The Presence of the Divine

By Jamal ud Din al Burhany Macfarlane

At some stage in life every intelligent person asks themselves the first real questions:
Who am I? What is this world? How did I come to be and where am I going?
In a straightforward way these questions are answered by the traditional response of a Muslim on hearing of the passing away of a fellow believer:

"To Allah we belong, and to Him is our return" (Holy Qur'an 2:156).

This explains that we are creatures of Allah, that we come from him and return to him and that the creation in this life and the after-life is the way of our return.
It sometimes seems that there are two creations: humankind and the Universe we find ourselves in and that mankind is somehow somewhat separate and different from Nature. There is the macrocosm, the vast universe which is our outer world, and the microcosm, the individual human being, which contains our inner, personal world. This sense of not quite 'fitting in' gives rise in the human individual to the 'first real questions'. More light is shed by an Islamic tradition, in which Allah, the One Divinity, speaks in the first person:

"I was a Hidden Treasure, I loved to be known,
so I created the Creation in order to be known."
Hadith Qudsi

Here, Allah Himself, explains why He created the creation and why He created mankind. He created the creation so that His Hidden Essence (Ad-Dhat), the 'Hidden Treasure' might be known; and the special creature of this creation destined to achieve this knowledge is the human being. This explains why the human tends to feel somewhat dislocated from the rest of Nature; because of the implanted faculties of consciousness and conscience which drive the human to try to remember his purpose and realise his personal relationship to his Creator.
In the Holy Qur'an, Ahadith and texts of the Sufis there are many descriptions of the levels of creation and their relation to the Creator . The Creator could not be known from the world of forms (alam-an-nasut) without the world of similitudes (alam-i-mithal) above it in the hierarchy, which is the world of meanings, related to the world of forms. The content of this world of similitudes, also known as the Imaginal World, is projected into the human mind by means of true insights or realisations, true dreams and, in the case of mystics, true visions. The physical world is the world of literal names and forms, whereas the Imaginal world is the world of symbols and meanings. The physicist Landauer realised that information cannot exist except in physical form. Hence the creation had to be created for the non-manifest meanings to be known.

However, information is the mere patterning of physical forms. For meaning to arise a mind must link a patterned form which is a symbol to our understanding of what that symbol means; i.e. to the reality to which it refers. Apparently only mankind can do this consciously. We understand a 'stop sign' means 'Stop!' Kangaroos do not. We can understand symbols we have never seen before if we know the language of correspondences. We link the concept symbolised by the patterning with the 'reality' that the symbol represents. We associate the letters 'P-E-N' with the concept we have of an actual pen. In the physical realm (alam-i-nasut) a physical pen is a symbol of a concept in the alam-i-mithal which refers to the reality of that concept which transcends the imaginal world. That reality lies in the world above the alam-i-mithal in the World of Commands (alam al-amr or alam al-arwah). Without these levels of worlds and their inter-relatedness by meanings the Hidden Treasure could not come to be known by a progressive process of realisations.

The simplest division of terms is defined by: Allah and 'ma siwa Allah', Allah and 'everything-other-than-Allah'. There is only God and all other than God does not really exist.
He is as He was.

This is a statement of the Oneness of the Divine Being (tawhid). This means that the creation of the cosmoses did not change or diminish Allah in His Essence. He is now as He was before creation.
Adding a third term, that of 'absolute nothingness', which is merely a mental concept of the absence of everything, permits many points to be clarified. This concept of 'absolute nothingness' is really impossible because it is a concept of denying the existence of God as well as the presence of the manifested creation.
The concept of 'absolute nothingness' is useful because from the purely human rational point of view the logical situation in regards to the creation is that there should have been absolutely nothing to 'start with' and absolutely nothing for evermore. The advantage of this concept, like the zero in mathematics which represents 'nothing', is that we find we can only think of it if we bring in several other concepts, namely: space or form, time or change, and 'priorness' or causality. So, just as in mathematics we define zero in terms of addition and subtraction, the concept of 'absolute nothingness' is conceptualised as an empty space in which all forms are removed and an infinite time in which nothing exists and any change is impossible. So we arrive at this concept of 'absolute nothingness' by abstracting from our experience of existence, which is clearly not 'nothing'. So it is possible for us to think of an impossible or self-contradictory concept. So here our logical concept of the necessity for there to be just 'absolute nothingness' is contradicted by our experience of existence.

"Existence implies miracle: it is by miracle that things are, so to speak, separated from nothingness; the gap between them and nothingness is infinite, and seen from this angle the least speck possesses something of the absolute, of the 'divine'. To say that one must see God everywhere means, above all, that one must see Him in the existence of beings and things, our own included".

'Seeing God everywhere' is not the same as Pantheism which is the belief that God and the universe are identical. It is better phrased as 'finding the handiwork of God everywhere in creation' or 'remembering the Presence of God in the presence of all things'. So although Allah is al-Dhaahir, the Manifest, and the creation is manifest, Allah is manifested in creation, in one way, by the 'miracle of creation' which is evidence of the Creator and He is not manifested in His Reality in the creation since He is simultaneously al-Batin, the Uncreated Reality. However, the realisation that He is manifest means that to intuit that one is in His Presence. This is precisely the experience or direct intuition of the mystic as a creature or slave of the Creator. The Divinity Itself is beyond being and beyond earthly experience. This argument is summarised in the table above.

The importance of this categorisation of terms is to realise that any thing other than the Divine Essence does not really exist. It only has relative existence, like a reflection in a mirror. This explains why the human has a vague sense of individuality and personal existence which is shaken daily by the processes of forgetfulness and sleep. The human creature can only operate successfully by forgetting. Imagine everything that we saw or heard in the last minute or hour was still simultaneously present in our consciousness. The human is made up of a sense of existence, a sense of personal identity and a sense of separateness. The Declaration of faith states: 'Laa ilaha illa Allah', 'there is no deity but God, there is no reality but the One Reality': Allah. Only Allah is ultimately the Real, ultimately the Omni-Present, ultimately the One Existent and so our sense of self, our personal existence and separateness is not an ultimate reality.

One can obtain a feel for this state of affairs through the analogy of a mirror representing the phenomenal realm. Everything which is seen in the mirror we will call an image in the mirror-world. Everything which could be seen in the mirror is a potential image in the mirror-world. The source of an image (say a page of writing) is the real existence relative to the mirror-world. Its potential, but not actualised, image in the mirror is its pre-existent image before the page is moved in front of the mirror. When the page is moved in front of the mirror its reflection, which is the actualisation of its image, comes into existence. It is no longer a potential existent to the mirror-world but an actual existent in the mirror-world. The image derives its existence from the source object and in some ways is identical to some attributes of the source but is not identical with the source itself. So the images have no real existence because they have no substantiality and can disappear at any moment. They derive their mirror-world existence from the existence of a real object in front of the mirror. They derive their potential existence in the mirror-world due to the real existent and the presence of the mirror. The potential image in the mirror before its actual reflection is pre-existent in the mind of the one who writes on the sheet of paper.

So the manifestation does not really exist, however, one name of Allah is al-Dhaahir, the Manifest. The process of creation is ambiguous and has the nature of an illusory duality with the uncreated. Allah is both the Hidden (al-Batin) and the Manifest (al-Dhaahir) and as for example:

"Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth" (Holy Qur'an 24:35).

And:

"Nothing is like unto Him and He is the All-Hearing All-Knowing" (Holy Qur'an 42:11).

For Muslims every possible consistent meaning of the Holy Qur'an is true. So how can Allah be both the Hidden (al-Batin) and the Manifest (al-Dhaahir)? In more general terms, Allah is Incomparable (tanzih) but has Similitudes (tashbih). Everything in our creation is manifest, but we cannot say that a table or you or I is God.

"Everything perishes except His Face" (Holy Qur'an 28:88).

On the other hand these things cannot be wholly other than Allah or they would be an entirely separate reality.

"And He is with you wherever you are" (Holy Qur'an 57:4).

What this reveals is the power for provoking the progressive realisation of truths that is one of the miracles of the Holy Qur'an. It reveals the limitedness of human language and human reason, but entices one to hold two apparently contradictory truths simultaneously and thereby transcend a limited view. Whatever understanding we achieve, the Holy Qur'an outpaces it.
'This is not a sentence.' In this sentence the form contradicts the meaning. This demonstrates one of the limitations of human language but more importantly shows how the sentence (a 'created thing' in grammar) can contradict its meaning (the aspect uncreated or non-manifest in physical form). Allah is Manifest by our realisation of His Divine Presence but His true meaning or nature is forever hidden or Incomparable.

For further reading:
Sufi Terminology -the mystical language of Islam by Amatullah Armstrong under the direction of Murshid F. A. Ali ElSenossi, A.S.Noordeen (soft cover $39.00).
Gnosis - Divine Widsom by Frithjof Schuon, Perennial Books (soft cover $41.00).
Stations of Wisdom by Frithjof Schuon, World Wisdom Books (soft cover $28.00).