So we start with this question to say that you keep talking of emanation, you keep talking of manifestation, you keep talking of the fact that God is the only reality. But when I feel the things around me, everything seems to be real, solid, independent, tangible. My body, the walls, the trees, the mountain, everything I see is solid. It seems like it is an independent reality on its own. It does not seem like it is just a manifestation or an emanation of something. So let us ask science. What does science say?
The first thing that science tells us is that if you are talking about the human body, most of the human body is not even solid. It is fluid. If you look at, for example, this term we call body water, search for body water, you will find that a newborn infant, 75% of it is body water. An adult is about 65% fluid or water. And of course there is a disagreement and a variation. You will see, for example, the female body is 50 to 55% fluid or water, the male body is 60 to 65%, and so on, but most of your composition is water. That means if we sucked all the water and fluid out of you, just like vacuuming it out, you would shrink, and there would be only like 35% of you left. That is the first thing.
The second thing is when we probe and ask scientists more, they say, actually the skin on your body is made up of tissues - I am using again layman terms - and if you break it down further you have cells, and if you break it down further you are made up of atoms. We all know this, right? Unless they have changed science radically from the time I went to school, but it is all atoms. And then these atoms, 99.99% is empty space. So you are made up of atoms, that atom the mass in it is 0.000000 whatever 1%. And then that atom is made up of particles like neutrons and protons and electrons, and then the electrons are made up of subatomic particles that they call leptons, I think, and neutrons and protons are made up of other subatomic particles that they call quarks, right?
So when you now begin to relook at your perception of what is solid, what is real, science is telling you you are just a bunch of atoms held together. Now, there are people who have tried to study, then what is it that is holding us together and giving us shape or giving us form? And so they start looking at it and they say that the organic matter that creates your form or gives you your body, it is actually something that we can measure its frequency, like sound frequency, and it matches a sound frequency that is the equivalent of 570 trillion hertz, and a hertz is measured as vibrations per second, which therefore means that your body is made up of atoms that are vibrating at a rate of 570 trillion vibrations per second. And because this number is so immense that you cannot imagine, therefore it appears to you as if these atoms, most of which is empty space, most of it is empty space but whatever is there that is solid or mass that you think is mass, it is vibrating against each other with such rapidity and such high frequency, it appears to you that it is solid.
There is no religion here, there is no philosophy here, there is no metaphysics here. This is a simple science, I mean, some of it from what I learned, some of it what I pulled out of the Internet that I think is reliable, but by all means, go speak to your science teacher, to your university professor, to the scientists and the doctors we have in the community here. And see, they might even tell you things that are even more amazing than what I am telling you.
Now, one of the things that scientists noticed is that for some strange reason, the mass of the subatomic particles do not weigh the same. Some of them have a greater weight than others, and they have not been able to figure out why. If everything is made of atoms that is made of electrons and protons and neutrons that is made of leptons and quarks, why is it that some have such immense amount of mass and some do not have any mass at all?
So, in 1964, there was a doctor by the name of Dr. Higgs who came up with a theory. His theory was that the entire universe is covered by an energy field. There is an energy field. Now keep in mind as I say this, that in Arabic, Nur is light but it is also energy. And the verse we have been saying again and again: "Allahu nuru as-samawati wa al-ardh" (24:35). I am still not alluding at anything, I am just dropping a hint here that Nur is not just light, it is energy.
Dr. Higgs proposed that there is an energy field that pervades the entire universe, and what gives any atom its mass, is how those atomic or subatomic particles interact with that energy field, and what they draw from it. And this energy field, in time came to be known as the Higgs field, named after him. And this continued to interest scientists and physicists. And so they have been plagued with this idea that if we can somehow extract one particle from this energy field, we might be able to identify the absolute building block from which anything gets its matter or its mass that gives that atom even what we might call solid in it of what is left after you remove all the empty space. So if we slow down the vibration from 570 trillion to be able to see that atom and separate all the space, whatever is left of it, what is the particle that is giving matter its mass?
And because of this, they began searching for this particle. Now, its scientific name is the Higgs boson. But guess what is the layman's term for it? The God particle. The God particle. And this was big news, 2012 and so on, isn't it? You all know about the Hadron Collider, the atom smasher, right? What are we trying to do? We are trying to find the absolute particle that gives anything its mass, that is what is eluding people.
When you keep all this in mind and then all the documentaries you have seen about the String Theory and all these other things, you begin to see that what we are talking about emanation, manifestation, "Allahu nuru as-samawati wa al-ardh" (24:35), it does not seem such a far fetched and a wild idea. Because we are not saying that we are a figment of imagination or we are not real. We are just saying that we are not as solid and as real as we think we are, that we are an emanation from a higher source, from one source, that source we call Allah. But you could call it Being, Consciousness, whatever you want to call it.
And so, scientists are spending millions of dollars trying to find this. And we need to ask ourselves that if different things in existence are simply made up of different atoms and subatomic particles that are simply vibrating at different frequencies, then what is it that is giving consciousness to us and to everything else that has consciousness? What is it that makes us sentient beings? Is it simply the brain in our heads and the self consciousness and identity of I that is created through conflict at the time that I am born?
Essentially, when you think about it, the whole universe, including ourselves, are simply swimming in an ocean of energy. Now you can call that energy anything you want. You can call it Nur, you can bring in the String Theory, you can wait for scientists to discover the God particle. There is an interesting fiction or novel written by Scott Adams who is known more for his comic strips and so on, but he also writes books that tickle the brain and he has a book called God's Debris, which I do not want to sort of give a synopsis of because you might think I am subscribing to the idea that he has in this God's Debris. But for those of you who have seen that book, it sort of plays a little bit into what we are talking about, the idea that everything in the universe is made up of, if there is a particle it is made up of, it would be God. If God was solid or real, then the building block, what we said yesterday, the space that gives anything, the sense of room that allows things to come into existence or have any consciousness is from Allah.
And that also is not the essence of Allah. It is not the "Dhaat" of Allah which we said is un-manifested and unknowable. It is simply what we said are His names and His attributes. What is causing us a hard time is we are trying to think a name is made up of letters, how could God's names and attributes create this manifestation? When we say God's names and attributes, do not think of them necessarily as alphabets or letters in the sense that we say the name of something or the label of something. You could think of it as that part that allows anything to manifest. We call it names because those are the things we identify and associate back to Allah.
So for example, one of the names of Allah is An-Nur. An-Nur now is the light, but it does not have to be the word, the light, that causes the manifestation. The Nur could be the energy that causes then things to exist and come into any form of appearance that we now see.
So now if I go back and I say that everything in the universe is simply blinking in and out of existence, or simply vibrating at a certain frequency, at a certain rhythm, which is the rhythm of Tawhid. And I talk of a Tawhid-based ontology, what now do you think is more real to you? The idea of an emanation and manifestation or the idea of solid independent realities? It seems at least up to this point, science is on my side. So everything begins to change now. We now begin to look at things differently.
No comments:
Post a Comment