The dot is the most important of all figures, for every figure is an extension of the dot and the dot is the source of every figure. You cannot let a pen touch paper without making a dot first of all. It is simply the extension of the dot in two directions which is called a horizontal and a perpendicular line. And again, it is the dot which determines sides; if it were not for the dot the sides, as above, or below, or right, or left, could not be determined. The origin of all things and beings may be pictured as a dot. This dot is called in Sanskrit Bindu, the origin and source of the whole being. Since the dot is the source of the perpendicular and the horizontal lines it is the source of all figures and characters of all languages that exist and have existed, as doubtless it is the source of all forms of nature. The principal thing in man's figure is his eye, and in the eye the iris, and in the iris the pupil, which signifies the dot.

At the same time the dot means zero, meaning nothing. It is nothing and it is everything, and the dot expresses the symbol of nothing being everything and everything being nothing. Amir, the Indian poet, expresses this idea in his well-known verse. He says, "If thou wilt come to thy senses by becoming selfless, free from life's intoxication, thou wilt realize that what seems to thee non-existent is all-existing, and what seems to thee existent does not exist." How true it is that in ordinary life we look at reality upside-down; what exists seems to us non-existent, what does not exist in reality, but only seems to exist, that alone we consider existent.

The dot develops into the circle, which shows the picture of this seemingly non-existent developing into all-existing. The iris of the eye is the development of the dot which is called the pupil. A dot added to one makes one ten, and with two dots the one becomes a hundred, and this shows that man is small when he is unconscious of God; when the knowledge of God, Who is the source of the whole being, although non-existent to the ignorant eye, is added to man, he becomes ten, or a hundred, or a thousand. As the dot enriches the figure so God enriches man; as all figures come from the dot so all things and beings come from God; and as destruction must in time break all things into dots so all things must return to God.