Having counselled us in the first instalment of this series that the ultimate nature of God is beyond description, he now lays out a powerful illustration of the sun, its light and its rays, to help us understand our relationship to the Divine.

God apart, can one explain anything fine and subtle such as gratitude, love, or devotion, in words? How much can be explained? Words are too inadequate to explain great feelings, so how can God be explained in words? Nevertheless, in the language of metaphysics the Absolute is the omniscient Spirit, the essence of Intelligence itself in its original condition. In the East they call it Nur, which means radiance; and the nature of radiance is to centralize; it is the centralizing of the radiance which illuminates. Physically one can say that the sun is the centralized all-pervading radiance; therefore the sun which we can see is only the point of centralization of the Nur, the light. In reality the sun is all; in the form of light it is the sun, and the sun is not only in that center, but wherever the light reaches in our houses and outside, the sun is there. Its manifestation is indirect, yet it is all the sun.

When we look at the all-pervading Intelligence as centralized intelligence we call it God, because it begins with centralizing; from this point manifestation begins. For manifestation there must first be centralization. It is this which forms an entity, and the wise have called it God; but this does not make it a being which is separate from manifestation, just as the sun cannot be separated from the sunlight. Light is as much the sun as the sun we see before us, and in the same way manifestation is God as much as God is the origin and source of manifestation.

Now, when we study the sun, we see that there is the sun and that there are rays. In the rays the sun is manifest in variety. But what are the rays? The sun. This is only an action of the sun, where the radiance has been centralized. The first action is to project itself, to manifest in the form of various rays. And if I were to explain what we human beings are and what God is, I would say that our relationship with God is the same as that between the rays and the sun. Every soul is a ray of the sun, which is God. It is not our body or our mind which is the ray but the soul, whose nature it is to attract a garb from whichever sphere it touches in order to cover itself so that it can live in that particular sphere. It is this garb which the soul has borrowed that we call our physical body, a clay which has been kneaded for many centuries to make the body of man, a clay which was once a rock, which once manifested itself as a tree, which once appeared as animals and birds. This same clay, in its finished form, has given the soul of man a garb, which he calls his body.

It is in this belief that the mystic differs from the scientist, not however in the understanding of the process. The scientist believes in the same process; that from dense earth the mineral and then the vegetable have gradually developed. Biology rests on this principle. The mystic, however, does not attribute to this garb the origin of the body which the soul takes for its use; he attributes it to the spirit, which takes the garb upon itself. This origin does not belong to the dense earth; it belongs to God; it is the ray of the sun. And is the ray separate from the sun? Never, and for the same reason man is never separate from God. In this material world one only sees that one lives on food, that one eats, that one needs air and water, and one does not see any other source of life; but in reality all these things which sustain man’s body only sustain the garb which is earthly. Its real sustenance is different and belongs to the source from whence it comes and to which it is attached. It is thence that man draws all strength, vitality, and illumination every moment of his life. Therefore the proper name for God is ‘origin.’ The word ‘God’ is related to the Arabic Djod, which has this meaning. When man neglects the knowledge of self and of God, and only knows about the garb he wears, he does not know about himself. Whatever his learning and qualifications may be, they all pertain to the garb which he is wearing, but it is through the understanding of the spirit and the soul that man really acquires the knowledge of the self and of God.

Some people think that the physical garb is the only one the soul wears, but this is not so; in order to come to this plane of the earth the ray, the soul, must pass through two different spheres. The first sphere may be called the angelic sphere, and the next the sphere of the jinns. One may ask, ‘Then why do I not see them, if I also have garbs from these other spheres?’ But one can see them too if one has studied human nature minutely. Eating, drinking, and sleeping, all these faculties come from the physical world; but there are others: the love of music, appreciation of poetry, the tendency to invent wonderful things, all intellectual pursuits and phenomena come from the jinn world. Poets and thinkers show the garb of that sphere in the work they do in the physical world. This garb is hidden, but where? It has become their mind, and therefore the mind is the inner garb, while the body is the outer garb, which covers it. The mind is the garb which man has brought from the jinn sphere. But even before this, man had still another garb, and this comes from the angelic sphere. Do we see any sign of it? Yes, in his devotion, in his idealistic tendencies, in his innocence, in the love and beauty of his nature, in all these qualities man shows the garb of the sphere of the angels.

Innocence always goes with a loving nature. A person who is loving is generally innocent also, whereas a person who is very clever is least loving. For the very reason that he is clever he has little love, for then love is buried in his cleverness. I do not mean to say that innocence is the most valuable quality; every quality has its place; nevertheless, innocence is an angelic quality. Great prophets, saints, and sages, those, who have healed the wounds of humanity, were most innocent people. Innocence is the proof of spirituality. However great a person’s cleverness may be, without innocence he cannot be spiritual; also, spirituality produces innocence. 

The garb that man has brought from the angelic sphere is revealed in the form of unselfish love, devotion, high ideals, a worshipful attitude, and love of beauty. The first tendency shown by every infant from the time it opens its eyes is love of beauty: beautiful colors, beautiful things, all these attract it. Perhaps it does not see beauty as we do, for our sense of beauty has been spoiled by our experience and our ideas, but the infant comes to the earth with a natural sense of beauty. That which is really beautiful strikes the infant, and it loves it.