Ahmadiyyat or The True Islam — Page 97
97 Islam lays down the same three stages of realiza- tion. The first stage is, that a man hears about the mani- festation of God’s attributes from others, or reads in books as to how God has dealt with His servants in the past, and he begins to think that there must be some reality underlying it. But this creates no more than a temporary impression on his mind. For, when he begins to strive in the same path himself he at first meets with disappointment and often loses courage, like a man, seeing smoke from a distance, begins to advance to- wards it, but as he proceeds further and sees nothing but smoke without any other indication of fire he begins to imagine that his eye had deceived him and that what he had seen was not smoke but a speck of cloud or a spiral of dust. Only such persons are satisfied with the records of the lives of holy men as never strive to have an experience at first hand themselves, and whose compla- cency remains, therefore, unshaken. This, however, is far from being enviable. Islam does not limit man to the first stage of re- alization. It keeps the door open to the highest stage, and it claims that any one striving after God in accor- dance with its teachings, gains in understanding and realization in proportion to his effort, and that there is no stage of realization which was opened to others from which men are now debarred. I have explained that true realization is a purely inward condition of mind; it is that sharpness of spiritual vision by which man begins to perceive the attributes of God in a new light; it is that keenness of spiritual perception by which man discovers himself clothed with the attributes of God. But as every