
xxi  A.E.Affifi, The Mystical Philosophy of  Muhyid Din Ibnul Arabi  (Lahore, 1979) p.46–47. This passage powerfully emphasises Ibn ‘Arabi’s insistence on the ultimate unkowability  and inconceivability of the Essence. Meister Eckhart equally emphasises this when he says ‘God is above names  and above nature’. But interestingly he goes on to say: ‘We read of one good man who was entreating God in his prayer and wanted to give names to him. Then a brother said: “ Be quiet – you are dishonouring God”..... We cannot find a single name we might give to God.Yet those names are permitted to us by which the saints have called him and which God has consecrated with divine light and poured into all their hearts’.  And this would equally apply, I suggest, to prophets and would include, for example, ritual practices such as  the Lord’s Prayer and the Fatiha which opens the Koran. Ibn Arabi himself also, however, makes a distinction between the inspiration given to the prophets through an angelic medium (as was the case with Mohammed) and the revelation given to saints. Prophethood is brought for a particular people and times  as a Guide and Reminder and is, of course, most well known for the promulgation of new law or as a re-emphasis of, or as corrective to, the proper understanding of an extant law. In their strict role as prophets they are  concerned with the external promulgation of the law and their prophetic function is unambiguously and single-mindedly directed to the law’s proper elucidation and establishment.
On the other hand the revelation given to saints and ‘people on the way’ comes through ‘taste’  (dhawq)and depends on  the original inclination (fitra) of a person to receive it. But it is not given to prophets in their role as prophets to know the inclination of people – whether they will be receptive or not to the Divine message they deliver. Nevertheless, each prophet has their saintly side which is receptive  to the interior realities of the  Law they promulgate. With the seal of the Prophethood through Mohammed (who is traditionally understood as Seal of the Prophets)  the making of new doctrines and religions has been cut off or sealed. Consequently, the ongoing emphasis, as far as the present discussion is concerned, is on knowledge of the interior realities of religion –  through ‘taste’ and self-knowledge and this is never cut-off  as ‘Sainthood is the enclosing circle of all’ and cannot be cut-off.
And finally there is a further point which it is very useful to make: such ritual practices as the Lord’s Prayer and the Islamic Fatiha are to be regarded as Divine Gifts which must never become frozen religious forms, however sincerely practiced. For they are divine gifts given for our benefit and given as a means of pointing beyond themselves to the interior divine realities and they offer the possibility to their adepts of passing beyond their ritualistic emphasis (that is, beyond  their external  forms however well and sincerely and accurately  executed)  and potentially offering  the opportunity to ‘fly’( as Plato would put it) to their Source.
xxii  Bursevi,  Haqqi.  Kernel of the Kernel  translation and commentary (Sherborne) p.20
xxiii   Cited in MIAS Journal  Book Reviews, (Volume 27, 1995)  p.104
xxiv  M. Chodkiewicz, Seal of the Saints (Cambridge, 1993) p. 147 importantly notes  that  whilst “two ‘travellers’  will never travel the same path”....it none the less is true that  all initiatic journeys, whatever their particulars, encounter stages and dangers whose nature and distribution conform to a model in the absence of which the notion itself of a ‘spiritual teacher’ would make no sense”.
xxv  Willliam James, The Varieties, pp. 70–71 The mind-cure philosophy is, according to James,   ‘a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and practical side’  which developed in the last quarter of the 19^th Century. It drew on a variety of cultural/religious sources :  the Gospels, Emersonian transcendentalism, the idealism of Berkeley, spiritism, the popular science of evolutionism and Hinduism. It could not have developed, suggests James, ‘until a religion has got well past its earliest insecure beginnings’. Its advocates had an intuitive belief in ‘the all-saving power of healthy-mindedness ....in the conquering  efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind.’  We can glimpse here echoes of  Ibn ‘Arabi’s  elucidation of  Perfect Man as  one  who possess ‘neither fear nor sadness’  and it also relates (quite interestingly) to Ibn ‘Arabi’s   intimations that the experience of the interior realities of religion are  becoming more accessible in modern times.  But as we will see in our discussion James held a much more potentially positive view of such ‘precautionary states of mind’ and their usefulness  and their veracity than did mind-cure advocates.
xxvi  Willliam James, The Varieties,  p.75
xxvii  Willliam James, The Varieties,  p.75
xxviii Ibn ’Arabi, Muhyiddin. Sufis of Andalusia. Trans. R.W.J. Austin. Gloucestershire, 1971. p.72
xxix Willliam James, The Varieties, p.61
xxx  Willliam James, The Varieties, p.101
xxxi William Shakespeare Hamlet  Act 2, Scene 2
xxxii  See, for example, Kierkegaard ‘Stages of life’s Way’  in Kierkegaard – Modern Thinkers   Zuidema  trs. Freeman (Philadelphia, Penna, 1969) p25
xxxiii  A.E.Affifi, The Mystical Philosophy of Muhyid Din Ibnul Arabi  (Lahore, 1979) p.15
xxxiv  Ibn Arabi, Futuhat ll, translation provided by Ralph Austin.
xxxv  Al Niffari. The Mawaqif and Mukhatabat (Cambridge, 1978) p.172
xxxvi  Affifi, The Mystical Philosophy, (Lahore,1979) p.165
xxxvii  Willliam James, The Varieties, p.97 James argues that to accommodate the facts of evil ‘one needs to cut loose from the monistic assumption altogether, and allow the world to have existed from its origin in pluralistic form, as an aggregate, or collection of higher and lower principles, rather than an absolutely unitary fact’. But once we recognise, with Ibn ‘Arabi, that there is only one unique reality which reveals itself in the infinity of its own forms  and which possesses two fundamental dimensions ‘transcendence and immanence’ then James’s point is effectively countered,  although one would not perhaps want to describe Ibn  ‘Arabi’s world view as resting on a ‘monistic assumption’ in its usual understanding.   
xxxviii  Toshihiko Izutsu Sufism and Taoism (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1983) p.149.   Izutsu interesting observes that  ‘the watery element contained in all things in varying degrees corresponds to the He-ness of the Absolute which, as Actus, runs through all’.
xxxix  Michel Chodkiewicz. Seal of the Saints (Cambridge, 1993) p.149. It is interesting also to note here that  Chodkiewicz in citing the above passage from Ibn ‘Arabi’s  The Epistle of Lights suggest that the ‘density of these the few lines’ sums up many of Ibn ‘Arabi’s  fundamental ideas  and posits ‘from the start’ the ‘Oneness of Being’.
xl  Ibn 'Arabi, Muhyiddin. Kernel of the Kernel , p20.
xli  Ismail Haqqi  tends to describe these three journeys as From Him, To Him and With Him. But it is important to remember as Ibn ‘Arabi points out in another work: “ In our opinion and that of those who contemplate that which we contemplate, our ascent is of three types: towards Him, from Him and in Him. After, let us  join in one sole and unique ascent which unfolds in Him.  Because that which goes towards Him takes place in Him and that which leaves from Him equally takes place in Him with the result that to Him and  from Him are identical in the ascent in Him. Thus, in reality, there is no ascent to other than ‘in Him’ and there is no progression ‘in Him’ other than ‘by Him’, since it is Him and not you who realises it’. ( Ibn ‘Arabi  from  Kitab al-Tajalliyat ) translated by Jaume Flaquer and cited in a talk by the translator at a recent  Ibn ‘Arabi  Society Symposium.
xlii  Toshihiko Izutsu Sufism and Taoism (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1983) p.101
xliii  ‘An Introduction to the Kitab al

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