By Hasan Askari (Alone to Alone)

The moon and the stars were all there reflected in that still emerald lake that night as our boat slowly and respectfully floated across the lake. We were all silent. I felt for a moment or two a sense of complete union with the lake, its reflections, their originals.

The following morning as we sat under a tree beside the lake, we were amazed that we could hardly recognize that it was the very lake we had crossed last night. We hardly recognized ourselves to be those very persons who saw the moon and the stars reflected in the lake.

In the afternoon of that day we had a session with our teacher on Plato’s idea of Eternal Forms. The idea that There in the Ideal world are “forms” of everything we see here is hardly believed, our teacher started to reflect. One of the modes in which doubt is cast upon Plato’s Ideal Forms is rather amusing. Enchanted by the apparent solidity of things here and trusting our sense perception, we reverse the relationship. We regard Forms there as reflections of things here on the model of comparing the images in our mind with the things outside.

The idea of Plato’s Forms cannot be demonstrated as true on the exclusive testimony of senses and of reasoning based on sense-perception. We require another principle. Plato saw the reality of the forms not by his physical eye nor by his reason bound with his body and with the world. He saw them by the soul’s sight.  He could see his own Form before and after embodiment, and when he looked at himself here, then he could recognise which form was real, and which a copy, feeble and ephemeral.

It was during one of the sessions of Zikr we used to hold every Thursday evening that I had a strange and over-whelming experience of having lived the entire cycle of life of diverse races and civilizations, of life-forms here on our planet and in other galaxies, and still reciting the Zikr.

While invoking the Zikr on another occassion for the benefit of the souls of my parents, I was taken aback by a sudden realization of unity between their post-death soul-status and my pre-birth soul status, a state which remained unchanged even now while I was in body.

As I prayed for them and as I recalled them, my eyes were full of tears. My heart was drowned in that sorrow, in my longing and love for them. Many things became clear.

Some say why should one really pray for anybody in particular because all things are interconnected and under the direct and unfailing providence of God. I agree. But while one prays for some loved one, the heart melts; its hardness disappears; its doors open; a gentle wind coming from nowhere envelops the heart bathed and purified by sorrow. Then the universal truths enter and find their true home there; otherwise those truths come, find the door of the heart closed, and they leave.