Nahjul Balagha analysis: Sermon 1 - Part 2: Knowledge is everywhere - Open your eyes, think, question.

He for whose description no limit has been laid down, no eulogy exists, no time is ordained and no duration is fixed.

Where as in the first part of the paragraph, Imam Ali (as) has been guiding us  how to think about Allah, and laid out the boundaries for understanding Him conceptually, in this second part of the first paragraph he negates any limitation of Allah by time and space to further expand out understanding of His limitlessness, enabling us to expand our mind further by understanding the vastness of His existence.  

We also see that in this paragraph two methods so far have been used to show the vastness or ever existence of Allah.  The first negates our ability to describe, count, understand and reason Allah with completeness, whilst the second negated the negatives of Allah.  

He brought forth creation through His Omnipotence, dispersed winds through His Compassion, and made firm the shaking earth with rocks.

In the last part of this paragraph, for the benefit of man who understands concepts only through what he is familiar with, Imam Ali brings to our attention the Originator and Omnipotent aspect of Allah's attributes by referring taking our minds to the invisibility and subtlety of His creation - the winds and the magnitude of the physical that our mind can perceive in the earth and the rocks.  Through this we are not only invited to recognize Allah through His creation and to ponder on the wisdom of His creation but also we are invited to research further into the Holy Quran into these elements of creation.

In order to juice this paragraph for greater meaning and understanding, we can look further into the Quran for what Allah says about the thinking aspect of man, the earth, the rocks (and mountains) and time.  We can also go and look further into how Allah talks about His creative aspect, the reasons for it, how it came into being and the creation itself.

Further, would be to look at the traditions of our Holy Prophet and other Imams (especially Imam Jafar as Sadiq (as) in his book Tawhid Al Mufadhal) and see more explanations on the intellect, the earth, the rocks and the wind. 

In this way our intellect can begin to expand and allow for new questions and new dimensions of our mind to open up.

The beauty of Imam Ali's guidance is that whereas often in schools we are taught what to think as we memorize information and present them back to examiners, Imam Ali takes us back to the beginning of creation (the earth, the wind and the rocks and gives us a spring board from where to begin research or questioning.  

Often, in life when we have questions we find a book that has been written by a scientist or someone who is experienced on a subject but when we question ourselves honestly about what Allah has said about this same issue we can not answer.

In essence we are approaching knowledge backwards where as we should be going back to the original sources (the Quran and the traditions) and then referring to science for it to prove or disprove science.  In addition, if we understand what Allah has said about a topic we may also understand what our behavior should be towards this part of Allah's creation, each other or life.

We will go deeper into these matters on here Inshallah.