There’s a story about the fish who was constantly asking “What is water?” and “Where is water?” Even when the fish was pulled out of the water and told “This is land, where you were was water.” The fish would then say, “Now I understand, now I understand. Put me back in the water.” When he was put back in water the fish started asking again “Where is water?” and “What is water?”. Man walks around the world asking “What is God? Where is God?”.
Even though we are constantly awash in grace, even though we are constantly surrounded by the splendor of His reality, we walk around in torpor asking “Where is He? What is He?”.
In science there have been lots of advances. Three hundred years ago microscopic organisms weren’t known to exist. People couldn’t see them, therefore they had no knowledge of them. With the microscope we are now able to see things and know things exist that we can’t see with our eyes. In the world of physics we got to the point of the atom and we constructed an entire theory of physics based on the movements of the atom, the molecules that the atoms formed, the elemental things that we could see and the reactions of those elemental things. Just as we were able to determine that there were microscopic organisms, we have now been able to determine that there are sub-atomic particles — particles smaller than atoms and other than atoms. There has been a lot of writing and a lot talk recently about something called the Higgs-Boson. The scientists, or some scientists, have called it the God particle. The reason is that they seem to theorize that this is what gives substance to matter. Without it, there might be an entirely different understanding of the way matter is and that this is one of the building blocks of the universe. They go so far as to say this may be what existed prior to the big bang. This is what the scientists say.
What the Sufis say is “la ilaha illalahu”, which means “nothing exists but Allah”. We put ourselves on a tableau of illusion and we call that reality. Something like saying the images on a movie screen are reality. We live a temporary existence on the screen of this elemental world and we call it real. We track it. We call it “history” to give it depth and to give it time and space. To make it be more “real” more “filling”. But the Sufis say that there is a particle, not like an atom, smaller than an atom, in today’s language “sub-atomic”, which if you were able to look at it very, very closely you would see that there are ninety-nine particles rotating around themselves. They now have what they call colliders where they shoot atoms at each other to try and make them split. If you could break this particle that has the ninety-nine floating around each other, you would end up with another particle exactly the same as the one you cut, which has ninety-nine particles all rotating around each other.
Imagine if you can, that the essence of existence is the Asma Ul-Husna. The essence of existence are the ninety-nine qualities or essences of Allah. Imagine the reality of “la ilaha illala”, nothing exists but Allah.
