Ibn Arabi outlines his view of the spiritual journey as, among other things, a movement where one’s limitations and ideas of multiplicity are gradually removed until one recognizes the unbounded unity of all experience. To justify the possibility of such a movement, Ibn Arabi borrows the framework constructed by Avicenna, establishing in essence that God is the only necessary being, and that all other beings are contingent and hence connected to the necessity of God. Accepting this view creates an obvious tension between unity and multiplicity, forcing one to affirm the former and deny the latter (Ibn Arabi, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). This tension, while important to address, will not be considered here. I want to consider Ibn Arabi’s movement towards unity as a provisional framework for the individual experience; being provisional, I hope to avoid ontological consequences. I want to argue that this movement creates a guideline for the individual to move away from their limitations while gradually expanding their horizons.
Creating a provisional dichotomy between limitation and infinity creates a virtual structure within which the individual can move through vertically. With or without this ideal, the individual, while opening themselves up to an expansive experience, would be provoked with an intense anxiety because their limiting yet dependable core beliefs about how the world functions directly conflict with the expansive experience. This would seemingly provoke either a retreat back to foregoing limitations, or an affirmation of the engagement with hitherto unexplored territory. Considering engagement as favorable, this is only possible if the individual has enough faith to throw him or herself off the cliff, to use an analogy of Kierkegaard. This faith must manifest itself somehow, and I believe that an ideal such as the one created by Ibn Arabi provides something firm enough to clutch on to, especially in moments of uncertainty.
The ultimate ideal of Ibn-Arabi’s journey seems to be to destroy the Ego, to remove the “barrier of the veil” consisting of one’s limitations and attachments, and finally to become one with God so as to “mirror the divine reality”. In order to avoid ontological implications, it may be possible to understand this ideal in the formal sense, emptying it of all content. As such, it would be conceivable that the individual decide for themselves what reality consists of, preferably after deliberate and rigorous investigation of the world around them. Consequently, it is feasible to imagine that mirroring reality, whatever that may be, could be justified. After all, reality is all there is, and to deny reality would be to deny “what is” in the literal sense; to limit one’s reality would be to deny oneself the possibility of expanding it; to oppose reality would be to struggle against an insurmountable force. On the one hand, the act of mirroring would require a submission, a surrender to reality; on the other, one would need to assert oneself perpetually in order to confront and embody that reality (The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker). Thus, one would not be forced to one side of the spectrum: the individual is free to maneuver between freedom and subjection.
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