When Bewilderment Tracks the Mystery

of God. Knowledge of God effervesces into the greatest mystery. And yet life plummets into meaninglessness without tracking this impossibility. One thread to sustain the pursuit comes in the embrace of bewilderment, a gift from and perhaps a tasting of the Divine.

From the first to the final pages of Sufi Path of Knowledge, William Chittick offers nurturance involving the taste and understanding of bewilderment as it comes through the teachings of Ibn  al-‘Arabi.

“To find God is to fall into bewilderment (hayra), not the bewilderment of being lost and unable to find one’s way, but the bewilderment of finding and knowing God and of not-finding and not-knowing Him at the same time. Every existent thing other than God dwells in a never-never land of affirmation and negation, finding and losing, knowing and not-knowing . . . The bewilderment of the Verifiers in respect to God as He is in Himself never prevents them from finding Him as Light and Wisdom and from employing the fruits of those divine attributes to illuminate the nature of things and put each thing in its proper place” (pp. 3-4).

The “Verifiers” are described as those who “have verified the truth of their vision of God on every level of existence and finding, not least on the level of intelligence and speech, the specific marks of being human” (p. 4).

I’m only midway through this volume of Chittick’s and won’t quote from the final pages yet, but I did consult his index which notes nineteen occurrences of “bewilderment” extending through to the end of the book. Of course, the notion of bewilderment builds meaningfulness through the development of a web of terms. A few of the critical notions include the “relative absolute,” the “coincidence of opposites,” the “He/not He,” and “imaginal faculty.” [* See notes at end for further elaboration on these terms.]

When we try to approach the Truth, we’re onto the slippery slopes of essentials and absolutes. “The Absolute allows for no absolutizing of anything other than Itself, which is to say that everything other than God is imagination” (p. 29). “The Essence alone is absolutely Real” (p. 29). 

“the spiritual ‘stations’ (maqamat) themselves,. . . go back, in Ibn al’Arabi’s way of seeing things, to unique perceptions of reality, delimited and defined by certain relationships and constraints. But none of these is absolute, so each can be contradicted by other points of view. The human response to these constant shifts in perspective may well be ‘bewilderment,’ which, Ibn al-‘Arabi tells us, is the station of the great friends of God” (p. 29). 

Most, if not all of us, place premium on certainty, and this undergirds the appeal of fundamentalism as well as racism, sexism, and other exclusive dogmatisms. The constructs that prioritize tolerance for ambiguity serve as alternatives to such oppressive absolutes. For example, the scheme developed by William Perry for intellectual and ethical development offers progression from dogmatic thinking toward the advanced levels which involve making commitments even within relativism. But my experience of such schemes leaves the longing for Truth, for the Absolute, insufficiently tended.

The pressures of relativism and multiplicity eventually push for the reconciliation of opposites. How can God be both Transcendent and Immanent—totally beyond and simultaneously close as heartbeat? How can a loving, all-powerful God allow good persons to suffer? Reminding me of C.G. Jung’s linking the union of opposites with psychological wholeness, Chittick emphasizes the “coincidence of opposites” (jam’ al-addad): “God is the coincidence of all contrary attributes. In knowing God, we must be able to put opposites together. . . The rational faculty can grasp God’s Unity and transcendence, while imagination is needed to perceive the multiplicity of His self-disclosures and His immanence” (pp. 59, 70). 

“It is impossible for sense perception or the rational faculty to bring together opposites, but it is not impossible for imagination.Hence the authority and strength of the Strong only became manifest in the creation of the imaginal faculty (al-quwwat al-mutakhayyhila) and the World of Imagination, which is the closest thing to a denotation (dalala) of the Real. For the Real is ‘the First and the Last, the Manifest and the Nonmanifest’ (Koran 57:3).” Page 115, Chittick translating Ibn al-‘Arabi.

Bewilderment, perhaps by definition, results in separation from the normal world, as the person is tossed to “be wild,” to be separated from standard thought, meaning, and relationships. One way of coping is acceptance of silence. Professor Alan Godlas translates a poem from Rumi and adds end lines with transliteration which adds feeling of the language:

          Go into contemplation
          of God's wonders, andar ravid
         Struck by awesomeness
         and bewilderment, become lost, gom shavid

         Stunned by God's creative brilliance
         one's loses ones proud beard and moustache, gom konad
         one recognizes one's limits,
         and about the creator, becomes silent, tan zanad

         He can only say, like the Prophet,
         "I cannot praise You as You deserve,"
         from deep in his soul, u ze jan;
         since a truly worthy elucidation
         is beyond articulation and expression, an bayan.

In addition to claiming the value of silence, the world beyond words, persons may look to the World of Imagination and to dreams. As discussed in previous blogs, Michael Sells offers very helpful development of “unsayings” as tastings of the divine. Concerning dreams, Chittick summarizes from Ibn al-‘Arabi: “Dreams are in fact a God-given key to unlock the mystery of cosmic ambiguity and the constant transmutation of existence. The new creation is never more clearly witnessed than in the world of dreams” (p. 119).

As noted in the first quotation, the bewilderment Chittick/Ibn al’Arabi talk about is “not the bewilderment of being lost and unable to find one’s way.” So it’s important that persons hold bewilderment without slipping into lethargic trance, self-indulgent delusions, and/or despondency. Supportive relationships with a guide and with “friends of God” are called for. In relation to holding bewilderment, Chittick elaborates on Ibn al-‘Arabi’s emphasis on Wisdom and Courtesy:

“The revealed religions (al-shara i) are God’s rules of courtesy (adab Allah) which He set up for His servants. He who gives God’s Law its full due (haqq) has gained the courtesy of the Real (al-haqq) and come to know the friends of the Real.” Page 175, Chittick translating Ibn al-‘Arabi.

* More on these terms can be seen in previous blogs including these:

For coincidence of opposites, see

Parables Guard Wonder November 20, 2016 (includes  Jung’s  Mysterium Coniunctionis)   

Majesty & Beauty  December 9, 2018   (includes Michael Sells & Sachito Murata)

For “imaginal world,” see 

Winter Solstice & the Imaginal World   December 21, 2018

Pictures Revealing Reality July 14, 2019