Inspiration 3: Allah's Knowledge
You were in Allah’s knowledge; the knowledge of Allah is the ultimate bliss and the ultimate light. You were drifting about in the eternal past. He then allowed you to emerge into the world of atoms, with a sense of hearing with which you heard, “Am I not your Lord?” When the pleasant call pierced your hearing, the spirits responded, “Indeed, indeed!”
Then the world of wombs manifested you before Me, and then it brought you into the world. Your previous life was pre-eternal. Then you are moving on to the Intermediary Realm (the barzakh), then to the Place of Assembly, and finally to Paradise or the Hellfire. Then you are finally returning once again to the knowledge of Allah, whereupon Allah will reward you with a blissful existence in contrast to which the previous bliss (Paradise) would resemble a torment, and all of this is called the “Cycle of Existence.”
Accordingly, at this very moment of your presence in this world, there are human beings who are still in the knowledge of Allah, others in the world of wombs, and others still who have preceded you either to the Intermediary Realm, to the Place of Assembly, to the Paradise, to the Hellfire or to Allah.
These are all parallel worlds, and no person awaits another; whoever dies, his Hour of reckoning has arrived. There is the one who dies young for whom the phase of this world is folded up, while another may die as a result of a miscarriage. Another may come to know Allah in this world and become annihilated in Him in his witnessing and tasting (dhawq); for such a person, the entire Cycle of Existence is folded up and condensed, such that there is no death, resurrection, assembly, reckoning, Paradise, or Hellfire, and there is nothing but Allah.
O human being, you have emerged from pre-eternity and are heading to the eternal. Allah has decreed everlastingness for you, for you are everlasting by virtue of Allah’s intervention and not by virtue of His Everlastingness. And you shall not die, as long as the Breath of the All-Living - who never dies, remains within you.