12 Spirituality Studies 11-1 Spring 2025 context that the eye in Upanishadic thought may become a fitting symbol of the transcendent purity of the Self, unaffected by the objects of its vision: “As the sun, the eye of the whole world, is not stained by visual faults external to it; So the single self within every being, is not stained by the suffering of the world, being quite distinct from it” (Olivelle 1996, 244). 4.4 The Unseeable Eye The “immanent transcendence” that we have just highlighted in the previous quote implies an incognoscibility of God by other than God: only the Self can know the Self. Knowing is therefore unknowing, and vision blindness. Thus, the Kena Upanishad, dated by most experts to be from the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, refers to this knowing of the unknowable in the following way: “Sight does not reach there; neither does thinking or speech. We don’t know, we can’t perceive, how one would point it out” (quoted in Olivelle 1996, 227). Indeed, the knowledge of the Self that transcends sight, thinking and speech lies paradoxically beyond the known and the unknown. This is so to the extent that this distinction implies duality and objectification, while any objectification of the Self is not Self-Knowledge. The unseeable and unreachable reality of the Ultimate is also expressed in the Qur’ān in terms of vision The context of verse 103 in the Surah Al-An’ām is an enumeration of God’s supreme attributes, among which All-Knowingness is paramount: “Sight (Ar. absār) comprehends Him not, but He comprehends all sight. And He is the Subtle, the Aware” (Nasr 2015, 378–379). The two Names translated in this verse are al-Latīf and al-Khabīr, which imply respectively subtle presence and perfect awareness. The vision of God is impossible, in the sense that no human conceptual or perceptual ability is adequate to it, but also in the sense that this vision comprehends everything. Being the very Subject of knowledge, He can never be an object of knowledge. However, the next verse indicates that some “inner vision” (Ar. basāir) has come to mankind from God: “Insight has come to you from your Lord.” And the Qurʼā n adds: “whosoever sees clearly, it is to the benefit of his own soul (man absara falinafsihi).” Three steps can be distinguished, therefore, in the Quranic account of Divine vision: no human qua human can see God, some vision is given from and by God, and this vision, if recognized, is for the benefit of oneself. One very important consequence of this threefold teaching is that the only God worshipped is the one communicated by the vision from God Himself, or which “has come to you” (the human being). A mystical hermeneutics of this restriction is developed by Ibn ’Arabī in his doctrine of the “god of belief” when he claims that the only God worshipped is the one who is “represented” in the worshipper, the “the god of binding dogmas” (al-Haqq al-makhlūq fi ’l- ’tiqādāt or al-ilāh al-mu ’taqad): “[Note: Most humans] have… an individual concept (belief) of their Lord, which they ascribe to Him and in which they seek Him… So long as the Reality is presented to them according to it they recognize Him and affirm Him, whereas if presented in any other form, they deny Him, flee from Him and treat Him improperly, while at the same time imagining that they are acting toward Him fittingly” (Ibn ‘Arabī 1980, 137). What is important in our context is to note that the Divine Essence is the Reality that “Vision perceives not”, while the God of whom humans have a vision “comes” from their own being “seen” by the Lord inasmuch as they are “existentiated”. Here is the way Ibn ’Arabī (Ibn ‘Arabī 1980, 92) articulates this crucial distinction: The Essence, as being beyond all these relationships [note: between the Divine Reality, Names and creatures], is not a divinity. Since all these relationships originate in our eternally unmanifested essences, it is we [note: in our eternal latency] who make Him a divinity by being that through which He knows Himself as Divine. Thus, He is not known [note: as ‘God’] until we are known. The Hindu tradition presents us with an analogous distinction founded on the invisibility of the Brahman which, according to the Kena Upanishad “one cannot see with one’s sight, by which one sees the sight itself – Learn that that alone is Brahman, and not what they here venerate” (quoted in Olivelle 1996, 227). In this context, a distinction is clearly drawn between the vision of the eye, which is objectifying, and that which makes this vision possible, the pure Subject. The enabler of the vision is the Brahman, or the Supreme Self. The Brahman is not that which is venerated or worshipped because the worshipped is necessarily an Object, and therefore Saguna Brahman, the Brahman with qualities, and not the Supreme, Nirguna Brahman, which is beyond qualities (Deutsch 1973, 12–14; Rambachan 2006, 112).
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