The Unity of the Source and the Freedom of the rabbānī Human Being

It has become settled in my certainty that the true difference between God and the cosmos is not a spatial gap between two regions. It is an essential distinction of degree and of perfection. God, glorified is He, subsists by Himself, while we are the existents, with no standing and no presence except through Him — through His supply and His bringing into being. This deep realisation drives the spectre of existential estrangement from the human heart. The independent believer, who has recovered his sovereignty of knowledge and left blind dependence behind, never feels alone or lost. He sees with the eye of insight that every cell of his body, every thought that passes through his Fuʾād and every turning of the Heart of the Self is a living message, a perpetual disclosure taking place within the sown matrix, in the wide expanse of God. This decisive denial of the traditional spatial separation opened new horizons for me in understanding the laws of the signs (āyāt) — the miracles — and the breaking of familiar laws. Whoever is certain in his heart that he is immersed in the outpouring of God’s power sees clearly that the material laws governing our world are not blind shackles from which there is no escape. They are flexible, subtle patterns, governed by the First Source, who alters their coordinates for whichever of His servants He wills — those who have truly merited sincerity and connection. When human consciousness joins its abstract origin in perception, matter becomes obedient to it by the leave of its Maker, because the branch is joined to the essence of the root. I found an echo of this illumination in the words of the philosopher Plotinus: “It is not far from anything, and yet it is far from everything; it is present in all things in such a way that nothing can bound it.” This harmony between absolute presence and absolute transcendence is the essence of the Abstraction we seek. God is near through the outpouring of His sustaining power, and exalted through the greatness of His rank, for He is “Exalted in Degrees” (Q 40:15). The rabbānī human being, as we understand him, therefore no longer looks for God in a cloud or behind a planet. He witnesses Him in the disclosure of His laws within his own Self and across the horizons of the cosmos, and so attains an existential peace that does not pass away, in which consciousness comes to rest in its true homeland. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved