NB: These are notes on an essay written by Oludamini Ogunnaike from Harvard. MW obviously denotes me (Mustafa Warsi).
tldr; The theology below is fundamentally neoplatonic or theomonistic, i.e. not only is there One God, but the One God is all there exists, in the ‘true’ sense of the word.
Introduction
People are asleep, and only when they die, do they awaken — Prophet Muhammad
In reality, the entire earthly existence of the Prophet passed thus, as a dream in a dream. — Ibn Arabi
This essay is an exploration of the parallels between the film and certain mystical ideas in Sufism in order to help clarify the latter.
NB: an aside, the film is itself a clever symbol for the cinematic experience. Distinct individuals coalesce to ‘share a dream’, populating it with their own ‘projections’ just as an audience brings with it their entire experiences of life into the film in order to imbue the events unfolding on screen with meaning.
Multi-layered narrative structures, or stories within stories are a popular narrative within the Islamic Tradition, notably manifest within the Quran, but also in the Arabian Nights, the Conference of the Birds and Rumi’s Mathnawi. These symbolise the multi-layered nature of reality and the role that imagination or khayal (imagination or representation) plays in navigating these layers. This is also true of any idealistic philosophy of existence including those of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Kabbalism or Neoplatonic Christianity.
Mal as Maya + Hijab
Mal in the film is interpretable as the embodiment of Ibn Arabi’s conception of the veil (hijab) or the shadow.
Veils, by their nature, hide what they veil, but also delineate what they hide. (Imagine throwing a sheet over an invisible object.)
Similarly, the forms in which the Real clothes itself in the khayal, both obscure and reveal aspects of the Real. But just as the dream is not quite distinct from the dreamer, the veils of reality are not quite distinct from reality itself. i.e. “Behold what shows you His Omnipotence: it is that He hides Himself from you by that which has no existence apart from Him.” (cf veils are contingent on the one, true, necessary being)
i.e. “God has 70,000 veils of light and darkness; were they to be removed, the Glories of his Face would burn away everything perceived by the sight of His creatures” – Prophet Muhammad
The light, here, is the revelatory aspect of the veils or forms of the imaginal world, and the dark is the enshrouding aspect.
From Ibn Arabi, “we only see that Thou art thyself the veils. That is why the veils are also veiled and we do not see them, though they are light and darkness. They are what Thou hast named Thyself, the ‘Manifest’ and the ‘Nonmanifest’. We are veiled therefore from Thee only through Thee, and Thou art veiled from us only through Thy manifestation.”
The suicidal Mal is calling to Cobb from above, to escape from his dreams and join her in reality, while his projection of Mal is calling to him from below trying to trap him in illusion. They are mirror images of each other, concealing and revealing the truth: “that this world is not real”.
In Christianity, this duality of the feminine principle (i.e. that which both reveals and conceals) is represented by Eve (who births sin/illusion), and Mary (who births salvation/truth). In Hinduism/Buddhism, this is represented by the Maya. i.e. Maya is often rendered as ‘cosmic illusion’, but is also the ‘divine play’. She is the great theophany, the ‘unveiling’ of God in Himself and by Himself. Maya may be likened to a magic fabric woven from a warp that covers and a weft that uncovers.
She is a quasi-incomprehensible intermediary between the finite and the Infinite – atleast from our point of view as creatures and as such she has all the multi-coloured ambiguity appropriate to her part-cosmic, part-divine nature.
Mal is Maya, imagination personified, the creative feminine principle which brings the world into being, conceived fundamentally as an act of Divine Mercy, but in so doing, introduces illusion, obfuscation, and ultimately evil. (MW: the paradox here materialises: you cannot manifest anything without concealing something else.) The light cannot project without shadow.
Along with dreams + imagination, the shadow is one of Ibn Arabi’s favourite symbols of this principle. In fact, “shade”/”phantom”/”mirror image” is one of the actual everyday meanings of the term khayal.
Ibn Arabi continues: God did not create the shadows except to serve as an indication for you of you and of Him, so that you may know who you are, what your relationship is to Him, and His to you.
Importantly, however, the property of shadows is ultimately that they are mutable. They decay, disappear. This is equivalent to stating the impermanence of what we think of as our world.
Mal’s final scene is particularly important, for it echoes a number of important questions. She pleads with Cobb here to give up his notions of a reality apart from what he senses here and now. If you could enter the Matrix or Nozick’s Pleasure Machine or surrender yourself as a Brain in a Vat, provided this process would afford you all the sensory bliss you desired, would you do this? Would you leave? What would distinguish reality from the others? What makes one “more real” and is this better? (MW: I think this is very important since it highlights the importance moral/normative aspect to searching for truth, and where truth is specifically the nature of Reality.)
In the film, Cobb’s guilt is a form of ‘inner wakefulness’ or metaphysical buoyancy that orients him and gives him a sense of what is real. It is his intimacy with and love for his real wife and children that force him to recognise his projections as ultimately unreal, escaping Mal the projection, and returning to his reality. Indeed, it is this love that when misdirected from its true destination (i.e. suicidal Mal not projection Mal) that threatens to trap Cobb in limbo.
This is the ambiguous, dualistic nature of beauty in Maya/the World itself: insofar as this beauty is transparent and points beyond itself, i.e. is revelatory and light, then love for it is liberating. (MW: think of the beauty inherent in the discovery of Natural Law.) However, insofar as this beauty is opaque and obfuscatory, this love is imprisoning. (MW: the traps of taking the Dunya (i.e. the sensory world) too seriously.)
This point is important since for Ibn Arabi, God’s love is the force which causes the Absolute to dream the world into existence in the first place.(MW: it is the love we have for God then, a reflection of God’s creative love, that impels us to seek Him, to seek the Truth, to understand the nature of Reality.)
(MW: love, ultimately, is a form of return, of reunison.)
“God asserts, I was a Hidden Treasure and loved to be known.” – Prophet Muhammad.
Ibn Arabi notes, “none but God then is loved in extant things. It is He who is manifest within every beloved to the eye of every lover, and there is nothing which has not the capacity to love and be loved, for everything manifests God. All the cosmos is a lover and beloved, and all of it ultimately goes back to Him.”
The freedom from illusion, and the discovery of God as underlying all of reality comprises our visualisation of Paradise. It is a return, a garden, where our desire for Truth will be fulfilled.
“You shall have within the Garden whatever your souls desire/imagine/have passion for,” – Quran 41:31.Ibn Arabi notes this to be the ontological state of the Garden, where ‘imagination’ or khayal rules.
Cobb desires reunion with his children more than anything else. This was his garden. The garden, however, is still khayali or imaginal, and so ultimately still veiled. It is not fixed, but a stage in the process of self-discovery, of the ultimate return to God.
Ibn Arabi, ‘When you enter His Garden, you really enter yourself, and know yourself (behind the veil)”.
Importantly, both Heaven and Hell, this life and the next, are woven from imagination/khayal since everything formal (i.e. having a form) and that is not the Absolute is imaginal. The soul ascends through these imaginal worlds perpetually until final unison with God itself, or perhaps divorce from it.
The Double Mirror
Here we investigate the concept of the Mirror as it exists in Ibn Arabi’s metaphysics.
Like the dream, a reflection is not the same as the object it reflects, but not independent of it either. In Ibn Arabi, each world or hadarah, is but the image or reflection of the world above it.
Everything in the physical world is but a reflection of images in the archetypal world (think laws of physics or platonic forms), which are merely reflections of Divine Attributes (Justice, Beauty, Truth, Wrath, Mercy etc), which is reflective of God Herself.
The metaphor is deeper than this, however, revealing the reasons for creation at all, and also the limits of human understanding.
Ibn Arabi: “ a vision a thing has for itself is unlike from that which a thing has for itself in a mirror”
In the beginning, the Absolute or the Real saw itself in itself without any other thing, without any subject-object relation. This is the simplest, barest form of self-consciousness akin to us in deep sleep. The Hindus refer to this as Athman.
However, this seemingly unqualified mode of reality or being or consciousness is in fact qualified by its unqualification. It is limited by its being unlimited. This is contradictory and therefore the Absolute manifested itself with limitation (i.e. veiled). This manifestation is the act of Creation. This is Genesis.
Ibn Arabi explains that the Universe was created like an unpolished mirror, but that the situation demanded that the mirror of the world be clear and that Man (i.e. Adam) (MW: and the extent to which he knew the names of things and sought their true reality) was the very clearness of this mirror.
Man is what makes the Universe visible to the Real in this form of delimitation, and by which the Real looks upon His creation and shows mercy upon them.
This is pretty abstract, so let’s clarify using the film as a guide, again:
If we take Inception to be a giant dream of Cobb’s, then all the events + characters are Cobb; they are aspects of him. Mal = guilt, Eames = playfulness, Ariadne = creativity, Arthur = focus. But then, who is the Cobb of the dream world? While a part of Cobb’s imagination, he is not the dreamer himself, instead: he is the one through which the dream becomes intelligible to the dreamer. (MW: He is the mirror, the vantage point, the frame of reference.)
This is a good analogy of the relationship between the Real/Absolute/God (the dreamer), the Universe (the dream), and the man (the dreamer’s projection of himself in the dream).After all, “God created man in His Image”, Genesis 1:27. (This is also a Hadith!)
But why does God use Man as the vehicle by which He navigates His Dream? Why not something else? Well, Cobb experiences his dream through his self-projection since the latter is an abridgement or summary of the former. They have similar characteristics+properties.
The self-projection is more him than any of the other characters, they are his conception of his essence. Ergo, his self-projection is special within the context of the dream since it is a microcosm of the whole dream.
(MW: This clarifies Man’s special place in the Universe, why he is God’s vicegerent.)
Man is a Small Universe, while the Universe is a Big Man, both ultimately veiled manifestations of the Absolute.
Ibn Arabi refers to the Universe as Insan al Kabir (the Big Man) and that all extant objects represent a particular aspect (read: Name!) of God. These objects are disparate and discrete, disconnected. The mirror is cloudy. They only unify themselves in the mind of Man, the structure of the Universe slowly unveils itself to him in his focus. Thus, the act of discovery and the search for Truth is holy. It is the polishing of the mirror.
But Man does not only reflect God. God reflects Man, too. He is your mirror for your vision of yourself, and you are His mirror for His Vision of His Names.” These 2 mirrors, when aligned, produce the infinitude of reflections which comprise the Cosmos.
What does it mean for God to be the mirror of man?
Since God has asserted (Quran 41:53) that He will show us His Signs within Creation, then to know Him, we ought to study Creation carefully.
We can describe Him with no qualities other than those which we can infer by studying Creation itself (MW: knowledge comes from experience)
When we look for God, we do so within the context of Creation. We see ourselves, and the Cosmos.
“Man is My secret, and I am his secret,” – Prophet Muhammad
In the language of Inception, the dreamer himself is always unknown. You can learn about and understand the dreamer by studying the dream, but nowhere close to his entirety. The “real” Cobb is invisible within the dream, and there’s no way for us as dreamed creatures to know him, since outside of the context of the dream, we simply cease to be.
“Only God knows God”, says Ibn Arabi.
Death = Awakening
“People are asleep and when they die, they awaken,” – Prophet Muhammad
This is often interpreted as death in this life is an awakening into the dream of the afterlife, but there are more subtle interpretations (eg to die is to interpret), one of which is alluded to by the Prophet famously saying, “Try to die before you die”.
What happens to a character in a dream when the dreamer awakes? What radical transformation must it undergo from a seemingly independent persona to an aspect of another’s consciousness, to pass from reflection to reality, from form to meaning?This is what we call the death before death. This is what we call fana’a or self-annihilation.i.e. the throwing off the shackles of sensation and naive rationality, the traversing past phenomenon and seeing what lies beyond.
The fanaa is not something you can simply read about, but only attained through rigorous psycho-spiritual exercise and the abandonment of worldly desire and focus for the sake of approaching God.
Fanaa is really the recognition in full of your (contingent)/non-existence in the face of the Divine.
“All things perish save His Face!” – Quran 28:88
After this, the concomitant realisation of our existence as a contingent manifestation of the Absolute is baqaa or “subsistence”.
In fanaa, all the various features of the dream (of khayal or of reality we see it) dissolve and give rise to the deep sense of fundamental unity of all of reality. (MW: fanaa is synthetic/unionising)
In baqaa, all the various features of the dream continue to subsist in the mind of the dreamer. (MW: baqaa is analytic/delimiting)
(MW: Imagine you’re seeing an object in a double mirror, where you don’t know it is really a reflection. Fanaa is the noticing of the mirrors. Baqaa is the recognition that it is a reflection in those mirrors.)
Analogously, in Inception, fanaa is Ariadne’s realisation that she is dreaming when she destroys Paris in a bunch of explosions. Baqaa is the return to the dream, where she recognises she is in a dream and interacts with her reality accordingly (by manipulating it).
Accordingly, the Prophet’s 2 hadith really reference the death of the everyday consciousness that accepts reality at face value which is a pre-requisite for the “awakening” which interprets and correctly contextualises these experiences as reflections in the Real.
Inception/Talqin
Now, all this is great, but how do we undertake fanaa and baqaa?
“We will show them Our Signs on the horizons and in their souls, until it becomes clear to them that it is the Truth, al Haqq.” – Quran 41:53
i.e. “on the horizons” = the cosmos, “in their souls” = our selves.
i.e. God will keep showing us the signs (ayah), carefully arranged, until we realise the Truth. All we have to do is follow the breadcrumbs.
This takes place within Inception itself, as Cobb’s team does to Fischer, as Cobb does to Mal, and ultimately as Cobb does to himself through the film. The subject goes through an elaborate, individual process in a highly symbolic dreamworld which eventually culminate in an important, dramatic realisation.
Ideas can come to define or to destroy you. In Ibn Arabi’s case, the central idea of the Real vs imaginal nature of our Cosmos is meant to destroy us in our prior conceptions, and redefine us in terms of the Real, i.e. as its reflections/manifestations/veils.
Imagination and the Limits of Reason
The word ‘Reason’ in Arabic translates to aql which shares roots with the verb aqala meaning ‘to bind’ or ‘to fetter’.
i.e. reason helps us get a handle on reality, it delimits and defines reality.
Reason is critical + analytic, whereas imagination is creative + synthetic. Using both is to observe reality ‘with your two eyes’.
Reason distinguishes the real from the unreal, and imagination sees images, reflections, symbols and dreams as simultaneously real and unreal.
The interpretation is deeper, for just as you require two vantages to perceive physical depth, so you need both imagination and reason to perceive metaphysical depth.
Reason is a tool, building from axioms. Where do we divine axioms from? Insight, intuition, imagination.
Reason can tell me that I love my family, or even why I do so biochemically, but it cannot tell me how I should love them, why I should love them, and what this love really means.
(MW: From this, I’d garner that what modern religion really lacks is not enough reason, but rather the imagination to think more deeply, to see reality as it is, a shadow and a dream. This renders most earthly discussion trivial in the face of manifesting the Divine Archetypes, in the face of the Search for Truth, in the Return to God.)
NB: To be more precise, khayāl has three meanings: 1) everything which is not the Absolute Reality, 2) the human faculty which joins sensory forms to pure ideas, and 3) a specific level of reality experienced in veridical dreams and visions, between the physical and spiritual levels of reality (although these levels are both considered part of khayāl in the first sense). This third meaning of khayāl is an objective world more real than the physical but less real than the spiritual, and serves as the bridge between the two (again: think Angels, Natural Laws, Platonic Forms)
A few other links:
An overview of Ibn Arabi’s cosmology
Porphyrian Tree
Kabbalistic Tree of Life
TODO: might be interesting to compare the Jewish Sephirot with the Islamic Hadharat.