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Actualization

‘Without human (or analogous, all-comprehensive, free beings), an infinity of ontological possibilities would not find their actualization. As Ibn ‘Arabî puts it, “If not for us, the next world would never become differentiated from this world”

Ibn ‘Arabî, al-Futûhât (1911 edition, 3:253.21)

- submitted by Harold Mozley

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Eternity endures

"It is by means of opposites that eternity endures."

Seneca

- submitted by John Zada

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Truce

"The life of this world is a truce between opposites."

Rumi

- submitted by John Zada

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Doctrine of Divine Unity

“This then is how the Sufis understand the Doctrine of the Divine Unity (Tawhid): not merely is there ‘no god but God,’ as the Muhammadan profession of Faith declares, but there is nothing but God. The world of Phenomena and of the Senses is a mere Mirage - a reflection of Being on Not-Being, manifesting the Attributes of Being as the reflection manifests its original, but not really participating in its nature. 

It is the essential nature of Beauty to desire to reveal and manifest itself, a quality it derives from the Eternal Beauty. ‘I was a Hidden Treasure,’ God is described as saying to David, ‘and I wished to be known, so I created creation that I might be known.’

Now a thing can only be known through its opposite - Light by Darkness, Good by Evil, Health by Sickness, and so on; hence Being could only reveal itself through Not Being, and through the product of this admixture (to use a not very accurate expression), namely, the Phenomenal World. Thus Eternal Beauty manifests itself, as it were, by a sort of self-negation; and what we call ‘Evil’ is a necessary consequence of this manifestation, so that the Mystery of Evil is really identical with the Mystery of Creation, and inseparable therefrom. But Evil must not be regarded as a separate and independent entity: just as Darkness is not the mere negation of Light, so Evil is merely the Not-Good, or, in other words, the Non-Existent. 

All Phenomenal being, on the other hand, necessarily contains some elements of Good, just as the scattered rays of the pure, dazzling white light which has passed through the prism are still light…more or less ‘coloured’ and weakened. It is from this fall from the ‘World of Colourlessness’ that all the strife and conflict apparent in the world result.”

“… the Grades of Being may be conceived of a series of Emanations, which become weaker, more unreal, more material and less luminous as they recede further from the Pure Light of Absolute Being.”

“So far we have spoke chiefly of the ‘Arc of Descent’ but there is also the ‘Arc of Ascent’, whereby Man, the final product of this evolutionary chain, returns to his original home and, by ‘Annihilation in God’ (fans fi'illah) is once more merged in the Divine Essence which is the source of the only True Being: as it is said, ‘Everything returns to its Source.’”

-     The Sufi Mysticism: Iran, Arabia and Central Asia - E.G. Browne

-     submitted by Harold Mozley

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Exchanging form for form

“In this way everything is created. The Sun bestows on the immortals their everlasting life and he nourishes the eternal regions of the cosmos with the ascending light sent forth from the side that faces heaven; with the descending light that illumines the entire hollow realm of water, earth, and air, and enlivens and set in motion birth and death.

   “The creatures in this region of the cosmos he remakes and reshapes in a cyclical movement, exchanging one for another, kind for kind, form for form. In so creating he acts just as he does with the celestial bodies. Change is constant for all bodies: for immortals without dissolution, for mortals with dissolution. Thus the immortal differs from the mortal and the mortal from the immortal.”

  The Corpus Hermeticum Book 16, The Way of Hermes

  - submitted by Harold Mozley

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The One and the Three

“No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back into the One. When I think of any of the Three I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me. I cannot grasp the greatness of that One so as to attribute a greater greatness to the rest. When I see the Three together, I see but one Torch, and cannot divine or measure the undivided light.”

  - Gregory of Nazianzus, Archbishop of Constantinople in the 4th Cent. (quote is from Karen Armstrong's book The Case for God)

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The Unveiling

The creature has being only by contingent attribution,

In reality it is nothing.

When the Divine Lights appear,

They efface this attribution,

So that the creatures were not, nor ceased to be.

God extinguished them, but in their essences, they have never existed,

And in their extinction they subsist...

When they are annihilated, the Being returns to God;

He is then such as He was before they became;

The servant becomes as if he had never existed,

And God is as if nothing had ever ceased.

However, when the Divine figurations appear,

The creature is invested from the Light of God and becomes one with Him.

He extinguishes him, then He substitutes Himself for him;

He lives in the place of the creatures, and yet they have never occupied anything.

Like waves, of which the principle unity is the unity of the sea,

And which, in their multitude, are united by it;

When it is in movement, it is the waves which are it in their totality,

And when it is calm, there are neither waves nor multiplicity.

Abd al-Karim al-Jili, Universal Man

- submitted by Nick Swift

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The Creation

In parable, the creation is like ice,

And it is Thou who are the gushing water.

The ice is not, if we realised it, other than its water,

And is not in this condition other than by the contingent laws.

But the ice will melt and its condition will dissolve,

The liquid condition will establish itself, certainly.

The contrasts are united in one single beauty.

It is in that that they are annihilated and it is from them that it radiates.

       Abd al-Karim al-Jili, Universal Man

- submitted by Nick Swift

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Of the Quality of Divinity

"And know that existence (al-wujud) and non-existence (al-'adam) are found, as it were in reciprocal confrontation, and that the sphere of the 'Quality of Divinity' encompasses both..."

Abd al-Karim al-Jili, Universal Man

- submitted by Nick Swift

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The linking substance

“….the universe, together with all its parts, is nothing but a number of accidents, ever changing and being renewed at every breath and linked together in a single substance, and at each instant disappearing and being replaced by a similar set. In consequence of this rapid succession, the spectator is deceived into the belief that the universe is a permanent existence.”

Jami (Lawa'ih)

- submitted by Nick Swift

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Every breath

“This universe is changed and renewed unceasingly at every moment and at every breath. Every instant one universe is annihilated and another resembling it is taking its place and the majority of men do not perceive this.”

Jami (Lawa'ih)

- submitted by Nick Swift

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Tao Te Ching

Book One, Section 2: Something and nothing produce each other; The difficult and the easy compliment each other; The long and the short offset each other; The high and the low incline towards each other; Note and sound harmonize with each other; Before and after follow each other. Book One, Section 16: The myriad creatures all rise together And I watch their return. The teaming creatures All return to their separate roots. Returning to one's roots is known as stillness. This is what is meant by returning to one's destiny. Book Two, Section 42 The way begets one; one begets two; two begets three; three begets the myriad creatures. The myriad creatures carry on their backs the yin and embrace in their arms the yang and are the blending of the generative forces of the two. Selections from Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, taken from the 1963 Penguin Books edition/translation.

- submitted by John Zada

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"Kullu shayin yarjiu ala aslihi: 'All things revert to their original source.'  The source of all things, in respect of existence, is God from whom they are manifest and to whom they return. Thus Possible Existence is dependent on Necessary Existence.  Letters and words are dependent on ink for their existence. The dhat (essence) of things is non-existence, which is ghayr (the 'other', 'foreigner'), of existence.  Every moment, things borrow their existence from God, and every moment they revert to their dhat (essence), which is nothingness.  So far as existence is concerned, they revert to the 'necessary' existence; and so far as their own existence is concerned they revert to nothingness: Balhum fi labsin khalqin jadid. [Qur'an, Sura Qaf.] The 'possible' existence has therefore two phases or aspects: one toward God and the other towards itself.  In its first aspect it is nothing but God; and in the second, it is nothing but absolute non-entity or annihilation itself. Kullu shayin halikun illa wajhahu [Qur'an Sura Qasas] – everything is liable or subject to annihilation except its 'face.' In itself a thing is an eternal non-entity; but in 'its face', i.e., its aspect toward God it is not a non-existence.  Secondly, the essences of things are the attributes of Jalal (glory) and Jamal (beauty).  Things are then manifestations of these two attributes.  Everything whether good or evil comes out of the windows of these attributes and returns through the very same windows.

Everything, in borrowing an attribute, relishes that attribute; and this relishment forms its relationship to the attribute which it has borrowed; and it forms the potentiality of that thing.  Everything is a form of some attribute; the a'yan [thought-forms of his own potentialities in the knowledge of God] is a perfection of that attribute.  Everything will revert from the temporary to the eternal world with the perfection that it has received here.  When things divest themselves of their attributes (and this will not be for more than a minute, so that the internal may become external), Real Unity appears. The 'ariff [gnostic] appreciates this for a minute in the world.  The thing does not revert to the dhat but only to the sifat [attributes] from which it came out.  Sifat [are(?)] from the condition of the next world; hence the necessity for the Judgement Day, when the sifat that are still hidden will become manifest."

Khan Sahib Khaja Khan's 1926 book (Ashraf Press, Lahore, 1971) The Secret of Ana'l Haqq ("Being 300 Odd Irshadat (or Sayings) of Shaykh Ibrahim Gazur-i-Ilahi, Translated from Persian) had the above on pages 47-48, as the second page in the third chapter, The Possible Existence (Mumkinu'l-Wujud)

- submitted by Nick Swift

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John Scotus Eriugena writing earlier and within Christian theology describes God as the self-manifestation of the universe:

‘Therefore descending first from the super essentiality of His nature in which He is said not to be, He is created by Himself in the primordial causes and becomes the beginning of all essences, of all Life, of all intelligence ….and thus going forth into all things He makes all things and is made in all things and returns to Himself.’ (Periphyseon III 683A)'.

A procession from non being/nothing to full creation and back. This excerpt is from The Mystical Cosmos by Joseph Milne (Temenos Academy p48).

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Shabistari returns to the topic of the Oscillating Universe at line 640 of The Garden of Mystery (ArcheType edition 2007):

‘As each part of the whole returns to nonbeing   The whole in that moment becomes void of accidents

Our universe is the whole and in every blink of the eye   It passes into nonbeing:”It doesn’t last two moments.”

Yet another universe is immediately created   In every moment another earth and another sky. ……. In every breath is an assembling and dissolution.’

The translator, Robert Darr’s note to line 645 is: ‘It is the experience of the Sufi that the universe oscillates at each moment between existence and non-existence.’

- submitted by Harold Mozley

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Idries Shah's father is clear about the oscillating universe. In his book, Islamic Sufism, beginning chapter 6 ‘Reality of Existence’, quoting Jami; ‘This universe is changed and renewed unceasingly at every moment and at every breath. Every instant one universe is annihilated and another resembling it takes its place though the majority of men do not perceive this, as God has said:” But they are in doubt regarding the new creation.”

And a few pages on: ‘At every moment one universe is annihilated and another similar to it takes it place.’ Still though the notion of defined moments and succession thereof.

Submitted by Harold Mozley

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The note to this verse says; ‘This refers to the Sufi doctrine of ‘renewed creation,’ developed by Ibn al-‘Arabi. It is held that there is, in all life and creation, an oscillation between existence and non–existence at each moment. Jahiji, author of the most authoritative commentary on The Garden of Mystery writes that this oscillation exists as God destroys and renews creation in each moment.’

- submitted by Harold Mozley

"The material and spiritual worlds sprang from one Breath, Coming into and departing existence in that same Breath.”

From The Garden of Mystery by Mahmud Shabistari (translated by Robert Abdul Hayr Darr)