"from the works of Ibn e Arabi (1165 - 1240)"

"Questioner: How do you know God? Abu Asa'id al-Kharraz: By the fact that He is the coincidentia oppositorum. Corbin's commentary: . . . the entire universe of worlds is at once He and not-He (huwa la huwa). The God manifested in forms is at once Himself and other than Himself, for since He is manifested, He is the limited which has no limit, the visible which cannot be seen. This manifestation is neither perceptible nor verifiable by the sensory faculties; discursive reason rejects it. It is perceptible only by the Active Imagination (Hadrat al-Khayal...) at times when it dominates man's sense perceptions, in dreams or better still in the waking state (in the state characteristic of the gnostic when he departs from the consciousness of sensuous things). In short, a mystic perception (dhawq) is required. To perceive all forms as epiphanic forms (mazahir), that is, to perceive through the figures which they manifest and which are the eternal hexeities, that they are other than the Creator and nevertheless that they are He, is precisely to effect the encounter, the coincidence, between God's descent toward the creature and the creature's ascent toward the Creator. The "place" of this encounter is not outside the Creator-Creature totality, but is the area within it which corresponds specifically to the Active Imagination, in the manner of a bridge joining the two banks of a river. The crossing itself is essentially a hermeneutics of symbols, a method of understanding which transmutes sensory data and rational concepts into symbols (mazahir) by making them effect this crossing."

- from the works of Ibn e Arabi (1165 - 1240)

To perceive God, one has to forego his five senses. These senses have been
given to perceive the world around us,
but God is above this world, not in a
sense of height, but in a perceptual
sense. In order to identify the higher
... stimulus that is God, one has to let go of the five
'primitive' senses that are only useful to
perceive the stimuli of this world. There
are planes other than this world:
existence of places which can only be
reached if one is able to dissociate himself from
the five senses WHICH ONLY SERVE TO
DISTRACT MAN by putting his focus on
this world, and Man is unable to reach
the ground reachable solely by spiritual
ascension (gnosis/'kashf'). Hence, 'Evil is
whatever distracts' - Franz Kafka. Man lives life as an animal, pursuing the basest of the desires in this world, whereas a whole sea of the Truth inside him remains unexplored.