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SpiritualRoadmapbyGhazali, page : 124
their observations and reasoning. What they are unfamiliar with they suppose
impossible. If it were not that veridical vision in sleep is familiar, when someone
claimed to gain knowledge of the unseen while his senses were at rest, men with
such intellects would deny it. If you said to one, `Is it possible for there to be in
the world a thing, the size of a grain, which if placed in a town, will consume that
town in its entirety and then consume itself, so that nothing is left of the town and
what it contained nor of the thing itself‟?; he would say, `This is absurd; it is an
old wives‟ tale‟. Yet this is the case with fire, although, when he heard it,
someone who had no acquaintance with fire would reject it. The rejection of the
strange features of the world to come usually belongs to this class. To the
physicist we reply: `You are compelled to admit that in opium there is a property
which leads to freezing, although this is not consonant with nature as rationally
conceived; why then is it not possible that there should be in the positive
precepts of the Divine law properties leading to the healing and purifying of
hearts, which are not apprehended by intellectual wisdom but are perceived only
by the eye of prophecy‟? Indeed in various pronouncements in their writings they
have actually recognized properties more surprising than these, such as the
wonderful properties observed when the following figure was employed in
treating cases of childbirth where delivery was difficult:
impossible. If it were not that veridical vision in sleep is familiar, when someone
claimed to gain knowledge of the unseen while his senses were at rest, men with
such intellects would deny it. If you said to one, `Is it possible for there to be in
the world a thing, the size of a grain, which if placed in a town, will consume that
town in its entirety and then consume itself, so that nothing is left of the town and
what it contained nor of the thing itself‟?; he would say, `This is absurd; it is an
old wives‟ tale‟. Yet this is the case with fire, although, when he heard it,
someone who had no acquaintance with fire would reject it. The rejection of the
strange features of the world to come usually belongs to this class. To the
physicist we reply: `You are compelled to admit that in opium there is a property
which leads to freezing, although this is not consonant with nature as rationally
conceived; why then is it not possible that there should be in the positive
precepts of the Divine law properties leading to the healing and purifying of
hearts, which are not apprehended by intellectual wisdom but are perceived only
by the eye of prophecy‟? Indeed in various pronouncements in their writings they
have actually recognized properties more surprising than these, such as the
wonderful properties observed when the following figure was employed in
treating cases of childbirth where delivery was difficult: