The Beginning of Blessings

Imam Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali said, “How many are the Blessings which began before asking and praying, and indeed without one being worthy of them.”

The blessing, in his account, frequently precedes the asking altogether.  It arrives before the prayer, before the visualisation, before any claim of merit could conceivably attach to the recipient.  A newborn breathes, and a heart beats, before either has ever prayed for the privilege of doing so.  The capacity to think, to reason, to eventually formulate a prayer at all, was itself a blessing that arrived unrequested and unearned, the precondition for asking rather than its reward.

The manifestation framework reintroduces a transactional theology into daily life, where gratitude becomes conditional on having correctly performed the ritual of desire.  Imam al-Ghazali’s framing removed the transaction entirely.  If the greatest blessings arrive before the asking and without worthiness, then gratitude cannot be reserved for the blessings a person successfully manifested.  It is owed, continuously, for everything that was never a transaction in the first place.

A person who only feels gratitude for what he believes he manifested through sufficient effort has missed almost everything Imam al-Ghazali described.  The rarest blessings are not the ones secured through visualisation boards and correctly worded requests.  They are the ones already sitting underneath every request a person has ever made, granted long before he was worthy of asking, let alone worthy of receiving.