Becoming Whole by Leslie Stein

Author:Leslie Stein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611457742
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

The consequence is that “He sees only God as being that which he sees, perceiving the seer to be the same as the seen.”71

It has been pointed out that this allegory represents the inner transformation of man from a “worldly state of being” to an “otherworldly state of being.”72 The worldly state is where a man is under the dictates of the body and is therefore veiled from the essence of things. The choice of the original name of Idris is important because he was the prophet that gained sway over his animal instincts and cast off his body, spending sixteen years without eating or sleeping, leaving only a “transcendent intellect.”73 Thus Idris abandoned himself to the elemental force of nature and experienced animality. “In this state of unmixed animality, the man is given a certain kind of intuition, a particular sort of unveiling (kashf).”74 This is the intuition of animals, which is not intellectual reasoning.75 Ibn Al-‘Arabī explains that when such a man experiences the unveiling of animality, he cannot speak. From that position, Ibn Al-‘Arabī says that the individual sees those who are chastised by angels in their graves, the dead living, the dumb speaking, and the crippled walking. This implies that the insights are beyond reason. As Isutzu explains:

What Ibn Al-‘Arabī wants to say is that all the seemingly watertight compartments into which Reality is divided by human Reason lose their ontological validity in such an “animal experience.”76

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