When the Men who have no impediment
reach the long interval,
you will see among their warriors
a servant whose state brings
the pain of distance,
this cutting him off from them.
He says: Since God created human beings hasty [17:11] and He created in them seeking, but they do not gain the object of their search in the first step, the interval draws out for them because of their hastiness. They halt because of the length of the interval, and they are held back from gaining benefit.
After all, God is not reached through seeking. Hence the gnostic seeks his own felicity, not God. One does not aspire for what one already has. God is greater than that He should be sought through the distance of steps, hardship of deeds, and reflective thoughts. Just as He does not become spatially confined, so also He does not become distinct. He is known to us in the sense that in each thing He is identical with each thing, but unknown in the distinction, because of the diversity of the forms that we witness.
As soon as you say concerning a form, "He is this," another form with which He is identical will veil you from that form. Concerning it you will say, "He is this," and His He-ness will absent itself from you through the form that goes. Then you will not know what you depend upon, exactly like the person who is bewildered by reflective consideration and does not know what he believes. As often as a proof shines forth to him, an obfuscation also shines forth.
No proof of Him can ever be safe from obfuscation, because He is the Greatest Proof, and we are His obfuscation.
SOURCE:
Ibn al-`Arabi, Futuhat al-Makkiyah, VI 442.31
translated by William C. Chittick in The Self-Disclosure of God, Principles of Ibn al-`Arabi's Cosmology, pgs 14-15
In our efforts to understand wujud, either in itself or in its relation to the cosmos, at some point we become bewildered, a state, according to Ibn al-`Arabi, that can be considered one of the highest stations of knowledge.
Shaykh al-Akbar says: "Through the knowledge which arises in contemplation, [the attainer] turns to face what is beyond each appearance: the Truth beyond appearances. For the Apparent One, though He is one in essence, is infinite in aspects. They are His traces in us." The words echo: "There is no God but He, everything perishes except His Face. Glorious and Magnificent"
In all praise, it is only He that is worshiped.
