The Return to the Central Archive

The verse “Truly, to your Lord is the return” (Q 96:8) has always been for me an existential riddle that goes far beyond the traditional notions, which reduced death to annihilation and the return to a purely material bringing back to life. On my journey to decipher the code of existence I saw clearly that existence is not a line that begins in nothingness and ends there. It is a complete informational cycle that begins from the first existential unity and ends in it. I found clearly that what we live now in the world of Concretion is a state of temporary exile, in which our copies of consciousness have been sent to operate in a dense, material operating environment, for the sake of interaction (the relative test), of vicegerency, and of bearing the Trust. The Return (al-rujʿā), in essence, is going back to the higher origin, through degrees, until the first origin is reached: that moment when codes and information are withdrawn, little by little, from the interfaces of dense matter and return to their abstract reality in the expanse of the First Source. I have understood the return as a final filtering of data, carried out in different stages, in which everything concretised, false and bound to the illusions of falsehood falls away, until in the end nothing remains but the Real — the truth by which, from which and within which we were created. My journey into understanding this mechanism of the Return began when I asked myself honestly: where do our experiences and the accumulations of our consciousness go when the material body dissolves? The answer lay in the idea of an essential, original memory. The Return is not movement through space across geographical distances, because, as I established earlier, we are sown in God from the very beginning, and there is no place that lies outside His encompassment and sustaining power. The Return is a state of awakening and of ascent in frequency: we return, little by little, from the slow frequency tied to matter to the higher frequency tied to light, and then to the Absolute. At the level of earthly existence it is a safe shutdown of the earthly session, so that the great synchronisation with the Central Archive can begin. At that moment the record of each vicegerent’s deeds is examined. One whose inclinations and deeds were in keeping with the order of Abstraction and elevation has a smooth return, full of calm and peace. One who sank into the mire of Concretion and purely material attachment finds his return to be a painful, forced correction, undoing his ties to those illusions. Grasping the laws of the Return changes our whole view of life. The rabbānī Vicegerent no longer sees this world as an end in itself, but as a station for processing data and building consciousness. Every act we perform is like writing a line in the code with which we shall return to the Central Archive. This vision gives the Self immense steadiness: death is no longer the frightening end, but the moment of the great connection and of recovering full consciousness, far from the veils of matter. We are on a continuous journey of return, and every moment of Abstraction we live in this world is a small rehearsal for that great Return. Sovereignty of knowledge shows itself here in realising that we never left the Source in place. This existential degree came about only in keeping with the sense that we had left it in rank and in rhythm, for the sake of the inevitable, merit-based interaction of a lower world of frequency. Keeping the covenant requires us to return carrying a consciousness worthy of the majesty of that Highest Source from which we came. This understanding was deepened for me by reflecting on the verse “And that to your Lord is the Utmost Boundary” (Q 53:42). This verse completes the verse of the Return and opens a wider horizon before it. I found that the Return describes the laws of returning and their movement in frequential time, while the Utmost Boundary (al-muntahā) describes the ultimate goal at which the circle closes and comes to rest. The Return is an extended act that runs through stations, ranks and gradations. The Utmost Boundary is the point at which every question, every extension and every search comes to a stop, within a particular level of existence. There the pursuit ends and consciousness is completed, and the journey goes on — not through us, but through the Lord to whom belongs the Utmost Boundary. From this I realised that the whole of existence is governed by two inseparable laws: the law of the Return, which governs movement, and the law of the Utmost Boundary, which governs rest. It is as though the Return were the journey and the Utmost Boundary the homeland, where everything has come back to what it issued from. This great truth means that every existential question a human being asks has its great answer deferred until he stands at the Utmost Boundary, where there reigns a stillness that holds all that was and all that will be. The Utmost Boundary corrects an old illusion that has dogged human thought in its breathless attempts to explain what lies beyond endings. A consciousness accustomed to the logic of sequence always asks: and what comes after? and what lies beyond? The verse settles this sequence at its furthest limit. There is no “after” after the Utmost Boundary, and no “beyond” beyond it, at any level of existence. There the book is folded, and everything returns to the origin from which it issued. Through this union of the Return and the Utmost Boundary, the philosophical picture of existence is completed in my consciousness: a sustained movement towards the origin, and a final tranquillity on reaching it — and so on, stage after stage, along the great ascent towards the Absolute. In this sense, independence becomes the capacity of consciousness not to identify wholly with its slow material interface, and always to keep hold of the thread that connects it with its swift origin. The Return is the right way of engaging with the Trust that the human being took on, and of stripping it of the murk of Concretion so that it returns to the presence of the Real pure and complete. The building of consciousness I am striving for therefore aims to prepare the rabbānī Vicegerent for that moment, so that his passage is a luminous ascent rather than a material descent, and his meeting with the Source is the fullness of contentment and tranquillity in the expanse of perfect peace. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved