3. The Light of GOD in Life, Love, Power, Truth, and Peace (4)

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SINGULAR CERTAINTY

Just as GOD cannot be understood in His totality by one particular subset of attributes, neither can Truth be truly grasped if it is severed from Power, Life, and Love.

Through a particularly narrow definition of truth now prevalent in Western culture, many have come to believe that GOD and Truth are unrelated or even antithetical. What do we mean, then, by saying that we see the Light of GOD in Truth?

Every intellectual system relies for its veracity and acceptance on some fundamental proposition that is deemed to be self-evident, and hence unquestionable. A statement such as Cogito ergo sum is one such attempt to verbalize the very bedrock of thought. Materialist scientists regard the hard clarity of mathematics (e.g., 2 + 2 = 4) or the physical sciences (e.g., the molecular formula for water, the length of a metre stick, or E = mc²) as the benchmark of reliability. Never mind that the human mind is so fashioned that whatever one person says, no matter how ‘clear’ or ‘obvious’, can easily be doubted by another, or at least relegated to the trivially true. The impulse to work up from the obvious is itself noteworthy; it shows us that sight (or some other sense), as suggested by the term ‘self-evident’, and not thought, is the ultimate ground of truth. The superstructure founded on that experience should be so carefully constructed that its architect can always say, ‘Surely, if you have seen the truth of this a, then b, c, d, and e above it are likewise undeniable.’ The greatest truth is one that best approximates an immediate, overwhelming experience, like an inspiration from heaven, and has the longest range, like the light of a supernova piercing immeasurable distances by sheer force.

Truth, then, is truest when it is most like Power, Life, and Love, all of which are ‘known’ intuitively or immediately, without the aid of words. All four of these absolutes resemble Light in their being apprehended at once and directly, like a flash of insight.

The particular gift of Truth is in leading the mind from that first illumination into the darker regions where laws, theories, scientific methods, and moral reasoning must take the place of instantaneous vision. It is in these labyrinths of the intellect that the original Light of GOD can be gradually lost. Partial, diminished, and reflected lights of any sort are welcome, and so desperately needed that in time they can convince us that GOD Himself is a matter of doubt. A candle in a dungeon can be both a genuine friend and a poor witness to the reality of sunlight.

When people insist on the truth today, they often mean nothing more than facts of mere candle power that illuminate virtually nothing, like knowing the hair colour of a celebrity. GOD as Truth is not just the sum of all these tidbits of information, but the Absolute Source of transformative meaning, changing not only minds but hearts as well. The truths of modern science are but pale reflections of that divine brilliance. AL-LAH has to wrap His truths in ‘signs’, namely the impressively diverse and abundant phenomena of this world, if we are to make sense of them in any meaningful way at all, rather than being simply blown away or blinded by their original intensity. And one such truth is the peace that comes to us as we absorb these diffractions of the One Truth.

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