The All-Embracing Absolute and the Denial of an Outside

In the philosophical solitude in which I reset the scales of the enlightened heart, I began to ask a question that tears up the roots of the spatial illusion. If God, glorified is He, is the Absolute, the All-Embracing whom no limit bounds, how could there be any space or void “outside” this Absolute for something else to occupy? Merely to claim that there is a place not filled by God’s presence is a veiled slight upon His eternal self-sufficiency (ṣamadiyya) and upon the absolute encompassment and sustaining power with which He has described Himself; it is shirk against Him of the gravest kind. From this I concluded with pure certainty that the whole of existence is nothing but a living matrix, sown in the knowledge and power of the Living. We are not independent, self-standing entities floating in a parallel void. We are existential representations, drawn at every moment from God’s words and His will. These reflections led me to a great truth: that “place” itself is only a created law within the cosmic order. How could something created — place — contain the Creator, or come between Him and His servants? The illumination that flooded my insight as I pondered the clear revelation “He sows you within Him” made me see existence as a sea of light, and ourselves within it as rushing waves. Is a wave, in truth, separate from the sea? Outwardly it is a passing determination of the sea’s water, but its essence and reality are the water itself. This is existence sown in God. We are particles of information swimming in the outpouring of God’s majesty, and the notion that we are separate from Him is only an error in the perceptual calibration of our material senses — senses that perceive nothing but the condensation of matter and call it “an independent reality”, while the truth lies behind this veil. As the wise poet Labīd ibn Rabīʿa put it: Truly, all things but God are void. Void, as I have come to understand it in the school of Abstraction, does not mean sheer nothingness. It means the absence of any independent existence outside the One, the Only. All that the eye sees is God’s sustaining power showing itself in countless forms, and the “outside” is an illusion that has collapsed before the majesty of His encompassment. This vision freed me from the desolation of distance. Existence became for me one great sanctuary, in which the worshipper is never separated from the One he worships by place, but is joined to Him in consciousness and presence at every instant. From the Prison of “Direction” to the Expanse of “He Is with You Wherever You Are” This realisation brought about a radical revolution in the authentic edifice I am building. The moment the illusion of spatial separation fell away in my consciousness, all the myths of “distance” necessarily fell with it — the very myths that made human or sectarian mediation necessary. My God was no longer “there”, far from me, veiled at the frontiers of material, concretised heavens, as the traditional curricula had pictured Him. My God was “here”: nearer to me than my jugular vein, present in every pulse of my consciousness, encompassing every atom of my being. I discovered that the traditional patterns had locked people’s consciousness inside the illusion of direction and place — and even of “placelessness” — so that they went looking for God on distant material horizons and along rough historical passages, while the Qurʾān proclaims a great existential truth: “And He is with you wherever you are” (Q 57:4). My journey from Concretion to Abstraction led me to understand the Throne as a cosmic centre of Providential Governance, command and law. The Throne is the station from which the laws are broadcast, the source of the laws that run the fabric of existence — not a spatial enclosure that would leave the All-Merciful absent from everything beyond it. Mediation is the daughter of distance. Once a person sees that the distance is zero, the intermediary has nothing left to do. The sovereignty of vicegerency that I seek, and whose foundations I am laying, springs from my sincere certainty that I am in a state of structural, unbroken connection with the Source. My existence at every moment is a continuous broadcast from the Giver of life and the Originator of the laws. On this understanding, the relation between the rabbānī Vicegerent and God can be summarised, to make the concepts easier to grasp, in the following points: The unity of the Source. Nothing lies “outside” God; everything we see is a disclosure within the compass of His knowledge and power. - The denial of distance. Divine nearness is not spatial nearness. It is an all-embracing, sustaining encompassment that transcends length, breadth, height and time. - The end of mediation. Independent consciousness draws its light directly from the Source, because revelation from the Lord, joined to God Almighty, reaches every atom without a veil. Faith, for me, has changed from believing in something distant into witnessing something present. From here I set out to draw the road map for the rabbānī human being, who needs no one’s permission to reach his Creator, and who holds fast to the handhold of truth that unites the logic of science with the illumination of the Spirit. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved