Insight Newsletter Feature: Gathered or Scattered

Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim

Blessings of harvest and fulfillment with the coming of the Fall season! In this edition of the Insight newsletter “Science and Spirituality” column, we sit with a single question posed by Sufi Master Shah Nazar Seyyed Dr. Ali Kianfar in Quran class, and consider what the stars themselves reveal about it.

Born Gathered

Recently, Dr. Kianfar referred to a hadith of the Prophet:

“As you live, so shall you die. As you die, so shall you be resurrected. And as you are resurrected, so shall you be gathered.”

Then he asked us to read it in reverse. What stands at the beginning? Gathering. At the beginning, he teaches, there is a collection, absolute and abstract, and it begins to spread – and that first gathering, that first point, is a star. Past editions of this column have explored this star, the origin and companion set within every heart. Here the teaching adds a direction of motion: from the first gathering, radiation has continued for billions of years, descending state by state until it ends in the body. “The beginning was a mountain, now just a rock.” And now the question posed by the reversal: when this body drops, is there any gathering?

The Family of the Sun

Stars are not born alone. They condense by the hundreds and thousands out of a single collapsing cloud – born gathered, a family sharing one center. Our Sun was born this way, more than four and a half billion years ago. Its siblings are gone, scattered long ago into the disk of the galaxy, anonymous now among the field stars. Astronomers have identified only a few candidates. The most confident, a star called HD 162826, drifts one hundred ten light-years away in the constellation Hercules [1]. Astronomically speaking, we live in the scattered state.

Not every stellar family dissolves. Why do some scatter while others hold? Every cluster lives between two attractions: the collective gravity of its own members, binding them toward their common center, and the tidal pull of the galaxy outside. Within the boundary where the family’s inward pull is stronger – the tidal radius – the gathering holds. Beyond it, stars evaporate away one by one. The Hyades, the nearest cluster to Earth, is dissolving in just this way right now: the Gaia space telescope has revealed two tails of escaping stars streaming from it, hundreds of light-years long [2]. Open clusters like this – the loose stellar families of the galactic disk – endure only a few hundred million years. Yet the galaxy holds gatherings of another kind. Globular clusters – dense spheres of hundreds of thousands of stars, concentrated intensely toward their centers – have survived twelve billion years and more, nearly the age of the universe [3]. They orbit through the same tides that dissolve every open cluster. The churning outside is the same. The difference is entirely internal: how tightly the system is bound toward its own center.

Notice, too: when a cluster dissolves, nothing is destroyed. Every scattered star still exists and still shines. What is lost is the gathering itself – the binding, the family, the pattern.

The Magnet Center

Dr. Kianfar teaches that truth is oneness: one rule for everything, at every state and every station. Earlier this year, in the pages of Sufism: An Inquiry, this column explored how every self is a center of the infinite. The question now is what holds a center together? In the same class as the hadith, Dr. Kianfar stated the answer as: it lives within us – you always create something within yourself as a magnetic center, a source that grabs the same quality. Anger grabs anger. Jealousy grabs jealousy. And likewise peace, harmony, balance, generosity – “because we are speaking about shall you be gathered.” The quality of the center determines what it can hold. And a center, even one comprised of peace, must be held and maintained. Meditation, Dr. Kianfar teaches, is the balance between the pulls: “the energy of the center and the gravity around it.” And the outer pull never rests. “All information distracts you and pulls you away from the gravity of your center.” As he asked at a recent gathering: how can you survive within the great energetic churning of the universe?

The clusters have shown the shape of the answer: what is bound to its center survives. For the human being, the question becomes where that center lies. Seyyedeh Dr. Nahid Angha teaches why that center must be the heart: “Security must reside in a place that does not change,” and the heart is “the means of transformation into a form that will survive the demise of the body.” What is at stake, then, is not existence itself. Nothing in existence is truly lost. As Sufi Master Mir Ghotbeddin wrote, nothing vanishes into space, and all is “handed from wave to wave into eternity.” And as Dr. Kianfar teaches, “There is no way to disappear once you appear in the universe.” What the hadith leaves open is not whether something continues, but its condition – gathered, or scattered.

Gathering Now

Is there any gathering when the body drops? Dr. Kianfar left the question open, and this column must do the same. What the teachers give is a practice. “Focus all your electromagnetic energy to your heart,” Dr. Angha teaches, “and concentrate on one point.” Meditation is not a flight upward but a shrinking of space toward the center. This is the same geometry by which a cluster of stars survives the galactic tides. The practice is carried on “under the supervision of someone who knows.” And Dr. Kianfar describes where it leads: “When your being is in balance, you are in meditation all the time.”

Inshallah, may we collect what has been scattered and draw it toward the center that was our first beginning – and hold it there, through every tide.

References

[1] I. Ramírez et al., “Elemental Abundances of Solar Sibling Candidates,” The Astrophysical Journal 787, 154 (2014).

[2] S. Röser, E. Schilbach, and B. Goldman, “Hyades tidal tails revealed by Gaia DR2,” Astronomy & Astrophysics 621, L2 (2019).

[3] “Globular cluster,” Encyclopædia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/science/globular-cluster.