Zahiir, from the Arabic root “to give light”

“I did not confide the entire absurd story to him; I told him that I was tormented by insomnia and that often I could not free my mind of the image of an object, any object, say, an ordinary twenty-centavo coin…”

“There is no creature in the world that does not tend towards becoming a Zahir, but the All-Merciful does not allow two things to become a Zahir at the same time, since a single one is capable of entrancing multitudes.”

“Others will dream that I am mad, while I dream of the Zahir. When every man on earth thinks, day and night, of the Zahir, which will be dream and which reality, the earth or the Zahir?”

“Perhaps behind the coin is God.”

-Jorge Luis Borges, “The Zahir”

 

Borges claimed that in the time of Nadir Shah the Zahir was a brass astrolabe that he ordered thrown into the sea; in Gujarat at the end of the 18th century it was a tiger. The one that Borges found, at the beginning of the second quarter of the twentieth century, was a common twenty-centavo coin dated 1929 with the letters N,T, and the number 2 scratched onto its face.

I have reason to believe that today the Zahir has been reduced to its core substance, the essence of purely mental torment. In my mind as it is in everyone’s mind who has seen it down through the centuries since its creation, it is an idea. I have not seen the object itself, because it lacks form, knowing that all form is the same and the external physical and mental perceptions are preceded by mental states. Behind the coin, the tiger, the astrolabe, there is God, who does not stoop to signal representation because he, she, it, (we?), the unknowable presence, knows that manifestation through representation is inefficacious, since the sign is perceived differently through each set of eyes and each mesh of mental processes that react to it.

The Zahir is unforgettable not because it possesses the mind, but because it is revealed to a mind that cannot grasp the truth that the Zahir is God, and God is in all things – thus to try to escape its presence is puerile and impossible. The Zahir possesses the earth because it is the earth, and it abounds in all consciousness.

Behind the coin there is God – but that unknowable presence, the Universal Self, Atman – it is also before it, around it, beneath it and above it, effluvient and indestructible and present in all the interbeing of things extant and inextant.