particularly in animate beings; although it is itself inanimate and unconscious. Rain which is then the very embodiment of divine mercy can only be manufactured in the unseen treasury of mercy of One Most Compassionate and Merciful, and on its descent expounds in physical form the verse: And He it is Who sends down rain after men have despaired, and thus spreads out His mercy. [^159] , [^160]

[^159]:Qur'an, 42:28.

[^160]:Şualar, 91 (Eng. tr.: Rays, 133-4).

An important element of the Risale-i Nur's method which is related to the mind is reflection or meditation (tefekkür). In one of his letters to his students, Bediuzzaman writes that because he took the path of reflection at the time the Old Said was being transformed into the New Said, he sought the true meaning of the Hadith, "An hour's reflection is better than a year's [voluntary] worship." After twenty years this meaning had found, after The Supreme Sign, its final form in a collection of Arabic pieces which included the well-known al-Jawshan al-Kabir, and a summarized extract of The Supreme Sign, called Khulasat al-Khulasa. [^161] This reflection entails pondering over the beings in the universe in the manner of the traveller in The Supreme Sign and "reading their tongues", which proclaim the Unity of their Maker and point to the other Divine Names and attributes. Bediuzzaman described how this form of reflection illuminates the whole universe, on the one hand displaying the baselessness of concepts such as nature on which unbelief is based, and on the other, resulting in a level of belief that leads to an awareness of the universal Divine presence and universal worship:

[^161]:Nursi, Kastamonu Lahikası, 171.

In the Hizbü'l-Nuri there is both the meaning of "An hour's reflection," and universal worship... I saw that the Jawshan al-Kabir, the Risale-i Nur, and the Hizbü'l-Nuri illuminate the universe from top to bottom; they disperse the darknesses; they destroy heedlessness and 'nature'; and they rend the veils under which the people of heedlessness and misguidance want to hide. I observed that they card the universe and all its beings like cotton, and comb them out. They show the lights of Divine Unity behind the furthest and broadest veils of the universe in which the people of misguidance have become submerged... And they show in such a way that from top to bottom the universe reflects the manifestations of the Divine Names like mirrors that no possibility remains for heedlessness. Nothing becomes an obstacle to the Divine presence. I saw that rather than banishing or forgetting or not recalling the universe like the Sufis and mystics (ehl-i tarikat ve hakikat) in