conscious creatures in order to please them and make them happy and friends of himself, every sort of delicious bounty from unexpected places in a way it is impossible to attribute to chance.
Also to be observed are a generous treatment, a mutual acquaintance and friendly dialogue with the tongue of disposition, and a compassionate response to supplication which make perceived a profound compassion and elevated mercy. That is to say, the bestowal of bounty and giving of pleasure which are observed behind the making known and loved, which are as clear as the sun, arise from a genuine wish to be compassionate and powerful desire to be merciful. And this powerful desire in One Absolutely Self-Sufficient Who has no need of anything demonstrates certainly an utterly perfect pre-eternal, everlasting, peerless Beauty the nature and reality of which necessitate its wanting to be manifested and to see itself in mirrors. In order to display and see itself in various mirrors, this Beauty has taken on the form of compassion and mercy; then in the mirrors of conscious beings has assumed the state of bestowal and munificence; then has taken the form of making itself known and loved; and then bestowed the light of adorning creatures and making them beautiful.
Second Point: Mankind’s genuine, intense, and powerful love of God, and especially that of its elevated classes and of innumerable persons whose paths are all different, points self-evidently to a peerless beauty; indeed it testifies to it. Yes, such a love looks only to such a beauty and necessitates it; such passion demands such loveliness. Indeed, all the praise offered by beings verbally and through the tongue of disposition looks to that pre-eternal Beauty and goes to it. In the view of lovers like Shams-i Tabrizi, all the attraction, captivation, ecstasy, and drawing truths in the universe are signs of a pre-eternal and post-eternal truth of attraction. While the ecstatic motion and rotations which cause the heavenly bodies and all beings to dance and spin like moths and Mevlevi dervishes are the passionate and dutiful responses to the imperious displays of the sacred beauty of that captivating truth.
Third Point: All the scholars who have researched into reality have agreed that existence is pure good and light, while non-existence is pure evil and darkness. The chiefs of the people of reason and the people of the heart have agreed that in the final analysis all instances of good, beauty, and pleasure arise from existence, and that all evils and bad, calamities, suffering, and even sins are attributable to non-existence.
I f y o u s a y : The source of all beauties is existence, yet also in existence are disbelief and the egotism of the soul?
T h e A n s w e r : Disbelief is non-existence because it is denial of