tarotist1231
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Between Readings
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Ibn ‘Arabi and the principle mirror
First Sentence of the Fusus Al-Hikam chapter on Adam is famous for offering a complete summary of the unified theophanic vision of Muyhi’l-din Ibn ‘Arabi, the encyclopedic codifier Sufi metaphysics.
Ibn Arab was born in Spain in Andalusia and belonged to the cosmopolitan culture that gave rise both to the Zohar as well as the definitive form of Qur’anic esotericism in his own writings. (There is a Christian form of this esotericism to found in the writings of Raymond Llull, more about him at some other time.) I have been studying Ibn Arabi’s works in translation for about 30 years and thought that is essential ideas are not radically different than what can be found in the mystical Kabbalah Sephiroth.
I am including in here because it is central to the idea of Adam Kadmon, of the cosmic human person who is perfect. In fact the perfect human person is known in Arabic as al-Insan al-Kamil.
Kamil is a name of the divine as perfection, while Insan means both “eye” and “man.”
Seeing is the locus of perception; seeing is its own mirror.
The idea of the perfect reflection as the king or primordial Adam seems close to the nature of our stalking the Sephiroth meaning of the King.
So, without any commentary at this time, I thought I would share with you a couple of opening sentences in Ibn Arabi ‘s summary work that has been widely studied and commented upon in Islamic Sufi circles for generations.
I do not expect that it will be crystal clear initially without some serious coaching. The footnotes for this initial section take up about 3 pages!
One overriding hint however is that for Ibn Arabi there is only one existent: That the absolute unity of creator and creation is without equivocation, degree, or doubt, anything other than itself: the divine being. It may not be polite to say that I am God! To announce such an assertion is foolish and blameworthy , if not shirk, however it is the prerogative of the divine to say: I am you! If it was not for you, if it were not for you, I would not have created the universes. (Hadith qusi)
Translation:
RINGSTONE 1 OF THE DIVINE WISDOM IN THE WORD OF ADAM
The Real willed, glorified be He, in virtue of His Beautiful Names, which are innumerable, to see their identities—if you so wish you can say: to see His Identity—in a comprehensive being 2 that comprises the whole affair 3 insofar as it is possessed of existence and His Mystery is manifest to Himself through it. 4 For the vision a thing has of itself in itself is not like the vision a thing has of itself in another thing, which will be like a mirror for it; indeed, He is manifest to Himself in a form accorded by the locus seen, which would not have manifested to Him without the existence of that locus and His self-disclosure to it. 5
God had existentiated the entire world as a body made ready, in which there was no spirit, and so it was like an unpolished mirror. 6 Intrinsic to the divine governance is to make ready no place that does not receive a divine spirit, which He referred to as the "breathing" into it. 7 This is none other than the realization of that form's prepared¬ness, 8 it having been made ready to receive the emanation of the per¬petual self-disclosure that has not ceased, nor ever will cease. There abides but a receptacle, which comes from His Holiest Emanation. 9 All things, from their first to their last, come from Him. And to Him the whole affair shall be returned, 10 just as it began with Him. The situa¬tion required that the mirror of the world be clear, and Adam was the very clearness of this mirror and the spirit of this form.
The angels are the various faculties of this form, which is the form of the world, referred to as the Great Man in the terminology of the Folk. 11 In relation to it the angels are like the spiritual and sensory faculties in the makeup of man. Each of these faculties is veiled and cannot see anything superior to itself, and considers there to be some¬thing within itself that is worthy of every exalted station and lofty abode with God, due to what each possesses of the Divine Synthesis, which stems from the side of divinity, from the side of the Reality of realities, and from that which is necessitated by Universal Nature, which latter—in the makeup that bears these qualities—comprises the receptacles of the entire world from its most exalted to its most base aspects. 12 An intellect 13 cannot know this through the explo¬rations of thought, for this kind of perception depends solely upon unveiling, from which one knows the principle of the world's forms which receive His spirits.
(Translation by Caner Dagli)
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