IV

THE “RENEWING OF CREATION
AT EACH INSTANT”

HERE is an aspect of the Sufi theory of Creation
called the “Renewing of Creation at each instant”

or, “at each breath” (7Tajdid al-khalq bil’anfas), and it
is very directly connected with spiritual realisation. It
was said above that the “immutable essences™ (al-a‘yan
ath-thabitah), the pure possibilities in which God mani-
fests Himself to Himself, are never, as such, brought
forth to existence and that only their relative modali-
ties—all the possible relations (nisab) they imply—are
deployed in the Universe. Nor do these latter really
“come out” from their archetypes, and their variety is
never exhausted in a mode of succession, even as the
waves of a river never cease from changing their form
while at the same time obeying the law imposed on them
by the configuration of the river-bed. In this picture, im-
perfect just because it is concrete, the river water repre-
sents the incessant “outpouring” or ““flux” (fayd) of Be-
ing and the river-bed “immutable determination” while
the waves correspond to forms, either sensory or subtle,
resulting from this ontological polarity. The “immu-
table essence”’, or the archetype, can also be compared to
a colourless prism which breaks up the light of Being
into rays of all the colours of the rainbow, the colour-
ing of the rays depending both on the essential nature