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The Holy Book declares:
"Glorified be He Who carried His servant by night from the Sacred Mosque (of Mecca) to the farther Temple (of Jerusalem), the neighborhood of which We have blessed, that We might show him of Our signs. Surely He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing (17:1)"
"Then he drew nigh and came down, till he was two bows’ length or even nearer, and He revealed unto His servant what He revealed. The heart (of His servant) lied not (in seeing) what he saw (53:8-11)."
The Ascension is one of the greatest miracles of the Messenger Muhammad. The Messenger realized a spiritual perfection and full refinement through belief and worship and, as a reward God took him to His holy Presence. Escaping from the imprisonment of ‘natural’ laws and material causes and rising beyond the limits of bodily existence, the Messenger crossed distances swiftly and transcended all dimensions of the material world until he reached the holy Presence of God.
Multi-dimensional existence
Atomic physics has changed many notions in physics and established that the material world is a dimension or an appearance of existence. Besides this world, there are many other worlds or dimensions of existence, each of which has its own particularities. Einstein put forward the notion that time is only one of the dimensions of existence. Science has not yet drawn the final conclusions about existence and new findings and developments continually change our view of it. Therefore, especially in our day, it is completely illogical to question the event of Ascension. People have difficulty in understanding how one can penetrate all time at the same moment as a single point. In order to understand this subtle matter, consider the following analogy.
Imagine that you are standing with a mirror in your hand, with everything reflected on the right representing the past, while everything reflected on the left represents the future. The mirror can reflect one direction only since it cannot show both sides at the same time as you are holding it. If you wish to reflect both directions at the same time, you will have to rise high above your original position so that left and right directions are united into one and nothing remains to be called first or last, beginning or end.
In the Ascension, the Messenger Muhammad must have moved with the speed of the spirit and he traveled through all time and space and all dimensions of existence in a very short period. During that heavenly journey, he met with the previous Messengers, saw angels and beheld the beauties of Paradise and the terrors of Hell. He also observed the essential realities of all the Holy Book's issues and the meanings and wisdom of all the acts of worship. He went as far as the realms where even the greatest of angels, Gabriel, cannot reach and was honored with vision of God’s ‘Countenance’ free from any qualitative and quantitative dimensions and restrictions. Then, in order to bring humanity out of the darkness of material existence into the illumined realm of belief and worship, through which they could realize a ‘spiritual’ ascension each according to his capacity, he returned to the world where he was made subject to all kinds of persecution.
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