His material existence thus once firmly established and secured, he begins to indulge in his speculations on all sorts of bodies,—on the different kinds of animals, plants, minerals and different sorts of stones, earth, water, exhalations and vapours, ice, snow, hail, smoke, fire, etc.
By the time he attains to the age of twenty-eight (fourth Septenary), his mind starts to ponder over astronomical problems—over heaven and stars, sun and moon; and in the end comes to the conclusion that the body of heaven is finite and is of a spherical figure.
At last his mind finds itself occupied with the great problem of Creation and Creator. With admirable skill the author delineates here the gradual development of Hayy’s reasonings on the Creator and Mover of the world, and concludes with the panegyric words of the Koran: He is the Existence, He is the Absoluteness, He is the Perfection, He is the Beauty, He is the Glory, He is the Power, He is the Knowledge, He is He, and all Things perish beside Him.
All his thoughts were henceforward confined to the contemplation of this necessarily self-existent Being. In order to do this, he removed all his affections from sensible things, shut his eyes, stopped his ears, and refrained himself as much as possible from following his imagination, endeavouring to the utmost to think of nothing besides him.
Whilst so, on the one side, the imagination and all the other faculties which make any use of the organs of the body grew weak; on the other side, the operations of his essence which did not depend upon the body grew strong, so that sometimes his meditation was pure and free from any mixture, and he beheld thereby the necessarily self-existent Being; but then again corporeal faculties would return upon him and spoil his contemplation, and bring him down to the lowest degree.
Thus he continued, he opposing his corporeal faculties, and they opposing him, and mutually struggling one against another. Then, when he observed that the negative attributes consisted in separation from bodily things, he began to strip himself of all bodily properties—to remove and reject all those things from himself, as being in no wise consistent with that state which he was now in search of.
Thus he continued, confining himself to rest in the bottom of his cave, with his head bowed down and his eyes shut, and turning himself altogether from all sensible things and the corporeal faculties, and turning all his thoughts and meditations upon the necessarily self-existent Being without admitting anything else besides him: and if any other object presented itself to his imagination, he rejected it with his utmost force, and persisted therein to that degree that sometimes he did neither eat nor stir for many days together.
When he succeeded in preventing the admission of an extraneous object into that contemplation, he endeavoured as it were to disappear from himself—to detach himself entirely from his corporeal faculties, so as to be wholly taken up in the vision of that true Being.
And, thereto when at last he attained both the heaven and the earth, all spiritual forms and corporeal faculties, and all those powers that are separate from matter, all disappeared and vanished, and were as if they had never been. And amongst these his own being disappeared too, till at last there remained nothing but this One, True, Perpetually Self-existent Being, who spoke thus in that saying of his (the Koran): To whom now belongs the Kingdom? To this One, the Almighty God.
Thus he deeply immersed himself into this state, and witnessed “that which neither eye hath seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it ever entered into the heart of man to conceive.”