Throughout this series we aim to build a terminology that places the Qur'an at the centre of our effort to understand the cosmos, the human and life, blending scientific and spiritual principles. By joining concepts from physics, biology, sociology and Sufism we hope to read the physical and the metaphysical from a shared vantage. Our wish is to treat the Qur'an's wisdom through the tradition's own handling while also using, to the full, the instruments modern sciences offer — exploring both the material and the spiritual.
Meaning and Matter
The Qur'an draws attention to the unseen dimensions of existence by speaking of angels, jinn and the spirit. These dimensions are manifestations of a divine wisdom that renders not merely the representation of matter but its very existence meaningful. Yet how such beings are represented in matter — through which configurations they interact with it — lies, for most of us, outside our knowledge. Our knowledge of how mountains, stars and fruits relate to the world of meaning is likewise limited. To know what a Qur'anic recitation — perceived as variations of air pressure — alters in the spiritual realm is possible only through a very particular knowledge.
The Ontological Priority of Meaning
When we think or design, we think through meaning, not through letters. We make plans, form designs, then pour those meanings into sentences, words and letters — observing shared rules of spelling and grammar so that a reader who knows the same rules can decipher the meaning. Likewise, before erecting a building we produce a design. Meaning and design therefore come ontologically prior to matter.
But a question arises here: if meaning is an indivisible whole, why does it become divisible in matter? Though a person lose a hand, a foot or an organ, the identity “human” in the world of meaning does not change. Likewise there is no difference in meaning between saying “Praise be to God” loudly or softly.
How this transition occurs, how the boundaries of matter are drawn, and in which cases the carrying relation between matter and meaning succeeds or fails — these are deep questions still to be resolved. If everything has a destiny, does that destiny find its representation in matter within a deterministic mould? Does a deterministic mould fix, exactly, the state of the parts composing that thing's matter? If a community has a destiny, are the destinies of its individuals thereby fixed as well?
Matter and Meaning — Being a Mirror
Nursî explains this relation through the notion of “being a mirror.” Donald Hoffman, expounding human consciousness, says that particular configurations of matter constitute a headset, like a VR visor.
The Qur'an states that it created the earth and the heaven from a single substance. The Ashʿarīs held that this substance consists of indivisible fundamental particles. Yet these particles are not entities located within space as ordinarily understood; rather they shape space itself and the three-dimensional place we perceive. Just as the relations among the particles constitute the perception of nearness and distance in space, the updating of those relations — their erasure and inscription according to certain rules — constitutes the perception of time.
Just as a radio, tuned to the right frequency, turns into sound the electromagnetic waves present but unseen, so meaning becomes visible through matter.
Ontological Wholeness and Unity of Spirit
That a community or a being has a destiny shows it possesses a higher reality — a level of meaning. But does a community's destiny fix the destinies of its individuals? What is the difference between a crowd and a society, a heap and a structure, coal and diamond, a person dead five minutes ago and their present dead state?
When a group of people gather to accomplish a work, what may be done for a unity of spirit to form? How does that unity come? How may one become a mirror that receives divine confirmation and reflects the manifestation of the Greatest Name? How may we dissolve our selfhood — in one sense a part — within the universal reality of the perfected human, and unite with that light which is the ink of the pen that writes the cosmos?
Just as colours that seem independent compose, in harmony, a great picture on a canvas — just as dozens of instruments, each with its own voice, compose a symphony — so we too may become parts of a great world of meaning chosen by our own free will. But how, and on fulfilling which conditions?
In the Next Essay
In this essay we have tried to offer a preface, a frame, for reading existence in terms of meaning and matter. To grasp that frame more deeply we must widen our terminology. In the next essay we will deepen the discussion with concepts such as macro and micro states, phase transitions, irreducibility, emergence, entropy, information and the Markov blanket.