The Futūḥāt Project: Quotations

Book 1

Therefore do not seek the True inside or outside the fence. Both the entrance and the exit are based on New qualities. Thus observe the All in the All and you shall find the All.

Futūḥāt, Book 1

Knowledge of something leads to encompassing it and finishing with it, and this, in regard to the Divine Side, is impossible. So knowing Him is impossible. It is not correct that one know part of Him either, because He is not partitioned. So there remains knowledge only of what is from Him, and what is from Him is you; so you are known.

Futūḥāt, Book 1

Extract and dust off the opals and the pearls!

Futūḥāt, Book 1

Inescapably, all meanings are centered in the self; then they are disclosed and revealed with the nows, moment after moment.

Futūḥāt, Book 1

You seeker for the Being of the True – to perceive hu,
return to your dhát (essence, core); in you is the True, so stay there!

Futūḥāt, Book 1

The ʿárif is […] the constant companion of the moment and cheered by it.

Futūḥāt, Book 1

The cosmos is anchored in God and is the anchoring of the possible to the Necessary Being Itself and of the designed to the Designer.

Futūḥāt, Book 1

The minimum step on the path is patient submission to what you do not know, and the highest step is certainty in its validity.

Futūḥāt, Book 1

If the ocean is deep,
then the shore of the heart is deeper still.

Futūḥāt, Book 1

The True is sought out through the True.

Futūḥāt, Book 1

Between the knowing and the known are oceans whose depths are unfathomable; because of the widely dispersed truths, although the inner secret is the connection between them, it is an ocean difficult to sail. No, metaphor cannot sail it, nor gesture: but kashf (unveiling) may perceive the ocean from behind many fine veils.

Futūḥāt, Book 1

You appear to one You preserve after his annihilation.
He is without existence, because You are he.

Futūḥāt, Book 1

The True is ever generous, incessantly effusing generosity.

Futūḥāt, Book 1

If you prepare yourself, and ready yourself, and polish the mirror of your heart and make her radiant, you will receive this generosity ever and ever, and you may receive a glimpse of something that cannot be constrained in time, because of the vastness of that intelligible orbit and the constriction of this physical orbit. How would something which cannot conceivably even have a terminus come to an end, or to a final resting place at which to halt?

Futūḥāt, Book 1

The Youth said: ‘I am the ripened meadow, the universal harvest, so lift my veils and recite what is contained etched in my lines.’

Futūḥāt, Book 1

How strange! They think they are at the lowest of the low when actually they are where they should be, at the highest of the heights.

Futūḥāt, Book 1

If you are ignorant of you, you are not you.

Futūḥāt, Book 1

Who wants to connect to Him connects only by Him and by you – by you in the place He seeks you, and by Him because He is a site of your search. The Divine seeks that, but the essence does not seek it.

Futūḥāt, Book 1

If you journey you will arrive; and God will guide us, and you.

Futūḥāt, Book 1

Book 2

The place that most looks over all, to ascend to on the path of God, is ignorance of Him and recognizing ignorance of Him, because such recognition is a truth of ʿubūdīyah (the state of creature/slave-hood).

Futūḥāt, Book 2

He made your self a pointer to and proof of yourself, and then He made your being a pointer to you as a pointer to Him, with regard to the one who is distant. The creature recognizing itself is prior to its recognizing its Lord. Then after that, you disappear from your maʿrifah (recognition) of yourself, as the intent was that you recognize your Lord.

Futūḥāt, Book 2

I am the insignificant being.
And in fact every being circulates around my being.

Futūḥāt, Book 2

The recognizing of the self comes before the maʿrifah of the Lord.

Futūḥāt, Book 2

It is a deep ocean the aspirant is sent to, its understanding arising from the gate of kashf (unveiling) – because from the perspective of kashf, it is easy, but from the perspective of the intellect it is difficult indeed.

Futūḥāt, Book 2

The soul is gathered on the Last Day according to the image of her knowledge, and the organic body according to the image of one’s behavior.

Futūḥāt, Book 2

There is not in the Heaven or the Earth any place in which there is not an angel, and the True does not stop creating angels from cosmic breaths, as they keep being breathed into spaces.

Futūḥāt, Book 2

There is nothing except it praises with His praise.

Futūḥāt, Book 2

The human being … is the khalīfah in the universe.

Futūḥāt, Book 2

The human being is the universal, the All-Word, the master manuscript of the universe

Futūḥāt, Book 2

Be true and be safe, be given disclosing kashf (unveiling), and come up, join in!

Futūḥāt, Book 2

They do not recognize any but Him, just as they are not recognized except by Him.

Futūḥāt, Book 2

The ultimate limit of the ʿabd (creature, slave) is that one praise oneself, the one seen in the mirror, as the New cannot bear the Old.

Futūḥāt, Book 2

Ibrāhīm bin Masʿūd al-Ilbīrī said:
The man journeys to his sought goal,
but the sought-after means of subsistence is in the journey.

Futūḥāt, Book 2

Attainment of perception of Him comes from His effusive generosity and grace and gift – as the ʿárifīn recognize Him, the people of direct vision – not from the intellectual faculty in the place where it speculates.

Futūḥāt, Book 2

There remains for us only to say that the True is mawjūd (a site of being) by Himself and for Himself, with absolute Being, without being constrained by anyone. He is not the effect of anything nor the motive cause for the sake of anything else; no, He is the Creator of the causes and effects, the King, the Holy, who is always. The universe is mawjūd by God, not by itself or for itself. It is a being defined by the Being of the True in Himself. The universe truly has no being at all, except by means of the Being of the True. And when the Being of the True is negated from time, and the Being of the Initiator of the universe is negated from time, the universe will be found in another time.

Futūḥāt, Book 2

All people are addressed commensurate with their understanding of these things, and according to the strength of their mastery and their insight.

Futūḥāt, Book 2

With us, we travel another path when understanding these words. That is, we empty our hearts from intellectual ratiocination and we sit with the True with dhikr (remembrance of God) – in a setting of courtesy, disciplined self-awareness, and being in the Divine Presence, and spiritual preparation – in order to accept what comes to us from Him. We do this so that it will be the True who takes charge of our education, through kashf (unveiling) and verifying for ourselves, since we indeed have heard Him say: Then be aware of God, and God will teach you (al-baqarah 2:282).

Futūḥāt, Book 2