Know Yourself: An Explanation of the Oneness of Being
Know Yourself is a short Sufi treatise on the oneness of being (wahdat al-wujud), presented in an English translation from the Arabic by Cecilia Twinch. The Arabic work is traditionally known as the Risalat al-Unjudiyya, and in this edition it is attributed jointly to Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi and to Awḥad al-Dīn Balyānī — the latter, a Persian Sufi of Shiraz, being the figure to whom modern scholarship most plausibly assigns the actual composition, the treatise having arisen within the spiritual orbit of Ibn ʿArabi. The volume consists of the treatise itself together with a translator’s introduction and explanatory apparatus aimed at the general reader.
The scriptural premise
The whole work hangs on a single saying widely cited in Sufi literature and attributed to the Prophet Muhammad: “Who knows himself knows his Lord.” The treatise takes this as a precise metaphysical statement rather than a pious commonplace, and sets out to explain what kind of “self” must be known, and what kind of “Lord” is thereby known, if the two knowings are to be identical. Its answer is that self-knowledge, pursued honestly to its root, collapses the distance between knower and known.
The argument
The treatise’s central contention is that there is only one Being. What appears as the multiplicity of creatures — and pre-eminently as one’s own separate self — is not a second reality alongside the Real (al-Ḥaqq), but the Real considered under the aspect of particularity and limitation. Existence belongs to God alone; the things of the world have no independent claim on it, being rather loci in which the single Being discloses itself.
From this it follows that the “self” the seeker is commanded to know is not the physical body, nor the ego with its opinions and appetites, but the reality of one’s own existence — and that reality, examined closely, proves to be nothing other than the Real. To know oneself, therefore, is not to acquire a new object of information but to recognise what one already is. The treatise insists that a creature cannot, by its own power as a separate subject, come to know God; knowledge of the Divine is possible only because the Divine knows itself in and through the form of the knowing creature. The human being is not the agent of this knowledge but its occasion and its place.
The distinction between “Lord” and “servant” is accordingly treated as relational rather than substantial. The One is Lord only in relation to a servant, and the servant is servant only in relation to a Lord; the correlation does not introduce a second entity into being, any more than a name introduces a second thing beside what it names. The duality of worshipper and worshipped, of knower and known, belongs to the level of relation and perspective, not to the level of Being.
Throughout, the treatise is concerned to clear away the misconception that gives the book its practical force: the deep-rooted assumption of one’s own separate existence. This assumption is the veil. Nothing positive needs to be added to the seeker; what is required is the removal of an illusion, so that a true perception may appear. The treatise therefore construes the spiritual path less as an acquisition than as a letting-go, and treats self-annihilation (fanāʾ) not as the extinction of a real entity but as the disappearance of a claim that was never true.
Themes and manner
The exposition moves among a small set of interrelated themes: the unity of Being and the illusory character of multiplicity; the divine names as the patterns through which the One becomes manifest; the human being as the locus in which all the names are gathered and in which the One contemplates itself; the identity of knowledge, knower, and known in the act of self-knowledge; and the way in which the legitimate distinctions of religious law, worship, and moral responsibility remain valid on their own level even though, at the level of Being, no duality obtains.
The argument is conducted in a compact, dialectical style. The author poses objections and answers them, distinguishes senses of terms, and repeatedly turns the reader back from the consideration of things to the consideration of the considerer. Images of mirroring, reflection, and light recur: the many are as forms in a mirror, real as forms and nothing apart from the one whose face is reflected. The tone is not that of systematic theology but of directed instruction — the treatise is written to be understood by someone willing to test its claims against their own experience of existing.
The translator’s introduction and apparatus
Twinch’s introduction sets out the textual and interpretive context needed by a reader approaching the work for the first time. It addresses the question of authorship, explaining why a treatise long circulated under Ibn ʿArabi’s name is now generally ascribed to Balyani while remaining a faithful expression of Ibn ʿArabi’s teaching; it describes the Arabic manuscripts drawn upon for the translation; and it explains the technical vocabulary — wujud, ḥaqq, nafs, fanāʾ, the divine names — on which the argument depends. The stated aim is accessibility: the translation is designed to be followed by readers with no Arabic and little acquaintance with the cultural setting of the text.
What the reader encounters, then, is a brief but dense classic of Islamic mystical metaphysics, valued over centuries for its directness: an argument that the self one is urged to know is not a thing among things, and that the knowledge of God to which it leads is not the achievement of a separate knower but the self-knowledge of the One.
The knowledge of self and the knowledge of God
The title points to a saying current in Sufi teaching and received as prophetic: whoever knows himself knows his Lord. The treatise can be read as an extended unpacking of this saying. The self it bids the reader know is not the personality or the life-story but the bare fact of one’s existence; and since that existence is not one’s own, to see it as it is, is to see the One whose existence it is. Knowledge of self and knowledge of God are therefore not two achievements, one following the other, but a single recognition described from two sides. Everything the book says about the divine names, about the human being, and about the removal of the illusion of separateness hangs on this point.
