Concretion and the Worship of Sockets

Through patient reflection I observed that the human mind leans instinctively towards Concretion: the constant urge to turn whatever is intangible and absolute into a person, a body or a definite entity with limits and a place of its own. At bottom it is an oversimplification. Consciousness practises it defensively, to avoid admitting its ignorance and to be able to deal with what exceeds its perception and its capacity to understand. It is exactly what we do with electricity, that immense power: we give it wires and sockets so that we can live with it in our homes and bend it to our daily needs, without ever grasping the true nature of that tremendous energy in its raw state. The grave danger I found running through the human inheritance is that, over time, we came to worship the sockets and the wires and forgot the electricity itself. We became absorbed in the concretised mental image and forgot the Source. Seen through my philosophical lens, Concretion is a condensing of meaning that makes us picture God as a material sovereign, or as a body of light dwelling in some place. It drops us into a trap that denies the Spirit its flight towards the horizons of transcendence. And when I tried to name this structural flaw, I found that traditional language colludes with Concretion with great skill. It springs, in origin, from the experience of matter and is bound to the senses, and so it cannot describe what lies beyond matter without soiling it with limits and restrictions. Once I had admitted that language falls short before the majesty of meaning where the Absolute is concerned, I was bound to look for an exit in knowledge — a gateway that would give me the right, and some relative ability, to engage with the divine text outside the prisons of our dense earthly language. Smashing the idol of Concretion is the first step towards independence of knowledge. It frees us from the illusions that send us looking for God in where and how, so that we begin to discern Him through His acts and His abstract self-disclosures, which fill existence. This break with the language of Concretion opens new horizons for understanding Divinity as an all-embracing sustaining power (qayyūmiyya), which no conception can bound and no imagination, imprisoned in a world of material sockets, can encompass. The idea, then, is this: once we admit that spoken language cannot do justice to the highest meanings, we must acknowledge its limits and its boundaries, and move from relying on its material concretions, and on the traditional conceptions we have formed through it, to reading what lies beyond the structure of the word and the sentence, decoding the meaning hidden within the mould of the linguistic context. Our aim along this path is to recalibrate our inner receiver, so that we do not stop at the limits of the human process of converting truths into images, but reach through to the original code that gives these images their existence. It is the worship of sockets that has fragmented consciousness and divided the schools over the image of God, while liberation towards Abstraction unites us on the reality of the one Source, far from the clamour of concrete forms that have set a distance between servant and Lord. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved