At every moment the universe is absorbed into the Principle and recreated. Although from one point of view creation is old, from another it is fresh and new. God's act of existentiation is ever present: existence is not so much a state as an act.

The great mystery of existence is that it veils God by what is none other than Him. As Ibn 'Arabi said, "Glory be unto Him who hides Himself by that which is none other than He." This truth is explicitly stated in the Quran, where it is mentioned, "He [God) is the First and the Last, and the Outward and the Inward and He knows infinitely all things" (57:3).

 

It is not difficult for a person of faith to understand that God is the Alpha and Omega of all reality, that all things come from Him and return to Him. As we know, Christ also spoke of himself as the alpha and the omega. It is also not difficult to understand that God is the Inward, the inner reality of all things. But how can God be the Outward?

 

This is the most difficult aspect of the relation between God and creation to understand. Once a fairly advanced Sufi went to a great master and told him that he could understand that God is the First and the Last as well as the Inward. But he asked the master, "How can God be the Outward?" The master put him in a spiritual retreat (khalwah) and told him to invoke the Divine Name Allah until this truth became manifested and clear to him. The disciple followed the instructions. After some two weeks in which he continuously invoked God's Supreme Name, suddenly the walls of the room in which he was holding the spiritual retreat began to invoke Allah and he heard the invocation all around him. As he wrote later, he then understood what it meant to assert that God is also the Outward. The moral of this story is that the in-depth understanding of the truth that God veils Himself by what is none other than God can come only from spiritual realization.

 

The Sufis also speak of creation not only as an act in the past but also as a continuous process. This is what is called the renewal of creation at every instant.

 

At every moment the universe is absorbed into the Principle and recreated. The relation of the world with God is therefore not based solely on a temporal event called creation "at the beginning." That "beginning" is also the ever-renewed present moment.

 

Although from one point of view creation is old, from another it is fresh and new. God's act of existentiation is ever present, and in fact existence is not so much a state as an act, as the existentiating command of God, "Be!" This doctrine is of great significance not only for cosmology but also for the spiritual life.

 

In the same way that each breath we take rejuvenates and makes possible the continuation of our life, the Divine Breath is renewed at every moment, making possible our and the cosmos's continuous existence in what appears to us as duration.

 

This duration is, however, nothing but the repetition of the "now" within which creation is renewed. In a deeper sense, every tree that we observe in the garden comes freshly from God's creative act.

 

 

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The Garden of Truth by Seyyed Hossein Nasr

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