"They All Return to Me in The End": A Brief Reflection on Some Verses in The Surah Pilgrimage (22)

The following verses touch my heart, and after reflection and divine grace, I can feel their truth.  It is God speaking, so let’s listen carefully and only those who can respond can hear, because hearing is a kind of responding:

“If they reject you [Prophet], so did the people of Noah before them, and those of Ad, Thamud, Abraham, Lot, Midian. Moses too was called a liar. I gave the disbelievers time, but in the end I punished them. How I condemned them!  How many towns steeped in wrongdoing We have destroyed and left in total ruin; how many deserted wells; how many lofty palaces!  Have these people not travelled through the land with hearts to understand and ears to hear? It is not people’s eyes that are blind, but their hearts within their breasts.” (22:42-46)

How many?  How much evidence?  Can I feel the passage of time?  Can I imagine the cycle of coming into being and leaving the world?  Can I see the recycling of towns, wells, and lofty palaces?  Do I read history?  Do I watch historical movies?  Haven’t I seen the impermanence in the hands of God?  Do I not see the presence of God in the cycle of events and in my self?  Do I not have the heart, is my heart deaf and blind, to seek God, pray to God, prostate to God?

“They will challenge you [Prophet] to hasten the punishment.  God will not fail in His promise– a Day with your Lord is like a thousand years by your reckoning.  To many a town steeped in wrongdoing I gave more time and then struck them down: they all return to Me in the end.” (22:47-48)

Can I doubt that this life is transient, a mote in the historical whirlwind?  Can I reckon what does it mean that “a Day with your Lord is like a thousand years by your reckoning”?   Can I digest the spiral cycle of returning, the returning to the center, as dependent origination which returns to its abode, the self-sufficient God?  Can I imagine it?  Is God not everywhere, as the center is present in all periphery?  In the spiral of galaxies and flowers, in the golden spiral and ratio[1]?  An allusion and sign to “they all return to Me in the end.”?

“Say [Prophet], ‘People, I am sent only to give you clear warning.’  Those who believe and do good deeds will be forgiven and have a generous reward, but those who strive to oppose Our messages and try in vain to defeat Us are destined for the Blaze.”

How many centuries of warning do I need to heed?  Do I not see that God speaks to us in a nonapologetic and straightforward language?  Whom are we deceiving, but ourselves by our empty sentimentalism which always intensifies suffering by depriving the world from its soul?  Have I not seen that there is no other way?  Am I blind to the fact that my best wishes ended up and ends up to nihilism and hedonism at the end?  Can I not understand that it is in vain to escape from ‘returning’ to the center of spiral—the farther I escape the further I wither away into annihilation?  Am I blind?  Is my heart hardened?     

“We have never sent any messenger or prophet before you [Muhammad] into whose wishes Satan did not insinuate something, but God removes [The basic meaning of nasakha is ‘removed’ rather than ‘abrogated’ (al-Mu_jam al-Wasit)] what Satan insinuates and then God affirms His message. God is all knowing and wise: He makes Satan’s insinuations a temptation only for the sick at heart and those whose hearts are hardened– the evildoers are profoundly opposed [to the Truth]– and He causes those given knowledge to realize that this Revelation is your Lord’s Truth, so that they may believe in it and humble their hearts to Him: God guides the faithful to the straight path.”

How can I know the insinuations of Satan?  How can I discern Satanic verses?  Can I listen to my heart guided by God?  Did God not give me a measure for discretion inside my heart?  Can my heart harden and go astray?  How can I keep my heart young and pliable to God’s message?  How can I stay vigilant?  How can I keep my ears, eyes, heart fresh?  Is the Satanic voice not vain, a noise, and does it not perish easily in an iota of divine of light?  Should I not surrender to God and the experience of God which is light through and through surging within and erasing fogs of friction and conflict?  Can I be seduced by legalism and empty following formality of the words rather than letting them enter my heart?  Does my heart not testify that the words of God have a healing effect and connect me to the center and the words of Satan give rise to empty emotions of ambitions and revenge, to alienation and the illusion of power and absolute autonomy?  Do the Satanic insinuations not disconnect me from the light embedded in my heart and attach me to empty desires and whims?  Is my discernment not the experience of spiritual elevation and transcendence—that which feels and transcends words of God in the surging bliss of the light within, and to experience friction and separation by the Satanic seduction of empty sounds and noises?  Does God not guide me, when I turn away from delusion towards God?  Is it not obvious to the heart that can hear that to say any person or thing is God is an aberration and idolatry?  Is it difficult to see that Satan enters through rigidity and excessive righteous indignation as well as sins?  Can’t we see that Satan enters through exaggerations and imbalance?  Can I not feel it?  Did the Quran not come to rectify Satanic insinuations?  And is it not a clear guidepost to always remember that only God and only God will guide me to see diversions and it is not the subject of my own autonomous logos only?  Has God not been so close, closer than my jugular vein, and I have been blind to it for so long?  Am I not thirsty to experience constant presence (not identity) of God within me?  Is this nearness not a measure?  Am I not a mask over this nearness?                 

“The disbelievers will remain in doubt about it until the Hour suddenly overpowers them or until torment descends on them on a Day devoid of all hope. On that Day control will belong to God: He will judge between them. Those who believe and do good deeds will be admitted to Gardens of Delight, while those who disbelieve and reject Our revelations will receive a humiliating torment.” (22:49-57)

Can I be grateful enough to God who gave me the insight to understand the message of revelation, as clear as understanding that a flower will wither away without its soil and water?  Is this difficult to digest?  Is not the rejection of God, the rejection of air and sunshine?  Can I not see that the delusion of independence and power will destroy me?  Can I not become aware and fully conscious of my poverty of existence in love with God?  Can I not see that I can write these words by God’s subsistence?  Can I not see that I can’t escape God, I have nowhere to go but destruction?  Has God not been so close, closer than my jugular vein, and I have been blind to it for so long?  Am I not thirsty to experience constant presence (not identity) of God within me?  Is this nearness not a measure?  Am I not a mask over this nearness?                 

---

[1] In geometry, a golden spiral is a logarithmic spiral whose growth factor is φ, the golden ratio. That is, a golden spiral gets wider (or further from its origin) by a factor of φ for every quarter turn it makes.  Φ is 1.6180339887
http://nation.lk/online/2015/08/08/nietzsche-on-buddhist-philosophy.html

Golden ratio: In mathematics, two quantities are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities. Expressed algebraically, for quantities a and b with a > b > 0,

          A + B = A

             A        B

A golden rectangle with longer side a and shorter side b, when placed adjacent to a square with sides of length a, will produce a similar golden rectangle with longer side a + b and shorter side a.
http://nation.lk/online/2015/08/08/nietzsche-on-buddhist-philosophy.html