Al-Ghazali on Truth - Haqq

Al-Ghazali accounts for the Truth in existence, knowledge and speech. 

Ghazali describes a spectrum ranging between absolute and necessary truths on one end, and absolute falsehood or impossibilities on the other. In between is a mix of circumstantially true and false claims. Let’s take my existence, it is possible but not a necessary feature of Reality, it belongs to the mixed things that are “true in one respect and false in another.” My existence is not self-produced nor self-sustained, it is dependent on the Reality of my Creator for continuous existence. While my life will perish, the Most High says “everything is perishing but His Face” (XXVIII:88). An eternal principle is what temporal creation is dependent on for existence and sustenance. By drawing out that my existence is true only by virtue of Allah, Al-Haqq, and false as it relates to itself, Al-Ghazali concludes that “the absolutely true is the One truely existing in itself, from which every true thing gets its true reality” (124). 

The truest existence belongs to God the most high, it confers truth to the existence of transient beings; and knowledge of God is the truest because it is true in itself, “corresponds to what is known, forever and eternally” and is a first principle to all other derived claims on the nature of things. The chain of interdependent claims building atop one another, if the foundational claim is false, all the other claims that hinged on this false building block become unsound. As the First and most foundational intellect, the Truth of God doesn’t falter, and maintains the coherence of claims derived from first principles (124). A first principle for example can be “there is no god but God”, a statement true irrespective of any time or place, “by virtue of itself and not by virtue of another” (125). 

By taking God to be the only self-subsistingly True existence, Al-Ghazali concludes that humanity’s share in the divine name Al-Haqq is in our falsehood. That only God can claim to be true, and all other existents owe their truth of their existence to God. To claim truth for oneself is only correct for Al-Ghazali in two instances. The first is if we’re claiming we exist by virtue of the Truth and recognize this dependence to be shared by all existants other than the Truth. The second correct claim to the truth is if one is “so absorbed in the Truth that he has no room for anything else” (125). This second mode is most often attributed to Sufis like Ibn Arabi who welcome the nhilation of the self for the subsuming of the totality of the Truth. By recognizing nothing but God, Al-Haqq, Sufis gain yaqeen, as certainty of the only true existent, Allah.

Some Lights

I’ve seen all sorts of Lights, felt, heard, dreamt of them. I've dreamt of an all-encompassing Light, a Great White Canvas, fielding the cosmos, enjoining creation within itself, living breathing hues of colors flickering under Suns, enjoining creation with the Light of the true Reality. I was a heartbeat of blue in an immeasurable One, I felt one with All, whelmed ecstasy. I’ve remembered a different kind of Light, a flickering festival of lights diffusing the white light of Reality, I remembered teachers patiently familiarizing my classmates and me of the shapes we’ll encounter when we join material creation from our comfortable stay in the middle grounds, between the Real and our world. There's a different light I've felt, heard, and seen whispers of, a primordial fire of an all-colorful Sun, much more familiar, warmer, than all these other lights, older it seemed too. It beat ever so faintly in some, and a blazing fire in others, a pulse of sustained existence granted from the Forge of Living Creation; I haven't quite understood this light yet. It spoke of the embrace of ancestors, yet it felt much older than life here on earth, like this sustaining heartbeat, much like the life on all other worlds, owed their breath to the same source of life. Life across and before the stars. I see its ribbons tethering the hearts of passersbys and lovers alike, between parents and children, ribbons, that know neither of distances nor the time it takes to cross them. Ribbons that rip hearts apart when they break or tear, when death relocates our loved ones and we have to patiently wait till our hearts find the new ribbons that bind us to them in death. This fire, preserved our stories, all of ours, stories of ancient seafarers sailing towards the horizon, where the stars meet the sea, the spirit of humanity remembers us all, it defies oblivion and makes a Home for ourselves, a mutual promise, a guiding hand pushing history along, the project of life (still going strong!) under the sun, until the final day, when we stand for judgment, until our return to the Eternal light of the Real, to Allah, until we all return home.

Growing Up

We all have to grow up, at some point. We take on new responsibilities, new challenges, and duties of care. It can be terrifying leaving the nest. Early on I learned life was tough, and I can be a khara. I carried this weight later on when I was alone enough to feel it. Children can be irritating little doochebags but they also have a wonderful sense of freedom that most adults end up selling for some sort of compensation or another. From time to time, everyone loses themselves to the drudging inertia of efficiency, of a predictably monotonous life. We take on our suitcases, cigarettes, or weapons of choice and slash away at the precious little time we have in this Oasis under the Sun. We lose our breathing hearts, our spirits of adventure, of playfulness! We lose looking forward to our days, wishing the night would stall its arrival. We grow distant from our hearts and learn to forestall or shun our hearts' temperance to a more convenient time. When you shun the pain of falling down enough times, hearts turn cold, they calcify and grow numb to our own pain just as much as the pain of others; numb to our joy too. Hearts grow circuit boards for ventricles, stretch out wires for veins, and lay out transistors for aortas. 

Mechanical hearts for mechanical people, whose artificially encoded natures have been pre-conceived by the Machine they serve. Winnie the Pooh once said “doing nothing often leads to the best something”. As opposed to being empty, I believe Pooh is talking about the optimistically limitless potential that nothing carries. We all have to grow up, the trouble is making sure we don’t leave the child in every one of us behind. That we don’t neglect or shame these ever-living sparks of freedom into docility and lose our joy in life to obscurity or utility. Our essence is the core to the rings that grow around our tree-trunks, the place we find peace in, where our heart was born, and the name we came into this world with. The core of our being is where we feel and emerge from, the heart is the center because it is always rooted in its affective, relational, and naturally authentic truth; whether we offer dirt or pearls. Our roots stretch further than just our own history, our own neatly separable plot of soil that tells us who we are. The roots of our hearts touch, co-depend on for support, communicate, and are entangled with not only the roots of our community of hearts, our people; they stretch far across the globe, to all living, breathing communities of organisms depending on the Sun. In fact, our roots dig down to a much more profound and originating Source of Light too.