Ibn 'Arabi Heir to the Prophets [3]

OPENING

Ibn ‘Arabi tells us that effort can take seekers only as far as the door. Having reached the door, they can knock as often as they like. It is God who will decide when and if he will open the door. Only at the opening of the door can complete inheritance occur. This explains the sense of the word “opening” in the title of Ibn ‘Arabi’s al-Futuhat al-makkiyya, “The Meccan Openings.”

The title announces that the knowledge and understanding contained in the book were not gained by study or discursive reasoning. They were simply given to the author when God opened the door to him. The whole Futuhat, in other words, represents a massive series of unveilings and witnessings, or “mystical visions” if you prefer.

Meister Eckhart and Buddhism [2]

~D. T. Suzuki 

Below are further quotations from Eckhart giving his views on ‘being’, ‘life’, ‘work’, etc.: 

Being is God. . . . God and being are the same – or God has being from another and thus himself is not God. . . . Everything that is has the fact of its being through being and from being. Therefore, if being is something different from God, a thing has its being from something other than God. Besides, there is nothing prior to being, because that which confers being creates and is a creator. To create is to give being out of nothing. 

Eckhart is quite frequently metaphysical and makes one wonder how his audience took to his sermons – an audience which is supposed to have been very unscholarly, being ignorant of Latin and all the theologies written in it. This problem of being and God’s creating the world out of nothing must have puzzled them very much indeed. Even the scholars might have found Eckhart beyond their understanding, especially when we know that they were not richly equipped with the experiences which Eckhart had. 

Mundus Imaginalis [2]

I have just mentioned the word utopian. It is a strange thing, or a decisive example, that our authors use a term in Persian that seems to be its linguistic calque: Na-kojd-Abad, the "land of No-where." This, however, is something entirely different from a utopia. 

Let us take the very beautiful tales -simultaneously visionary tales and tales of spiritual initiation-  composed in Persian by Sohravardi, the young shaykh who, in the twelfth century, was the "reviver of the theosophy of ancient Persia" in Islamic Iran. Each time, the visionary finds himself, at the beginning of the tale, in the presence of a supernatural figure of great beauty, whom the visionary asks who he is and from where he comes. These tales essentially illustrate the experience of the gnostic, lived as the personal history of the Stranger, the captive who aspires to return home. 

Self-Observation [2]

~Maurice Nicoll

Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky

The object of this Work is to make us conscious in ourselves and to ourselves, to what is going on in us, to the vast inner traffic of thoughts and feelings that lies within, in the psychic invisible realm as distinct from the vast outer physical world of things and people that the senses reveal to us. Here, in this inner world, and in what we select and reject in it, lies the key to the Work, and so to evolution. 

You all know how to reject and select things in the outer world. You discard useless things from your business and cling to useful things. It is the same idea. Suppose, by long observation, you notice that 'I's create moods, thoughts and feelings, that depress you, that eat you, that make you despondent, or negative, or suspicious, or evil-minded. Then what are you going to do?