"And he for whom Allah has not made light, has no light" [Surat An-Nur: 40].
The human rational soul is an ember of God's light, a transparent and immortal jewel. If we polish it with unitarian virtues, it becomes pure and is drawn in love and devotion to its Creator, just as a letter is drawn to its meaning, and a river to the encompassing ocean. Then, God tends to it with His finest providence, so it lives virtuous, serene, and reassured, ascending through the degrees.
Nothing polishes the soul, crystallizes it, and helps the branch be drawn to its root more than truthfulness. For truthfulness is to faith as the head is to the body; truthfulness is an executive decision and a positive stance that must stand on firm ground so its pillars do not waver and its structure does not fall, and this firm ground is belief. Truthfulness begins with belief and culminates in love connecting the servant to the Worshiped, radiating the light that illuminates within the servant's soul, manifesting as words on his lips and actions through his limbs.
It is belief, first and foremost, that man is the ultimate purpose of this existence and the intent of the Creator, Glory be to Him, and that all entities in this existence—from galaxies to atoms and electrons—are in his service to fulfill his humanity, and to know his Maker and obey Him. His humanity is nothing other than his communion with his Creator by sensing Him within himself and in all that surrounds him. It is complete happiness on the day man is able, first through sound belief and second through good deeds, to polish the essence of his rational soul to see all the self-evident truths of existence reflected upon the mirror of its insight. At that point, knowledge becomes recollection, as one sage said, and the self-evident truths within the soul's essence align with the knowledge of universal laws acquired by the intellect through observation and experience. Then man becomes certain that his soul is none other than an ember of God's light—the divine leaven in this worldly life. God manifests to it when it is purified and rendered translucent through righteous knowledge and deeds, and He forsakes it when it grows dark and dense with false knowledge and evil deeds.
It is the belief that existence is teleological and not futile, and that every cause follows its origin, because God ordered it according to laws He established in the nature of existents. Nothing is the product of coincidence, and nothing happens at random; even marvels, miracles, and wonders are nothing but phenomena subject to precise rational laws of which we remain ignorant to this day.
And because the Creator originated His creations based on laws He arranged in His wisdom, it was necessary for man to know and believe that nature is entirely good, and that the evil practiced on Earth stems from human actions contrary to the laws of the messengers and prophets. For through his stubbornness, arrogance, and utilitarian philosophy, man insists on ignoring the laws of nature and reason, pursuing his desires, greed, and the darkness of his soul, thereby committing aggression against himself by neglecting the seeds of goodness, truth, beauty, and justice within it: "So whoever does an atom's weight of good will see it, and whoever does an atom's weight of evil will see it." When man's belief in the divine messages, messengers, and saints is confirmed, he realizes through reason and experience that monotheism is enshrined within all those messages. It is the spirit by which souls live, and he becomes certain that truth, goodness, and justice are the essence, purpose, and ultimate summit of all those messages. At that point, fanaticism departs from the human heart and negativity clears from the mind, opening up positively toward everyone, knowing with absolute certainty that appearances change while the essence remains one, seeking the One, the Eternal Refuge, Who neither begets nor was begotten, and to Whom there is no equivalent. At that moment, man acts upon the principle of divine truth and justice.
It is truthfulness that dissolves the duality between what one seeks with the spirit and what one seeks with the body, completely eliminating duality and opposition between spirit and body until the body becomes a transparent spirit, obedient to its Creator, in communion with His messengers and prophets, just as a flower communes with its fragrance and a ray with its sun. It is truthfulness that transforms man into an eternal lover; whenever he discovers an island of coral and ruby in the ocean of divine love, his joy increases, and longing blazes within his wings to sail further in search of another island. It is the joy of perpetual evolution and elevation, for love has taught him that teleological movement is the essence of this existence, and that the human of flesh and blood—in whom the finite and the infinite, consciousness and the unconscious, the relative and the absolute, the dense and the subtle are intertwined—has as his purpose the perpetual voyage across the sea of His love, passion, and longing to commune with his Origin, Whom intellects cannot comprehend and thoughts cannot encompass. For He is closer to us than our jugular vein, yet distant from us because He encompasses us while we cannot encompass Him; thus, we journey from Him to Him on an endless voyage, whose guide is longing, whose vessel is love, and whose goal and desire is communion.
