holy and most holy outpouring [fayd-i-aqdas and fayd-i-muqaddas]
Editorial introduction
Why is there anything at all? One answer in Bahá’u’lláh’s writings begins not with power but with love: a stirring of love within the hidden Essence, a Treasure that longed to be known and disclosed Itself to Itself, so that the archetypes of all things came into being. Everything that exists carries the trace of that generosity. Bahá’u’lláh insists that nothing can exist without the splendour of God shining within it and that a discerning eye finds every created thing testifying to its inner light; Paul had already said in Romans that the invisible qualities of God are apprehended through what has been made [1]. Yet the same teaching guards a boundary. The Essence Itself stays barred to every seeker, while the Prophets are the mirrors in which the divine names are faithfully reflected. Holding universal signs and an unreachable Presence together is the discipline this subject asks of us, and it leads on to God’s love for His own Essence, the difference between emanation and manifestation, and the bounty that pervades all things.
And when that Hidden Essence revealed Its Essence to Its Essence and showed forth Its Self to Its Self, the Maiden of Love, which was veiled within the canopy of the Essence of Unity, arose and came forth.
O servant of the All-Merciful, the Most Merciful! Mercy is of two kinds: special and general - the Most Holy Outpouring and the Holy Outpouring. Through God's grace, I hope that thou mayest become the manifestation of both kinds of mercy, the dawning-place of the lights of bounty, that thou mayest bring the friends to a state of enthusiasm and become a herald of the Day of Resurrection to the heedless ones.
And likewise observe in the world of divine law, manifestation and effulgence - thou shalt see that the special Most Holy Outpouring, through which exist the holy temples and the sanctified, subtle, spiritual essences, is the bestowal of the Greater Guidance and the kindling of the divine love ignited in pure hearts, ablaze from the All-Merciful Breath, the Divine Support, the Godly Outpouring and the Eternal Bounty. And thou shalt find that the Divine Holy Outpouring is the bestowal of perfections, the spiritual outpouring, attributes, faculties, spiritual gifts, qualities and virtues whereby the world hath life and all peoples are illumined. These two Essential Mercies - the special and universal - that proceed from the Divine Essential Most Holy Outpouring are mentioned in the Bismillah, which is the opening of creation and the outpouring of existence for abstract and material beings.
Further quotations · supplied wording and references
Within a compass of two hundred pages it [the Kitab-i-Iqan] proclaims unequivocally the existence and oneness of a personal God, ... adumbrates and distinguishes between the three stages of Divine Revelation...
There is not then (apart from the Divine Reality) other than one pure receptacle (qabil); but this receptacle itself comes from the Holy Effusion (al-fayd al-aqdas) (that is to say from the principle manifestation, meta-cosmic, where the 'immutable Essences' are Divinely 'conceived' before their apparent projection in the relative existence).
The creative movement, or, to use the technical terminology of wahdat al-wujud philosophy, the self-manifestation (tajalli) of the Absolute which is activated by the principle of love, emerges for the first time at the stage of ahadiyah and is called the 'most sacred Emanation' (Fayd-i-Aqdas). As the result of this Emanation, the stage of wahidiyah becomes established. The wahidiyah, is the ontological state at which the original absolute Oneness of the reality of existence appears with inner articulations. These inner articulations are called, in accordance with the traditional terminology of theology, divine Names and Attributes. … And the creative or self-manifesting activity of the absolute reality of existence by which this ontological 'descent' is actualized is called the 'sacred emanation' (fayd muqaddas) in distinction from the 'most sacred emanation' by which the ahadiyah develops into wahidiyah.
The second type of self-manifestation, the tajalli shahadah, ... refers to the phenomenon of the permanent archetypes which form the content of the Divine Consciousness coming out of the stage of potentiality into the outward world of 'reality'. It means the actualization of the archetypes in concrete forms. In distinction from the first type, this second type of self-manifestation is called by Ibn 'Arabi 'the holy emanation' (al-fayd al-muqaddas).
...in Ibn 'Arabi's world-view, the self-manifestation of the Absolute is a perpetual process whose major stages - (1) the 'most holy emanation', (2) the 'holy emanation', and then (3) the appearance of concrete individual things - go on being actualized one after another like successive, recurrent waves. This ontological process repeats itself indefinitely and endlessly. At every moment, and moment after moment, the same eternal process of annihilation and re-creation is repeated.
To the eye of a man who has attained this spiritual stage there arises a scene of extraordinary beauty. He sees all the existent things as they appear in the mirror of the Absolute and as they appear one in the other. All these things interflow and interpenetrate in such a way that they become transparent to one another while keeping at the same time each its own individuality. This is the experience of 'unveiling' (kashf).
For thought and discussion