A Prelude to Reflections on Ibn-Arabi and Meister Eckhart 

(To my son Tous Kabir)

They left us a jungle of words to seek and trust their experience of eternal and to venture into our own experience beyond skepticism, through their major overlapping guidepost: detachment. Contemplation on “detachment” from the world, from senses, from desires, from thought itself. And they tried to show us how from that no-thing and no-place, from the experience of God, the ethical emerges: Goodness, Truth, Justice, Oneness, Wisdom, Love. But we are excessive beings, this is the condition of our existence and evolving out of it. The temptation of Mara burned the sensual on the altar of inquisition. And indeed through the seduction of absolute rejection of the sensual-temporal, Mara excluded the eternal in our excessive reaction to the hurt. Thus we became congealed in the prison of identities, in seeking or escaping from the eternal. In both ways, in pain and loss, we lost Goodness, Truth, Justice, Oneness, Wisdom, and Love. We fell into fanaticism and religious bigotry. We fell into hedonism and nihilism. We lost indignation against cruelty and injustice, and we lost ourselves in the cruelty of our righteous indignation. The very spirit that could save us, hurt us. The very faith through which we could approximate the divine, reproached us from attaining the eternal. Like insane people, we ran from snake to dragon and from dragon to snake. 

I pray to God to open up a space of thinking and writing about the eternal and the ethical within me. I want to overcome being closed off, but there is no absolute opening up as such, as we always seek some measure and absolute measurelessness is being lost in meaninglessness and nihilism, where one has lost one’s ethical-existential compass. But on the other hand, politics of identity and self-righteousness is destructive and imprison us in an identity from which there is no escape. What is the way out and what should be done? 

I see a ray of light, a wedge between these two ways, that I call the false binary or dichotomy of “identity vs. non-identity”. This ray of light comes to us through temporal and from the eternal, the experience of God, as ineffable (negative theology) or nameless, which renders goodness, truth, justice, wisdom, oneness, and love possible for human beings (positive theology). I see a connection between this ray of light coming from a wedge between eternal and temporal and overcoming the false dichotomy between identity (I am Muslim, I am Christian, I am Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Atheist, Scientist…) and non-identity (I am agnostic, skeptic, cynic, nihilist…). I experience an emanation of light from in-between the eternal and the temporal, between everydayness and detachment, between meditative-praying states and engagement with career and business, which grounds our ethical practices. 

I am a Muslim, listening and speaking carefully. So let’s sort things out: 

1) We have a way of life (Muslim, Buddhist, etc.), which becomes a prison to thinking and connecting to others in excessive self-righteousness and righteous indignation. 

2) Each one of these ways of life has some point or valid measures that distinguishes them from each other and give us proper indignation to stop the bully and aggressive and hateful, to stop genocide and murder, and to offer peace and love. 

3) I claim that an experience of coincidentia oppositorum of detachment and attachment, meditation-prayer and engagement in everyday life guides us to the ethical goodness, justice, oneness, truth whose roots belong to the divine, out of space and time, and can bring all of these different identities together to open up to each other, to learn from each other, in its branches in the world. 

4) This experience of eternal in coincidentia oppositorum is not mixing up contradictions of good and evil, or right and wrong. This would be ethical relativism and nihilism. This experience of coincidentia oppositorum is to see a bridge that opens up a path out of the prison of dichotomies of: 

  identity and non-identity, 
 temporal and eternal, 
 being and becoming, 
 reason and heart, 
 flexibility and rootedness, 
 ethical relativism and absolutism 
 fallibility and righteousness 
 listening and speaking, 
 freedom and limitation,  
 this world and rejection of this world, 
 to desire God and to see God in the world, 
 So that to overcome evil, and become good, whose root is not in the world, and whose branches are in the world. 

I make this claim based on an “experience” of the eternal. I wish to show how we can find a way out, but we ought first to accept an axiom which can’t be rationally proven, but has to be experienced. And those who haven’t experienced it for themselves ought to believe that it is in them, it is near, not far. We don’t need too many theories to have access to it. It is like breathing, that constitutes us, and meditating on that breathing frees us from mundane. It comes not from “knowing” but knowledgeable detachment from all theories and knowing. 

Those who haven’t experienced the eternal for themselves should put aside all the agnosticism and all the history of religions and sciences, and simply and closely focus on the connection that comes from all venues in this very moment to them. In this very time (the temporal) they can breathe in and out, and feel that light literally touches their eyes and their skins, and step by step stand outside (ek-stasis, ex-istence) the temporal and reach out (connect) to the eternal. It happens as a transformation of consciousness in bliss. 

But disbelief stops it. Is there a God? Is there an eternal? Theories and ideas enter and questions overwhelm one. Aren’t we an accident of the universe? Aren’t we making these stories to soothe ourselves? Can one really experience the eternal? 

Pay attention that this is a narrow razor edge bridge. If we lose our balance for a moment, we lose the connection to the eternal and will be thrown back into the temporal. At this very point, we also will fall back from the goodness, justice, truth, oneness, and love emanated from the eternal into contingent pragmatics of everyday world. Thus the ethical becomes “how to manage one’s life” for…Survival? Genes? Success? Pleasure? Humanism? 

This is the story of thousands year religious and philosophical experience of the eternal. All the meditative practices of Hinduism and Buddhism, Taoism and Confucius ethics, of prayers in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and in indigenous religions, which have expressed an experience of the eternal (for example, black elk), say the experience of the eternal is real. God is real. Some encountered its manifestations. Some experienced it within themselves or on the horizon of events. And all of them say that the ethical, goodness, justice, truth, and love come from the eternal within and without space and time. We can’t hold onto this razor edge bridge between temporal and the eternal within and without, coincidentia oppositorum, and so oscillate from hope to despair. So, disenchanted we conclude: it is just here, eternal return of the same (Nietzsche), or it is out of space and time and disconnected from here and now (excessive ascetic practices). 

Plato experienced the same thing. He experienced the eternal immutable goodness, beautiful, justice, and love out of space and time—out of the Cave, and tried to bring its light back to us. Wittgenstein also experienced the mystical and in his lectures on Ethics, he tries to show how the roots of the ethical is out of space and time. Heidegger’s Being also is this expression of the experience of the eternal, in revealing concealing alethia (truth), rooted in existential care (Sorge). Ibn-Arabi and Meister Eckhart also tried to show how they experienced the eternal in detachment from the temporal and in the temporal. 

All these expressions of the experience of the eternal gave us descriptions, ideas, theories, and metaphysics upon which to elaborate the experience of the eternal, to ground the ethical in divine Goodness and Wrath rooted in Love. All started from the experience, a pathos and ethos, and sought to translate it into concepts and words. Hence, we entered into the chaos of metaphysical accounts. The allure of words pushed some to try to make intelligible that which cannot be completely intelligible. But the pathos was not vain. 

They left us a jungle of words to seek and trust their experience of eternal and to venture into our own experience beyond skepticism, through their major overlapping guidepost: detachment.

Contemplation on “detachment” from the world, from senses, from desires, from thought itself. And they tried to show us how from that no-thing and no-place, from the experience of God or Nirvana, the ethical emerges: Goodness, Truth, Justice, Oneness, Wisdom, Love. 

But we are excessive beings, this is the condition of our existence and evolving out of it.  So, we introduced the false dichotomy of detachment vs. attachment.  The temptation of Mara burned the sensual on the altar of inquisition. And indeed through the seduction of absolute rejection of the sensual-temporal, Mara excluded the eternal in our excessive reaction to the hurt. Thus we became congealed in the prison of identities, in seeking or escaping from the eternal. In both ways, in pain and loss, we lost Goodness, Truth, Justice, Oneness, Wisdom, and Love. We fell into fanaticism and religious bigotry. We fell into hedonism and nihilism. We lost indignation against cruelty and injustice, and we lost ourselves in the cruelty of our righteous indignation. The very spirit that could save us, hurt us. The very faith through which we could approximate the divine, reproached us from attaining the eternal. Like insane people, we ran from snake to dragon and from dragon to snake. 

The same happened to Plato, Wittgenstein, Ibn-Arabi, and Meister Eckhart. They saw and experienced the eternal, they initiated a path to the divine and the mystical, they showed us that the root of the ethical is beyond space and time, then Plato extended the experience of the Form (eidos) of the Good, Beautiful, and Wisdom to all universal concepts, such as small and big, trees and animals. Wittgenstein swung between logical positivism, variations of behaviorism, and excess in his negative theology. Ibn-Arabi and Meister Eckhart, each started from clear expressions of the experience of the eternal in coincidentia oppositorum and negative-positive theology and fall into making a house of sands with metaphysical words. We have to constantly pray to God and go back to revelations to guide us through this forest of excess. 

We are back to the first room. This is the age of nihilism and excess in sensuality and pleasure, coming to its end. Nietzsche is dead. The experience of God is real. Religious experience of God in attachment-detachment dialectic is real and is the source of the ethical. Plato’s experience of eternal and to see the immutable source of justice and goodness in God is real. Wittgenstein’s mystical experience to see the ethical as belonging to the divine, beyond space and time is real. Heidegger’s experience of Being is real. 

[Heidegger heroically attempted to overcome Plato's metaphysics and to overcome Descartes' subject-object binary, to overcome the hiatus between existence and essence, and thus shone light on the ontological difference between being-in-the-world and Being-in-concealment-from-the-world.]  

Ibn-Arabi and Meister Eckhart’s negative theology, in rooting the good, the truth, oneness, justice, and wisdom, in one word, the ethical in God is real. So we have to hold onto this axiom and believe in the possibility of the experience of the eternal. And this is the history of unfolding of religions in which one has to patiently separate the wheat from the chaff, the fake from the real, the excess from the balanced. 

In the next reflection, I will try to write about the relation between the eternal and the ethical, by reflecting on Ibn-Arabi and Meister Eckhart.