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Ibn El-Arabi - Idries Shah - My heart is capable of every form
Identifier
000283
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
There is some reason to believe that the Sufis used Sex magick, making love and sexual stimulation as one of the ways of reaching the divine. They also used love with visualisation. The poems of Rumi, the poems of Ibn El-Arabi, plus many others can be taken both literally as love songs or in some cases erotic poems, but also a symbolic description of the search for the Higher spirit and the joy of Union – nirvana moksha.
But the two are not incompatible. It is possible to find your Higher spirit via love of another, although this love must be true love and not lust or obsession or the seeking after gratification. Through true love one finds Divine love.
The following is about Ibn El-Arabi……………..
A description of the experience
The Sufis – Idries Shah
The chief of this Persian community was named Mukinuddin. He had a beautiful daughter, Nizam, devout and well versed in the religious law. His spiritual experiences in Mecca, and his symbolical rendering of the path of the mystic, are expressed in love poems dedicated to her.
EI-Arabi realized that human beauty was connected with divine reality; and for this reason he was able to produce poems which both celebrated the perfection of the maiden and also, in correct perspective, stood for a deeper reality.
But the capacity to see the connection was denied to the formal religionists, who professed themselves scandalized. The poet's supporters have pointed out, often in vain, that real truth may be expressed in several ways simultaneously……
Ibn El-Arabi’s Interpreter therefore reads, on the surface, as a collection of erotic poems
But there is an inner reality which he refers to when he accepts all formalism, yet claims a truth behind and beyond it. Professor Nicholson has thus translated one of the poems which most shocked the devout, who believed that theirs was the road to human salvation:
My heart is capable of every form:
A cloister for the monk, a fane for idols,
A pasture for gazelles, the votary's Ka'ba [temple],
The tables of the Torah, the Quran.
Love is the creed I hold: wherever turn
His camels, Love is still my creed and faith.
The source of the experience
Ibn El-ArabiConcepts, symbols and science items
Concepts
Symbols
Science Items
Activities and commonsteps
Commonsteps
References
See also Al-Ghazzali on Marriage (Alchemy of Happiness) - Muhammad Al-Ghazzali