56 - Mirror Images

Not being is the mirror, the world is the reflection and your eye is as the reflection of the eye of the seer.

Mahmood Shabistari

By contemplating Him, we contemplate ourselves and by contemplating us He contemplates Himself.

Ibn 'Arabi

The same physical phenomenon may be computed in two complementary space-time frameworks.

Einstein

Typifying the characteristic outlook of the Sufis, the great Sufi mystic and metaphysician Ibn Arabi invariably presents the same reality as seen from two complementary points of view.

I see him through his eyes, he sees me through my eyes.

Ibn 'Arabi

We humans are continually striving to discover ourself in another ourself. But to discover ourself in another ourself, we cannot suffice with contemplating the other as the object cognized, nor can the other know us. To discover the features of the identity we are looking for, we need to place ourselves in the vantage point of the 'other'. One can espy in him/her as the mirror-image of oneself (representing that which we have in common with the 'other ourselves'). Therein are one's own qualities and defects and aspirations and anxieties, concerns, resentment, motivations, and passion and compassion.

Reciprocally, one can discover those very same features of oneself in the other's mirror image of him/herself that we are for him/her. This is illustrated by two mirrors reflecting one another in infinite regress as in the typical Sufi architectural model of the place of mirrors, Aina Khanah, adopted by the Mogul emperors. The light of a single candle would be duplicated in a plethora of scintillating lights. The face of a person would be duplicated into an endless glut of faces in an inane degree. Now for the sake of hypothesis, suppose that face were that of God and supposing the mirrors fail to project a genuine replication of the Divine Face, that would be an apt metaphor to describe the world of humans. Still, as in the Qur'an: "All faces are His Face."

Yet admittedly a mirror may well - whether designedly or by its defectiveness - amplify defects or blow up qualities or distort the features of one's personality. For example we may discover a fault that seemed negligible in ourselves in the more blatant fault of the other. We also may discover their faults because we have them in ourselves. Conversely, since every quality has its shadow defect, we might discover a quality in ourselves by observing the shadow of that defect in the other. For example we may discover our inherent joy while disapproving facetiousness in the other.

This way of considering experience is called the permutation of vantage points in a one-to-one relationship. Essentially this example is simple enough when the reciprocity of the terms is on a parity basis. But consider the relationship between the totality and the constituents of the totality, such that each fraction carries potentially within itself the attributes of the totality.

Examples are provided by the difference between a fraction of a hologram and the total hologram, or the relationship between the DNA of a cell where certain genes are turned on and others recessive and the DNA of the Blastema (the cell at the outset where the DNA is in the undifferentiated state). Now this relationship could not be expressed in the mathematical formula T=p+p+p etc., but rather T=px , which represents the basic mathematical formula of the holistic model of the universe'.

Those to whom unity is revealed see the Absolute whole in the parts; yet each is in despair at its particularization from the whole . . . Behold the world entirely comprised in yourself. The world is a man, and man is a world . . . all mingled together: angels with demons, Satan with the archangel, all mingled like unto seed and fruit together are gathered in the point of the present. The heart of the barley seed equals a hundred harvests!

Mahmood Shabistari

So much for the assumption that the holistic paradigm is a find of this century!

Furthermore, the Sufis recognize a mirror image of a very different nature - if we may call it so. Certainly they (we) consider the corporeal world as a reflection by way of forms - endowed therefore with spacial parameters - of a reality that is formless yet is endowed with what one might call a metaphysical orderliness.

"Can you or anyone else reach the central order of things or events whose existence seems beyond doubt as directly as you can reach the soul of another human being? . . . yes the word soul refers to the central order to the inner core of being whose outer manifestations may be highly diverse and pass our understanding . . . For Kepler these are the visible expression of the divine law."

"But the decision upon goals cannot be made within science and technology; it is made if we are not to go wholly astray, at a point where our vision is directed upon the whole man . . . And in the spiritual patterns known to us, the relation to a meaningful connection of the whole, beyond what can be immediately seen and experienced, has always played the deciding role."

It is only within this spiritual pattern, of the ethos prevailing in the community that man acquires the points of view whereby he can also shape his own conduct wherever it involves more than a mere reaction to external situations . . . These ideals do not spring from inspection of the immediately visible world, but from the regions of the structures lying behind it.

Werner Heisenberg
(Nobel Prize in physics, inventor of the matrix quantum mechanics theory)

The soul is awe-stricken and shudders at the sight of the beautiful, for it feels that something is evoked in it that was not imparted to it from without by the senses, but has always been already laid down there in a deeply unconscious region.

Plato

The reason why our sentient, percipient, and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture.

Erwin Schroedinger
(Nobel Prize in physics, inventor of the wave equation in quantum mechanics)

This way of looking at things highlights implicitly the antinomy between an archetype and an exemplar - a totally different mode of mirror reflection. Such a relationship could possibly be described in a transcendental equation, i.e. T=px. 

In this borderline case, the polarity is infinitely offset. And this is where mysticism comes in: the contemplative grasps and embodies the harmonic order beyond the existential universe of which the existential universe is conventionally considered to be a mere projection. Though meaningfully structured, this archetypal order is a reality beyond form. The Sufi mystics strive to tune their consciousness to a level in the celestial spheres called 'jabarut' where reality is grasped as pure splendor beyond form.

Plotinus called it: "the translucence of the eternal splendor of the One through material phenomena." (Plotinus was a Greek mystic philosopher of the Neo-Platonic school that inspired Sufism in Iran)

Yet these 'gestalts', these pictorial patterns shining forth upon the mirror of the psyche from the deep recesses of the soul, albeit mere inadequate and distorted projections of a posited perfect divine orderliness, possibly bewildering optic illusions spirited on the rainbow bridge between the celestial realms and the hackneyed palace of mirrors, nevertheless fulfil the purpose of existence because they intimate the divine intention. While our interpretation of the feedback of experience proves disappointing by its limitation, in the patterning of images within the psyche.

Let us beware of considering the physical universe as a mere projection of the 'real reality' behind it all! If indeed we are speaking of mirror images; we are talking about reciprocity. However rather than reality mirrored in a mirror, we are talking about the two terms of an antinomy.

This is the implicate versus the explicate order of Dr. David Bohm. Or one might say it is the timeless spaceless versus the transient, local - a bi-polar reality, however offset the relationship between these two poles might be. Instead of thinking of God and man, let us think of it as two poles of the One being.

God is human perfection and man is divine limitation

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

If you just see the impact of the eternal on the transient, you neglect the feedback of the transient into the eternal. It is actually a two way system: the feed-forward and the feed-back.  Rupert Sheldrake emphasizes the feedback from the existential level of reality to what he calls the morphogenetic field. Dr. David Bohm elicits both: the feed-forward and the feed-back. Moreover he highlights the two way exchange from what he calls 'the information field' to the existential and vice versa.

Seen thus, it is in the physical patterns of the universe and in the human heritage of works of beauty, of culture and human enterprise - in which we exult - that the creative act of the universe is actuated. The elegance of the universal software is perceived as the beauty evidenced by "the proper conformity of the parts to one another and the whole", a phrase of Aristotle.

For the Sufi Ibn 'Arabi, "God is both the created Creator and the creating creature", not a Being removed from the universe. Yet the terms of the antinomy are incommensurate. Note that transcendence is still respected since it includes that which it transcends. 

The place of concepts is taken by images content that are not thought but are seen pictorially.

C. J. Jung

As ordering operators, and formatives, in this world of symbolic images, the archetypes function indeed as the desired bridge between sense perception and Ideas . . .

Werner Heisenberg

Ultimately, these images, evanescent as they might be are equally part of our being, as well as the archetypes of which they are the projections.

What Shabistari is conveying, is more still: we are not only in our form an albeit inadequate effigy of the divine archetype, as is said in the Old Testament. Our personal vantage point, rather than being the convergence of the total vantage point having incurred considerable constraint by the funneling down, is but the reflection of the Divine Eye in that mirror which is paradoxically mere void, in which the universe appears as a reflection.

Was it utterly absurd to seek behind the ordering structures of this world a consciousness whose intentions were these very structures?

Werner Heisenberg

By espying in the footprints in this bountiful universe of the divine blue-prints, symptoms of orderliness, or peering into the scenario in Alice's mirror, or scanning the patterns of the shadows on the wall of the cave (the electronic vapor chamber for the physicist), and extrapolating between these, we are actually discovering our own minds and through our minds the mind of the universe.

Now if we adopt the Sufi point of view, jockeying with the permutation of terms: what is happening is that it is ultimately the mind of the universe that is discovering itself. It is doing so through and as our minds by dint of the projection of this mind in what we call physical reality. The consequence for the Sufi is that instead of thinking of ourselves as the observer or even the instrument of the observer or, the convergence of the glance of the observer, we need to think of our consciousness passively with respect to the divine action.

In the state of union there can be no mediation between God and man; and consequently the dialogue with God is evacuated. When God intimates His intentions, our act of listening stands in the way.

Abd el Jabbar Niffari
