Beshara

Second page of 'Bridges to Self-Knowledge'

Continuation of  Bridges to Self-Knowledge, by Peter Coates:

Ibn ‘Arabi:  The Landscape and Metaphysics of Unity (cont.)

By way of an aside: given modernity’s perceived limitations of (and even some incredulity  towards) dogmatic exclusivist belief-systems and, in particular, forms of aggressive Islam, then one might be inclined to say if Ibn ‘Arabi’s world-view was simply called Islam (or even radical Islam) it would not have the same possible universal impact with which the term Unity of Existence resonates.  Even if it was called ‘esoteric’ Islam the situation would be little different. Alternatively, if it was simply labelled innocuously as ‘the perfection of man’ it would also lack to many modern ears (and for the same reasons) a certain cognitive status, attraction and ambience. Put in another way, it is to the universal ‘structure of reality’ and all existence that the traditional description ‘the Unity of Existence’  gives immediate  testimony and emphasis. One can readily see why: the term initially transcends (and in its metaphysical depth and universality)  circumnavigates the limits and confines of much traditional religious historical specificity and, in essence, addresses itself to a universal vista beyond dogma and religion. A vista of such enormity and universality that, as Affiffi notes, ‘We now live in the One and after death we shall continue to do so’.[xlvi]

Generally, Ibn ‘Arabi’s multi-faceted exposition of this all-inclusive reality (other-than-which- there- is-not) possesses an intrinsic  cohesion and ubiquitous human application beyond the limits of its original cultural setting, even perhaps beyond some of the esoteric  aspects of  traditional religions. In this respect, the unfolding of what is entailed in Ibn ‘Arabi’s vision is a mobile spiritual gift for the future of mankind. Although It is true that Ibn ‘Arabi’s delineation of his vision is inseparable from its historical Koranic context it is also, with the works of Rumi, the most complete universal statement which we have as yet at our disposal. The universality alluded to embraces the past, the present and future. If it is true that all we ever have at our disposal is the ‘present now’ then it is in the ‘present now’ that the future must  be discerned by the attuned and  ‘listening ear’. We must listen to the future in the present and lend an ear to what the era is telling us. What I am tentatively suggesting is that the descriptor ‘Unity of Existence’ has a metaphysical magic, magnetism and magnitude  which goes beyond traditional conceptions of God, beyond dogma and even beyond historical religion and invokes its own freedom of enquiry and response according to its own criteria and level: like a breath of fresh air. Certainly, like Einstein, Ibn  ‘Arabi did not let himself be too much restricted or limited by the conventional thinking and external conditions  of his time or almost any time for that matter. The freedom Ibn ‘Arabi alludes to is the freedom of  infinity-on- the-move: that is, the infinite movement of Love: ‘Divine Love is fluent in all stations,  and the manifestation of all things is through Divine Love...Therefore any station or state which happens to come to Man before Love, is meant for Love and all stations and states which come after Love, benefit from Love because Love is the origin and essence of all being [and] ......the origin of all existences’.[xlvii] And we also learn that the Divine love manifested in the human form  is His love of Himself in that human image.

The absolute source of this Divine love and absolute freedom is equally intimated by Rumi:

‘What is to be done, O Moslems? For I do not recognise myself....I am neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Gabr, nor Moslem........I am not of this world or the next, nor of  Paradise nor of Hell.....I am not of Adam, nor of Eve.....My Place is the Placeless, my trace is the Traceless....I belong to the Soul of the Beloved...One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call.’[xlviii]

Haqqi Bursevi points that this all-inclusive Truth for Ibn ‘Arabi is intended to refer to only one thing  and that is One Ipseity and One Reality. And Bursevi goes on to suggest that this One Reality   has been designated variously as love, light, existence, being, self, compassion and that what is meant by all of these names is One Being which is Reality  (Haqq)  and that ‘this Existence is transcendent beyond all these names’.[xlix]  I particularly like the word ‘Existence’ in this context for it not only conveys a sense of directness and immediate presence and accords with the fact  that God holds the existence of everything by the forelock: and this is ‘Good News’ (Beshara).

It is not at all the case that a condensed title like ‘The Unity of Existence’ cannot represent or suitably indicate the elevation of such a wonderfully simple (yet a powerfully rich, complex and   subtle) metaphysical vision. It may be, as Izutsu, remarks  that ‘Existence’  takes on a special connotation here ‘based on what is conceived as an intuition of the reality of existence’. From this standpoint the full reality of man’s existence both as a species and individually takes on a profound spiritual significance. It embraces in its universality even such an innocuous traveller as ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’. Ibn ‘Arabi’s metaphysics is predicated on God’s vision of Himself in the Infinity of His own forms. Such a universal vision, Ibn ‘Arabi insists, is there for all who would see it. The refrain in Ibn ’Arabi’s Theophany of Perfection ‘What ails thee? What ails thee? What  ails thee?.....’ becomes  one of Ibn ‘Arabi’s  most poignant lines.[l] 

The picture of reality Ibn ‘Arabi presents to us, particularly that conveyed in  the Fusus al-Hikam and referred to in the Kernel of the Kernel is directly about our possible evolution and  personal development and it invites the would-be searcher to reach-out-to and  be drawn-into  a deeper and more conscious awareness of the reality it depicts. This process is related to the guidance it contains and the inner response in the reader which it is capable of engendering. But, more fundamentally, its transformative capacity derives from the source from which it originates.  Perhaps enough has been said about these points now and we can direct our attention to looking  at the life, work and relevance of Nabulusi in the context of our further  investigation.

To summarise so far: initially we looked at William James’ defence of the mystical and his insistence on its rational inelimitablility and ‘of the reality of the states in question and the paramount important of their function’. This conclusion is even more remarkable when we remember that William James was one of the most outstanding exponents of the Science of Psychology the scientific root of which, he argues, lay in brain-science and brain-physiology. He recognised that whether we are a ‘spiritualist’ or a ‘materialist’ we must be ‘cerebalists’: for both must admit that for the working of their respective understandings  of the nature of human experience ‘brain laws are a co-determinant of the result’.

In his scientific psychology for which he is most famous (ie. Principles of Psychology, 1890)  he felt no requirement  to choose between ‘a psychology without a soul’ or a ‘psychology with a soul’ because Psychology’s fundamental focus on brain-science rendered it neutral to these larger debates. In this respect he was a very early precursor of cognitive neuro-science. But he also, after 1890, gave up psychology and termed it ‘that nasty little subject: all one cares to know lies outside it’. He did not say the same of mysticism.

The discussion of James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience prepared the ground for further exploration into the underlying nature of mysticism according to the term Unity of Existence – a descriptor traditionally used to describe the mystical philosophy of Ibn ‘Arabi. It was suggested that this term, when contextually elucidated, in no way does any injustice to Ibn ‘Arabi’s  vision of reality and its spiritual landscape. It also unambiguously affirms the essential transformative purpose of his writings as providing ‘bridges and passageways set up so that we can cross over them...into our own essences/selves and particular states’.[li]

Nabulusi:  The Mystical and the Rational

So next to a consideration of Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi (1641–1731).[lii]  His life spanned from just before the middle of the Seventeenth Century to the third decade of the Eighteenth Century and significantly overlapped with the beginning of that period in Europe known as the Enlightenment. The European Enlightenment heralded a new attitude to nature, to knowledge, to law and history  and to the place of man in the universe based on rational investigation and not on traditional authority or religion. Nabulusi himself belonged to a group of religious Islamic scholars ‘keen on expanding the rational scope of Islam’[liii] and he did not want to foreclose (like many of the anti scientific ulama did) on the scientific attitude and discoveries of the European Enlightenment epitomised by their hero Isaac Newton.[liv] But Nabulisi was also and foremost a follower and defender of the traditional understanding of the Unity of Being of Ibn ‘Arabi. His of defence of the principle of unity was  directed internally (that is, within Islam) against the dogmatism of the  ‘arrogant ulama’. It was directed externally  in defence of the relative autonomy of nature and natural causation. It was Nabulusi’s aim to show the compatibility of natural causation with the Islamic axiom that God’s power is fundamentally responsible ‘for all the effects in the natural world’.[lv] This he did by emphasising the validity of the relatively autonomous causes of natural phenomena and equally emphasising that the implicit and real ‘cause alone’ is God. This defence itself is in accordance with Ibn ‘Arabi’s metaphysics of unity which insists that both the immanent and transcendent aspects of the single unique reality have to be asserted simultaneously if one is ‘to follow the right course’.

What Nabulusi was, in fact doing, was attempting to show that true Enlightenment belongs to the mystical vision to which Ibn ‘Arabi’s metaphysics of unity alludes. There has long been a debate between modernity and Islam as to whether Islam has remained, and in some crucial aspects still remains in the ‘dark ages’ without an enlightenment. For Nabulusi this view simply rests on uninformedness and a restricted metaphysics of knowledge. The Enlightenment of Islam has always resided in its mystical foundations the principles of which need to be brought to those who will benefit – no matter who they are. But before we pursue this point further it is useful to see how Nabulusi conceives of the relationship between God’s power andman’s power. Basically, man’s power is seen as an effect of God’s power which itself is the cause of all the perpetual myriad effects in the cosmos, including man’s actions: like the moon’s light is the effect of the sun’s light. I remember Bulent [Rauf] once saying that the power in man can be likened to the power in a battery. I would continue: it is like a battery which thinks it possesses this power itself and does not realise that it is simply the instrument through which this power flows. In another consideration it is the battery’s power, for God’s power needs an instrument for its effects to be accomplished. But its effects, therefore, can veil the servant into assuming that that power is only ‘the servant’s power’  without awareness of its ultimate source and without awareness of how this power can be misused by the servant and without adhering to the responsibility it involves. It says in one of Ibn ‘Arabi’s prayers that it is out of the sheer generosity of God that he ascribes the acts to the servant. But neither, out of the extreme and delicate tact of the true situation, should the servant ascribe blameful acts to God but rather to himself or herself: this is the proper attitude for the balanced evolution of the servant.

Nabulusi’s desire to expand the rational scope of Islam is extremely important: it involves two things – a universal vision and tolerance. Nabulusi clearly recognised the fact that God  can inspire human kind ‘through thinking and inquiry [with the] intellect as well  as ‘inner unveiling and direct witnessing’.[lvi] Of the former kind Isaac Newton and many others would be paramount examples.  Nabulusi’s general and expansive orientation is refreshing, tolerant and universal in its implications.

This also brings up the general question of causality: the universe is constantly full of causes –  natural, sub-atomic, cosmological, ecological, historical, economic, social, cultural and so on ad infinitum. Sometimes this has been referred to as the ‘infinity of the world process’ and can, to an extent, be divided into human and non-human causes at work in the cosmos. The most characteristic feature of people and cultures, of course, is that they inhabit and constantly generate changing conversational universes: ongoing universes of values and meanings which often define personal self-identity and are clearly open to change in the light of experience. Such systems of meaning are historically and culturally open-ended, although often exercising a degree of mutual incompatibility, but, crucially they are not irredeemably fixed in their respective formulations. All this is included in what is referred to by the term the ‘infinity of the world-process’.

And this view fits well into Ibn ‘Arabi’s cosmology of the perpetual Self-Disclosure of Being[lvii] which depicts the world-process as a dynamic movement transforming itself ‘kaleidoscopically from moment to moment’. For Ibn ‘Arabi, the infinity of the world-process has an even more fundamental and significant dimension. All things he says ‘for those who know’ are imbued  with essential life and ‘there is not a single existent in the manifest world....that has not a speech’.[lviii]  But ‘relative man’, who manifests only certain and not all of the divine qualities, cannot discern this and is veiled from ‘hearing the speech both of the hidden and manifested kinds’. But for those who are not veiled they see and hear the ‘spirituality of everything’ even the interior speech of ‘solids and plants’. They see, for example, flowers giving ‘grace to the Truth... through their manner’. This is an extraordinary situation where everything is speaking with their own language: the whole universe is in constant converse. But such a vision is only properly accorded, says Ibn ‘Arabi, to the one to whom God has manifested all his Names and Qualities: that is, Perfect Man. So it comes as no surprise when Nabulusi recounts the following:

On a rainy winter day [Nabulusi}] was walking along with some of his disciples.......when he was suddenly stopped by a heavy stream of water gushing forth from a spout on one of the roofs. He passed and gazed at the spout and said ‘true, true.’ Puzzled by his reaction one of his disciples asked: what truth does a spout tell? [Nabulusi] replied: ‘the spout is telling me: be like me. I collect the rain water that comes scattered form the sky and pour it out together in one stream, without leaving anything on the roof. I believe it, and know that it is advice to me.[lix]

In these ways the universe becomes (and is) imbued with omnipresent spiritual meaning. Put very simply, there is only one thing going on the whole time or, as Bulent [Rauf] puts it,  ‘Everything is of one thing’.

Nabulusi’s desire ‘to expand the rational scope of Islam’ coupled with his awareness of the emerging rationality (and potential influence) of the European Enlightenment and his profound adherence to the metaphysics of unity of Ibn ‘Arabi directly issued in an affirmation of the open nature of public access to mystical texts that leads me to call Nabulusi a ‘mystical moderniser’. Let me explain. Nabulusi’s understanding of the times in which he lived lead him to realise, much in advance of his contemporaries and opponents-to-be, that it was necessary to ‘go public with mystical knowledge’. Texts of Ibn ‘Arabi which were usually read in secret  were read openly, particularly passages from Ibn ‘Arab’s Meccan Revelations. This was unheard of and when asked for his justification he replied that he was ‘acting under the “demand of disclosure” ’. It was as if he was saying, to some extent, that the times in which he  lived demanded this in relation to what God had disclosed to him. It implied a change in the meaning of elitism: it still meant ‘the best’ but the ‘best’ for everybody. It was an open, non-exclusive invitation for those who would benefit from it: directly in accordance with Ibn ‘Arabi’s wish in the Preface to Fusus al-Hikam.

This going public also rested on Nabulusi’s vital appreciation of the potential transformative effects of certain mystical texts: the texts themselves can directly communicate mystical truth. As Nabulusi interestingly remarks ‘I have seen boys on the spiritual path among my brothers who reached by reading these books in a few days what men could not reach by personal devotion (ie. without books) in forty or fifty years......and [for this pupil] we did not know for his advancement any cause from mystical practices other than reading the books of truths until he excelled in his knowledge and surpassed many of the predecessors’.[lx] And he also says ‘if after that one supports his knowledge with additional practice and devotional struggle one becomes among the perfect men’.[lxi]

For Nabulusi the  primacy of the mystical texts, particularly the central texts of Ibn ‘Arabi, figured  essentially in opening up the transmission of mystical knowledge. Equally so, his promotion of  non-dogmatic  reasoning in the understanding of tradition and his involvement in the contemporary issues  of his time.[lxii] And when one understands the origin of Fusus al-Hikam of Ibn ‘Arabi which  was handed to him in a ‘dream-vision’ by the Prophet himself it is recognised that such a text is not of the ordinary human run of things.[lxiii]

 I would put the matter also in another context. In his absolute concern for the primacy of  Ibn ‘Arabi’s mystical texts he is identifying a metaphysically-oriented quality of inspired visionary thinking: a feature which is intrinsic to the whole of Ibn ‘Arabi’s metaphysics of unity. It is a quality which derives from the all-inclusive generosity of Ibn ‘Arabi’s vision itself. In this context, reason is being asked to exercise its capacity in relation to the changing demands of a vast spiritual landscape which governs the ‘material’ everywhere: nothing is excluded. What Nabulusi spiritually discerned in the times he lived was that it was time to go public with the essential spiritual  truths  of  Ibn ‘Arabi’s  writings: the time was ripe and the need was there. It was noted that Nabulusi’s gatherings ‘were very popular, attracting an unusually mixed social group that included notables, religious clerics, scholars, judges and governors as well as mystics and lay people’.[lxiv]

So I think the term ‘mystical moderniser’ would do him no injustice. He acknowledged the discriminatory nature and diversity of all historical religions and never questions that this is God’s work. But he distinguished between the  ‘realm of law’ and the ‘realm of  truth’ (or between the ‘exoteric’ and ‘esoteric’ dimensions of historical religion) and in the ‘realm of truth’ there was sufficient spiritual landscape to go beyond the often disabling exclusivist dualism of belief and unbelief and open up a universal  landscape of incredible beauty, love and compassion beyond dogma: an all-inclusive ecumenical Unity of  all Existence.

Update 

I was both delighted and surprised when I first read something of the life and focus of Nabulusi’s  writings. I was surprised because Nabulusi’s clear address to the rationalist challenges of the European Enlightenment and his desire to find some middle uniting ground between the mystical and the rational (rather than setting up an insurmountable  barrier) was the kind of  question I addressed in my own endeavours in Ibn ‘Arabi and Modern Thought. But Nabulusi did not have at his intellectual disposal in the Eighteenth Century all the discussions and debates about the nature of rational knowledge and its grounds of the Twenty-first century and the radical questioning of the European Enlightenment’s equation of knowledge with certainty. And much more. But I felt my own earlier work was in the same kind of business as Nabulusi: a broadening of our concept of  rationality in the light of the metaphysics of unity.

But even more astounding was Nabulusi’s going public with mystical knowledge. This seems completely in line with the educational foundations of the Beshara School at Chisholme House in the Borders of Scotland. There are some differences, of course, for times have changed.  The SchooI has been described as a ‘university of the future’ combining  the metaphysics of unity with the  art of self-discovery and the Fusus al-Hikam of Ibn ‘Arabi is a central text. But there are no gurus only students. It is its educational directness in self-knowledge without intermediary which I found to be its most overriding and transformative feature and enduring form of re-enchantment.

Peter Coates 2014

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