No. 115 of 124 · A Name of God · The Long Healing Prayer
The Source of all Being
When everything feels precarious, this name draws us back to the one reality that cannot run dry.
I call on Thee O Constant One, O Life-giving One, O Source of all Being! Thou the Sufficing, Thou the Healing, Thou the Abiding, O Thou Abiding One! Bahá'u'lláh, The Long Healing Prayer · read the full prayer
What “The Source of all Being” means
What follows reflects on this name of God, offered for your own contemplation, and not as an authoritative interpretation of the Bahá'í Writings, which rests with ‘Abdu'l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi alone.
To call God 'The Source of all Being' is to recognize something both philosophically vast and intimately personal: that existence itself does not generate its own fuel. Every particle, every breath, every moment of awareness flows outward from a single origin that is itself without origin. Nothing that exists brought itself into being, and nothing that continues to exist sustains itself by its own power alone. This name quietly dismantles any illusion of self-sufficiency, not to diminish us, but to locate us rightly within reality.
There is also something dynamic in the word 'source.' A source is not a static reservoir sealed off from what it feeds, it is actively giving, continuously pouring outward. The name suggests that God's relationship to creation is not a one-time act now completed and left to run on its own, but an ongoing bestowal. Being flows from God the way light flows from the sun: the moment the relationship is interrupted, the light is simply gone. To meditate on this name is to sense, perhaps for the first time or perhaps again after a long forgetting, that we are held in existence right now, at this very moment, by something inexhaustibly generous.
The name also carries a kind of equality before God: the greatest philosopher, the most accomplished healer, the wisest ruler, all draw their very capacity to think, to act, and to breathe from the same single Source. This is not a leveling that erases difference, but one that orients every difference toward its proper ground. Whatever gifts or knowledge any of us possess, they are, at their root, borrowed light from the one Light that owns itself.
Calling on The Source of all Being for healing
When illness arrives, whether in the body, the mind, or the deeper places of the spirit, it can shake our sense that life has any stable ground beneath it. Invoking God as The Source of all Being in that moment is not a formula for making symptoms disappear; it is an act of reorientation. It is turning to face the direction from which existence itself keeps flowing toward you, even now, even in the middle of pain. Healing, when it comes, arrives as a gift from that same Source; and if recovery is slow or the path is harder than we hoped, we are still not cut off from the One who is keeping us in existence through every moment of the struggle.
Practically speaking, this name can accompany, not replace, the care of skilled physicians and therapists. Seeking competent medical help is itself an act of honoring the world God has made, a world in which healing often works through human hands and knowledge. But the prayer holds something medicine alone cannot offer: the reminder that the doctor's skill, the medicine's chemistry, and the body's own will to recover all ultimately draw from a Source that no illness has ever diminished. Sitting with this name in prayer can steady the spirit, and a steadied spirit is not a small thing.
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Living the Word
Applying The Source of all Being in your life
A name of God is a virtue to grow into. Where is The Source of all Being being asked of you right now, and how will you practice it? Keep a short note each time you return, and watch your own path with this name take shape over time. It stays on this device.
In the Bahá'í Writings
“God Is the Great Compassionate Physician Who Alone Gives True Healing October 19th All true healing comes from God! There are two causes for sickness, one is material, the other spiritual. If the sickness is of the body, a material remedy is needed, if of the soul, a spiritual remedy. If the heavenly benediction be upon us while we are being healed then only can we be made whole, for medicine is but the outward and visible means through which we obtain the heavenly healing. Unless the spirit be healed, the cure of the body is worth nothing. All is in the hands of God, and without Him there can be no health in us! There have been many men who have died at last of the very disease of which they have made a special study. Aristotle, for instance, who made a special study of the digestion, died of a gastric malady. Avicenna was a specialist of the heart, but he died of heart disease. God is the great compassionate Physician who alone has the power to give true healing. All creatures are dependent upon God, however great may seem their knowledge, power and independence.”
Read in full at bahai.org →“5 For example, the mind and the spirit of man are aware of all his states and conditions, of all the parts and members of his body, and of all his physical sensations, as well as of his spiritual powers, perceptions, and conditions. This is an existential knowledge through which man realizes his own condition. He both senses and comprehends it, for the spirit encompasses the body and is aware of its sensations and powers. This knowledge is not the result of effort and acquisition: It is an existential matter; it is pure bounty. 6 Since those sanctified realities, the universal Manifestations of God, encompass all created things both in their essence and in their attributes, since They transcend and discover all existing realities, and since They are cognizant of all things, it follows that Their knowledge is divine and not acquired—that is, it is a heavenly grace and a divine discovery.”
Read in full at bahai.org →“‘Say, all is from God’ is a sound and sufficient argument, and ‘if God toucheth thee with a hurt there is no dispeller thereof save Him’ is a healing medicine.””
Read in full at bahai.org →Questions about The Source of all Being
- What does it mean that God is 'The Source of all Being' rather than just the creator?
- The word 'creator' can imply a craftsman who builds something and then steps back, leaving it to function on its own. 'Source,' by contrast, suggests an ongoing, active relationship, one in which existence continues to flow from God moment by moment rather than being handed over as a finished product. This framing invites a sense of continuous dependence and continuous gift, rather than a single past event.
- Can meditating on this name actually help with physical illness?
- Reflection and prayer can bring genuine comfort, steadiness, and a sense of being held, and these are not trivial contributions to a person's wellbeing. That said, this website holds healing outcomes in trust with God's wisdom and does not promise any specific result from prayer. Anyone dealing with a medical condition should seek the guidance of qualified healthcare professionals, treating both body and spirit as deserving of proper care.
- Why is this name placed alongside 'The Constant One' and 'The Life-giving One' in the same invocation?
- The names cluster together like facets of a single diamond. Constancy tells us the Source never wavers; Life-giving tells us the Source is actively generative rather than inert; Source of all Being tells us that this generativity reaches all the way down to existence itself, not merely to its qualities. Together, they build a portrait of a God who is not distant or intermittent but perpetually, fundamentally present to everything that is.
- Is there an authoritative Bahá'í interpretation of this specific name?
- Authoritative interpretation in the Bahá'í Faith rests with 'Abdu'l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi, and this page does not claim their role. The reflections offered here are devotional companions meant to open the name to personal contemplation, not to settle its meaning definitively. Readers are warmly encouraged to explore the Writings themselves for deeper understanding.
Listen to, recite, and reflect on the whole prayer, its more than one hundred names of God.
Hear the Long Healing Prayer