Progressio Harmonica

"One does not penetrate into the Angelic World by housebreaking, one does not move around mentally in the world of Hurqalya by the assistance of a formal logic or of a dialectic which leads from one concept to the next by deduction." - Spiritual Body & Celestial Earth, xix

How one does move in such a world is perhaps best suggested by the dynamics of music and dance. Events in time are exemplars of eternal Events in the time of the Soul, and these can only be evaluated by a measure that varies with their intensity. The harmonies and rhythms of music provide such a measure.

"And this intensity measures a time in which the past remains present to the future, in which the future is already present to the past, just as the notes of a musical phrase, though played successively, nevertheless all persist together in the present and thus form a phrase." - Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi, 35-36

"The homologation of forms in time with forms in space offers a particularly subtle case of isomorphism. It is this, in reality, which leads us to conceive of many modes of spatiality, among which the visual mode, corresponding to sensible perception, is not perhaps even the privileged case. Speech, the Divine Word...is the sonorous incantation which evokes beings and which remains the profound and secret nature of each being. Stabilized in this being, this nature does not reveal itself, however, to the empirical point of view, but to another visual sense, to an interior vision perceiving other spaces. But precisely these spaces, and this psycho-spiritual spatiality, which has other properties than sensible space, require in their turn a homologation of sonorous space to supersensible spaces where the vibrations of the Word propagate as 'arpeggios charged by distant lights.'" - En Islam Iranien, vol.1, 141.

The "theophanic method of discourse" recommended by Ibn 'Arabi is perhaps itself "nothing other than a form or an appeal of the progressio harmonica." "Something in the nature of harmonic perception is needed in order to perceive a world of many dimensions." - En Islam Iranien, Vol. 1, xxviii.

Page from the Topkapi Scroll - Topkapi Museum, Istanbul. Diagrams of metric circles representing rhythmic patterns of sound. Muslih al-Din Mustafa Sururi. From his "Bahr el-maarif" (Sea of knowledge), written for the Ottoman prince Mustafa in 1549, copied in 1585, red and black ink on paper. MS H. 659, Fols. 17v-18r.