Spiritual Healing
Question:
Religious
teachings and beliefs speak of many unseen agencies — jinn, angels, the
heavens, paradise, hell, the Throne and the Footstool, and so on — realities
that lie beyond our sight. This raises a
Question: if these things truly exist, why do
they not appear to us as other things do? Why has no human being been granted,
by nature, the ability to see beyond the confines of time and space?
Answer:
When
a child first opens its eyes upon this world, the state of its consciousness at
that moment may be expressed through the following equation:
The
child's consciousness = the consciousness of Adam + the consciousness of the
human species + the consciousness of the parents
As
the child grows, further elements begin entering its consciousness, and its
structure keeps changing accordingly. We may then express it thus:
A
person's consciousness = the consciousness of Adam + the consciousness of the
human species + the consciousness of the parents + the consciousness of the
environment
According
to the first equation, the child, as a member of its species, belongs to the
family of the universe, and in that capacity its mind remains connected to
every other thing within it. It perceives and senses the unseen agencies fully
and completely.
But
as the child grows older, the environment's concepts, ideas, and influences
begin to press upon it with full force — a process that unfolds both knowingly
and unknowingly, and from which no child is spared. Through constant
repetition, the information supplied by the environment settles into the
child's conscious pattern. The child speaks the very language its parents
speak, though no one formally teaches it to do so. When a child is introduced
to the moon, it is told that the moon dwells in the sky; and as a relative
points a finger toward it, the child absorbs the idea that the moon lies at a
great distance. In this way, alongside distance, the length of time becomes
embedded in the child's mind as well. The sense of distance and duration
continues to take root — a sense that cannot step outside the inherited
consciousness of Adam's species. Through parents and kin, the child receives
constant reports: this is our house, this is the school, this is a star, this
is a tree, and so on. We come to believe these reports, and they, in turn,
become our memory and our experience. Alongside sight, sound too instils the
sense of distance and time — a soft voice for what is near, a raised one for
what is far. This mechanism of nearness and distance instils in the child a
bondage to time. All these experiences and pieces of information impose time
and distance upon the human child so thoroughly that every faculty, every
sense, becomes confined within their bounds. And the longer the child lives
within this confinement, the further it drifts from timelessness.
Whatever
information reaches the human mind arrives, in truth, from timelessness — and
it is this very timelessness that keeps dispatching ever-new information into
the realm of time. Were we to liken timelessness to a single point, we might
say that within that point is inscribed the unified programme of the entire
universe. When this unified programme is broadcast from that point in the form
of waves, it strikes the surface of human memory and scatters — and the instant
it scatters, each wave takes on a different shape and form. Since human memory
has, by acquired habit rather than by nature, become limited, it renders one
thing near, another far, another very far, and another altogether absent — that
is, hidden in the unseen. Could we but locate that point where the universe's
unified programme is inscribed, distance itself would cease to exist.
The
same law governs the unseen agencies. Our inherited nature conceives of them as
distant and concealed, and it has entered our conviction that the unseen cannot
be seen — and this very conviction becomes the veil over their witnessing. This
is why the first step toward perceiving the unseen is simply to acknowledge it;
for until the conviction takes root that something exists behind the veil, the
mind will never incline itself toward seeing it. This is what the Qur'an terms belief
in the unseen (Iman bil-Ghaib). If, for instance, we had no
certainty and had never been informed that London is a city, we would never set
out toward it — and London would remain, for us, a thing unseen.
That
man has in our age reached the moon, invented spacecraft, and devised countless
wireless systems is a clear sign that his connection to timelessness never
ceases, even for a moment — which is precisely why we can never sever our bond
with our true origin, timelessness itself. This capacity keeps turning and
unfolding in new ways, even as we continue to exercise it within the grip of
time. These very inventions point to something else too: that human
consciousness is steadily seeking a way out of that grip. When that escape is
finally complete, man will need neither spacecraft nor rockets — he will be
able to travel through the universe at the speed of thought, by will alone, and
the unseen agencies will stand before him, witnessed. Anyone who wishes may
attain this capacity; nature, standing above time and duration, has placed it
within every human being.