The fourth luminous aspect of God’s sufficiency

 

Once, when in an instance of heedlessness in which I felt overpowered by circumstances like old age, exile, illness, and defeat, I was painfully anxious about my being, to which I was intensely attached and with which I was infatuated. I was anxious that my being, as well as all other creatures, were heading for death, were being stripped of existence. So, once again, I had recourse to the verse. It said to me, “Note my meaning; look at it through the telescope of belief!”

So I looked with the eye of belief and saw that like all other believers, my minuscule being was the mirror of an Unlimited Being, and through infinite expansion, the means of gaining innumerable existences, and a word of wisdom yielding the fruits of numerous permanent existences more valuable than itself. So, I knew with the certainty of knowledge that to live in connection with that Being, even for an instant, was as valuable as eternal existence. For I understood through the consciousness of belief that my being was a work of art and a manifestation of the Necessarily Existent Being. So, being saved from the essentially groundless anxieties of loneliness and from innumerable separations and their pains, I formed relations and bonds of brotherhood with beings that I love, to the number of Divine acts and Names responsible for beings and especially living ones, and I knew that there was a permanent union with all of them after a temporary separation. And so, through belief and connection with the Creator and all of His creatures through belief, like all believers, my being gained the lights of innumerable existences untainted by separation. Even when my being departs, as they remain behind, it is as happy as if it too had remained.

In short, death is not separation, it is union; it is a change of location; it is producing an eternal fruit.

Bediuzzaman Said Nursi