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Tuesday, April 12, 2005

The allegory of the pen - the interpretation

The rather perplexing and mind-boggling article that I posted previously certainly need an exhaustive interpretation. It certainly requires quite lot of thinking and manipulating perspective the faculty of thought to elucidate the entire message of the story written by Imam al-Ghazali.

In the first part of the story, a man called a devotee was walking towards a certain place when he found a paper blackened by a line written by a pen. Thus, the title 'the allegory of the pen'.

Then, the devotee tried to find the one who is responsible to cause the line to be written on the paper. He asked the paper, ink, pen, hand, vitality,will and finally met three matter. The mind, knowledge and reason altogether defensed themselves by saying that they are not guilty of accusation since all of them are servants to one powerful invisible pen.

The devotee was strucked by a puzzle. He already interrogated the pen and the pen said it was controlled by another matter and this seems to be in a circling riddle. Is this a joke? So, who is 'the invisible pen'?

The first part is actually an analogy of a man trying to find who or what controlled all the events that occurs in his life. When we find something that we cannot explained, we have this tendency to sought plausible reason for that matter. First, we might explored the physical matter that governed or leading to the event.

Let say, we saw an apple fall from a tree [classic story of physic law]. We ponder and contemplate the reason it fell to the ground. Why the apple doesn't went upward instead of downward? Then, we think that may be caused of the wind. Then, further contemplation reveal that there is an invisible force that we called now as gravity. But then again, if we continuously thinking, what caused the gravity to be there in the first place? Is it because the formation of the planet earth suddenly cause the gravity force to be there, without any logical reason? Or is it because the sun and the earth 'communicate' with each other to form the gravity force?

Indeed, if humans to ponder again and again on who is the one behind everything, he will found that there is The One Most Powerful God behind all matter. It is God that creates everything that we saw and felt, including the gravity.

It was revealed in the Holy Book, al-Quran; the story of Prophet Abraham (Ibrahim) who contemplates on the idols, the sun, the moon and the universe in his quest to find the God.

One who thinks upon the creation will find the ultimate Creator.

to be continued....

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