JOURNEY OF THE UNIVERSE
  AS EXPOUNDED IN THE QUR`AN
  (Excerpts Only)

By: Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri

Chapter 7
Eternal Life

We have tried to pick the âyât which describe to us the meaning behind, as well as the form of, creation. We covered the description of the beginning of creation; how it arose from one unified field; how the earth and heavens then separated; how the earth became stabilized; and how life arose from it. In the meantime, we were given the parallel inner meaning of, and the reason for, the rise of man, and the fact that he must go through this purification, this inward melting pot of the world, so that the rise of higher consciousness takes place within him. With the development of intellect and awareness he gains the wisdom of discrimination that stems from the knowledge of tawhîd – seeing two and glorifying One, seeing the good and bad, and knowing that all of it stems from the One.

That I may do good in that which I have left. By no means! It is a mere word that he speaks; and before them is a barrier until the day they are raised. (al-Mu'minûn:100)

As far as the individual is concerned, the end of his life experience comes with the unique breakthrough experience of death. For him, death represents his personal or mini-resurrection, because between that experience and resurrection he is suspended in a zone of non-time and non-action. Those who are still living call that space of time between an individual's death and everyone's final day a barzakh, an interval, gap, or a non-man's land. We remain in this barzakh until all life comes to an end and resurrection and its attendant states come about. Each of us will then enter only one experience of non-time, whether pleasant or unpleasant, garden-like or hellish.

Entering the barzakh involves breaking away from the past state of life on earth. In the barzakh one is unable to act or change everything in one's total record system. The new state of eternity has not yet come about, and there is an apparent waiting period, as if one is in no-man's land between two national borders. The end of this waiting period comes when all experiences of physical creation on earth come to an end – the big collapse – and when all living things are submerged again into the state of subtlety and thereby into another realm of existence that is completely beyond our intellectual capacity to comprehend.

At the end of the expanding big bang – as we have seen, everything is in expansion – a point will be reached when creation will collapse and revert to the zone of non-time, where time no longer exists as we experience it. Then we will go through the regeneration of the garden and the fire, and everyone will recognize that he has experienced these states before in the form of an echo, because the next life will be a reversed mirror image of this life. But because it is in a timeless zone it will be on a different level of consciousness. This is the message we receive from the Qur`an in describing the cosmic journey from which we are not separated.

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