Absolute and Relative: My Dilemma, and How the Limited Meets the Unlimited

The relation between the Absolute and the relative has long been the black hole that swallowed most philosophical and scholarly attempts throughout history. For me it was the great obstacle, and it demanded a complete reshaping of my consciousness of existence. In my early days I was caught in the trap of Concretion, which sees the unlimited — God, glorified is He — and the limited — the human being and the cosmos — as two entities competing for space. Either the Creator is in one particular direction and we are in another, or we are independent “others” with a parallel existence of our own, jostling with the existence of the Real inside some greater existence. But the authentic insight within me rejected this shallow picture. How can the Absolute be absolute if something relative limits it from outside? And how could the limited exist at all, were it not drawing on the Absolute from moment to moment? The dilemma lay in the scales of our perception, which are formed to think in material measures — mass, volume, distance — and in an Aristotelian logic that refuses to let opposites meet. The truth lies in the domain of Abstraction, and so I began to solve the dilemma by purifying the senses of their fetters. Immersion in material Concretion makes the heart ask, in ignorance, how God can hold the cosmos when He is greater than it. The question starts from picturing the Creator as a celestial body or a physical object, and that is the core of the epistemic flaw in traditional thought. When I rose to the horizon of independent Abstraction, I found that the Absolute is the infinity that contains an infinite number of finite sets without anything being taken from it and without those sets crowding it. I came to grasp how the unlimited contains the limited through the gateway of understanding true existence. The Absolute is the first Encompassing; the relative is the disclosures within it. We are relative forms at work within the divine environment. As consciousness contains a thought, the Absolute contains existence through the outpouring of His power. I saw clearly that the relative is a deliberate disclosure of the Absolute, as His Names and Attributes require. God is absolute in His Essence and manifest in His disclosure. This is the truth of which I became certain: the Absolute did not separate from the relative in order to bring it into being; He sowed it within Himself. My dilemma was resolved when I understood that limitation is a property of our own deficient perception, of us as we are, and not a restriction on divine power. In truth there is no “we” and “He” in the simple sense we might imagine; it is only to bring the concepts within reach, at this level, that we are forced to speak this way. We see barriers, walls and boundaries because we live in the density of matter. In the light of Abstraction, however, no boundaries separate God from existence except degree within the light — the light that is itself the light of God. The unlimited contains the limited as light contains darkness, and as reality contains imagination. This containing is His sustaining power: God is the one original Source who keeps the relative standing and moving at every moment of existence. My consciousness came to maturity once I stopped trying to measure God with the instruments of matter. I discovered that the Absolute’s containing of the limited is the secret of God’s Name the All-Embracing (al-Wāsiʿ). The All-Embracing is not a geographical area. It is an existential breadth that leaves every act and every material atom immersed in God’s knowledge. The dilemma lay in the concretised ego, which feels itself separate. When I abstracted myself, I found that the relative that is “I” is a single pulse in the ocean of the Absolute. That is why the edifice of law I am founding rests on the principle that the rabbānī human being is the one who perceives his own relativity as a gateway to understanding absoluteness. We do not reach the Absolute by becoming gods. We reach Him by stripping away the fetters of matter so that we witness Him containing us. This understanding is what brings human tyranny down. The Vicegerent knows that, however high he rises, he remains a relative being within the Absolute, drawing his standing from his faithfulness to the covenant and not from any independent self. This containing works through what I call dimensional superposition. The Absolute operates at the station of eternal self-sufficiency; the relative operates at the stations of existence. The containing here is like consciousness containing a thought: the thought is limited and consciousness unlimited, yet the thought dwells in consciousness without any crowding. This perspective revealed to me the hidden meanings of the Qurʾānic passages that speak of God’s nearness and encompassment. Encompassment is not a fence around us on the outside, as it is usually imagined. It is an existential structure running through our depths. God encompasses us because He is the Source who broadcasts us. When my heart grasped this, the desolation of limitation vanished. I no longer saw myself as a tiny creature in a vast cosmos, but as a rhythm pulsing in the heart of the Absolute. Authentic independence is to understand your place in existence. I have observed that the schools of Concretion fell into this dilemma because they tried to explain the Absolute with the tools of the relative, and so produced a conception of God resembling human beings in their passions and decisions. In our school, by contrast, we live with the truth: we know that the Absolute is the law of laws and “the light of the heavens and the earth” (Q 24:35). Grasping this containing gave me inner peace, for there is no conflict between my being a servant and my being a vicegerent. This balance enabled me to deny the material Unity of Existence (waḥdat al-wujūd), which fuses Creator and creature into a single mass — the furthest extreme of Concretion — and to affirm instead the Unity of the Source, which keeps the Absolute distinct in His absolute existence and the relative distinct in its contingency, while the containing and the sustaining remain complete. My journey of discovering existence sown in God reached its full maturity in this Inquiry when I broke down the wall of fear that had kept the intellect from reflecting on how this containing works. Containing is disclosure, not material mixture. The unlimited contains the limited by manifestation: everything we see is the outward face of the Real, relative for us but absolute in its Source. I now see the world as a symphony that the Absolute plays on the strings of the relative. The vision we seek, then, is the vision of the Absolute in the relative — the vision of God the Manifest through the veils of existence. Independence means being a polished mirror that reflects this absoluteness in the fullness of its beauty, with no Concretion to distort the image and no relative thing claiming absolute independence from its origin. To grasp this meeting of opposites, the unlimited and the limited, was the ascent in knowledge that let me write this book with steady certainty. I found that God is not outside us, for us to go looking for Him, nor inside us, for us to confine Him. We are immersed in His sustaining power as meaning is immersed in the word. From here we shall move on to discover God’s Name the Manifest, and how this absolute containing turns into the astonishing cosmic disclosures we live moment by moment, as the relative fades away in the majesty of the Absolute. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved