Edited and Slides by OmarKN
15 The Entire Cosmos: ‘the Breath of the All-Merciful
Ibn al-ʿArabī offers several versions of this scheme. In one of the better-known schemes, he describes the entire cosmos as ‘the Breath of the All-Merciful.’ Each thing in the universe is a letter, a word, a sentence, or a book uttered by God and situated at an appropriate level of deployment within the Breath, just as our own spoken words are situated within our breath in a specific manner.
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Each created thing is thus a precise enunciation of the Real Being, and each has its own role to play in the book of creation.
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Once the spoken things are deployed in God’s Breath, they move back to their origin in a series of stages. This process might be called an ‘evolution,’ since it reverses the prior devolution and brings about the completion of the great circle of being (dāʾirat al-wujūd). [17]
Related texts
Muhyiddīn Ibn ʿArabi, Presentation of 30 Texts
[17] On existence as a circle in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s teachings, see Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), pp. 220–34.
