Imam Ali heard someone abusing and blaming the world and said to him, "O you, who are blaming the world, who have been allured and enticed by it, and have been tempted by its false pretenses. You allowed yourself to be enamored of, to be captivated by it and then you accuse and blame it. Have you any reason or right to accuse it and to call it a sinner and seducer? Or is the world not justified in calling you a wicked knave and a sinning hypocrite? When did it make you lose your intelligence and reasoning? And how did it cheat you or snake false pretenses to you? Did it conceal from you the fact of the ultimate end of everything that it holds, the fact of the sway of death, decay and destruction in its domain? Did it keep you in the dark about the fate of your forefathers and their final abode under the earth? Did it keep the resting-place of your mothers a secret from you? Do you not know that they have returned to dust? Many a time you must have attended the sick persons and many of them you must have seen beyond the scope of medicine. Neither the science of healing nor could your nursing and attendance nor your prayers and weeping prolonged the span of their lives, and they died. You were anxious for them, you procured the best medical aid, you gathered famous physicians and provided best medicines for them. Death could not be held back and life could not be prolonged. In this drama and in this tragedy did the world not present you with a lesson and a moral?

Certainly, this world is a house of truth for those who look into it carefully, an abode of peace and rest for those who understand its ways and moods and it is the best working ground for those who want to procure rewards for life in the Hereafter. It is a place of acquiring knowledge and wisdom for those who want to acquire them, a place of worship for the friends of God and for Angels. It is the place where prophets received revelations of God. It is the place for virtuous people and saints to do good deeds and to be assigned with rewards for the same. Only in this world they could trade with God's Favors and Blessings and only while living here they could barter their good deeds with His Blessings and Rewards. Where else could all this be done? Who are you to abuse the world when it has openly declared its mortality and mortality of everything connected with it, when it has given everyone of its inhabitants to understand that all of them are to face death, when through its ways it has given them all an idea of calamities they have to face here, and through the sight of its temporary and fading pleasures it has given them glimpses of eternal pleasures of Paradise and suggested them to wish and work for the same. If you study it properly you will find that simply to warn and frighten you of the consequences of evil deeds and to persuade you towards good actions, every night it raises new hopes of peace and prosperity in you and every morning it places new anxieties and new worries before you. Those who passed such lives are ashamed of and repent the time so passed abuse this world. But there are people who will praise this world on the Day of Judgment that it reminded them of the Hereafter and they took advantage of these reminders. It informed them of the effects of good deeds and they made correct use of the information it advised them and they were benefited by its advice".

Some people are only able to perceive the crudest machine-structure in man, and can only recognise the mind as some odd ghost inhabiting a delicate house of tissue and nerve-endings. It is an odd ghost, for, according to their picture, it is enough that the delicate fibre-furniture be damaged for the occupant somehow, mysteriously, to be affected. This dualistic frame on which the pathetic crumbling structure of our hastily put-together modern psychology is erected, leaves us with a picture of something called 'behaviour' which ends up being classified into 'types' and the crude mechanistic picture soon bogs down in a welter of sub-types. It is inevitable that in our time the accepted cure for mal-function of this non-existent ghost in its bizarre house (electrocute the house and thus wipe out the house-keeper) should be an equally crude and massively administered chemical drug treatment. Although some modern therapists have recognised a quite profound and clinically identifiable picture of much greater subtlety which opens to the streaming, sub-electric energy-fields of the body, they in turn become so hypnotised by their own discovery that they again try to contain man within a bio-energy definition reducing the human being by that token simply to the sum of his energies. Utterly closed to the nature of an Unseen reality, because still essentially trapped in this basic duality which they quite rightly observe to exist in the world of forms, they relentlessly avoid the metaphysical question which in other sciences insists on attention. Now that we have uncovered the chromosomic level of patterning, and glimpsed the beauty of form-manifestation and recognised also our profound ignorance of these processes at the very point that certain key designs open themselves to us, we are forced to a threshold of activity which is, if you like, the 'edge of the Unseen', or more correctly, in the language of the Master Jalalud'din Rumi, the Non-spatial, the realm of mind itself, which so delicately and purely refrains from 'being' the brain, and yet so lovingly and seductively is its shadow-reality. I now do not refer to 'your' mind or 'my' mind, for in this picture I would have to italicise out of existence thus – 'your mind' and 'my mind'.