The Difference Between the Unseen and the Witnessed

I saw clearly that the difference between the world of the Unseen and the world of the Witnessed is not one of place or space. It is, in truth, a difference in rate of frequency. Light at its absolute speed, in its first broadcast, represents pure Abstraction, which exceeds the capacity of all existence — and, at the level of our own existence, exceeds the capacity of our material senses to detect it. It is an absolute presence that the eyes of the dense system in which we move cannot perceive. But when the law of existential condensation intervenes, this light begins to slow by degrees, much as an electric current slows as it passes through a particular medium and turns into heat or visible light whose effect we can feel. It is this slowing that gave rise to what we call the atomic and the molecular. The atom, in my philosophical view, is nothing but a frequency confinement (al-ḥabsa al-taraddudiyya) of the Source’s light, frozen in this space to form the building-blocks of the sensible world. I saw the worlds taking shape as superimposed layers of condensed existence, with a direct relation between falling frequency and rising density. The more light is slowed — the Luminous Deceleration (al-tabāṭuʾ al-nūrānī) — the stronger gravity becomes and the more plainly materiality emerges, all the way down to this earthly world, which is one of the lowest degrees of material Concretion. It is as though we live in a frozen crust of one of the degrees of God’s light, where matter is only a heavy, visible imprint of the disclosure of God’s Most Beautiful Names — Names disclosed to us in this mould so that we might exist, and might be able to undertake the experience of vicegerency and witnessing. The matter we see is the veil that the ignorant take for absolute reality, while in its depths it is only a deliberate slowing of the light of the Real, which forms all things through its continuous outpouring. This understanding frees consciousness from the authority of blind matter and lets us see the world of the Witnessed as a subtle extension of the world of the Unseen. Nothing separates them except the speed of reception and perception. Sovereignty of knowledge here springs from a person’s ability to see the luminous engine behind the relatively fixed material image, so that every atom in existence becomes a message proclaiming the presence of the One who brought it into being. Grasping this gradation of frequencies opens the door to understanding revelation — the “sending down” — as a passage from absolute Abstraction to relative Concretion. It also makes the Written Book and the Beheld Book two units joined in the essence of light, separate only in the density of their expression. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved