Regarding the statement in The Hidden Words, that man must renounce his
own self, the meaning is that he must renounce his inordinate desires, his
selfish purposes and the promptings of his human self, and seek out the
holy breathings of the spirit, and follow the yearnings of his higher
self, and immerse himself in the sea of sacrifice, with his heart fixed
upon the beauty of the All-Glorious.
As for the reference in The Hidden Words regarding the Covenant entered
into on Mount Paran, this signifieth that in the sight of God the past,
the present and the future are all one and the same--whereas, relative to
man, the past is gone and forgotten, the present is fleeting, and the
future is within the realm of hope. And it is a basic principle of the Law
of God that in every Prophetic Mission, He entereth into a Covenant with
all believers--a Covenant that endureth until the end of that Mission,
until the promised day when the Personage stipulated at the outset of the
Mission is made manifest. Consider Moses, He Who conversed with God.
Verily, upon Mount Sinai, Moses entered into a Covenant regarding the
Messiah, with all those souls who would live in the day of the Messiah.
And those souls, although they appeared many centuries after Moses, were
nevertheless--so far as the Covenant, which is outside time, was
concerned--present there with Moses. The Jews, however, were heedless of
this and remembered it not, and thus they suffered a great and clear loss.
As to the reference in the Arabic Hidden Words that the human being must
become detached from self, here too the meaning is that he should not seek
out anything whatever for his own self in this swiftly-passing life, but
that he should cut the self away, that is, he should yield up the self and
all its concerns on the field of martyrdom, at the time of the coming of
the Lord.