People often despair about forgetting or losing what they experience/understand to be deep and profound. They despair about not ‘walking the walk’ in relation to talking the ‘deep’ talk. They hear something that hits them as profound or something profound occurs to them and in that moment, they feel raised to a higher level of consiousness. In that moment, they feel they have found a new, higher ground on whicn they can now stand and live their life. But that deep thought, that profound realization inevitably weakens or even disappears until it comes to mind again as an absence and with a regret – one finds oneself judging oneself to be living on shallower ground, shallower than the ‘profound’ thought one had once held in one’s mind. One is sorry, even despaired, that one does not, that one cannot live how one would have liked to live or behave. One starts to doubt whether one really believed or understood what seemed profound or whether it was profound at all! The passing of profundity makes people question its reality, its worth.
Profundity, like beauty, passes and fades in this realm of change and death, in this lower realm. It shows its face and attracts praise and exaltation but is then taken away sometimes (or often in my case). To me, profundity is the name given to the depth or degree or attractiveness of beauty. Like beauty, it is not a product of this world, not a product of things or people but a bestowal by the One who is the source of all beauty. An idea’s measure/degree of beauty is its profundity and it is subject to the will of the one who owns beauty. When and if it is given/received by a human being, it is given in proportion to, and in relation to, the need (the degree of shallowness) of a person’s view or life at any given moment. It is to be sought not for its own sake but for the sake of the beauty and perfection, the divine beauty and perfection, that the soul desires to always behold and be close to. Whatever does not enable or aid the movement or gaze of my soul towards the unfailingly beautiful is not profound. Whatever enables these is profound. The force or will that enables my movement towards beauty is divine compassion and divine beauty. Profundity is the force by which the divine pulls me towards himself as the beautiful and compassionate sustainer and I experience that pull, whenver He so wishes/wills and only so long as His wisdom and compassion determines it, not as much as I want it for the sake of being profound (i.e. for its own sake). God does not allow profundity to be exalted and worsipped for its own sake and He deprives me of it just enough for me to see that it is not mine and yet I need it because I need beauty to the extent that it lacks nothing.
The Quran as Revelation 