intoxication of love and as demanded by the ecstasy of permanence, meeting, and union, they imagined that in the Unity of Existence was a most pleasurable way of illumination whereby they could be saved from the dreadfulness of separation.
That is to say, the first reason sprang from the fact that the hand of their intellects was unable to reach up to some of the truths of belief, which were extremely broad and elevated; they were unable to comprehend them, and had not developed completely in regard to belief. While the source of the second reason was the extraordinary unfolding of their hearts from the point of view of love, and their wondrous expansion and breadth.
However, the supreme level of divine unity, which the Purified Ones – who were the people of sobriety and great saints of the legacy of prophethood – saw through the explicit expositions of the Qur’an is both extremely elevated, and shows both the maximum level of dominicality and creativity and that all the divine names are real. It preserves the Qur’an’s principles and does not spoil the balance of the decrees of dominicality. For they say that together with the oneness of His essence and His being free of space, with His knowledge Almighty God encompasses and determines directly all things together with all their attributes, and through His will He chooses and specifies them, and through His power He creates them. He creates and directs the whole universe as though it were a single being.
He creates the huge spring with the ease of creating a flower. Nothing obstructs anything else. There is no fragmentation in His regarding things. He is present everywhere at the same instant through the disposal of His knowledge and power. There is no division or distribution in His disposal. This mystery has been expounded and proved decisively in the Sixteenth Word and in the Second Stopping-Place of the Thirty-Second Word. Since, according to the rule, “Comparisons are incontestible,” no attention should be paid to defects in comparisons and allegories, I shall set forth a very faulty comparison so that the difference between the two ways may be understood to a degree.
For example, let us imagine a huge, matchless, and wondrously adorned peacock which can fly from east to west in an instant, and opens and closes its wings, which stretch from north to south, are adorned with hundreds of thousands of fine patterns, and in every single feather of which are included brilliant arts. Now, there are two men observing it; they want to fly with the wings of the intellect and heart up to the elevated qualities of this bird, to its wondrous decorations. One looks at the peacock’s condition and form and the marvellous inscriptions of power on all its feathers; he loves it with extreme passion and ardour; he in part abandons his attentive