Transcendence: The Homeland of Consciousness

Living in the space of the First Source gives the authentic human being a steadiness that the passing winds of earthly disagreement cannot shake. In this wide space there is no such thing as a “sectarian enemy”. There is only an existential diversity that enriches meaning and deepens human experience. I learned that the Absolute has room for all human ideas in their variety, but that sectarian narrowness can never have room for the Absolute. My flight towards this horizon was a way of saving pure tawḥīd from the clutches of hidden shirk: the shirk that sanctifies limited human understanding and falsely raises it to the rank of divine revelation. I came to treat the Highest Source as the direct broadcast of the truth. For me the Qurʾān is not a silent historical text but a code that speaks in the living present, and the cosmos is not a collection of lifeless objects but a field that bears perpetual witness to the truth. Migrating towards God revealed to me the meaning of abstract beauty. Sectarianism is at heart ugly, because it rests on hostility and exclusion; the Absolute is beautiful, because it rests on transcendence and infinite breadth. I began to see the authentic edifice whose bricks I was laying as a safe place for every seeker of the one truth, far from the conflicts of material Concretion. Attachment to the Source is the only safeguard against repeating the errors of the system that drained the consciousness of the community for centuries. Whoever is attached to the Source has an inner immunity against falsification; whoever is attached to a sect remains open to manipulation by its guardians. As the wise poet said, describing how one rises above small things and connects with what is great: I comfort my soul with hopes, and watch for them; how narrow life would be, but for the breadth of hope. I was not content with life while the days came towards me; how can I be content now they have turned and hurried away? Hope here is that connection with the Absolute which frees the Self from the narrowness of matter into the breadth of transcendence. From this experience I concluded that true independence lies in a single equation: Let God be your goal, knowledge your means, and Abstraction your homeland. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved