Openings in Makkah: What Lies Beyond The World Of Our Senses With Dr. Shu’ayb Eric Winkel

The Sufi mystic and scholar, the great shaykh, Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi, received amazing revelations that allowed him to gain insights beyond this realm. He wrote over 10,000 pages of teachings about what lies beyond our three-dimensional world.  These teachings are known as The Openings in Makkah. In this episode, Dr. Shu’ayb Eric Winkel shares insights from his translation of Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi’s Openings in Makkah.  Dr. Winkel is translating over 10,000 pages of teachings from Ibn ‘Arabi – the largest English translation of this work.  This interview is from the Ocean of Sound Summit, hosted by Amany Shalaby and Debra Mastura Graugnard. Join in as Dr. Winkel takes us on a journey inside Ibn ‘Arabi’s mind and learn how his body of work can help guide us and future generations in navigating the path forward.

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Openings in Makkah: What Lies Beyond The World Of Our Senses With Dr. Shu’ayb Eric Winkel

We are here with our guest, Dr. Eric Winkel Shuʿayb. Welcome. Thank you for having me here. This is wonderful. I was saying before we started the show, I feel like a little kid doing cartwheels over here. I’m very excited about this interview. Also with us is Amany Shalaby, our co-host. I’m going to begin by reading Dr. Winkel Shuʿayb’s bio and then we’ll begin our interview. Dr. Eric Winkel Shuʿayb was first, “Cast onto the path,” as Ibn ‘Arabi would say, by Ralph Austin’s Sufis of Andalusia. He had been Michel Foucault and discovering how to look at the marginal people on various ships of fools to better understand what was going on in the mainstream. When he encountered the strange and wondrous people populating Ibn Arabi’s Andalusia, he knew he had found the answers to his questions. At seventeen years of age, he proceeded to delve into Ibn Arabi’s works as much as he could. As we proceed in this interview, if you’re not familiar with Ibn Arabi’s works, you’ll find amazement in that sentence right there. When writing his dissertation, Dr. Winkel had to skip over Ibn Arabi. He felt he did not have an adequate grip on what Shaykh al-Akbar was saying. Over the following years, he had the great fortune to be able to study with Arabic experts one-on-one. General language classes would not have worked. He was interested in the nuances of medieval Arabic and in the reading Arabic language of the Futuhat. Newcomers to the works of Ibn al-ʿArabī may not appreciate how important and nourishing the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society website was in the early days, and still is, although intellectual and academic standards were and are always met, Dr. Winkel felt that the site was clearly created by and for seekers like himself. He was immensely grateful to all who contributed to it and helped to foster a deeper understanding of Ibn Arabi’s teaching. While holding the position of Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies, Dr. Winkel explored connections between Islam and the new sciences. He produced two articles for the Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society. He’s taken on this immense project to translate the works of the Ibn Arabi Society known as The Futuhat Project. This is largely what we’re going to be talking about in this episode. We have with us Amany Shalaby, who was a translator for our spiritual teacher for many years. Our spiritual teacher, Shaykh Muhammad Sa‘id al-Jamal ar-Rifa‘i ash-Shadhuli is a Sufi Sheikh from Jerusalem who was heavily influenced by Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi. Amany has her Post-Doctorate in The Philosophy of Comparative Religions and did her dissertation on Ibn Arabi, among many other things that Amany has done. I’m very excited about what we’re going to delve into in this interview. I’m going to turn it over to you, Amany. As-salamu alaykum. Welcome. It’s a pleasure to have you. I am impressed when I read your work. I’m a native Arabic speaker and I work as a translator. I appreciate and understand how difficult it is to translate in Arabic because after our sheik passed away, I was thinking, “What can I translate now?” I found to hire Arabic course online. It’s like 1,000-something pages. I was like, “That’s quite a work.” I want to thank you for the great work you are doing and knowing that you are not a native Arabic speaker was the question for me of what made you interested and how did you start. You must have dealt in the language itself very deeply. How did you start all of that and what made you start? Can you tell it a little more? Just cast to us on to us. The Al-Futuhat Al-Makkiyah is 1 of the 2 books that are important in Ibn Arabi’s writing, Fusus and Futuhat. Futuhat has about 10,000 pages in the critical edition. I’m anticipating 19 volumes and 12,000 pages. This is the first translation and commentary of the Futuhat in hundreds of years. There have been some partial translations and attempts to do a commentary. Somehow the first time that the critical edition was created was 800 years after the Futuhat was written. It was done in Sanaa, Yemen. The first time the translation of commentary has been done in 800 years is right now. This is a very special time. I’ve been going around the world, from the UK, Europe and Maldives to Indonesia. What’s coming up is that there is a special time that’s happening. Ibn Arabi has said that there will be a time. He already saw and lived it when it was going to be our time. He calls this the third part of the night, when our cherish descends into the sky of this world and is the most close ever. He asks us, “Is there anyone seeking their separation from me to be healed? Is there anyone asking to return to me and I can turn to them? Is there anyone asking of something that I may bestow them?” This is a very special time. You could say that the time of midnight is over. The time of midnight when we don’t have any light and we don’t know where we’re going and all of the Islamic schools are becoming very fixed and solidified then all of the Islamic spiritual paths are becoming very fixed and solidified. Now is the time when our cherish is coming down. Ibn Arabi says, “Our cherish comes down and speaks to us in our own language.” This is a very special time. Ibn Arabi says, “It’s our time.” This is what I see happening with the Futuhat. That’s why it hasn’t been translated for 800 years. The partial translations are word by word. Word by word doesn’t work. I was very disciplined all the way up to maybe only a few years ago. I spent eight years completely disciplined. Word by word, everything is carefully done with no dots in my translation. I always stayed with it, sometimes for months. I would have to sit for the passage for three months before something came. I stayed with it. I kept my discipline. At some time, what happened was that I found that I was translating very fluidly. This was an event that happened to me with a friend. After that event, things moved very smoothly in this translation. I could pause and wait until I received what needed to be received. One of the examples, I translated something and then a few years later, I had the actual experience of that chapter. When I had the experience of that chapter, I said, “I better go back and see what I translated, what it looks like, and I’m sure I’m going to have to do lots of revisions.” It turns out I didn’t have any revisions at all. Even though I didn’t know anything about a lighting place, the translation was correct. I was talking to a good friend about his dissertation. He translates something Ibn Arabi says and the Futuhat one way. He says, “Dr. Winkel translated this way, which is wrong.” I called him. He wanted to go over it with me. We went over it with it. I said, “Can we go to that section where you say that was wrong? Tell me why it’s wrong.” He went there and he said, “No, you were right.” I said, “Great. You published that I’m wrong, and now you say I’m right.” This is something that’s very exciting. It tells me Ibn Arabi wants this work to come. The peers and the great beings are all doing well that this work will come out. It’s clearly beyond my abilities. I don’t have any such ability. I’m a pretty intelligent person and good at language, but that’s it. I am not this or good at language. Therefore, this is something that has to be coming out. It’s a sacred trust. I had a wonderful letter from someone who’s saying that this is for other generations. This is for what’s coming next. It’s why I am doing this. If I were in a university, you would publish 300 pages every couple of years. I’ve got to do 300 pages every couple of weeks. That’s the speed that we have to go here. Things are moving very quickly. It’s been an absolutely exciting journey. One of the things that came up to me is we were going over a passage with some people. They asked, “What’s that passage in English? What’s the passage back in Arabic? What is the source of that word? What keyword is that?” I realized at that point I had no idea because once it came in English in this way, it was as if someone had told me, “This is what Ibn Arabi sounds in English.” When it comes out that way with that clarity that this is how he sounds in English, then I can’t go from the English back to the Arabic because it’s already come out the way it’s supposed to come out. That’s also why it’s a translation and commentary or elucidation. Shala is something that elucidates and gives light to it. This is the first time that’s ever been done. Inshallah, I’ll be giving the years to be able to complete this. This is something that will be completed in more years are required. I won’t do the last paragraph until I’m ready to die because it’s not going to be okay. That’s off you go. I love the way you described it’s the message and the opening for this era. It’s, “The light is coming,” because most people see darkness. The people in the past see it as the opening of the light. This is a very special time. I have been very excited to hear spiritual beings telling me this is what they have been talking about. This is what’s coming. This is a special time. I remember a few years ago when one Political Science scholar was talking about COVID. He said he all his life, he’d wanted to see some big event happen that would change the world. He said, “Now I saw it.” I thought that if you’ve ever wanted to see the world will change, this is the time to be in right now. I think it is the instructions that we need as we enter this new world. If you've ever wanted to see the world change, this is the time to be in right now. Share on X I want to come back to the instructions that we need as we enter into this new world and this being for the future generations. In your translation of books 6 and 7, and there’s a total of 37. Am I getting the scope of this thing right? We’re doing 2 books and 1 volume. That’s the easy way to remember. Now we have four volumes out. We are hoping that the next four volumes will be ready for printing. We’re now moving very fast. Why are we moving so fast? Is it because I think I’m going to die? No. We need this and it could be going very quickly. There was a lot of gestation going on. Me having to learn how to do this and how to be effective in transmitting what needs to be transmitted and understanding what needs to be understood. The biggest and most helpful way that ever has come to me to understand has been the community. From the beginning, Shaykh al-Ja’fari tells us that authority is in a community. For me, I’ve seen that when I can’t understand if not, I’ll be on my own. When I speak to a wall or record on a microphone, nothing comes out, but when I’m speaking to a community who knows Ibn Arabi, then everything comes out. I understand things. I am able to describe and illustrate things. That’s because of the communities around the world who love Ibn Arabi and who know that this is something important. The Futuhat’s 10,000 pages are the most articulate description of what’s happening to us inside. It’s articulate, intelligent, and wise.

It is the way to describe what’s happening inside us. Other people can talk about poetry. He has 70,000 lines of poetry. He’s a poet. He’s also a poet who is also articulate and prose, telling us what’s happening to us inside who we are, where we’re going and what we need. What is happening to us inside? The first is the Futuhat shows us how to read Quran. As we’re reading Quran, we’re beginning to see the scope of what humanity is. My teacher talks about the divine origins of humanity. Ibn Arabi has one line. I love this line. He says, “Who is the inaccessible zat, essence, inaccessible, unseen, the place everything comes from, but is completely inaccessible and untouchable by us.” That’s the who. When the who becomes manifest, “She is humanity.” We are the curtain that allows this shadow play to take place. Humanity is the place where the divine names can play, act and do what they need to do. If you think about the unseen, the seen and the two oceans never meet and they can’t cross over, there’s nothing of the seen inside the unseen. There’s nothing of the unseen inside the seen. There’s nothing of the zat inside humanity. There’s nothing of humanity inside the zat. There’s a membrane in between. This membrane in between is the place where the divine names live. They look towards the zat and us. We are old in the sense that we come from there, which is old and eternal. We are new because we are a creation that’s never been seen before. This old and newness is the special feature of humanity. Why we’re here is because the old wants to see the new. The old one’s to see us. What we’re doing on the shadow play and this curtain, whatever we’re doing, is what we’re supposed to be doing. We keep thinking that, “I want to make the Earth like paradise. I want things to be nicer. People to be more pious.” The purpose of this play is for the playwright, the one who wrote the play. The one who wrote the play is very happy with the way the play is going. The actors might be complaining, “I don’t want to be the been guy all the time. I want to be more powerful.” We might complain about things, but that’s because we think it’s our play, but it’s not. It’s the play of the one who created us. The one who created us, created us so that the divine names would have their place, position and agency to do things. That’s why they’re there and we’re here. We might complain about things, but that's because we think it's our play, but it's not. It's the play of the one who created us. Share on X Is it accurate to say that we are like the shadow that is cast by the light through the membrane, we are the shadow? When we think about a shadow play or a movie theater, there’s a light projection. It hits the curtain, and then the shadows are us in two dimensions. We are running around and we’re not sure why we’re there. We don’t realize that we’re on one curtain. That curtain is called humanity or Mother Earth because Mother Earth is humanity. Ibn Arabi said, “Scratch your skin. Smell it. Now you know that you’re Mother Earth.” You are Mother Earth. Humanity is Mother Earth. It’s the perfect curtain screen for the shadow play to exist.

If you up the dimensions, we’re saying that instead of being, the shadow plate hits a three-dimensional puppet, which has color, volume, depth, and all of that. It then casts onto a two-dimensional surface and makes a shadow. If the puppet is four-dimensional, then what will be cast to the three-dimension will be colorful and volumeful. It’ll be us. It’ll be exactly where I look right now. This is a three-dimensional shadow of what happens when my four-dimensional self is hit by light. What’s the other dimension? The other dimension is meaning. When a colorful puppet with volume and depth gets cast as a shadow, that puppet loses her color and volume. What happens when my true self gets hit by light and cast this three-dimensional saddle that you see? Meaning gets lost. You don’t know what I mean. What is the meaning? When the widow gives the mite for charity, what the meaning of that little charity is greater than when the millionaire gives a little bit of his money? When I say a kind word to someone, that’s a charity. That charity might be the most valuable thing that that person heard that year or that day that cheered them up and made them feel good. The actual sound waves are the sound waves. The meaning gets lost. Would you say then that when that shadow is casted, the shadow itself in the beginning, it is losing a sense of the value that is unseen, or the meaning that is unseen, but across the way, the way it is designed is to awaken the shadow to know it’s relevant, then to know where it came from in its divine origin. We were in Indonesia and we were using the Wayang Kulit, the shadow play, which is a very powerful part of Indonesian culture and religion. When I could say all these things, everyone understands it because they know the shadow play. I was saying that when you’re in a shadow cast on the curtain, you’re telling this shadow, “Can you look at yourself?” Where’s yourself? It’s not on the curtain anymore. You can go as far as you want left, right, up, and down, but you can’t get to the puppet and the light. How do you say, “Look at the puppet who you are? Look at where the light is coming from.” In three dimensions, I say, “I look up, down, left, right, in and out, and I still can’t find who I am and where the light is coming from.” If you imagine back on that curtain with the shadow, and you say, “Look over there,” in this strange place, and you can feel, “Ah.” If they get pulled off the curtain, they’ll go, “What happened to me? Where am I? I see things,” and then back onto the curtain. That’s what our dreams are. Our dreams are being pulled off the curtain, taken somewhere where we see things and then slammed back into the curtain and we wake up. The same way in these three dimensions, “Where do I look?” I look maybe deep within. I have to find these words to say, “I’ll find out where I come from and where the light is coming from,” and that will find out who I am. The great beings see their puppet and they see everyone else’s puppets. They see the people’s value. Animals do the same thing. Animals probably have four dimensions. They have a beak that can see magnetic fields. Cats know who’s who. Ibn Arabi and Sufis of Andalusia says there’s this cat. He knows who the person is and what they’ve done. They either approach them or stay away from them. Cats are, in a sense, saying that they see who you are as you puppet. They know what you’ve done and so on. Ibn Arabi says that Hakim, the person who’s a wise doctor, knows more about you than you know about yourself because the wise doctor can see who you are and see that you know something’s happening to you in your lifestyle that’s not good for you. You’ll say, “I’m doing this and that’s not good for me.” They know something that you don’t know. This is the spiritual guide and is the one who can see who your true self is and how you can get to that true self. It makes sense that when you talk about meaning being the fourth dimension, that we are wired to seek meaning, or our hearts have that inspiration and that desire to seek meaning to know our true selves. That desire or the acquisition of meaning is what’s going to help us to understand what is on the other side of the curtain. I was very happy to think about you have length, width and all these things. What about meaning? Time didn’t work. I say, “It’s got to be something else. It’s meaning,” then I thought, “How do we describe meaning?” We say someone’s deep or that has a lot of depth. We do talk about another dimension, a depth that’s more than the depth of going into my chest. There’s something deep within. If I say deep within, and that was a deep thought and that person has a lot of depth in them, then I’m talking about this other place that’s orthogonal to every other dimension that I’m familiar with. We talk about people of the oceans that tell us that there’s some vast place that’s not just left, right, North, South and all that. We talk about the ocean of sound, which is one of the things we’re going to talk about as well. I’ll touch on something for everyone to understand because it seems like a paradox a little bit that the shadow that we see that we’re struggling, we don’t understand, we make mistakes or this and this. On the other hand, you said that creator sees it as perfect. What causes us to feel that it is imperfect in a way? Is it because we make false meanings or because we don’t understand the divine qualities, so we misuse our freedom and do these actions that we call mistakes? In some very intricate passages, some of them are saying, “Do the people who are these mistakes to these great ones who recognize a lot everywhere? Do they make mistakes? Do they sin? Do they offend?” He says, “Yes, they do.” What’s torturous for them is that they know they’re meant to offend, and they see themself offending. This is a very powerful and painful thing. The others who do these offensive things, they are the ones who have covered up. Ibn Arabi says that those who are covered up are told that there’s a hell fire and that they’ll be punished eternally in that hell fire. He said, “This is covering up because the truth of the matter is that each family will be in the garden or the hellfire. It will be their greatest mercy and joy to be in their place with their family.” He says, “We cover this up because some people will then think that they don’t need to reckon with themselves, don’t need to try harder, work with themself and so on. There’s a mercy to cover things up.” The other that I noticed that is in mainstream Islam and on the Friday prayer, there’s a sermon and often, I classify the sermons as shouting at me. They’re saying things very loud, “Do better. You’re not good enough,” and all of these things. I remember offending. He was asked why he doesn’t do that. He said, “I accept people for where they are.” Ibn Arabi says, “The great ones know that everyone is where exactly where they are supposed to be, and I accept them for where they are.” “The great ones know that everyone is exactly where they are supposed to be.” - Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Share on X Ibn Arabi talks about this person who was a very treacherous human being, and the people of the time didn’t know whether they should pray behind him or not because he was such a horrible person. Ibn Arabi says, “There’s not an issue. What happened with him before, we don’t know. What brought him to where he is now to be treacherous to be a horrible person, we don’t know what happened.” “We don’t know what happened before and what Allah will do with him tomorrow, we don’t know either. All we know is right now.” At the moment, this person was doing all of the checklists of what it takes to be the Imam of the Friday prayer. You follow him. He said, “There is no question.” This is the person we are of the moment. People are not determined by what they did. We don’t know what’s going to happen to them. We are moment by moment. We are all where we’re supposed to be. If I think of myself in progression, then I’m looking too much at the past and the future, and I’m not looking at the present. I might say, “Why should I try to get better? I’ve been bad before. Maybe I’ll be better tomorrow, but I’m not good now.” We’ve got to leave that kind of thinking and see, “With what I have been given, this is the best I can do. This is where I am right now. Tomorrow I may be in another place and I’ll take on another challenge tomorrow, but right now, this is what I can do.” It is a great paradox to me. The whole idea of I doing, being and striving versus what’s on the other side of the curtain and me being the shadow. It’s like, “I don’t want to say, ‘It’s the shadow, not me, or it is not the shadow.” “’I am the shadow and it is the one casting the shadow, not me. Therefore, what more can I do other than follow that desire for meaning and for purpose?’” We are also wired to want to be of use and to be helpful. Each is cast as they’re intended to be cast. Not all wired the same. I don’t even know what the question is there. Does it have to do with the intentions and the alignment, like the purpose of why I am doing? Even if I’m of offending or appearing as offending, my intention is pure or I am more aware it’s a divine will. The awareness maybe is the thing because is how much of it is me striving or wanting to do versus me recognizing that I am a shadow cast. That is the answer. There’s one thing called Sharia, the way to the water. The Sharia depends on an actor, I, me, then it’s the Sharia. There’s Haqiqa, which is the way things truly are. That’s when the I is out of the equation. If I am in a situation where I have agency, I’m an actor, I see myself, I and me, then I have a way to the water, act. I do this, that, these prayers, fast this way, do this in contracts with other people. All of those things take place because I’m an actor, but then the Quran in verse is, “You did not throw when you threw, but a lot through.” That shows us how everything we do, we ask the question, “I did not throw. I ultimately have no ego. I have no I. I am not someone who does. There’s only one who does. The one who does, does. The rest of us are slaves. We do what we’re told to do or what we’re made to do.” When you are through, “Now that I do have agency.” “When you are through,” means, “I have agency, that I do something. I am someone. I am accountable and responsible for my behavior, but a lot through.” Ultimately, back to Haqiqa. It’s the truth. This is the true way things are. This is the way Ibn Arabi counsels us to deal with what’s happening to us. If we have agency, we’re aware of what we’re doing, we’re I and me, then we have Sharia. We follow the way of the prophets. Some of them we follow, “This is how you do things. This is how you make contracts with other people. This is how you behave with other people. This is how you behave with your parents, children and all of these things.” All of that is there when I’m an actor. What’s interesting is when the I gets destroyed or the ego goes. That happens in intoxication and love. That’s why we call love and intoxication. When we have love, we lose the ego. When we lose egos, we work simply from love, which I will say is Haqiqa. That is the true way to work from love and to say, “Whatever Allah gives me good, bad, I like it, I don’t like it, I don’t care. It’s the beloved gave me something. It’s what I love to do. Whatever the beloved does is loved by the lover.” When we’re in that situation, then we say, “I have no movement.” Ibn Arabi says in that situation, “When you tell me to pray, then I ask, and you give me that task, but you are the only one who can do things. Who are you asking to do that yourself? That sounds strange. Me? I have no ability to do this. I am confused.” That’s exactly it. We go back and forth. It depends. Ibn Arabi does talk about how we say that, “Allah made me pray. He prayed and danced me.” One of the ways the Sufis used to say, “Is dancing prohibited or not prohibited?” He says, “Yes, dancing is prohibited, but if you are made to dance, that’s beautiful.” On those times when we offend, and I love that you used the word, “When we offend,” we are made to offend, it is that opportunity for us to find the meaning and come closer to what is on the other side of the membrane. A few years ago, when sheikh taught us what astaghfirullah means. I always thought it as like sin and things like that. You say, “Forgive y sin.” Astaghfirullah, the keyword there is GHUFR, which is propolis, which is what the honey the bees have propolis, and it protects the honey and the hexagonal cells. If there’s a foreign object, an insect comes in that propolis will be poured around that object, they won’t infect the rest of the hive. That’s propolis. It’s healing things that are not good for me and that have separated me. Astaghfirullah means, “Restore me to you. Heal me so that I can be restored to you.”

That’s why we say it all the time. For Ibn Arabi, when we say, “Astaghfirullah,” we say, “Heal my separation, Allah.” We say that and angel is created. The angel is on our bridge. What was an offense, which is as separation? what I did wrong was I felt separated. That’s why I did what I did and I attributed to myself. I said, “I did this. I was wrong.” That’s a hook that’s right there. In the journey of my life that when I’m going from the womb to the grave and I’m trying to get to the garden, that hook will grab and stop me unless I say, “Astaghfirullah.” Ibn Arabi says that Angel will be created and will do nothing but wait by that hook until the day of judgment so that you’ll pass smoothly across. That’s why we say, “Astaghfirullah.” What it is, “Heal separation because I attribute things to myself. I did that. I’m a bad person. I’m horrible. I did that.” That’s attributing to myself. Ibn Arabi says, “From Quran, you contribute the bad to yourself, that only attribute to Allah is good.” The divine, everything is good. If I attribute to God, then everything has become perfect and there’s imperfection. In obvious teaching, me, us not to look at some behavior that needs to be forgiven, but as separation, which needs to be healed and when I need to be restored to Allah. Restoring is an alignment, turning towards then Allah says, “I give up. I cannot fix what I have done.” “Therefore, I say, it’s not in my control, it’s out of my hand. I give up.” when I give up, I say, “I attribute everything to Allah.” Only you can make things right. Allah has that angel covers the bridge, smooth sailing to the gate of the garden. I have a multilayered question that in a way that is healing from the separation, gives us either the assurance or, at a higher level, discovering the beautiful meaning and purpose of what is behind, like the divine purpose and meaning. That is one way I understand it. I would like to go back to the concept of hellfire because I remember reading somehow somewhere that also Arabic said that hellfire may not be eternal, which is not the popular traditional Islamic view, but there are few scholars, including Rasi, that argued that it is not. Did you come across something like that? It’s throughout the Futuhat. I didn’t read the whole Futuhat, but I read something to that extent. I’m translating one of the passages right now. That’s the one where it says that it can be hidden. The people in the hellfire are her people. They’re Jahannam’s people. They’re her family and the people at Jahannam are her family. There’s a time when the people in the garden will look at the people in the hellfire and they’ll say, “Thank God I’m not there,” because they are in the place that fits them. It’s the place where they belong. The people in the hellfire will look at the garden and say, “Thank God I’m not there,” because they do not want what’s there. They want what they have here, the temperature, because of the heat or the cold of Jahannam, that’s what they want. That’s their family. Ibn Arabi says that when Allah says that, “My mercy will outstrip my wrath,” the outstripping is very good. Let’s go quickly to that and then I hope I don’t forget the rest of that. What happens is that when you have a horse race and the people will put a stake in the ground, and then they all try to race that with horses. Ibn Arabi says, “When this horse race, wrath is very fast, very powerful. It goes fast towards the stake and you say, ‘For sure wrath is going to win.’” Rahma is a very slow horse, but she has a very big chest. She’s got all the wind. In the end, it gets closer and wrath is getting tired. Rahma coming up. Rahma then comes to the stake and takes it, and Ibn Arabi says, “The stake is humanity.” He said, “I’ve got you.” They alluded to in Hadith that Allah will stable the hellfire and it’ll extinguish itself. I was looking at the vocabulary in the Quran. I learned it from the Ibn Arabi approach to the Quran, where the word hulud, which means eternity and the mind. It’s like a state of the mind, consciousness, being and that it is also in the Arabic language, it may not mean eternity. Ibn Arabi would say that the family of Jahannam will be forever in Jahannam because that’s their mercy. That’s Rahma. It would be a disservice and an unmerciful thing to take them out of the place where they want to be and they love to be. There’ll be a time when Jahannam, which is torment, becomes oud which means sweetwater. The torment changes to sweetwater. It’s the same three letters in Arabic. Sweetwater and torment are the same three roots in Arabic. There comes a time when the torment changes to sweetwater. They’re there forever because that is their place. That is the place that is good for them and best for them. Ibn Arabi says that, “Therefore nothing can take them out of their mercy,” because the wrath that was required to put them there and to begin their punishment, and which is the creation of their processing until they can be able to be perfectly peaceful and receive mercy, there’s a lot of pain to get there. The faithful people have that pain in this world. People they love die, get sick, get hurt, feel dominated, feel damaged by people, all of these things happen to them. That is because that’s processing them and making them able to receive the mercy of Allah. Other people cruise through this world and they get their pains and people die and get sick. They get all of that later, and then they’re ready to receive the mercy of God. This is a necessary process. We get it in this world, they get it in the next world. This is a necessary way that all these shadows on this curtain all have to be waved so they can pass through. That becomes a mercy. There are a lot of ways to express this mercy, but the wrath that it took will never have that wrath again. That means that there’s no way that wrath can keep someone in a bad position, but the wrath then gives up and the mercy outstrips takes. Anyone who wasn’t in their family will be brought into the garden, but anyone who is in her family stays there, and this is where they want to be. They look at the garden and say, “Thank God I’m not there.” You mentioned something about the torment and the sweetwater coming from the same root. We find that a lot in the Arabic language where the root contains the opposite meanings. Ultimately, in my mind, I’ve reconciled that because as we come to know the truth that the opposites are contained and there is no separation. There is only one. Can we talk a little bit more about that and perhaps moving into language and sound? One of the things that I desire to talk about is the emanation of consciousness through the meanings of sounds and how that decodes our world. This is why the Arabic language is important. At one point, I was reading Lisan al-Arab’s Tāj al-ʿArūs and I said, “Everything I’m reading in this these three columns about this one word is straight from the Futuhat. It’s exactly the Futuhat.” I got all of the Futuhat in the language itself because all of the tensions and the contradictions. Someone said that before, but I thought it was very rich. I said, “Every Arabic word has one meaning. It’s the opposite, meaning. A meaning about sex and camels.” I thought that was mine. Someone said no. Somebody else has said that. That is because the words themself contain all of these meanings the way we contain all of these meanings. We contain contradictions. That’s one reason why poetry is effective and the sound of things. What we’re doing in the line-by-line reading every other Friday is you read the text and you hear the text, you hear the text being read. Somehow, reading and hearing are enough to get the intellect to fall asleep so the heart can begin to understand. There is something very special about sound. Whenever I have a problem with a sentence, the way to unravel the sentence is I start speaking it. When I speak and hear it, then I get the rhythm and I understand what’s happening. We were reading texts with a good friend in Orlando. This is how I understand the text, “My translation with this. Her translation is that,” then she said, “Let me read it to you.” She read it out loud in Arabic the way she punctuated it with the voice then I realized that that was the natural way to say that sentence. Her translation was the correct one. That comes from the way the natural voice. Ibn Arabi is dictating the Futuhat to his friends. He’s writing them down, but he’s also saying it out loud. It’s very important to have it out loud. I can understand things when it’s out loud and then I began to see the Inb Arabi saying, and I kept thinking everything is visual, and it is very visual.

Visuals are certainly absolutely important. We got the illustrated guide. Visual is important, but you could say that the primary place is sound for Ibn Arabi. The first thing we hear is be and we are, “Am I not the one who loves you? Am I not your cherish here?” The hearing is a cleaving. Our ears are like this, and then they get cleaved apart and then something is produced. That has something to do with cleaving. It’s the same in English. The cleaving is its own opposite, its own antonym. You can say,” you cleave together or you cleave apart.” it’s its own antonym. There are many Arabic words that have their own antonym. It also has to do with sex and camels. Camels also have a cleaving situation. It’s all always put in there. Sound, so the ears get cleaved, they get split and something happens to them. That’s the description of how a well is dug. A fatir is the one who digs the well by putting the blade of the shovel into the sand and splitting it apart and digging it and making it well. I didn’t know what it meant to be a Fatiras-samawati wal-‘ardi, the initiator or whatever of the heavens and Earth. They are arguing, saying, “I’m the fatir of that well because I’m the one who first put the blade of the shovel into that sand.” There’s a wonderful scholar. I’m trying to reconnect with her, who says that the Arabi words are also Ajami words are also non-Arabic words. When we hear fatir, we do hear father also. It’s not that there are Semitic languages here, and Hindu-Iran languages are there. There could be some very close connections, and one of them might be fatir. The source is one. In a way, we are the spoken words of Allah. The word itself, the sound of the word or the letter has spirit. You separate a little more of that. In a way, we are the spoken words of Allah. Share on X I’ve always been trained in languages. I always say that there are separations of languages all the time, but maybe it comes from one source. As a human body, we are one humanity. One human body we have. We say things one way. The biggest thing for Ibn Arabi about sound is he tells the story. He says the first, “The first letter and number is the one which has no second the one. That has no second is the alif. The alif has nothing that comes after her. The alif is there, and then he connects the alif to the Sea of Muhammad, Nur al-Muhammadi, the Light of Muhammad. This one is the non-manifest one that is outside of time, but when the alif comes into time, it comes in as an, “Ah,” sound. Here sound goes very interesting. The I is a sigh. What happens is that we hear that, “I am a treasure concealed, and I long to be recognized. I create the treasure chest, humanity, and I teach them to recognize me, and they recognize me.” This is the sigh. I’m a treasure. No one sees me. No one appreciates me. No one values me. No one knows I exist. That sigh is wet and vaporous as Ibn Arabi says, and it creates the mist. The mist is where everything takes place then. In this mist, the first creative being is the Light of Muhammad. When that Light of Muhammad is created, he turns to where he came from and says, “There’s no reality but you.” She says, “You are the one who’s conveying my reality.” He says, “La ilaha illallah,” and she says, “Muhammadur Rasulullah.” This is the alif. When it comes into being, Mother Earth and humanity, it comes as ahamsa. First is that sa. The next is an H, ahasa and the last is the ush. It goes all the way through the body and makes all of the letters. Ibn Arabi is interesting because everything is Arabi. He’s not talking about Arabic. He’s talking about the Arabi language, which is the Arabi moving, the language that makes things clear. This is not just the standard classical Arabic. He seems to know very little about other religions or other languages. He seems to be very monolingual. I cannot translate anything into French or German or any of the languages that I know, but only English. I’m monolingual when it comes to that. He says that there are 70 phone names in the human body, then he talks about tones. Not only are there 70 phone names, but there are tones, which he calls colors. Now he’s talked about human language, not Arabic language, 28 letters or other language have 36 letters or 70 phone names with their own tones. He is talking about the universal language. It comes and is produced by the body. When it comes out the lips, it comes out, the last letter is. The wa or the oh sound. You start with ha and hoo. That comes out that way. The last letter wa is six, and is associated with Muhammad Wa Salam. If you ask, “Is there another prophet who asked for Muhammad Wa Salam?” Your answer is, “There’s no other place after the sound, after the air has left the body and left the mouth, there’s nothing else out there that can change the sound, modulate the sound. There are no more messengers after the last one has come, which is the wa, the sixth. He’s the beginning and the end.” When you draw a circle, the moment you put the dot on a page, you now know where the end of the circle is going to be. It’s going to be right there. The moment I draw a circle, I already have told you what the end is. There is first and last, and then if that circle is not a circle like this, but a Mobius circle or loop, then a Mobius circle loop is the beginning, all the way around twice to the end, beginning, inside, outside, end. Who is the first, the last, the inside and the outside? When you go through the Mobius trip like this, you’re reciting the Quran burst, “Who is the first, the last, outside and the inside?” If I may comment on something you said that struck me about the sigh. I want to go back to it because sheikh usually told us, “It’s the first sound that the baby would make when he’s newly born.” Also, the word Mishkat in the Arabic language is the niche in the verse of light. The Mishkat comes from shakwa. Shakwa means to complain or sigh. Is it like whenever we have that sigh inside us, which is unspoken, it’s a feeling. That sigh is almost like when the divine wants us to release or act to channel the divine qualities. Ibn Arabi starts out a little bit easier by saying, “Every attribute that there is a divine attribute.” We don’t have seeing and hearing, those are divine attributes. There’s nothing that we have. It’s all lie and then we take those attributes. He starts with that, which is okay to handle then he says that every emotion that we have is a divine emotion. Every experience we have is a divine experience. Every hurt we have is a divine hurt. This gets very tough to say that the divine gets hurt and the divine has a wound and the divine wants something but doesn’t have it. Every attribute is a divine attribute. Every emotion is a divine emotion. Every experience is a divine experience. Share on X One thing is Irada. Irada is desiring. This Irada is a divine attribute. When we sigh because we want something, we don’t have it. This is the sigh of the zat who sighs and say, “I’m a treasure, but no one sees, recognizes or knows me. I have to create someone who can look at me and say who I am, ‘You are everything. You are great. You are beauty itself.’” That’s what has to happen. It’s very difficult and it’s one of the secrets. When we have this experience of, “I’m not seeing. I want something and I don’t have it. I wish this would happen. I wish someone would see me, I wish someone would hear and acknowledge me. “That’s a divine experience. That’s not my experience. A hidden treasure who desired to be known. I have to tell this story about this little girl that I worked with at one time. She was six years old at the time, and she had not forgotten. She still remembered being in the womb. She said, when you’re in the womb, like when you get scared because you can see everything from there. When you get scared, you can go back and ask questions. You still have that ability to travel between the veils. Her mom asked her, “Do you got scared? What happened?” She said, “They show you a movie of your whole life before you come here.” Mom says, “Really? It’s scary. If you don’t like it, can you change it?” She says, “No, God has it all worked out, and you have to come here. It’s like going to school.” You have to go to school because you have to learn things. She says, “Do you remember the movie?” This is the beautiful part that is reminding me of as you talk about the treasure. She says, “No. That would be like going on a treasure hunt when you already know the treasure.” The six-year-old girl said that. It’s like this is the ultimate reality show where we forget. We think we’re separate and independent. We think that we are somehow masters and actors in this single, separate and independent universe when we’re acting in a treasure hunt to know the treasure. It struck me that in the Quran, “A lot takes the soul out. If the body is going to continue to live, brings the soul back. If not, it keeps the soul out.” The soul is always traveling. Newborns are sleeping all the time. In 23 or 24 hours, they’re sleeping. That’s such a mercy because they’re able to go back, come back and then forget. When they come out, they know everything and then they forget. The body, because it’s composite, makes forgetting to happen. We forget and we spend the rest of our life trying to remember what we forgot. Some remember quickly, some take a long time, some remember only after the grave that they can then remember why they were created. That is why the practice of sounds comes. That’s where the hearing comes in because, in the womb, we hear perfectly well. The hearing is a reminder. One of the reasons that they say that when the babies were born, they say, “Bababa,” is because they said, “Bala,” in Arabic. All of these are sounds that are coming out. There’s also reminding. They’re remembering by saying that, “Bababa,” themselves that that’s the word that they heard. They heard themselves say that. That’s the contract. That’s the covenant. That’s the thing that remember this because when we come into the body, we forget. The older we get, the more we forget. How do we remember what we have forgotten? It does require us to go to another place. We call it deep within or something like that. One of the beauties of sound is that things that we see have object permanence. We think that things are always there. There’s object permanence. We tend to think that this is a stable world. Remember that once a sound comes, it will never be heard again, but it will never go outside of existence. Once a sound wave starts, it will never end. The sound never ends, but it’s never encompassed. You cannot encompass a wave. You can’t cut it up. What physicists and scientists try to do is analytical, try to cut things up to find out what they are. If you take a wave and you cut it, it’s no longer a wave. It doesn’t work. You take a wave, and the ocean, you put two walls on it. You no longer have a wave in the ocean. A wave is something that goes from somewhere and never ends, then there’s a moment where it is, but it cannot be encapsulated or encompassed. The wave and the sound is one of the beautiful metaphors or images, or we have the word for audibles or something where the who is always bringing things into creation. They’re there and then they continue it for eternity in creation. They never leave creation after they’ve come into creation. This is what sound does. It teaches us that there’s now because I cannot remember what sound came before, and I cannot predict what the sound will be next, but I only can hear the sound at this moment. That’s beautiful teaching to say that, “If I want to find out where the sound come from, I have to hear the sound at this moment.” This is why every moment Shaykh Noreen translates Ibn Arabi and the Futuhat saying that every breath is a path to Allah. You don’t have to go anywhere or do anything. Every breath goes back to where it came from. If you could only ride the breath, one wave, all you need to do is ride the one wave and you’re there. When Ibrahim Adham left and said, “I’m going to go look for God,” and he got on his horse, and the saddle turned around and said, “This was not why you were created. Every step that you’ve taken towards what you think is God has been a step away from me.” It has been a step away from God. Bayazid Bastami goes outside looking for God. Some old guy comes up to him and says, “Who are you?” He said, “I’m Bayazid Bastami. Allah is back there and looking for you.” We don’t take a step forward. Every breath is a path to Allah. It’s one step, not a series of steps, not something that takes place in the future and requires something in the past. The visual doesn’t necessarily teach us that the same way, but sound teaches us that there is sound right now. What there was before is no longer present. What there is next is going on eternally. When you get there, you’ll see whatever it is there. We cannot predict what the next note will be. We have Makam, which is the syntax of sentences and the scales of music. You know that the next note will be a note, B flat or A flat, but we don’t know what note it will be. You alluded earlier to the sounds from the silent, “Ah,” to the, “Oh,” being a progression through the body. Can you say more about this in terms of how this can help us to understand, if we can, the emanation of creation from the source? This is one of the things that intrigues and fascinates me about the teachings. Ibn Arabi is going to tell us that each of the places that the air goes through that air can modulate it as a palatable, labial, dental, guttural, and all of these things that modulate them. Ibn Arabi then ties those into the Light of Muhammad. These are all the lights and guides of humanity. The first guide, the alif is there outside of time, then the next one that comes in is going to be all of humanity’s guides. All our guides are here. All of the sounds that can be produced in the body are guides. All of them can be put together and understood its meaning. We can understand the meaning. The meaning is not in the sound or the letter or the word itself. It’s in the reading, voicing and making audible. That’s where meaning comes from. All of these beings modulate in certain ways. When we look at them, we see, “The sub is different from the time. The ja is different from the ka.” We see separation. Instead of saying, inside the ka, ja, da and sa is the ah. The ah is inside all of them. This light is inside all of them. You can’t say that the S is better than the T is better than the U. It doesn’t make any sense. All there is that everyone has an ah side of it and everyone is coming through the curtain, the veil, which is humanity. One of the ways to remember that and one of the practices is to recite hu because the hu was first one and the last one. By reciting hu, we are understanding that all of these guides have been touched, met, thanked and welcomed. This is a word that reminds us of the looping that takes place, that we are one breath away from this light because the breath, the light came put into the breath one and it came out. Breaths 2 and 3. Any of those breaths are the breath that could be gone back to and the light is seen. Any of those breaths, you can go back to the puppet in the shadow play and back to the projection projector on the left. Something that Ibn Arabi touched on, and I’ve been contemplating and receiving some of the treasures is that the sound exists within us or they come from us. They have meaning and spirit is alive in them, but that also has a cosmic dimension. Ibn Arabi touches about that a lot about the orbits of the letters and their meaning in these other cosmic dimensions. I know it’s a very deep, complicated topic, but can you touch a little bit on it?

On the line-by-line reading, we’re at chapter two. It is the most difficult chapter there is. I spent years looking for anyone else who says anything about anything like these things that he talks about in letters. no one else comes close to talking about all these things for them. Letters are communities. They’re an uma. They’re a community. They have their own guys, messengers, and all of these things. They say, “Where is all this coming from?” There are 2, 3, 4 and 10 orbits. There are all these kinds of orbits and all these things. I said, “How is all this happening?” Suddenly, during one of the Friday sessions, we were looking at 100. One of the images that were coming up was the horse’s mane. Ibn Arabi is telling us that the horse’s mane is a visualization of dual time. We think about numbers as a number line, and then there’s a number plane, which is the complex plane, and then there’s a number volume and the other strange volume is numbers. The same way thing happens with time. Time is not just a timeline. There’s a time plane. It has two dimensions. It has length and width. Ibn Arabi talks about time as having length and width. Somehow, I got it that he is the horse’s mane. The horse’s mane goes from the forelock to the hunch. That’s one line. Where all the letters come from, that line is from the inner chest to the last lip. That’s the vertical line. He says that all of these letters that come in any of these places have traveled for three years. That took a while to figure out, “He means the horse’s mane.” The horse’s mane comes like this, and then the hairs go sideways. Every letter that comes like this in 1 second has taken 3 years to reach there, so 1 second vertically and 3 years horizontally. That helps explain a little bit of something but also tells you why the Sufis are careful about sounds and words that they say because they produce angels, for instance. They produce good things, bad things, and they have come for three years to come here. All of them are very valuable. These sounds are also then beings. They’re the zodiac, but they’re also connected to the twelve Imams and spiritual beings who organize and are in charge of the world of the cosmos. They have three-year orbits that they do things in. Those three-year orbits are dual time. Muhammad Jusuf, the word dual time. These are the plane and then the timeline. Whatever’s happening here second by second is happening for three years. Only Ibn Arabi talks about dual time, as far as I can see. Only he’s the one who sees what’s happening and what the quality of these letters are. It’s something I’m still very much exploring because it will break. It will burst my mind and work on time as a two-dimensional thing. When you take numbers and all of a sudden, you say, “What if the number has a width as well?” Your brain starts frying. It’s difficult. The idea is that there’s a time that has 3 years and 1 second. 1 second in 1 direction, 3 is in the other direction. That’s a lot to work with. In exploring the concepts of time, I took a chaplaincy program with Amany. We read a paper with Ibn Arabi where he talks about time. My mind remembers it as space worms, answering the question of if creation is continuing to unfold and evolve, how is it that God is the all-knowing from the beginning to the end, and there is no beginning and there is no end? Talking about panning out beyond this limited dimensional reality that we live in a greater dimension and seeing time as these space worms that are traveling through this dimension where we see a cross-section of the time and in this space. Julian Barbour is a physicist who wrote The End Of Time in 1999. I liked his work. He says it’s a temple that there’s only a now. There’s no movement and continuity. I emailed him some passages from Ibn Arabi. He wrote back, and said, “It much better.” I look at it as, for people, in my generation, you have a vinyl record. That vinyl record contains all, but what’s being played is only what you hear at that moment. That’s like sound. Sound is something that has a presence. It doesn’t necessarily know what’s happening before or after. The difference between the divine names is Al-Alim, the one who knows, and Al Khabir, who is informed. In the ground here, we will try you until we are informed or until we know. This means that we need to see what happens then divine names will then say, this is what happened. With the stylist as it goes around the record player, the Al-Alim is the one who sees and hear the record player as one big sound. We hear the divine names hear it step by step. Sound is coming to us in a series of nals. All we can know is the now at any one moment. There’s no algorithm that predicts what the next sound will be. We’re in that status. We are like the ink that’s in the inkwell. All of the letters that are going to be drawn from the inkwell can be known by Allah, but not by us and not by the divine names. They need to have each letter drawn before they can see what they have. The one who draws it is the pen. The pen is the light of Muhammad. That shows that outside of time, all of this is clear. Inside of time, everything is as with a sound on a record. Sound has its meaning. What things mean is not just the notes. The notes aren’t good notes and bad notes, A, B, Fa, Sa, Sol. We are the ones who find meaning. The letters and sounds themselves are not good or bad. That means that they’re always mutable. We can go back to the record player, listen to the song again in that place and hear it differently. The sound is going to be the same, but what it means is going to be different. I can go above and say, “Can I hear the sound and this time know what it means and change its meaning?” The way I think about that is that if someone hits me like this, then you get angry as you kill the person and they say, “Sorry, my mistake.” The moment they say, “Sorry, my mistake,” it still hurts, but it’s over. This is exactly the same hit or if a tree, I’m walking through the force and the tree goes bang like that and I get so angry, “It’s a tree. It didn’t mean to do that.” Now it’s okay. It still hurts. I might have a red spot there. In other words, the event itself can’t change. It’s immutable, but the meaning is completely mutable and changed. Either I can go and say that tree hit me for a good reason, “It reminded me of something. I was forgetting something, the tree reminded me. What a lovely tree. Thank you, tree, for doing that.” Someone says, “It’s an accident. That happens. I’ll forgive you the way you forgive me.” All of these things are mutable. Our events are unchanged. As a six-year-old said, there’s a movie and these are all the events that are going to happen, but what it means is entirely up to me and I can then change it at any time. That means that even if someone is in the grave, they have a bridge from the womb to their grave. I can say, “When I hit you like that, I was wrong. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry. Would you forgive me?” If that person forgives me, then my bridge is opened up and then their bridge is opened up. If I say to the person who’s died, “No,” we had this argument, I leave it at that, or, “You owed me money, it’s done.” That clears that person’s bridge. That person’s bridge has changed, even though the person’s in the grave. There’s never too late to change meaning. That meaning is the bridge of your life from room to the grave is your meaning. It’s never too late to change meaning. It’s always changing because someone that I don’t even remember is, forgiving me for something that I did and I even forgot. It's never too late to change meaning. Share on X My bridge is changing. I don’t even know if someone’s changing my bridge at this moment. That’s why we always are forgiving each other and we’re always storing each other and saying, “I forgive you. I will reinterpret this event.” I remember someone saying to Nelson Mandela, “Did you forgive the guards? Did you forgive the people who put you in prison?” He said, “If I didn’t forgive them, I’d still be in that prison.” The prison is an event that’s going to happen, but the event can be the meaning is changing. He can say, “I don’t want to be in that prison anymore. I forgive. I’m on. I’m out of here.” This is something that’s very delicate because everyone has to come to it for themself and no one can say, “You ought to forgive that.” There are horrible things that happened and horrible things have happened to people. To say that you should forgive them is nothing like that at all. When that person says, “I don’t want to be that way anymore. I want to say the event happened, but this is my interpretation. This is my meaning,” that’s liberating. I hope that we all can come to that and take things that, “Someone failed me, but I forgive and I move on.” That helps them and it helps me that our bridge then gets smoothed as we go to the gate of the garden. I’m drawn to the sound. I’m going to go back to it a little bit because what I was reading in Ibn Arabi and it seems very ambiguous in the beginning. I’m receiving a little bit of glimpses. What caught my attention is that elements and the particles that they’re 28. Arabic is 28. These particles are a wave in nature, but they are also particles and they are stardust. You see Arabic talking about the connection of the letters to the subject signs and planets in a way that these sounds inside us resonate also with the universe around us and with the planets. The way the ancient people were always looking at the Zodiac signs and reading how it’ll affect the Earth and all of that. Ibn Arabi touches on that a little bit. Have you cracked this a little bit? A lot of times, I try to understand Ibn Arabi, I have to delve into places and, it does seem that there are Chinese, Indian, Arabic. The way they handle Cosmologies and Mathematics is very enlightening. Ibn Arabi talks about some kinds of mathematics that only the Indians seem to have understood. Bhāskara and some of the others. There’s something there. It is a fascinating world. These events are there. That humanity is moving through because humanity is this cosmos. We are moving through things and things are happening to us. To understand how things are happening when the moon is here, the sun is there and the asteroids are here, the comments are there, and all of these things are all signs because they’re all events and how we interpret and interpret them. We’re trying to find out where things are going. “Where is this cosmos in its age and how is it functioning? Where am I at this age? How is my body functioning?” These are all those things. Things that happen out there happen inside here. Also, I have influence from the inside to the outside. We have things that get placed and set in another world and this membrane world then they come into here, either dream first and then into what we call reality, or it gets put together. Ibn Arabi’s greatest teacher, they met and he would learn and then come back and say what he had understood. When he looks at the cosmos, he has a diagram with all bodies, then a blank circle. He has a throne and then the cross, which are the two feet that come down on the footstool. The one that’s not labeled is the Earth because Mother Earth is inside the cosmos and outside as well. This is the only thing that’s inside and outside. It is the mambrane. It is humanity because we are old and new. We are old and uncreated. We are new and created. We are the ones that hold that in ourselves in our humanity. The first sound we hear is, “Am I not your cherisher?” To hear that sound, we have to have the divine attribute of being able to hear and then to say, “Yes, you are my cherisher. You’re the one who lost me. We have to have the divine attribute of speaking.” Shaykh Noreen says, “If we didn’t already know the truth, we could not learn the truth. If we were not already the truth, we could not know the truth.” We have to already have the divine attributes of hearing, seeing, desiring, knowing, living, speaking. We have to already have those divine attributes. Otherwise, nothing could happen. If we were not alive and Allah spoke to a lump of clay that’s not alive, nothing would happen. If the lump of clay had no ears to hear and could not hear, then Allah could speak as much as Allah wanted to, and nothing would be heard. The divine attributes are already in us. That’s the secret. Unless we were already divine, we could not become who we are. We could not become humanity unless we were already divine. That’s the divine origin of humanity. The first thing we hear is, “Am I not the one who loves you?” We say, “Yes, you are,” and then we’re sent to this world. When we’re sent into this world, we forget. The last thing we hear is that if we are fortunate, someone that will give us an inception and they’ll lodge something in our chest, they’ll say, “You’re going to go to the grave.” When you go through the grave, two people will come to you and ask you questions. Here’s how you answer. The first thing we hear is outside of time, we enter into time and accomplice it. We enter into the womb when the clay has been lumped together for four months, and then we enter into that lump of clay. We’re in the womb. The womb becomes tighter. There’s too much pressure. We have to go. Something has to go. We can’t just sustain ourselves and stay here forever. The channel opens up. There’s light on the other side, and we move through the channel. We come out and we come into this world, then when we’re in this world, we hear what’s lodged inside your chest one more time. When I say, “I am a treasure,” it concealed. Ibn Arabi says, “A treasure concealed means that there’s a treasure chest. Where’s the treasure chest? Open the treasure chest and see what the treasure is.” We open this treasure chest. We see what the treasure is. If we’re about to die, we’re fortunate. Someone reminds us and says, “When you go to the grave, you’ll hear this.” The first thing we hear is, “I might not be the one who loves you.” The last thing we hear when we’re in this world is,” when you get to the grave, do this and do that.” This is the procedure of going into time. Once we’re into time, we stay into in time forever, eternally. There’s a timeless and endless ocean. In the middle is humanity. These oceans don’t mix. They have a membrane inside. Ibn Arabi says, “What’s strangest and most wonders is that there’s never been a time when I have not been outside of time. This is what we want to be, is be able to go outside of time.” The six-year-old person said that you can ask questions. You can go and ask and go outside of time again. Ibn Arabi says, “There’s never been a time when I’ve not been outside of time.” Now that’s been lifted up, see the record player, and then watch the stylist go around. It is the record to go around the stylist to play music. It’s also the shadow play to be outside of time to move off the curtain, go to the light and projector, and see the whole thing through someone else’s eyes. The one who’s seeing the play, you see it through those eyes and suddenly, everything becomes clear. You see things that you couldn’t see if you were on the curtain. That’s why the prophets had 360 of view. Ibn Arabi had that one moment in his life when he could see around him 360 degrees because he was not looking from shadow to shadow. He was looking from projector to shadow. If I may ask a question about nature, animals, plants, water, all of the elements of nature, everything has a life. Ibn Arabi said, “Everything is alive, even the things that you think are not.” Everything has a consciousness. I know we are the ones that forget. They do not. Everything is alive, articulate, and intelligent because it has to be alive to be able to do the celebration of the divine. It has to be articulate that the celebration is articulate. It has to be intelligent to know what it’s celebrating. Everything is alive, articulate, and intelligent. It has to be alive to celebrate the divine. It has to be articulate that the celebration is articulate. It has to be intelligent to know what it's celebrating. Share on X Everything is alive, intelligent and articulate. Ibn Arabi says that so that we shouldn’t say that someone died or someone passed away. Someone says, someone went from someone’s spirit, went somewhere else, and their mineral continues to be alive. This mineral body will always be alive. That’s because it’s Mother Earth. This is one humanity. Once we enter existence, we’ll never leave. We’ll always be mineral. That mineral is the most receptive of divine radiance. The divine radiance comes out. It’s like looking at the mirror, and then the mirror makes an image, and we see an image behind the mirror. What is the most receptive mirror is humanity and Mother Earth. We receive all of the different views or perspectives of the divine as the divine gazes at the mirror. We are able to show all of those different views, looks and aspects because we were taught the divine names. We are talking divine names, so every divine feature has an expression in humanity. This is what makes humanity special because that humanity can demonstrate the features of the divine. Demonstrating feature design is why we’re. If we see that, that we are demonstrating the features of the divine, then we begin to take on another viewpoint.

When we take on the divine viewpoint, we see everything in a very different way, in a very beautiful way. That’s the easiest way to understand it is love matters. That whatever the beloved loves is loved by the lover. Whatever Allah loves to see is loved by me to see whether I think it’s good or bad. If Allah loves to see it, then I love to see it. When you talked about the membrane, according to Arabic, as far as I understand, it’s also the imagination. In a way, it’s the threshold between the two words. Through it, we also hear or even in our own thinking, it comes in walls. There is this aspect of the word spoken and the world also that is inside. The words inside are also vibrations of sound. Ibn Arabi touches on that a little bit. The membrane draws upon the senses. That’s how the senses are important because the raw material of the imagination, memory and all of that come from the five senses. The senses are the raw material, and they give the data. If the imagination sees a unicorn, it’s an ibex and a horse because I have to have seen an ibex and a horse. One of the things is that in order to have this rich imaginable realm, I need to have the senses. The senses are what provide all of these things. I need to hear all of these sounds in order to be able to imagine sounds. I need to be able to form these words that have never been formed before. They have a basis there that they come from. We’re looking for the basis that things come from. The imagination is the place where all of these things can come together and do things that they have an aspect of the divine because they’re creating things that have never been made before. They come from something, but they’re created because they haven’t come before. Ibn Arabi is talking about imagination. I’m still working on this. We had a talk with the Ibn Arabi Society. One of the guests was asking about imagination. It’s something I’m studying there now because what I’m finding very important is that Ibn Arabi is looking at the census. They said the census is primary. Allah can be the entity of the senses, but never of the secondary things like imagination, the imagine or memories, because they depend on something else. Allah will not depend on something that depends on something.

When Allah says, “I become the hand with which they hold, and I become the ear with which they hear,” that shows that the senses and the entity are the same. That’s where the senses are. Ibn Arabi says, “You should find out for yourself which of Allah’s senses are you. Are you hearing, seeing or something else? “I’ve already told you what sense I am.” I have a few answers to what he means by that. It’s a little bit of a riddle. What sense is Ibn Arabi? That’s something that we do. Let’s rethink about sound. The sound that I become the hearing with which someone hears. The sound is exactly what it is. It is everything that it is. It can’t be better or worse. It is sound. It is the way it is. What we’re then saying is that it is divine because it can’t be better and less. It can only be what it is. When Allah speaks, what does it sound like? We know that there is Allah’s speech. It is no different from the speech you’re hearing. It is not that Allah has a very melodious voice. Whatever voice you hear, that’s the voice that Allah has. Ibn Arabi likes to you a verse from the Quran that give the person asylum that he’ll hear the word of God. I say the word of God is being spoken by the prophet, who’s a human being. What is the word of God? When you want to ask, “What is beautiful in creation that is divine?” we have the answer. “What is Allah’s sound?” We have the answer. “What does divine feel like?” We have the answer. Those human beings who want to be transcendent are the ones that want to belittle the sounds, voices, features, humanity and people. They want to transcend that. “I don’t want this body. I want to transcend bodies. I don’t want to be a friend of this person. I want to be a friend of God.” If you want to be a friend of Allah, you have to be a friend of this person. If you can’t see that this person is perfect in their imperfection, then you can’t see. You can’t hear that the sound that I heard is the way Allah speaks. If I may touch back into what you said about the horse’s mane. We have 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet. There is placement. As they move through the body, that place of friction within the body does make an arc. I believe Ibn Arabi relates them to the stages of the emanation of creation from the source. They do move along the vocal tract from behind the heart, step by step, up through the mouth and out through the lips from the hot to the wow. My visual mind is relating that to the horse’s mane, the 1 second of sound and the 3 years that it took to on the other plane, the width of the sound. I’m wondering, as a way to explore and understand the creation and the emanation of creation from its source, to dive into that one second of sound or one second of that sound. Be with it, like, “Can we feel into three years of knowledge, wisdom experience, whatever is associated with that one second of sound?” I’m intrigued by that. I want to spend time in each sound, feel the other dimensions of time, and say, “What can I experience from there by being with an individual?” When we also notice how the newly born is taught to speak a lot and teaches us to say all the names. He taught him to speak and almost at three years, you found that all the sounds are coming together and forming the words correctly and forth. That’s parallel to the horse’s mane. If you think about when I was describing in Indonesia to the people very close to the shadow play, that is what it feels like for the shadow to go towards the puppet and the light, and it’s like a feeling. You’ve been disassociated and disengaged. You’ve been somehow pulled out. The same way will happen when you start exploring the sounds and then you feel the width of three years, you go, “Ah.” You’ll feel this. You’ve entered. It’s like a river going into the ocean. Instead of staying that way, all of a sudden, it starts spreading out oceanically. You’ll feel that, “What does that mean?” this is going to be the ocean of time instead of the river of time. When you enter the ocean of time, what will happen is things will dilate. There’ll be a slowness of time. We know that we’ve had that experience of time dilation. There’ll be a dream within a dream and time within time. There’ll be a moment when we are doing things in the three-year place. Ibn Arab italks about Jahari. He went to the Nile River. He was washing. When he went inside the river, all of a sudden, he saw himself. He was in Baghdad, married, and had three kids. He comes out of the water, goes home, tells his family what he saw. A few months later, someone says, “I’m from Baghdad,” and these are his three kids, and, “We were married in Baghdad.” Things can happen there. In the horse’s mane time, he was in the water for a few seconds, but in this time, he was in Baghdad, marrying and having three kids. My experience is the river going into the ocean, it spreads out. The delta spreads out in there. It also happens with brainwaves that from the populous house, 70,000 angels are coming every day. 70,000 divided by 86,500 whatever seconds, makes 1.1 seconds is the frequency of these angels coming to us. They can come to us faster or slower, but they are about one every second. We can have a situation where our brains are in theta wave, like at 1.1 hertz and then 1 angel. That’s when time dilates. It’s usually when we’re in prayer or other kinds of experiences like that, that all of a sudden, time will then widen. When it widens more than we are having experiences, or we’re having angels come to us that we are responding to. It may have only been a few minutes that we’ve been doing that, but somehow we’ve had all of these experiences and the same way with dreams. Ibn Arabi says, “There’s a place where you dream for 1 hour and you’ve had 3 days of experience.” The person has been sleeping for 1 hour, but they’ve had 3 days of experience happening. That’s from the movie Inception. They have the dream within the dream, but that’s definitely from Ibn Arabi. It’s a beautiful idea that we can have these experiences that come from us from outside of time and then from this dilated. This vast Earth it looks the same like he is sleeping, but in the vast Earth. I’ve been traveling for three days. I’ve had conscious awareness of those experiences of being on other planes simultaneously and having these different lives in different places and things going on. It’s an amazing experience. I’ll make a comment. What I took away from that experience of that awareness that came in during those times was it’s like what I felt in between, which was that flooding of there is only love. Love is all there is and everything and nothing else matters. All of these things happen simultaneously. Love is all that there is. When I have those experiences, I think I’m going to write all this down and it’s like one sentence. It keeps looping. It’s the same sentence over and over again, but that’s what it was. This conversation was a pleasure. We enjoyed it very much. If I can ask one more question to wrap up now. We started out saying that the time is here for this work, and it is for the future generations, for the people who are younger than us maybe, but who are here and now. How can you see them or advise them on how to use this work to help us navigate this path forward on this planet that, from the strictly material human side seems to be, you talked about the garden and the hellfire, the divisiveness in our world. How can future generations use this as a way to help navigate the path forward that we’re on in the time of now? Ibn Arabi is always saying the sisters. We don’t have the Christian or other hellfire and all that kind of thing. That’s one of the things that he gives us a language that’s very helpful and beautiful. That allows us to avoid and clarify things in a beautiful way so that we don’t get stuck with old baggage and things that take place at midnight when there’s no light guiding us. This is a different time. The others, as you can see, that the seekers of this generation and the next generation are coming with a very much direct. They do feel very direct. They don’t say that, “I’m going to preachers, imams, and spiritual people that are the head of my religion.” There is a feeling that you can go directly to the source. That is the third part of the night that you go directly to the source. The instructions on \how to go directly to the source in a safe way partly is being very self-aware. It’s also always asking oneself and being aware of oneself. There are parts of us that are wanting not the best for us, and there are parts of us that want the best for us, how do we work with all of that and work with our personalities, our character and all of that? The character is a very important thing. It’ll be understanding myself, struggling with myself, and learning about how I do things when I’m fooling myself and sabotaging myself. All of these things are very important to understand because those are ways that clear the way for us to have a direct relationship to the source. Religions and these other forms are no longer able to help me with the things that I’m finding out about. What do they say about dual time? There’s no dual time. What do they say about the eternity of the people in Jahannam having mercy and goodness? Otherwise, Allah would not have put them there. That doesn’t make any sense. You’re supposed to holler at people and tell them that they’re not where they’re supposed to be, all of that. We are in an area where we need to have a language that is suited to the time that we’re in. That’s why Ibn Arabi wasn’t translated and understood. He was implicit in all of the spiritual paths, but explicit in almost none of them very rarely. Now’s the time to come out and speak. I remember many years ago, I read one line and it struck me, “The time for hiding the secret is over. The time is to broadcast the secrets. The secret will protect yourself.” I realized that when someone would say, “What’s the answer to this question?” I said, “It’s this and that.” They say, “Go back and see what Ibn Arabi said about this.” I go back to a book that I’ve already published, volumes 2 and 3. I open it up and say, “That’s what it meant.” The secret protected herself from me, even as I was translating, publishing, typesetting, design, and the secret was still hidden until one day I opened up, “That’s what’s happening here.” The secret does protect yourself. It’s the time for us to speak out and speak the secret.Let her protect herself and give encouragement to the people ready for encouragement and to encourage everyone to work with themselves. This is the antenna or the receiver of all the things that we need to know. We need to work with ourselves, “How can I be clear? How can I understand what’s best for me and for others?” That’s our time now. It is our time. This conversation is endless. We’ll be happy maybe to have you again in the future. I want to thank you very much for your precious time and the knowledge you shared with us. Thank you very much.

Is the best way for people to connect with you is through the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society website and your YouTube channel? Those are the ways that I know you. The website is TheFutuhat.com. That’s the best place to find out what’s happening, updates, also registration, and emailing me. That’s good. Please come that way. I have this book, An Illustrated Guide To Ibn Arabi. This is one of the things that you’ve put out. I figured that the work was deep. I start with pictures. It’s not a to A to Z. You read anywhere you want. I go back too and learn things. What’s encouraging is when you read a text that has 800 pages and you say, “Will I ever understand this?” When there’s a picture, you figure, “Somebody understood it. It must be understandable. Now let me understand it.” It’s a great place to start. I want to thank you so much. I look forward to being with you in person. Thank you.

Important Links

• Dr. Eric Winkel Shuʿayb
• Amany Shalaby
• Sufis of Andalusia
• Tāj al-ʿArūs
• Al-Futuhat Al-Makkiyah
• Fusus
• The End Of Time
• YouTube – The Futuhat Project
• An Illustrated Guide To Ibn Arabi

About Eric Winkel

Dr. Shuʿayb Eric Winkel is a community-engaged scholar. The practice of community-engaged scholarship includes translation and commentary, teaching, research, and creative work. He has studied the Futūḥāt al-Makkīyah over three decades. Previously, during his tenure as Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies (Malaysia), he explored connections between Ibn al-ʿArabi’s vision and mathematics and physics developed after the 19th century. The mystical, strange world lbn al-ʿArabi describes may be read as also the strange realm of quantum physics and higher-dimensional, and fractal dimensional, topographies. As the author of books and monographs on lbn al- ʿArabi, Islamic law, and the new sciences, and articles examining lbn al- ʿArabi’s vision in light of contemporary mathematical physics, he is uniquely poised to connect these worlds. He has been appointed an honorary fellow of The Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society. Since 2012, Dr. Winkel has been translating full-time and dedicating his life work to the Futūḥāt al-Makkīyah, The Openings Revealed in Makkah, for Pir Press and the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Order. His audience is international, and over the past decades he had given regular dars sessions on the Openings in Santa Fe, New Mexico, New York, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and Morocco. If you are interested in his international dars sessions, visit our events page, under Moving Hubb.

About Amany Shalaby

Amany Shalaby, PhD, is an Author, Speaker, Teacher, Translator, Interpreter, and Chaplain. She is the Founder of Universal Chaplaincy, and a Member of The Association of Muslim Chaplains, MWO’s Hakima. Amany served for twelve years as interpreter and translator for Sidi Shaikh Muhammad Sa’id al-Jamal, who was the Imam for al-Masjid al-Aqsa and the Head of the Sufi Counsel in Jerusalem for thirty years. She translated twenty books on Islamic spirituality, written by the Shaikh. Shaikh Muhammad al-Jamal taught that there is only one Divine message for humanity: It is the message of unity, love, peace, mercy, justice, and freedom for all.