Light of the Real

In his introduction to a translation of Mahmud Shabistari’s works on the concept of the Unity of Existence (wahdat al-wujud), Robert Abdul Hayy Darr compares the God-Cosmos relation to a projector’s relationship to a screen. The projector is what Ibn Arabi would describe as the Narrator of our individual and collective lives in this Universe, one that praises God just as we do, and that instructs our souls of the world to come before we come into being. It takes on a similar function to the Plotinian Nous or Divine Intellect (see figure 1) structuring matter according to forms, giving trees and humans their shapes and their essential attributes, forms that are for Ibn Arabi qualitative reflections of God’s Names. The Light it projects is the Light of Being, the Reality, God’s essence. The Light shapes reality in another profound way as well, it also animates our bodies, our internal and communal lives. The film on the screen, the moving images themselves, is the unfolding of our lives, our own life, that of the living ecosystem on the globe we live with, and the passage of the history of our cosmos. Empirical experience of Creation, just as Creation in itself, operates in the intersection of the screen of non-being, or non-existence, and Absolute Being, the Light of Reality. Without non-existence, the film would have no stark background to project the Light against. Without the Light of Being, the singular Reality, there would be no film playing, no active, changing and living creation, just non-Being. Despite matter being organized according to different forms, and the characters in the Film differing from one another or their environment, they nevertheless are composed of the same Light, the same life-giving Spirit at the root of both their non-Being and the Light of their Being on the screen. There is an organic and commanding unity that Hearts alone can experience when they situate their spirits within an ecosystem of Spirit, one that binds together all life on Earth, across the Stars, and to the Essential and Grand Spirit on which the Cosmos is dependent on for existence. The relation between the unity of this Spirit and the multiplicity in creation is often compared by ‘Arabi to a white light diffusing into color once hitting a prism. The colors are not the same as the Light, creation is not the same as the Creator, and yet, the colors consist of nothing but the white Light, and creation nothing but its Creator. This kind of unity is a lot more actionable and universally accessible to a community of loving hearts, than the artificial unity that rises from the centralized efforts of the few to compel a community of minds to fall in line with a particular, temporally static and conceptual vision of unity and universality. Whether the doors of the Sharia are opened by direct reception of revelatory divine Law, or by means of an already revealed Law of which we are only followers of, these doors can only be opened by “independent effort” (ijtihâd) to experience the Light in all its modes and dwellings (112).

This experience of the divine Law for Arabi, may in fact coincide with the visions of order, unity, and purposeful symmetry of a rationalist that takes God as Nous, however as far as Ibn Arabi is concerned, these rational experiences are incomplete without a love of the “divine side to every existing thing other than God” (212). It is only when “the servant draws near to Him through supererogatory works”, when they love and are loved by God and practice their ‘proximity of gifts’ that God says “ I am his hearing, his sight, and his hand” (101). A rationalist would seek the rational design through which God as Nous orders the cosmos. However, the experience in question remains, as wonderstruck as it might be, an intelligible one. The ‘divine side’ of existents can be taken to mean a supra-sensible experience of the governing spirit being self-disclosed in material existents, an awareness of the Spirit that permeates matter into a formal being but cannot be reduced to an intellectual appreciation of the underlying design of Nous ordering mattering into forms. A true experience of the divine Law for Arabi must be led by a Heart open to the Love that the Real has composed the world from. Ibn Arabi situates the Heart in the opposite direction of al-zahir, the sensible world. Its production of knowledge departs rather, from al-batin, the inner and abstract world from which it observes the properties of the unseen world of divine principles. 

Al-Ghorab , Mahmoud, and Michael Tiernan. “Muhyiddin Ibn Al-’Arabi Amidst Religions (Adyân) and School of Thought (Madhâhib).” Muhyiddin Ibn ’Arabi: A Commemorative Volume , edited by Stephen Hirtenstein, Element Books, pp. 199–227.

Chittick , William  C. “Two Chapters from the Futûhât Al-Makkiyya .” Muhyiddin Ibn ’Arabi , edited by Stephen Hirtenstein Hirtenstein, Elements Books , Longmead, Shaftesbury , 1993, pp. 90–123.