“The world appears to us as multiplicity, and the goal of the spiritual life is to ascend from this multiplicity to unity, to see the One in the many and the many integrated into the One. Now the doctrine of the oneness of Being does not negate the reality of multiplicity. Nor does it claim that God is the world and the world in its totality is God, a position held by pantheists. How could a metaphysics that speaks so categorically of the transcendence of God be accused of pantheism? What the Sufis assert is not that God is the world, but that the world is mysteriously plunged in God, to use a formulation of Frithjof Schuon. Existence is a manifestation of Being, and all existence issues from and belongs to Being in the same way that the rays of the sun are finally nothing but the sun.

Some Sufis and Islamic philosophers have interpreted the doctrine of the oneness of Being to mean that all levels of being come from the one Being, that all the rays of light emanate from the sun, while many Sufis claim that on the highest level of understanding there is in fact only the one and absolute Being. Viewed from within the sun, there is nothing but sun…”

– Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth

I find the analogy of the Sun and the Sun’s rays to be helpful when thinking about unity and multiplicity in the context of the contemplative traditions. From the perspective of a ray of light, after it projects outward from the Sun, it can look around and see other “Sun-rooted” rays of light – the world of multiplicity. But from the perspective of the Sun, there is “Nothing But Sun.”

Unity and Multiplicity. Multiplicity and Unity.

The “Oneness of Being” is a core concept in much of philosophical Sufism.