Seeing and Meeting the Infinite Reality

the Infinite Reality: God

Nahid Angha, Ph.D.

The Prophet looked at the moon in the sky and said: “You will see your God, the Provider, as clearly as you see the moon [and you will be blessed with seeing (ru’yat) Him]; and knowing that He sees you even if you do not see Him.”

Ru’yat may be translated as seeing or vision; in Sufi terminology it refers to “beholding God.” There are Qur’anic verses, as well as hadith, that refer to seeing and meeting God, such as: for those who hope to meet (liqa’) God (29:5), on that Day (a day appointed by God) some faces will be happy looking (nazir) towards their Lord (75:23, 24). But there are those whose hearts are disgraced, are veiled from (seeing) the light of their God (83:15).

Since the beginning of human searching for God, meeting and seeing God have presented as utmost important pursuits. There are people who are promised to see God or His disclosure in paradise, and there are those who discover the divine reality–for what they seek is God Himself, not a promised future nor paradise.

At whatever level a human being seeks the Divine, be it the world, paradise, or God, that is the level at which he will witness divine manifestations or reality. A human being seeking God for the benefits of the world may receive his share from the world and what he sees are those worldly blessings that God is giving him. A human being who seeks God for the reward of paradise may dwell in paradise and what he sees is God’s grace in blessing him with what he has asked for: the paradise. A human being who seeks God for God’s sake alone will discover His reality and such Reality will not be veiled from his sight.

It does not matter where one is looking for God, one will receive just what one is looking for, as to God belongs all that exists, the heaven and the earth (Qur’an 57:2), and He is the first, the last, the apparent and the hidden (Qur’an 57:3). For the people of God (those who love Him as He loves them) are glad tidings in the life of the present and in the hereafter (Qur’an 10:64). These glad tidings perhaps constitute the union between the seeker and the Sought (God), or the human who seeks God becomes, as Sheikh Abdullah Ansari (eleventh century Persian Sufi) writes, like “a raindrop that falls in the ocean to become united with the ocean, as the star disappears in sunlight, and so the one who reaches God reaches Himself.”

This union is what Ahmad Ghazzali (eleventh century Persian Sufi), describes in his Sawanih as the seeker dissolves in the being of the Absolute God, or as Shah Maghsoud writes in his Nirvan, is a longing and whisper to the ultimate reality to “Please secure the seed of faith in [the searching heart of the one who is searching for the divine presences]. “... Let his heart remain humble...command his tongue to be sincere, and his character to form straight and strong. Let his ears hear the epic of Your praises and his eyes see the source of all Light.” Ghazzali uses

the metaphor of the lover (the seeker) and the beloved (God) and writes in a profound lyrical expression:

The beloved called upon the lover: Come and become me. Since if I become you, then the beloved will remain in the state of need, and the lover will become greater. Such need will increase longing. But if you become me, the beloved will become greater, all will become the beloved, and all that remains is the beloved and there exists no lover. There will be no more need. Everything will become the Discovered (yaft), and there will remain no undiscovered (daryab), all becomes wealth and there remains no poverty and all becomes happiness and there remains no misfortune.

We read in the story of Moses of one who longed to see God. In his travels, Moses saw a burning bush and from that burning bush he received a revelation. He asked to see God but the answer was that: you will not see, but...when his Lord revealed and disclosed Himself, Moses fell down unconscious…” (Qur’an 7:143). The verse surely indicates that a human being in his physical form, in his “finite condition” with his physical eyes and optical vision, is unable to see the Absolute reality. However, when one arrives at the appointed time and place for meeting and one’s sight is firm and established, one witnesses the self-disclosure of his God, on the day of the time that is known (Qur’an, 15:38).

People who begin a spiritual journey towards God fall into different ranks and different classes, thus mastering different levels of vision. It is important to note that the levels of one’s knowledge and awareness play an important role in determining the level of one’s vision in witnessing the divine reality. When the level of the wayfarer’s understanding and knowledge advances and he finds certainty in his knowledge, he becomes able to see what he knows, thus when he remembers God he sees Him. As the Qur’anic verse reads: [. . .] when they remember God, they see (7:201). These are the ones whose seeing is not based on mental reasoning and familiarity, but on the illumination of the heart; they see God through the eyes of the heart, and their sight emerges from the illumination of the heart.