The meeting with God is not physical similar to the meeting...

The meeting with God is not physical similar to the meeting of different human beings amongst each other. This meeting is different in nature and can be understood with the help of this example. This meeting is like· the meeting of a student and teacher. It is not the physical meeting of a student with his teacher, where he meets and greets his teacher and the teacher also greets him with a reply. But, instead over here the teacher relates to a person with certain merits, qualities and knowledge.

The student is the one who has no knowledge in the first meeting with the teacher, but he gradually starts to acquire knowledge from his teacher thus elevating his level of perfection of knowledge in his self. Then, day by day the distance on the basis of knowledge starts to reduce between the teacher and the student. On the first day, when they met, the distance was too much, because the student had no knowledge at all, but later the student started his journey of acquisition of knowledge.

The result was that day by day he was reducing the distance from his teacher. Then finally a day comes when he comes very close to the level of knowledge possessed by his teacher. In fact it also happens that he exceeds the level of knowledge of his teacher. This excelling of qualities by the student over his master is possible only when the relation is between two creations, but not the relation between the creation and the creator.

In the relationship between the creation and the creator, the creation can never excel over the creator, neither can the creation ever reach the same level as that of the creator, but instead he can reach near to the creator. The meaning of this achievement of nearness or proximity can be understood from the fact that whenever we perform any religious act we start with an Intention (Niyyah) of Qurbatan Ilallah (for the nearness of Allah).

This is because the essence of Allah is a collection of perfect attributes and its peak (which in reality is infinity), whereas human being starts from a point where he has no attributes. He gradually starts to develop these attributes one by one in his self. This is what we call as the Journey of Proximity (or nearness) to Allah. And when human being reaches that stage where he acquires all possible attributes then the distance between him and Allah reduces.