Denying the Unity of Existence, Affirming the Unity of the Source

The great battle of my journey in knowledge was the battle over the ontological identity of existence: the essential question of where our limits as creation end, and where the reality of the supreme Creator, God, begins. In trying to decipher this relation I saw clearly that the human intellect has historically split and fallen into two of the traps of Concretion. The first is total separation, promoted by the traditional schools, which pictured the supreme Creator as a distant entity cut off from the world by spatial expanse. In their consciousness, existence came to seem empty of His moment-by-moment sustaining power and of His unbroken supply. The second trap is what is known as the Unity of Existence in its material, incarnationist sense, into which many philosophers fell when they imagined that the cosmos is God, or that matter is the divine Essence itself. I have been firm in denying this material unity, because in truth it deifies matter and diminishes our understanding of the Absolute. God is too great to be reduced to particles of clay or confined within the narrow dimensions of spacetime. Confusing the supreme Creator with creation is the very peak of Concretion. It veils the vision of Abstraction and makes consciousness a prisoner within the limits of matter, which is in origin only a disclosure from the Origin. From here there dawned in my consciousness the alternative truth: the abstract Unity of the Source. It affirms that existence proceeds from God, stands by Him and is sown within Him, yet is not “He”, either in degree or in quiddity. Existence is an outpouring of information and lights that the Real willed to appear in relative forms, as His Names and Attributes require; yet the Source remains alone in His existence and His perfection. As has been said, expressing this subtle difference between the origin and its shadows: All that is in the cosmos is illusion or imagining, or reflections in mirrors, or shadows. A shadow has no existence without its origin, yet it can never turn back and become the origin itself. Independence of knowledge in this philosophy rests on this delicate balance. We affirm the Unity of the Source so as to remain joined to the first spring, and we deny the material Unity of Existence so as to preserve the majesty of transcendence and the greatness of the supreme Creator. We live in an ocean of divine disclosures, where every atom speaks His Name the Manifest; but our abstract consciousness keeps us from falling into worship of the “mirror” in place of witnessing the “Face” disclosed in it. This perspective gives the Vicegerent the ability to handle matter with the consciousness of the Spirit and to deal with the relative by the compass of the Absolute, in a tranquillity that knows the whole to be from God, in Him and returning to Him — without a mingling that erases distinction, or a separation that cuts off the supply. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved