The 5 Ways to See Allah — Ibn Arabi

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[00:00:08]One gnostic says, "I have never seen a thing without seeing Allah after it."

[00:00:14]Another gnostic says, "I have never seen a thing without seeing Allah in it."

[00:00:20]Another gnostic says, "I have never seen a thing without seeing Allah before it."

[00:00:26]One gnostic says Allah alone while another saysnone sees Allah but Allah.

[00:00:35]These five stations belong to the outer world. The Gnostic who has reached perfection after he has seen and gathered all five of these stations then sees all five of them within his own self. Ibanarabi.

[00:00:52]There is a single reality before all eyes. Yet not all eyes see the same thing.

[00:00:59]Listen closely because what Iban Arabi places before you here is not a riddle to admire from a distance. It is a map.

[00:01:07]It is a map of how the heart learns to see drawn by a man whom the masters called the greatest and every line of it is meant for you. He is describing the Arif, the knower, the one who has tasted what others have only heard about. And he tells you something astonishing at the very start. He says that among those who truly know there is not one single way of seeing Allah in the world, there are at least five. Five different gnostics look upon the same creation.

[00:01:39]And each one reports a different relationship between what he sees and the one who is behind it. And then at the end he opens a door beneath all of them.

[00:01:53]So let us walk into this slowly. First, who is the Arif? This knower he keeps returning to. In the Sufi understanding, the adif is not the scholar who has memorized many books. He is the one who has arrived at mifa, direct knowing, the kind of knowledge that does not come from the outside in, but from the inside out. The Sufis say that you can know fire by hearing it described. You can know fire by seeing its light from far away. Or you can know fire by being burned. The adif has truly been burned.

[00:02:31]His knowledge is the knowledge of taste.

[00:02:33]What the masters call valk. And once you have tasted honey, no description of sweetness can be given to you anymore because you carry the sweetness itself.

[00:02:44]This is why Iban Adabi does not say the philosopher sees or the theologian sees.

[00:02:50]He says the Arif sees. The seeing he describes is not a theory in the mind.

[00:02:56]It is an event in the heart. Now hear the first station. One knower says, "I have never seen a thing without seeing Allah after it." Sit with that. This is the seeing of the one who looks at creation and is carried beyond it. He sees the rose and the beauty of the rose becomes an arrow that pierces him and points to the one who made beauty itself. He sees the sea at night vast and dark and trembling under the moon.

[00:03:27]And the sea does not hold his gaze. It releases it sending it onward to the one whose vastness the sea is only whispering. This is the station of the sign. The Quran says that Allah will show his signs upon the horizons and within their own souls until it becomes clear to them that he is the truth.

[00:03:49]Everything is a sign, an aya, a finger pointing past itself. The knower at this station never lets the finger become the destination. He follows it. He sees the gift and remembers the giver. He sees the wave and remembers the ocean. For him, the world is a doorway and he never makes the mistake of mistaking the door for the room.

[00:04:17]But there is a second knower and he says something subtly different. He says, "I have never seen a thing without seeing Allah in it." Feel how this is closer, more intimate. The first knower saw Allah beyond the thing. This one sees Allah within the thing shining out from inside it like light through stained glass. This is the station of Tajali, of theophony, of divine self-disclosure.

[00:04:45]To understand it, the Sufis give you the image of the mirror. And Iban Arabi loved this image above almost all others. The whole of creation, he teaches, is a mirror in which the divine names and attributes behold their own reflection. When you look at a merciful act, you are not looking at something separate from the divine mercy. You are looking at the place where that mercy has chosen to appear. The Quran says it plainly that wherever you turn, there is the face of Allah. Not after you turn, there in the turning, in the very direction your face is pointing, the face is already present. This knower does not need to travel past the world to find his beloved. He finds him in the texture of things, in the breath of the wind, in the trembling of a single leaf.

[00:05:34]And here I want to give you a true voice from the early masters. So you do not think this is mere poetry. It is related of the great Egyptian knower Zulnun al-Misri that he prayed to his lord and said in his own words that there was never the cry of an animal never the rustling of a tree never the gushing of water never the song of a bird never a shade he rested under never a whispering wind never a rule of thunder except that in it he found and witnessed the testimony of the divine oneness. Do you hear what he is saying? He could not encounter a single sound or movement in the world without it announcing Allah to him. The whole creation had become for him one continuous remembrance. That is the second station lived and breathed by a man who walked this earth long ago.

[00:06:28]Now the third knower steps forward and he says, "I have never seen a thing without seeing a law before it." This is deeper still and stranger to the ordinary mind. The first saw Allah after the thing. The second saw Allah in the thing. But this one sees Allah before the thing even arrives. He sees the source before the stream. He perceives the divine first and only then does the creature appear to him as an act appears after the actor as a shadow appears after the one who casts it. The Sufis teach that the entire world is like a shadow of the absolute and a shadow has no light of its own. It exists only because something real stands in the light and projects it. This knower has trained his heart to see the one who stands in the light before he ever notices the shadow on the ground. The Quran says of Allah that he is the first and the last, the outward and the inward. the first before every first he is. So this knower lives in that priority. Nothing comes to him on its own. Everything comes to him already carried in the hand of the one who was there before it. Then comes a knower who speaks only two words. Allah alone.

[00:07:48]There is nothing to add and nothing to explain. This is the station the Sufis call fauna. annihilation where the multiplicity of the world dissolves like mist when the sun rises and only the one remains in the seeing. The masters describe a state they named the unity of witnessing in which everything other than Allah falls away from the eye of the heart and the knower beholds nothing nothing at all except the one. Imagine standing on the shore and watching 10,000 waves. Each one different. Each one rising and breaking and claiming to be itself. And then suddenly your eye shifts and you no longer see waves. You see only water. The waves did not leave.

[00:08:33]Your seeing changed. The water was always all there was. And the waves were only its movement. Allah alone. The drop has looked up and remembered the ocean it never truly left.

[00:08:49]And finally, the fifth knower, and his words are the most subtle of all. He says, "None sees Allah but Allah." Read that again and let it unsettle you. The first four knowowers were still present as the one doing the seeing. There was a seer and there was the scene. But this knower has discovered something that overturns even that. He has realized that his own act of seeing was never his at all. Iban Arabi teaches that Allah sees himself in you through your own eye and that the eye by which you witness him is in truth his own. The true Sufi the masters say is the one who sees Allah from Allah in Allah with the very eye of Allah. The veil here is not the world. The veil here is the self that still claims to be the witness. When even that claim dissolves, what remains?

[00:09:48]Only the one gazing upon the one through what you once called your eyes. The lover, the beloved, and the love itself collapse into a single light. This is why they say that at the deepest reach of the path, you do not find Allah.

[00:10:04]Allah finds himself where you used to be.

[00:10:08]My friend, pause here for a moment because Iben Arabi now does something you must not miss. He says these five stations belong to the outer world. All five of them, the seeing of Allah after, in, and before the thing, and the two great words, Allah alone, and none sees Allah but Allah. All of these were happening as the knower looked outward upon the creation spread before him.

[00:10:33]They were ways of reading the great book of the world. But then he turns the whole teaching inward like a key turning in a lock. He says that the Gnostic who has reached perfection, the Camille Arif, the complete one, after he has seen all five and gathered them together into one heart, then turns his gaze around and sees all five of them within his own self. The Quran promised that the signs would be shown upon the horizons and within their own souls. The first part of the verse is the outer journey, the five stations of looking at the world. The second part is this turning inward. The complete knower discovers that he himself is a world.

[00:11:15]That same Quran says, "Allah is nearer to you than your own jugular vein. So the perfected one no longer needs the rose or the sea or the night sky to find his beloved, though he never loses them.

[00:11:28]He looks within and sees Allah after his own self. sees Allah within his own self, sees Allah before his own self, says of his own being, Allah alone, and finally witnesses that even his inward seeing is Allah seeing Allah. The human being in this vision is the gathering place, the comprehensive mirror in which every divine name finds its reflection.

[00:11:55]The Sufis say that the whole vast cosmos was scattered across the heavens and the earth and then it was gathered and concentrated into one being and that being is the human heart that has been polished into clarity.

[00:12:14]And this is the secret the masters have whispered for centuries. You are looking everywhere for the one and the very seeing by which you look is already a sign of him within you. You travel across oceans of teaching. You climb the mountains of practice. You cross the deserts of longing. And at the end of the road, you arrive at the one place you never thought to search, your own breast. The treasure was buried under your own feet the whole time. So why then do most people not see this? Why do we walk through a world drenched in divine presence and perceive only dead objects, only things to use, only surfaces to scroll past? The Sufis answer with a single word, the veil. It has been related that hearts rust the way iron rusts and that the polish that returns them to brightness is the remembrance of Allah. The mirror is in you. It was placed there before you were born. But the dust of heedlessness has settled on it. The rust of the ego has darkened it. The breath of forgetting has clouded its surface. And so the light that pours endlessly toward it cannot pass through. Your problem was never that Allah was far. Your problem was that the mirror was unclean. And this is also the great hope because rust can be removed. A mirror does not need to be rebuilt. It needs only to be polished. The fire of love, the water of tears, the wind of the sigh that rises from a sincere heart. All of these are given to you for the polishing.

[00:13:56]This is the work of the path. The zikur you repeat is not magic words. It is the cloth that wipes the glass. The night you spend awake while the world sleeps is not lost time. It is the hour the polishing goes deepest. For in the night when the noise of the world falls silent, the heart can finally hear itself. The turning of the dervish in the sa is not a dance for entertainment.

[00:14:22]It is the body learning what the planets already know. That everything in existence turns and turns and turns again around a single center. And the only freedom is to turn willingly toward the one you are already orbiting.

[00:14:42]And here let me bring you the great voice of Mevlana Roomi. For he opens his math nawi with an image that lives inside this very teaching. He tells you to listen to the reed flute as it complains crying of separation. For it was cut from the reed bed. And ever since its lament has made men and women weep. The reed is the soul. It was cut from its source, separated from the one it came from. And the music you find so beautiful is actually the sound of its longing to return. This is the third station turned into song. The reed sees Allah before itself, before its own existence, because it remembers the bed it was torn from, and its whole life becomes one cry of return.

[00:15:36]My friend, that ache you sometimes feel late at night, that inexplicable homesickness for a home you cannot name, that is not a flaw in you. That is the reed remembering. That is the shest proof that you came from somewhere and that something in you has never stopped knowing the way back.

[00:15:59]Let me bring this close to your life for a moment because Iben Arabid did not write this for monks in caves alone. You live now in a time that trains your eye to see only surfaces. A thousand images pass before you every hour and you witness all of them and truly see none of them. You consume the world and remain starving because consuming is the opposite of witnessing. The Arif looks at one thing, a single cup of water, a single human face, a single morning light against a wall, and he sees through it to the infinite. You look at a thousand things and see nothing through any of them. The cure that Iban Arabi is handing you is not to add more to your seeing. It is to slow down until you can see even one thing the way the knower sees it. until one rose, one wave, one breath becomes a door. Begin with one. The whole sky can be seen in a single drop of dew if your eye has been cleaned.

[00:17:11]So I will leave you with the question the masters would leave with their students. The question that should follow you out of this moment and into your day. Of these five ways of seeing, which one is yours right now? Do you see Allah after the things of the world, following the signs back to their source? Do you see him within them, shining out from inside creation? Do you see him before them, recognizing the source before the stream? Or have you tasted even for an instant the dissolving of the sear into the scene?

[00:17:50]There is no shame in whatever your answer is. Every station is holy and the path moves through all of them in its own time. What matters is that you have now been shown the map and a sincere heart can never again pretend it does not know there is a road.

[00:18:13]Look at one thing today, just one. And instead of using it, witness it. Hold it in your gaze until it becomes transparent. Until the one who is after it and in it and before it begins to show through. This is how the journey begins. Not in some distant place, but here in the next thing your eyes fall upon. My friend, if this journey is doing something good in you, if a small fire has been lit in your chest tonight, then walk a little further with us.

[00:18:48]Subscribe to the channel because on this road, you are not meant to be alone. And there is more of this path waiting in the next video where we will keep climbing together toward the one. And before you go, leave a single line in the comments below. Write these words so that the heart learns them by repetition. Write I have never seen a thing without seeing Allah in it. Write it for yourself and write it for the one who reads it after you and needs to remember. May your mirror be polished.

[00:19:22]May your night be a friend to you. And may everything you look upon become a door until we meet again on the path.