thought. Thinking that they would affect others as they had affected me, I formed the intention to set them all down in writing towards the end of my life. For sure, important parts of them have been included in the Risale-i Nur but a further power and value will be found in them in their totality.
Since the end of life is not clear, and since the conditions here of my imprisonment have taken on a form worse than death, not waiting for my life to end, on the insistence and importunity of my brothers I have written those sequences of thought without changing them, as seven chapters.
[The remaining six chapters of this Flash have been published in hand-duplicated editions of The Flashes, and not included here.]
T H E T H I R D C H A P T E R
On the Degrees of ‘God is Most Great!’
We shall mention seven of its thirty-three degrees. An important part of those degrees have been expounded in the Second Station of the Twentieth Letter, at the end of the Second Stopping-Place of the Thirty-Second Word, and at the beginning of the Third Stopping-Place. Those who want to understand the reality of those degrees should refer to those two parts of the Risale-i Nur.
THE FIRST DEGREE
Say: “Praise be to God who begets no son and has no partner in [His] dominion: nor [needs] He any to protect Him from humiliation: yes, magnify Him for His greatness and glory!”(17:111)
God is Most Great, may His Glory be exalted! In power and knowledge, greater is He than everything. For He is the Creator, the Maker, the Giver of Form, who through His power fashions man like the universe; He writes the universe with the pen of His determining as He writes man with the same pen. For the macrocosm is like the microcosm: both are fashioned by His power, inscribed by His pen; He creates the macrocosm as a place of prostration, while He gives existence to the microcosm as prostrating; He brings the former into being as a property, while He gives existence to the latter as owned and needy for the property; His art in the former displays it as a book, while His colouring in the latter shines through speech; His power in the former reveals His majesty, while His mercy in the latter arrays His bounty; His majesty in the former testifies that He is One, while His bounty in the latter proclaims that He is Single, Undivided; His stamp