When you ride a rollercoaster for the first time you feel a surge of emotions that grab, terrify, and haunt you all at once – well, at least at the start. But once you get over that first drop, that first mind bending, gut wrenching drop, you suddenly realize that your life isn’t over. And not only is your life not over, it’s also exciting anticipating what else is around the corner.  When the adrenaline takes over, the fear of the impending disaster dissipates.

That’s what pregnancy was for me. I had the initial fear seeing the digital test flash “pregnant.” That fear wasn’t because it wasn’t planned – technically, we did plan. We got married, bought the nice house in a subdivision, and had a fantastic waiting period of five years so that we could explore married life without kids. The fear was the feeling of “oh no, what have we done?!”

And I wasn’t the only one who felt it! My husband had that look on his face when I showed him the test. He didn’t jump around with joy or even smile; he just looked at me with an expression of confusion and worry that settled somewhere closer to acceptance. You would have thought we were two fifteen year olds still in high school with no life achievements. But what mattered most wasn’t our initial reaction. What mattered was the journey we were embarking on together as husband and wife. The excitement hit us quickly enough, along with the extreme nausea and vomiting that plagued me for months.

My husband always wanted a beautiful baby girl. That was his desire from the start. I don’t have to explain how happy he was when the ultrasound tech told us what we were having. We decided to have a nice small and intimate reveal party, just for the grandparents. We got the idea to get cute pink build-a-bears to give to the prospective grandmothers and we revealed our daughter’s name along with the due date. It was exciting and wonderful.

But life always has a drop waiting around the corner. It never fails: impending doom lurks, waiting for its next victim. It wouldn’t be a journey if it didn’t have obstacles. So that is what I first thought when my OB/GYN called me to come to the office exactly one week after the reveal party. But I could have never prepared myself for the words “positive for Down syndrome.” I kept thinking, how could this be? My husband and I were both still in our twenties and healthy, with no family history of anything more than diabetes. This couldn’t happen to us! I stared at my husband, and he had the look of suffocation, as if the room had been stripped of oxygen. We rushed home to do research, to ease our minds into believing that the prenatal test was inaccurate or wrong. We even grasped at the straw of someone in a lab mixing my blood with someone else’s. Our parents reassured us that it was a faulty test, it happened all the time in the eighties and early nineties. My husband held fast to thoughts of positivity, but I ventured into the realm of realism very early because I knew that life always gives you something that you perceive to be unfair and unbearable. That drop was unbearable.

The twist and turns came in the next few months with the fantastic ultrasound test that showed no signs of Down syndrome at all on our little one. But of course, me being the president of the realm of realistic notions, I couldn’t allow myself to be too relieved. But could anyone really blame me? I mean if my child was to be born with Down syndrome, wouldn’t I, as her mother, need to be there for her? If the doctor pulled her from my womb and the true visualization of her features set in, and she bore obvious signs of that extra chromosome, I would still reach for my child and hold her tighter than a mother bear.

My husband and parents could step out of the room and regain their composures, while going through the stages of grief all the way to acceptance and unconditional love. But me, being momma, I needed to go through that ahead of time, so when my baby girl was handed to me the only thing she would feel was my undying and unwavering love for her.

I did the only thing I could do: I prayed. Not to take away any disabilities or deformities. How could I? How could I be so presumptuous to ask God to make my life any easier than the next person’s? No one has it easy. No, instead I prayed for a healthy beautiful baby girl. And I spent hours telling God “thank you.” I was grateful that I could conceive, and that I had a great husband who also would love our daughter unconditionally. I was thankful for the roof over my head and the qualities that my loving parents instilled in me, because during my pregnancy there was barely a week that went by without hearing about a woman killing or abandoning the baby she didn’t want. I was thankful to have compassion and natural human affection. I spent hours crying and speaking my peace with God, knowing that no matter how different she might be, my daughter was a direct gift from Him and I knew that I only wanted what was best for my child, which is to be better than me. That is what all parents truly want.

When the delivery was over, so was that ride of loops and drops. Because when they handed me my little girl all I saw were her perfections, no flaws. And my husband thanked me for bringing our child into the world. Even now, two years later he still thanks me, and I still thank God because he answered my prayers.

This entire ordeal taught me many lessons about life and our ability to make it harder than it needs to be. Sometimes we ourselves are the disasters we try so hard to avoid. It’s our thinking and our mindset that end up getting the best of us and turning something that can be conquered into a mountain of pain. I learned that you don’t have to be a saint to put trust in a higher power to guide you. I could have allowed the fear of the unknown to destroy me, to cause me to become so paralyzed that I lost my ability to avert a disaster. We all have that ability, regardless of what life sends our way. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but also what we perceive as a catastrophe is ultimately left up to our own interpretations.  

Now I am on a new rollercoaster ride. New twists, turns, and drops, each one filled with thoughts of fear and despair. But this ride is called motherhood. Every day I am forced to reset my thinking and my viewpoint on things. I remind myself that it is my choice as to whether something is a mountain or a molehill. Do I choose to wallow in negative thoughts of impending doom or do I look for the way out of the tunnel, the light that is always at the end? Because when I look at my life over the past couple of years, every disaster that has come my way has made my family and me stronger and more versatile. And every blessing that has come our way is received with gratitude and graciousness.

Do I see everything through rose colored glasses now? Not in the least. I was and will always be a realist. Seeing life for what it is will constantly require an endless readjusting of our minds. The truth is, we never truly stop riding the rollercoaster. We can only hope to learn how to enjoy it as much as possible. If we don’t, we are doomed to see every event as something to cower in front of. You don’t get to know when it is coming, and you don’t get to know what it will be, but you do get to choose how it will affect your life: mountain or molehill? I choose to see the twists and turns of my pregnancy as the blessing they always have been. My daughter has no real health issues or problems, no heart defects and no developmental delays. She is healthy and beautiful, with a smile that will bring the world to its knees. All that I truly wanted was for my baby girl to be healthy and smart. She is beyond everything I could have dreamed possible. When I look into her eyes, I am aware that she may have difficult days ahead, but she will have many happy ones, and on her worst day she is still better than I am.

Have you ever seen a rainbow? Until recently, I had looked at many rainbows, but had never truly seen a rainbow.

In his writings on faith and logic, religious scholar Bediuzzaman Said Nursi maintained that looking and seeing are two different things. In his book, The Words, he says: “The eye is a window through which the spirit looks at this world. If you use it on behalf of your carnal soul, without selling it to God Almighty, by gazing at transient, impermanent beauties and spectacles, it panders to lust and other carnal desires.”

Using Nursi’s reasoning, you might look at a magician who is right in front of you, for example, but never see how a trick is accomplished. The same thing happens when you look at a mathematical equation but don’t see what the x value is – unless you are good at mathematics.

After watching MIT physics professor Walter Lewin’s lecture “The Hidden Beauty of Rainbows,”[1] I am finally able to see the rainbow, instead of just looking at it. To share my fascination about this topic, and reinforce my own knowledge, here are some notes I took during Lewin’s lecture. Walter Lewin is the author of For the Love of Physics. This book is really a perfect book if you love Physics.

Figure 1.0

There are four fundamental facets we need to cover to understand a rainbow (Figure 1.0). The first is the “radius” of a rainbow. Since every rainbow has a radius, this means a rainbow is a circle. And every circle has a center point. A rainbow’s center point is below the horizon. Here, we can ask these follow-up questions:

1.1 How we can find the radius of a rainbow in degrees?

1.2 Do all rainbows have the same radius?

The second question is about the colors of a rainbow, specifically red. If you see a rainbow, there is always a red color. But:

2.1 Is the color red always on the inside or outside of the rainbow?

2.2 Does the position of the red color depend on the time of the day and year?

It’s obvious that light determines a rainbow. If there is a rainbow somewhere, there is an enormous difference in the brightness of the sky above and below a rainbow. We can now ask:

3.1 Where is it bright?

3.2 Where is it dark?

There are some additional questions we need to discuss regarding the second bow in Figure 2, specifically:

4 Have you ever noticed the second bow? If yes, then;

5 Where do you look for the second bow?

6.1 What is the color sequence of the second bow?

6.2 Is it the same as the primary bow, is it brighter, or is it reversed?

Figure 2.0

In order to understand rainbows better, we need to review some basic physics. Let’s start with reflection and refraction.

Mediums, reflection, and refraction

Definition: A medium[2] is the substance that carries a wave from one location to another.

When light goes from one medium to another, like from air to water, one of two things happens:

● Some of that light bounces back, which we call reflection. The light will reflect at the same angle at which it hit the surface.

● Part of the light doesn’t reflect, instead continuing into water at an angle. We call this refraction.

Each medium has an index of refraction, which tells us what the speed of light in that medium is. The index of refraction of air is 1.0003, and the index of refraction of a vacuum is 1.

That means the speed of light in air and in a vacuum is almost the same. That speed is 300,000 kilometers per second, and that’s why the index of refraction for air and a vacuum is 1. But in water, the index of refraction is approximately 1.33. The difference between 1 and 1.33 means that in water the speed of light is 33 percent slower than it is in air.

Snell’s law and an angle of incidence

There is also a connection between angle of reflection, angle of refraction, and the index of refraction. We call it Snell’s law.

Snell’s law illustrated:

Figure 3.0

To understand this formula, you need to know the definition of the sine of an angle.

Definition:The sine[3] is a trigonometric function of an angle. It is found by taking the length of the side opposite the angle and dividing by the length of the longest side of the triangle.

If α is 0°, then sin (α) = 0.

If α is 30°, then sin (α) = 0.5.

If α is 90°, then the sin (α) = 1.

Let’s do an example where we can apply Snell’s law (Figure 4.0).

Light comes from air to water at an angle of 60°. (This is possible, because the angle at which water comes in, the angle β, will be 40.6°.)

Definition: The angle of incidence[4] is the angle between the incoming light and the vertical on the surface.

Figure 4.0

Like professor Lewin said, “very simple, very straightforward.”

Figure 5.0 | Figure 5.0. Example of refraction and reflection. See also [5].[5]

Figure 6.0

Figure 6.0 displays a true wonder of water. Sunlight is coming from the left side, landing everywhere on half the surface of that raindrop. We can choose one very narrow beam of all that sunlight with a 60° angle of incidence. We call the angle of incidence “i” and the angle for the refraction “r.”

Of course, that narrow beam is the only a small fraction of the total.

At point A, two things happen (in accordance with Snell’s law);

● A little bit of light reflects.

● The remaining light refracts.

The light reaches point B inside the water drop. At point B, two things happen:

● Some of the light goes back into the air (signaling refraction).

● Some of the light gets reflected. (Therefore, at point B, the angles are the same, “r.”)

Then the reflected light goes on its way to point C. Here, a little bit of the light is reflected and goes back into the water. Most of it comes out of the water, which results in refraction.

At this point, if we use Snell’s law at point A, the reflection law at point B, and then Snell’s law at point C again, we will see that our angle for the refraction at point C will be, surprisingly, “i.”

Now, if we check the line that comes out from the water at point C, we will have a changing angle. We can call it φ (Phi). And for the angle φ, we have an algebraic formula, as follows:

φ= 4r — 2i

If you check the figure, you will see that we have 4 r and 2 i.

By the way, if we take the narrow beam which passes through the center of the raindrop, we can easily see that the angle of incidence is zero. In accordance to Snell’s law, this narrow beam goes straight through. Then it reflects back and finally it comes out of the water. This is true because:

if i = 0, then r = 0 and therefore φ = 0.

Let’s do something interesting and change the value of “i.” If the light hits the water drop higher up, the angle “i” increases. At some point, the angle φ also increases and reaches a maximum value.

Figure 7.0

If you recall, the index of refraction for water is 1.336. If we take any value of “i” on the table and apply Snell’s law, we can easily calculate values of r. And then, if we use the formula φ=4r — 2i, we can come up with the values of φ. This is illustrated in Figure 7.0.

If this doesn’t seem all that special, there is something else that you wouldn’t expect: φ reaches a maximum value, and when you go to higher values of i, then φ goes down again. This plays a key role in the formation of a rainbow.

The index of refraction depends on the color of the light.

Figure 8.0

As seen in the table, when the angle of incidence for red light is very close to 60°, the value of φ is at its maximum, which is 42.3°. In other words, the value of φ can be smaller than 42.3°, but it cannot be larger. For blue light, the angle of incidence is slightly lower, and the φ maximum is at 40.7°.

Water drop and a cone

A key question arises: Let us say we have one water drop, and the sunlight falling onto that water drop is coming from the left. What is that one water drop going to do with the white light from the sun that covers half of the rainbow?

Let us check first for red light and then for blue light.

Light beams will come out of this drop, and that cone will be filled with red light. But the angle for the light beams cannot be larger than 42°, meaning they can be smaller. Then we will see a cone of lights.

But why is it a cone? Because, if we go back to what was previously discussed, we will remember that one light beam comes in with an angle i, and then comes out with an angle i.

Figure 9.0

Figure 9.0 shows a representation of a water drop. The light that comes in at the angle of incidence is 60°. It refracts and reflects inside the droplet, then goes to point C and comes out of droplet at an angle of 42°. And, surprisingly, if the angle of incidence is 60°, when the light beam comes out, it has to be red light. On the other hand, there is not only one light beam coming in with an angle 60°. The entire surface of this water drop is illuminated by the sun, so there are an enormous number of beams for which the angle of incidence is 60°.

If we go back to Figure 9.0, we see the black line on this water drop. Any light beam that comes in anywhere on that black line will have an angle of incidence of 60°.

Figure 6.1

Now we will do the same for blue light. This time, we will have another cone which is completely filled with blue light, but when the blue light beams come out, the angle will be at a maximum of 40.7°.

Interesting fact: All the colors except for red and blue that are in the sunlight will be in between the red and blue.

Figure 6.2

A journey: refraction, reflection, and refraction

We know that when the light comes in, it goes through a journey. A light beam refracts, then reflects, and then refracts. That’s all. But, how about the light on the right side of the cone? Is there any light? When the sun shines in, does this water drop bring light there?

If the angle φ is larger than 42°, then, yes, it is possible. But we have already proven that the angle φ cannot be larger than 42°. So, it is impossible: There is no light outside the cone.

Another question… What will be the color of the light inside the blue cone? We should remember that the red light is everywhere in this cone, because as long as the angle φ is smaller than 42°, red light can be anywhere. The blue light is also almost everywhere because the blue light is allowed to be smaller than 40°. This means all the colors that we didn’t mention are coming out inside the blue cone and there will be just white light.

Figure 6.3

To summarize, if we have a water drop, and a bright light shining onto this water drop, we will see red, blue, green, white, and other colors inside the cone or circle. In other words, all the colors of a rainbow. And of course, there will be no light outside the cone. There are some experiments on YouTube that you can watch if you want.

Figure 6.4

You may think that at the location where blue comes out, if all the other colors can come out — which they can because the angle is smaller than 40° — the light should be also white, not blue. It is a nice approach, but wrong.

It is wrong, because of the light intensity. If you check the graph for the intensity of the light, you will see that different colors have peak points where φ reaches the maximum value. If all the colors are present and equal intensity, we see white light. That’s why the inside of the cone is white. However, when the color red spikes up, it dominates its location. We don’t even notice the other colors.

Figure 6.5

Looking at the sky

Let’s say you are standing at point A and the sunlight is coming from the left. Since the light comes from infinitely far away, all these lines are parallel to each other. Let’s say you look at the sky in direction B and pick a raindrop at any point. Any point you pick will cast the cone in the direction of the sun with the angle 60°.

When you look at the sky in the direction B, will you see light? You will not, because you are outside the 42°.

Figure 10.0

What if you look in a different direction? We will look at point C (it doesn’t matter where), and take a rain drop on line C. Light beams will do the same thing. Again, they will produce a 42° red cone. However, you will see white light. Yes, you read that right, white light, because you are looking straight in the middle of the cone of white light.

Let’s say we choose another angle and look at point D. If we choose a raindrop anywhere on line D, it will make no difference. It will cast into the sky the famous 42° angle because that’s the angle that was chosen there. If we look in that direction of the sky, what will we see? Yes, only red. No other color!

Figure 10.1

And now, we know where we will see red light, blue light, or white light. And we also know which direction has no light.

A rainbow is a bow in the sky

Let’s suppose the sun is on your left and you are standing at point A (Figure 11.0). Since there is light, you will have a shadow on the ground. As long as you look 42° away from any direction, you will only see red. That is because a cone is a spherical object. And that explains why the rainbow is a bowl in the sky. As long as it is 42° away from a line in any direction, you will always see red light. And if you decrease the angle, you will see the other colors in the sky.

And so now, we can make a picture of a rainbow.

When we look at the horizon, sometimes we see a rainbow. And we will have a center point somewhere below the horizon. The radius with 42° has red light. The blue light is closer to the 40° radius. This tells us that the red bowl is always on the outside and the blue light is always on the inside. That’s what we always see.

Figure 11.0

Double Reflection in the Rainbow

We can also include two reflections in the rainbow. If we do, we get refraction, reflection, another reflection, and then another refraction. So, the light beams reflect twice. And if we do this hocus-pocus again and again, we can come to a conclusion: There is no maximum value for the various colors, but there is a minimum value. In other words, various colors cannot be lower than a certain value, but they can be higher.

And if we do some calculation for the angles, we will see something very similar. We will find out that the second bow is pointing at the sky, and the angle is 10° above the first one (which is 52°). And, surprisingly, the colors of the second bowl reverse. In other words, red is the one on the inside, and blue is on the outside this time.

Figure 11.1

Interesting fact: There is no light between the two bowls. This is because of the φ maximum and minimum. We call that dark part Alexander’s dark band.[6]Additionally, since the second bowl is formed by φ minimum, sunlight can come out at angle φ or larger and there will be sunlight above a rainbow.

Figure 11.2

Some examples…

Image 1: René Descartes’ sketch of how primary and secondary rainbows are formed (probable engraver: Frans van Schooten the younger).

Image 2: This diagram was drawn by the famous physicist Newton who was one of the first to understand the rainbow, from his book Optics.

Image 3: Double rainbow. The primary red bow is on the outside, and blue is on the inside. Alexander’s dark band can be seen in between the two bows. It shows up really dark. For the secondary bow, red is on the inside, and blue is on the outside.

Image 4: Walter Lewis’ backyard and his rainbow. When you water your garden when the sun is high in the sky, you can get a rainbow all the way around you. 42° away from the line is always red. If you turn around and look back, it is red.

Image 5 | A white rainbow. It is very unique and rare. It is also called a fog bow, because fog has small water droplets that create this effect.

Image 8 | Red rainbow. Let us imagine that there is a rainbow at sunset. What would you expect to see? We would only see red light because there is only red light. What would happen to the white light inside the bow? It would be red too.

Mosquitoes like climates with high humidity and rainfall. While a single raindrop can weigh 50 times as much as a mosquito, how can mosquitos fly and survive under what seems to be a devastating weather condition for them? Andrew Dickerson and co-workers at Georgia Institute of Technology examined the effects of falling raindrops on the flying mosquitoes using high-speed video capture and found that rain does no damage to flying mosquitoes. Upon impact with mosquitoes, the raindrops do not splash and scatter but they merely deform and hold together. This was calculated to be due to the small diameter and the velocity of the drop. On the other hand, given the relatively small mass of the mosquito, the drop does not significantly alter its speed. A partial hit on the mosquito by the falling drop causes the mosquito to rotate around its flight path. Mosquitoes were found to easily recover and resume their flight immediately after the impact. In the case of a direct hit by a raindrop, the mosquitoes were still able to literally separate themselves from the drop after traveling with the drop for a while without lethal damage and resume flight. The researchers further analyzed the impact force of the raindrops on the mosquitoes and found the direct impact to exert around 80 times the gravitational force. This is an extremely high force for larger organisms however, for mosquitoes with a very strong exoskeleton, this turned out to be a minor fraction of 1500 X g, which the researchers tested the mosquitoes and found them to be still able to fly! The outstanding resilience of such a small organism already inspired scientists to start designing very small robots that may serve as airborne search-and-rescue vehicles. But scientists are still very much limited by the basic factor of how small they can go.

What exactly happened in AD 774?

Researchers in Nagoya University of Japan have recently discovered a cosmic mystery when they were analyzing the growth rings of two cedar trees that are as old as 1200 years. All trees are known to incorporate particles from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. Carbon-14 (C14), one of the exceptional elements in the atmosphere, is generally formed by massive solar flares or by supernovae and it is present in very low percentages. Interestingly, researchers found that the cedar tree ring produced during the growth season of AD 774 had about 1.2% more C14 than in the previous years, that is about 20-times more than the usual range of 0.05%. These results indicate that some cosmic event during AD 774 generated a major influx of radiation leading an excessive amount of C14. Only a massive supernova explosion might have been strong enough to create this much radiation. However, if this was a supernova, we should either be able to catch the traces with modern telescopes, or find historic documents reporting this extraordinary cosmic event. But, we simply have no record of anything unusual happening in our skies in that period. Alternatively, a massive solar flare might have created such a radiation. In fact, 13th-century English chronicler Roger of Wendover mentions a cosmic event that could possibly be a solar flare. However, a flare with that magnitude would have been the biggest solar flare ever recorded by our sun and probably would have destroyed the Earth’s protective ozone layer leading to disastrous ecological consequences. Thus, the flare hypothesis seems also unlikely. By now, scientists are only positive that some very energetic event occurred in 774. But what exactly was it? Frankly, their guess is as good as ours.

To some it brings bliss, to others perdition

Suddenly shows up at an unexpected location

Beyond which is Paradise or the pit…

The spirit is anxious to flee this world,

Breaths dying down in gasps

Everyone broods by the cold corpse;

The steps of the Angel of Death echo all around

Lonely lives reach death alone

Falling, standing and crawling in this abyss

Horizons stalked by nameless fears

In the end, buried in the void within

For the believer, calls are heard from the beyond,

They may fall, but like a drop, they still reach the sea,

Transcending the limits, extending to infinity

Free from the narrow confines of the mortal abode.

They step into the garden of spirits,

Walking under arches like rainbow,

Showers of joy, springs of bliss overflow,

A life-long journey unfolds its mystery.

Every part of creation is a mirror displaying various names and attributes of God in unique combinations and degrees. The human being is merely the brightest mirror reflecting God’s divine names and beauty even more gracefully than the whole universe. What separates us from Him is our minds, hearts, and egos that claim to have a separate existence. For those who see pointers to Him in every being, it is not possible to be far from Him. They do not expect Him to “come down to establish a loving relationship with His creation” as He is never away from His creation. We can feel that proximity only through losing our partial existence in the Whole. When the “self” disappears in God’s all-encompassing presence, then all existence besides God quickly loses significance.

The mainstream theological school of Islam distinguishes between two categories of existence. The first is the necessarily existent (wajib al-wujud), which defines the existence of God the Most High. God the Most High exists independently through Himself and His existence is necessary for the existence of all other things. None of His creation shares in His existence. The second category is contingent existence (mumkin-il wujud). This defines the existence of created things that may or may not exist. Created things have no independent being and their existence is not necessary.

God the Most High brought them into being through His will, power and knowledge, and if He willed they would have no existence. Creation only exists through Him giving it being, so in this sense it exists through Him, but doesn’t share in His independent, necessary being. The core concept of the spiritual tradition of Islam is ihsan, that is living in the constant consciousness of God’s presence. This concept is described in a famous and authentic prophetic tradition narrated by Abu Dawud where the archangel Gabriel appears in a meeting of Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, as a traveler, sits down close to the Prophet and asks him three questions: [The stranger] said, “Tell me about iman (faith).” [The Prophet] said: “It is that you affirm God, His angels, His books, His messengers, and the Last Day….” [The stranger] said, “Muhammad, tell me about Islam (submission to God).

”The Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him peace, said, “Islam is that you bear witness, testifying that there is no object of worship aside from God, and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God; and you establish the ritual prayer; and you give the prescribed alms; and you fast in the month of Ramadan; and you perform the pilgrimage to the House if you are able to find a way to do so.

”Finally, he said, “Tell me about ihsan.” [The Prophet] said, “It is … that you worship God as though you see Him, for though you do not see Him, truly He sees You.” The ultimate goal in some Sufi schools is to achieve a state where one is so immersed in the presence of God that he or she regards the creation as nothing but a collection of pointers to Him. Wherever such a seeker looks, (s)he sees nothing but reflections of God’s Names. In a sense, the seeker “annihilates” his self in the presence of God. God’s transcendence If the Whole is likened to the Ocean, and the part to a drop, the Sufi says that witnessing the Ocean with the eye of a drop is impossible. However, when the drop becomes immersed in the Ocean, it sees the Ocean with the eye of the Ocean. It is true that God is transcendent and His Essence is a mystery to us. He exists in His unique way which is impossible to grasp for the human mind. However, God has chosen human beings, the most glorious of creation (ashraf al-mahluq), to get to know Him. He wanted to be known by us and granted us vehicles to understand His names and attributes. This vehicle is the “ego.” This vehicle is given to humankind to understand the Lordship of God and to feel our Oneness with the God. Ironically, human beings use this vehicle to distance themselves from God, and to question God’s closeness to them.

Ego: Both the remedy and the venom

Human beings can only know God with the help of their ego, which constitutes a hypothetical bounding line (wahid- i qiyasi) to understand God’s immenseness. It is the key that can open the secret treasures of God’s names and the enigmatic meaning of the universe. How? The great Islamic scholar Nursi answers this question as follows: “An absolute and all-encompassing entity has no limits or terms, and therefore cannot be shaped or formed, and cannot be determined in such a way that its essential nature can be comprehended. For example, light undetermined by darkness cannot be known or perceived.

However, light can be determined if a real or hypothetical bounding line of darkness is drawn. In the same way, the Divine Attributes and Names (e.g., Knowledge, Power, Wisdom, and Compassion) cannot be determined, for they are all-encompassing and have no limits or like. Thus what they essentially are cannot be known or perceived. A hypothetical boundary is needed for them to become known. In our case, this hypothetical boundary is our ego. Ego imagines within itself a fictitious lordship, power, and knowledge, and so posits a bounding line, hypothesizes a limit to the all-encompassing Attributes, and says: ‘This is mine, and the rest is His.’ Ego thus makes a division. By means of the miniature measure it contains, ego slowly comes to understand the true nature of the Divine Attributes and Names. Through this imagined lordship, ego can understand the Lordship of the Creator of the universe. By means of its own apparent ownership, it can understand the real Ownership of its Creator, saying: ‘As I am the owner of this house, the Creator is the Owner of this creation.

Through its partial knowledge, ego comes to understand His Absolute Knowledge. Through its defective, acquired art, it can intuit the Exalted Fashioner’s primary, originative art.

“Our Creator knows that we need a God that is close to us. He knows that when we feel that He is not close to us we won’t be satisfied. That is why he has chosen us and furnished us with the necessary tools to know Him. He granted us a magical key to unlock the mysteries of His Essence and His Creation. Yet, while the key is meant to be the remedy, it also has a potential to turn into a poison that blurs our consciousness and detaches us from the Essence. An illusory individuation, a deceptive wisdom and knowledge covers our sight and conceals the truth; the truth that “There is no existent but He.”

Counterargument to: “Islam is about man trying to please God by obeying His will”

“And I have not created the Jinn and the men except that they should serve Me.” (Dhariyat 51:56) “And that you should serve Me; this is the right way.” (Ya Sin 36:61) According to the Islamic view, serving God, obeying His will and worshipping are the human being’s fundamental obligations. However, the purpose of worshipping is to grow in faith, knowledge and love of God and to feel His proximity. Seeking God’s pleasure in one’s worship, conduct and life in general is seen as a necessary outcome of one’s growing love of God. Worshipping God to attract God’s reward or to avoid punishment is seen as an inferior level of faith. If we accept that the main purpose of worshipping God is to get close to Him, or more accurately to “be aware of our closeness to Him,” then the main purpose of human beings in this world emerges as removing obstacles that we put up between ourselves and God who is always close, and attaining His consent by doing that. Anything that brings about this proximity or guides in that direction is praiseworthy and it is considered as worship. One of the means to help man in his journey towards God is knowledge; accordingly, a prophetic saying (hadith) reveals that gaining knowledge is considered as worship: “God can be worshipped and served by means of knowledge; bliss in this world and hereafter comes through knowledge; and adversity of this world and hereafter lies in ignorance.

”The purpose of God’s commandments and all the obligatory worship is to seek proximity to God. And it is only God’s mercy that He shows us the way that will lead us to Him. Through prayer, contemplation, fasting, and purification of the soul by begging His forgiveness, the “ego” abandons his vice and arrogance. The ego realizes the Truth and becomes aware of his proximity to God which was concealed from him by claiming a separate existence.

The basis of attaining closeness and proximity to God is through seeking (talab) Him, and this seeking is manifested in the form of practice and actions that allows one’s level of closeness to increase. By sending us down to this worldly realm and making us in our bodily forms, God placed within us a capacity to perform actions through which the doors of the levels of proximity were fully opened.

It is us who should attain a proximity to God, because He already is close to us. Such an awareness and appreciation are what makes people “friends to God” (wali). One way of attaining this awareness is through being an “abd” to God which means acknowledging your position as a servant. However, attaining proximity to God is an endless journey. There are levels of proximity (qurb) that awaits us, without boundaries. This is why even the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, whose proximity to God is unimaginable and unattainable by the rest of the creation, was commanded to supplicate with “Oh God, increase my knowledge.” The connection between knowledge and proximity is clear in that the former increases the latter.

Yet, since knowledge is infinite, so is proximity, thus reaching a “finish line” is impossible. It is mentioned in an authentic prophetic tradition that God Most High said: “When the servant draws close to Me a hand’s span, I will draw close to him an arm’s length. And when he draws near to Me an arm’s length, I will draw near to him a fathom’s length. And when he comes to Me walking, I will go to him running.”2 God the Most Merciful tells us that our intention to seek Him is what He is expecting from us and the levels of closeness will be ascended quickly if we are eager to feel the proximity. Since He is already close to us, it is our choices and intentions that will either allow us feel the “oneness of being” or keep us away from Him as a result of our unwillingness to get rid of the illusory wisdom and arrogance. The spiritual life in Islam begins with the inner struggle with the ego. It is the fist stage in the journey that will make us aware of our position in front of God, to know God, love God and be a drop in the Ocean of oneness. Distracted and polluted by worldliness, the lower self has a tendency to drag the human creature down into arrogance and vice. Only by a genuine effort of will can the sincere seeker of Truth achieve the purity of soul which enables him to reach total “awareness” of God’s closeness.

Sophia Gallant is a sociologist in Houston, Texas. Yuksel A. Aslandogan is the Vice President of Institute of Interfaith Dialog, Houston, Texas.

Notes

1. Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, The Words, Thirtieth Word, The Light, Inc., NJ:2005, pp.552-3.
2. Bukhari from Abu Hurayra and Anas. Also narrated by Muslim, Tirmidhi and Ibn Majah.

Travel here and there seeking the seas they parted from.

They fall with the sound of plucked lute-strings;

And hearing it, the earth begins to breathe.

Drops of rain float down with the grace of butterflies,

As if arranging some meaning in most rhythmic verse.

They resonate in the ear like a sweet melody,

And skies seem to weep for the grass on earth.

Each drop has said farewell to its heavenly life,

And returns to its origin, which is a roaring ocean.

Everything on earth holds still to listen to rain;

Each drop descends to the ground like an angel.

Eyes seeing the rain fall in such thrilling harmony

See worlds beyond this world come into view.

The skies rejoice with smiles observed everywhere;

Everyone is enchanted by the heavenly rhapsody.

Vapour rises in masses as great as mountains,

Then it seeks the green, blue and orange on earth.

Rain always brings down a peculiar contentment;

And carries fragrance of Paradise and exhilaration.

That fragrance pervades everywhere, deep into the soul,

Earth awakens to life and flowers burst open.

The whole of creation finds peace and serenity,

The window open to the realms beyond becomes visible.

***