Sufism and COVID Test Centers

Today I remembered a friend, who during the COVID pandemic, being destitute and not able to work because of the restrictions, looked out of his window and saw a COVID test center across the street and thought: “That’s something I could do!”. He then proceeded to act on this intuition, without any means or prior knowledge about opening a business, let alone a health care facility, and no background in the medical field.

On his way to do that, things started to fall into place. And without this his venture would have been short lived. Since he was destitute, he had no capital, and since he had no capital, he could not rent a premises. But to register a test center with the municipality he needed to show that he had premises from which he intended to operate from. So instead of renting anything, he went to a closed and desperate cinema which gave him a letter of intent. The cinema owner was happy to have any sort of income, and did not insist on a rent contract, not obligating him to do any up-front payments. This way he got his test center registered.

But then he needed to have the test kits to start operations. But how to purchase them, without any money in the bank account? He discovered, and this was only a short window in the beginning of the pandemic mayhem, that the municipality would ship out test kits to test centers without any up-front payment. He placed his order, and 50.000 test kits were delivered to his doorstep. The only thing he had to do was sign the delivery note, and there it was: warehouse full of test kits. Due to the overload of the COVID bureaucracy, the bill arrived several months later, giving him enough time to generate some income from testing and pay for the test kits much later.

This reminded me in a strange way of Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi and what he wrote about “the imaginal”.

Ibn Arabi claims that everything we see and what we perceive as fixed and of material substance is “gods imagination” which is identical to our own inner imagination. We are therefore created “in gods image” but in an inverse way. While God imagines the outer world and is fixed in timeless eternity, we see ourselves fixed in our material reality but can access our ever-creating internal imagination.

My friend, when opening his COVID test centers, had followed his intuition and jumped into the great unknown and started to create. But this only worked because the great unknown made steps towards him and co-created. We call this also serendipity.

What seems to happen on these intuitive pathways is that the inner imagination links up and premeditates the outer imagination by an act of devotion - the jumping into the void – and combines this with grace - the creative universe bending in serendipity. Both become one interlinked imagination, helping each other along in manifestation.

But there is more.

The other day I came out of a concert, a bit annoyed at the main performer, a singer, and that he left me unfulfilled by his lack of talent. As I was contemplating this, a group of women passed me by, and one of them said in an exasperated tone: “One could have done much more with this play!”. But the group had been in an entirely different event. This is what you would call synchronicity: the exterior experience mirrors at the same time the interior experience.

Or with the words of Ibn Arabi: exterior imagination and interior imagination express themselves simultaneously. And the higher consciousness recognizes itself in the mirror.