Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī

Ibn ʿArabī, honored as al-Shaykh al-Akbar (“the Greatest Master”), was a 12th–13th-century Andalusian mystic and the most influential theoretician in the history of Sufism. Across an enormous output—above all The Meccan Revelations and the compact, dense Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam (“Bezels of Wisdom”)—he articulated the doctrine later termed waḥdat al-wujūd, the “unity (or oneness) of being”: the view that there is only one true Reality (the Real, al-Ḥaqq), and that all apparent existents are its self-disclosures (tajalliyāt), the ways the one Being reveals itself to itself through an infinity of forms.

He also gave systematic articulation to the ʿālam al-khayāl, the imaginal world—an ontologically real intermediate realm where spirits take form and forms become spiritualized. Ibn ʿArabī is arguably the single most important upstream source for the “all is one” and “consciousness creates form” metaphysics that pervade this Atlas.

His unity-of-being underwrites the nondual claim that self and world are modulations of one Reality, and his doctrine of the imaginal—where the creative imagination participates in bringing forms into being—is a direct philosophical ancestor of the manifestation idea that imagination shapes reality (compare Neville Goddard’s imaginal creation, several centuries later and far less rigorous).

Through Henry Corbin’s 20th-century scholarship, Ibn ʿArabī’s imaginal world re-entered Western thought and shaped depth psychology, archetypal theory, and esoteric metaphysics. He is the theoretical keystone of the Sufi branch.