Denying Indwelling; the Unity of the Source as the Law of Sustaining Power

My denial of what is called the material Unity of Existence rests entirely on the law of Abstraction I apply to understanding existence. Whoever claims that the material world is the Creator Himself has made the Absolute concrete, divisible and subject to decay — an impossibility in the logic of divine perfection. I found clearly, in this philosophy, that the relation between the Real and His creation is not a mixing of two things, but the relation of a source to its outpouring, of information to its first spring. In this account we see existence as a continuous broadcast of information issuing from the First Source. All that is other than Him is only a disclosure of His will and His words, for He is the Originator who gives things their identity and their form. My affirmation of the Unity of the Source means that every atom in this cosmic system goes back, in its essential origin, to one Real — just as millions of images and pixels on a screen go back to a single processor that runs them and gives them their visible existence. The Source is one and the disclosures many; the Source is absolute, while the creature is relative by nature. This essential distinction is what preserved my independence in the experience of vicegerency. Were I the Creator Himself, in the sense of indwelling, my responsibility would fall away, and the meaning of the test and of human striving would vanish. Were I wholly separate from Him, my supply would dry up, my trace in life would be cut off, and my heart would stop beating for want of the source that sustains it. Likewise, I found that the Unity of the Source explains in depth how God is with us wherever we are without mixing with our clay — far be it from Him — or mingling with our bodies in a material mingling, in the traditional sense held by some groups. In the edifice of knowledge I am laying down, value lies in acknowledging our existential poverty: admitting that we have no independent existence of our own, and that our existence is drawn moment by moment from the outpouring of that Source. My journey in denying the traditional Unity of Existence, or union (ittiḥād) and indwelling (ḥulūl), was a necessary protection of God’s transcendence and uniqueness. Union and indwelling, as found in Ibn al-Fāriḍ and al-Ḥallāj, may God have mercy on them both, necessarily imply a prior state of separation and division, and to me this can only be shirk itself, even if unintended. Here I am describing the position, not judging the person who held it. In the Unity of Existence, degrees and ranks dissolve and existence becomes the very being of God, as the doctrine is commonly read in Ibn ʿArabī, may God have mercy on him. I, however, see God as the One who brings this existence into being, and this existence as nothing but an existence disclosed through His Names, which form one indivisible whole — not that He is existence itself, as the Sufi conception holds. The matter we touch and see is only a trace of God’s Name the Manifest; it is not the Essence of God, which is disclosed through the Hidden. This understanding is what allowed me to reject the illusions of those advocates of the Unity of Existence who went so far as to abolish the distance of rank between the supreme Lord and the servant. The distance exists: it is a distance of rank, degree and perfection. And the connection exists: it is a connection of sustaining power and of a constant, unbroken supply. We are sown in His being as a thought is sown in the human heart — to put it approximately. Is the thought the heart? Certainly not. Yet it has no existence without the heart, draws itself from it, and vanishes the instant the attention of consciousness is withdrawn from it. We live by this continuous supply, in which the Source remains distinct in His existence and the relative distinct in its poverty and contingency, in the shade of a sustaining power that is never heedless and never sleeps in governing all creatures and holding them firm in the mirror of manifestation. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved