On Wednesday, December 2, Munjed M. Murad, a ThD candidate at the Harvard Divinity School, delivered the presentation, Living the Dream: Ibn al-'Arabi on Transcending and Interpreting Life.
The lecture, analyzing the writings of Ibn al-'Arabi (d. 1240) in general and his Ringstone of a Wisdom of Light in a Word of Joseph in particular, put into conversation the mystical goal of transcending life with the symbolic attitude of contemplating natural phenomena. It employed the metaphor of life as a dream, the metaphysician's goal of awakening, the regard for things as symbolic, and the idea of dream interpretation. From this perspective, the realized mystic is like one awake in the dream which life is. He or she interprets the phenomena of life like those encountered in a dream, traversing from these sensible forms to the spiritual or higher meanings they each symbolize. In this way, the form of the tree is seen as a hierarchic system of existence and that of milk as knowledge. The highest level of meaning to which forms lead is, on the one hand, the reality of the Divine Selfhood reflected in the dream and, on the other, the irreality of the dream itself, as in Ibn al-'Arabi's Huwa lā Huwa or the Islamic declaration of faith lā ilāha illā 'Llāh.