Adelphiasophism
Ibn Arabi and Sufi Mysticism
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Tuesday, October 23, 2001
Failing to Understand
“The Twenty-Nine pages” is a pamphlet on the work of the Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi (1165-1240 AD), who apparently still retains a following among some New Agers. A friend urged me to read this and another book on Arabi “with an open mind,” which really means read it with a child-like gullibility. The other book, a more substantial work, “Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi,” actually says on page three of the Introduction:
In speaking of a genius as complex as Ibn Arabi, so radically alien to literal dogmatic religion and to the schematizations such as religion encourages, some writers have employed the word “syncretism.” This is the summary, insidious, and facile kind of explanation that appeals to the dogmatic mind alarmed at the operations of a thinking which obeys only the imperatives of its integral norm but whose personal character does not impair to rigor. To content oneself with such an explanation is to confess one’s failure, one’s inability to gain so much as an intimation of this norm which cannot be reduced to a school or other collective conformation.
So much for open-mindedness. This author, a man called Henry Corbin, seeks to preclude any criticism before anyone has got past the third page of the introduction. He must expect it, and have a reason to. He has. He admits Arabi is not rigorous and his system obeys its own norms only. It follows it is useless in real life because that is outside its norms. Yet, critics are dogmatic in the mind, facile, insidious (a word much better suited to the practitioners of patriarchal propaganda) and summary, a necessity for anyone who wants to do anything else in their life besides reading the vast corpus of unintelligible work by Arabi. For my part I readily “confess” my “failure!” What I read of Arabi can only be considered as impressive at all in the context in which it was written, approaching a thousand years ago and in a Moslem society, although admittedly when Moslems were a good deal more enlightened than the Christians of the time, and than most Moslems are today.
Ibn Arabi is indeed syncretistic and eclectic. His work is a miasma of ancient philosophies all roped into the idea of maintaining the idea of a monotheistic God being at the root of everything within or transcending the universe. The Arabic equivalents of Greek “Logos,” Platonic “Forms” and “Nous” show strong pickings from the Greek philosophers, and Zoroastrianism. Sufi is not a Semitic word though the Arabs relate it to their word for wool. The scholar, Biruni, in the tenth century, knew it was the Greek word “sophos” meaning wisdom.
Corbin seems to take his readers to be fools, just as most propagandists of patriarchal religions and “esoteric wisdom” do. Like those of his type, he bandies about the word “spirituality” knowing it impresses the gullible for whom it is a profound mystery. Corbin goes further than some in partially saying what he understands by it, but it remains a mystery: “It concerns the most secret and most profound life of the soul.”
The superlatives are another trick for the unwary. He is not talking merely about the “secret” and “profound life of the soul,” which would be a miraculous task for anyone, but the utmost of these things! He means us to gasp mentally. Note also the implication that he knows these most secret and profound things. In fact he knows no more about them than anyone else does—nothing! Soul is a metaphor for life and beyond that it is meaningless. When life ceases, it does not go somewhere else. It simply ends. It is a function of the body that was living. Gurus, mystics, priests and prophets are charlatans as soon as they claim to know what we do not know about souls and spirits. Those who are not out-and-out crooks are hysterical or deluded, and only a few were trying to collect diligently and improve upon ancient speculation in the light of their own objectives.
Doubtless that is what Arabi tried to do, but ancient speculation was merely speculation and did not have to be verified. Only those who believe it is based on some lost knowledge now take any notice of it, but a million years of study will get nothing from it because it bares no relationship with reality. In 200 years of scientific investigation, and another 3000 years of written records, not a jot of useful practice has emerged from any of this, and nothing confirms that bodies need a soul or spirit to live. It is no less sensible to say a body needs “envy” or “courage” to live, or “a hope” or “a resignation” to live. Can any mystic or prophet prove these are any different from soul or spirit?
Spirituality is best explained quite simply as that quality of awe felt at the wonder of Nature. It is difficult to feel these days because patriarchy has so debased our respect for Nature that we are predisposed to hate it rather than love it. Teaching our proper relationship with Nature would regenerate it.
Corbin also uses another common trick of these tricksters. He insists that we will not understand without accepting certain conditions. When we think carefully about what he asks, we find it is to reject the understanding we already have. “You will not be able to understand my mystic revelation that black is white until you put aside your convictions that white is white and black is black.”
We are therefore not allowed to analyse Arabi’s doctrines because we will “distort their perspectives” with our western categorizations, but neither are we, because it is Moslem, to view it as “Arab philosophy.” We have therefore to view it in its own terms, and when we do that black must be white! Today, an angel or the name of an angel explains nothing. A whole angelology and the myriad names of God are no more of an explanation of anything. These and many other absurdities have to be accepted in Arabi’s system. We can read everything that Arabi wrote—a great deal—and can only finish up more confused than before.
The author of “T29P” says “Arabi was the first to put forth a synthetic and systematic theory, or rather a group of theories, derived from different sources and brought into one unity.” This is an admission of eclecticism if not syncretism, but we find that he saw all religions coming together under a higher form of Islam such as he tried to synthesize, and that is indeed syncretism.
Occam’s Razor
Such systems as Arabi’s, while doubtless serving a function in pre-scientific times serve little more than a historic function today, in showing a little about the evolution of human understanding. It is almost valueless in itself except for pithy statements that can be taken in isolation and still mean something to the modern mind. One of the reasons it is valueless is that it consists almost entirely of unjustified assertions or assumptions based on the patriarchal religious monotheism common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Arabi, unless it is merely the author of “T29P,” gives us bare assertion after bare assertion, and expects us to accept them all.
Why should we believe an unsubstantiated assertion? Will I believe anything a used car dealer will tell me? Will I believe that a stage magician really has psychic powers? Will I believe that the host at a Catholic mass is really the body of Christ, or anyone else when it looks for all the world like a thin wafer of biscuit? Will I believe the spokespeople of the tobacco companies when they promise me that cigarettes are healthy? Sensible people are skeptical, and with reason and the method we have of discovering about Nature is based on being skeptical until we can confirm something.
Multiplication of entities. The author of “T29P” tells us the heart is not really the heart. It is several other things apparently. Ho hum! Metaphors and analogies are as common as the entities that are thrown up paragraph by paragraph in this philosophy! Duality of anything can scarcely be tolerated by Arabi who therefore has to say that a shadow is the same as its source. Plainly, it cannot be, but false analogies and paradoxes like these make some think these inscrutable works are profound.
William of Occam (1270-1349 AD) was perhaps reading Arabi when he decided to formulate his famous principle of speculation called his “Razor.”
Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.
He actually said: “It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer,” but it means that unnecessarily complex hypotheses and systems should be rejected when simpler ones will suffice. Arabi lived in the previous century and had no such theorem, as is plain—he multiplies and multiplies again. It might seem profound to some, but it is tedious and childish and only acceptable because it was pre-scientific speculation from long ago. Its antiquity does not make it correct. Almost all ancient speculation was quite wrong even when it was not aimed at defending absurd theologies.
The purpose of the endless creation of speculative cycle on speculative cycle is to maintain the rigid monotheism that patriarchal religions insist upon on pain of death. Even so, some Moslems declared Ibn Arabi an heretic and ordered his death.
Monotheism
Were it not for His form, in all existents, the world would have no existence.
This is at the start of “The Twenty-Nine Pages” and requires us to accept from the outset that Nature depends on the pre-existence of God. The older, always called Pagan, idea was that Nature itself was divine. The founders of patriarchal religions took over religious control of the people by placing a male God behind Nature, put humanity in charge of Nature and thus relegated Nature to a resource to be exploited. Exploited, it has been, and will continue to be increasingly exploited until we return to the idea of the divinity of Nature and our need to revere the source of our life. It is difficult today, after millennia of indoctrination in patriarchal monotheism, for anyone to challenge it, yet it has to be done even though it is often hard to begin a discussion, there is so little common ground.
Continuing the theme of monotheism, “T29P” tells us that “Reality is One.” It is another assertion. It has no basis in the least and in fact all of our common sense tells us it is not “One.” What is so wonderful about Nature is that it is diverse almost to the point of infinity—so far as human beings are concerned. The let out is the word “ultimately,” With the word included and understanding the basis of reality to be energy, it is possible to agree, though it now no longer leads us where Arabi intended—to God. Then we discover that “Absolute Being” is a necessary “Essence,” the source of all that exists. Again it sounds like a primitive speculation about energy but is intended to point to God.
Arabi distinguishes four planes of being, but only one is independent of a human thinker (or God conceived of as a large human), so the others can have no existence for anyone who rejects the idea of a thinking divinity at the source of everything. Assuming a God at the source of everything will manifest itself in God appearing in everything. Believers will consider this as proof of God, but it merely reflects their original assumption.
Why must God be assumed? He is seen as male and does not and cannot give birth, so he makes or creates things, like a potter in the biblical example. It is pure anthropomorphism, yet many people cannot see it. Why must the universe have been made—or even born—at all? Why cannot it be eternal itself, if God can be? Why do believers have no trouble in accepting an eternal God but cannot accept an eternal universe? Arabi, it seems at one point anyway, sees the universe as eternal only in the mind of God, but this seems an unnecessary multiplication of entities. If God can be eternal, then why cannot the universe be the same?
“One is Lord and Many are slaves” is the typical oriental idea of God as a despot. Patriarchal religions contrive to see Him as a despot even when they tell us He is entirely Love. Humanity are His slaves. The reason churches hold “services” is precisely that—in Babylonian religion, humanity was created by the gods to serve them as their slaves, feeding them and clothing them. The beneficiaries were not gods but priests. The concept has been with religion ever since. The word used in the bible is the word for slave, though modern translators render it as “servant.” It illustrates the dishonesty of the ministers of the patriarchal religions however trivial it might seem. That humans are slaves of God is a degrading and obnoxious concept that justifies tyranny and stems from ancient society. It has no place in modern life nor in any Neo-Pagan Nature religion, where all of the products of Nature’s womb are equal. Human beings have no justification for driving any other species extinct. That we do it merely foreshadows our own fate.
The absurd patriarchal monotheism of Judaism, Christianity and Islam reduces the wonderful diversity of Nature to a single Super Being, then demands that we can only experience wonder and awe through this imaginary father. Religion and life are reduced to a baleful monotony and an impossible task of seeking variety through impossible links to God. It is another gross error of patriarchal religion, scarcely eased by Arabi’s admixture of Neo-Platonism and Buddhism. Mystical experience is not a vision of the One but a vision of the interconnectedness of ourselves with everything else in Nature. In conception, it is the opposite of Arabi’s idea, and even dismissing the conception in favour of the experience is harmful because it seems falsely to uphold erroneous and therefore dangerous delusions. Believing in God is dangerous because it stops us from seeing the absolute importance of the life we have. Without realizing this, we waste our lives. Children will make more of their lives when they are taught there are no second chances. Make the best of it and forget the idea of another one elsewhere.
Nature
“T29P” starts to use the expression “External World” apparently to mean what we understand as reality. Since a distinction is assumed between Mind and the “External World,” the external world seems to equate with the Material Universe. These assumptions, often unstated, at least in this summary, become extremely irritating to the critical mind. We have no compelling evidence that Mind can exist without a material basis—in fact in a brain!
“God is immanent in all that hears and sees.” Make this Nature and we can agree. The Goddess of Neo-Paganism is not sentient except insofar as the sentient creatures that are part of her give her senses. The same is true of intelligence. An eye is an organ of vision, but is it true to say that an eye can see? What sees is the creature with the eye. We might be now at the stage of evolution of Nature that humans will become her senses and her intelligence. We cannot do it if we despise and exploit Nature to destruction. Let us realize that we are part of Nature and have a symbiotic relationship with the rest of her. Let us realize that we have a duty to preserve and protect her. By co-operating with Nature instead of fighting and exploiting her, we can be Nature’s hands and brain.
If you regard Him through Him then He regards Himself through Himself, which is the state of unity, but if you regard Him through yourself then the unity vanishes.
It seems a typical mystical conundrum but is utterly simple once He (God) is understood as Nature. Arabi asserts (as ever) that everything and all things are God. He is simply equating God with Nature, which might be permissible were it not for the human tendency to personify. When God is identified with Nature, sooner or later Nature will disappear again and God will emerge as a figmentary force behind it. “Everything” in the real world is Nature itself. It is the real world. God is superfluous and exists only from the 2500 year old influence of the patriarchal religions on our way of thinking.
We have been brought up, through patriarchal arrogance, to see ourselves as above Nature. God Himself made us stewards over it. From this viewpoint no unity with Nature will be seen. We have to see the whole from the viewpoint of Nature, and when we do, we immediately perceive ourselves as part of it. Everything is kin in Nature and what we appreciate is Nature’s “kinunity.” Christianity disparages reality and Nature in favour of a figmentary world and a figmentary God. Real life is a Vale of Woe, and we only begin to live when we die in reality. There is no way of uniting these utterly opposite views, which is why patriarchal religion has to be rejected. A mystical experience is not an experience of the Godhead but an experience of Nature’s kinunity!
Arabi tells us that the One and the Many are in total reciprocity so that “the Creator is the created,” “Reality is Appearance” “Reality is not Appearance and Appearance is not Reality,” and so on. Arabi seems to want to have his cake and eat it. These are not paradoxes the author of “T29P” tells us. Taken as expressions of Nature, it is possible to accept them, but spoken of God they are simply paradoxes. It is hard for the rational mind to understand why believers think God, the Almighty, is incapable of explaining things to us simply. The rational mind tells us we are not hearing God’s explanations, but explanations of men who want to use belief for control and profit. In Nature, everything is born of something else. Males cannot give birth. That is why Nature is conceived of as a Goddess. “The Creator is the created” makes sense of Nature which is self-generating.
Transcendence and Spirituality
Patriarchal religions have to maintain that the “spiritual world,” meaning the “supernatural world,” is prime. That is because they have to have an eternal life after natural death as a bogus reward for faith. In Nature, there are different ways in which we personally “live” after death. One is through our children and another is through our actions in life, that can have profound effects, even after we are dead. Of course, when we die in Nature we return to her, thus leaving space and providing nutrients for future life. Thus we live on impersonally too. We are not just “spiritual food,” we are food!
Paradoxical or nonsensical, now the author of “T29P” tells us that matter is spiritualised. Perhaps he meant “sacred,” in which case we agree in the sense that Nature is sacred. He seems to be trying to find an explanation of mystical experiences however. The most likely explanation is that it is a psychological phenomenon which comes out of a mental realization of the kinunity of Nature, but as yet no one has a scientific explanation. We shall eventually have one without invoking a God of the Gaps or inventing non-explanations or confusing the puzzled even more with paradox. If attributing matter to the spiritual makes us respect the world more, then the result of this might be positive, but we are faced with the fact that one benefit in a sea of ills cannot be a philosophy.
Multiplying entities, or at least names, again, Arabi says “Haqq” is transcendence, and transcendence seems to equate with what we would today call energy. Yet we have been led to believe that it is something standing outside the universe. Once we define the Universe as being everything, it immediately precludes the possibility of something being outside it. It is possible, no doubt, that there are parts of the Universe that can never be accessible to us, but they are still parts of the Universe and the transcendent God must stand outside them. No Adelphiasophist pretends that humanity knows everything, but patriarchal theologians always want to square the circle, and, when they cannot, it becomes a mystery of God, or our feeble lack of comprehension of Godly matters. The explanation that it is a mystery of God is merely playing about with contradictory meanings of words, then pretending to simple believers that it is too profound for us.
If we accept the theologians’ violations of logic and language, we have no choice but to blame our incomprehension on God’s infinite wisdom. Yet it ought to be plain, even to simple humans, that we do not have to accept the theologians’ contradictions, tricks and falsehoods. Arabi makes “Immanence” equal Nature, and Nature is sufficiently understandable to us because she has given us life and nurture, in fact, in her womb. That is simple enough to understand and ties in with our direct experience. It should therefore be simple enough to understand that our duty in life is to preserve the womb that served us, for our own children and all other creatures that depend on it.
The Perfect Sufi might have a glimpse of transcendence. This alludes to mysticism again, and it has been explained as an appreciation of the kinunity of Nature not of any state outside of Nature, any phony unity of God and men called transcendence. It is utterly natural, though it uses aspects of our consciousness that are not properly developed, and perhaps never can be while we pursue false trails instead of genuine ones. Priests and prophets set the wrong trails. When we start to follow the right ones, we shall have more experiences of Nature’s kinunity. Mystical experience is not touching God or the beyond, it is apprehending Nature in totality. There can be no one who has not experienced it in embryo, in a storm or a glade or glimpsing a vista. Arabi says then “there is no duality of subject and object, knower and known.” That is precisely right but Nature is the unity, not our imaginary idol, God.
Immanence and Transcendence
God is in everything, yet above all things.
He is immanent yet transcendental. Patriarchal religious leaders want us to believe ten impossible things before breakfast, then they know we are gullible and malleable. Again they offer us a contradiction, but one which is possible with God because everything is possible for Him. He can be dead and alive at the same time. It is a proof of divinity and we can be the same if we have faith!! The truth is that we are dead not alive after natural death. Few people are willing to accept this simple fact of life—we die! We convince ourselves that we do not because most of us are so arrogant we cannot conceive of the world continuing without us. Some are also scared of death and it mollifies their terror to pretend that we do not die. We cannot die and remain alive and God cannot be within something and outside of it at the same time. The Christian God cannot be a man and remain a god. He is either a god all along or He becomes a man and dies like a man. He cannot be a man with the powers of a god or he is no longer a man—men do not have the powers of gods. To have the powers of a god shows that He remains a god and therefore it is impossible for Him to understand what it is like to suffer like a man. What is immanent does not also stand without.
Understand that Nature is divine, and nothing else need be so considered. Let us seek to understand and feel our kinunity. In principle it cuts out multiple entities and dubious theories of the names of God. Seeking unity with God, or realizing it, if we are obliged, with Arabi, to recognize it is already present, is like seeking unity with a television image. The picture is generated in our mind from an array of lines and dots. God is equally an image in our heads. Nature is real and exists. It is purely ingratitude and self-obsession that prevents us from seeing Her as our nurturer and infinitely more valuable than our mental idols. We can feel our unity with Nature, providing that we are willing to, and we can understand Nature because Nature has given us the tools to do so—it is called scientific method.
If “Essence” is energy, then it is not transcendental. What is transcendental and so beyond the Universe cannot be known to us, because the Universe to us is all that exists. If we can never know something then it does not exist so far as we are concerned, and it is irrelevant to us. Even the Greeks 2500 years ago knew these things, and Arabi uses their speculations in his eclectic mix, but he cannot use reasoning like this that relegates God to the irrelevant. If God is “unknowable and incommunicable and beyond all proof,” then why should we bother about Him, wherever He is?
God may be called transcendent in the sense of being absolute.
“God may be called transparent in the sense of being colourless,” but so what? What does it tell us? Does it help us to live or feed our children? Why should we have to postulate a self-caused God to give us purpose or whatever? Why cannot Nature be self-caused, saving us the wasteful concept of God? Why must divinity be posited “in contradistinction” to Nature?
Creation and Death
“Body, soul and spirit.” Plainly we have a body, and in the west we assume a soul which carries with it life so that when it leaves the body we can live eternally wherever the soul finishes up. Arabi multiplies entities and insists on a separate spirit too, just as the ancient Egyptians had Kas and Bas and goodness knows what else. Arabi accepts that soul is “animal life,” which is all that it is. When life goes, the soul departs elsewhere—we give up the ghost. When the TV breaks down, no one imagines its soul has gone to TV heaven. Spirit, which most westerners would identify with the soul, turns out to be the personality, what most people in the west think lives on after death. To think that we must survive after death is again part of our hubris, but compounded with fear of death. These are strong emotions and easily taken advantage of. Even the biblical Jesus warned about the priests of the Second Temple extracting the last mites from widows. Widows want to keep sweet with God so that they will have a chance of living again with their deceased husband. They would better spend their pennies feeding their children than smug priests.
We deceive ourselves and others to pretend that Jesus died for us, and through faith in Him, we shall have eternal life. It is a disgraceful scam that would never be allowed in a just society. Taking money from poor and gullible people under false pretences is rightly declared a serious crime on the grounds that credulous people must be protected from confidence tricksters. Yet patriarchal religions have got rich through it, and are accepted without question because they are called religions. Let them be, but they are confidence tricks whatever they choose to be called. People must think about what eternal life would mean rather than cringing in fearful self-deception about natural death. Eternal life would be worse than death. The punishment of the Wandering Jew was to live until Jesus chose to return. If the world is never to end, he lives forever. Living forever, for this man is a punishment!
“A continuous process of annihilation and recreation” is what Nature is, though death and birth would be more appropriate processes to describe it. The ancient Great Goddess was often depicted with a death aspect, which puzzled some Victorian scholars who saw her as an idealized mother figure, to parallel, for simple people, the idealized father Christians worshipped. The Great Mother is Nature, and Nature gives life and takes it away! Eternal life does not exist and cannot. Life only exists because there is death. Nature is fundamentally dual, if not plural, and the attempts of patriarchal philosophers and theologians to force it into a monopole system is stupid and futile. We should not resent death, but should welcome it, especially if we have used our lives productively for the benefits of future life. We should be happy to die to leave space and nutrients on the planet for future life and our own children. It is an ultimate sacrifice that we should welcome and be proud to make.
Seemingly contrary to what has already been asserted, “T29P” now says that the Universe is eternal and not created, and there can be no such thing as the “End of the World.” That blows out of the water the whole of Jewish and Christian eschatology. Jesus was expecting a new world called the Kingdom of God. Arabi’s synopsist said previously, it was eternal only in God’s mind, but the external universe did indeed have an existence in time. Another circle to square! Arabi also adds that the world not only has no end, it has no purpose. He begins to sound like a believer in the Goddess not the solitary God. It seems reasonable to believe that the Universe is eternal. It cannot have been created unless there is a God, and that is a hypothesis that even the religious Pascal found unnecessary.
God wills nothing and commands nothing the existence of which is not made necessary by the very nature and laws of things themselves.
God therefore only has to include as one of His laws that “anything that is ready by its very nature and laws must be,” and He can go back into eternal repose leaving everything to carry on without Him. He is the “Prime Mover” in this idea. Otherwise God is wasting his time carefully willing every act that is made necessary into being. If this is what He is doing, He does not sound too intelligent, and, if He is the Prime Mover, since He has moved things and put them into evolution according to their nature and laws, we can forget Him and accept that only Nature matters to us any more.
Arabi comes up with more paradoxes, or contradictions, for that is what they really are in the monotheist’s attempts to keep God and His world from duality. Now the Universe is not eternal again “in Essence,” but it is “in Form.” The impression is that of the philosopher having contradictions pointed out to him and being obliged to add a further layer of refinement to explain the previous contradiction. Since Arabi is reputed to have written between 300 and 800 books, it must have been a long process. It can only be seen as evasive. It does not matter much in practice whether the Universe began spontaneously or exists eternally or both (time began spontaneously, or birth is an illusion, just as parallel lines seem to merge at a distance). In any such case, no Creator is necessary. Nature exists in its own right.
Reason and Science
Principle of Universal Reason. It sounds like the old Stoic idea of God, and that in turn sounds like the idea of Nature being divine at least in the sense that it is a divine order or harmony with no anthropomorphic God behind it. It is, in other words, the laws of Nature. Because they are laws which represent order and harmony, we can investigate them scientifically. Science begins with the working hypothesis—practical assumption, if you like—that the laws of Nature are consistent, regular and repeatable. If they were not, science could discover nothing because the results every time an observation was made would differ. They do not differ, at least when certain conditions are met, and so Nature’s laws can be worked out through science.
Many people do not seem to understand science, which is a surprising fact in our society, and another indictment of our educational system. Science is not arbitrary. It does not, like Arabi lay down postulates by assertion. It makes hypotheses, perhaps in the form of tentative assertions, and then seeks ways of testing them in practice. If practice fails to uphold the hypothesis then it is rejected, and the scientist must look for one that does work in practice. Science is therefore always tested against Nature and only those assertions that match natural behaviour under the given conditions are accepted. That is a world of difference from making any assertions that suit your presumptions and insisting they are true contrary to experience. We have evolved the intelligence to be able to learn about the Goddess, and it is incumbent upon us to do so, but not by tearing her apart. That is foolish, and irresponsible to all subsequent life. Arabi understands this when he writes:
[Man] is the only creature in whose power lies the possibility of knowing God absolutely. It is through Man that God knows Himself, for he is the manifested consciousness of God.
Replacing “God” with the true divinity, Nature, this observation is true and significant for us all. Humanity, through seeking the Goddess and knowing her both emotionally and rationally, has the potential to be her consciousness. It is quite impossible so long as we continue to disparage Nature in favour of a fabrication of our own hubris. We are a part of Nature and the imaginings of our brains are part of us. How then can our imaginings be the God that controls Nature? Our God is humanoid in essence because we are made in His image, “Genesis” tells us. Yet the Greek philosophers before 500 BC knew that the gods of black men were black and the gods of Thracians were ruddy skinned, the gods of horses, if they could describe them, would be horses, and the gods of oxen would be oxen. God is constructed in our imaginings like us, not the other way around. It is the Goddess that is primal. Yet despite this insight, we are immediately shown that it is accidental rather than part of a true philosophy when the heart is thought of as the source of reason, another ancient erroneous idea.
“Cause and effect are identical,” we learn. It is more medieval nonsense aimed at maintaining the unity of God contrary to our direct experience. Cause and effect are distinctly dualistic and Islam demands a single God. It is true that our modern discoveries in science suggest that cause and effect at a subatomic level is not that at the macroscopic level we live in, but it is not something that needs to bother us unless we are atomic physicists. Newton’s laws, which do not work in particular circumstances of size and velocity, still work perfectly well at our own level and rate of motion. At our macroscopic size we even know of the effects of feedback and non-linearity, but they do not dispose of cause and effect but show that they can amplify acts in a way that once would have been surprising. In everyday experience cause and effect are facts of life, and can usually be seen and separated. It might be argued that what is seen at the extremely small scale that quantum effects begin to manifest is more fundamental, but why should any scale be more fundamental than another. They are all aspects of Nature. That is what is important, not fantasies and figments.
Dwelling on time, Arabi gives us more evasion. “We cannot say yesterday precedes today in time.” Why not? Time is the succession of events that we can record at some spot, and in this succession yesterday preceded today in the order of recording and therefore in time. Again he sees a danger in time being divisive and immediately has to find a way out. Effectively, he claims time is a point and not a continuum as we know from our everyday experience and common sense. Concept upon concept, definition upon redefinition, evasion upon paradox and contradiction, the whole gets more and more entangled—to what purpose? It is to preserve a non-existent unity. Speculations like these can go on and on “ad infinitum” and explain nothing because they are utterly divorced from reality. Arabi creates an unravellable Gordian knot of impenetrable conjecture and invites us to believe it is a profound insight into some underlying reality. If it had been so, Arabi would not have been an obscure Sufi mystic but would have been one of the founders of modern science. I cannot see what divine names can explain, whether there is one of them or a million—another ancient error.
Humanity
No one can be perfect unless they understand our Oneness with Nature. By appreciating Nature everyone has a better chance of achieving a mystical experience. Paganism used herbs as medicines but under patriarchal influence demons were considered the cause and ritual or prayer the cure. No proper progress could be made until the idea of demonic causation of illness was rejected. The same is true of Nature. How can we approach Nature properly while imagining that She is ours and not that we are Hers. Most of us get the feeling of mysticism in a small way whenever we pause at the awe we feel at Nature. Those who appreciate Nature as divine improve their chances of amplifying the feeling.
Through the Perfect Man alone all God’s Perfections are revealed.
Again, make God Nature and it becomes immediately obviously true. “Perfect” here must be taken to be those who accept Nature as the primal Goddess and reject God. Yet humanity is not special in Nature. We might value our brain or our brains but we have no reason to believe that brains would not eventually evolve elsewhere if not in humans, or will not evolve again if humanity destroys itself. If we aspire to be the intellect and consciousness of the Goddess, we have first to make sure that the Goddess is able to sustain us. At present She and we are failing.
Evolution has given us intelligence, but if this is not used as Nature’s intelligence and therefore to assist Nature, it will be used against her and be self-destructive. Humanity is not and will never be the “object of Creation.” Creation is the whole, and the whole must be greater than any of its parts. Human hubris and arrogance leads its philosophers to say we are the “pinnacle” or “object” of Creation. It leads to an utter disregard for the rest of Nature, which is inferior, and so becomes inimical to our ever understanding Nature properly.
To assume a purpose in Creation is to assume God, both by believing in a Creation and because a purpose implies an intention of an intelligence. Only with the evolution of humanity did Nature ever come across the concept of purpose, so far as we know, even though it might have happened elsewhere in the Universe many times over. If a purpose must be sought in Nature, it is simply a tendency toward local complexity, which is the force behind evolution. The idea of an intelligent and indeed infinite being, such as God is imagined, wanting to make people to worship Him, defines God as a megalomaniac. It is a primitive attempt to explain God’s purpose in the Creative Act. If God created the Universe to satisfy His craving for kneebending and adulation, He is plainly an insane God. Maybe that is why the world seems insane, but the truth is that the distraction of humanity from its proper regard for Nature is what is insane. If believers in God dislike megalomania in humans then they should dislike it in their God even more.
Man is the focus of the divine consciousness of God.
It is pure arrogance and could only have been written by a man and not by a God. Arabi adds:
God has so exalted man that He placed under his control all that is in the heavens and the earth from the highest to the lowest.
This belief is the cause of much of the trouble in the world today. Can any believer in God accept that it is true when it elevates men into being the gods of all they survey—the gods of the earth. This too is no law of any god but a man-made rule meant to justify exploitation and hierarchy. The king becomes the top man, God’s vice-regent on earth. He in turn appoints his ministers and so on. Nature belongs to God’s top man and he can use it how he wishes, while peasants can scratch an existence and pay too much of it to his master. Humanity has no stewardship over Nature. We are symbiotic with Nature, but have become a parasite on Nature, not a partner with the rest of natural things. If we do not find humility before Nature, then we shall self-destruct. By continuing to destroy Her, the time will come when we shall find that we have destroyed ourselves by severing a vital artery in the Goddess’s body. The warnings are issued repeatedly but we ignore them. If we become the “preserver and maintainer” of the world then we shall be “guarded and honoured” just as the rest of Nature is.
Deification of Man. Humans always have aspired to be Gods. They want to be divine, and Arabi takes much from the Gnostics who saw a spark of divinity in us all. More hubris. Though men might think they are gods, they are not, and are unlikely to ever be unless they change their ways. We are less than Nature, and can never equal it, so the only chance we have of being gods is to unite with Nature as one by bringing our symbiotic relation closer, and becoming the consciousness of Nature herself. If we think of all of Nature as sacred, then we are too, but the important caveat is that we are not exclusively sacred. That is delusion.
Innate Knowledge
Many of these mystics, like the priests and ministers of patriarchal religions, claim a knowledge they do not have. They claim it to gain a gullible following who will keep them in comfort and satisfy their yearning for power. Social control and profit are the motives of orthodox religions, and only the believers refuse to see it.
The only innate knowledge we have resides in instinct, a form of behaviour that has evolved because it was to the advantage of animals that had it. Inasmuch as certain behaviours are coded genetically, they were passed on by animals that succeeded better in reproducing. These are called instincts and sometimes are still useful in civilized society, though equally or more often they might now be counter-productive. The extreme flight response conditioned by panic was useful, and sometimes might still be, but in crowded societies can be disastrous. Now, a cool head might be preferable. So, acquired responses and knowledge are usually considered better than instinctive ones, these days.
If reason and intuition should conflict, the former should always be sacrificed to the latter.
This is ridiculous advice. No knowledge other than instincts like panic, if they are classified as “knowledge,” can be beyond reason to a rational animal. Something “beyond reason” is unreasonable or irrational by definition. All knowledge should be tested against reason when it can be.
Intuition is not, as many think, irrational knowledge. It is an unconscious assessment of the facts available, and it is useful particularly when information is incomplete. It often works best when the unconscious mind has time to review the problem, by “sleeping on it.” When we do not have enough information to make a rational assessment, we will trust to intuition, but our unconscious mind has been doing what our conscious mind is unable to do—come to a conclusion based on the information available and a lot of unconsciously retained previous experience. It evolved through evolution, long before reason had ever been thought of, to allow judgements without reason, based on experience. Experience is plainly an important factor because “fortune favours the prepared mind,” as they say. People with sufficient experience of similar situations intuitively do the right things—at least more often than not—and find themselves surviving when other die, for example. No one would go into a jungle full of dangerous predators with an inexperienced guide.
Provided that there is sufficient information and time to assess it rationally, reason should prevail over intuition, but it must be remembered that intuition will be throwing up proposals anyway, and these have to be considered as part of the information being rationally assessed. If it is impossible to come to a rational conclusion, through lack of time or information, then intuition should be followed naturally, but intuitive conclusions will usually be conservative ones, ones that offer the least risk. A cautionary principle should apply when reason cannot be applied and intuition has to be relied on. In a dangerous situation, a group of people ought to follow the most experienced in such situations for that person will be more likely to make correct intuitive decisions. Equally, we should be aware that intuition moves us to caution unless we are in the direst situation and caution has to be thrown to the winds. Government ministers might feed beefburgers to their children to assure us they are safe, but my intuition is to distrust them and not eat beefburgers. If I like beefburgers, it is tough on me, but intuition warns me to be cautious. People will accuse me of being irrational because beefburgers are safe and the Minister of State proved it dramatically, but I have not personally seen any convincing evidence that they are safe and prefer to stick to my intuition. Intuition warns us against risky actions.
Prophets and saints have no monopoly of intuition, particularly when they are dead. Arabi is puffing the power of the religious elite, particularly, for him, the mystics, but religious men rarely are altruistic—they have their own agenda, and should be intuitively distrusted. Whatever secrets mullahs, priests, prophets, saints or whatever claim, they are men not God, and we do not have to believe them when they claim a knowledge of divine things. Esoteric knowledge, when it means intuition can be experienced by everyone—is experienced by everyone daily. No one bothers to make conscious rational assessments about precisely when they will feed the cats. They do it intuitively based on certain signals. Mystical experiences are also had by most people, though they might not be recognized as such because they are led to believe they have something to do with God, and they cannot see God in them.
Intuition does not and cannot yield certain knowledge, as Arabi tells us. That it why it is a cautionary faculty. We might be invited to spend our life savings on a share tip, but intuition would restrain most people from doing it. As a cautionary principle of living, it helps us. If it encouraged us into wild adventures, it would have been eliminated by evolution long ago. To pretend that intuition is God’s knowledge is to elevate intuition into some sort of mystic experience and not the everyday one it is, but worse is that it elevates those who say they practise it to the level of God. Like all charlatans they claim contact with God to the exclusion of others, who must follow them because they have God’s attention. It has been the way of madness and murder since the patriarchal religions were invented. Elsewhere Arabi is said to be contemptuous of those who claim to be God through mysticism. What then is he saying? He constantly makes, then seems to disclaim, assertions.
No one but a mystic can realize the full meaning of such knowledge.
Quite. But mystics, or rogues who claim to be mystics, can use a pretence of knowing God’s mind to control people that believe them. That is what all patriarchal religion is about. Plotinus is quoted as saying, “the vision is there for him who will see it,” but it applies to the mystical vision of the totality of Nature, not any vision of God (unless the two are equated, in which God is not an intelligence, but simply a vision).
The mystic gains perfect knowledge of reality.
While this might be, in a sense, true when Nature’s kinunity is perceived, it is also the utmost of arrogance and dishonesty. Such knowledge can only be emotional and not practical knowledge. No mystic has come out of a trance and told us he has had a vision of how to build a flying machine, or cure leprosy. Mystical knowledge, bragged about, is useful only to those who claim it inasmuch as they can persuade the gullible they have some power that others have not. The way to mystical knowledge is by appreciating Nature as sacred, then enjoying it fully, not by listening to sweet talking boasters. Secret and mystical knowledge has always been a lie, and worse, a scam.
Duty and Responsibility
To believe your actions as belonging to yourself is to be in the presence of pure darkness… The real agent is God Himself.
Judaism and Christianity tell us we have free will, but here Arabi says we have not, and to think it is Satanic. Patriarchal religions want to blame people for sins and leave God to take the credit for any good acts. Whether it is through submission to God or the sacrifice of Christ to redeem us from our sins, we cannot be responsible for what good we do, and the Catholic Church goes so far as to take absolution of our sins on to itself through the confessional in return for regular coins in the platter. Duty and decency demands that people should be responsible for what they do. Heinous crimes whether against humanity or against Nature cannot be absolved by any church or appeals to God. “The real agent is God Himself.” Well!
To worship a star or a tree is to worship a god who is but a partial manifestation of the real God.
Write “Nature” for “God” and we have an element of recognizable truth. Arabi introduces here his obvious syncretism. He is accepting that people worship partial gods and encouraging them to worship the one true one that encompasses all the others. The fact is that the one true God exists as synapses in our heads and nowhere else. It is less even than a star or a tree. It is an imaginary idol. Nature worship is always considered as equal to polytheism because everything in Nature was considered to have its own spirit. It is an old idea that is now outdated and redundant. There is only one Nature because it is the Universe—everything that exists. So there is nothing necessarily polytheistic in “Immanence” as Arabi says, taking Immanence to mean Nature.
Nothing is evil.
We might equally say, “nothing is good.” Arabi dislikes duality in anything as imimical to his theory of Oneness. Good and evil are opposites on a pole and cannot exist alone. That is why the whole notion of an entirely good world is absurd. It is contrary to Nature. The lion cannot sit down with the lamb unless it is prepared to starve to death by defying its own instincts as a predator. If spiders cease to eat flies, we shall be quickly overwhelmed by them. All of it is childish dreaming.
Pain is not evil, as Arabi thinks. It is a valuable protection against injury and over exertion. Nothing can be evil in itself as part of Nature. We make things evil by misusing them. Pain is evil when it is deliberately inflicted.
Nature can be cruel but for all its cruelty, and among human societies, most of the distress we cause ourselves, the large majority of people still value life so much that they do not deliberately choose to die. They do not value the hypothetical “after life” so much that they are slashing their wrists to get there sooner. Whatever incredible fantasies people might say they believe, they instinctively value the life they have. For most people, even a hard life has sufficient joys to make it worth living, and if we once began to treat Nature properly the gates of heaven could begin to open here on earth.
Patriarchal religions are Satanic, as we have recently seen. Some Moslem leaders see no wrong in killing innocent people in the USA. Then the churchgoing leaders of the vocally Christian USA lead a crusade on an innocent Moslem population, pleading that they do not mean to hurt people through “collateral damage.” That is all right then! Moslems, particularly in the west tell us that the fanatics are not “proper” Moslems, but millions of Moslems think otherwise. Christians tell us it is a commandment of God that “thou shalt not kill,” but the Christian USA thinks everyone should have two hand guns as a constitutional right of self-protection, and “collateral damage” is acceptable if they are not Americans. Not according to their Christian faith—but it proves their cynicism about religion. Jews also have the same commandment forbidding killing, except when they are Arabs, and Moslems say the Quran says taking the life of an innocent person is taking the life of the whole of humanity—except when it is the life of a Jew.
The root of all these religions is Judaism, yet they all hate each other. It is time we ditched the whole lot and returned to the Goddess.
Fancy or Reality?
Thanks for your letter in reply. Arabi wote a large number of works, too many to be all his, most critics would say. He wrote poetry among it, some of which is beautiful. The poem you sent copied from a chapter called “Sophiology” is marvellous—the essence of Adelphiasophism. I shall put it on my website. Although doubtless meant to be Allah musing, it is far more appropriate to the Goddess who has been deserted by humanity for 4000 years, and is puzzled by the neglect she has to bear. We take it that in this piece Ibn Arabi, if it was he, is writing as an Adelphiasophist. I am told it has no title.
Listen, 0 dearly beloved
I am the reality of the world, the center of the circumference,
I am the parts and the whole.
I am the will established between Heaven and Earth,
I have created perception in you only in order to be the object of my perception.
If then you perceive me, you perceive yourself.
But you cannot perceive me through yourself.
It is through my eyes that you see me and see yourself,
Through your eyes you cannot see me.
Dearly beloved!
I have called you so often and you have not heard me!
I have shown myself to you so often and you have not seen me.
I have made myself fragrance so often, and you have not smelled me,
Savorous food, and you have not tasted me.
Why can you not reach me through the object you touch
Or breathe me through sweet perfumes?
Why do you not see me? Why do you not hear me?
Why? Why? Why?
For you my delights surpass all other delights,
And the pleasure I procure you surpasses all other pleasures.
For you I am preferable to all other good things,
I am Beauty, I am Grace.
Love me, love me alone,
Love yourself in me, in me alone.
Attach yourself to me,
No one is more inward than I,
Others love you for their own sakes,
I love you for yourself.
And you, you flee from me.
Dearly beloved!
You cannot treat me fairly,
For if you approach me,
It is because I have approached you.
I am nearer to you than yourself,
Than your soul, than your breath.
Who among creatures
Would treat you as I do?
I am jealous of you over you,
I want you to belong to no other,
Not even to yourself.
Be mine, be for me as you are in me,
Though you are not even aware of it.
Dearly beloved!
Let us go toward Union.
And if we find the road
That leads to separation,
We will destroy separation.
Let us go hand in hand.
Let us enter the presence of Truth.
Let it be our judge
And imprint its seal upon our union
For ever.
The viewpoint of the poem is Nature pleading with her beloved to pay her the attention she is due. What are we to suppose her beloved is paying attention to instead of her? It is a phantom called God. The Goddess is not spiritual enough for people indoctrinated into belief in imaginary entities. Why! Why! Why! indeed do people persist in their absurd obsession with their own image reflected back at them in their minds?
The “Introduction to Beshara” seems to me to be again largely Adelphiasophist without knowing it. The first element of confidence trickery in most such works is to begin with the familiar, which is Nature, then at some point make a conceptual leap to the spiritual, fooling the bored or unwary reader into thinking it is all logical. Reading here that Beshara means “Good News” has to ring alarm bells with anyone cognisant of the roguery called Patriarchal religion, the only religion that most people know. Good News means “Patriarchy! Patriarchy! Watch out! Rogues about!”
The first half of page three could have been written by an Adelphiasophist, but then ancient nonsense rolls back in with talk of Transcendence, Immanence, Absolute Unity and Single Being, all of which can be found in fairy stories with different names. Why is all this fancy necessary? Why isn’t Nature herself sufficient without a big man standing behind her? It is because it is a rewritten Patriarchy meant to keep those who believe it in confusion. The author warns of “making the ego larger” but that is what all of this is about. Relegate the Goddess into the background and who appears but the big phantom Self called God. Nature is a unity. Inventing a transcendent God disunites it, and then it has to be put back together again by pretending that God after all is immanent as well as being transcendent, as if he could be visible and invisible at the same time.
Nature is a unity of constant successive birth—of metaphorical umbilical cords that link us all together, from the simplest bacterium to Albert Einstein—or even Ibn Arabi. This is Nature’s “kinunity” and it is real. There might well be other forces, as yet undiscovered, that link us too. You can call this “The Spritual” if you wish, but it is a conjecture until it is proved. The author concludes talking about knowledge and love but I’ll move on to your own note before addressing these.
First, your joke about the two neighbours arguing from different premises, I had not heard but it is funny and true. We might seem to agree about Nature but as long as you cannot accept it as prime, we do not agree, and Nature will ultimately be ditched, if it is expedient, just as the Patriarchal religions do. They have been forced to pay lip service to Nature, but it can be nothing other than insincere so long as the basic tenet of these odious religions is that there is a better place, after death. Nobody really believes this. If they did, everyone would be committing suicide. They only take a spurious comfort from it when they are about to die or when a loved one dies. I cannot see how any hybrids such as those you admire can get good out of mixing together bad religions. Ibn Arabi was trying to get Islam from everything he could think off. The computer people say GIGO and it is true.
You chastise me for refusing to be gullible, but I note that arguments in connexion with this you did not address. If I have a closed mind because I declare that the sun will rise tomorrow, then I have to live with it, and so will you. Yet you want me to forget it and believe what you tell me. I cannot and so I am wasting my time, you say. Which of the two neighbours in your joke had the closed mind? You cannot see yourself as one of them. When perfectly sound and repeatable evidence for something is presented, it is not open-mindedness to ignore it but stupidity. If something has been trumped as being true for 2000 years but no one has been able to prove it, then to believe that too is stupidity, not open-mindedness. The spiritual beliefs of Patriarchal religions, however disguised they are by mystics or charlatans, have revealed nothing useful and at best are metaphorical comfort blankets for immature adults. That is why they call God Father.
You quote Capra at me but he is either saying it tongue in cheek or setting it up as a straw man. No one thinks that anything living is just the sum of its parts. Not even a clock is.
You speak of people coming up with new ideas being called mad, but the ideas that impress you are ancient ideas not new ones. All of the mystical elements mentioned by Doris Lessing mean nothing because they can mean anything. That is her complaint. Anything that is fictional or imaginary, and not rooted in Nature’s reality, has nothing that can act as a real reference for judgement. It is hard to change the meaning of the word “horse” because we can compare any written definition with real horses to see whether the definition is true. Nobody can do it with gods, spirits, souls, devils, or whatever. They mean whatever you mean by them.
You seem to associate closed systems with closed minds, believing as you do that your mind is open, and presumably your systems too. Yet your openness begins to sound like believing every impossible thing you hear. You challenge me now to believe David Icke and not what is written about him. You are not content to walk through a swamp, you jump in at every chance you get. I do not have to read either what the newspapers say about him, or whatever he says about himself. He has appeared in person on TV, talks gibberish and makes himself a laughing stock without apparently noticing. He is plainly a fraud or he is insane. I prefer to think he is a simple fraud. It is the people who believe him who must be insane.
You say Dr Maximus was famous. Was he the object of Occam’s warning? You have nothing to say about the multiplication of entities, presumably because to decry it is not to be open-minded. To be open-minded must be to multiply entities “ad infinitum.”
You now come to evolution, which you disparage. Yet, if you really believe we are all linked together in some way, evolution is the one certain and widely accepted method that allows it. In evolutionary theory, we are not separate but life is a single spatial and temporal meta-organism—the nearest thing to the Single Being you are ever likely to find.
“Why do we continue in our outmoded ways?” Perhaps it is because people persist in believing outmoded faiths, and lies described as ancient wisdom.
We come to your ultimate point, the fact that I do not mention love. Sophia is the Goddess of Wisdom, and now, through science we have the chance of becoming wise, as long as we remain humble in the face of the Goddess. Love, on the other hand, is one of those words that Lessing could have included. It is a debased word, with so may meanings that no one knows what it means. It has been particularly debased by the Patriarchal sects called Christianity that is supposed to be a religion of love, when anyone looking at its history would have come to the opposite conclusion. You quote Ibn Arabi’s definition that love pervades all beings and binds them together—an essential unity. So, there is yet another definition. Because the word has been so debased, whatever pervades things and holds them together should not be called love. It is unecessarily confusing. Love is an emotion, not a cosmic glue. It has enough nuances as an emotion without redefining it as a cosmic glue. To be urged to love an enemy is asking more than anyone, or most people anyway, can do. Certainly few in that Great Country, America, full of Christians as it is, can do it.
Ibn Arabi’s love seems to be some sort of brotherly affection, which makes sense, if we are all brothers and sisters in Nature, as we are. Adelphiasophism has the concept of kinunity, the natural unity of the temporal and spatial organism of life. We are all brothers and sisters—adelphos in Greek. That is why we are Adelphiasophists. If brotherhood imples love, and Sophia is wisdom, then you can translate Adelphiasophism as “love and knowledge,” if you wish. Neither knowledge nor love is achieved through ancient fancies which, despite your statement implying the contrary, you accept without question. To truly question things productively, you would not disparage science, because that is what it is for.
Even if we are only shouting from our own premises, a debate like this helps us to clarify them, but I would urge you to be more open minded yourself about what you seem to reject without understanding. The trouble with the Goddess is that she is too familiar for those indoctrinated in cosmic mysteries. There are plenty of those all right but they are not the ones that you think they are. The old teaching adage is to begin with what is familiar. So, begin with the Goddess, practice discernment in what you accept, and concentrate on what is important—reality—not fancy.
