Dear Dirty America

I’m told that some Sufi sheikhs don’t allow their students to read alone the classical, eternal knowledge and wisdom of Ibn al’ Arabi. The work is so challenging it needs a scholar to lead through it any seeker of truth. Arabi lived during the 12 and 13th centuries, and is noted for his insight into oneness of being, and God’s immanence and transcendence.

From “The Bezels of Wisdom”:

It is known that when the Scriptures speak of the Reality they speak in a way that yields to the generality of men the immediately apparent meaning. The elite, on the other hand, understand all the meanings inherent in that utterance, in whatever terms it is expressed.

The truth is that the Reality is manifest in every created being and in every concept, while He is [at the same time] hidden from all understanding, except for one who holds that the Cosmos is His form and His identity. This is the Nature, the Manifest, while He is also unmanifested Spirit, the Unmanifest. In this sense He is, in relation to the manifested forms of the Cosmos, the Spirit that determines those forms (the Wisdom of Exaltation in the Word of Noah, 73).

My mind grapples with the inflating and deflating of Arabi’s Reality, and where it crouches. Arabi takes us into Reality being the Cosmos, in form and identity, yet he sucks us out again, only to throw us into a more complicated puzzle of reality — the unmanifested Spirit.