Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Conclusive argument remains with God - Shaykh Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi

Bismillah.

A spiritual intuition will reveal that that which was necessary to affirm His Divinity is none other than the Reality Himself, and that the Cosmos (of created beings) is nothing more than His Self-Revelation (to Himself) in the forms (determined) by their eternally unmanifest essences, which could not possibly exist without Him. It will reveal also that He manifest Himself variously and formally according to the (inherent) realities and states of the essences all of which is understood together with the knowledge that, in relation to us, He is the Divinity.

A further spiritual intuition will show you our forms manifest in Him, so that some of us are manifest to others in the Reality, know each other, and distinguish each other in Him. There are those of us who have spiritual knowledge of this mutual recognition in the Reality, while others have not experienced the plane on which this occurs. I seek refuge in God lest I be of the ignorant.

As a result of the last two intuitions it is known that we are determined only through ourselves through ourselves (as essences); indeed, it is we who determine ourselves through ourselves, which is the meaning of the words God's is the conclusive argument, (Quran VI:149), that is, against the veiled ones when they ask the Reality why He has done with them things contrary to their own aims. And He made their affair difficult for them. (Quran LXVII:42), and this is the truth revealed to the gnostics. For they see that it is not the Reality that has done with them what is claimed, and they see that what was done with them came from themselves, for His knowledge of them is according to what they are themselves (in their eternal essences). Thus their complained is nullified, the conclusive argument remaining with God. 

We are His as has been shown,
As also we belong to ourselves.
He has no other becoming except mine,
We are His and we are through ourselves.
I have two aspects, He and I,
but He is not I in my I.
In me is His theater of manifestation,
And we are for Him as vessels.

- Shaykh Ibn al-'Arabi in The Bezels of Wisdom
Translated by RWJ Austin
Publisher Credit: Paulist Press

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