A 13th-century mystic argued existence is one thing wearing countless masks

Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi taught 'wahdat al-wujud' ('the unity of being'): that God is the only true reality, and everything in the universe is a mode or reflection of that single existence rather than a separate thing in its own right. His ideas, worked out across hundreds of treatises, profoundly shaped later Islamic mysticism even as orthodox theologians accused him of blurring the line between Creator and creation.

— William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-'Arabi's Metaphysics of Imagination — 1989
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