- 19 Aug 2019 01:12
#15027465
The basic idea is that "God" dreams up the world, and we are the refractions of their light. Basically, as Seyyed Hossein Nasr put it, “Every creature is ultimately the manifestation of the Face of God and its reflections through the immutable archetypes upon the mirror of nothingness.” What could this mean? Well, you'll find out.
There are three levels of God, which are God’s Essence, his Names, and the Creatures of the World. For anyone who knows Spinoza, we see here what he calls substance, attributes, and modes. To put this in simpler terms, there is the core of God, his essence, then a second layer of his Names, which describe the ways in which he manifests in the world, and the third layer, which is the world of matter, the world we all see. In this sense, the names connect God in his purity to the world of things.
The names are the attributes of God, such as the Merciful, or the Wrathful, and these describe the ways in which God exists. Finally, individual entities in the world, often called ‘creatures’ in Islamic thought, things like stones or people, are complexes of attributes which are vibrated into existence by God, and in this process, they go from potential to actual.
Each thing in the world, then, is an inmixture, or to use Whitehead’s term, an ingression, of various attributes. A tree, for example, has greenness, tallness, strongness, etc., in particular proportions according to its nature. But the most important attribute, that of existence, that which makes these fantasms of possibility closer to being real, is when they are dreamed into existence by the only Real. And this means that the attribute of existence of everything is derived from God, who is the Real, the only Real, that which gives existence to all else to the extent that they participate in his Realness.
These three levels are represented physically as forms of light. God is the only pure light, and by means of a subtractive function, imagines the attributes of God’s names as giving rise to colors of light, and the existent entities or creatures as bits of opacity which refract these colored lights in various ways. In this way, we can think of the attributes as jewels that refract the pure light into colored light, and the entities as bits of opacity, which is to say, screens, upon which intermixings of these colored lights are projected , which is to say, screens, upon which intermixings of these colored lights are projected. Think of it as a sort of ontology of light.
There are degrees of intensity however: God is the most intensely Real, the attributes less real, and creatures less real still. However, everything in the universe becomes more intense the closer it comes to God. And God is defined, as it is for all from Plotinus to Ibn Arabi forward, as that which is both unchanging yet also able to give rise to all that exists or ever could by emanation. And our world simply is an attempt to bring some of this perfection into us, but our inability to do so leads to multiplicity, the shattering of the material world into many aspects. Only the complex recombination brings us closer to God.
And yet, what would this look like? God is the ultimate intensity of all aspects of the world, for God gave rise to it, but is bound by none of it. God is pure power to exist, to exist more fully, and to have all the aspect of the world as potentials within it, all at once, and to be able to actualize all of them at once in all their permutations. This is most similar, in fact, to the human mind, that which is able to think of all things it sees without having to ‘be’ them.
And thus U believe that our imaginations and dreams, which is to say, visions, are one way in which we get in touch with God. For if the world is God’s dreams, then our dreams, when we are in sync with God, in which our ego is in suspension, a state called fana’ by the Sufis, participate in God’s, not in the imperfect manner of all matter, but in purified form. Just like Neoplatonists, even down to Spinoza, felt we came into sync with the Agent Intellect when our reason comes into sync with that of the ‘way of the world,’ so to speak, so it is with Imagination with me and other Islamic philosophers. For between the Agent Intelligence, the Reason of the World, and the Things of the World, is the Agent Imagination, which is to say, how God expands upon the pure forms of reason, and incarnates them into things.
But what does this mean? If God’s attributes are qualities, then only by their combination into refractions do they come to exist, for example, as ‘this’ tree, rather than as tallness, greenness, and other sets of disjunct qualities. Only when they are linked into a full knot or image does a particular entity come to ‘exist,’ and in this sense, we can think of existence precisely a this knitting of qualities into knots or images of this sort. From such a perspective, the qualities are the forms or categories, the generalities of reason, while the imagination produces combinations which gives rise to things.
When humans imagine, they recombine images derived from the images which comprise the world, and these images are less ‘heavy’ that those in the world, and in this sense, more free. And this means they are closer to God, for like God, humans can recombine images and intertwine them freely. What humans can’t do, and which God does effortlessly, however, is make imaginations real. However, when our imaginations come into sync with those of God, our visions can tell us something essential about the world. Often it is these visions which can be considered prophecy.
However some visions can be misleading, harmful, etc. so how do we know when these are on the right track? If they lead us closer to God, they are, but what might that mean? If God is that which tries to liberate all that exists to be more like God, which is to say, maximally free and potent then we should all strive liberate all that exists to be more like a perfected form of the human mind, which is to say, maximally free and powerful. In this, we participate in God’s nature, which is to not be bound by selfish desires, but to have compassion on all around us, in our desire to liberate it as well, to give it maximum freedom to be all that can be.
All that accords with this is true, good, and beautiful, and all that brings us closer to this is truer, better, and more beautiful than the rest. It is more real, and to come in sync with this is to make the world that small bit better, to increase the intensity of freedom in all that is.
To do this, of course, one needs to leave one’s self behind, or rather, not be limited by it, and rather, be liberated from the self, it’s partial viewpoints and cravings, and come into sync with this larger motion to liberation of all for and by all. To assist in the effort to help all emerge from itself into greater emergence. Such a project would use science and philosophy, but always in light of an ethical orientation to this larger project.
But such a project must defend the freedom of each and all to give rise to all the freedoms they can, and in this, there are necessarily many pathways to this truth, and this is why there are many prophets to many peoples, and therefore, all the world is a theophany, which is to say, the appearance of God to aspects of himself. God reveals himself, and to each aspect of the world, there is a vision of God appropriate to it, a lure, as Whitehead would say, to greater freedom. The trick is figuring out which lure is the one that leads to God, and how to get there.
What seems evident, not only from the Sufi tradition, but many philosophical and devotional traditions, is that it lies in some form of negation of the partiality of the individual ego. Hegel argued that evil is particularlity with no regard for the universal, while Ibn Arabi would simply speak of “idolatry,” which is to say, reification for its own sake, blindness to the call of God to liberate all from and with all. Each aspect of all that exists has its God, it’s lure, the appearance of the true, good, and beautiful, which calls to them, and the side that calls them to think of their own narrowly defined self-interest. Only collective liberation, the desire to liberate all the world from others and themselves, can lead to liberation of the self, and vice-versa. Paradoxical as it may seem, the way to greater power and freedom for the self is to give it up for all other than the self, and vice-versa.
(Side note: this is where the Sufi or Islamic path has much in common with that of the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, and the Christian scholastic tradition. While there are many differences between these traditions, there are many theophanies, for God is theophany, God is the appearance of existence and its potential to better itself, intertwined together.)
There you go @annatar1914.
There are three levels of God, which are God’s Essence, his Names, and the Creatures of the World. For anyone who knows Spinoza, we see here what he calls substance, attributes, and modes. To put this in simpler terms, there is the core of God, his essence, then a second layer of his Names, which describe the ways in which he manifests in the world, and the third layer, which is the world of matter, the world we all see. In this sense, the names connect God in his purity to the world of things.
The names are the attributes of God, such as the Merciful, or the Wrathful, and these describe the ways in which God exists. Finally, individual entities in the world, often called ‘creatures’ in Islamic thought, things like stones or people, are complexes of attributes which are vibrated into existence by God, and in this process, they go from potential to actual.
Each thing in the world, then, is an inmixture, or to use Whitehead’s term, an ingression, of various attributes. A tree, for example, has greenness, tallness, strongness, etc., in particular proportions according to its nature. But the most important attribute, that of existence, that which makes these fantasms of possibility closer to being real, is when they are dreamed into existence by the only Real. And this means that the attribute of existence of everything is derived from God, who is the Real, the only Real, that which gives existence to all else to the extent that they participate in his Realness.
These three levels are represented physically as forms of light. God is the only pure light, and by means of a subtractive function, imagines the attributes of God’s names as giving rise to colors of light, and the existent entities or creatures as bits of opacity which refract these colored lights in various ways. In this way, we can think of the attributes as jewels that refract the pure light into colored light, and the entities as bits of opacity, which is to say, screens, upon which intermixings of these colored lights are projected , which is to say, screens, upon which intermixings of these colored lights are projected. Think of it as a sort of ontology of light.
There are degrees of intensity however: God is the most intensely Real, the attributes less real, and creatures less real still. However, everything in the universe becomes more intense the closer it comes to God. And God is defined, as it is for all from Plotinus to Ibn Arabi forward, as that which is both unchanging yet also able to give rise to all that exists or ever could by emanation. And our world simply is an attempt to bring some of this perfection into us, but our inability to do so leads to multiplicity, the shattering of the material world into many aspects. Only the complex recombination brings us closer to God.
And yet, what would this look like? God is the ultimate intensity of all aspects of the world, for God gave rise to it, but is bound by none of it. God is pure power to exist, to exist more fully, and to have all the aspect of the world as potentials within it, all at once, and to be able to actualize all of them at once in all their permutations. This is most similar, in fact, to the human mind, that which is able to think of all things it sees without having to ‘be’ them.
And thus U believe that our imaginations and dreams, which is to say, visions, are one way in which we get in touch with God. For if the world is God’s dreams, then our dreams, when we are in sync with God, in which our ego is in suspension, a state called fana’ by the Sufis, participate in God’s, not in the imperfect manner of all matter, but in purified form. Just like Neoplatonists, even down to Spinoza, felt we came into sync with the Agent Intellect when our reason comes into sync with that of the ‘way of the world,’ so to speak, so it is with Imagination with me and other Islamic philosophers. For between the Agent Intelligence, the Reason of the World, and the Things of the World, is the Agent Imagination, which is to say, how God expands upon the pure forms of reason, and incarnates them into things.
But what does this mean? If God’s attributes are qualities, then only by their combination into refractions do they come to exist, for example, as ‘this’ tree, rather than as tallness, greenness, and other sets of disjunct qualities. Only when they are linked into a full knot or image does a particular entity come to ‘exist,’ and in this sense, we can think of existence precisely a this knitting of qualities into knots or images of this sort. From such a perspective, the qualities are the forms or categories, the generalities of reason, while the imagination produces combinations which gives rise to things.
When humans imagine, they recombine images derived from the images which comprise the world, and these images are less ‘heavy’ that those in the world, and in this sense, more free. And this means they are closer to God, for like God, humans can recombine images and intertwine them freely. What humans can’t do, and which God does effortlessly, however, is make imaginations real. However, when our imaginations come into sync with those of God, our visions can tell us something essential about the world. Often it is these visions which can be considered prophecy.
However some visions can be misleading, harmful, etc. so how do we know when these are on the right track? If they lead us closer to God, they are, but what might that mean? If God is that which tries to liberate all that exists to be more like God, which is to say, maximally free and potent then we should all strive liberate all that exists to be more like a perfected form of the human mind, which is to say, maximally free and powerful. In this, we participate in God’s nature, which is to not be bound by selfish desires, but to have compassion on all around us, in our desire to liberate it as well, to give it maximum freedom to be all that can be.
All that accords with this is true, good, and beautiful, and all that brings us closer to this is truer, better, and more beautiful than the rest. It is more real, and to come in sync with this is to make the world that small bit better, to increase the intensity of freedom in all that is.
To do this, of course, one needs to leave one’s self behind, or rather, not be limited by it, and rather, be liberated from the self, it’s partial viewpoints and cravings, and come into sync with this larger motion to liberation of all for and by all. To assist in the effort to help all emerge from itself into greater emergence. Such a project would use science and philosophy, but always in light of an ethical orientation to this larger project.
But such a project must defend the freedom of each and all to give rise to all the freedoms they can, and in this, there are necessarily many pathways to this truth, and this is why there are many prophets to many peoples, and therefore, all the world is a theophany, which is to say, the appearance of God to aspects of himself. God reveals himself, and to each aspect of the world, there is a vision of God appropriate to it, a lure, as Whitehead would say, to greater freedom. The trick is figuring out which lure is the one that leads to God, and how to get there.
What seems evident, not only from the Sufi tradition, but many philosophical and devotional traditions, is that it lies in some form of negation of the partiality of the individual ego. Hegel argued that evil is particularlity with no regard for the universal, while Ibn Arabi would simply speak of “idolatry,” which is to say, reification for its own sake, blindness to the call of God to liberate all from and with all. Each aspect of all that exists has its God, it’s lure, the appearance of the true, good, and beautiful, which calls to them, and the side that calls them to think of their own narrowly defined self-interest. Only collective liberation, the desire to liberate all the world from others and themselves, can lead to liberation of the self, and vice-versa. Paradoxical as it may seem, the way to greater power and freedom for the self is to give it up for all other than the self, and vice-versa.
(Side note: this is where the Sufi or Islamic path has much in common with that of the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, and the Christian scholastic tradition. While there are many differences between these traditions, there are many theophanies, for God is theophany, God is the appearance of existence and its potential to better itself, intertwined together.)
There you go @annatar1914.
- By FiveofSwords
- By paeng
- By Pants-of-dog
- By Godstud