To mock and laugh at it these men have dared,
To conquer their hearts there’s no hope in hell–
The pearl is not harmed, only its mere shell;
Transcending grammar, law, theology,
They’ve chosen self-effacement, poverty,
When images from heaven shone to earth
Their hearts received them, and they knew their worth;
Their place is loftier even than God’s Throne,
God’sSeat of Certainty, they’ve made their own.^59
The breath of those who polish the heart/wall enables clarity where the
image can appear without a veil. For ibn Arabi, creation (the Cosmos) is
the ever-renewed exhaled breath of God, enabling each instant to re-create
perpetual divine creation. Similarly, the seeker of knowledge polishes the
mirror as in breathing–perpetually.^60
This enables the veil over the mirror–what Nizami refers to as rust–to
lift.^61 As for ibn Arabi, such knowledge is not intellectual. The silence of the
brain enables the banner of true certainty to rise as the two sides appear in
each other: the Cosmos, embodying the Real (the painted wall), and its
shadow as imprinted on the unveiled, polished heart of the seeker. Ibn
Arabi describes this thus:
Then He raises the veil between Himself and the servant and the servant sees Him
in the form of his belief; indeed, He is the very content of the belief. Thus, neither
the Heart nor the eye [of the Heart] sees anything but the form of its belief
concerning the Reality...Thus the eye sees only credal Reality, and there are a
great many beliefs.^62
This self-revelation of the unveiling closely parallels ibn Arabi’s use of the
mirror as a metaphor for revelation as self-revelation.
Whenever a gnostic receives a spiritual intuition in which he looks on a form that
brings him new spiritual knowledge and new spiritual graces, [he should know]
that the form he contemplates is none other than his own essential self, for it is only
from the tree of his own self that he will garner the fruits of his knowledge. In the
same way his image in a polished surface is naught but he, although the place or
plane in which he sees his image effects certain changes in accordance with the
intrinsic reality of that plane.^63(^59) Rumi, 2004 : 212–214. (^60) Austin, 1980 : 146–148.
(^61) Metal mirrors rusted when unpolished. Austin, 1980 : 48. (^62) Austin, 1980 : 149.
(^63) Austin, 1980 : 69.
154 Seeing through the Mirror