rather the immutability mands relationships ness. (II 91.

15)

of the entities dewith the He-

It is characteristic of a oarzakh to stand between two stools. Is the Cloud God, or is it creation? Is it existent Of is it nonexistent? To these sorts of questions, one has to answer equivocally, since here we have the whole mystery of Nondelirnited Imagination: He/not He. Inasmuch as the Barzakh may be said to embrace both the attributes of God and the attributes of creation, it is called the Universal Reality, since it brings together all realities without exception. The Reality of Realities defines the sphere of intelligibility of all things. Through it the relationships are established without which nothing could be known. It is not a separately existing thing - unlike God Oil the one hand or the cosmos on the other. Ibn al-' Arabi describes it as ma'ql~l, "intelligible" or "conceived of by reason ('aql)." This means that we are able to conceive of it even though it has no existence as such. It exists only through the relationships that arc established between God and creation. AftcI- all, it possesses the attributes of those things that it embraces, which arc the divine names and the immutable entities. As we have seen on more than one occasion, neither names nor entities are existent as such; they represent relationships tbat arc established between the Nonmanifest and the Manifest. When we conceive of the totality of these relationships, we call it the "Universal Reality. "
The Reality of Realities is neither exisneither temporally lJrigit\3ted nor eternal, hut eternal in the eternal and temporally originated in the temporally originated. It is conceived of by the rational f;lculty, but it docs nor c;{ist in its own essence, The same is the case, for example. with the attribute of knowing, speaking, and so on. (Azal 9) The Universal Reality becomes mauifest in the Eternal as eternal and in temporally originated things as temporally orig-

inated. It is the manifestation of the divine realities and the lordly forms (al-~Ijwar al-rabballiyya I = the divine narncsj) within the immutable entities, which arc described by possibility and which are the loci of manifestation for the Real. Hut none knows the relationship of this manifestation to this locus of manifestation ex-

cept God.

(II 103.28)

In one passage Ibn a1-' Arabi speaks of "the four objects of knowledge," the four basic concepts which embrace all that can be known. These are: (1) Cod as Essence, though we cannot know the Essence as such; (2) the cosmos as a whole, that is, everything other than God, the macrocosm; (3) the human being, in which all God's attributes are brought together III undifferentiated mode, i.e., the microcosm; (4) the Universal Reality, which brings together all three of these realities. The Shaykh then describes the Universal Reality:
The Universal Reality belongs to both the Heal and the cosmos. It is described neither by existence nor by nonexistence, neither by temporal origination nor by eternity. If the Eternal is described by it, it is eternal: if the temporally originated thing is described by it, it is temporally originated. No object of knowledge. whether eternal or temporally originated, is known until this reality is known. But this reality docs not come into existence until those t hirigs described hy it come into existence. If something exists without a precedent nonexistence. like the Real and His attribute" OI1C says that this reality is an eternal existent, since the Heal is described by it. Ifsorncthing exists after nonexistence, like the existence of everything other than God, then this reality is temporally originated and existent through something other [han itself; then one says concerning it that it is temporally origiuatcd. In each existent thing it accords with its own reality. since it does not accept division, since within it there is no "whole" or "part." One cannot attain to knowledge of it disengaged from form through a logical demonstration O! a proof. By [his Reality the cosmos carne into existence through the Heal. BUl this

tent nor nonexistent,

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