Concepts and Symbols

The Arabic word for 'heart', qalb, is derived from the root QLB or QBL, which embraces a number of concepts having to do with 'turning'.  In Sufi metaphysics the Heart is the center of the psyche, the point at which it is intersected by the vertical ray of the Spirit (ruh). This symbolic image has obvious affinities with the act of constructing a circle using a compass and a sheet of paper. The Heart is who we really are in the sight of God; it is the central point of our full and authentic humanity. Whoever wants to rise along the vertical path of the Spirit, the axis mundi, first has to have reached the Center, the Heart, which is another way of saying that we can’t relate to God with only a part of ourselves. A line drawn from any point on the circumference of a circle so as to intersect a line passing vertically through the circle’s center can never be one with the infinite elevation which the vertical line symbolizes. It must intersect the vertical line at some point short of infinity. Furthermore, it only 'represents' its own point-of-origin on the circumference; it can in no way stand for the circle as a whole. But the center of the circle does stand for the whole circle, since it is the point from which the circle expands, and to which it returns. And only the central point of the circle is available to the ray of infinite elevation which symbolizes the relationship between the human form and God. It is said that God holds the Heart between His fingers, and turns it however He will. This is a way of saying that the Heart is the reality through which we can see how all the changes-of-state we experience in passing time have the same Point-of-Origin; that change on the horizontal plane is an expression of permanence on the vertical one; that the waqt, the present moment of spiritual time, is the manifestation of God’s eternity in the created world. And just as God turns the Heart however He will, so the Heart is the point through which and by which the human soul returns to God on the spiritual Path; it is the spiritual Kaaba, the qiblah toward which we turn.

Beauty and Power (Jamal and Jalal) are the two categories of Divine qualities manifested in creation: sometimes blended in varying proportions as in the beauty of a swiftly running stallion or the power of a rushing waterfall. The Beautiful and the Sublime (or Infinitely Powerful) are the two essential qualities of the natural world: the still reflective lake and the erupting volcano; the dove and the cobra. Created Beauty is an expression of the Names of God which fall under the category of Beauty (al-Jamil); Sublimity is an expression of those Names which fall under Majesty (al-Jalal). Without the Sublime, nature would be stagnant and cloying; without the Beautiful it would be horrendous, too much to bear. This is why a balanced relationship to the natural world – and to life itself, for that matter – requires both rigor and rapture, both war and peace, the relaxant of calm pleasure and the tonic of danger and struggle. If it’s all peace, we become effete; if it’s all struggle, we become barbaric. There is also Sublimity in Beauty – witness the stallion – and Beauty in Sublimity – witness the tiger. God, too, manifests as both Beauty and Sublimity, both Mercy and Rigor or Majesty—which is why the integral vision of nature is the primary support, outside of divinely-revealed religion, for the contemplation of God. 

When Muhammad cast the idols out of the Kaaba, he was not only reminding his people that it was their duty to worship Allah, not the natural forces which are Allah’s creation; he was also casting the idols of self-worship out of the temple of the human heart.

It was the Prophet’s mission to remind the Arabs, and all later Muslims, that there is more to reality than what your five senses can tell you: [God] said, Did I not say unto you, verily, I alone know the hidden reality of the heavens and the earth? [2:34].  In this revelation, the ancient religion of Abraham was being renewed: And thus we gave Abraham insight into [God’s] mighty dominion over the heavens and the earth – and to the end that he might become one of those who are inwardly sure. Then, when the night overshadowed him with its darkness, he beheld a star: he exclaimed, ‘This is my Sustainer!’– but when it went down, he said, ‘I love not the things that go down.’ Then, when he beheld the moon rising, he said ‘This is my Sustainer!’– but when it went down, he said, ‘Indeed, if my Sustainer guide me not, I will certainly be one of the people who go astray!’ Then, when he beheld the sun rising, he said, ‘This is my Sustainer! This is the greatest [of all]!’– but when it [too] went down, he exclaimed: ‘O my people! Far be it from me to ascribe divinity, as you do, to aught beside God’ [6:75-78].

We think of nature as something outside of us which also contains us, instead of realizing that the Spirit of nature – God in his Names Al-Khaliq (The Creator), Al-Bari (the Producer), Al-Musawwir (the Fashioner), the Life-Giver (Al-Muyhi), and Al-Hafiz (the All-Preserver) – is within us as well as all around us, that He holds both us and the universe we are a part of between His two hands. He shows us His signs on the horizons and in our souls; He is Al-Shahid, the Witness over everything.

Earth has always helped humanity remember Eden. The English word Paradise comes from a Persian word meaning 'walled garden'; the Qur’an describes Paradise as an area of gardens beneath which rivers flow (i.e., a world of visible forms whose secret springs of life are in the Unseen). When witnessed in the Light of God, the earth is the very image of these gardens, her green trees and grasses the colour of Paradise, which is also the color of Islam, of life and abundance. 

God made the universe to remind of Him. I was a hidden treasure and loved to be known; I created the universe so that I could be known (hadith qudsi).  And he made the human heart capable of knowing Him, just as the ear hears sounds or the eye sees light. 

Every Muslim has a duty to seek knowledge: of nature, of God, of other people, and of himself. He who knows himself, knows his Lord. This is why the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said: O Lord, increase me in knowledge ; and Seek knowledge, even as far as China; and O Lord, show me things as they really are. 

When trying to tell the difference between things by naming them, we tend to rely on our eyes: we attach a particular name to a particular object we see. But to get a sense of the original Unity that exists before we start naming things, one thing we can do is pay more attention to what we hear than what we see. When we name things, we merely attach words to them; when God names things, He brings them into existence. If we stop speaking and talking to ourselves for once, and listen instead to the sounds of the world, it is as if we were listening to the sound of God’s original act of creation.

Listening softens the gaze. And if we listen deeply enough – if, that is, we stop talking to ourselves completely enough – then the Eye of the Heart may open, and let us see into the heart of things.

The world is God’s first Book, in which every form is a letter or sentence. But the world is also an echo of God’s spoken Word, in which every sound is a reverberation of the original word Kun, ‘Be!’, by which He brings all things into existence. The sense of sight is related to our ability to tell things apart by naming them. The visual forms of objects appear as established facts; they seem to exist in their own right. In the face of their matter-of-fact existence, we tend to forget that, in reality, all things are signs of God.

The sense of hearing is different. It is related more to God’s continuous act of creating the universe than to the catalogue of what He has already created. This is why, in Islam, the written and spoken word is emphasized over the image, and why making images of the natural world is discouraged, and why making an image of God is forbidden: because an image is always in danger of turning into an idol. Whenever we take something literally, as if it existed in its own right rather than being an act of God, we have made an idol out of it. If we see the universe as made up of things, we are tempted to identify with those things, to desire and possess them; and the first step toward possessing something is to define it, to give it a name. 

But if we see the universe as made up of acts of God, acts which we can no more predict, or control, or grasp with our greedy hands than the next gust of wind or the next cry of a bird, then this kind of idolatry becomes impossible to us. All we can do is wait, in attentive silence, for God’s next gift. His next warning. His next command. Instead of always trying to name and define things, why not keep silent, and listen to how God is pleased to name and define things? Why not let Him teach us their shapes and definitions? He taught Adam the names, all of them [2:31]. After all, it is He, not us, who creates them.

Sound is bigger than us; it surrounds us and washes over us. We can deliberately look in a particular direction, but we can’t deliberately listen in a particular direction. Sounds simply come to us, unpredictably, uncontrollably, from beyond what we know. This is why hearing is related to obedience – instead of judging and discriminating, we simply ‘hear and obey’ [2:285]. To hear is to heed. With our eyes we investigate, we spy things out – but the knowledge that flows into our ears is something that is impressed upon us, not something we can grasp or locate on our own initiative.

The will of God comes into our experience through the dimension of time. We become sensitive to the will of God by paying attention to the changes that are always going on – and one of the best ways to do this is simply by listening instead of looking. If we listen deeply enough we can hear the subtle changes in the quality of passing time, like changes in the weather, or in the quality of light, or the mood we and our friends are in. If we listen deeply enough to the sounds of the world, we may almost hear the silent pressure of God’s creative power – the word Kun – by which He brings all things into existence. 

In listening to the sounds of the world, you simply sit and attend to all the sounds within your range – birds, wind in the trees, flowing water, traffic sounds, human voices – and hear them as the voice of Allah, the vibration of the primal creative Source of the Universe, finally reaching your ears. 

When you listen to the sounds of the world, you begin to see yourself as part of the world around you, a universe created by God before you were born, immensely bigger than you in space, immensely older than you in time. And you also come to understand that God’s act of creating the world never ended; it is still going on. If he were to stop saying Kun! (Be!) for one instant, the universe and everything in it would fall into oblivion. This is one way of coming to a deeper understanding of what it means that God is Creator, Producer, Fashioner, Lord of all Worlds. Although this kind of deep listening can be practiced anywhere, among the best places to do it, are by a stream or waterfall, or on the shore of the ocean, or in a wooded area, during a gentle wind. (Or if at night, the frogs and the crickets.)

The practice of paying attention to the natural world is a discipline in itself; it requires us to suppress our formless agitation, our obsessive planning and strategizing, as well as the images produced in our mind by fear and desire. We must never forget that heedlessness is only cured by discipline; we must also never forget that Paradise is a Garden, of which the natural world is the clearest of signs. As for those who have attained to righteousness – what of those who have attained to righteousness? 

When we go out into the natural world, into that part of the planet which is neither destroyed nor cultivated by human action – the part that 'arises of itself',  not by our own efforts and plans and agendas, but by the will of God – we meet a different part of ourselves. When you are in a natural, living environment, an environment that possesses life, like you do, but does not possess serious heavy ego, then you can begin to feel how your body is a part of nature, part of God’s creation, one more living organism among the bugs and plants and birds...

The Qur’an mentions something called ‘the Trust’ which God offered . . . unto the heavens and the earth and the hills, but they shrank from bearing it and were afraid of it. And man assumed it [33:72]. What exactly is this ‘Trust’?

The Trust is our ability, which is also our duty, to see the forms of the world around us, both natural and man-made, as signs of the Creator. The angels can witness God’s presence without having to deal with the many distractions our five human senses confront us with. The animals are immersed in the world of the senses; they have no way of standing apart from it. Only we human beings have the power to sense God’s presence and submit to His will, while at the same time living in, and dealing with, a material world. In other words, humanity is the bridge or barzakh (isthmus) between God and the created universe. We are God’s khalifa on earth, his delegated representative. And because we are khalifa, we have a privileged relationship to knowledge. The animals are fixed, by God’s will, in their basic views of reality; we call this 'instinct'.  Humanity alone is capable of growing in knowledge by moving from view to view. 

This ability to change and enhance our view of reality is the reason why humanity has been able to develop art, culture, science and technology. But if this ability remains separate from our capacity to sense the presence of God – which is also our God-given duty, since it is part of the Trust – then it becomes destructive. We end up using our uniquely human ability to manipulate the environment in the service of desires which are still basically on an animal level. This sort of desire is appropriate for animals, of course, since they don’t possess civilization and advanced technology. But if dogs or pigs, for example, had access to nuclear weapons, this would definitely not be a desirable state of affairs. Our ability to fulfill our desires has grown over the centuries; our ability to change what we desire, or sacrifice a given desire entirely, apparently has not. Rationality helps us to satisfy our desires, but faith gives us the power to change or sacrifice them. And faith is the basis of the Trust. If we do not fulfill this Trust, then we are not yet, or no longer, fully human; rather we are animals without the protection of a single unchanging pattern of perception, chaotic animals who are always shifting from pattern to pattern without being able to control ourselves, who are addicted to 'trying things out' and so end up destroying much of the world we might have loved.

Part of the Trust is the human capacity to know the names of things, their inner essences. And He imparted unto Adam the names of all things [2:31].  This is a kind of knowledge even the angels do not possess: He brought them within the ken of the angels and said: ‘Declare unto me the names of these [things]... They replied... ‘No knowledge have we save that which Thou hast imparted unto us... Said He, ‘O Adam convey unto them the names of these [things]’ [2:31-33]. It is because God taught Adam all the names, names which even the angels did not know, that it is often said that the human form, alone in all creation, is capable of reflecting all the Names of God; it is precisely this which makes us so destructive when we fail to live up to this form, or when we betray it.

To name something is to distinguish it from its background, to see it as a separate entity. When God taught Adam all the names, He gave the human race the unequalled ability to discriminate between things, largely through the gift of human language. Yet God is not many; He is One. His Names are not separate entities; they are names of Him alone. The forms of the universe are not separate 'gods' which exist in their own right, but signs of the One God. This means that our heightened ability to tell the difference between things is a two-edged sword. If we practice discrimination while remembering God, then we are fulfilling the Trust. But if we forget God in our desire to analyze, dissect and control the world around us, then we have become idolaters. . . .

One of the arts of appreciating nature is developing our knowledge of the names and characteristics of things; the other, companion art is knowing how to keep quiet and pay attention, both within and without. Speech is knowledge of the many; silence is knowledge of the One. Only if we forget, for a while, what we already know, will we be able to learn something we don’t yet know. (And it is exactly the same in relation to God: we can know about Him through His Names, but we cannot know God Himself in His Essence; and yet – if we are silent enough and vigilant enough – God Himself may make His presence known to us.)

Our soul needs a sense of place. We often experience soul in nature because the direct experience of the sun, trees, grass, flowers, and the earth is so nourishing to our soul...When I am truly present in nature I feel a sense of awe and reverence from just witnessing the beauty of it all... Thomas Moore advocates a 'soul-ecology' where we respect the soul in nature that is based on a 'felt relationship'.  He argues that the root meaning of ecology is seeing the Earth as 'home'.  We are moved to take care of earth as we would our own home when we feel a deep affection for it.

Moore goes on to suggest that the problem of what he refers to as our homelessness is rooted in our abstraction from the earth. Because we have lost the felt relationship to the Earth most human beings have become inwardly homeless on the planet. The Zuni Indians of New Mexico see their home as 'a particular place and the entire world'; Muslims, if they have retained their sense of the sacred, see Mecca and Jerusalem in the same way.

Earth education demands that things and events be looked at within larger patterns and relationships. David Orr suggests that many of our personal and societal problems stem from seeing the world in a fragmented and disconnected way. Building freeways, shopping malls, parking lots at a non-stop pace without consideration of the real need and impact on ecology is a product of the compartmentalized way of seeing and behaving.

These things are threads of a whole cloth. The fact that we see them as disconnected events or fail to see them at all is, I believe, evidence of a considerable failure that we have yet to acknowledge as an educational failure. It is a failure to educate people to think broadly, to perceive systems and patterns and to live as whole persons.

John Ralston Saul in his 1995 Massey Lectures, The Unconscious Civilization, points out the failure to make important connections in our society. In one ecological example, he states:

The world-wide depletion of fish stocks is a recent example. The number of fish caught between 1950 and 1989 multiplied by five. The fishing fleet went from 585,000 boats in 1970 to 1.2 million boats in 1990 and on to 3.5 million today. No one thought about the long or even the medium-term maintenance of stocks; not the fishermen, not the boat builders, not the fish wholesalers, who found new uses for their product, including fertilizer and chicken feed; not the financiers. It wasn’t their job. Their job was to worry about their own interests. (p. 135)

As we awaken to the Earth and its processes, we free ourselves from this modern blindness and start to look at life interdependently; we see how all that is in the heavens and all that is on earth extols the limitless glory of God [62:1]. We then can discern the effects of industrialization in the air we breathe and the water we drink, not to mention the harm to the ozone layer and the ongoing process of global warming. A strictly rationalist approach to life denies this broader perspective. A soulful approach not only enables but demands such a perspective because soul is immersed in connections; it lets us witness Allah’s creation through the Eye of the Heart.

To learn how to see nature as a carpet woven of symbols or signs of God, you must, in a sense, become profoundly naive – guileless, sincere and simple-minded. You must learn, again, to trust your direct experience of things, like you did when you were a child. Symbolic consciousness reminds us how to see the world as it actually appears, and how to let that appearance instruct us. It was not without purpose that God placed us in a world of mountains and plains and forests and deserts and oceans, with the sun, moon, and stars above us, with winds and clouds and rain, the day following the night and the night the day. It was not without purpose that he gave us the kind of bodies we have, and the kind of senses that allow us to perceive the world around us in exactly the way He has willed us to perceive it.

In order to really see the natural world as a living symbol of its Creator, we must 'cleanse the doors of perception'.  But we also need to sense how, as we contemplate the universe, we are also being contemplated; as we sit quietly, watching the natural world, Someone Else is watching us. In the words of Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him: Pray to God as if you saw Him: because even if you don’t see Him, He sees you.