THE JOURNEY OF THE SELF
(Excerpts Only)

By: Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri

Chapter 3
Phase One: The World of Absolute Unitive Reality

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From the world of the unseen came the command, 'Be!' However one conceptualizes this event, it happened. Creation began. There is a good description in the Qur'an of the story of creation. It tells of the inception and creation of the cosmos and the worlds of celestial and terrestrial creation, the rise of consciousness and the subsequent confrontation of good and evil, obedience and disobedience, and the development of the macrocosm and the microself.⁽¹⁾

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Reality willed our present universe, Be! – and creation began. Its equivalent on the human level is the emergence of the light of consciousness. At that point, all that the microself – you and I and everyone else – knew was its own essence, by itself.

At that point, then, from the realm of the unseen emerges the spark of creation, seen and bounded. From the formless void of the cosmos came the first shattering explosion of the Big Bang, as some scientists call it. In the dark void of the human womb comes the emergence of the light of consciousness. These different manifestations are descriptions of the same event, for the human (microself) reflects the heavenly (macrocosm), and the terrestrial echoes the celestial. In the Qur`an it says:

We shall show them Our signs in the universe and in themselves until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth. (41:53)

The Qur`an also challenges us to accept the fact that there existed an absolute unific state before the act of creation, and asks:

Was there not a period of time that came upon man when he could not be mentioned? (76:1)

The challenge is for us to seek an answer within ourselves. How, after all, could something come from nothing, then again vanish into apparent oblivion? The meaning here is that man's existence was known, or decreed, but in another frame of reference altogether – in the system of the unseen, in the timeless, limitless, eternal book, whose faint echo and copy appears in the flimsy world of material and physical reality.

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Notes

⁽¹⁾See Journey of the Universe as Expounded in the Qur`an, by the author, published by KPI Ltd, London: 1985, for a detailed account of the story of creation. [Up]