Page 184 - The Truth of the Life of This World

And Hell is placed in full view for [all] to see. (Surat an-Nazi'at: 36)
But on this Day the Believers laugh at the Unbelievers (Surat al-Mutaffifin: 34)
And the Sinful saw the fire and apprehended that they have to fall therein:
no means did they find to turn away therefrom. (Surat al-Kahf: 53)
As may be seen, occurrences that are going to take place after our death
(from our point of view) are related as already experienced and past events
in the Qur'an. Allah is not bound by the relative time frame that we are
confined in. Allah has willed these things in timelessness: people have
already performed them and all these events have been lived through and
ended. It is imparted in the verse below that every event, be it big or small,
is within the knowledge of Allah and recorded in a book:
In whatever business thou may be, and whatever portion you may be recit-
ing from the Qur'an, and whatever deed you [humanity] may be doing, We
are witnesses thereof when you are deeply engrossed therein. Nor is hidden
from your Lord [so much as] the weight of an atom on the earth or in heav-
en. And not the least and not the greatest of these things but are recorded in
a clear record. (Surah Yunus: 61)

The Worry of the Materialists

The facts discussed in this chapter, namely the truth underlying matter,
timelessness, and spacelessness, are extremely clear indeed. As expressed
earlier, these are hardly some sort of philosophy or way of thinking, but
crystal-clear scientific truths, impossible to deny. On this issue, ratio-
nal and logical evidence admits no other alternatives: For us, the universe
- with all the matter composing it and all the people living on it - is an
illusory entirety, a collection of perceptions that we experience in our
minds and whose original reality we cannot contact directly.
Materialists have a hard time in understanding this - for example, if we
return to the example of Politzer's bus. Although Politzer technically knew
that he could not step out of his perceptions, he could admit it only for
certain cases. For him, events take place in the brain until the bus crash
takes place, then events escape from the brain and assume a physical real-
ity. At this point, the logical defect is very clear: Politzer has made the same
mistake as the materialist Samuel Johnson, who said, "I hit the stone, my

182 Relativity of Time and the Reality of Fate