“Local” comes from locus — a particular place, a point. “Global” is used as its opposite: universal, all-encompassing. In physics the principle of locality holds that an object is influenced only by its immediate surroundings, tied to the limitation of causality by the speed of light. Here we take the concept more generally, topologically: things considered through their adjacencies, neighbourhoods and proximities in space, in time, or in the world of relations.

We will first define, then turn to selfhood — for the local–global perspectives emerge precisely through the concept of the self. Afterwards we will try to understand good and evil, randomness, and the relation of will and destiny through this shared framework. This essay cannot carry all of it in detail; we will touch briefly and leave the rest to the reader's reflection. The aim is to lift “local” and “global” out of the dictionary and raise them into technical terms we will refer back to often.

By the local perspective we mean looking at a matter from within a bounded, restricted frame — in space, in time, or in the world of relations. By its opposite, the global, we mean taking up the matter from a perspective without bound in space, time and relation: one that encompasses everything.

A small note: we have not yet treated selfhood, but as the perspective widens the scope of the “I” shifts too. Moving from local to global we may take in the family, society, humanity, nature, existence — and perhaps, effaced entirely, what lies beyond all of it.

Is an absolute global perspective — one weighing all times, all places and all part-whole relations at once — possible for a human being?

Reaching the absolutely universal view may not be possible for the human mind and feeling. Yet whenever we widen a local frame a little, even while it remains local, it is broader than the previous one and nearer the global. By watching the direction in which meanings transform as the frame widens, we can infer where they tend in the absolute global — much as in calculus we derive a function's behaviour at infinity by taking a limit.

Looking from the local perspective we draw an imagined boundary — sometimes explicitly, sometimes by implication — around certain things, concepts and relations. Focusing on a yellowing leaf as it falls from a tree, considering only a narrow span of time and a few relations around it, we may be saddened. So long as we picture the leaf apart from the tree, the tree apart from nature, nature apart from existence, we are drawing boundaries. Drawing them is not a bad thing; it is a useful tool. But to suppose them real misleads a person: it harms the health of thought and feeling, and one struggles to make sense of the cosmos, of oneself, and of one's Creator.

The source of the boundary that separates the leaf from the tree out there — and the most important of the boundaries we draw, indeed their basis — is the boundary that produces the inner/outer division. This boundary, which divides an inner world from an outer, is what we call selfhood (ene). The notion of a unit of measure which Nursî uses in expounding the “I” is likewise a mental object: it arises with the local, particular gaze; its existence is relative, temporary, secondary — yet it is useful as a concept.

One of the most-watched TED talks is neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor's My Stroke of Insight. Taylor observes her own brain haemorrhage from the inside, as a neuroscientist, and tries to convey what she experienced when selfhood was effaced: that through the right hemisphere's consciousness she was an energy being connected to the energy around her, and that the moment the left hemisphere said “I,” she separated — cut off from that flow, becoming a solid individual, alone.

Taylor's talk is from 2008; neuroscience has moved since. The likely cause of her experience was the suppression, by the haemorrhage, of a neural network known as the Default Mode Network (DMN). DMN activity — which also furnishes the sense of selfhood — can be suppressed by antidepressants, meditation, psilocybin, and by eating little, speaking little, sleeping little and withdrawing from company; it can tear down the false walls by which the “I” localises everything, and open a new perspective on the integral reality of existence.

When God declared that He was appointing a vicegerent on the earth, the angels spoke of bloodshed and corruption and asked after the wisdom in it. The answer — “I know what you do not know” — indicated that the angels' perspective was deficient, that is, local: there were relations within their frame of view that they did not know.

Elsewhere Nursî argues from the universal principles of the sciences that in the global there is good, beauty and perfection; whereas evil, ugliness, falsehood and badness arise in the particular, as a unit of measure — that is, in the local perspective. Ugliness did not enter the cosmos for its own sake; it entered creation as a measure, so that one reality of beauty might unfold into many realities.

Our subject is not the problem of evil, debated for centuries by theologians and philosophers; let that have its own essay. What we are setting out here, from within the local–global frame, is this: many concepts — selfhood, evil, randomness — are not realities at the ontological level but are used as relative, mental instruments.

In everyday speech we may use “random” to mean purposeless, aimless, devoid of wisdom. Technically this is a misuse. What we call a random variable in science is in fact a model of influences outside the system under study. Not every random variable is uniform or Gaussian; even random variables have a structure of their own.

The careless conflate the technical “random” with the everyday “purposeless” and reach a false verdict: describing a system, they assign its deterministic parts to mechanism and its indeterministic parts to random variables; then they say that explaining the system requires no notion of purpose or wisdom. Then they take one step further and conclude that the system therefore has no purpose or wisdom.

Yet the mechanistic account may not need the assumption of wisdom — and not needing it does not license the conclusion that there is none. That we can predict the social average of human behaviour does not let us say that all people act without purpose.

Every system of which we have partial knowledge is local in proportion to that deficiency; hence we necessarily explain it using random variables. The indeterminacy of quantum mechanics likewise indicates that the cosmos is not a closed system — that this must be an uncertainty arising from a deficiency of knowledge at the most fundamental level, since it cannot enclose the choice and will of the Creator.

In this essay we have tried to set out the Local and Global Perspectives as instruments of thought, giving examples through fundamentals such as selfhood, the problem of evil, and randomness. Many more — the distinction between decree (local) and will (global), consciousness, witnessing, the general and particular rulings of jurisprudence — can be better understood through this same mental object.