Where to look to see God Everywhere?

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Nature presents us with powerful illustrations of creation, destruction, continuous change, cycles of life and death, and so on. Those people who have the power of vision to see through the “veils” of existence might see, as the great Muslim mystic Ibn ‘Arabî could see, an unending progression of coming-into-being and going-out-of-being. In “Creation According to Ibn ‘Arabi” Toshihiko Izutzu uses an analogy to explain Ibn ‘Arabî’s complex philosophical point:

It is as if you saw millions of lights flickering against the background of an unfathomable darkness. If you concentrate your sight on any one of these illumined spots, you will see its light disappearing in the very next moment and appearing again in a different spot in the following moment.

Izutsu quotes the great mystic as he reveals how people who have been “unveiled” might perceive all creation as the continuous self-manifestation of God:

As to the people of “unveiling,” they see God manifesting Himself with every Breath, no single self-manifestation being repeated twice. They see also by an immediate vision that every single self-manifestation gives rise to a new creation and annihilates a creation (i.e., the “creation” that has preceded), and that the disappearance of the latter at every (new) self-manifestation is “annihilation” whereas “subsistence” is caused by what is furnished (immediately) by the following self-manifestation.

So that we might not be lost in the seeming flux of this perception, Izutsu sums up for us:

Thus in Ibn ‘Arabî's thought, everything in the world (and therefore the world itself) is constantly changing, but underlying this universal flux of changing things there is Something eternally unchanging.

This certainly is a powerful mode of seeing God everywhere…and always.