#68: Michael Wolfe: Polish the Heart

Dr. Michael Wolfe, tutor at St. John’s College and leader of the Middle Eastern studies program there, joins these Fools for a great discussion. Since discovering him in graduate school, Dr. Wolfe was and remains captivated by the great 12th-century Sufi mystic Ibn-al-Arabi, and we go pretty deep into his views on the nature of God, consciousness, and reality (is it a dream? Could synchronicity exist if the universe is essentially material?) These fools loved this conversation and can’t wait to have Dr. Wolfe back - hope you enjoy it as well!

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Episode Transcript

(00:14):
Hi, welcome to the Fools and Sages podcast.
I'm Boaz, and Brian and I are very excited today to welcome
Michael Wolff, another philosophy professor in sort of
the series that we're doing in talking to philosophy experts
around the country. Michael is a tutor at St.

(00:34):
John's College and he was also agraduate of St.
John's. He focuses as he as he did in
his PhD in Columbia and still today on Islamic studies and in
particular Ibn Al Arabi. And we're really curious to fit
that perspective into the sort of cognitive model that we've

(00:56):
been slowly trying to paint on the wall.
So, Michael, welcome. Thank you.
It's lovely to have you. Why don't you tell us a little
bit about yourself and what you do and what you're excited
about? Yeah.
So as you mentioned, I graduatedfrom St.
John's College with a bachelor'sdegree in 1994, and I went off

(01:17):
from St. John's to grad school not
knowing exactly what I was goingto study within the realm of
religious studies. I knew I wanted to do religious
studies and I I had a sense I wanted to explore things that I
did not have the opportunity to study at St.
John's. St.

(01:37):
John's, the undergraduate program is limited to Western
classics as we define it, and the way we define it excludes
Islamic texts, and certainly also Indian and Chinese and
Japanese texts. And I wanted to go down those

(02:02):
rabbit holes that were not provided to me by St.
John's. I came back to the college and
I've been teaching at St. John's since 1999.
And so in the meantime I'd gotten an interest in Islam and
particularly Sufism and Ibn al Arabi.
So I brought that with me back to the college, and I felt the

(02:25):
lack of Islamic texts at the college.
And for years I've been, and I'mnot the only person who has been
thinking about this, how might we introduce Islamic texts at
St. John's?
And so together with colleagues of mine, students, other people

(02:52):
with a relationship to the college, having these
conversations about how we mightbring Islamic texts to the
college, For me, this started early on, around the turn of the
century. Here we are in 2025, and we are
now at last introducing a new program, Master of Arts program
in Middle Eastern Classics. We just launched it.

(03:15):
I'm teaching the seminar together with Krishna on
Venkatesh. The two of us are leading the
seminar. We're having a great time.
Those conversations are rich, and there's a kind of thrill in
the classroom because we know we're doing something we've
never done before. It's very exciting.
It's taken a long time, though, to define it, and the way we

(03:38):
have defined it has been predominantly Jewish and Islamic
texts, Jewish and Islamic texts.Students who are enrolled choose
between studying classical Hebrew and classical Arabic and

(04:00):
in you might I, I think you havesome familiarity with the
Eastern Classics program that wehave with where we study Indian,
Chinese and Japanese texts and, and so we modelled our program
on that. It has the same structure.
In the Eastern Classics, students choose between studying

(04:23):
Sanskrit and Chinese. And with Middle Eastern
classics, it's Hebrew and Arabic.
But while they resemble each other, I want to highlight a
real difference between the Middle Eastern classics and the
Eastern classics. With Eastern classics, we really
are studying different traditions.
It's a different line of thoughtand, and you could trace, you

(04:44):
know, with Buddhism, for example, from India to China to,
to Japan, and certainly had an influence on some of the later
European texts. But it, it really is a matter
of, of two different traditions intersecting.
And I, I would say this is different from the Middle
Eastern classics because what we're doing with the Middle

(05:05):
Eastern classics program, although it looks as if it's
another separate tradition with its own integrity, I think it's
really, it's a piece of the Western tradition that we've
just neglected at St. John's.
And we felt, we felt the, the absence of it.

(05:27):
We see glimmerings of it for reading Thomas Aquinas, for
reading Dante, for if we're reading Cervantes, we're reading
Don Quixote. And we know that the Islamic
tradition is in the background and comes up in explicit ways.
We find ourselves when we go through the undergraduate

(05:48):
program wondering about this tradition that's there.
We know it's there. Why are we not talking about it?
Yeah, I think that's was was oneof the big ah ha's that I've had
just recently was when I heard that Heraclitus in Pythagoras
both spent a lot of time in Persia.
Yes. And that they were actually
influenced by Zoroastrianism. And, and I think that one of the

(06:13):
big untold secrets in Western philosophy is that if it wasn't
for not just the the Islamic world, but if it wasn't for the
the thirst for knowledge that was happening this like a
renaissance that happened in thein the Middle Eastern world, we

(06:36):
wouldn't have Aristotle. That's right.
Like it Literally, we reinherited our own traditions
because we didn't have the juicetogether to keep our grasp on
them. But the Islamic world was on the
ball and that was one of that. I think that's one of the big on

(06:57):
untold secrets is that there wasa vacuum for knowledge that was
going on that really was a a flowering and a blossoming
culturally that we know nothing about and that some of these.
If there is some examples of the, the, the seeds of ways of

(07:23):
looking at the world and and explaining meaning and things
like that, that occurred in the,in the, in these, is this
Islamic renaissance that you're referring to that kind of might
have predated or even caused Aristotle's breakthroughs.
I think the big one that everybody knows first hand is

(07:46):
algebra. That sort of came out of that
flourishing of knowledge. But, but go ahead, Michael,
please. No, that's right.
I want to make sure I'm understanding your question
correctly, Boaz. We're talking about the
reintroduction of these ideas toChristian Europe.
Is that is that what you're asking about?
Well, maybe that's it. What I'm getting at is the the

(08:12):
statement Brian made that we wouldn't have Aristotle if we
didn't have this Islamic renaissance.
And I saw you nod in in agreement.
So I just want to understand that better.
Oh, yeah, I think I think what Brian is referring to is the
preservation of these texts and engagement with these texts and
not simply reading them and preserving them, but responding

(08:36):
to them, building on them. And it comes back, you know, a
really obvious places with Thomas Aquinas.
And in Thomas Aquinas, you see this articulation of a
difference between essence and existence.
And he's doing this. Thomas Aquinas is is building on

(08:59):
largely on Aristotle, but that particular way of framing it,
essence versus existence, is notstraight from Aristotle.
It comes from the way Muslim philosophers and theologians
worked with Aristotle to work out that distinction.
Yeah. And, and I think that that that

(09:20):
was one of the things that surprised me when I started
looking into the early Middle Eastern philosophers, was the
degree to which they were discussing Aristotle.
That's right. I mean, that was like, wait a
minute, this is this familiarityin a way that they sort of
carried on that tradition when the West was was having other

(09:42):
issues sort of at the time. Right.
And you're right, Brian, about algebra, mathematics in general,
astronomy, things like this. There was a time in Christian
Europe if, if, if somebody were a serious mathematician, they
would have to learn Arabic, theywould have to learn Arabic to

(10:02):
read these texts or many of these texts, not all of them.
And it's interesting which ones were translated and which
weren't, but many of them were translated into Latin and they
took on Latin names. So Ibn Rushed becomes Averroes,
even in a becomes Abasana. And then you've got these.

(10:24):
And so they came into Europe in Latin.
What's interesting is that they're very important texts
within the Islamic tradition that never get translated.
And Ibn al Arabi, for example, is just Ibn al Arabi.
He's got an Arabic name. Why does he not have a Latin
name? Christian Europe had no interest
in it. Although Ibn al, I would say

(10:48):
that there's nobody more important in Islamic thought
from the latter half or the last, you know, last Millennium
of Islamic thought. There's nobody more important
than Ibn al Arabi. Which is why they call him
Sheikh Al Akhbar. That's correct.
Yeah. But the greatest of masters, the

(11:08):
greatest the. Greatest of the Masters.
That's right. So I wanted to ask Michael,
maybe you could tell us a littlebit about why Al Arabi is the is
the master? What, what did he, what does he
represent in kind of in, in the lineage of, of thought?

(11:31):
I'm I'm going to zoom out a little bit and and talk about
the importance of Sufism in general, which means Islamic
mysticism and I've got qualms about the word mysticism, but as
shorthand, it's a good place to start it.
It's useful to use that term while I I don't entirely like

(11:52):
that word, but it's useful to, to distinguish between mysticism
and a rational approach. And Ibn al Arbi belongs to this
mystical tradition and it has a kind of centrality, I think in
the Islamic tradition that we don't see in Christian Europe.

(12:14):
We, we do have Christian Mysticsand they're fascinating.
Meister Eckhart, for example. But one way of talking about
this is, and, and it's reflectedin the curriculum we've designed
for this program, is there are these two discrete lines of

(12:36):
thought that are kind of bouncing off of each other,
responding to each other. The the rational tradition or
traditions, because we got philosophy and theology, which
are distinct, but they're leaning on the side of
rationalism. And then we've got this mystical
tradition, Sufism, which has other ways of knowing that uses

(12:58):
faculties other than rationalityto know the truth.
And they're highly developed. There are a lot of, of thinkers,
if I can use thinker in a broad sense, contributing a lot of
ideas. It's a very rich tradition and
what I find really interesting in the Islamic tradition is

(13:20):
while you have on the one side figures of Avicenna and Averroes
philosophers, and on the other side you got people like Ibn al
Aravi and Rumi. They end up converging.
And in the, the summer semester of our program, we see these
things come together where we have philosophers who are also

(13:42):
Sufis and are actually bringing together Aristotle and Ibn al
Aravi in, in a, in a single system of thought.
And so, so responding to that question generally, Sufism is
important. Why is Ibn al RB the, the
predominant one? That's, that's a hard question

(14:05):
to answer and it starts becomingpersonal for me.
Why is why is Ibn al RB important to me?
Maybe a first thing to say is that Ibn al RRB is an ocean
without shore. That's his own expression.
He's an ocean without shore. He's vast and he's all

(14:27):
inclusive. And people get attracted to Ibn
al RRB for various reasons. But I think one reason is you
get a sense that he is embracingeverything, that he, he gives us
a way of understanding everything in a way that I find
very persuasive. But also because it's so vast,

(14:50):
you, you constantly have this sense.
I've only got the tip of the iceberg.
There's a you. You sense the depths, the
breadth and the depths of what he's doing.
I want to footnote this vastness.
You're not. You're not just talking about
this in a metaphorical metaphysical vastness.
I mean this guy, one of his works I think Futuhat Al Makiya

(15:12):
is 10,000 pages and he literallywrote hundreds of works.
Am I? Am I?
Right, That is correct. That is correct.
And I, I've got a friend who is,is underway translating the
entire thing in English and, andhe, my, my friend is very good,
Eric Winkle and he's moving veryfast through it, but he still

(15:38):
has a long way to go. It's huge.
And and you know, I guess I by by way of introducing this, I
find I've known about even Ella Rabi for a while, not in the
depth that I have because of preparing for this, but even
Ella Rabi is, is really the first Mystic text that we've

(16:01):
addressed straight on. And I really love even Ella
Rabi. And that's one of the reasons
because of as you speak, I, I'vereferred before to within
Japanese Buddhism, they make a distinction between Tariqi and
Jiriki. And Jiriki is my power and and

(16:21):
Tariqi is trusting others and and this tradition of my power
really means my seeing for myself.
That's right. And and another one of my one
string banjo songs. It's about the difference
between propositional knowledge,making truth statements, and

(16:41):
dispositional knowledge, which is like being in a state or
knowing how to do a thing or knowing how to, you know, I
would say to see reality differently is it is a
dispositional shift. And this is kind of why Zen
masters try to hit us with a stick.
This is why because they want toshift us somehow, right, to give

(17:05):
us a direct experience. And then out of this direct
experience, we start to say, well, it is as if when we try to
come back out of the land of theineffable and back into, as my
Zen master would say, the land of toilets and, and restaurants,
bathrooms and restaurants. And, and these characters, they

(17:29):
try to leave bread crumbs for us, if you will, about how we
can get ourselves into this rarefied different way of
perceiving and relating to the world.
And, and that's kind of what I mean, we've been talking, we,
we've been focused or I, I picked up of these thousands and

(17:54):
thousands of pages at the end ofhis life.
He wrote this, this book that we've that's part of the
program, the ring stones of Wisdom, Fusus al Hikam, which is
an interesting idea in itself. It was something he wrote near
the end of his life. And it is, I guess what we would

(18:19):
call a revealed text in that he didn't say, OK, I'm going to
write a book. Let's sit down here, get my pen
and paper and I'm just going to write down a book.
He actually had a dream in whichhe's Muhammad gave him this book
and said, don't mess this up. You know, translate this to

(18:42):
people. And it's fascinating because you
know, one of the things about Ivanella Robbie, while he was a
definitely a Muslim, he also said these mysterious things I
think occasionally got him into trouble.
If I'm not wrong, saying that you should embrace all creeds
because if you don't, you might miss something good, which to me

(19:06):
just seems like just genius insight, right?
But that also this insight that all the paths meet at the top of
the mountain when they so that so that each might have
something to contribute to you on your way to that place
without not being a Muslim out of all this somehow.

(19:28):
I mean, so so it seems like there's something universalist
about the way he's he because he's basing on this experience
rather than a a jargon system. Maybe.
I mean, what do you think? About all that, just, well,
there are multiple things what you just said and, and maybe we
can pluck out and address individually.

(19:50):
I think the first thing I want to address that you touched on
is different ways of knowing things, ways that are different
on the one hand from using your rationality, but also different
from simply receiving a tradition and and committing

(20:11):
yourself to what others have said.
That is, it has to be your own contact with this.
And know it directly. So it's being contrasted with
what Ibn al Arvi sometimes callsimitators and, and he doesn't
object to that. You know, you can be a good
Muslim, you can follow the teachings and you're not really
bringing your own insights to itand that's OK.

(20:36):
But there. But he really encourages getting
into direct touch with truth andalso by contrast with
rationality, which is often our way of working out our insight
into things. And he recognizes the
limitations of that. So if we have imitation, we have

(20:57):
rationality. What's the third way of doing
things that Ibn al Arabi is advocating and he talks about?
He uses different terms, but I think probably the most helpful
term to bring in is tasting that.
That would be the English translation, tasting for
yourself, which is more direct than rationality.

(21:19):
It's not a matter of drawing outchains of inferences.
You're getting in touch directlywith it for yourself.
And he there, there's a, there'sa brief passage in the Futu hat
where Ibn al Arbi talks about eating an apple and tasting the

(21:42):
apple. And you know what the apple
tastes like, but you can't tell somebody else who's never had an
apple what that taste is. You, you just can't put it into
words. It's, it's direct.
So, so that that's the first thing I want to address is, is
just what is this other way of knowing?

(22:04):
I'm interested, Brian, you're drawing out this distinction
between propositional and dispositional.
Am I correct? Are those the terms you use?
And I, I, I want to think about that a little bit.
My, my sense is these two thingsare thoroughly intertwined and

(22:25):
can't be separated. And so, So what do I want to
say? You know, St.
John's, we, we read books, we talk about propositions.
Why is this person saying this? What's the argument being made
here? Do I agree with it or not?
And that's largely in the realm of propositions statements that

(22:47):
this is the truth, this is what's real and it needs to be
complemented by practices. And, and, you know, initially
I'm thinking about something like Zazen contemplative
exercises or, you know, Sufi traditions like vicar.

(23:10):
And so I'm thinking about these,these sort of disciplines where
you're, you have to practice. You have to practice and not
simply read. But I also want to say you do
have to have propositions. There have to be assertions that
this is true. This is real.
Whether you're saying it out loud, articulating a truth claim

(23:33):
or not. The way you live is
communicating assertions. This is true.
This is not true. I live this way because I take
this to be the case. This is the nature of of
reality. And I and, and in addition to
contemplative exercises, I wouldsay morality.

(23:53):
Morality is not separable from truth claims.
And and there there's a, there'sa, there's a word in Arabic that
helps me to think about this. The word is hawk, which is
translate, often translated as real.
And and Brian, you've, you've picked up the Fasus you've

(24:15):
looked at, you see that in many places, instead of saying God
Ibn al Arbi will say thou capital R real, thou real.
That's the word hawk. So, so, so God is equivalent to
what is real. But there's another in in your,
you know, we're all familiar with this.

(24:35):
If you move from one language toanother, we have words that
don't exactly match or completely overlap.
There are there are, you know, ramifications of this Arabic
word that I think we don't have exactly in English.
But Huck doesn't just mean what's real or what's true.

(24:55):
It's also the word for right, asin human rights.
Human rights or or a rightful dosomething that is due to me
because of my right to it. That's the same word, and I like
it because I'm inclined to say that our primary moral

(25:19):
obligation is to recognize what is true above everything else
and all of morality. I'm stating this in broad terms,
but I think it's true. All of morality begins with our
obligation to recognize and acknowledge what is true.
And to to stem out a little bit from that, I'm thinking of

(25:46):
something that Simone Vay said that really had an impact on me
in Gravity and Grace, Simone Veysays belief in the existence of
other people as such is love. Belief in the existence of other
people is love. Or if I put that in my own

(26:10):
words, you know, recognition of the reality of other people,
that's what love is. And if you are loving somebody,
you are recognizing that they are real and that they have a
claim on you that they they you have an obligation to recognize
their reality. Brian, you won't be surprised.

(26:32):
That reminds me of loving us. That's just what I was going to
say. The face, it's, it's it's, I
think it's the, it's the same thing.
Loving Us appeals to me for similar reasons.
And it reminds me of the Quran that says wherever you look, you
will find the face of God. That's right.
That's right. Yeah.

(26:53):
The couple of things you touchedon there, Michael, that that I
was wondering if we could circleback to the direct contact with
truth, I think is a it, it's on one hand, an easy distinction
between, you know, kind of following the rules as or, or

(27:15):
the, the, the knowledge as it's handed to you as opposed to
pursuing it's experience yourself.
And you know, Brian mentioned earlier that some great thinkers
have left some bread crumbs in terms of accessing truth
directly. I wonder if there's more to be

(27:37):
said, either from your perspective or or, you know,
referring back to even Al Arabi.What, what methods or what kind
of core tenets maybe is better than methods?

(27:57):
What what are? Are there some core tenets for
directly experiencing truth thatmight surprise us?
So this this this might be surprising.
This, this is a, a personal autobiographical response to
this. And this was before I even
encountered Ibn al Arabi. But I, I think what became a, a

(28:21):
turning point in, in my own journey is, is presupposed by
Ibn al Arabi. I would say, and I think this is
going to be surprising when I say it, but it was Descartes for

(28:41):
me. I was 19 years old when I
encountered Descartes and the Meditations.
And I'm, I'm saying I'm, I imagine that surprising.
Nobody likes Descartes. Everybody hates Descartes.
But, but, but I and I and I actually think Descartes was
mostly wrong, but when he was right, he was importantly right.

(29:07):
And so just to give it a little bit of of background and
autobiographical context, when Iwas in high school for three
years, I was an evangelical Christian.
I was very serious about it for three years.
And then when I was 18, I lost my faith and I lost it suddenly

(29:30):
like that. And it's probably not necessary
to go into the details of why I lost my faith, but I had this
thing that I, I firmly believed,sincerely believed, seriously
believed. And I suddenly lost it.
And it, it left this vacuum. It left me with questions.

(29:51):
It left me with a lot of questions.
And I, and I had to start all over again.
What do I believe? And it was a few months after
this I took my first, I was not yet at St.
John's College. I was at a Community College
taking an sort of intro to philosophy class and I
encountered Descartes. And what this where this ties

(30:13):
into the notion of having directknowledge is I think this is the
starting place for for Descartes.
Descartes says, you know, once in your life doubt everything
rigorously, seriously doubt everything, everything.
And he goes through that processuntil he hits bedrock.

(30:33):
And the bedrock is, well, I knowthat I'm thinking and and when
he says thinking, it's not just rational thinking.
When I fear, when I desire, I know intimately directly that I
am fearing that I am desiring. And I cannot deny that that's
the one thing that I know is that I am presently

(30:55):
experiencing. I'm presently, you know,
conscious. I think Descartes got everything
wrong after that. But, but I thought that that the
starting point is absolutely right.
And this put me into a position at age 19.
Well, if he's got this right, I,I now have a starting place.
Where do I go next? My sense was that Descartes

(31:20):
turned left when he should have turned right.
And what I, what I mean by that is what Descartes does next is
he tries to prove the existence of God.
And then, and then, you know, God is trustworthy, he wouldn't
deceive us. And so the world is real.
It's not a deception. And he gets the whole world
back. My own sense was that after

(31:46):
proving that I am, I exist, the next step should have been you
are you exist, meaning the otherconscious mind, the other person
should recognize because there there's a real rescue.
You would just end up in solipsism.
I'm the only thing that exists and, and there's a lot to be
said about it and I'm and I'm never quite sure to say what how

(32:10):
do I know that you exist? But it's absolutely compelling.
You know, we could talk about itin terms of Levinas the face.
You know, there are different ways of talking about it, but I
recognize there's another conscious mind just like me and
the other person. I don't even want to say in
terms of he or she. I just want to say you, you

(32:31):
know, that you exist the same way that I know that I exist.
But there's, there's a, there's a kind of crisis in that because
there's a way in which we kind of mutually exclude each other.
Well, I know I'm real. You know, you're real.
How are we even coming together into a common reality?
And, and for me that amounted toa, a, a proof of the existence

(32:56):
of God that the only way that you and I can interact with each
other is 2 separate conscious minds is a mind large enough to
include my mind, your mind, everybody's mind, and the, and
the one other piece of it for meis I have this sort of tenacious

(33:20):
resistance to dualism. I want everything to be reduced
to one reality. And, and I can give reasons for
that, but maybe just to, just toassert that, to say that there
are conscious minds and a material world is a problem.

(33:41):
And properly understood, minds and matter are radically
different. One can't be reduced to the
other. But if I assert that they both
exist, then I've got this problem with dualism.
I ended up in spite of Descartes.
Descartes didn't want me to end up here, but I ended up as an

(34:04):
idealist. I ended up not believing in a
material world, thinking that the I am convinced of it, that
what we talk about when we talk about the world is it's, it's,
it's, it's imagination. The the term that's used for Ibn
al Arbi is imaginal. That was the term that term

(34:27):
imaginal was coined to describe that.
So this is bringing it back around to Ibn al Arbi.
I'd never encountered Ibn al Arbi, but Descartes of all
people brought me to idealism, brought me back around to a
belief in God, a belief that that we are pretty literally

(34:47):
living in a dream. And then about a decade later I
encountered Ibn O Arbie. And here is a thinker who who
agrees with that, affirms that, and then takes me much further
than I ever could have taken myself to understand the world

(35:07):
as a dream and how to understandthe relationship between us as
individuals and God. And you know, one of the things
that I, that I found that was a big aha for me in, in reading
it, the little, the bit that I did, because there's definitely
a lot there. It's some pretty dense stuff.

(35:31):
And, and I would encourage people, if you're interested in
this, that there are a lot of resources online of people that
will literally help you through this and help stir the pot, you
know, to get all the, the marrowout of the bones as you do,
which I, I highly recommend. But one of the things that I
kept thinking of was of the BaalShem Tov.

(35:57):
And also lately I, I have this thing where I read a mystical
tradition and I always, it ends up turning into the, the first
book of the doubt of Chang for me.
And so both of those things are prelude to the topic of names,
which is something that I think that modern people don't

(36:19):
understand and modern religious traditions don't really give us
a grasp of it. So the connection between names
in the Baal Shem Tov and Ibn Ella Rabi that I think was
considered a Baal Shem if I'm not mistaken, is this idea of a
Baal Shem is a master of the names?

(36:40):
Yes. And, and somebody who, through
the wisdom that they have acquired through the names, can
actually like manifest effects in the contingent world.
And so this is kind of a way to address Boaz's question also is
to like, how do we get to this truth?

(37:01):
And this is one of the things I love about the worldview of
Ibenella Robbie, which I'll try to lay out and and please fix it
if, when I and if I screw it up.So we have these two ideas.
It's all mind and it's all matter the, the the mind body
problem as you laid out. And it seems to me that Ibenella

(37:21):
Robbie wants to say that, well, God is so multi dimensional that
if you pick either one of those camps you miss and that in fact,
it's it's both of those things and maybe even something more
than so. So we have the discussion of

(37:43):
pantheism and pantheism. Is there a little more leftover?
And even Ella Robbie seems like maybe he's a little one click
past that with the in the mystical direction.
But so I guess I guess the thingthat that fascinates me about
this name idea is that his picture of the world is First

(38:07):
off, like we met with Spinoza. There's nothing here except God.
That's right. It which is another
understanding of the Quran whereit says there is no God but God,
but it's a expanded version of that.
There is no anything but God. That's correct.
There's just God so but God needs to or how do I?

(38:30):
God doesn't need anything, but in the experiencing of God's
Godness, let's say there is thisurge to self experience and so
created reality, what we would call contingent, which is an
important idea, right? This is this Buddhist idea of
dependent originations. You say you exist and I say I

(38:54):
exist. But when the philosophers have
unfolded this, they've said, well, you kind of exist, but
your existence really depends onthese other things.
So for you to exist, it really pulls these other things in.
And if we start pulling in otherthings, there's nothing we don't
pull in. So you really only exist by
virtue of everything existing the same like everything else.

(39:18):
And so, so Robbie has this idea that that God is like the light
that shines through a slide, a color slide or a movie film.
And, and the things that are left out because the film
obstructs them, allows the places where the light makes it

(39:40):
through to be even more highly contrasted, even more
appreciated. So it stands out.
And that's where we get into this mystery of names, because
one of the names for God is El Haq, the real.
Another one is, which we hear a lot about, is El Rahim El
Rahman, right? The all merciful, the all

(40:02):
giving. I like another one that I heard
recently, the obvious, but the idea is that there are these 99
names of God, which is of coursejust a, a, a a quick way to say
infinite names of God, but that each name for God, I points out

(40:24):
a particular virtue of God that we appreciate when it's not all.
I don't want to say muddied up over shined by all the other
virtues of God so that the mirror of reality becomes a
place where we can actually appreciate and and and perceive

(40:48):
each one of these aspects of God.
And then the next part on top ofthis is that man, because this
is what I always want to get back to you.
This partnership of heaven and earth.
Man's responsibility has to do with his uniqueness in creation.
That because we can speak the names, because we can understand

(41:09):
those qualities, we can mirror those qualities more perfectly
than the, the, the unpolished mirrors of general creation.
And that that's where this responsibility to realize God at
the highest level that comes from, because that is the most
perfect way for the, the Dow of all reality to experience itself

(41:34):
the most completely. And that's why all of reality
wants us to enlighten ourselves.Did I do a good job there to try
to sum it all up? No, I think you did an excellent
job there. There's one thing and I don't
think I'm disagreeing with you, but just to give a little
clarification here is I don't think it's a matter that Ibn Al
Arby is affirming both mind and matter.

(41:58):
That is, I, I think his view is,is thoroughly idealistic, that
really it's all imagination. But maybe a more precise way of
articulating it is what is the relationship between God, who in
his essence is unitary, and the multiplicity and specificity of

(42:21):
the world. So it's not so much mind and
matter, it's, it's unity and multiplicity or universality and
particularity. That's the real problem.
And, and I think, I think you did a great job of, of talking
about this and bringing it down to the level of, of, you know,

(42:42):
individual experience and how one relates to God.
That is the way Abdullah ABI talks about it is, well, what is
the color green? It's white light.
When it shines through, say a stained glass window through the
through that green, it will filter out all the other colors
and, and, and we'll just get thegreen.
And then we, and then we have a relationship to the

(43:04):
particularity of the color green.
Ibn al Arbi is very fond of of astatement from an earlier Sufi
named Junaid who says that the water takes on the color of the
cup. The water takes on the color of
the cup. And in Ibn al Arbi interprets it

(43:24):
differently in different places.Sometimes he understands that we
are the water, and when we take on the color of the cup, the cup
is a particular aspect of God. So I'm taking on the attributes
of God. But what I find more interesting
is when he interprets it the other way around, that God is

(43:45):
the water, we are the cup. And the way we experience God is
when God takes on our colors, takes on our specificity that I
find very interesting. Another way that he talks about

(44:05):
it is he talks about the heart. He's very serious about the
heart. It's not your physical heart.
It's also not in English. I think the heart is is
typically associated with sentiments.
Whereas for for Ibn al Arabi, it's a faculty of knowledge and

(44:27):
our heart at any given moment has a particular shape and God
will conform exactly to the shape of your heart.
So God is being manifest to us all the time.
Everybody we're having encounters with God all the
time. Most of the time we don't
recognize it, but God is manifesting to your heart in a

(44:50):
particular form that matches theshape of your heart.
Now this revelation that is happening to us all the time,
which is very specific, it's so specific that it never happens
twice. There's a particular
manifestation of God that never ever happens again.

(45:13):
So God is revealed differently to different people, and that's
what underlies the kind of pluralism and tolerance that Ibn
Al Arvy advocates. Is, is, is that you don't
reprimand other people for having different beliefs about
God because God is in fact revealed to this other person in
a way different from the way Godhas revealed to you.

(45:35):
And so everybody has a differentperspective on God, but also God
does not reveal himself to you in two different moments.
Your heart is constantly fluctuating as the word that he
used. It's related to the Arabic word
for heart changing moment by moment by moment by moment.

(45:57):
And so to be related to God, youcan't be related to a fixed idea
of God. You have to be constantly on
your toes and to recognize how God is revealing how He's
revealing Himself to you right now as opposed to 1 moment.
Before and he has this idea thatI found very relevant, this idea

(46:22):
of preparedness and that God reveals himself itself to us in
the shape that is appropriate for our preparedness, which sort
of puts the ball back in our court a little bit.
As opposed to the idea that God is just grace and God picks some

(46:42):
and doesn't pick some and you'relucky or you're not lucky
somehow, like it's a lottery. This says your preparedness is
actually it has to do with your relationship here.
And and with your your will and intent maybe.
Or like if if the revelation of God were were only accidental,

(47:06):
then you know that rabbit hole has the no free will argument in
it, or at least the precedent. Whereas preparedness implies you
can take it upon yourself to to set the stage for direct contact

(47:30):
with truth. It's it's, it's complicated.
So in a sense, it's true to say that I am determining the way
God will reveal himself to me because it's my preparation.
It, it comes from me and you can't deny it.
You're responsible for it. You're responsible for the form

(47:51):
that God is taking. But what's more complicated is
can you choose your preparedness?
Can you choose how you are prepared?
And, and, and sort of on a deeper level, God is forming
your heart and you're being prepared in a particular way to

(48:14):
receive a certain image. And so from one point of view,
and this is, you've seen this brain is Ibn al Harvey, this is,
is he's very dialectical. He says, you can say it this way
or you can say it the opposite way because both of these things
are true and he'll bounce back and forth.
So on the one hand, God conformsto your heart.

(48:36):
It sounds as if you've got the upper hand, right?
I'm determining how God will reveal himself.
But God is forming your heart. So you go a level down.
You also say that that God is actually forming you and
preparing you for a particular revelation.
And those revelations, you know the names of God, they're lovely

(49:01):
names like the forgiver. I mean, I'm on board with that.
I want a God who forgives, but he's also the one who abases,
who will humiliate you. They're very harsh names.
The traditional distinction is between the names of majesty and
the, and the names of beauty, right?
And I, I wish they were all names of beauty, but they're

(49:21):
not. And the world is not all
beautiful. It's very harsh.
And, and there's a real, I think, you know, a central
question of theodicy, You know, why, why would a merciful God
create this world that we're living in?
And I think Ibnu Larabee's answer is that these names,

(49:44):
these harsh names and these lovelier names all want to
exist. They want to be brought into
existence. And so God's most fundamental
trait is mercy. And he had mercy on us.
We wanted to exist before we were brought into the world.

(50:05):
There's something pre existent or pre established about us and
we, we demanded of God, you know, please bring us into
existence. And God showed mercy on us by
bringing us into existence. He did the same thing with the
names and the name. The one who abases this harsh

(50:27):
name wanted to exist. And so it's it's a peculiar
thing to say, but it was an act of mercy to bring into existence
this harsh name. And it's a.
He, he even says that people that commit heinous acts and are
punished it you know in the hereafter that even that

(50:49):
punishment is a manifestation ofGod's mercy and God's love for
the world is that. That, that that's correct.
And, and, and I think, I think Ibn al Arbi thinks that all of
us without exception are destined for mercy and relief,

(51:10):
relief from pain in the afterlife.
And, and he says, I'm not sure if it means that that people
will end up in hell and hell will end up being pleasant for
them or, or that, or that they will just be let out of hell.
But but the end point is everybody comes back to God.
Everybody comes back to reconciliation with God.

(51:33):
Everybody without exception. Which is very Hindu.
Yeah. Well, let's the Bhagavad Gita
like. Right, Yeah.
And and that's a very harsh formof the Bhagavad Gita, looks very
harsh in the Bhagavad Gita. But to recognize that, and
that's a challenge, but to recognize that that is a kind of

(51:54):
mercy. The the language is a little
funny that IMNRB highlights this, that everything returns to
God. Everything returns to God.
So we're from God and we return to God.
But at the same time, he emphasizes the fact that there
isn't really a stopping point. There's not a point where you

(52:17):
cross the finish line and say, OK, I have arrived at God.
That process is actually infinite.
You will will continue to get infinitely closer to God.
But it's it's, it's like Zeno's paradox.
You're never going to finish that.
You're never going to arrive at the end.
Point the ever revealing face ofGod.

(52:39):
That's right. Yeah, yeah.
Well, there's a, there's a ton of stuff in there that that I
want to ask about. Maybe let me let me choose one.
That's, that's always tough for me because I, I always backslide
on this. So I feel like I never quite
grok it well enough. Earlier, I think both of you

(53:02):
talked about God's urge to experience himself.
And then it, it came up again interms of these names of God want
to exist. And I think there's like a a
volition there. And I think the way I understand

(53:23):
God's urge to experience self isas an explanation for
self-awareness. Like we're we're self aware and
that's a good thing because we're part of God or the
universe experiencing self. But that but I don't have direct

(53:45):
knowledge of God experiencing self and I wonder if there are
any bread crumbs that could be laid out around this that might
give me and maybe some of our listeners some clues about what
that really means. To to have access to God's self
knowledge or am I misunderstanding?

(54:07):
How, why, Why do we think that God has an urge to experience
self? Why is that part of our
cognitive model, or of the dreamas you put it?
That's a really good question. Why does God want to experience
himself? That it's it's an excellent
question. I'm not sure how to answer it.

(54:29):
How typically don't they say that, that if God was only
absolute, that would be limiting?
And so that for God to manifest a contingent universe is just
another expression of even more absoluteness, because that
contingent universe will be infinite in its expression of

(54:52):
all those possibilities. I'm just, you know, that that's.
Correct. And, and, and maybe I'm
misunderstanding the question. So it's an assertion that God
wants to experience himself, to experience himself in a
particular way that could only happen by creating the world.
And so Ibn al Arbi's language isin terms of mirrors, though the

(55:14):
created world is a mirror that God holds up for himself to see
certain aspects of himself that he couldn't see otherwise.
Ibn al Arbi points to an Islamictradition that that God was a
hidden treasure and he loved to be known.
The verb is love. It's, it's an expression of

(55:36):
love. He, he passionately desires self
knowledge. And, and, and yes, Brian, I
mean, it's, it's, he wants to know himself both absolutely and
in particulars. But your question, boys, I
think, and maybe I still don't have a handle on it, is like,

(55:56):
how do we know that God has thatimpetus?
And I and I don't, I think I don't know how to answer that.
How do we know that mystical experience?
Sorry, mystical experience. Yeah.
But that kind of kicks it kicks the can down the road.
What does that mean exactly? I mean, the, the, the the

(56:18):
principle that Ibn al Arabi frequently cites, and it's
another Islamic tradition. He who knows himself knows his
Lord. And you have to know yourself
before you know your Lord. And so those are intimately
connected. And it, and it sounds as if what
it amounts to is, well, I have this self knowledge and I, I

(56:42):
have this desire for knowledge to manifest these things.
And God has the same thing. But I, but I think your question
boys, is, well, how do you, well, how do you know?
How do you know? And I'm not sure how to answer
that. Well, from what you just said,
I'm what, what I'm taking away is that, you know, there's been

(57:06):
this thread you you didn't use these words, but fragmentation
and coherence, the particular and the universal.
And if we have already concludedthat we and our consciousness
are fragments of the whole and of God, then our self knowledge

(57:30):
or our desire for self knowledgemust be a fragment of God's
desire for self knowledge. So I can cook that for a while
and then I'll come back with more questions.
Which is that microcosm, macrocosm, kind of a hermetic
idea originally. And, and I think that there's a

(57:51):
thread here that bears at least mentioning, and that is Platinus
and the Neoplatonists. It seems like they had their
fingers in the soup here too. And the thing that I've always
liked about them was that it seemed that they had a
dispositional nature, a, a series of practices or methods

(58:11):
because, you know, I always wantto put a lot of heavy lifting on
the idea of the mysteries with the ancient Greeks say, well,
the metaphysics, it didn't, you know, it came from realizations
that were this, you know, we've mentioned before the idea of
intuition, but not meaning picking lottery tickets, more
like a direct seeing that doesn't need a inferential

(58:35):
process and a conclusion. It's just a direct seeing, like
a seeing the three angles of a triangle or something.
And so I've always sort of felt that the Neoplatonists had this
idea, you know, science, a naiveunderstanding of science says
that it's telling us, OK, look and then draw these conclusions.

(58:58):
But it really is telling us do this and then look and then draw
your conclusions. And it seems that when, when
Descartes with no mysteries and no spiritual discipline apart
from in a, a, a soundtrack of please, please, please, hope,

(59:19):
hope, hope. He didn't have, he didn't have
the, the basic experiment to runthe observation on.
Because like the Buddhist would say, OK, do this and you'll see
you don't exist. You know, exactly the opposite.
And it seems to me that the the the premise here with Sufis is
the practice. That's right.

(59:41):
And that the practice is going is actually going to affect.
And this is a whole theme for me, the things that we do that
that our brain isn't just the thoughts, but that there is an
embodiment to it. And that a lot of these
practices work with the vehicle to empower and support the
process of consciousness. And you know, we've talked

(01:00:02):
before about use of plant medicines or different.
Fasting methods and you know, Native Americans have done
different things to open portals, so to speak.
And it seems that the Sufis weremaybe part of that lineage and
maybe coming from the Neoplatonist or I don't know
what your what your thoughts areabout that?
Well, there are two. There are two distinct things

(01:00:24):
you're bringing up. 1 is about the relationship between Sufism
and more broadly Islamic philosophy with Neoplatonism,
and Neoplatonism is a huge part of that soup.
It's it's a very important ingredient.
But I think more broadly, practice contemplative

(01:00:47):
practices, whether we are thinking of Neoplatonism or not.
Are we engaged with contemplative exercises to hone
our ability to recognize truth or to have a relationship with
truth and, and you, you might have mentioned this earlier that
the the Sufi image of polishing the heart, polishing the heart

(01:01:09):
so it will reflect more clearly polishing, polishing, polishing.
What are the practices we do to do that polishing and, and, and,
and Sufism, the Sufi traditions,because there are multiple
lineages, are rich with traditions.

(01:01:30):
I mean, there are many, many, many different exercises that
have been passed down and that are practiced and, and they're
absolutely central. And maybe this is, this is a
little bit of a detour, but I, but I, I've thought a lot over
the years about the relationshipbetween what we do at St.
John's, reading books and engaging with contemplative

(01:01:56):
exercises, which we, which we don't accept in, in certain
particular ways, you know, our math class and going up to the
board and demonstrating A Euclidean proposition is a
contemplative exercise in our, in our lab class, we have what
we, you know, practica. We have practica.

(01:02:18):
You can't just read, you know, classical papers from chemists
developing atomic theory. You need to go into the lab and,
and, and replicate those, those,those experiments.
So we do that in certain ways. Do we have contemplative

(01:02:40):
exercises for when we are reading Plato or when we're
reading Platinus? We actually don't spend much
time reading Platinus or Descartes or, or any philosopher
or religious thinker. Do we then say to our students,
go and engage in this practice? We, we don't.

(01:03:02):
That's really that, that, that absence of practice is, is
especially stark in the Eastern Classics program when we're
reading Dogen and, and we're nottelling students you need to go
to the zendo and you need to, tosit in order to understand what
Dogen is doing. We don't.
Do that smell the incense? Yeah.

(01:03:24):
And so this has become really interesting to me as a question
of what it would even look like to complement our our readings
of philosophical and theologicaltexts with practices, exercises.
What would that look like? I think Brian might be
interested in applying for that job if the job description gets

(01:03:47):
gets written. Like our our new director of
labs here but but this version of labs is is a contemplative
exercises I have so I could be my my thoughts on this over the
last oh 1215 years. My my thought on this has been

(01:04:10):
influenced by another college. I don't know if you're familiar
with Dharma Realm Buddhist University in Northern
California. It's AI, think I might have
heard of that. Yeah, it's called a university.
It should. I think it's appropriately
called a college. It's a very small college.

(01:04:31):
It's been around like at the city of 500.
Buddhas maybe. I think that's right.
I think that's correct, yeah. And I think it was founded in
the 1970s. It's, it's got a monastic side
of it. I, I think there are Buddhist
nuns, East Asian Buddhist nuns who, who live on campus, if I'm

(01:04:55):
understanding correctly. But about a dozen years ago,
they wanted to heavily revise their their curriculum as a
great books college. And so they, they've come out
here multiple times. They have learned from us how to

(01:05:17):
do a great Books program. So they've learned from us.
They've modelled what they do onus.
And what came out of that doesn't look like Saint John's.
That is that they've brought real innovation to it.
And part of that innovation is that they require contemplative
exercises. You don't just read books.
And we're not only talking aboutBuddhism, of course Buddhism,

(01:05:39):
Buddhist meditation in multiple traditions is highlighted, is
emphasized at this school. But they also, they don't only
read Buddhist books, they read Western texts.
They have made an effort to develop contemplative exercises

(01:06:01):
to complement their readings of Western philosophers and so on.
And so I feel that that we should think of ourselves as
being in the position of learning from them.
I think, I think, I think they, they have learned from us.
I think we can learn a lot from them.
They, they drew my attention in my conversations with them at

(01:06:22):
Dharma Realm, drew my attention to a book I was not previously
familiar with, Philosophy as a Way of Life by Pierre Hadeau.
I don't know if you've heard of this book, but he was a
philosopher who focused on whatever we can find in the
written records of what Neoplatonists and Stoics and

(01:06:47):
Epicureans actually did as a contemplative practice.
And he he he wrote on that. And my understanding is that at
Dharma Realm, they looked at that and said, well, this is a
model for us. What kinds of contemplative
exercises might we recover from the Stoics, from the Epicureans

(01:07:09):
and so on, so that we're not just reading the Stoics, we're
trying to engage with the practices that they actually
engaged in. So I'm, I'm, I love that.
I'm quite, I, I'm really grippedby that question of how we might
bring, I think not in a kind of official or required way, but to
make available at St. John's opportunities to

(01:07:34):
practice. Yeah.
I I legitimately think bringing Brian on as, as a consultant to
develop something like that would be, would be worthwhile.
I'm, I want to go back to, to something that came up earlier
that I've kind of been chewing on, if that's OK with you.

(01:07:58):
Yeah. So so you talked earlier,
Michael, about mind and matter being a a duality.
That's a problem. And as I understand it, you and
Ibn Al Arabi reconcile that through idealism and concluding

(01:08:24):
that this is essentially a dreamor a projection.
And I don't quite understand howthat's not choosing one mind and
not the other matter and how it actually represents A
reconciliation. Would you be willing to talk

(01:08:45):
about that a little? I'm not, I'm not sure I would
call it a reconciliation. I think it's choosing one side.
It is I, I that is I again, I, Ithink in my mind what's being
reconciled is not minded matter.It's mind.
Or you know, the, the, I think the correct term for it's

(01:09:07):
imagination, it's imaginal. There's no such thing as matter
if, if we understand matter is that which exists when nobody's
looking at it, that the rock is still there when nobody is there
to experience it. If that's kind of the definition
of matter, it doesn't exist. There's there's no such thing.

(01:09:27):
These things exist only insofar as they are experienced.
It is choosing one side over theother.
What I think is being reconciled, or what Ibn al RV is
striving to reconcile is unity and multiplicity or universality
in particularity. That's, that's the real, that's
the real Wrestling is, is to bring these two things together.

(01:09:51):
But it's it's not. I don't think there's any
implication that matter is a real independent thing,
independent of our imagination. Or sometimes might they say
imminence in universality or? Absolute, Absolute right,
Transcendence, Transcendence andimminence.

(01:10:13):
Similarity is sometimes the wordthat is used for imminence.
And what's the opposite of similarity that he uses?
I'm trying to think of the the word that's how it's translated
into English. But it's essentially
transcendence that that God, on the one hand, is utterly

(01:10:33):
different from us. There's nothing we have in
commonality with. Nonetheless, God only manifests
to us in our own particular form.
And that has to do with I know he talks about US or maybe
contingent reality having a need, having a necessity to rely

(01:10:54):
on this other thing. So that's where the mind would
become prime primary in that respect, because it has no need.
God, God absolute has no need. That's.
Right, I'm having trouble getting there.
Maybe just for what it's worth, I'll I'll share that that as

(01:11:15):
close as I can get to grokking that is kind of the idea.
I mean really dangerous territory here because I'm going
to talk about quantum physics, which not only do I not
understand, but the quantum physicists say they don't
either. So.
But we all want to talk about itanyway.
We all want to talk about it. Well, but I think for this

(01:11:38):
reason that I think I at least infer an explanation from my
very, very limited understanding.
I wouldn't even call it understanding that matter can
exist and not exist at the same time, that matter can be energy

(01:11:59):
and and matter at the same time.And that what determines what
that energy and matter is in anygiven infinitesimal,
infinitesimal moment of time is quantum potential.

(01:12:20):
Or I think what Brian has referred to as the is not quite
the right word, but the emergentuniverse.
So there's there's the potentialthat exists just before now and
then there's now and in now there is matter, I think.

(01:12:41):
And we don't have to go down this rabbit hole.
But if you want to help me understand what doesn't work
about that, I'm curious. And if not, we can move on to
something else. So I, I, I think I'm going to
respond to this obliquely. I'm not going, that is I'm not a
physicist, but I, I think, I think in these conversations, we

(01:13:04):
all want to bring in quantum, you know, notions of, you know,
indeterminants, how we interact with things will impact how
these things manifest. I think, I think we're tempted
to do it because because we respect physics, we respect

(01:13:26):
natural science. So we want to take these, these
philosophical ideas. And well, I can point to this
because I know the physicists are right.
They have experiments to verify these things.
And so I want to connect what sounds like an unverified
philosophical idea by connectingit to physics.
That's very attractive, but, butI don't think it comes any

(01:13:48):
closer to answering the question, well, why?
Why does quantum physics work? Like we can say that there are
certain impacts of the, you know, of the observer on what's
observed, but we run back into the same questions again.

(01:14:09):
Let let let let me put it this way.
And this is going to sound really roundabout.
And so I don't know if this is ahelpful response.
It might sound really oblique. I'm going to bring in Jung.
You guys talk about Jung, right?Carl Jung, right.
I'm going to bring in Jung hair and synchronicity, the idea that

(01:14:31):
that that you can encounter something in your waking life.
Here it is, and it it directly connects with what's going on
with you in your psychology. Well, why does that happen?
Like what is the connection between what's going on in your
head and what you're encountering not just in your
dream life, but your waking life?

(01:14:53):
What is the explanation? How does that work?
I don't know if Carl Jung has anontological account or
metaphysical account for why this happens.
But I've had conversations with,I had a conversation with
somebody. We were talking about Young, and

(01:15:14):
I said, well, doesn't that only make sense if, if, if we are
idealists, that in fact what happens in our waking life is in
fact a dream? Now I understand why what
happens in my dreams when I'm asleep is connected to what
happens in my waking life, because they're both dreams.

(01:15:38):
I feel as if I've got an explanation then.
But the response I got from my friend is well, it's like
quantum physics. Well, you haven't answered
anything. You've just given me a different
version of the same problem. My my inclination, which might
be simplistic. Quantum physics works because
the universe is idealistic that at at root reality is

(01:16:02):
consciousness, intentionality, teleology.
And of course the observer and the observed are going to
interact with each other becauseit's all at root, different
aspects of consciousness. Is this related to the idea of
breath that that God has breathed into this dead matter

(01:16:28):
some aspects so that there's nothing that's not got that
element that's goes beyond matter that is God.
I mean, I mean, I, I, maybe I didn't get that because he's got
a whole chapter in there about breathing, right?
The breathing of life into whichis one of those central
mysteries in the chain of being that we've talked about before,

(01:16:52):
is that involved with this like the it's not dead matter,
because even the deadest matter has some breath of life put
inside of it. I Well, there, there's no such
thing as dead matter. I mean, dead matter just doesn't
exist. What but?
Is that why? Because of the breath of.
Well, yeah, the the Breath of the All Merciful, which is a

(01:17:13):
particular topic that's really important for Ibn LRV.
It's it's the act of creation, of creation.
So we we, we get the story in inGenesis chapter 2, right.
So Adam is formed and God breathes into this matter and
brings Adam to life. For Ibn al RV it it becomes much

(01:17:39):
more general where breath, the breath of God, the breath of the
of the All Merciful, is breathing the entire universe
into existence. It's related.
Like an like an emanation in thein the Neoplatonic sense.
It is, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's quite similar to that and

(01:18:01):
and also related to the notion of speaking the universe into
existence. So let there be light.
So, so there are different ways of speaking about the same
thing, that activity of creatingeverything, although I'm going
to keep saying it doesn't mean creating matter, but it is a
manifestation of this creative impulse.

(01:18:23):
And what I find really engaging for me this notion that God
doesn't have this one moment of breathing the universe into
existence and then rests on the 7th day and stops creating.
But that at every moment God is creating the world and and, and

(01:18:46):
in a really radical way. Umm that moment by moment by
moment. Or one could say breath by
breath by breath by breath. Meaning the breath of God every
moment the entire universe will will blink into non existence,
everything will stop existing and in the next moment will be

(01:19:09):
recreated. And if God didn't keep doing
that moment by moment by moment,there wouldn't be anything.
So there's, there's nothing selfsubsistence about the world.
If you stop looking, it disappears.
That is, if God stops looking atit and stops working with it,
there's nothingness. In a sense, I find that to be an

(01:19:33):
answer to, you know, Zeno's paradox.
How, how you know, how do I get to, I've got this continuous
distance I need to traverse. I'm going to traverse half of
that before, before that, I haveto traverse half of that and
half of that and it goes on infinitely.
And because space is continuous and time is continuous and is

(01:19:58):
infinitely subdivisible, how do you ever get started and how do
you ever finish? How do you ever take that first
step? I think Ibn Al Arby's answer is
it's not continuous. It's atomic, it's moment by
moment by moment. It's like a flip book or frames
of a film and and I find that tobe an interesting account of

(01:20:22):
what is always mysterious to us.What is the nature of time?
Right. That links up to my
understanding of. I shouldn't call it
understanding of quantum potential and, and, and all of
the possibilities galvanizing into a particular thing again

(01:20:43):
and again and again. If you, if, if you'll, I'm, I'm
going to hold off on trying to explain synchronicity in a
material universe. Maybe we'll have you back for
that, but I need to, I need to work on that a little.
I I think I I have something but.

(01:21:04):
I'm not. I'm really.
Curious. Now you're going to keep me in
suspense? Yeah, well, you'll have to come
back. So, So there was something else
that that you said earlier aboutthe idea that God is revealed to
everybody in a unique way and respecting that all of those

(01:21:28):
manifestations are valid and valuable.
I dig that and there's a danger there and let's say false
prophets or, you know, in, in, in people misinterpreting the
revelation, meaning it wasn't a revelation at all.

(01:21:50):
It's some, you know, other, other ego trip that that they're
having or so. So how do you reconcile maybe
the the idea that everybody's revelation of God is valuable,
which sounds like a little postmodern and and maybe
excessively egalitarian with theidea that there is a hierarchy

(01:22:11):
of spiritual or mystical experience or a hierarchy of
direct experience of God? Yeah.
I don't know how successfully I can address that.
It's a very important question. And so I acknowledge that that
we should worry about false prophets or, or one might make

(01:22:32):
this in Islamic terms, we shouldworry about idolaters, people
who worship idols who aren't, who aren't God, who or notions
of a plurality of gods and things like that.
There there are real dangers in that, but I'll begin by saying

(01:22:55):
that that Ibn Alarabi shows tremendous generosity even
towards idolaters. And in in the Fasus, in the
chapter on Noah, Ibn al Arabi interprets the way Noah
interacts with the idolaters. They worship the specific Pagan

(01:23:18):
gods and they end up drowned in the flood.
And you know, in the flood storywith Noah, the way Ibn al Arabi
understands it is that that the ocean that they are drowned in
is knowledge of God. It is a way of knowing God, that
through their idolatry they cometo know God.

(01:23:41):
And, and, and again, I don't want to brush aside the concern
that there are dangerous forms of worship.
There are dangerous or, or what we might call false or
idolatrous versions of religion.And yet Ibn al Arabi recognizes

(01:24:04):
that even in the idolater, that the idolater is relating to God,
even the atheist and, and, and maybe I'm not sure that I don't
know if I'm drawing from Ibn al Arabi here, but I think it's
consistent with Ibn al Arabi. I'm thinking of something that
Martin Buber said that that has always stayed with me is that

(01:24:26):
the atheist looking out his attic window can be closer to
God than the believer who's attached to his false image of
God. That the atheist can be closer
to God than the believer. I think that that, yeah, go
ahead it. It seems that that even Ella

(01:24:46):
Ravi also is, is equally happy to say that everybody is a
heretic because we're because we're all worshipping some image
that we have in our head as opposed to God, which we
couldn't even conceive of. So the degree to which we
envision God, we know. Well, that's not it.

(01:25:09):
So, so as the more we in our petty human dimension try to
conceive of this appropriate thing, it's always heretical,
even the you know, but that that's maybe why we need to
constantly purify and and Polishour hearts, so to speak.
Well, it's, yeah, it's really tricky.
I think you're right. I think, I don't know if you

(01:25:31):
would call us all heretics, but it's it's implied in what he
says that you only worship the divinity of belief, that is the
divinity of that you have created in your own heart.
You, you, you create that you worship that all of us, all of
us. And it has that kind of
particularity and uniqueness. You can't escape that.

(01:25:55):
And that might look like, I don't know about heretic
idolatry might be closer. We are all idolaters.
And he says that you worship a God that you have created.
What's what's funny about that though, is yes, Polish the
heart, but I don't think you Polish away your specificity.

(01:26:18):
That is, it's inevitable you will never stop.
If if we want to call that idolatry, if we want to call it
that, you don't ever stop doing that ever, anybody, because you
are a specific created being. You have 0 access to God in his
own essence, 0 access to it. All you have is a particular

(01:26:39):
image of God. And that this is where the
language of of mirrors in Ibna larvae I find really helpful is
that God created us as a mirror for God so that he can look into
creation to see himself in a waythat he wouldn't see himself any
other way if he hadn't created the world.
God also is a mirror to us. So we are encountering God.

(01:27:04):
We're looking in this mirror. What do we see?
We see ourselves. We don't see God.
We see ourselves. So we look in the mirror of God
and we see ourselves. God looks at creation and he
sees himself. And this is these two mirrors
facing each other. And and you can't get past Ibn

(01:27:27):
Al Arby's really strong about that is don't strive to get past
the mirror. You can't.
You have 0 access to what's on the other side of the mirror.
You're only going to run into yourself.
And that's not a problem. That's that's that's how you
relate to God. Because God hides himself with
himself. Yeah.

(01:27:47):
Yeah. So you can't miss really.
You can't miss. That's that's the good news,
right? You can't.
Fall out of the universe. I and I'm not trying to brush
aside the the worries, the concerns about, you know, ego
trips and things like that. I'm not trying to brush that
aside. But there is this kind of
there's something reassuring as you can't miss, you can't get it

(01:28:08):
wrong. That has a teleology to it.
I think that that implies that amovement, if you can't miss and,
and you maybe your idolatry and going astray is what ultimately
leads you to greater coherence in the long run.

(01:28:32):
That that implies a trajectory of towards consciousness or
towards coherence or, or something like that.
I think you mentioned earlier that's how you see things.
Yeah, back home. Yeah, the eschaton.
Yeah, yeah, today's Rock'n'roll reference.
Can't find my way home. I might be complete for now on

(01:29:01):
questions. Brian or Michael, is there
anything else you want to bring up I've.
Got nothing. You know, that my just my
regular one string banjo songs, which are that, you know, we
typically what we, we, we consistently look at these

(01:29:22):
different thinkers and they're always trying to, you know, give
us a map of what they've pieced together, trying to make sense
of the whole thing, which I always want to say is
fundamentally an, an ontologicalhermeneutical problem.
That is we're trying to interpret being.

(01:29:47):
And what we tend to do is we tend to look at the contrasting
aspects, say, well, this guy says this, but this guy says
this. And what for me, the great
benefit that I get out of this is, and I got in a lot of
trouble at St. John's for this, is how what

(01:30:08):
they're saying is the same thing.
The big pieces, you have a differ in the details, but the
big pieces often point in the same direction.
And so, you know, in this case, once again, you know, and maybe
this is a case of, you know, when you buy a red car, you
start noticing red cars everywhere.

(01:30:30):
So maybe I'm just looking and seeing myself, but I see the
same exhortations of us and improve ability in our ability
to experience and parse reality.That we really can get wiser.
That there are things that we can learn in life that that that

(01:30:54):
as we accumulate experience, it gives us a base to sound meaning
out from the world around us. And so when I look at Ibn al
Rabi, I see a verification for me which was very important was
that there are other extra reasonable ways that is beyond

(01:31:15):
reason to access information. Which doesn't mean you can't
fool yourself, but it is kind ofthis idea that you know, seek
and it and it shall be found. Knock and it shall be opened
unto you like seek wisdom and you will get wiser.
And I mean, this is a lot again with another one string banjo

(01:31:35):
song about why philosophy is important, why trying to get
wiser is important, that your life will be better for it and
and it will be more filled with meaning for it.
And so, so you know, I get I getthat message out of everybody
that we read. So although I do think that even

(01:31:58):
Ella Robbie is this really special expression of and I
encourage people always, you know, to like, get your hands on
this stuff. If you have the slightest
curiosity, there are now. This is why lately I have been
like a poor seen individual in apigsty because the Internet
really can support your efforts to understand.

(01:32:20):
I know that reading now is like this thing that nobody seems to
want to do unless it's on a meme.
But honestly, you know, I got through Finnegan's Wake.
I get through a lot of difficultstuff because of the support
system that the information revolution has provided.
So don't get psyched out by thisstuff like you can crack these

(01:32:41):
books and if you aren't getting it, you can find support to get
it out and there's good stuff inthere that will help you that
will change your life. So that's like my that's my one
string banjo song for for today I guess.
And if if anybody is interested in in learning more about Ibn al
Arabi, that it's true there, there's an enormous amount of

(01:33:05):
resources out there. You know, texts are being
translated, but there are also scholars.
There's been an explosion of scholars of Ibn al Arabi over
the last 50 years or so. The Muhiyiddim Ibn al Arabi
society, I think they don't say Ibn al Ibn Arabi is how they put

(01:33:29):
it. Muhiyiddim Ibn Arabi society,
which is based in Oxford. It was started, I believe, in
the early 1980s and there were just a few scholars and then
they had, they have a journal that comes out a couple of times
a year and over the last, you know, you know, 40-50 years.
Young's upcoming scholars. And there are a lot of them.

(01:33:53):
They're doing exciting work. And so there's this growing
community of people who just love Ibn al Arbi and want to
dive into this. And, and because it's, it's
infinite and, and it's very rich.
There's a lot to bring up. There are a lot of things out
there. And if somebody's curious, I
would recommend going to their website and, and look at their

(01:34:15):
articles. They've got, you know, lectures
that they've, they've recorded their lectures, put them online.
There's a lot out there there. There's a banquet out there, you
know, ready for you to partake in, right?
And I'd also put that. Group in the show notes.
We will. We will definitely put the group
put, put the show notes. We'll have that and anything

(01:34:38):
else, Michael, that you think would be relevant, we'll put in
the show notes. You can send that to and there
will also be information about the Middle Eastern program at
St. John's because I.
Do want to encourage people to consider that, you know, I do
feel like, and this is another one of my little regular rants
is that is that we are at a special time.

(01:35:01):
And I do think that this that that we're, we're going to see
instead of fragmentation, we're going to see an, an energy to
glue things back together. That there is that that we're at
a pendulum swing to come back into synergy.
That's that's why I got in trouble at St.
John's. I said, we want you to write
analytically, not not synthetically.

(01:35:22):
We want to see what the differences are, not what the
similarities are. But anyway, there I think that
there is this great unification that's happening and I hold a
high hope for philosophy to be the, as Habermas would say, the,
the usher that shows each of these appropriate disciplines

(01:35:42):
into their seat. And so that's what I'm
foreseeing for the future. My, my hopeful aspirations.
Great. It's been really wonderful and I
trust we'll have a chance to do it again.
Yeah, I. Hope both.
Michael, you went deep with us and, and I really liked some of

(01:36:04):
the places we went to and, and you gave me certainly a lot to
think about that I I'm going to want to come back and talk about
some more. Thank you.
Well, thanks. I appreciate the conversation
again. You, you, you put me in
suspense, Boaz, about your did Ihear it right, A materialistic
explanation. It's not.
I don't think it's materialistic.

(01:36:24):
I think it's, it's just allowingfor the existence of matter and
synchronicity or a collective unconscious.
It's and, and, and I, I, as I was thinking about how I would
present it to you, I heard the, the difficult question that you

(01:36:46):
were going to ask right away. And so I want to address that
myself before I bring it to you.Yeah, well, you've got me
hooked. You.
You've put out that bait, so I'll come back again.
I really want to hear what you have to say about that.
Great. Yeah.
Thank you.