Muhammad: An Ever-Present, Living Miracle

🟠 Muhammad: A Living, Ever-Flowing Miracle
🔘The Birth of the Noble Messenger (PBUH) and Imam Jaʿfar al-Sadiq (AS)
📆 Date: 1403/06/31 — 17 Rabiʿ al-Awwal 1446
📌 Meshkat-e Noor session
📌 Weekly session on the commentary and interpretation of al-Sahifa al-Sajjadiyya (Supplication 20)
👤 Lecture by Master Ali Saei

🗒 Some points discussed in the session:
🌼 The Prophet dawned over every horizon and every soul; he entered the world and transformed its very colours and texture. The world had to be freed from baseness and set on a path of progress, growth, and flourishing. This could not have happened without him.
🌼 He freed the world from being merely worldly.
🌼 His birth affected the whole of creation.
🌼 If we were to view a three-dimensional scene in a two-dimensional space, how would it appear? What about in a one-dimensional space? So how would a being beyond dimensions reveal itself?
How does the Prophet appear on the screen of the Divine Throne?
🌼 To behold the Prophet, we must go beyond the limits of knowledge.
🌼 The world had to reach maturity. Before his coming, it was heading toward destruction. That spirit had to be breathed into it for life to attain the fullness of maturity.
🌼 The possessor of magnificent creation and character wished to make his stature rise in this world.
🌼 Muhammad came into the world to uproot impurity.
🌼 Impurity arises from heedlessness, and heedlessness had to be wholly dispelled. Muhammad had to come.
🌼 Where does the source of attraction lie? Those who seek it must turn to Muhammad. The Prophet, the first and the last to draw all things toward him, is the best of creators.
🌼 Because God was his intermediary, it came to pass.
God performs miracles, breaks the laws, and brings new laws into being.
If only we knew Muhammad: the reality from whose heart the heavens, the earth, the Throne, and all that exists first emerged.
🌼 Who can truly know Muhammad?
🌼 This mercy—the Prophet Muhammad—uproots impurity.
He is mercy indeed. The virus of heedlessness had taken hold in the soul of this world. A physician was needed to dispel heedlessness and uproot that virus.
A physician who knows neither time nor place, who reaches into the heart of every single being and, all at once, treats the whole of creation.
🌼 This world was like software in the Prophet’s hands, and God had granted him such power.
🌼 A physician who is ever in motion, moving from place to place to heal: he has made his remedies firm, is skilled and masterful in treating the site of pain and illness, and has heated his instruments of healing—heated them so fiercely that they can extinguish every infection (sin and fire).
He places his medicines wherever they are needed.
He knows the pain and treats it.
🌼 But alas for us human beings: we run from this physician. He pursues us so he can heal us, while we flee from him. I confess that I am one who flees from the Prophet: just as I am far from the Quran, I am far from him too.
🌼 Muhammad gives sight to blind hearts, relieves their constriction and opens them wide, softens their hardness, cleaves their darkness and fills them with light. He is God’s lamp. He gives hearing to deaf ears and speech to mute tongues. He searches out the places where heedlessness has taken root, so he can heal them.
🌼 His birth was blessed. If we contemplate it, we see that the Prophet’s birth dawned over the horizon of all creation, for it affected the whole of existence—even to the distance of two bow-lengths.
🌼 If we look into our hearts, there is no doubt that they, too, have been touched by it.
🌼 If our hearts were free, they would perceive the effects of this supreme dawn.
🌼 His birth was accompanied by immense transformations in the souls of all the world’s people.
🌼 When we hear that the crenellations of the Arch of Ctesiphon collapsed, when we see the Persian fire temple extinguished, Lake Saveh dry up and the parched planet fill with water, idols shattered, Mecca shine, crowns fall from kings’ heads, and soothsayers left confounded—can these be called minor events?
🌼 These events also took place within us, in every particle of our souls. The devils had to depart from our hearts because the Prophet had been born.
🌼 His birth was an exceptional opportunity; it meant that God had sent His final proof to all creation.
God gives the people of the world their last opportunity; no excuse will be accepted after this. Whoever wishes to grow must do so with Muhammad. Whoever seeks a fundamental transformation must do so with Muhammad.
🌼 With his final gateway—the Imam Mahdi (AS)—every excuse will be removed from the people of the world. The opportunity is running out; we must attain perfection.
🌼 With the Prophet’s birth, the transformation of the world’s structures began.
🌼 How can we discover the Muhammadan reality? The Infallible Imams, in all their magnificence and glory—of which Ziyarat al-Jamiʿa al-Kabira reveals but a glimpse—are merely gateways leading to the Prophet Muhammad.
🌼 What is the Prophet’s reality? Is it the Greatest Name of God?
His heart, his blessed being, is the centre of the Greatest Name—indeed, it is beyond the Greatest Name.
Through the manifestation of these Beautiful Names, we will be able to behold the sublime beauty of the Prophet Muhammad.

How, truly, can one sense his presence?
How can I sense my Imam of the Age, God’s own vicegerent?
By God, he is closer and more intimately connected to me than my own soul.
🌼The sense of the Imam of the Age within me is very strong, yet I cannot comprehend it—just as I cannot comprehend the soul, though its effects are there.
It is beyond spiritual and luminous perception: an effort to discover the Muhammadan Reality
🌼an effort to discover the essence of Reality.
🌼Is that the one distinct letter among the seventy-three letters of the Greatest Name (Mother of the Book)? I do not know!
🌼Is his presence the First Will, the First Divine Will, the First Decree?
🌼He is the very soul of knowledge, and is therefore called the City of Knowledge
🌼His being is a tempest.
🌼His birth, which was the beginning, brought about such changes and transformations. Then his presence continued and flowed on until he reached the age of forty. I should have been turned upside down and emerged at the Lote Tree of the Utmost Boundary—why did that not happen?

🌼 How do we recognise the truthful one? Were it not for him, I would never have come to know God through Muhammad.
Imagining this world without Imam Sadiq is hard and difficult—a world intensely dark.
🌼 He is the great display of God’s prophets.
Had it not been for the sciences that have reached us from His Holiness, what state would we be in? Perhaps we would have been transformed, and we would have perished! His Holiness is a Muhammadan miracle, a gift of the knowledge of wisdom.
Were it not for Imam Sadiq, we would have fallen into a famine of knowledge and wisdom, we would have been destroyed in the valley of darkness and ignorance, and a fate worse than the Age of Ignorance would have been decreed for us.
🌼 How were the nations of the past destroyed?
🌼 The Imam is the life-vein of knowledge. Without the Imam, nothing of humanity would remain.
🌼 Ibn Bakr asks His Holiness
(I begin with the greatness of the Imam so as to arrive at the greatness of the city)
Does our Imam see between the east and the west? (Seeing is not the point; the point is understanding.)
The Imam says: How can one be God’s proof, the proof over the regions of the easts and wests, and yet not see them and not be able to judge between them?
He must see and encompass them in order to rule over them.
🌼 That is, the Imam judges each one of us; he must both understand and make them understand, and rule over them.
🌼 He both ruled over a single place and, at the same time, is in contact with each and every individual of the community in this world.
🌼 He judges and conveys God’s command.
🌼 But in our time he is not absent from us—we are the ones absent, and we do not see him.
🌼 The Imam must be capable, and they must be capable of him! That is, the connection between the community and the proof is two-way.
The Imam must understand them, and the community must understand its Imam, and find the ability to connect with their Imam.
🌼 This nerve-thread is in constant connection. Why do I not understand? What is the reason? I must repent. O my God, I repent; if I have been ungrateful for the blessing, I seek forgiveness for this ingratitude.
🌼 How can one be God’s mine and a witness over God’s creation, yet not see them?
🌼 How can one be God’s proof and remain behind a veil, with a distance fallen between them? He is the one who rises up by God’s command.
God says: We did not send you except for all people, and as a proof.
🌼 After the Prophet, he too is his successor—that is, the very distinction the Messenger had, the proof possesses as well, for he is the evidence concerning the disputes of the community, the one who rises up by God’s command, and the establisher of fairness among the people.
🌼 The angels are, for the proofs of God, like eyes and ears and senses.
🌼 We are so far from divine oneness that I fear to speak of the greatness of the proof, lest we come to equate God’s creation with the Creator.
🌼 I wish to behold the Prophet Muhammad within my soul and across the horizons, and each and every one of God’s proofs, both in my heart and across the horizons.
🌼 This heart of mine is a mirror for God’s proof. I do not have the capacity for direct beholding; I must turn to my heart and look upon His Holiness through that mirror. By the divinity of God, Muhammad and the family of Muhammad can be seen in the delicacy of a flower; they can be beheld in the clarity of water; they can be beheld at sunrise, at sunset, and in the vista of the sky.
🌼 His Holiness says: Where can a sign greater than us be found? Which sign is there across the horizons, other than us, that God should show to the people of the horizons?
And God says
So which sign is greater than us?
🌼 His Holiness says: Quraysh knew us and knew what God had bestowed upon us, but they were envious, and this very envy was the cause of their destruction.
🌼 The claimants to the caliphate would come to us when they were in dire need, and they would ask us, and we would solve their problems for them.
And they would say: We bear witness that you alone are the people of knowledge.
His Holiness says: But when they went out, they would say: We see no one more misguided than those who follow these people.
🌼 Would that we too were like Abu Harun before Imam Sadiq—they would sit beside His Holiness and ask him questions. When they had not gone to meet His Holiness for some days, His Holiness said: Abu Harun, it is some days now that I have not seen you. Abu Harun said: A child has been born to me. His Holiness offered congratulations, then asked: What did you name him? Abu Harun says: I said, Muhammad. Abu Harun says: I saw Imam Sadiq bow down as though his blessed face were about to touch the ground, saying: Muhammad, Muhammad, Muhammad.
Then he said: May my soul be sacrificed for Muhammad, and my children be sacrificed for you, O Muhammad, and my family and household be sacrificed for you, O Muhammad, and my father and mother be sacrificed for you, O Muhammad, and all the people of the earth be sacrificed for you, O Muhammad.
Then he said: Beware lest you ever strike him or beat him; beware lest you be stern with him or frown in his face. Know that there is no house in which a name from among the names of Muhammad is found but that house becomes sacred every day and is purified and made clean.
🌼 The sacred being of His Holiness cannot be described or expressed; describing His Holiness requires a heart as vast as all of existence.