Ibn Arabi in Plain English: Why “All Is One” Is No Excuse to Put Your Feet on the Table and Forget Distinctions

“My heart can take on any form”

Ibn Arabi, Tarjumān al-ashwāq, poem 11; English translation by Michael A. Sells.

What This Article Is About

Imagine that an armchair intellectual’s entire encounter with Sufism wrapped up with a glass of wine, a couple of social media status updates, and a smug, blissful sigh: “Well, basically, everything is God, so chill out”. Ibn Arabi’s thought cannot be reduced to such a lazy generalization. He investigated the connection between finite beings and an unconditional ground, but certainly not so the public could wholesale wipe out all boundaries under the magic buzzword “oneness”.

His writings are a precision joint connecting Islamic revelation, intricate metaphysics, and rigorous inner discipline—not a club for lovers of abstract group hugs. In this article, we will unpack why the signboard “wahdat al-wujud” was slapped onto his legacy after the fact, and why the dependence of our being on the Creator does not turn the world into a glitch or a mirage, nor does it make you a numerical duplicate of God. We will dissect the divine names, the flexibility of the cognitive heart, and the poetic language of love, which is all too easily distorted. And to clear the lens, we will place Ibn Arabi’s thought side by side with Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, and an early Buddhist sutta, flatly refusing to brew them into one murky “esoteric porridge”. The modern office scenarios and the voluntary practice at the end are our own analytical gym, not a 13th-century mystical prescription: they do not prove theology, but they show vividly where our high-minded speeches about “cosmic interconnectedness” devolve into banal rudeness and sheer disregard for our fellow human beings.

I. A Name That Appeared After the Thought

A sufficiently thick label can easily relieve a reader of any urge to think further. Upon hearing the resonant phrase “wahdat al-wujud” (“oneness of being”), an enthusiastic reader confidently declares: “Ah, Ibn Arabi’s official brand patent!” Alas, we must burst that bubble. As Bakri Aladdin convincingly demonstrates in his academic study of the term and the doctrine, this cliché became the focal point of fierce theological battles significantly later. Ibn Arabi himself was not marching around Damascus with a placard reading “I invented wahdat al-wujud”; the attachment of the term to a distinct school developed through polemics, in which labels were generously dished out by devoted commentators and spooked opponents alike.

Picture a hypothetical dialogue. “If everything is already interconnected, why do you keep constantly nitpicking my words?” an annoyed interlocutor grumbles. The answer is stubbornly simple: connection does not make things interchangeable. Water is vital to a tree, but if you toss a bucket of water into the fireplace instead of a log, you won’t get any warmer. Love binds spouses together, but it doesn't fuse them into a single two-headed mutant sharing one passport. Any sane discussion of unity is obligated to explain meticulously: what, exactly, is united, on what principle, and which differences remain firmly preserved?

Ibn Arabi is interesting precisely because he shatters the vulgar formula “everything is God,” after which armchair sages happily shut the book. That handy little slogan doesn't open the door to truth—it slams it right in your face. Behind it, people promptly bury the distinct levels of being, the total dependence of creation, the language of manifestation, and the strict rigor of inquiry.

Here, it is vital to distinguish between three separate tiers:

What the author himself actually wrote;
The systematization and polishing carried out by his direct disciples;
The polemical label thoughtfully slapped on by critics.

In a hypothetical everyday scenario, this shell game of concept-swapping looks like this: A researcher publishes a paper stating, “Human behavior is significantly conditioned by environment and upbringing”. A pop-science blogger summarizes: “He claims personal responsibility doesn't exist!” And in the comments section, a pitchfork mob is already lynching the author of the “dangerous theory of rampant unaccountability”. The original idea has vanished, but everyone found a great excuse for a brawl.

Clearing Ibn Arabi’s thought of third-party labels does not magically canonize him as an infallible saint. It simply restores an honest investigative order: first understand what is actually being asserted about the relationship between God and the world, and only then criticize it on its merits, instead of wrestling with straw men. Even the word “unity” is notoriously tricky: does it refer to a single origin? The indivisibility of a system? An identical nature among elements? Or numerical identity? By dumping all of these into one bucket, what you get is not enlightenment, but standard terminological chaos.

II. To Exist Is Not to Exist Independently

The central nerve of the question is the illusion of autonomy. In her thorough study on the unity of being in Ibn Arabi, scholar Souad Hakim carefully sets the accents: unconditioned, self-sufficient being belongs exclusively to God. The existence of created things is seen as derived, secondary, entirely dependent upon that single ground.

Mind you: dependent existence does not mean fictional existence! Just because you aren't personally holding up the celestial dome with your bare hands doesn't turn you into a hallucination. Consider a live rock concert. It is undeniably real: eardrums are ringing, the crowd is roaring. But does the concert exist all by itself, in a sterile vacuum? No. Pull the musicians off stage, yank the power cords, lock up the venue, and the event is gone. At the same time, the concert cannot be reduced to a solitary guitar cable, the drummer, or the rented hall. It depends on conditions, but while it is playing, it truly exists.

This mundane analogy helps clarify the mechanics of dependence, but it does not replace metaphysics: a concert’s conditions are observable and material, whereas asserting God as the unconditioned ground of all being belongs to theology and philosophical thought. No lab is going to issue an empirical certificate for that.

The reader is entirely entitled to ask whether such a primary ground is introduced merely to bring an exhausting chain of reasoning to a halt. A serious account is obliged to preserve this objection, even when it cannot resolve it within the scope of a single article. Otherwise, the word “unconditioned” functions as nothing more than a convenient ban on asking the next question.

Still, the distinction itself remains useful: “this exists” and “this exists solely due to its own independent greatness” are two radically different assertions. In daily life, it is remarkably easy to forget this. Imagine a self-made hotshot who genuinely believes he created himself from scratch out of cosmic dust. Yes, he worked tirelessly, but he didn't invent language, the laws of physics, modern medicine, the internet, or the presence of breathable oxygen on this planet. Acknowledging that context doesn't invalidate his hard work; it simply clarifies the scale of his self-aggrandizement.

Dependence does not dissolve discrete things into a featureless slurry. The question “Why does anything exist at all?” and the question “What kind of creature are we looking at—a cactus, a stool, or an accountant?” demand entirely different answers. Reducing everything to an airy “Well, it’s all from God anyway” is an open admission of intellectual laziness.

III. Manifestation Preserves the Question of Form

If the ground is one, where did this entire multi-colored zoo around us come from? In his translation and analysis of the discourse of Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, William Chittick demonstrates how Ibn Arabi’s key disciple links the one being with the determinate forms and boundaries of entities. A quick footnote for historical hygiene: Qunawi’s work represents the development and commentary of a school, not an extra set of secret diaries penned by Ibn Arabi himself.

The metaphor of “manifestation” must be handled with care. Handled clumsily, it tempts people to view the cosmos as a cheap one-man theater: as if there were only a single actor on stage, while the scenery, the plot, another person’s pain, and shattered lives are merely cardboard props that can be blithely ignored. Such a cynical conclusion does not follow automatically from asserting the world's ontological dependence.

Take the common language we speak. We share the same vocabulary, the same grammatical syntax. Yet one person uses these rules to confess their love or cry out for help, while another uses them to extort money or snap at someone in a grocery line. The shared linguistic bedrock does not turn an insult into a compliment, or a threat into a blessing. The concrete form of an utterance carries immense weight precisely because it arises within a shared field.

A form is limited—and thank goodness for that: a cat is not a dump truck, and a cup of tea is not an active volcano. The trouble starts when our limited perception mistakes that form for an exhaustive portrait of reality. You might know a coworker strictly as a meticulous corporate drone from accounting, but at home he is a devoted father, and in his garage, a gifted motorcycle restorer. One accurate description does not capture the entire person. The multiplicity of the world is not an irritating glitch in the matrix of unity; it is the very wealth of manifestations that a thinker is supposed to account for, not chuck into the trash.

IV. Names Help Distinguish, but Do Not Grant Ownership

To keep from stumbling into either crude anthropomorphism or a blank intellectual wall, Ibn Arabi’s thought leans on the divine names. In Chittick’s foundational study on Ibn Arabi in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a clean line is drawn between the divine essence—utterly unknowable to mortals—and the names that articulate Its countless facets of relationship with the created world. These names are not parts from a DIY kit titled “Build Your Own Pocket Deity”.

This principle is sobering even down on our mundane, terrestrial plane. A name can illuminate a specific trait, or it can slam the door shut on genuine perception. The moment you smugly declare, “Oh, that’s just petty jealousy!” you may stop listening to the person. Why bother investigating when you’ve already stamped the label on their forehead?

A hypothetical manager labels an employee “unreliable and lazy”. Perhaps the employee really did botch a Tuesday deadline. But once the label replaces actual observation, it starts hijacking reality: a project completed ahead of schedule is dismissed as a “fluke,” while a two-minute pause at the water cooler is seized upon as “irrefutable proof of a defective character”. The actual human being vanishes behind a cardboard sign.

This is our own ethical analogy, not a Sufi management treatise. It illustrates the steep cost of mistaking a convenient category for full ownership of a subject. The answer is not to lapse into vow-of-silence muteness: missed deadlines and actual damage must be called out and dealt with. But one must address the specific breach without pretending to hold exhaustive knowledge of someone’s soul. The limitation of any name should sharpen our attentiveness, not serve as a license for willful blindness.

V. A Heart Capable of Taking on Form

The term “heart” in Ibn Arabi’s texts can easily lead a hopeless romantic astray. Stephen Hirtenstein, in his study “The Mystic’s Kaaba: Wisdom of the Heart”, stresses that the heart here is not a repository of sentimental sighing, but a refined organ of metaphysical cognition and radical receptivity. And there is zero license here along the lines of “whatever warm fuzzies I feel must be pure, divine truth”. Receptivity demands a rigorous transformation of the perceiver.

The modern mind can oscillate between two ditches: stubborn pigheadedness and gullible suggestibility. One can brush off anything unfamiliar or fall head over heels for any exotic nonsense just because “it gives us spiritual chills”. Emotional intensity is a wretched criterion for truth.

A decent sanity check requires two complementary questions:

Am I capable of entertaining an assertion that does not fit into my comfortable worldview?
Am I capable of examining that assertion critically, without swooning in ecstasy over its novelty alone?

When an opponent in a heated dispute suddenly appeals to an obligation of honor, the cynical reflex is to scoff: “Drop the act, you’re just chasing money”. It is far harder to hold back the sarcasm, actually listen to the other person’s logic, and only then calmly evaluate its merit. In our hypothetical debate, this represents a willingness to shed the armor of our own know-it-all attitude. In Ibn Arabi, this relates to cognition in relationship with the divine: it is not identical to the ordinary mechanics of human interpersonal attention.

VI. Love Does Not Turn Religions into Identical Texts

The most widely circulated meme of Sufi poetry is the stanza about a heart capable of accommodating cloisters, idols, and the Kaaba. In the curated poetry of Ibn Arabi, poem 11 of the Tarjumān al-ashwāq, translated by Michael A. Sells, features prominently. And a crowd of enthusiasts may leap to celebrate: “Hooray! All religions are completely identical, differences were invented by evil priests, let’s all hold hands and sing!”

Not so fast. What we have here is a soaring poetic image, not a handbook of comparative dogmatics. The beauty of a verse does not erase the profound differences between doctrines, moral codes, ritual disciplines, and paths of salvation. Attempting to prove the absolute sameness of all traditions based on a single poetic metaphor is the height of intellectual flippancy.

Worse, it conceals a covert imperial arrogance: “I am willing to respect your tradition only if I can stretch it across my own familiar framework and prove that you believe in the exact same things I do”. And what happens if it doesn't stretch? Does respect instantly evaporate?

Two neighbors—one a staunch monotheist, the other a convinced agnostic—might rush with equal urgency to haul a stray kitten out of a well or look after an ailing neighbor. Practical solidarity is right there. But does that make their views on the ultimate origin of the universe identical? Not in the slightest. Genuine respect for the other begins where you can tolerate distance and refrain from feverishly repainting another person’s experience in your own favorite colors.

VII. Oneness Does Not Grant the Right to Explain Away Another’s Suffering

The most repugnant trick of pseudo-spiritual demagogues is using the oneness of reality to invalidate someone else’s pain. The moment someone experiences grief, betrayal, or abuse, a sleek, self-appointed “guru” with a saccharine smile may pop up: “Why are you so upset? All is one, pain is an illusion, it’s just a lesson for your karma!”

James Morris, in his study of suffering, compassion, and atonement in Ibn Arabi, insists on reading scattered passages strictly within their contexts. The contemporary conclusion regarding manipulative abuse is our own analysis, not a packaged formula drawn from his research. Ibn Arabi’s teaching is a subtle spiritual pedagogy from which one cannot extract a callous, one-size-fits-all prescription for every human trauma.

If you have been robbed or maliciously betrayed, the advice “don’t separate yourself from the wrongdoer” is an assault on basic common sense. One can contemplate the ultimate interconnectedness of humanity while simultaneously recognizing concrete harm. One can abandon vindictive malice while permanently locking the aggressor out of one’s life. Setting boundaries and securing physical safety does not necessarily express hatred; it is basic existential hygiene.

The exact same rule applies to any “spiritual teacher”. Proclaiming elevated insight into cosmic mysteries grants zero right to violate boundaries of consent, manipulate followers, or evade mundane legal and ethical accountability. In the anthology of translations on spiritual practice, Morris highlights the indivisible link between inner discipline, Islamic context, and everyday ethical duties. Claiming spiritual depth gives no license to justify tyranny.

VIII. What Becomes Clear Alongside Other Answers to Being

At the mere sight of the word “one,” people may feel an urge to toss Sufism, Kabbalah, Advaita, Spinoza, and Daoism into a single blender, whip it up, and serve it with a knowing nod. Let us systematically examine why this is an embarrassing blunder:

Spinoza and His Substance. In Spinoza’s Ethics, Part I, all cosmic multiplicity is reduced to a single impersonal substance and its modes (Proposition 18 explicitly identifies God as the immanent cause). In Ibn Arabi, the discourse hinges upon divine names, transcendence, and revelation. Forcing the term “mode” into Sufi theology does violent injustice to both thinkers.
Thomas Aquinas and the Analogy of Being. Thomas Aquinas on the divine names teaches that names applied to both God and creatures are used analogically—neither in an identical (univocal) nor in a completely unrelated (equivocal) sense. This is an intellectual firewall preventing the Creator from being imagined as just an oversized worldly object. The underlying dilemma is comparable, but Catholic scholasticism and Ibn Arabi’s mystical symbolism operate in entirely distinct theological coordinates.
The Buddhist Deconstruction of the Self. The classic Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta (SN 22.59) systematically dissects the five aggregates (khandhas) and demonstrates that neither form, feeling, nor consciousness can be claimed as a permanent, unchanging “Self”. It is an antidote to the illusion of control. But deriving a stealth endorsement of an absolute Divine Being from this sutta is a preposterous stretch. This sutta pursues liberation from grasping without positing an absolute divine substratum.

Different thinkers provide fundamentally different answers to the existential challenge of reality. Comparing them is fruitful precisely because they do not agree with one another.

IX. Multiplicity That Shouldn’t Be Hastily Cancelled

Attempting to rescue the idea of unity by executing particulars is an unconditional intellectual surrender. Ibn Arabi does not offer to pack the entire universe into a bland gray crate labeled “God”. His inquiry is far more demanding: how can one conceive of an unconditioned ground without cheapening the uniqueness of every single leaf on a tree?

His conceptual apparatus—the dependent nature of creation, the divine names, the sensitivity of the heart—is rooted in a specific historical and spiritual environment. It does not turn into quantum physics merely because physicists also use the word “system,” nor does it become a psychotherapy session just because it touches on attentiveness.

Yet this philosophy confronts us with an uncomfortable question: when you speak of “oneness,” do you actually become more attentive to the living people standing right next to you? Or does that lofty phrase serve as an alibi to ignore someone’s tears, erase legitimate debts, or indulge your own laziness? If “unity” becomes an excuse to stop noticing specific details, you have understood the concept completely backwards.

What This Means in Practice: An Authorial Voluntary Audit

Disclaimer: The following exercise is a voluntary analytical reflection designed by the authors of this article, not an ancient Sufi initiation, not religious counsel, and not a warranty for opening chakras.

If you want to apply this lens to everyday reality without pseudo-mystical theater, dissect your habitual assumptions:

Auditing the Monument to Yourself (“I Did It All on My Own”). - Step 1 (Preserve the Foundation): Skip the fake modesty—acknowledge your genuine efforts and difficulties. - Step 2 (Observe Dependence): Honestly list the conditions without which your personal triumph would have crashed on launch. Who taught you? Who covered your back? What civic and technological infrastructure supported your efforts? - Step 3 (Action): Does this shift your behavior? Isn't it time to say thank you to someone, settle an overlooked obligation, or stop looking down on subordinates as decorative background noise?
Auditing Toxic Enmeshment (“We Are One and the Same”). - A tremendous litmus test for couples and families: evaluate not the romantic ring of the slogan, but its practical cost. Does your “unity” allow for separate interests and the right to private space? Can someone say “no” without immediately being accused of treason against family values? If under the banner of “we are one” decisions are invariably made by one person, what you have isn't love—it's mundane household tyranny.
Hypothetical Example: A Family Meeting on Relocation. - A family gathers around the kitchen table with the standard chant: “We need to make a unified, team decision about relocating to another city!” It sounds noble. But in practice, the price tag of this move is completely different for each person: one gets a career breakthrough, another faces the loss of their established social circle, and a child has their schooling turned upside down. - The real test of unity is not bullying everyone into a unanimous vote, but laying all disagreements openly on the table. Whose needs are genuinely accommodated, and whose were simply silenced with the guilt trip “but we're a family”? - The practical action here is entirely down-to-earth: establishing concrete compensations, timelines, and safety nets. For instance: “We move, but if within one year the partner has not found their footing, we return, and the budget for adaptation is strictly guaranteed as a separate fund”. In our example, such an agreement can fortify genuine unity by refusing to break people over a knee.
Unpacking Cardboard Labels. - Think of a label you have generously slapped onto an acquaintance: “toxic,” “spiritually immature,” “slacker”. What does that label blot out? Is that person capable of performing an action that would make you toss that label in the recycling bin? If not, congratulations: you are dealing not with a living human being, but with a dummy inside your own head.
Receptivity vs. Blind Agreement. - Try restating your fiercest opponent’s position so accurately that they nod and say: “Yes, that is exactly what I meant”. And then—calmly and cogently—disagree. This can help check the compulsive habit of tilting at imaginary windmills.

A single light source and multiple reflections help us picture interconnectedness, but they do not automatically explain how the world operates. Distinguishing between ground and form helps us think clearly, but it offers no prefabricated solution for a family feud. Real-world action requires facts, agreements, resources, and an honest assessment of consequences.

Key Quote

“I profess the religion of love”

Ibn Arabi, Tarjumān al-ashwāq, poem 11; English translation by Michael A. Sells. A poetic profession of faith does not replace the differences between doctrines and practical duties.

Connections Between Traditions

These comparisons represent our own comparative analysis: we juxtapose the logic of arguments, rather than asserting historical influence where no direct evidence exists.

Subject	Positions and Anchors	What Enables the Comparison	Where the Boundary Lies
Dependent existence	Ibn Arabi via Souad Hakim — Aquinas, I q.2 a.3	The finite does not secure its own being.	Aquinas’s Third Way and Ibn Arabi’s language of manifestation have different structures and theological contexts.
Unity and difference	Ibn Arabi: names and manifestations — Spinoza, Ethics I, 15 and 18	Multiplicity is not read as an assortment of utterly independent substances.	Spinoza’s substance and modes are not equivalent to the Akbarian system of names and revelation; no influence is asserted.
Limits of naming	Ibn Arabi: names — Aquinas, I q.13 a.5	Speaking of God requires explaining how human meaning relates to the divine.	Analogy in Aquinas does not homogenize essences and does not replace Ibn Arabi’s doctrine.
Incompleteness of conception	Qunawi: One Wujud — Pseudo-Dionysius, I.1–2	The supreme ground is not exhausted by familiar mental concepts.	Dionysius’s apophatic discourse is explicitly Trinitarian; Qunawi’s Islamic thought is not an adaptation of it.
Receptivity and non-appropriation	Ibn Arabi: heart — SN 22.59	Changing experience should not be hastily locked into one definitive container.	This is a comparison of attentional disciplines: the receptive heart is not identical to the Buddhist critique of aggregates, which posits no absolute divine substratum.
Action and conditions	Ibn Arabi: dependence — Epictetus, §1–2	Recognizing conditioning can limit the claim to absolute control over life.	The Stoic criterion of what is up to us is a practical distinction, not a thesis on the oneness of being.

Primary Sources

All texts are strictly distinguished by status: academic commentaries do not substitute for the thinker’s own primary texts.

Bakri Aladdin. Oneness of Being: The Term and the Doctrine. The history of the designation and subsequent polemics.
Souad Hakim. Unity of Being in Ibn Arabi. The distinction between unconditioned being and the dependent existence of creatures.
William C. Chittick. Qunawi on the One Wujud. Translation and study of Qunawi’s text; the development of the school.
William C. Chittick. Ibn ‘Arabī. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The context of his corpus and the distinction between essence, names, and relations.
Stephen Hirtenstein. The Mystic’s Kaaba: Wisdom of the Heart. The heart as the locus of knowledge and receptivity.
Ibn ‘Arabi. Selected Poems, including poem 11 of the Tarjumān al-ashwāq, translation by Michael A. Sells. Literary context of the heart taking on forms.
James W. Morris. Suffering, Compassion and Atonement. The context of spiritual themes and the limits of brief explanations of suffering.
Ibn ‘Arabi / James W. Morris. Translations: Spiritual Practice. Selected sections of the anthology consulted; not an assumption of exhaustive reading of all works.
Spinoza. Ethics, Part I, Definitions III–V and Propositions 15, 18, 29; English translation by R. H. M. Elwes. Primary text: substance, modes, immanent cause, and necessity. Text and referenced section.
Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae, I, q.2, a.3, the Third Way. Primary text: possible and necessary being; English edition by New Advent. Text and referenced section.
Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae, I, q.13, a.5. Primary text: analogical predication of names of God and creatures. Text and referenced section.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Mystical Theology, I.1–2; English translation by John Parker, 1897. Primary text: apophatic prayer to the divine in a Trinitarian context. Text and referenced section.
SN 22.59, Pañcavaggi / Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta; translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Primary Buddhist text: impermanence of the five aggregates and their non-appropriation as Self. Text and referenced section.
Epictetus. Enchiridion, §1–2; English translation by Elizabeth Carter. Primary text: distinguishing what is up to us from what is not. Text and referenced section.

About the Authors

Andrey Zarinsh — author and founder of the United Wisdom project. Explores themes of inner transformation, the unity of traditions, intercultural dialogue, and contemporary spiritual discipline. Instagram: @andrey.zarinsh.

Maria Evilkut — co-author of United Wisdom. Alongside research work, she seeks to test these ideas in practice and observe how principles of unity and mutual understanding operate in real life between people and cultures. Instagram: @ilkutki.