The fourth luminous aspect of God’s Sufficiency

 

 

Once, during a period of heedlessness in which I felt overpowered by old age, exile, and illness, I became painfully anxious about my being, for which I felt an attachment so intense that it bordered on infatuation. I was anxious that my being was, together with all other creatures, heading for death and would be stripped of its existence. So once again I had recourse to the same Quranic verse. This time it said, “Take heed of my meaning: look at it through the telescope of belief!”

So I looked and saw with the eye of belief that my minuscule being was the mirror to an unlimited existence; I saw that through infinite expansion it was the means of gaining innumerable existences, and that it was a word of wisdom which would yield fruits of numerous permanent existences more valuable than itself. I came to understand at a degree of certainty arising from knowledge that to live in connection with that unlimited existence, 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 essentially groundless anxieties of loneliness and from innumerable separations and their pains, I formed relationships and bonds of brotherhood with beings that I love, to the number of the Divine Names Which are the sources of the acts manifested on all creation, and living beings in particular. I knew that there would be a permanent union with all of them after a temporary separation. As everybody knows, those who share the same village, town or country, or serve under the same regiment, commander or master, will feel a close brotherhood or sisterhood and a warm friendship with one another, while those who are deprived of such bonds are in constant darkness and torment. Were the fruits of a tree sentient and conscious, they too would feel that they were the siblings, companions and observers of one another. If the tree ceased to exist, or if they were plucked from it, they would suffer separations to the extent of the number of fruits on the tree.

Thus through belief and the connection that it engenders with the Creator and His creatures, like all believers, my being gains the lights of innumerable existences untroubled by separation. Even if my being departs as others remain behind, it is as happy as if it too had remained. Moreover, as explained in detail in The Twenty-fourth Letter, the existence of every living being, and particularly that of those with spirits, is like a word: it is spoken and written down and then disappears. Yet as it goes, it leaves behind numerous “second degree” existences, such as its meaning, its “ideal” identity and form, and its results. It also leaves behind its rewards—if it has been favored with God’s approval and good pleasure—and the truth it has expressed. Only then does it pass beneath the veil.

Similarly, when they are stripped of their external shells, my existence and the existences of all living creatures leave behind their spirits, if they have them; and their meanings, the truths they have expressed, their “ideal” identities, and the worldly results of their personal natures and their fruits pertaining to the Hereafter are also left behind. They also leave their forms and identities in memories and on the “preserved tablets,” in films displaying perpetual scenes, and in the exhibitions of the eternal Knowledge of God. They leave the glorifications they have offered through their nature, disposition and lives, which represent them and give them permanence, in the records of their deeds, and they leave in the sphere of the Divine Names their innate responses to the manifestations and inevitable demands of those Names, together with their instances of being mirrors to them. In short, they leave behind numerous immaterial existences like these, more valuable than their external existences and then they depart. This I knew with the degree of “certainty based on knowledge.”

Thus, through belief and the consciousness and relationship that result from belief, one may attain the above-mentioned perpetual, immaterial existences. Without belief, one is deprived of all these other existences; indeed, even one’s own external existence goes for nothing, as if it had gone into eternal non-existence on one’s own account.

I once felt great sorrow at the speedy destruction of spring flowers; I pitied those delicate creatures. But the truth of belief mentioned above shows that these flowers are seeds in the world of meaning. Since each of them becomes like a fruit-bearing tree which produces all the above-mentioned existences apart from the spirit, they yield a hundredfold profit in respect of the lights of existence. Their external existences do not go to non-existence: they are only hidden. Furthermore, they are the renewed forms of the permanent truth of their species. For the beings of this spring, such as leaves, flowers, and fruit, are identical in nature to those of last spring: the difference is only one of physical identity. I realized that even this difference was to allow those words of Wisdom, those phrases of Mercy and those letters of Power to manifest numerous different meanings. Instead of lamenting, I uttered: “What wonders God wills! How great are God’s blessings!”

Thus, through the consciousness of belief and the connection that belief creates with the Maker of the heavens and the earth, I perceived to a degree how precious and unique it was to be the work of art of a Craftsman Who adorns the skies with stars and the earth with flowers and other exquisite creatures, displaying a hundred miracles in every one of His artifacts. What pride and honor conscious beings feel when they realize they are the work of such an infinitely wonderful Artist! In particular, the verse taught me that since that infinitely miracle-working Artist had inscribed in the tiny copy of a human being the mighty book of the vast heavens and earth, even making every human being a specially chosen and perfect synopsis of that book, the honor, perfectibility, and value bestowed on human potentiality are great indeed. And it taught me that human beings are favored with this honor and value through belief in God and establishing a relationship with the Creator that results from such belief. With the intention of speaking on their behalf, I uttered with the tongues of all creatures: “God is sufficient for us; how excellent a Guardian He is!”

Said Nursi