Literally meaning to separate, abstract, peel away, or to isolate oneself from every occupation and engagement, tajrid (isolation) denotes the state where one isolates oneself from worldly things and abandons all carnal or bodily desires. It also denotes turning away from all else save God and being freed from any attachment to wealth, status or position or any worldly expectations, and setting one’s heart totally on Him without expecting anything in return.

The scholars relate isolation to the Qur’anic statement, Take off your shoes (20:12), and interpret this as the purifying of the heart, which they call the home of God, of all worldly and otherworldly considerations, and preparing it for the visit of the All-Holy Sovereign. Some go a step further and regard this as turning to the Light of Lights with all one’s heart and setting one’s heart totally on Him without leaving any room for anything else in one’s feelings, according to one’s capacity. From another perspective, isolation has been approached as resistance against all carnal or bodily appetites and impulses and against the attractions of the world with whatever is in it. Initiates who have not been able to isolate themselves from carnal appetites, the attractions of the world, the attachment of the heart to anything else save Him, or from any worldly or otherworldly consideration, cannot attain His private company and the spiritual pleasure inherent in this.

Concerning this significant point, the author of al-Minhaj

says:

So long as you do not isolate yourself
from considerations about everything save Him,
You will not be able to reach privacy
with the Beloved in His private room.

Ibrahim Haqqi expresses the same point, as follows:

The heart is the home of God;
purify it of whatever is there other than Him,
So that the All-Merciful may descend into His palace at nights.

Isolation, which, in the words of Sayyid Sharif [1], is cleaning the heart and other innermost faculties from the dirt and dust of attachment to anything save Him, requires that the people favored with a vision of Him should isolate themselves from whatever they see or hear, and that they live immersed in the lights of the Existence of the Eternal Witness. Every initiate feels this and is favored with its gifts according to the individual’s capacity.

When those who are in the initial stages of the spiritual journey find themselves growing in the knowledge of God that is developing in the heart, the information acquired concerning Him gradually fades, and they begin to receive glimpses from beyond things. Then all of their material or bodily necessities, and even the entire world with whatever is in it, gradually lose their importance and value for them and they become polished mirrors to the truth, or function as some misty medium to reflect Him. One who feels this favor sometimes says, like Fuduli,

The way of isolation is a home
requiring full renunciation and sacrifice to settle in,
so abandon whatever worldly things you have,
and do not have a house.

or sometimes cries, like Yunus Emre:

I have found the unique, matchless honey;
Let everybody come and plunder my existence.

One who has reached the final point of the spiritual journey is freed from all considerations concerning other existent beings save God, and is left with no trace that belongs to anything else except Him. If those favored with this degree of isolation do not follow the principles of the Prophetic way or the rules of Shari‘a in their considerations, they may lapse into negating the “reality of things”— the established originals or essences of things in God’s Knowledge. This is a rank where many initiates live in a daze. Whereas, those who strictly follow the signposts and lights of the Prophetic way during their entire journey, though admitting the reality of things, see in everything only He Who is the One, only know the One, only mention the One, only call the One, and only turn to the One in thousands of signs of “dawn,” turning their eyes from all others.

Ahmedi [2] describes this rank according to his feeling as follows:

I have submitted all my being to that Friend, having no home any longer;
And purified my hands of any worldly things I had, being left without both of the two worlds.
For God’s love has come and drawn me to itself: opening the eyes of my heart, awakening me from an intoxicated sleep.
His Unity has become manifest to me, so that I have seen Him with all certainty.
I have driven away polytheism, having no doubt any longer.

As for the state of those who have completed their journey toward God, it is such a deep, indescribable state of pleasure, where efforts toward isolation have ended in perfect isolation and they have all but lost their own being, that those who do not experience it cannot know or describe it. Anybody who attempts to describe it cannot be saved from confusion. Such a relation between the Almighty, Ultimate Truth and an initiate whom He has favored with such a degree of spiritual attainment must be a mysterious gift of secrecy of His to His distinguished servants. What we should do is to feel respect for this gift of secrecy.

O God! Show us the truth as being true and enable us to follow it, and show us falsehood as being false and enable us to refrain from it. And bestow blessings and peace on our master Muhammad, the guide to the truth, and on his Family and Companions, godly, noble and honorable.

Notes

1. Sayyid Sharif al-Jurjani (1339–1413), was one of the leading theologians of 15^th century. He lived in Iran and taught in Shiraz. He visited Istanbul in 1374. Sharhu’l-Mawaqif is his most famous work.
2. Emir Muhammed ibn Emir Ahmedi lived in the same age as Jalalu’d-Din Rumi. He lived in Bayburt, in the Eastern Turkey. He was also the leader of the Ahis (The Brotherhood of Craftsmen and Tradesmen) in the region. (Tr.)

The worst thing about cancer they don’t tell you?

The aftermath. The shock waves.

It’s surviving the quick earthquake, only to find yourself dodging falling objects and electrical lines for the next few days.

What they failed to mention was that fighting cancer was the easy part.

The real battle was learning to live again.

I got the news of my cancer diagnosis as a young mother, and after we had moved to a new city with no close friends or family. The kids were 3, 6, 11, and 13. Summer break had just begun, and to make things worse, I could not drive. We were in the wilderness and were fighting for our lives.

We went into “survival mode,” literally and figuratively, and assigned each older child to a smaller child with the plan and knowledge that we could survive if each of the “bigs” both did a load of laundry and dishes a day. At one point, I had a goal to drop off the kids at school, so I could get three uninterrupted hours of sleep after my chemo treatment. I had finally dropped off the children at their three different schools, and my head had barely hit the pillow, when I received a phone call from the school.

“Mrs. Estes? You need to come pick up your children. They all have lice!”

Trials, temptations, disease, and now pestilence were hitting our household simultaneously. I remember thinking, “At least I can’t get it since my hair is gone,” and then laughed at the absurdity that we were so low that my “silver lining statement” included the phrase “Praise the Lord I’m bald.”

But that was not the hardest part. Not by a long shot.

The hardest part was after the storm, when the casseroles stopped coming and prayers had grown weary. The hardest part of fighting a deadly battle comes afterwards when the dust has settled and the gunsmoke has cleared and you find yourself standing in total rubble and destruction.

I shouldn’t say total. We had our health and were still married. Most do not escape with that, I learned. But we both were battered and bloodied. I had a visual representation come to mind of an old battleship slowly pulling into port – disfigured and worn, riddled with bullet holes and laden with shrapnel. We were afloat, but barely.

I awoke from my six-month drunken chemo state to find my life in ruins. While the “bigs” had done a wonderful job helping with the “littles,” there were still unmet needs and unspoken questions that the youngest mind’s lips couldn’t form, which resulted in one regressing into wetting his pants again in first grade and the other becoming a hair’s breath away from becoming non-verbal, screaming “Aaaaaa!” fifty times a day. All of this in addition to the “regular” stresses of having four children about to enter high school, middle school, kindergarten and first grade – and not to mention the emotional withdrawal that naturally comes in a marriage during crisis times and having a son with extreme learning disabilities.

At one point, I was finally able to lift my leg again, and I was able to climb the stairs to our second story – after a year. When I entered the playroom, the scene rivaled the ruins of a never-ending frat party, with beer bottles exchanged for sippy cups and ankle-deep trash covering the floor. It was a sign of what the kids had silently felt during our ordeal, and it served as a visual symbol of my life: ruined and messy.

In World War II, my grandfather was part of the company that liberated prisoner of war camps. At one point, he asked one of the prisoners what the difference was between those that made it out and those that did not.

“The ones that made it found something to look forward to – they had a goal,” he replied.

I took that advice and decided that when all the chemo and radiation was over, I would celebrate with the other cancer fighters I’d met while walking through the fire.

None of them made it. It was heartbreaking.

I “made do” by celebrating with all the friends and family who had prayed and supported us through the journey, but the weight was still felt. In addition to feeling thankful, I also shouldered the burden of false guilt from having survived when my other comrades had fought just as hard, sometimes harder. Soldier syndrome had come home to roost.

So, what do you do when you get through the war only to (symbolically) return to your home to find the farm overrun with thorns and that your wife has run off?

You start from scratch. And you begin with baby steps.

God was gracious, providing me with advice from an “older brother” in the church just when I needed it. He himself had come out of a near death, eight-day coma experience. He emerged paralyzed on one side, but no one would ever guess it today. The first thing he advised when I called him in tears was, “small goals, baby steps, little sister!”

When coming through tragedy, we want our life to be like it was “before,” but the “after” contains components the “before” never had. It is an “apples to oranges” comparison and is unfair to expect them to be the same. Life “after cancer” contains side effects such as “less energy” and “Chemo Brain” that affect what and how much can be done for a while. Just as I couldn’t expect to instantly run three miles again, nor should I have expected to jump instantly back into life, either. The girl who used to pay all the bills, pop dinner into the oven, and get all four kids ready for school before breakfast was now merely able to pay the bills by the end of the day. But that was okay, because that was enough.

Second piece of advice: good enough is good enough. Lower your expectations. Gone were the days of thinking “everything has a place, and everything should be in its place.” Life was still, even now, about survival. Gone were the days of a pristine home ready for entertainment at a moment’s notice; the day of “push aside the mess and have a seat” had come. And that is okay. Because, again, you are now living in a different reality. The good news? There is no fairy that is going to come grade you on how tidy or organized your home is. Your home is there to serve you, not the other way around. Feel free to live as such.

In addition, it is imperative to “accept the new reality” and “don’t look back.” At one point in the recovery process, I placed blinder goggles and a bottle of salt beside my bed to remind myself, “Don’t look back, lest you turn to a pillar of salt!” (like Lot’s wife). I was amazed at how many Bible verses there actually were with the theme of “pressing on” and “not looking back.” The message was clear: the past is the past, and the present is the present. Make sure to live in the right one. Thinking back to how things used to be and trying to make your world look now like it did back then is a guaranteed, instant trip to Insanity Land. Accept that now will not look like then, nor is it supposed to. Celebrate every “new” baby step and make recovery a big ol’ party!

One of the hardest pieces of advice to follow is: try to humble yourself. As a natural giver, this concept was the most difficult for me until a friend helped me realize that life is not all about me, and if I do not ask for help, then I am literally robbing givers of the chance to use their spiritual gift to give. Ecclesiastes makes it clear that life is divided into seasons, and this is perhaps your season to be a receiver. Accept it as you would a blessing for it will bless others as they minister to you.

A final word of advice on the journey of learning to live again: have a creative outlet and take time to feed your soul. Anything from songwriting, to painting, to simply coloring will help balm your weary mind as you learn to do things anew again. For me, I finally completed my novel, began songwriting, and never missed a sunset at our local park for three months straight. Learning to live again is like learning to walk again – hard and tiring. You must make the time to restore and renew your mind, spirit, and soul.

Of course, this all goes with the understanding that we are constantly praying and praising God for every single blessing He brings our way. It can be big things, like climbing stairs again – or small things, like hearing the song of a robin or seeing a butterfly. Whatever the size of the blessing that comes your way that day, praise God for it! And remember: like the butterfly in the cocoon, this season, too, is temporary and will pass.

Fana (annihilation), which is the opposite of permanence, has connections with some of the other concepts in Sufism. For example, sincere repentance requires annihilating one’s resistance to acknowledging sin, asceticism requires annihilating carnal pleasures, the highest point of loyalty and love is the annihilation of the expectation for a pleasing life in both this and the other world, and absence (ghayba) as a result of intoxication is apparent annihilation. Each of these is an attitude, a feeling and state of pleasure for a traveler on the way to God, while being at the same time, with respect to the Divine Being, Attributes and Names, manifestations of the lights of the Divine Oneness in the sphere of contingent things and beings. Initiates live in tides of existence and non-existence due to these manifestations. This life is known as devastation (sahq). Their melting away before the Existence of the Ultimate Truth is known as destruction (mahq), and their feeling that their deeds are mere shadows of the Acts of the One Who does whatever He wills is known as effacement (tams). Devastation, destruction, and effacement are dimensions of annihilation. They remind one of the fact that everything other than He is a shadow of the True Existence and Knowledge, having no essential value inherent to itself. These states also function as a bridge between the relativity of truth and human perception, feeling and understanding.

The absolute truth never changes; it is always what it essentially is. Neither the assumptions of union or incarnation on the part of the Divine Being nor human absolute annihilation in God bear anything of the truth. Things and events are created by God. Human beings are His created servants, and He possesses absolute Existence and Knowledge. Every existent thing is a ray of the manifestation of His Existence and Knowledge, and humanity feels, witnesses, and interprets these manifestations. But humans can make mistakes, which should be corrected. Humankind are like the conductors of choirs singing the praises of the Creator. They interpret what constantly pours into their horizon or is presented to their view, reviewing it, and adding new melodies taken from the depth of their emotions and sensations. These melodies are sometimes in accord with the truth being played, but sometimes it happens that the states, pleasures, perceptions, and feelings of individuals are in discord with the truth in existence with the result that the accord and harmony in existence is spoilt in their mirrors of perception and consciousness. This gives rise to a confusion of views of Divinity, the Divine Oneness and multiplicity in contingent existence. Utterances such as “I am the Truth” (attributed to Hallaj al-Mansur), or “I am a denier if I pray, and an unbeliever if I do not” (attributed to ash-Shibli), and “The Lord is the servant, and the servant is the Lord, so I wish I knew who is responsible for God’s commandments” (attributed to Muhyi’d-Din ibnu’l-‘Arabi), and “Who is the criminal, and what is the punishment?” (attributed to Yunus Emre), are all examples of this confusion.

God knows the true intention and purpose behind such utterances. However, as far as I understand, while preparing for the Prayer, ash-Shibli was surrounded by multiplicity. When the lights of the Divine Oneness surrounded him during the Prayer, he, as an obedient servant who is seeking God but has been enveloped by the lights of Divine Oneness and has felt annihilated in the One sought and obeyed, he might have voiced his feelings of wonder and astonishment with the phrase mentioned above. The utterance of Ibn u’l-‘Arabi, which is apparently incompatible with the Shari‘a, must have been an expression of the pleasure of a similar state. Some common people among the Sufis, who are closed to such states of spiritual pleasure and the manifestations of the Divine “Facial” Light and who take such utterances as literal truth, without considering the state in which they are uttered, might suppose that people, after they have reached a certain level of spiritual awareness, are no longer answerable according to the Divine commandments. This view is nothing but a deviation from the true path. It is also wrong that certain people have accused of heresy and unbelief the great saints who made such utterances, which are the product of being lost in a state of spiritual bliss and which accordingly need to be interpreted.

If such words are the expressions of a mood of self-devastation and destruction that is beyond love and is identified with the pleasures of annihilation in God—and I believe that to be the case—the persons mentioned above who uttered such phrases should not be held to account for such words; these words must be interpreted. Those heroes of intense love should be viewed and perceived from the perspective of their care in practicing the religion. It was reported that Hallaj al-Mansur used to perform a hundred rak‘as of Prayer every night, and that the others were also deeply devoted to the Almighty. Their words, which are apparently incompatible with the rules of the Shari‘a, should be interpreted according to the basic principles of the Qur’an and the Sunna, and if they have uttered anything that cannot be reconciled with those principles, then a Muslim must, obviously, follow the guiding words of the Messenger, upon him be peace and blessings. However, these great persons are excusable because of the states that they were in when uttering such words; others who willfully imitate them, without sharing the same mood and spiritual state, will be held accountable. The author of the Lujja says:

If you are not together with the good ones in all your deeds, what use will it be to you that you bear the same name as them.
One of the two Messiahs restores the eyes of the blind while the other is one-eyed. [1]

Doing as the Prophets did in one’s manners and acts is the way of saints, while blind imitation and following those who lead the way to the precipice is bound to end in spiritual death.

Jalalu’d-Din Rumi expresses the same thought as follows:

Do not compare pure, virtuous characters to yourself;
though the words milk and lion are composed of the same letters (shir), they are not at all the same.
If a perfected one holds dust in his hand, it turns to gold;
while if another, defective one holds gold in his hand, it becomes ashes.

Self-annihilation in God has been dealt with in the following categories by the Sufi scholars:

• Annihilation in God’s Acts: Travelers to the Ultimate Truth who have reached this horizon feel in every act that there is no true agent other than God. On the face of all their moments or conditions of poverty, weakness, helplessness, and need, they discern the traces of His Power and Wealth. They hear constantly the voice of the points of reliance and seeking help ingrained in the depth of their
• Annihilation in God’s Attributes: Initiates who have reached this point feel that all lives, all knowledge and power, all speech, will, hearing and sight are rays of His Attributes of Glory and reflections of their Seeing themselves without any innate power or strength, they are greatly astonished by the lights of the All-Holy One called by the All-Beautiful Names, and experience extreme wonder at feeling the All-Sacred One having All-Sacred Attributes, and always aspire to meet with Him beyond all concepts of modality.
• Annihilation in the Divine Being: A person of truth who has reached the point of attaining a new existence in which all the directions are united into one direction falls into such a state that he or she cannot help but utter, “There is no really existent one save ” Those who have attained this state see all space and time as having existence in His Knowledge and proceeding from His Knowledge and perceive all existing things as manifestations of the lights of His Existence. Enraptured with the spiritual pleasures, they utter with every breath that everything is from Him, and regard annihilation in the light of His Existence as the price of being favored with existence.

Thus, as declared in the verse (37:96), God has created you and all that you do, travelers to the Ultimate Truth receive the first signal of annihilation with respect to the realm of acts. Saying, “Everything is from You, and You are the True Agent,” they advance toward self-possession. Then, as pronounced in the Divine declaration (8:17), When you threw, it was not you who threw but God who threw, they perceive their nothingness, melt away in the shadow of His Attributes and become mirrors reflecting them. Some even rise to the point where people and jinn begin to turn around them. If they are able to go further, they will go on as far as the realms beyond, as stated in, “There was God without there being anything that existed with Him. Now He is as He was before” [2]. They feel themselves to be in an indescribable and all but unattainable state of pleasure, wherein their existence is transient and where they have wholly annihilated themselves on the way to permanence. Such a feeling is akin to that where a drop admits what its origin, capacity and end really is with respect to the ocean. It also denotes that everything subsists by His being the Self-Subsisting by Whom all subsist and that nothing can come into existence or maintain its existence without being dependent on Him. So, transience and decay are essential to human nature—a fact of which everybody should be aware, while Permanence is necessary to the Self-Subsisting. When the journey comes to the end where the servants perceive this essential part of their nature and existence, the All-Holy Sovereign and Owner rewards them with permanence. In the language of Sufism, this favor is called “annihilation in God” and “subsistence by God with or in the company God.”

The heroes that follow the way of the people of the Sunna wa’l-Jama‘a and who are able to base all their views, words and manners on God’s absolute Oneness and Uniqueness, have always viewed annihilation in the endless ocean of Divine Knowledge and Existence according to the above considerations. They have meticulously observed the rules that issue from the Sphere of Divine Lordship, and the manners required by self-possession and wakefulness, even in states of intoxication and absence. Any extreme words or manners contrary to self-possession are not seen in their words and acts, even though they are under the overpowering influence of the state and spiritual pleasure in their acts. One of them says:

The moving tunes that come from the wooden instrument and which the singer plays come in fact from Him.

This means that that hero of annihilation and self-possession sees that all things other than He are but drops from the endless ocean of the Divine Existence, although he cannot distinguish the drop from the ocean, a particle from the sun, a mirror from what is reflected in it because he is deeply immersed in God’s Existence. As was once said,

O beloved, you have become a river ending in this ocean; how difficult it is to distinguish between the ocean and the river!

he becomes lost in the ocean or in the heaven of the Divine Oneness or Unity into which he has been immersed. Overpowered by the irresistible waves of the ocean or the depths of the heaven, he can neither see the shore nor find in himself the power nor consciousness to come ashore.

Another one among those intoxicated ones, those who reached the horizon of annihilation in God and was favored with the gift of a new existence by the Lord, saw all existence like a mirror in which he was looking upon himself and in which he was intoxicated, said:

Sometimes He has condescended to appear arrayed like Layla, and sometimes He has honored us in the form of Majnun.
When the Beloved has stepped out of the privacy of the meeting room,
The decoration and ornament of the interior has become most apparent.

The heroes of immersion who have reached this highest point express their sensation of Divine Existence and Oneness, joy and pleasure, they express the favor of God’s company, and the excitement of feeling Him by sometimes crying or screaming, sometimes by losing themselves and fainting, and sometimes by going into ecstasies and dancing. All of these happen during the spiritual journey on the hills of the heart. One of those who dove deeply into this ocean expressed himself in the flood of the ecstasies of his heart as follows:

I am such a falcon of love that
I have no place in either world.
I am such a phoenix of secrets that
I no longer display any trace of my essence.
I hunted the two worlds in a pleasant way with my eyebrows.
Look and know that
I have neither an arrow nor a bow.
I have become a voice to speak
and an ear to hear every language,
and an ear to listen.
But how strange it is,
for I have no ears nor a tongue.

The leading Sufi scholars have also dealt with annihilation in the following four categories:

• Annihilation in renunciation of people: an initiate is saved from fear of people and from having expectations of them.
• Annihilation with respect to the desires: this is the renunciation of selfishness and all worldly desires, aspirations, and bodily
• Annihilation of will-power: total submission to God’s
• Annihilation of reason: this is reason’s submission to God in the face of the manifestations of the This annihilation comes along with the astonishment and amazement which initiates feel, due to which they are unable to observe the criteria of thinking, judging, and acting that are valid in the sphere of causality. They usually cannot help but voice this astonishment and amazement.

For example, Junayd al-Baghdadi says: “For a certain time, the inhabitants of the earth and heaven wept for my amazement, and sometimes it occurred that I wept for their amazement. Now I am in such a state that I am aware of neither myself nor of them.”

The amazement or wonder of Gedai is also worth noting:

I did not know myself as I see me now, I wonder whether He is me or I am Him?
This is the point where lovers lose themselves; I have burnt away, so give me water!
The words of the author of al-Minhaj demonstrate a deeper aura of love and amazement:
I do not know whether I am myself or Him.I am in bewilderment, but I am sure I am not myself.
Am I a lover or the one loved or love itself?
I am intoxicated from the cup of Oneness, and I am not myself.
What am I? Am I a phoenix with no fame or mark? I am away from my home, and I am not myself.
I am transient in soul but permanent by the Beloved.
I am flying high, and I am not myself.

If we consider what annihilation is, these words are natural for a hero of annihilation. Annihilation means that travelers to God see, according to their level, none save God and set their hearts on Him alone. When they advance to the point where their inner and outer worlds, perception, and consciousness are illuminated with the knowledge of truth, then they begin to see clearly Who holds the reins of everything, and they always turn to Him in Whose Hand lie their existence and subsistence. Then, while they become more deeply immersed in truth by concentrating all of their thoughts on Him and endeavoring to reach Him, then they perceive that all existence is a manifestation of the light of His Existence. They reach the horizon of viewing all things and events differently with the consideration of Unity, and they are favored with being able to feel and interpret everything with their essential characteristics that the veil of corporeality hides.

Travelers on the way to the Ultimate Truth take a further step and are able to perceive with the certainty of conviction that all the events in the universe, including human acts and endeavors, depend absolutely on God’s Names and Attributes, and that everything has come into existence and has blossomed in the heart of these Sources. They also perceive that whatever happens happens by His Power and Strength and see more clearly the limits of their willpower in all of their deeds. Abandoning all shadowy existence, they take shelter in the protection and ownership of the Truly Existent One, and gain a new existence by Him.

If the traveler can take a further step, then he or she can feel with some certainty, a certainty that comes from experience, that all things and/or beings with their being, attributes and characteristics are transferred from their existence in God’s Knowledge and clothed in external existence by His Power as a manifestation of His Existence. Becoming more profound in their feelings, the travelers are immersed in the vision of the truth that everything exists and subsists by Him. They perceive in their consciousness that the truth of (55:26), All that is on the earth (and heavens) is perishable (except He), undulates throughout the universe like a flag, and everything created is bound to decay, and is maintained by the manifestation of God’s being the Self-Subsisting by Whom all subsist. They also feel in their consciousness that if a being suffers a moment’s interruption of this manifestation, it will perish, and they reach a further horizon of perception of the Divine Oneness.

The first step belongs to the verifying scholars, the second to those traveling on the way to the Ultimate Truth who have strong, inflexible willpower, and the third to those who have true knowledge of God and vision.

Those who are at the first step are annihilated to the extent of the depth of their consciousness of God and enter the way to “a revival after death.” Those who have left this step behind experience absence and immersion with respect to their inner world by means of a spiritual vision and discovery; they find seclusion in crowds and silence in noise and uproar. Others, who have reached the third step, renounce all human desires and aspirations, and wherever they look are immersed in the manifestations of the Divine Knowledge and Existence; they feel fully surrounded by His signs, as stated in (2:115), To whatever direction you turn, there is the “Face” of God. Whatever they see, they feel awe when enveloped by His rays, and whatever they observe they feel astonished at the burning manifestations of His “Facial” Light and they mention Him with many allegories.

When travelers to the Ultimate Truth have gone beyond all these steps and have become heroes of annihilation in God, the colors of subsistence by God begin to appear to them from all horizons. At every moment during their journey they go beyond one dimension of “there is no deity” (i.e., no one truly existent, no one truly witnessed, no creator, no provider, etc.) Every new dimension they go beyond confronts them with a new dimension of “but God.” Due to their taking larger steps and due to the uninterrupted shower of Divine favors, the universal Lordship and complete Subsistence begin to manifest themselves on their horizon. A time comes and they feel that His Throne has embraced the whole universe, and rising by the stairs of repentance, penitence and contrition, which comprise the way of turning to Him completely, they are immersed in the lights of His Divinity. They drown in the extraordinary pleasures of feeling awe and fear of Him in their acts of worship. They take a great pleasure in listening to the Divine Speech—the Qur’an. Finding themselves sometimes in the clime of self-possession that is embedded in fear, and sometimes on the hills of alertness that are embedded in awe, and sometimes in the oceans of mercy, they experience fear and hope or expectation, sadness and rejoicing, all together at the same time, and try not to fall away from His door. Unburdening themselves to Him in every thought, concept, utterance and breath, they become heroes of following the Divine commandment (15:99), Worship your Lord until certainty, which is bound to come, comes to you, and without being content with their worshipping, they advance further and further. They know that when they stop, both the way and the journey will come to an end, and they can no longer have the ambition of reaching their destination. For the journey is toward the Infinite One, and unending endeavor in this world is reflected as endless favors from the realms beyond.

O God! Guide us to the Straight Way, the way of those whom You have favored, not of those who have incurred (Your) wrath (punishment and condemnation), nor of those who are astray. And bestow blessings and peace on our master Muhammad, and on his Family and Companions, all of them.

Notes

1. The poet refers to Jesus the Messiah, and the Dajjal who will appear before the end of time as a fierce opponent of Islam. The fact that he has one eye is usually interpreted to mean that he is blind to religion and the Hereafter. (Tr.)
2. al-Bukhari, “Tawhid,” 1; Ibn Hanbal, al-Musnad, 4:431.

Ma’rifa is a special knowledge that is acquired through reflective thought, sincere endeavor, using one’s conscience and inquiring into one’s inner world. It is different from (scientific) knowledge (‘ilm). (Scientific) knowledge is acquisition reached through study, investigation, analysis, and synthesis, while ma’rifa is the substance of knowledge attained through reflection, intuition, and inner perception. The opposite of (scientific) knowledge is ignorance, while the opposite of ma’rifa is denial.

Knowledge means comprehending or encompassing something thoroughly, while ma‘rifa means familiarity with or recognition of something—that something may be the Divine Being—in some of its aspects. For this reason, the One of Unity is called the All-Knowing (‘Alim), but He has never been called the One having familiarity with something (‘Arif). In addition, the exacting scholars of truth view ma‘rifa, which also means information, talent, and skill, as the culture acquired by conscience or one’s conscious nature. It has other meanings such as the ability to feel something with the spiritual faculty that humanity has been endowed with, the image of something known in the mind, and the knowledge kept in the memory which gains strength through repetition. From another perspective, it is consciousness, perception, and sufficient information which helps distinguish one thing from another. Ma‘rifa can be summed up as having concise knowledge about something or someone through their acts or works and attributes—knowledge which can be developed and detailed.

In order that one can be among those who have knowledge of God and who are regarded by God as being one of such people, one should have certain theoretical knowledge about God and the ways that lead to Him, recognizing the obstacles on the way, and knowing how to overcome these obstacles. One should also have enough willpower to apply what one knows. One who has true knowledge of God is a perfect human being who knows the Unique One, Who is the Eternally Besought, with His Acts, Names and Attributes, and is a person in whose everyday life this knowledge shows itself. He or she is also one who always keeps the heart purified and pursues sincerity and purity of intention, who can remain free of negative or evil moral qualities as far as possible, overcoming whatever dark emerges from the spirit and threatens to darken one’s horizon, and thereby demonstrating loyalty to the All-Watchful Guardian. Such a one can bear everything that befalls on God’s way to obtain His approval, and invites others to the way of the Prophets, which shows itself through God’s confirmation in every step, and whose lights he or she always feels with pleasure.

There is another approach to ma‘rifa that ma‘rifa is the ability to perceive something as exactly what it is in itself, in its true nature and identity, and based on the thing itself. According to this approach, knowledge of God is knowing the Divine Being with His Essential and Affirmative Attributes beyond all conceptions of modality. This is different from comprehending, perceiving and establishing other things, and is based on perception and knowing by conscience. This knowledge and perception should not be confused with modern intuitionism. The Divine Being is beyond all concepts and cannot be comprehended, perceived or scientifically known, although a certain knowledge or familiarity can be acquired of Him through His Acts, Names and Attributes.

The acknowledgment that The inability to perceive Him is the true perception, excellently expresses the inability of anything limited to perceive Him and the imperceptibility of the One Who is Infinite. The same meaning is exquisitely expressed in the saying, We have not been able to know You as knowing You requires, O the One Known.

It is only God Whose existence is absolute, and the greatest truth is acknowledging His Existence and Oneness. The first step in acquiring knowledge of Him is the attainment of belief, being a Muslim, and excellence—worshipping Him as if seeing Him. In realizing such a blessed aim, one should continue one’s traveling to the True Source of all gifts and blessings without turning to anything else as a source. One should be able to feel a new joy of reunion in every gift and blessing with which one is favored, and as the final point, gain familiarity with the mysteries of His Names and Attributes, and, if possible, of His Being.

This consideration is expressed as follows in Lutfiya by Wahbi:

Try your hardest and be one who has ma’rifa of Him,
One favored with knowledge of Him!
For the All-Loving declared, “so that I may be known;” [1]
Knowing God is the ultimate cause for the creation of the two worlds;
and knowing God is the adornment of humanity.
Those devoid of knowledge of Him are low in rank.
Knowing Him is a spiritual kingdom,
and Knowing Him is a Divine gift and blessing.
….
When you, O moving spirit, receive this gift and blessing;
the two worlds will be yours.

The following words, which are narrated in books concerning Sufism as a hadith qudsi—a saying, the meaning of which is from God and the wording of which was inspired in the Messenger—are the gist or kernel of all explanations concerning knowledge of God:

O humankind! One who knows his self also knows Me; one who knows Me seeks Me, and one who seeks Me certainly finds Me. One who finds Me attains all his aspirations and expectations, and prefers none over Me. O humankind! Be humble that you can have knowledge of Me; accustom yourself to hunger so that you can see Me; be sincere in your devotion to Me so that you can reach Me. O humankind! I am the Lord; one who knows his self also knows Me; one who renounces his self finds Me. In order to know Me, renounce your own self. A heart which has not flourished and been perfected through knowledge of Me is blind.

Knowledge of God sometimes becomes a source of wonder and astonishment for initiates, as has been said, “One who knows the Ultimate Truth becomes dumbfounded and tongue-tied.” But it sometimes becomes a means of expression for them, as has been said, “One who knows the Ultimate Truth finds his voice.” The voice finds its overflowing expression in one’s excitement and speech and echoes in many other ears. Although opposites, both the saying of Muhammad Parisa, [2] “There is none who knows the Divine Being other than Himself,” and the saying, “I know none else save God,” are true each in its own context.

There is none other than Him who has a true, substantial existence, and there are no true acts other than those done by Him. Other beings have a relative existence when compared with Him, and other acts, which take place in the cycle of causality, is of a relative nature. For this reason, knowledge of God is when an initiate melts away in the light of the Ultimate Truth and gains a new, “true” existence. This may be viewed as self-annihilation in God and subsistence by Him. I think the author of al-Minhaj stresses this fact in these verses:

If you can see with the lights of certainty,
then do not see one who knows and the One Known differently.

Fuduli [3] expresses this depth of knowledge of God as follows:

One who knows God is not one who knows
the wisdom of the world with what is in it.
One who knows God is he who does not know
what the world is with what is in it.

Sufis have made other descriptions concerning knowledge of God. According to these descriptions, knowledge of God is knowing the truths of the Divine Names and Attributes, grasping the phenomenon of the manifestations in existence and the discovery of the existential mystery, deeply perceiving the truth of existence with its originality and shadows, and understanding and representing in life the truth of religion according to the Will of the All-Desired One, Who is the final goal of those who set out to reach Him. Each of these descriptions requires a voluminous work to explain and is therefore beyond the scope of this study. We will only cite here some verses from Diyaiya (“The Book of Light”) which point to some dimensions of the subject matter:

The third chapter is about knowledge of God, O valiant young one;
to describe it the wheel of speech is unable to work.
….
There is no scribe nor a pen to write about it;
one cannot get his tongue around it to express it.
….
The mirror of reason is veiled from understanding it;
the ability of perception has nothing to say in it.
Only the bird of imagination can fly toward it;
there is no example that we can coin to explain it.
….
Here the gift comes only from God;
this is a light-diffusing, sacred rank.
….
The whole of creation is immersed in this realm,
which is more spacious than all the worlds.
….
There is no true existent save He Who is the One,
perceiving this is the real vision.
Do not interpret this vision in another way, or else,
it will mean unbelief and heresy, O one with body of light.
It is not the eyes in the head which have this vision;
The All-Loving One is all-free from vision by these eyes.
The innermost faculty—secret—discerns this truth,
when you find this faculty in you, you can understand it.
Human scientific knowledge and perception have nothing to say;
the merit is in wonder and helplessness in this field.
Perception of one’s helplessness is perception of the Ultimate Truth;
listen to what Abu Bakr, the truthful one, says concerning it. [4]

The rank of knowledge of God (ma‘rifa) is a rank of wonder, utter astonishment, and awe. It is possible to see this in almost all the reflections of the scholars of Sufism on knowledge of God. Some of them see it in direct proportion to the excess of the feeling of awe and have concluded that the deeper one is in knowledge of God, the deeper one’s feeling of awe is. Others regard knowledge of God as being the base of serenity and peacefulness and emphasize that inner peace and self-possession increase in proportion to the depth of knowledge of God. Still others consider knowledge of God as the heart’s attainment of friendship with God and the initiate’s following a way to nearness to God.

The approach of ash-Shibli opens new windows on the knowledge of God. According to him, it means that an initiate has an essential relation with none save God, making no complaints when burning with His love, is a sincere, obedient and faithful servant of God who avoids any claims of superiority, and one who worries about his or her end. A person with true knowledge of God and who has a strong connection with the sources of this knowledge, one who has taken refuge in the guidance of the spirit and meaning of Prophethood, and who has built sound relations with the truths that lie beyond human horizons, cannot feel any essential interest in transitory things nor does lower him or herself to feel attachment to others than the Lord. The Qur’an alludes to this highest point in (35:28), Of all His servants, only those possessed of true knowledge stand in awe of God, reminding the traveler of the relation between knowledge and awe or reverence of God. The greatest of those who have knowledge of God, upon him be peace and blessings, said concerning the same point: I am greater than you in knowledge of God, and more intense in fearing Him.[5]

In the books on Sufism, in which the intellect guided by Revelation is operative, and which contain numerous gems of wisdom concerning the “garment of piety” of those who have true knowledge of God, with Whom their hearts are deeply connected, we can find many gems concerning knowledge of God. The following are only a few of them:

• In the view of one favored with knowledge of God, the world with its material aspect becomes so small that it seems no greater than a cup.
• The souls that have gained profundity in knowledge of God expand to the extent that it is as if they have no
• Those who taste the pleasure of knowledge of God, which is regarded as the sweetest of all honey, pursue no other wealth than nearness to the Ultimate
• The richness of the honeycomb of knowledge of God in the heart is one of the most essential sources of love and An initiate burns with the zeal of reunion in proportion to how much this source overflows its banks, which he or she sees as the price of the favors received.

The following points which differentiate those who have a sound knowledge of God from others are important. The former have no selfish expectations from whatever good they do, never think of competition for either material or spiritual ranks nor feel jealous of anybody. They do not see themselves as being greater than anyone else, nor do they moan because of missed opportunities, anymore than they feel arrogant because of their accomplishments. Even if they were granted the kingdom of the Prophet Solomon, they would only seek God’s company, regarding it as futile to turn to other things. They feel no relation with beings other than the Almighty with respect to their worldly existence and corporeal selves, and know that one moment of God’s friendship is worth the entire world. They consider being with God among people as a victory that has been granted to their willpower, and see the Divine Will reflected in the face of their determination, recognizing the help of the Lord in the result of their endeavor, alongside many other instances of wisdom and God’s extraordinary gifts. They observe the manifestations of the Divine Oneness in the multiplicity of the creation, and thereby they grasp how a drop is transformed into an ocean, and a particle into the sun. They witness in their conscience how nothingness or non-existence is a fertile land, to be planted with existence and live drowned in ecstasies and intoxication.

Self-possession, steadfastness, seriousness, profundity, and resolution are the clearest and most important signs of perfect knowledge of God. Those who have this degree of knowledge live under the shower of the manifestations of God’s friendship and company. No sign of any flaws can be seen in their inner or outer world, nor is any laxity witnessed in their behaviors. They never show impertinence or conceit, even when favored with the most abundant gifts. On the contrary, they always act in a self-possessed manner, trying to lead a self-disciplined, spiritual life.

Obviously, everyone cannot have the same degree of knowledge of God. Some travel on the horizon of perceiving the Attributes essential to the Divine Being and the favors that accompany His Acts. They observe and avail themselves of His proofs that are found within themselves and in the outer world, with the result that their love of truth and their relation with the Greatest of Truths are witnessed in their manners. They travel between the Divine Acts, Names and Attributes and are thrilled with the different melodies of belief, knowledge of God, love, attraction and the feeling of being attracted by God to Himself. They feel in their conscience the reflections of the Divine Acts or operations in the universe and pursue more and more the pleasure entailed in observing ever new colors and aspects. This is a way bequeathed by the Prophets and it is a way that can be followed by everyone. One who travels along this way of objective truth travels toward the Ultimate Truth under the arches of His regard and compliments.

On this path there are others who feel all the dimensions in existence ending in one dimension, who feel that everything is annihilated in God. It is as if they have reached a point where the lights and manifestations of the Divine Being and Attributes come together from the perspective of humanity and annihilate their very being in the Divine Being, attaining a new existence with the Self-Subsistence of Him Who is the All-Knowing and the Ever-Existent.

While those belonging to the former group travel in the realm of the Divine Attributes and Qualities, others have already directed themselves to the Source of these Attributes and Qualities. Therefore, their observations and sensations are not aimed at either the Attributes exclusively in such a way as to veil the Being in their minds or spirits, nor at the Being exclusively in such a way as to suggest the denial of the Attributes. For this reason, such an approach has been regarded as the way of the perfected and most advanced, and the main path that is followed by those who travel to the greatest nearness to God.

The Book, the Sunna, reason, and the Divine system in creation and human primordial nature bear witness to the truth of this way along which God’s works of Art show themselves brightly. Initiates who have firmly established their feet on this path witness at every step that God witnesses His Existence and Oneness, and they cannot help but utter, God bears witness that surely there is no deity but He (3:18). They hear in their conscience the confirmations of angels and those possessed of knowledge as a reflection of God’s Own witnessing, and continue to utter: and the angels and those possessed of knowledge (also bear witness to the same truth) (3:18). Then, they see that all means and causes that are not essential to His Being having vanished, and they are able to be at perfect rest and to find perfect peace.

There are others who have such abundant knowledge of God that proofs of God are no longer needed in their world; all the things that witness Him are humbled in the face of their being in the Presence of the True Witness; all the means tremble with the shame of making distant whatever is near, and all the heralds are silent and busy with correcting the words that they have uttered. At this point, where everything is seen by the conscious nature as witnessing Him beyond all concepts of modality, the eyes are dazzled by the brightest manifestations of the “Divine Facial Light,” and all other identities save His are lost. Those who have reached this point see that the True Source of existence and knowledge surrounds everything from all sides, tasting the pleasure of perceiving every being’s perception of Him according to their level, and feeling that everything is annihilated in Him. They sense the way in which the manifestations of the Divine Names are combined with those of the Being, Attributes and Acts. The conscience is saved from any feeling of dependence on causality and reaches the horizon of Surely we belong to God (as His creatures and servants), and surely to Him we are bound to return (2:156). But this never means, as some have assumed, “absolute annihilation” or “union with God.”

Our Lord! Grant us from Your Presence a special mercy and arrange for us in our affairs what is right and for our good! And bestow blessings and peace on our master Muhammad, by whom the mysteries came to light and the lights shone brightly, and on his pure Family and Companions.

Notes

1. Here there is a reference to the Qur’anic verse, I have not created the jinn and humanity but to worship Me (51:56). To worship Me has usually been interpreted as “so that I may be known and worshipped.” (Tr.)
2. Muhammad Parisa (d., 822/1419) was a great scholar and saint from Bukhara. He passed away in Madina. Among his books al-Fusulu’s-Sitta (Six Chapters) is famous. (Tr.)
3. Mehmed Fuduli (1490-1556). The greatest poet of the Turkish classical literature. He lived in Iraq. His Diwan, (“Collection of Poems”), Layla wu Majnun (“Layla and Majnun”), and Hadiqatu’s-Su‘ada (“The Garden of the Holy Ones”) are some of his other well-known books. (Tr.)
4. The writer refers to Abu Bakr’s saying: “The inability to perceive Him is the true perception.” (Tr.)
5. 5. as-Sahawi, al-Maqasidu’l-Hasana, 21.

It was finally the weekend! After my long mathematics presentation, I came home to watch my favorite tv show, Person of Interest, to de-stress. Surprisingly, the episode was about the most famous mathematical constant, pi (π) which is equal to the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, commonly approximated as 3.14159. Mr. Finch (the main character) was acting as a substitute teacher and wrote on the chalkboard 3.1415926535. Then he asked the students, “What does this mean?” I answered the question in my mind, thinking, “If I have a bicycle tire with a diameter of 1, then one full revolution of the bicycle tire would travel the distance pi.” However, in the show, nobody answered. Then Mr. Finch answered the question himself, saying:

Person of Interest, Season 2 Episode 11 “2 Pi R”

“Pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — 3.1415926535 — is just the beginning. It keeps going forever without ever repeating, which means that contained within this string of decimals is every other number; your birth date, the combination to your locker, your social security number, etc. It’s all in there somewhere. And if you convert these decimals into letters you would have every word that ever existed in every possible combination; the first syllable you spoke as a baby, the name of your latest crush, your entire life story from beginning to end, and everything we ever say or do. All of the world’s infinite possibilities rest within this one simple circle. Now what will you do with that information; what it’s good for? Well, that would be up to you…”

Although that scene was actually inaccurate, I loved it. This scene is beautiful because most teachers in the world struggle to be as good and as interesting of a teacher as Mr. Finch is here. His knowledge about the subject expands the discussion beyond the textbooks and keeps the students focused throughout the lecture.

Wikipedia, gif, “Pi Unrolled”

We have all been taught that pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.

Unfortunately, this is wrong because mathematicians have not proved that pi has the characteristic of “normality” yet. In other words, mathematicians are not sure if pi contains all the finitely long permutations of digits from 0 to 9. They are not sure if every digit continues to be used after a certain amount of time or an unlimited number of times in pi’s decimal representation. Nobody knows what we will find in the digits of pi if we keep going. For instance, when we check the first billion digits of pi, we see that the digit 7 occurs almost 100 million times. This makes pi a nice random number generator. However, after some points, pi may not contain the digit 7 and might instead have a non-repeating number with just two or three digits such as 010203112233000111222333…

For instance, after the first 761 digits of pi, there is a famous mathematical coincidence where six nines occur in a row which is called the Feynman point.

Twitter, Feynman’s Library, “Feynman Point in Pi”

But we are sure that the digits of pi keep going on forever and in a random order. This makes pi interesting because the value of pi is finite; however, its decimal value is infinitely long. This is not a contradiction. Pi is a constant number because it is the ratio of the circumference of a circle and its diameter, which are finite values. Still, we need an approximate value for pi.

In 1768, Johann Lambert proved that the value of pi is an irrational number and it cannot be written as a rational simple fraction. 22/7 is a commonly used approximation but does not contain all of the digits of pi. This is because irrational numbers cannot be written as a ratio of two numbers, such as , because they continue on to infinity and do not follow a pattern. In 1882, Ferdinand Lindemann proved that pi is a transcendental number because it is not algebraic; it is not a non-constant polynomial equation with rational coefficients (“Transcendental number”, Wikipedia).

We can safely say that pi is transcendental because the mathematician Yasumasa Kanada found that the first trillion digits of pi appear to be statistically random. If you check the table below, you see that the event of each digit occurring is independent, and the probability of it is one-tenth of the time (“Kanada Laboratory,” Super Computing)

After many years, Emma Haruko Iwao found 34.1 trillion digits of pi in 2019. It took 121 days for Haruko and his computer, because calculating pi requires a lot of power, even for a computer. You can picture it in your mind like this; if you were to print a billion decimal values of Pi in normal sized, ordinary font, it would stretch from New York to Kansas.

However, 34.1 trillion digits is still not enough to prove whether pi is normal or not (“Pi in the Sky, Google Cloud Blog). Supercomputers are still crunching the numbers. If you check the graph below, you will see the number of known digits of pi, by year, since 250 B.C.

FiveThirtyEight, Graph, “Even After 31 Trillion Digits, We’re Still No Closer To The End Of Pi”

Going back to Mr. Finch, we see that he is not 100% wrong. We can find our birthdays in pi easily. If you go to mypiday.com and type your birthday, it will give you the decimal place in pi. For example, my birthday occurs at the 675,097th decimal place.

If pi is a normal number, then we can say that our whole destiny is encoded in pi. The pictures we are going to take in the future, will be in pi because there are binary numbers behind images. All digital products are in pi. Even this article has been in pi for thousands of years. Furthermore, the DNA of every creature is in pi. Mr. Finch was actually right.

There is an interesting and artistic way to show the randomness of pi. Some scientists might be happy with their tedious scatter plots, but there are some artists who use colors for data visualization to communicate with the public. Martin Krzywinski is one such artist, who found beauty and artistry in the randomness of Pi. He took the digits of pi and gave each digit a different color. For instance, he gave 3 the color orange, 1 as red, 4 as yellow, and so on. Then he made a beautiful poster. And if you look at it carefully, you do not see any particular pattern to the colors.

Science Art by Martin Krzywinski

Should we stop working on pi? Or should we continue looking for a better approximation? Is assuming pi as equal to 3.14 good enough? Or is it enough to use 40 digits of pi to find the circumference of the Milky Way galaxy to an error less than the size of a proton (JPL NASA)? Are the first 152 digits enough to find the circumference of the observable universe at 93 billion light-years (WIRED)? There are hundreds of mathematicians who have been trying to figure out more digits of pi for years. It is like trying to get to the moon and then to the next planet, and so on…

But why? Why do mathematicians bother calculating any more digits? Why aren’t 34.1 trillion digits of pi enough? Is it because pi lurks in every circle?

The logical reason seems cryptic: is it because pi is a beautiful source to generate random numbers? Or is it that countries can show off their technology to other countries, because calculating trillions of digits of pi requires a very powerful computer? For instance, in the Star Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold,” Spock foils the evil computer by commanding it to “compute to last digit of the value of pi.” So asking a computer to compute pi is called “a stress test” and may make it crash.

On the other hand, we humans are just weird. Staying at home and drinking tea is a beautiful activity, but when we get bored, we try to climb the highest of mountains, befriend a tiger, or try to memorize the digits of pi, like Chao Lu, who correctly memorized the first 67,890 digits of pi. We will keep doing these things because we like to understand the world around us.

We are inevitably connected to the past, and pi is a thread that’s gone through all of human history. That’s why we can say that as long as there are people, there’s always going to be somebody who wonders what’s next. And I assure you that somewhere in the world there is a mathematician or scientist using pi for something important, because pi is still the mysterious constant of nature.

Finding Pi

The previous statement is utterly true: there has always been someone who works on pi. Math is as old as civilization. Pi has been studied by the human race for almost 4000 years. When the last mammoths were going extinct, people were studying Pi. As far as we know, Archimedes was one of the first humans who calculated pi. He was most likely helping wheel makers. But how did he estimate the value of pi?

Firstly, he saw that all polygons are a circle. According to Archimedes, if you keep increasing the number of the sides of a polygon, you get closer to the perfect circle. In other words, a pentagon is more circle than a square, but a hexagon is more circle than a pentagon, and so on… Thus, more than two thousand years ago, he defined a circle as a regular polygon with an extremely large number of sides.

His definition is useful because measuring a curved surface was hard to do accurately. He found a way to find the circumference of a circle. First, he drew a square with its corners touching the perimeter of a circle and found the perimeter of the inscribed square. Secondly, he drew another square with its sides also touching the perimeter of the circle and found the perimeter of the circumscribed square. He came to the conclusion that the circumference of the circle had to lie somewhere between the value of those two perimeters of squares.

Using this method, however, the difference between those two values was pretty big. So, he drew pentagons to see the upper and lower bounds of the circumference of the circle. This gave him a smaller range of bounds. He kept increasing the number of faces of the polygon that he was drawing inside and outside the circle. Each time he did this, his estimation was getting more accurate. Archimedes got up to a 96 sided regular polygon [called an enneacontahexagon] until he grew exhausted. The lower and upper bound that he found were 3.1408 and 3.1429. Thus, he calculated π to two decimal places.

Archimedes’ method needed improvement because his life span was not going to be long enough to find the other digits of pi by hand. Mathematicians needed to discover more efficient formulas and new techniques.

Before they could do this, they needed to discover algebra. Its discovery by the great mathematicians inspired a whole new way of looking at the world.

The next great jump in calculating pi was the invention of calculus. After that, mathematicians started working on infinite series. An infinite series is an expression with numbers added together until infinity; sometimes these infinite series converge to a particular value.

There are many methods available now to calculate pi. Gottfried Leibniz found pi in infinity. James Gregory was working on one of the astonishing infinite series for the inverse tangent function below. He added infinitely many small numbers together and found pi.

He put x = 1 into the inverse-tangent series. He showed us the further we go, the closer to the estimation of pi we get. However, in order to get 10 digits of pi, we need to write about 5 billion fractions.

After that, another great mathematician, Leonhard Euler – who officially adopted the Greek letter “π” as a symbol to represent the value – found a more efficient equation for pi, when he was only 28. The symbol became iconic. Euler’s Pi equation calculates an infinite sum. The Basel Problem was named after him.

Euler also used pi to write another beautiful equation, Euler’s Identity.

Thanks to the Indian mathematician Ramanujan’s obsession with pi, we have many new formulas to find pi. When he arrived at Cambridge from India, he brought with him a notebook in which there were 400 pages of formulas to find pi.

After the invention of mechanical computers, mathematicians used Leibniz’s, Euler’s, and Ramanujan’s infinite series to calculate a trillion decimal digits of pi (Stanford Cryptography Group). Without a supercomputer, finding this many digits of pi would be difficult. For example, the mathematician William Shanks managed to calculate the first 707 digits of pi by hand but unfortunately, he had made a mistake after the 527th place.

Pi is everywhere

Children start learning about pi when they are in 7th grade and use it until they graduate from college. Even after that, most people use pi again when their children go to school. Pi appears everywhere in the universe. It is literally woven into our universe: the orbits of planets, electromagnetic waves, rivers, the colors of auroras, the structure of DNA, the Great Pyramid of Giza… If a scientist wants to describe the structure of the universe or find the relationship between planets, he/she definitely needs to use pi: anything involving a circle or a sphere is about pi. Circles appear throughout the natural world, whether they’re a soap bubble or the moon in the night sky.

 A Gif showing the clever play on the letters “pi”

Sinuosity of rivers

Pi has a direct relationship with rivers. But how? To figure this out, we need to measure the length of a river in two different ways. Assume that we know the starting and ending point of the river. First, we need the actual length to see how bendy the river is. In other words, the distance that you need to swim from the beginning point to the ending point. This whole length will be “L”. Second, we need to find a straight length. In other words, this time we need to fly from the beginning to the end. And this direct route will be a lowercase “l”. Now we can write the formula for the sinuosity by dividing L by l. The sinuosity is a ratio and measures how bendy the river is.

What is important here is there’s no limit to how high sinuosity can be. Rivers can be really bendy. However, Hans-Henrik Stølum proved that theaverage sinuosity of rivers around the world is pi. If you find the sinuosity of all the rivers and take the average sinuosity of them, you should get pi (Meandering River).

There is another interesting fact about sinuosity. Rivers can be very bendy at some points. But suddenly, those rivers become straight and make the sinuosity around pi. So, it is hard to find the sinuosity of a river equal to 7 because of fluid dynamics. Mathematicians found the highest sinuosity to be around 3.5 and the lowest sinuosity around 2.7.

At the extremely bendy point, rivers cut off after the bend point and make a shortcut to become straight again. This phenomenon is known as an oxbow lake, which controls the sinuosity of rivers. This keeps the sinuosity of a river around Pi.

Pi in Space

There is a mathematical order inherent in our universe. For instance, to understand our solar system, we need pi. We know that our planet moves in front of its host star. And the light comes from host stars. To talk about that light, we need to know how big the host star is. In other words, we need the surface area of the host star. The formula for the surface area of a sphere is 4πr², with r being the star’s radius. The size of a planet also helps scientists to guess whether it is habitable or not.

Another good example to show the relationship between pi and the universe is electrostatic force, which is the force between two electric charges. An electron exerts a force in all directions and forms a sphere field. Electrons also interact with each other on an electric field. To figure out that interaction, we need to find the surface area of spheres, where again pi comes up.

There is also a connection between pi and gravity. If you have had a chance to see Einstein’s field equations, you might notice that pi is there also:

The formula above calculates how objects with a large mass, such as stars and galaxies, can curve space and time with their gravity. Einstein said that, just like a ball sitting on a bedsheet, any form of momentum and energy can also curve space-time around it. In words, the formula is saying:

Gravity = 8 x π x Energy & Momentum

Lastly, if you take the square root of Earth’s gravity, you almost get pi.

Pi Day

After so many years studying pi, people decided to organize an official celebration of pi on March 14th. Since 1988, people have celebrated this magical constant. Coincidentally, Albert Einstein was born on pi day – March 14, 1879. Einstein also published his theory of general relativity on pi day.

The Google logos for Pi Day.

For nearly a century, chlorine has been used to disinfect drinking water. The use of chlorine in water started when John Snow used to purify the cholera-causing water of the Broad Street Pump, in London. After seeing that chlorine curbed deaths from cholera, Great Britain started chlorinating their public drinking water. Then chlorination began in New Jersey, and after that it was soon used throughout the United States. Measuring the benefits and risks, it’s clear that the advantages of adding chlorine to drinking water outweigh the potential dangers. Scientific research also shows that the benefits of chlorinated water are more than the risks from THM’s and other by-products (Health Canada, 2004).

There continue to be many people in developing countries who do not have access to clean water. In some parts of the world, people collect water from available sources and store it in containers without treatment and further protection from contamination (Sobsey, Handzal & Venczel, 2003).

Sobsey, Handzal & Venczel (2003) conducted an experiment to see the effects of chlorine when added to a container with contaminated water. These experiments were conducted in Bangladesh and Bolivia. Community families were divided into two groups: intervention (household water chlorination and storage in special container) and control (no intervention). The results in Bangladesh were: in the intervention households, only 12.9% of the containers were E.coli positive; in the control households, 55.2% of containers were E.coli positive. The results were equally stark in Bolivia: only 33.7% of intervention households were contaminated by E.coli, whereas 93.8% of control households were contaminated.

There was also a decrease in the diarrhoeal illness in the experimental findings for samples in both countries’ households where the water was treated with chlorine. During the eight-month trial period, the mean diarrhea incidence rates of children younger than five years old in Bangladesh was 20.8 episodes/1000 days in the intervention group and 24.3 episodes/1000 days in the control group. In Bolivia, where the experiment lasted for six months, the mean diarrhea episodes/person for all age groups was 0.21 for the intervention group 0.38 for the control group. 43% of all cases of diarrhea were preventable by the intervention (Sobsey et al., 2003).

The study noted other successes. In some countries, like Saudi Arabia, chlorine was used in household tanks, which resulted in a 48% reduction of diarrhea; and in India, chlorine was used in earthenware, which resulted in a decrease of cholera cases, from 17% to 7.3%. (Sobsey et al., 2003).

In another study, Coulliette, Enger, Weir & Rose (2013), evaluated the effect of chlorinated HaloPure beads on the reduction of bacterial pathogens with concurrent sewage contamination. They estimated the risk reduction of waterborne typhoid fever and cholera within a hypothetical community of 1000 people treating their water with the chlorinated HaloPure beads. Seeded well water resulted in log10 reductions of 5.44 for S. Typhi and 6.07 for V. cholera (Coulliette et al., 2013). In well water with 10% sewage and seeded bacteria, the log10 reductions were 6.06 for S. Typhi and 7.78 for V. cholera (Coulliette et al., 2013). If an individual drinks from the contaminated water that was taken from the water source that had fecal material leaked into it, the risk of disease according to the Monte Carlo analysis would be a median of 0.21 for typhoid fever and a median of 0.11 for cholera (Coulliette et al., 2013). If that same water was treated, then the result would be: median of 4.1*10^-7 for typhoid and a median of 3.5*10^-9 for cholera (Coulliette et al., 2013).

These are important results: in developing counties, diarrhea is one of the greatest health issues. Arnold & Colford JR. (2007) conducted a systematic review of all studies that measured diarrheal health impacts in children and the impact on water quality of point-of-use chlorine drinking water treatment. Of the 10 studies that were analysed, nine of them showed a reduction of diarrhea in children. Across the 10 studies, the intervention led to an 80% reduction in the proportion of stored water samples with detectable E. coli (Arnold & Colford JR, 2007).

Water chlorination has been a very useful strategy for treating contaminated water for years. Currently, chlorination is the only method that disinfects the pathogens from the point of treatment to the point of consumption. As the scientific research above indicates, the benefits of chlorinating water supplies, particularly in the developing part of the world, is essential for disease prevention and reduction. Water is an essential element for life, and clean water is what keeps us alive. Although chlorine in large doses can be harmful for our health, it can also be a lifesaver. Nothing on earth is created without reason. Chlorine has obviously been created to directly benefit humanity.

References

• Arnold, B. F., & Colford JR., J. M. (2007). Treating water with chlorine at point-of-use to improve water quality and reduce child diarrhoea in developing countries: A systemic review and meta-analysis.The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 76 (2), 354-364.
• Coulliette, A. D., Enger, K. S., Weir, M. H., & Rose, J. B. (2013). Risk reduction assessment of waterborne Salmonella and Vibrio by a chlorine contact disinfectant point-of-use device.International journal of hygiene and environmental health,216(3), 355-361.
• Sobsey, M. D., Handzel, T., & Venczel, L. (2003). Chlorination and safe storage of household drinking water in developing countries to reduce waterborne disease.Water science and technology : a journal of the International Association on Water Pollution Research, 47 (3), 221-228.
• It’s Your Health – Drinking Water Chlorination [Health Canada, 2004]. (n.d.). Retrieved June 5, 2013, from http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hl-vs/iyh-vsv/environ/chlor-eng.php

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.

Mushahada (observation) means using insight to see in Divine Acts the Divine Names that give existence to them, and to become aware, in the manifestation of the Names, of the All-Holy One Who is called by those Names. In oth­er words, observation denotes that those favored with Divine near­ness reach the horizon where they leave the corporeal realm behind and observe things like bright mirrors reflecting God’s Oneness.

Observation is seeing with insight or with the eye of the heart, and is therefore different from seeing. In his Sharh-i Muhammadiya (“The Exposition of Muhammadiya”), Ismail Haqqi Bursawi stresses this difference: Observation, a great Divine gift, is seeing with insight, not with the eyes. What is seen with the eyes is the shadow and manifestation of the Divine Light. As for what is seen with insight or observed, it is the truth of the Divine Light and the observation of the Ultimate Truth Himself, seen with the eye of the heart, beyond all concepts of modality.

Observation is also different from disclosure. Disclosure is that an initiate acquires familiarity with certain meanings and abstract truths; the object of observation is beings themselves, though not, of course, the Divine Being, Who absolutely cannot be comprehended. In other words, when the term “observation” is used with respect to the Divine Being as the object of observa­tion, it means turning to Him with one’s illumined and with illu­mining insight in such a way that one attracts Divine attention to oneself, while disclosure is the state in which one feels and expe­riences the Divine Names and Attributes.

Observation is made possible by a vigorous heart with keen sight and hearing. These senses are highly sensitive and receptive, completely connected to the realms beyond, and conducive to per­fect concentration. The verse (50:37), Surely in this is a reminder for one who has a heart or give ears having a full capacity of see­ing, can be interpreted as referring to this fact.

One favored with knowledge of God transcends His signs and the pieces of evidence provided by creation and, melting away in the originality of the Divine Names and Attributes, attains the observation of God’s Oneness beyond His Acts, Names and Attributes.

Like disclosure, there are degrees of observation. One can think of these degrees as observatories assigned to different capacities in order to observe the truth. Everyone is favored and honored with observation from these observatories according to the depth of their belief, the strength of their certainty, and the capacity of their heart. The lowest of these degrees is observation through knowledge of God supported by knowledge and belief. Initiates who have reached this point feel that by virtue of their strong certain­ty, they feel in their conscience that the lights of Divine Existence pour on the horizon of their perceptions in the form of knowledge of God. Such persons begin to walk with a deep yearning to the point where they will see everything annihilated in God.

The second degree of observation is so clear that it is as if one were seeing with one’s eyes. One favored with knowledge of God who has reached this point transcends His signs and the pieces of evidence provided by creation and, melting away in the originality of the Divine Names and Attributes, attains the observation of God’s Oneness beyond His Acts, Names and Attributes, which provide His signs and evidence in existence. Conscious of the fact that one’s existence is only shadowy, the seeker fixes his or her eyes on Him exclusively. Concerning this station, the author of Mizanu’l-‘Irfan (Mustafa Fevzi bin Nu’man) says:

Discovering the (Divine) Being is an elevated station,
where the currency of speech is not valid nor in demand.
Whoever attempts to knock on the door at that station,
always receives the answer, “You will never be able to see Me!”
If he is shown a sign like that resembling the one shown to Moses,
it will be only a single manifestation of His Majesty.

The third degree is observing everything as being annihilated in God. Those perfected ones favored with knowledge of God and who have attained this highest degree annihilate their material being and feel attracted by the All-Existent One with the All-Beau­tiful Names and All-Sacred Attributes by virtue of belief and a certainty that has been transformed into observation. With a sight that has gained the keenness that it will have in the Hereafter where the veils over the eyes will be removed, they know fully Who their Creator, Lord, Originator is, and the One Who has endowed them with the light of existence and Whom they worship. They are freed from any connection with all else save Him.

Junayd al-Baghdadi describes this station as the manifestation of the Unseen, which is perceived by means of the Divine lights in the time when hearts overflow with rejoicing. The author of Mizanu’l-‘Irfan says concerning the same point:

If the absolutely Sovereign Being manifests Himself,
the existence of the universe is no longer felt.
If the Truly Beloved One manifests Himself,
will any trace be left of the shadow of darkness?
However, this point leads some to confusion;
they take His lightning-like manifestation for the Being Himself.

What the author of Mizanu’l-‘Irfan is reminding us of is not to confuse the original with the shadow, and to take an observation from the conscience and the heart in a state of pleasure for the observation of the Ultimate Truth Himself. The following verses are only a few drops from the essence of such confusion:

If you have been given two eyes to know the Ultimate Truth,
then see the two worlds—this and the next—filled with the Friend!
Though we are each a drop, we are drowned in the ocean;
though we are each an atom, in fact we are the sun.

O God! Show us the truth as being true and enable us to fol­low it, and show us falsehood as being false and enable us to refrain from it. And bestow blessings and peace on Your Mes­senger, the pure, chosen one, and on his Family and Compan­ions, esteemed, appreciative and faithful.

Brittlestars form a large group of sea animals that are similar to starfish. There are more than 2,000 species of brittlestars. However, this article will focus on two of them, Ophiocoma pumila (Figure 1a) and Ophiocoma wendtii (Figure 1b). In spite of their similar appearance, these two kinds of brittlestars have one main difference. While O. pumila is insensitive to light, O. wendtii is highly light sensitive. For example, the latter has different colors at day and night, as shown in Figure 1b, left and right respectively. More interestingly, O. wendtii can sense shadows of predators and quickly move into dark areas such as a cave or underneath a rock.

To understand the mechanisms behind the difference in light sensitivities of these two species, Joanna Aizenberg and her colleagues investigated1 the microstructure of both brittlestars’ outer skeletons with an electron microscope and came up with a striking result: The top surface of O. wendtii’s skeleton has very well ordered lens-like hemi spherical elements (Figure 1f). The cross section image of one of those hemispheres actually looks like a compound lens made up from two hemispheres with different diameters (Figure 1g). On the other hand, O. pumila’s skeleton had a typical stereom (sponge-like calcite) structure (Figure 1e). These images strongly suggest that the lenses in O. wendtii’s skeleton are responsible for the relatively high light sensitivity. However, understanding how that really happens require further investigation.

It is well-known that spherical lenses suffer from a problem called “spherical aberration,” which means that the light rays that are closer to the optical axis are focused at a different point than the ones that are away from the axis. A quick solution to this problem is to use two lenses, whose diameters have a certain ratio, back to back; this helps to correct the aberration originating from the first one with the second one. Interestingly, when Aizenberg et. al. calculated1 the optimum compound lens configuration for O. wendtii’s skeleton, which has the minimum aberration, their result matched the original lens structure perfectly (the orange outline in Figure 1e). They were also able to locate the focal point of these lenses (d = 4-7 um* below the lens) with the same method. Their further electron microscopy studies showed optically sensitive nerve bundles exactly at that location. All these results clearly show that O. wendtii’s skeleton has the perfect geometry to collect and focus light to improve its light sensitivity. However, there is one big question about these lenses: their material.

Calcite, a kind of calcium carbonate (CaCO3), is a common ingredient of the shell or the skeleton of marine organisms. Interestingly, the birefringence property of calcite makes it very unfavorable as a lens material. In a birefringent material the speed of the light depends on the direction it travels with respect to the crystallographic axes of the material. As a result, if one looks through it, they will observe a doubly refracted image (Figure 2). Being the most famous example of birefringent crystals, calcite’s refractive index is 1.64 parallel to one crystallographic axis and 1.49 in the perpendicular direction. Therefore a regular calcite lens cannot focus light on a single spot, unless it is oriented along a special crystallographic axis (c-axis to be specific), which would be along the diagonal of the prism in Figure 2.

At this point we are not surprised to learn that the optical axis of the O. wendtii’s lenses, and the c-axis of the calcite crystal that they are made of, indeed overlap. We are not surprised because we already had a strong feeling that these lenses should work. However, it is quite surprising that these little creatures can grow single crystals of calcite with a specific crystallographic orientation. As Kenneth Towe states in the context of a similar study, “This precise orientation of crystals is the big mystery of biomineralization. Organisms know how to do it; we do not yet know how they know.”3

Biomineralization, the controlled deposit of inorganic minerals by living organisms, is a very active research field attracting many scientists from various disciplines, including biology, physics, chemistry, and material science. In general, controlling crystal structures at small length scales is a very challenging task. Scientists spend millions of dollars to build state-of-the-art facilities for single crystal materials synthesis. They work in clean rooms, under an ultra high vacuum and at extremely high temperatures. On the other hand, from brittlestars to large whales, almost all living creatures have biominerals, such as bones and shells, manufactured in chemically dirty environments and at decent temperatures. Organisms are apparently equipped more efficiently than our laboratories are.

A. Ali Eren has a Ph.D. in Physics and lives in the USA. He studies physical chemistry of biological processes.

References

*1 um (micron) is one thousandth of a millimeter. Human hair is approximately 100 micron thick.

1. Aizenberg, Joanna, et al. “Calcitic microlenses as part of the photoreceptor system in brittlestars.” Nature 412.6849 (2001): 819-822.
2. ttp://jademellor.com/blog/2013/6/21/rainbow-rhombus, accessed 4/20/2014
3. Towe, Kenneth M. “Sea urchins as crystallographers.” Science 311.5767 (2006): 1554-1555.

Knowing oneself is a good starting point. But what does it mean, after all? Is it possible to know yourself at all, particularly with all the tools we are presented with or forced to acquire throughout our lives? Tools, after all, are all limited in nature, presented to you by others, such as language skills, thought processes, and cognitive abilities. Then, do you think you can know yourself, let alone develop your own philosophy of life? With all these difficulties, you set out on one of two differing paths, either one where you become a thinker yourself and be a lighthouse yourself, or another, where you just drift around another lighthouse. Anything beyond could be darkness. The difference between these two seems to lie in asking, seeking, and questioning; that is, in having an inquisitive mind versus embracing, accepting, and believing – in other words, having a submissive mind. It becomes more like choosing a blue pill versus a red one, as is depicted in a recent film, which is a rather successful strategy for guiding the submissive in searching for meaning.

With all these thoughts, let me begin to talk about my journey of seeking the meaning of life – well, in particular my life. With all the boundaries and veils around me set by education and indoctrination, I set sail into different waters, far away. I enjoyed being myself as a subject rather than an object. I freed myself of some knowledge without any facts and was bound by other knowledge. This painstaking unweaving and weaving of myself led me to being who I am now, with numerous toolsets of scientific facts and knowledge, of faith and truths, with numerous veils, some old and some new. And I am somewhat content with what I have now, albeit at times I fear missing the whole point that is the meaning of life. Then, I revert to my comfort zone and feel safer for the moment.

Again, with all the new adventures and relearning of myself, I find myself mostly looking for contentment with life – both my life and others. Contentment, superficially a head-to-toe feeling, gives me a sense of safety and the courage to seek more facts and knowledge in science and faith. Confusion, on the other hand, is my fear. The difference is like having 20/20 vision versus having serious cataracts. In my journey, the beam of a lighthouse illuminated me and made me feel that I have 20/20 vision, by which I can potentially see and get to know everything and be contented with everything, most importantly with myself. But was this just due to this lighthouse or had I developed the tools to be my own lighthouse? With the comfort of not having to probe this question, I preferred to drift near this lighthouse all the time.

Reaching a comfort zone around this luminous lighthouse, and in my contentment, I stalled in searching myself for a while. Each and every time I attempted to sail a little further, I quit, fearful that I could go no further. I then realized that there were many more artifacts around this lighthouse that could help me develop my own tools for my journey. They were quite marvelous and beautiful artifacts. They were also quite handy, as if they were made for my use. I tremendously enjoyed collecting these objects, and sort of built my own little ship under a little projector. And, as if there must always be a catch, some of these artifacts were reflective in nature, and when I looked at them, I saw my own dark side. This soured my enjoyment for seeking and collecting ornaments. As if this was not enough of a sore point in my journey, I got to see others’ dark sides as well, which caused me even further pain. A dualism of saying and doing in many led me to become more cautious, as I tried to shed light into my dark sides. After all, terrible things could happen in the dark. As I enjoyed the moments under the lighthouse, despite the possibility of darkness, I learned that there were also other artifacts that could help me with my dark side and my dealing with others’ darkness. Through formulating and solving these problems, I was delighted to find that these artifacts were even more beautiful than when I thought when I saw them for the first time. Along with these ornaments, I also got to meet some great adventurers just like me, with the same hopes and problems and also with helping hands. I became even more content with what I had at the time.

As time passed, I encountered another obstacle in my journey; I lost my passion for the search. I felt too overwhelmed with the almost constant dualism of saying and doing and tended to lose my patience with the darkness in others and partly in myself. This was too much to take. Was there another artifact around to help me through this obstacle? In search of this “yet to be found” artifact, I again partly got into the process of unweaving and weaving myself. While moving through this stage, I got to see that finding more and more objects could cause someone to become quite pretentious and full of false hope. This newly found “fact” saddened me quite deeply.

Not to be trapped in these obstacles, I needed to put more effort into finding more around me to help me proceed. But it was not easier. On the contrary, it was a lot more difficult. This led me to another “fact”: whatever I was searching for could be only found by someone who persists. I got to see that knowing and doing are quite different, just as saying and doing are different from each other. Nevertheless, I grew more curious about what might come, let it be other precise substances or quasi-unyielding obstacles. Maybe this seek, jump, and find makes the trip joyful and worthwhile.

Where am I right now? With more artifacts and greater contentment with what I have and who I am, I am now more eager to set sail further under the luminous light of this breathtaking lighthouse, full of passion and joy, seeking to see what is to come. Have I developed any sense of knowledge or belief, or a motto for my life? Well, I am at a point right now where I know by heart that there are beautiful objects and ornaments and flowers in the Garden of Eden. They are only visible in the light, and I am much contented that I found a beautiful lighthouse that continuously sheds light on the Garden. I am undecided yet whether I can sail further or stay around in my current contentment.

When I look back, I see that throughout my joyful journey, I tried to keep an inquisitive mind and learn about my dark side while discovering that there are more things waiting to be found and healed. I also learned that being pretentious and contentious is a big obstacle to gaining consciousness in finding the good in life. I also got to see that while seeking, finding, being helped and helping others – sailing, in other words – the whole journey is full of action and reading. Reading myself, others, and all these artifacts, reading the beautiful writing on this beautiful lighthouse was what I was doing all along. This reading and doing made the journey of life actually very rewarding in itself. I now treasure the artifact I get to develop throughout my journey – sometimes alone, but mostly under the light of the lighthouse I came across. I have a strong knowledge of and belief in this artifact. It gives me passion and conscience throughout my journey of life, through which I sometimes walk alone, but mostly with others. It sheds light when I see darkness in myself and in others. It helps me find more precious artifacts and develop even more of them along the way. It helps me find joy even among obstacles. It gives me passion and hope for getting ready to sail away into unseen waters that will take me among the endless artifacts under the light without any darkness. Then, I will say I am more than content and thankful for this great fulfilling journey.