Make provision...

Make provision, then, for the world to which you will go after this transient abode and in which you will reside eternally.” ( Bihar al-Anwar, Vol. V, pt. 2, p. 182) The Great Storehouse of Mental Images The existence of a specific relationship between a container and a thing contained is one of the properties of matter; a larger thing can never be made to coincide entirely with a smaller one.

If for example we stand on some great elevation, and gaze over the vast plains that surround us, with all their trees, verdure, and birdlife, their hills and their vales, their great rocks piled up on top of each other, and if we then try to picture all these items in our minds, they will appear before our spirit, our inner vision, like a great picture, with all the attributes they possess.

Here we may ask whether all these varied images, with the extensiveness that they possess, both in the external world and in our minds, are stored up in our brains, with their very small and delicate cells? Does such limited matter have the capacity to accommodate precisely and without any diminution so vast a series of images?

Without doubt, reason and logic compel us to answer in the negative, for anyone can understand that it is impossible to make a larger object conform while retaining its exact quantity to a smaller one. For is it not the case that the container must either be larger than the object contained or at least equal to it? It is impossible, for example, to typeset on a single small sheet all the contents of a thousand-page book.

We can easily picture in our minds a big city with all of its buildings, streets, parks, cars and other vehicles, and population. But basing ourselves on the principle that “the large cannot be made to conform to the small,” we must conclude that such extraordinarily large mental images cannot be accommodated in the minute cells of our brain; for it self-evident that such conformity can take place only when the object contained is equal in size to the container or smaller than it.

In addition, our capacity of perception possesses attributes and properties that do not correspond to those of matter, and it cannot therefore be dependent simply on a series of physical relationships that accompany its functioning.