Recently, I had the opportunity to read an article about black holes. The selected and essential points of the article kept echoing in my mind, and a strong eagerness arose within me to hear something about it from my spiritual guide. Eventually, I asked him a question, seeking to learn something from him about black holes.
My revered guide, while nurturing and training his spiritual children, always keeps in view the seeker’s mental capacity and natural temperament, and therefore he often says something that gives birth to deep reflection. Within the mind, a sense of search, inquiry, and exploration is created. Curiosity is stirred, and the desire for awareness is awakened. As far as I have been able to understand, the real background of this is that spiritual knowledge is connected to one’s mode of thinking, and one of the marvels of this mode of thinking is that at every moment it manifests a new instant and a new state.
When I asked my guide about black holes, he replied to my question with great simplicity and said, “Well, only the one who has actually observed a black hole can truly tell you about a black hole.” My firm belief that it was only my guide who could make me aware of its true reality stood in the way of fully accepting this statement. Seeing my insistence, he said only this much, that the Quran contains a mention of them, and that there are three verses about them, in which they are explained through the use of the word ‘darknesses’.
What all he made me understand through that one brief sentence. I am still engaged in that effort and struggle to comprehend it. Yet, at first glance, in guiding me toward understanding the reality, besides pointing out the signs along the path, the very first thing he made clear was that this is not something new. It is not a new phenomenon over which you are becoming so excited. Long ago, centuries earlier, the Quran had already explained it, and not once, but three times. And the characteristics of black holes are not very different from darknesses.
In this way, by turning the discussion into an encouragement toward understanding the Quran, he taught me how to read the Quran, how to read it with understanding, and how to cultivate the discipline of search and inquiry within it.
From Book: A Journey with the Appointed Guide by Dr. Maqsood Hassan Azeemi