God can be stoned!

 God can be stoned! 

"God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal and awakens in man. " 

~Ibn Arabi. 

This oft-quoted line deserves the attention it receives. Its poetic power lies in collapsing boundaries: forms and names dissolve; the distinctions between living and non-living, animate and inanimate, desirous and inert, fall away. On closer reading, it feels pregnant with hard-won, mystical insight. 

It is not merely another slogan about God’s omnipresence. Rather, it is the spontaneous vision of One Reality appearing as many. The seer beholds God as rock, tree, animal, and human — not as a forced reconciliation of differences but as a direct seeing: the One shining through all. 

Often we labour to unify — “God is present in humans, animals, plants, even stones” — or we swap subject and predicate — “Humans are divine, plants are divine.” Here, the emphasis reverses: God is primary, experientially real; the multiplicity is a conceptual delineation that helps us make sense of world-appearance. 

When God is “asleep,” there is the inert stone; when “dreaming,” the vegetative; when “stirring,” the instinct-driven animal; and when fully “awake,” the human. Thus the text paints a perplexing image: God simultaneously asleep, stirring, and awake — as the world’s manifold forms. The distinction rests on degrees of awareness, implying that a mere shift in the divine awareness underlies the play of difference. 

Here, Vedānta’s avasthā-traya suggests itself. In deep sleep, anaesthesia, or the ‘stoned’ insensate, one is as good as inert matter — the “stone-state” (prājña). In partial awareness — coma, surgeries, sleep paralysis, hallucination — there is unintelligible movement without response, a leaf borne by wind: the “plant-state” (taijasa). In REM, somnambulism, intoxication, or psychosis, there is involuntary action and some external awareness — the “animal-state” (taijasa). In wakefulness, there dawns a sense of reality, memory, and volition — the “human-state” (vaiśvānara). 

The seventh mantra of the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad then withdraws all predicates — external, internal, dual, dense, aware, unaware — to reveal That which is none of these. Thus the cycles of analysis and synthesis, destruction and creation, devolution and evolution, turn ceaselessly.