41. The Reality of Words (1)

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What is real?

Each of us is born with a particular version of reality ready-made for us – one that we, in time, will either fashion to fit our particular circumstances or, if we are determined enough, will attempt to refine, revise, or replace.

As a soul sent down into this world, on the planet Earth, in North America, in the latter part of the 20th century, I imbibed from my parents and early education a particularly pure and powerful strain of Anglocentric, secular materialism that has been metastasizing until today as it continues to dominate and marginalize other cultures’ worldviews. I doubt that I can ever completely purge it from my psyche, despite my feeble efforts in this book. I firmly believe in GOD’s Justice, however, and therefore trust in the Wisdom that assigned me this place and time in His cosmos so that I may strive to overcome the obstacles He deliberately set before me and inside me.

I have personally encountered other versions of reality – all of them, however, ‘infected’ by the same Western materialism that I am struggling against – in Indonesia, India, and Thailand, and have read enough about many other cultures, both present and past, to recognize the immense variety of human perspectives on what is real. It would be well worth discussing, if only briefly, some of those other viewpoints, but there are plenty of historians and anthropologists who are better qualified to describe them at length. All I can do is mention in passing, by way of example, the kinds of reality that one could expect from a housewife in Kyushu worshipping at her household shrine 100 years ago, an old Sikh warrior who, 200 years ago, was still telling tales of his exploits in the Punjab, a Kyrgyz woman abducted 400 years ago at the local market to become the bride of a rich merchant, a Greek shepherd forced from his home on the island of Chios 800 years ago, a humble Donatist nun serving the poor in a village outside Carthage 1,600 years ago, a young man slowly dying from his work in a Cornwall tin mine 3,200 years ago, a Nahuatl shamanka negotiating the spiritual path in a peyote-induced trance 6,400 years ago, and so on and on, back in time, through all the countless experiences of reality encountered by our predecessors. The vast diversity of realities they encountered is utterly beyond our comprehension.

And that is only a microscopic sliver of the realities that have been felt, at some level or another, by the unimaginable variety of living beings on our planet since its birth, billions of years ago. What about the world of a bonobo, a dolphin, an emu, an alligator, a herring, a wasp, a prawn, an earthworm, a trilobite, a paramecium from a billion years ago, or a micro-organism struggling against the odds to survive on Mars two billion years ago? And then consider how immense our galaxy is, and how much life there could be in it . . . multiplied by the 125 billion galaxies in the observable universe. And what if we extended our scope of reality to worlds not actually experienced but nonetheless ‘present’ in some form or another to every subatomic particle and vibration that has ever existed or will exist? Can we grasp all of them in any meaningful way? Of course not. But they are undeniably there nonetheless.

Each reality, no matter how minuscule, may be called a world (like a domain in information science). A world is an assembly of things and/or experiences rooted in or related to one viewpoint, regardless of that point’s level of consciousness or importance. I have my world, which comprises all that was, is, or will be sensed or mentally contacted by myself, even in sleep or subconsciously, or that ‘touches’ me in some way, such as a wisdom tooth from fifty years ago, all the cells in my body at this moment, or the pain I will feel a few moments before death. A single electron, ten billion light years from here, has its world, namely everything with which it interacts. And GOD, the Master of the worlds (in the first complete sentence of the Qur’an (1:2), has His master frame or meta-narrative – the Reality that encompasses all our heavily redacted versions of reality.

At the level of Absolute Truth, therefore, the One Who names Himself the Real (Al-Haqq in Arabic) is the One Truth, the Only Reality: That is GOD, your Lord, The Truth. And what is there, besides the Truth, except misguidance? (Q10:32) We find this Reality prescribed for us in ample and repeated doses throughout the Qur’an, with every mention of AL-LAH. For pragmatic seekers after short, neat answers – after which they can get down to the business of ethical living and worship – this profuseness of absolute affirmation is more than enough.

For those inclined to ponder, however, this type of assertion naturally prompts a question: if AL-LAH is the Absolutely Real, the Whole Truth, and the goal of all our truth-seeking, then what about ourselves and our lesser versions of reality? Where are our shadow-worlds in His Unbearable Brilliance, our penny pamphlets vis-à-vis His Infinite Encyclopedia of Exact Knowledge?

In Chapter 25, I referred to our phenomenal universe as the mirror-world of objects; each object reflects the Unicity of GOD by itself being a unit of some sort. Unlike GOD’s purely singular Being, however, the units of this phenomenal world are composite and ephemeral; they gradually gather existence to themselves, change, disintegrate with age, and then disappear. Despite their nominally singular status, they consist of smaller units, which in turn can be divided into sub-units, and so on down to the sub-atomic level where frequencies, relations, and ‘states’ can also be interpreted digitally, as units of another kind. Based on our modern conception of the atom, they are energy-driven clouds of probabilities rather than hard, specific points in space and time. They have both a referential unity – their denotation – and a swarm of associated meanings and relationships – their connotation. They are neither literal singularity nor an unlimited expanse devoid of meaning.

If we take Reality to be a spectrum of intensity, with AL-LAH being Total Unicity at one end (figuratively speaking, for He transcends even the conceptual spaces we are compelled to use when mentioning Him), then the opposite or farthest end of reality is what we might call the void, or nothing. By definition, nothing does not exist – except as a concept. Concepts, or the words we have for them, are what enable us to talk about nothing, or evil, or any of the privations of value or reality that we oppose to GOD. We can have a concept or word for virtually anything, including nothing, but this semantic free-for-all should not delude us into thinking that there is a thing to which “nothing” refers, or a thing that we call GOD. Things are the objects that occupy the conceptual space between GOD and nothing.

However great the universe of material things is, the conceptual cosmos is immeasurably greater in scale. Why? Because it encompasses not only material objects but all other types of objects as well – the verbal, the mental, the false, the impossible, the merely possible, and the literally nonexistent. To every single thing, no matter how minute, remote, or insignificant, we can assign innumerable concepts without diminishing the Kingdom of Ideas. On this basis alone, I can confidentially declare that our world – and, likewise, every other world – is fundamentally and overwhelmingly conceptual. Or, since for every concept there is, theoretically at least, one or more names, we might say that reality (other than GOD) is verbal.

Since what I have encompasses far more than material things, a petitioner could ask for wisdom or virtue or faith, and be given what for him would be of immense value but for GOD would not even be regarded as a cost. The verbal nature of GOD’s Kingdom is even clearer from the following verse:

In other words, GOD’s verbal realm is so vast as to deplete the material realm (the sea) without itself being exhausted. Concepts are things that describe (write out) the things that are conceived in them.

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