The Starry Cave

It was a time when I found the concept of possession alien, exotic and dangerous. We Westerners have come to see possession a something akin to what we find in movies like The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Serpent and the Rainbow and many other movies that feed the fear of the unknown taking possession of us. But these movies speak solely about the possession and obsession that might happen by the intrusion of hostile spirits upon ones being.  The concept of possession means ownership over something or some faculty. We can say someone possesses a good or bad character as much as our friend can come into possession of a great heritage. When used as a verb, to possess means to reside in something or dominating something or someone, to be potent in one’s dominion, to assume master ship over something or someone.  Possession is a good thing; it is gods touching the god within you as they move towards one another in beauty and from this knowledge and pleasure erupts in sweetnes

“Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you disbelieve in all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. Let your soul be capable of embracing all forms of belief. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed... Wheresoever you turn, there is the face of Allah” -    Ibn al'Arabi Man is the form of God. Man is temporal, yet eternal. Man is God’s mirror as Man sees God when he turns inwards in contemplation. In this act God looks back upon himself and we contemplate God as Man. In this we find a path of deification.  The idea of deification, of becoming divine, is subject to a host of understandings mediated by religious affiliation. The sufi saint Said al’Kharnlz as well as Ibn al’Arabi understood themselves as temporal fluctuations on the body of God. It was the temporal that drove man to contemplate the various parts of God’s body in himself a