“Temporal and Eternal Time in Ibn ‘Arabi and Mulla Sadra”
Caner Dagli opened the Symposium with his talk “Levels of the Soul and the levels of Time” describing various models of time from the medieval geocentric cosmology of Ibn ‘Arabi’s era to the period of Newtonian physics and classical mechanics to the New Physics in which the scientist makes no absolute statement about what we can know. This has had the paradoxical effect of returning the human to an understanding of the world based on his real experience.
For Ibn ‘Arabi who asserts that time and space have no essential reality but are modes of revelation of the eternal unchanging Self, the spiritual journey consists of aligning the self which experiences time and movement, with the non-temporal self so that the former can be transfigured by the latter.
Ibrahim Kalin continued the theme of “experienced” time in his paper, “Temporal and Eternal Time in Ibn ‘Arabi and Mulla Sadra”. The modern concept of time as an even continuum which can be measured by a clock denies our experience of its different qualities. Both Ibn al-’Arabi and Mulla Sadra speak of time (zaman) as subjective and “imaginary” the experience of which alters according to state. The “Eternal Now” is the essential reality of the changing things and the path of the sufi is the preparation of the soul for participating in this.
Alison Yiangou’s talk “There’s no Time like the Present” dealt with the matter from the human perspective. As each instant is a “coming into being” of the singular ever present Reality in one of the forms of its possibilities, from our point of view this instant is the gift, or present, of existence in the form of our own possibility. We are necessarily an image of our time and our time is an image of us. In both senses of the word, there is literally no better time than the present.
In the early evening Rafi Zabor read from his just published book I Wabenzi a section relating to his first studies of Ibn ‘Arabi in the early 70’s and also a section describing his own experience of a timeless moment in attempting to practise the Mevlevi turn. To hear the description of a personal experience of time and timelessness so convincingly rendered provided an original end to the day.
On Sunday morning Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila delivered a paper on “Ayan thabita and Ibn ‘Arabi”. He suggested that Ibn ‘Arabi’s concept of time as an organising principle between events having no existence in itself corresponds in many respects to modern physic’s view of time as a fourth dimension. The changing things of this world whose reality is the ayan thabita or immutable entities are analogous to modern scientists’ description of things moving through time and space in spacetime worms.
Gerald Elmore’s paper “The Sun of Religion Meets its ‘Reviver’?” was a speculation on the relationships between Shams-i Tabrizi, and by extension Rumi, and Ibn ‘Arabi. The possible connections in time and space of these great saints and their differing but complementary legacies was explored in history and legend. Given the theme of the symposium, their connection outside of time was shown to be indisputable.
Stephen Hirtenstein completed the symposium with a paper entitled “The Mantle of Khadîr, mystery, myth and meaning” which extracted Ibn ‘Arabi’s writings on Khidr, his interpretations of his meaning and his descriptions of his own encounters with him. Ibn ‘Arabi tells us that at the level of Khidr, which he calls the Station of Closeness, is a prophethood which is fundamentally esoteric, unconditioned by people, place and time. It was entirely appropriate that this symposium should conclude with a description of a guidance to the inner reality of man from a station unconstrained by time.
