Pardon me for starting a literary discussion by wading into the familiar waters of religion.
كُنْتُ كَنْزًا مَخْفِيًّا فَأَحْبَبْتُ أَنْ أُعْرَفَ فَخَلَقْتُ الْخَلْقَ لِكَيْ أُعْرَفَ ۔
“I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, so I created creation(خَلق) that I might be known.”
Wherever I have looked, I have seen the phrase fa-aḥbabtu an uʿrafa rendered as “I desired to be known.” But aḥbabtu is not mere desire, it is love. A love so intense, so primordial, that it summoned creation into being. This is not a passive wish, it is an aching, generative longing.What is hidden remains hidden until a gaze emerges. Until there is one who perceives, one who recognizes. And herein lies the tragedy, humans inherited the Creator’s yearning to be known. That longing became woven into their very essence, an indelible presence in the archive of their memory.
تیں ساکوں تکیا ناں
اکھیں وچ رکھیا ناں
دھمی ویہلے نسرݨ دا
بہوں ارمان تھیا
اشو لعل
The divine experience,I loved to be known, became the human experience. Ashu too seeks a gaze. But not just any gaze. He seeks recognition from one he deems worthy, one he himself created, he himself fashioned.I believe the beloved is humanity’s most exquisite creation, hence her/his gaze is the most cherished gaze. Here, blossoming(نِسرݨ) is not merely a moment of bloom. It is the full arc of a lifetime unfolding petal by petal, from the quiet conviction of self-worth. It echoes the primordial utterance“ I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known.” Blossoming, then, is not just emergence. It is remembrance. It is the human reenactment of the divine longing to reach recognition, to reach the moment when the hidden is supposed to be welcomed by the most cherished gaze. Sadly, such a sight is nowhere to be found here.The blossoming has occurred but this entire process is cast into crisis by the absence of a specific gaze.The blossoming has occurred but It is rendered incomplete because it has not been witnessed by the one who matters. This is not a craving for the general gaze of society because it does not matter at all.The peculiarity of the desired gaze is that it affirms as well as confirms the revelation’s worth.Without it, the blossoming becomes a private tragedy. An unnoticed, unseen performance that questions its own purpose.
From our own creation, from our chosen one, we crave recognition. We ache when unseen, lament not being held in the eyes, regret not being known. The primordial divine drama is reenacted again and again. Sometimes this aesthetic architecture dissolves into illusion, sometimes it survives.This is the metaphysics of longing. Our complaint of not being seen, not being held in the eyes, is not vanity or self love.It is ontological. It is the echo of that first cosmic love for recognition.And so, the gaze becomes sacred. It is not merely visual, it is ontological. To be seen is to be affirmed, to be held in the architecture of another’s perception.Though that other is not the other at all.This is why humans do not seek recognition from the world at large, but from the beloved, from the one they have shaped in longing, the one whose gaze they trust to reflect their essence.
At the end, let me share with you the tale of another kind of flower, one you might call Schopenhauer’s bloom. It appears in Irvin D. Yalom’s novel, The Schopenhauer Cure. At the threshold of Chapter 19, Yalom places it like a quiet offering, a quote that opens the door.This flower speaks with the voice of existential autonomy. It rejects the gaze, not with bitterness, but with clarity. It affirms that being is its own joy, that emergence does not require an audience.The flower says:
“You fool! Do you imagine I blossom in order to be seen? I blossom for my own sake because it pleases me, and not for the sake of others. My joy consists in my being and my blossoming.”
But here is the paradox, the flower speaks. It declares its independence. And in doing so, it invites a listener, a gaze. Even the refusal of gaze becomes a gesture toward the other. So at a certain point the divine longing for gaze, Ashu’s regret of not being seen, and the flower’s self-contained joy, are not contradictions, but different modes of emergence. Shopenhauer’s flower may not seek communion, but it creates it by expressing its being. The solitude becomes shared, the moment it is voiced. And in that, even the most autonomous blossoming becomes a quiet invitation. Even in existential framing of essence, there is a subtle recognition.To speak of solitude is to transcend it. The gaze may not be sought, but it is always present as witness, as echo, as possibility.