Then I was forced to look behind me. I saw that this unstable, transient world was tumbling, disappearing, into the valleys of nothingness and the darkness  of non-existence.  I was seeking a salve  for my pain,  but  it only added poison. Since I could see no good in that direction I looked in front of me, I sent my view forward to  the future. I saw that the door of the grave was open right in the middle of my path; it was watching me with its mouth agape. The highway beyond it which stretched away to eternity, and the convoys travelling that highway, struck the eye from the distance. But apart from a  limited will as my support and defensive weapon in the face of the horrors coming from these six directions, I had nothing.

The faculty of will, man’s only weapon against those innumerable enemies and endless harmful things, is both defective, and short, and weak, and lacks the power to create, so he is capable of nothing apart from ‘acquisition.’ It could neither pass to the past in  order  to  silence the  sorrows which  came to  me  from there,  nor  could  it penetrate the future to prevent the fears which arose from there. I saw that it was of no benefit for my hopes and pains concerning the past and future.

As I was struggling in the horror, desolation, darkness and despair proceeding from these six directions, the lights of belief which shine in the sky of the Qur’an of Miraculous Exposition suddenly came to my assistance. They lit up and illuminated those six  directions  to  such a degree  that  if the terrors and  darkness I  had  seen increased a hundredfold, the light would still have been sufficient to meet them. One by one it transformed all those horrors into solace and the desolation into familiarity. It was as follows:

Belief rent asunder the desolate view of the past as a vast grave, and showed it with utter certainty to be a familiar, enlightened gathering of friends.

And belief showed the future, which had appeared in the form of a huge grave to my  heedless  eyes,  to  be  most  certainly a  banquet  of the  Most  Merciful  One  in delightful palaces of bliss.

And belief rent the view of present time as a coffin, as it had appeared to my heedless view, and showed it with certaint y to be a place of trade for the hereafter and a glittering guesthouse of the All-Merciful One.

And belief showed with utter certainty that the only fruit at the top of the tree of life was not a corpse as had appeared to my neglectful eye, but that my spirit, which would manifest eternal life and was designated for eternal happiness, would leave its worn-out home to travel around the stars.

And through its mystery, belief showed that my bones and the earth that was the source  of  my creation were not valueless pulverized bones trampled underfoot, but that the earth was the door to divine mercy and veil before the halls of Paradise.