Symposium report
“Know Yourself ”
Symposium Report - Worcester College Oxford, May 2006
"Know Yourself" in Oxford this May proved thought-provoking and well attended. The multitude of aspects that this title implies and includes brought a wide range of personalities and papers to the fore.
We were fortunate to have Jim Morris to chair the first and last sessions. His tenure in Exeter has come to an end, as he has just taken up a new chair in Boston this fall – for which congratulations – so his wit and wisdom will not be 'on tap' in Oxford in quite the same way. He reminded us to distinguish between levels of knowledge:
(1)The always knowing soul – good or bad – you are always knowing your Lord
(2)Knowing the Self – the spirit. As in Suhrawadi's saying "Go back to yourself"
(3)Whoever knows himself, already knows his Lord – who is the Knower.
Ibrahim Kalin (Associate Professor of Islamic Studies, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, USA) made a significant contribution to the symposium in his paper "Knowing the Self and the Non-Self: Towards a Philosophy of Non-Subjectivism". In this he leant heavily on Molla Sadra, the Persian proponent and developer of Ibn 'Arabi's ideas, but also referred to well known philosophers such as Socrates, Goethe, Heidegger, Galileo, Descartes and Hobbes – as well as the modern philosopher Charles Taylor. Kalin's main thrust was to contrast the self-knowledge that is based on seeing the self as divorced from existence and giving itself and existence meaning through thought, and the self that is integral to existence which turns inwards to meet presence and turns outwards to encounter the world and universe as no other.
For those not so familiar with Ibn 'Arabi's thought, Elizabeth Roberts (who first gave a talk to the Society twenty years ago and who has since taken on the roles of lecturer and yoga teacher) gave a beautifully presented overview of the main elements of the Shaykh's ideas in her paper "In my end is my beginning" – a quotation from T.S. Elliot. She also introduced the idea that self-knowledge is linked to our happiness – and that we have a choice where we wish to direct our knowledge-seeking.
Ghasem Kakaie (a poet and best-selling author from Shiraz with his book The Unity of Being According to Ibn 'Arabi and Meister Eckhart who is currently a visiting professor in Cambridge, UK), developed the theme of the symposium in relation to the Qur'an and Sunnah. In particular the various interpretations of the hadith "Whoever knows himself knows his Lord" and "God created Adam in His (or his) image". This was a helpful paper, as it highlighted certain interpretations that have developed over time. For example the latter hadith required Ibn 'Arabi's unveiling (kashf) to reveal the veracity of a further hadith "God created Adam in the form of the All-merciful (ar-Rahman)" to remove the "His/his" ambiguity in the prior hadith and confirm that Adam was indeed created in God's form (rather than in the form of man).
Angela Gruber (Deputy Director of the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education), expanded the point of view of "transpersonal psychology", where Ibn 'Arabi's thought is used as the basis for "making ourselves capable of God". Her emphasis was on the yearning of the self to achieve its potential – a yearning that is cut away by the alienation of the self caused by contamination of the "gold of our true nature". She went on to explain how techniques of psychotherapy have been developed based largely on Henry Corbin's interpretation of akbarian thought, which involve a process of mirroring to unravel "knots in the self". During one of the seminar sessions, she demonstrated some of these techniques in practice. One objection to this approach raised in the plenary session was that it could inflate the ego. Very interestingly Gruber replied that the problem for many people nowadays is that their egos remain undeveloped due to lack of confidence – this is possibly a problem of our time which the great Sufis of the past did not have to contend with – and yet the application of akbarian thought in a fresh way is a further evidence of the inclusivity of the Shaykh and his thought – transpersonal, transcultural and transtemporal!
On Sunday, we welcomed Giuseppe Scattolin for the first time (he is both a Catholic priest at the Gregorian University in Rome and professor of Sufism in Cairo). His concern is for human values which meet at the level of mystical experience and can be nurtured through a process of "reading together". Having just completed the critical edition of Ibn al-Farid's Diwan, his topic was "The experience of the Self in Ibn al-Farid's Sufi poetry". Ibn al-Farid was a younger contemporary of Ibn 'Arabi , though his expression was almost entirely poetic and his language was of love and yearning – never mentioning the word 'God' but using the term 'ana' – myself – to designate the silent eternal self-effusing creative manifestation at three levels, from the point of view of the experience of the mystic :
al-farq : separation from the Beloved
al-ittihad: complete unity and identification with the Beloved, in the end with his own "Self" (ana)
al-jam': the merging together of his own Self into the Whole and the Whole with his Self.
We were treated to a reading from the Diwan with exposition, bringing this important work into the sphere of contemporary akbarian studies. We look forward to new translations appearing in print.
Peter Young (principal of the Beshara School in Scotland where Ibn 'Arabi studies form a major part of the curriculum) made a robust and significantly fresh contribution to the topic in his paper "Working together between God's two hands". He took as his starting point the uncertainties of global climate change – and the need to know ourselves in a collective manner that avoids the traps of both individual and joint egotism, which merely perpetuate the mistakes whose dire consequences we are now facing. Echoing the earlier call for "reading together" – Young proposed a process of a "dialogue between people at the level of the one self of man" where participants sit "between the two hands of God" – between "knowing and not knowing". This is not the barzakh identified with the Viceregent whose rule encompasses the manifest and unmanifest – but a place of growth from the non-existent "other" to the One Reality. (Full transcript of this paper on http://www.beshara.org/reading/workingtogether.html)
Mohammed Reza Jozi (Research Associate with The Institute of Ismaili Studies) further expanded our view of the topic, with a paper identifying man as the "pointer to Him" and as the mirror both to the Real and to the self. This again was a very broad paper drawing on references from Hafez to "Clockwork Orange" to demonstrate the special qualities of man not being "a thing among things" and whose "language is the house of Being".
Denis Gril (the distinguished author and translator of Ibn 'Arabi from the University of Provence) was not scheduled to give a formal paper, but in the event began the final discussion with a substantial account of Chapter 177 of the Futuhat - the chapter concerning ma'rifa – this being the key term in "He who knows himself (or his soul) knows his Lord". A striking point that arose in this initial presentation was that the science that Man has of his own reality is that the lieutenancy (khilafa) he receives is a test and not an honour. (It is something for this earthly life, not the other life). Gril also said that in this chapter there was an interesting insistence on the importance of the body in spiritual knowledge. At the end of his talk he reported Ibn 'Arabi's response to the question of Hakim Tirmidhi : "What is prostration?" Ibn 'Arabi answers at first that prostration is to contemplate your origin which is actually absent/hidden from you - and of which you are a consequence. Man prostrates himself to the earth because it is the origin of his body. The Spirit prostrates itself to the Universal Spirit which is its origin, and so on. So prostration for man is to reach what is the hidden origin in him, and whoever knows his origin knows himself, and he who knows himself knows his lord - so the one who knows himself never raises his head. That is the question of Sahl al-Tustari to his master: "Can the heart prostrate itself?" And the master replied, "For ever."
The theme of "knowing what is other than God, without the existence of other than God" ran through all the papers in one form or another – and it was this topicality and immediacy, connecting the theme ("Know Yourself") with the participants (the selves) which made for such a stimulating symposium.
Richard Twinch, November 2006