The Futūḥāt Project: Quotations
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Quotations 2022-25
Quotations Archive
On this page, which is being updated on a regular basis, you will find a continually growing selection of quotations from Eric Winkel’s translation work on the Futūḥāt al-Makkīyah.
So praise be to God, who guided us to this;
we would not have been guided unless God guided us.
Futūḥāt, Book 1
On this page, which is being updated on a regular basis, you will find a continually growing selection of quotations from the Futūḥāt al-Makkīyah, posted hot off the press from Eric Winkel’s current translation work.
Quotations: 2025, April
25 April 2025
The human being is a microcosmos and the universe is a macro human being.
Book 13, Chapter 78
23 April 2025
God is the end of every path, as to Him returns the matter, entirely (Hūd 11:123).
Book 13, Chapter 76
21 April 2025
Struggle, for the soul, is bearing the burden of bodily pains affecting the constitution with feebleness and weakness – just as spiritual exercises rectify the psychological virtues by bringing the soul to bear suffering insult with dignity – and what is external to one’s body, such as what causes no movement in one bodily.
Book 13, Chapter 76
19 April 2025
With regard to the True there is no past or future.
Book 13, Chapter 76
18 April 2025
The root is that there is no return and that the matter goes on and on to infinity, not ending and not being encompassed. As there is no end to the Necessary Being, there is no end to the enabled beings. He is the Creator always, perpetually, and it is invalid that this principle should stop.
Book 13, Chapter 75
15 April 2025
God loves the oft-returners (al-baqarah 2:222) – oft-returning to Him in every moment, from opposition and from conformity – so He accepts the beloved in every moment.
Book 13, Chapter 75
14 April 2025
The call of the True is heard only by the True.
Book 13, Chapter 75
12 April 2025
To where shall I turn? If He calls, then He is the called – since no one is called to except one who can hear. And He is your hearing, so you do not hear except by Him; you do not find Him missing during His call to you. This is a definition of authentic knowledge.
Book 13, Chapter 75
10 April 2025
Cognitive sensing is a knowledge that is synoptic, certain, aware that there is thereafter something to be cognitively sensed – but one does not know what that to-be-sensed thing is. Knowing God is a sensing, but sensing is not knowing what exactly it is that is being sensed.
Book 13, Chapter 75
7 April 2025
The names of the Divine – everything – they are those who
are never described by any fading of the brilliant radiance of being.
Book 13, Chapter 75
4 April 2025
With the stations – there is no benefit from them unless there is an effect traced on the individual, because they are sought out for that reason, not for themselves.
Book 13, Chapter 74
3 April 2025
How many there are who are experts in the essential definition of a station but have not a whiff of it!
Book 13, Chapter 74
2 April 2025
Learn that the station of tawbah* is one of the stations that will accompany you until the moment of death, as long as you are addressed with things you must do. I mean here the tawbah of Law. As for the tawbah for the people who verify in the true dimension for themselves – it is never lifted off, neither in this world nor in the next. Tawbah has a beginning but it has no end.
* tawbah: turning. Then He turned towards them, that they might also turn (al-tawbah 9:118).
Book 13, Chapter 74
Quotations: 2025, March
27 March 2025
God does not reiterate anything in being.
Book 13, Chapter 74
26 March 2025
Every chance event will vanish, and every essential one will remain, continuing.
Book 13, Chapter 74
25 March 2025
He is the sought-for goal of the return.
Book 13, Chapter 74
24 March 2025
The desire of the True for them all is their felicity in the final destination, even if He grants them (in the meantime) whatever He grants that contradicts felicity.
Book 13, Chapter 74
21 March 2025
Abbreviating is better than putting in more, as the subject of speaking and explaining truths of the matters will never end; no, the knowledge of God is too vast, and His education of us will never halt before any boundary.
Book 13, Chapter 73
19 March 2025
If not for God saying to this deed, ‘Be in this place,’ it would not be.
Book 13, Chapter 73
18 March 2025
In His Hand is the ownership of everything, even though He addresses His creatures with doing things – while He is the one who does by them, not they (by themselves).
Book 13, Chapter 73
12 March 2025
There is no helper but God.
Book 13, Chapter 73
11 March 2025
God looks only at the heart of the creature.
Book 13, Chapter 73
10 March 2025
If you ask, ‘What is the traveler?’ – We answer, They are the ones who walk over the stations with their state (ḥāl), not with their knowledge – and that is the action; thus, the knowledge they have is ‘a state of the station itself’.
Book 13, Chapter 73
6 March 2025
If you ask, ‘What is the moment?’ – We answer, What you are moved by without looking back to the past or into the future. In this way is the property of the people of the path.
Book 13, Chapter 73
5 March 2025
If you ask, ‘What is the Presence?’ – We answer, A Presence of the heart by the True upon your being made unseen, so you are described with annihilation.
If you ask, ‘What is annihilation?’ – We answer, An annihilation of the creature’s sight seeing himself doing something that God has made stand up for him
Book 13, Chapter 73
4 March 2025
If you ask, ‘What is the True?’ – We answer, Negating the effects of your qualities away from you by His qualities, because He is the One who does through you and in you and based on you – not you. There is no beast except He is the one who takes her by her forelock (Hūd 11:56).
Book 13, Chapter 73
3 March 2025
If you ask, ‘What is the spirit?’ – We answer, The one who casts into the heart knowledge of the unseen in a special way based on which the soul learns.
Book 13, Chapter 73
1 March 2025
Engage yourself with Me; do not mix in with other than Me,
as the pursuit of other than Me is other than My pursuit and radiant attention.
Book 13, Chapter 73
Quotations: 2025, February
25 February 2025
If you ask, ‘What is the lasan?’ – We answer, What occasions Divine clarity to the ears of the ʿárifīn, and it is a word of the Presence.
If you ask, ‘What is the word of the Presence?’ – We answer, Be! And Be! is said only to the one that is seen, so that the One who is saying Be! is known by seeing.
Book 13, Chapter 73
21 February 2025
If you ask, ‘What is the sawāʾ?’ – We answer, The invisible inside of the True in creation, and the invisible inside of creation in the True. This happens only for the ones who recognize that they are visible sites for the emergence of the True, and they are, upon that, an inside of the True.
Book 13, Chapter 73
19 February 2025
If you ask, ‘What is taṣawwuf’ – We answer, Halting thinking-thinking, and learning (wuqūf) with good manners given in the Law both outwardly and inwardly. And they are the generous virtues. It is that you interact with everything according to what is fitting – that which will be praised – on your part. You will not be able to do this until you become someone awake.
Book 13, Chapter 73
12 February 2025
Being is His.
Book 13, Chapter 73
11 February 2025
There is no space or time in the Divine Presence.
Book 13, Chapter 73
7 February 2025
The enabled being will never cease being a visibly emerging site for the True.
Book 13, Chapter 73
4 February 2025
As long as knowledge is not tasted, the thinking of the listener will not be free from denial, refusing to accept things because of his intellect.
Book 13, Chapter 73
3 February 2025
We request and we beseech God that He not veil us, during our taking on of the Divine names, from our slave-basis.
Book 13, Chapter 73
1 February 2025
The complete human being looks by means of the Eye of God.
Book 13, Chapter 73
Quotations: 2025, January
30 January 2025
The human beings are this way: even if their mass is small compared with the mass of the universe, they combine the whole of the truths of the great (macro-cosmic) universe. This is why the intelligent people say, ‘The universe is the great human being.’
Book 13, Chapter 73
27 January 2025
AdamEve came out flush against an image of the name Allāh, as this name includes the entirety of the Divine names.
Book 13, Chapter 73
24 January 2025
The human being, who is Adam, is an allegoric expression for the whole of the universe; indeed, he is the small human, and he is the condensed summary of the great cosmos.
Book 13, Chapter 73
21 January 2025
Each name in the universe is His name, not the name of another.
Book 13, Chapter 73
20 January 2025
It should not be said about me that I in fact know everything I am speaking about; this is not necessary in order for me to speak about something. In fact, we have transmitted – from the event and from kashf* disclosed – the whole of what I am writing down, and so it is not necessary that I should be someone who actually knows it; no. I have said this lest it be imagined that I have spoken only of what I have knowledge of. But what is demanded of me by the True is the pure devotion that is unsullied by lordliness either in the sensory dimension or in the meaning dimension (in transmission).
* kashf: unveiling
Book 13, Chapter 73
10 January 2025
As for the family of God – with them there is the Divine courtesy, something that prevents them from covering up what God has disclosed, or their disclosing what God has covered up.
Book 13, Chapter 73
9 January 2025
It is inappropriate for us to elucidate for the general population what the True has obscured from His creation and made singled out for His special ones, because this is the height of bad manners.
Book 13, Chapter 73
8 January 2025
He exalted said, He is the One who blesses (yuṣallī) you (al-aḥzāb 33:43) – that is, He postpones (and makes ‘follow after’) His dhikr until after your dhikr,* so He does not remember you until you remember Him, and you do not remember Him until He makes you successful and inspires you to His dhikr. Thus, He reminds you by His dhikr of you; then you remember Him by Him or by you – so He reminds you by you and by Him (with ‘and’, not ‘or’). You see, He has the two remembrances simultaneously. It may be, for some of the ones who know, two remembrances simultaneously; and it may be a single one and not the other, for some other people.
*dhikr: The muṣallī is the one praying, the one following after, and the one blessing.
Book 13, Chapter 73
7 January 2025
There is no good path in declaring an expert wrong in some interpretation (of the Qurʿān) that the phrasing supports, because it will be the one declaring him wrong who will be shown to have the utmost shortfall in knowledge. But it is unnecessary to argue for it or to put this interpretation into practice; it is only for the case of that interpreter alone and whoever follows him.
Book 13, Chapter 73
6 January 2025
Those who learn the timing of their breaths know the facing of God to them during every day, because that breath is from the Breath of the Supremely Compassionate (the nafas al-Raḥmān).
Book 13, Chapter 73
3 January 2025
The special ones are present with God during 24,000 iterations each day.
Book 13, Chapter 73
1 January 2025
The core revelation that their selves require is that they celebrate God with His praise.
Book 13, Chapter 73
Quotations: 2024, December
31 December 2024
When He looks at their secret hearts, He gives them some knowledge of Him – as much as He likes, no more; and this is where He discloses to them for their sakes that they are by Him, not by them, so they should see Him in them and not see themselves.
Book 13, Chapter 73
20 December 2024
One of the masters said, concerning what was related by Qushayrī in his Risālat, ‘If a person faces toward God the length of his life, then is turned away from Him for a single blink of an eye, what he misses during that glance is greater than what he was given all his life.’
Book 13, Chapter 73
18 December 2024
To what does He look in them?
The answer: To their secret hearts, not to their outward aspects.
Book 13, Chapter 73
17 December 2024
What is its development on them in the (Divine) grip?
The answer: Churning, and that is what is happening to them. They are raised and lowered, expanded and contracted, disclosed and covered up, hidden and open; and they fall into agitation. They are familiar; they are alienated. The general effect on them is alteration in states, because it is an essential development – because if there were no alterations, the fact of His being God (having Divine names) would be idled, deferred, while the fact of His being God is an essential quality He has. Thus, alteration in the development of the enabled beings is necessary, never disengaged – just as they are in the grip, ever.
Book 13, Chapter 73
13 December 2024
The general population are in the station of similarity (of God to creation), and these others (the people of kashf, unveiling) are in a station of similarity and transcendence. The intellectuals are in a station of transcendence only. For the people who are His special ones, God combines these two extremes.
Book 13, Chapter 73
12 December 2024
There is nothing in the world except its root is based on a Divine truth.
Book 13, Chapter 73
10 December 2024
Every organic body is an earth belonging to your spirit, and there is nothing after all but body and spirit.
Book 13, Chapter 73
5 December 2024
He has told us that all are in His grip.
Book 13, Chapter 73
4 December 2024
Nothing is more knowing than the intellect m, and nothing is more ignorant than the intellect. The intellect is something that needs to seek beneficial learning, always; thus, he is the knower whose knowledge is not known, and he is the ignorant whose ignorance never ends.
Book 13, Chapter 73
3 December 2024
There is no lover and no beloved except God. There is in being only the Divine presence f, and She is His dhát,* and His adjectives, and His verbs.
* dhát: essence, core; essential identity
Book 13, Chapter 73
2 December 2024
There is no site of being except God.
Book 13, Chapter 73
Quotations: 2024, November
28 November 2024
There is nothing in wujūd (being) except God.
Book 13, Chapter 73
27 November 2024
Love has many principles – different ones, contradictory ones – so no one accepts love except someone who has it in his power to alter and change with the heart in love; and this belongs only to the heart.
Book 12, Chapter 73
25 November 2024
The lover changes and variegates in connecting his love to the variegations of the beloved in his (the beloved’s) behaviors, just as the glass cup that is bright and clear changes according to the changes of the fluid settling in the cup. Thus, the color of the lover is the color of his beloved; and this belongs to none but the heart – because the intellect is part of the world of confining and defining, and this is why the intellect (ʿaql) is derived from the hobbles of the camel (ʿiqāl). And the senses – it is self-evidently known that they are part of the world of confining. The heart is different.
Book 12, Chapter 73
23 November 2024
You say, ‘So-and-so loves so-and-so,’ and ‘So-and-so loves something’ – but it is nothing but the True in some entity loving the visible manifestation of the True in another entity, whatever it may be. The lover of God does not disapprove of the lover loving whomever he loves, because the lover of God sees no lover but God in whatever site of manifestation. Whoever does not have this Divine love – he disapproves of the one someone loves.
Book 12, Chapter 73
22 November 2024
The sign of the Divine lover is a love of all the beings in existence, in every presence – meaning-based, sensory-based, image-based, or imagined-based.
Book 12, Chapter 73
20 November 2024
Only God loves God.
Book 12, Chapter 73
19 November 2024
If not for the passionate love of the soul f for the body m, she would not be pained upon her separation at death from him, despite the fact that the body is the opposite of the soul.
Book 12, Chapter 73
16 November 2024
The coming into being of the world is from love (i.e. the Divine name the Desirer on that Side desires and loves to be recognized by the creation on this side). What has been recorded in the Sunnah supports this; and it is His word, ‘I am a treasure not recognized, and I love that I should be recognized; thus, I create the creation so that I can introduce Myself to them, and they recognize Me.’ Thus, He reports that love is the reason for the coming out of the world, and the Divine names are layered (ṭābiqa) for support, one after another.
Book 12, Chapter 73
15 November 2024
Whoever limits love does not recognize love. And whoever does not taste love as a drinking-in does not recognize love. And whoever says, ‘I have been told about it,’ does not recognize love. Love is a drink with no quenching. Some of the lovers have said, ‘I have drunk the drink, and I have never been thirsty after that again’; but Abū Yazīd said, ‘The real Man is the one who drinks the oceans and his tongue hangs out down his chest from thirst.’
Book 12, Chapter 73
12 November 2024
He said,‘God has seventy veils – or seventy thousand veils – of light and darkness; if they were uncovered, the brilliances of His Face would incinerate all. No eye of His creation perceives Him.’
Book 12, Chapter 73
11 November 2024
Our teacher used to say, ‘Allāh Allāh’; so I asked him, ‘Why do you not say, “lā ilāha illāʾllāh”?’ He replied, ‘I am afraid that I might die in the desolation of negating, as every letter is a breath.’
Book 12, Chapter 73
5 November 2024
Lowly humility […] is the riverbed path of life and knowledge.
Book 12, Chapter 73
4 November 2024
The organic configuration is just as God reported about it: fully formed and not fully formed (al-ḥajj 22:5) – that is, a fullness of creation and a non-fullness of creation; and the non-full creation is still included under His word, (Our Lord, the One who) gave everything its character-creation (ṭā-hā 20:50). Therefore, He gave the deficient its creation so that it would be deficient. Thus, if more were given to the deficient – whose deficiency is exactly itself – if this more were given, that would be a deficiency in the deficient, and the deficient would not have been given its character-creation. The full perfection of the deficient is that it be deficient.
Book 12, Chapter 73
1 November 2024
The moments in which there is a Presence with their Creator are part of a holy realm.
Book 12, Chapter 73
Quotations: 2024, October
31 October 2024
Whoever is given the Qurʾān has been given the perfectly complete knowledge.
Book 12, Chapter 73
30 October 2024
The greatest of blessings favored – no, it is an absolute blessing – is that the created beings be nourished with willing obedience to God, because for this they were created.
Book 12, Chapter 73
29 October 2024
An address of the True through the mediation of the spirit confers awe.
Book 12, Chapter 73
28 October 2024
Knowledge is something the knower is described by, not the thing known.
Book 12, Chapter 73
23 October 2024
He perceives them and they do not perceive Him.
Book 12, Chapter 73
22 October 2024
I am the cloak; I am the secret that appears
in me, the darkness of existence; lo, I become light!
Book 12, Chapter 73
18 October 2024
Being something destroyed and consumed in the True brings about a universal, utter destruction inasmuch as there does not emerge for it any ʿayn,* despite the emergence of the Divine effects on the entity. You do not find in yourself any truth by which any of these effects on you could be attributed to you, so you become true – all of you. It is his ﷺ prayer, ‘Make me light’ – that is, ‘Everything will appear through me, and I will not appear in anything.’
* ʿayn: eye, point, dot, source, well, entity
Book 12, Chapter 73
17 October 2024
No one other than God knows the form of one’s creative process, nor one’s reception of it, nor how one becomes a site for the visible emergence of the True, nor how one is described by being.
Book 12, Chapter 73
14 October 2024
As the True blessed His slaves when He invited them to recognize Him – by His descending to their level in making allegories for them – they obtain by that something to the extent that He desires they know of Him.
Book 12, Chapter 73
12 October 2024
Your search for your root is your search for the hidden unseen itself. Whoever recognizes one’s root recognizes one’s ʿayn – that is, one’s self – and ‘who recognizes one’s self recognizes one’s Cherisher.’
Book 12, Chapter 73
11 October 2024
Being elevated, for all other than God, is a departure from one’s root.
Book 12, Chapter 73
10 October 2024
There is actually no state more panoramic than the state of prostration, because this state connects to knowledge of the roots.
Book 12, Chapter 73
8 October 2024
When the True gives a tajallì* to the heart as a heart-turning, you see that you are in the grip of His heart-turning – and that is the Divine names, which the created being is never disengaged from. They are the rulers in the creations; so those who witness them (the names) – they are people whose hearts prostrate. And those who do not witness them – their hearts do not prostrate. He is a presumptuous claimant who says, ‘I’. Against someone whose quality is thus, the accounting will be faced; and there will be reckoning for what he was responsible for, on the Day of Judgment, and punishment if he is to be punished. The ones whose hearts have bowed down – they have no pretentious claims, so there is no accounting and no being held responsible and no punishment.
* tajallì: brilliant radiance of Being; Divine self-disclosure
Book 12, Chapter 73
7 October 2024
The cosmos has no continuity except by God.
Book 12, Chapter 73
5 October 2024
The angels prostrate to the step-level of knowledge – not to Adam’s skeletal configuration, but to his knowledge of the Divine names.
Book 12, Chapter 73
Quotations: 2024, September
19 September 2024
The body bows down onto the earth that is his root, and the spirit bows down onto the All-Soul whence he originated, and your secret heart bows down to his Lord, by whom the step-level was bestowed. The roots – all of them – are unseen. Do you see them (body, spirit, secret heart) having appeared for the tree, but their roots are unseen? Indeed, the process of creation is unseen – not seen by any one. The fetus undergoes creation in the interior of his mother, so he is unseen. Another animal is formed in the egg; and when he is complete, he breaks out. The True is the root being of the things, and He is unseen by them.
Book 12, Chapter 73
17 September 2024
The end result of guidance is felicity in the Garden.
Book 12, Chapter 73
16 September 2024
When you seek something from someone, certainly you depend on that person for your petition itself.
Book 12, Chapter 73
13 September 2024
The truth will not perish.
Book 12, Chapter 73
12 September 2024
The people are veiled from the True by the True, in order to clarify the True!
Book 12, Chapter 73
10 September 2024
All observers of God are under the ruling dominion of one of the names of God, and that name is what came in tajallì* to them. He is the one who provided them that belief system, by means of His tajallì to them, in a way they are unaware of. The Divine names – all of them – are co-relations to the True, authentic; so the vision of Him in each belief system, despite the differences, is authentic. There is nothing in the belief systems that is a mistake at all. This person (who understands this) is given the fullest kashf.*
* tajallì: brilliant radiance of Being; Divine self-disclosure
* kashf: unveiling
Book 12, Chapter 73
6 September 2024
Our discussion as people on the path is based only on tasting.
Book 12, Chapter 73
5 September 2024
The command to Be! is executed by His order in a single stroke.
Book 12, Chapter 73
2 September 2024
Everything making up the human organic whole, such as hair and skin and flesh and nerve and blood and spirit and soul and nail and tooth, is something that knows God by fiṭrah (instinct) – that is, by the revelation that was given in tajallì.* Thus, you are with regard to your organic whole – and whatever properties belong to your being an organic whole – someone ignorant of God; you speculate and reflect and refer to yourself, while they know that they have a Designer who designed them and a Creator who created them. If God allowed you to hear the articulation of your skin or hand or tongue or foot, you would hear it articulating its knowledge of its Lord, celebrating His majesty and declaring Him holy.
* tajallì: brilliant radiance of Being; Divine self-disclosure
Book 12, Chapter 73
Quotations: 2024, August
30 August 2024
Everything other than the human organic whole is born instinctively impelled toward knowledge of God; it is only the human organic whole and the jinn who are not.
Book 12, Chapter 73
29 August 2024
So my friend, if you think that God has given a revelation to you, just look into yourself for any hesitation or resistance; if you find something in that revelation that makes you deliberate or consider details or contemplate, then you did not receive a revelation. But if you are ruled over – if you are blinded and muted, and something intervenes between you and your contemplation and your deliberation, and its power penetrates into you – then that is revelation, and you are, with that, one of the people of revelation. And you know then that your being lifted and elevated is so that you may join up with those (non-humans) who are ‘below’ you – such as the animals (e.g. bees), and plants (e.g. date-palm trees), and minerals (e.g. mountains).
Book 12, Chapter 73
24 August 2024
Revelation has a more powerful dominion over the soul of the one revealed to than one’s very own nature, which is one’s very being.
Book 12, Chapter 73
20 August 2024
The revelation is the rapid impress of a word of the True on the listener’s self; and only the ʿārifūn* recognize this, the ones who recognize the Divine radiant brilliances, because the radiant brilliances are precisely the Divine revelation to the people, who are nevertheless unaware.
* ʿārifūn: those who recognize the Divine everywhere
Book 12, Chapter 73
19 August 2024
Every present moment in existence is exactly the Divine ‘radiant brilliance’.
Book 12, Chapter 73
15 August 2024
In us He deposited His graces, as in a treasure chest.
Book 12, Chapter 73
13 August 2024
The people of the visibly emergent sites are people of blessing and torment, while people of the Oneness of the dhát* have no blessing and no torment. Abū Yazīd al-Basṭāmī said, ‘I laughed a period, and I cried a period; I am today neither laughing nor crying.’ He was asked, ‘How are you this morning?’ He said, ‘I have no morning and I have no evening (to have a state – health or sickness – in). The evening and the morning belong to people defined by an adjective (e.g. health or sickness), but I have no adjective.’
* dhát: essence, core; essential identity
Book 12, Chapter 73
12 August 2024
In every part of the Earth there is an upper spirit-being overlooking that part; and these spirit-beings have a Divine truth that helps them, and this truth is the one called a ‘Divine virtue’.
Book 12, Chapter 73
8 August 2024
It is not possible for light to be covered up, because by its essence light rips open the curtains and rends the coverings. So what is this cover that veils the light? Is it not you who are that veil, just as the ʿārif* (al-Ḥallāj) said?
You are a veil of the heart, covering the secret of His unseen;
and if not for you, the seal of hu would not stamp flush against the heart.
* ʿárif: the one who recognizes the Divine everywhere
Book 12, Chapter 73
7 August 2024
Generosity is one of the virtues of God.
Book 12, Chapter 73
Quotations: 2024, July
25 July 2024
And to Him returns the affair, so worship Him (hu) (Hud 11:123). Do not worship yourself!
Book 12, Chapter 73
24 July 2024
The bowing down to God for Adam is a bowing down of thankfulness.
Book 12, Chapter 73
23 July 2024
The human beings are the fullest site of emergence of the Divine.
Book 12, Chapter 73
22 July 2024
The Now […] is being itself. And the being is in fact the Being of God.
Book 12, Chapter 73
19 July 2024
The being related to each created being is a Being of the True, as there is no being that belongs to the enabled beings; the aʿyān* of the enabled beings are receptors for the emergence of this Being.
* ʿayn: eye, point, dot, source, well, entity
Book 12, Chapter 73
18 July 2024
The perfect completion of the universe by the human being is like the completion of the body by the spirit. The human being is the site of in-breath into the cosmic body, and he is the intended goal of the universe.
Book 12, Chapter 73
17 July 2024
Learn that the root of everything that multiplies is one, so the bodies trace back to one body, and the souls trace back to one soul, and the intellects trace back to one intellect. But the multiplicity does not come from the one stripped of its oneness; no, it is by co-relations.
Book 12, Chapter 73
15 July 2024
As the intellects are incapable of perceiving the First Intellect, from whom they emerged, their incapacity to perceive the Creator of the First Intellect – and it is God – is even more. He is first – ‘The first that God created was the Intellect’ – and he is the one from whom all these intellects emerged, through the mediation of these organic souls.
Book 12, Chapter 73
13 July 2024
One imagines that one is a stranger extraneous to the True.
Book 12, Chapter 73
12 July 2024
When He is their sight, the True sees and they regard the things by the sight of the True one; at that moment knowledge of what they were ignorant of is disclosed in kashf (unveiling) for them, as nothing is hidden from the sight of the True.
Book 12, Chapter 73
4 July 2024
The human being is innately created to love being commended.
Book 12, Chapter 73
3 July 2024
The True does not have any personal qualities except One (wāḥdat), since His Oneness is precisely His dhát.*
* dhát: essence, core; essential identity
Book 12, Chapter 73
2 July 2024
Every individual in the universe is ignorant of himself, and knowledgeable. With regard to his ignorance, he is poor and dependent, and he begs and abases himself and beseeches; and in his knowledge of his ignorance, there occurs to him this description (that he is poor and dependent).
Book 12, Chapter 73
1 July 2024
The True is Being.
Book 12, Chapter 73
Quotations: 2024, June
27 June 2024
The True is not known by another; no, He is known by Himself.
Book 12, Chapter 73
26 June 2024
He is the Wise Judge, and no one judges against Him.
Book 12, Chapter 73
25 June 2024
Indeed, Our word to a thing, when We desire it – that is, during the moment of its empty void – We but say to it Be! – which is an existential word for coming into being – and it is (al-naḥl 16:40).
Book 12, Chapter 73
24 June 2024
You all are in darkness in you, and you all are in being in hu.
Book 12, Chapter 73
21 June 2024
The enabled beings are endless emptiness; they are in a darkness based on their dhát* and their ʿayn,* not knowing anything as long as they are not (i.e. until they are) a site of visible emergence of His Being. And His Being is what benefits the enabled being. It is His word, having light from his Lord (al-zumar 39:22).
* dhát: essence, core; essential identity
* ʿayn: eye, point, dot, source, well, entity
Book 12, Chapter 73
20 June 2024
God brought you out from the wombs of your mothers when you knew nothing, and He made for you hearing and sight and hearts (al-naḥl 16:78). These are lights in you by which you see the things. You do not perceive except by means of what was placed in you, and nothing was placed in you except you. To Him belongs the being that is you; and you, based on that being, perceive – you who are devoid of being.
Book 12, Chapter 73
19 June 2024
None of the enabled beings bound to its being present yesterday has any power in itself to become present today, nor tomorrow – because part of its full creation is an appointment (specification) of its time period. This is ‘decreed measure’, and these measures are ‘destinies’ – that is, these are the appointed moments when they come into being.
Book 12, Chapter 73
13 June 2024
If human beings are, (while) under the rule of faith, fighting the entities (e.g. secondary causes), then they will not achieve tranquility.
Book 12, Chapter 73
10 June 2024
When human beings have perfected their basic conditions of faith and its principles, they receive from the True a tajallì* to their hearts, these who are faithful and who are of this quality – a tajallì called ‘taste’. And it is the beginning of tranquility placed in their hearts, so that this tranquility becomes for them a gate or a ladder to the achievement of an unseen matter occurring to them by faith; and with them there is a presence of tranquility as provided by the first occasion, given that tranquility becomes habitual.
* tajallì: brilliant radiance of Being; Divine self-disclosure
Book 12, Chapter 73
7 June 2024
Spirit is a light from the Cherishing Presence f, not from anywhere but Her. The spirit’s basis is from the spirit that is from a command of my Cherisher – that is, from the spirit that is not found coming from creation. You see, the world of command (kun, Be!) is every site of being not coming about from an existential reason preceding it.
Book 12, Chapter 73
5 June 2024
We do not take Him as a cause for a thing, because the cause demands its effect, just as the effect demands its cause – and the Independent is not described by demands; therefore, it is incorrect that He be a cause.
Book 12, Chapter 73
4 June 2024
The enabled is a site for His visible emergence, and He is the Visible by it.
Book 12, Chapter 73
3 June 2024
A truth of the Being of the True is that He is a Creator of time. The meaning of this is: God is mawjūd (a site of wujūd*) and there is no thing with Him – that is, there is then no one whose being is necessarily-so-in-itself other than the True.
* wujūd: being, from wajada (‘found’).
Book 12, Chapter 73
Quotations: 2024, May
31 May 2024
The Divine rule is according to what the moment provides.
Book 12, Chapter 73
27 May 2024
The beginning never stops.
Book 12, Chapter 73
22 May 2024
Learn that knowledge of the beginning is an inaccessible knowledge and that it is non-limited and undefined. […] You see, the time period itself is part of the totality of embodied enabled beings. All that is intelligible is an anchoring connection of the enabled being to the Necessary Being Itself.
Book 12, Chapter 73
21 May 2024
The Being is His, and the empty nothingness is yours. He never stops being something with Being, and you never stop being something empty – nothing. And His Being – if it is for Himself, then it is what is unknown of Him. And if it is yours, then it is what you know of Him. Thus, He is the Knower and the Known.
Book 12, Chapter 73
20 May 2024
There is nothing in Being but God, and the entities are non-existent in the ʿayn* in which He emerges manifest.
* ʿayn: eye, point, dot, source, well, entity
Book 12, Chapter 73
17 May 2024
Being belongs to God. And whatever is attributed to Him from whatever attribute it may be – in fact, what is named by it is the named God; so understand. There is then nothing named with Being except God – so He is the one named by every name, and the subject of the description of every descriptor, and the classification of every classifier.
Book 12, Chapter 73
14 May 2024
Everything that happens or occurs to the creature is one of the (Divine) names; in fact, everything occurs to the entities given that they are the sites of visible emergence.
Book 12, Chapter 73
13 May 2024
The entirety of the (Divine) names that are in the cosmos and about which it is imagined that they belong rightfully to the creature – in fact, they rightfully belong to God.
Book 12, Chapter 73
10 May 2024
We do not actually merit anything – not any of His names and not any names that we believe to be our names and adjectives! This is a stepping place of confusion and disappearing footprints, except for people for whom God has opened – through kashf (unveiling) – their insights.
Book 12, Chapter 73
8 May 2024
Learn that the friends are the ones God entrusts with the authority of victory in the station of their struggles against four enemies: the ‘lower’ self (hawan), the self (nafs), the world, Satan.
Book 12, Chapter 73
7 May 2024
Adam was special for knowing the Divine names, whose knowledge was folded over and hidden from the angels, so God was not celebrated by them until they were given the benefit of the names by Adam (teaching them).
Book 12, Chapter 73
1 May 2024
The author of al-Maḥāsin (Abūʾl-ʿAbbās bin al-ʿArīf al-Ṣanhājī) said, ‘There is no relation between His slaves and Himself except grace, and no motive (reason to do anything) except Law commanded, and no time but eternity; the rest is just blindness and confused folly.’
Book 12, Chapter 73
Quotations: 2024, April
30 April 2024
Part of our foundations is that we speak only from tasting, and we are not messengers or prophets making Laws.
Book 12, Chapter 73
29 April 2024
There is no tasting for anyone concerning the share of any messenger from God. You see, the tastings of the messengers are singled out for the messengers, and the tastings of the prophets are singled out for the prophets, and the tastings of the friends are singled out for the friends. Some of the messengers have tastes three-fold, because they are a friend, a prophet, and a messenger.
Book 12, Chapter 73
24 April 2024
Faith does not point to any but God, while knowledge in fact may point to intermediary links and step-levels of wisdom conventionally defined in the world.
Book 12, Chapter 73
23 April 2024
The True is the speaker ‘to Himself by Himself’, and the creature is a site for the seeking of benefit f, because she is being-based matters; and being – all of it – is His ʿayn.*
* ʿayn: eye, point, dot, source, well, entity
Book 12, Chapter 73
22 April 2024
It would be impossible for creatures, if the True were not their hearing, to be able to understand any speech of God.
Book 12, Chapter 73
19 April 2024
The turning axis of the universe is around the Pivot (quṭb).
Book 12, Chapter 73
18 April 2024
Do you see that God makes sleep a sabāta (cf. sabbath) – that is, a rest, because it is between two opposites: death and life? Thus, the sleeper is not alive and not dead.
Book 12, Chapter 73
17 April 2024
The smile is between laughter and crying.
Book 12, Chapter 73
16 April 2024
The human configuration renews with every Divine breath, but you are not aware of it. But it is His word, We shall configure you all again in a way you will not know (al-wāqiʿah 56:61) – meaning, with the breaths – and in each breath of His there is for us a new configuration in a new configuration. And whoever does not have knowledge of this is in confusion about the New Creation. You see, the senses are veiled by the form that is not sensed because of its rapid alteration, despite the sensation of a stable, immutable ʿayn* that is receptive to the alterations with the breaths.
* ʿayn: eye, point, dot, source, well, entity
Book 12, Chapter 73
12 April 2024
He has given everything its created-character.
Book 12, Chapter 73
10 April 2024
If not for Him, we would not be;
and if not for us, He would not be.
If we say that we are hu,
then the True will be us.
He makes us appear and hu is hidden,
and He makes hu appear and we are hidden.
The True is existences,
and we are entities.
We become visible so that hu will be visible –
first secretly and then openly.
Book 12, Chapter 73
4 April 2024
Just as we seek from Him the being of our individual beings, He seeks us for the emergence of visible sites of His emergence.
Book 12, Chapter 73
2 April 2024
The True is not bound, as He is the ʿayn of each binding. The people are between being veiled and not veiled. May God make us among the ones for whom the True is witnessed in the veil of hu itself, and in the lifting of the veil of hu, and in whatever hu has behind the veil of hu.
Book 12, Chapter 73
1 April 2024
First-hand knowledge is tasting; it is an experiential knowing.
Book 12, Chapter 73
Quotations: 2024, March
29 March 2024
Our recognition (maʿrifah) of the Lord is newly found based on the recognition of the self. This is the proof-text: ‘Who recognizes one’s self, recognizes one’s Lord.’
Book 12, Chapter 73
27 March 2024
Spirits are divested of Nature-based mixings (characteristics).
Book 11, Chapter 73
26 March 2024
You are an instrument put to use for the Hand of the True, All-Powerfully able to choose you and purify you and beautify you with His qualities.
Book 11, Chapter 73
22 March 2024
He exalted said, the turners, the worshipers, the praisers, the travelers (al-tawbah 9:112). ‘Travel’ is walking across the Earth for the sake of learning lessons, by observing the traces of civilizations past and which of the communities that went before were destroyed.
Book 11, Chapter 73
21 March 2024
He sees His self f and He loves Her, because ‘He is beauty, and He loves the beautiful.’
Book 11, Chapter 73
20 March 2024
If you see an ʿārif* who presumes to be an ʿārif, and you see him becoming mighty over the offspring of this world when he thinks he sees them having (inappropriate) majesty and force, then learn that he is not an ʿārif, nor someone who has a tasting.
*ʿárif: the one who recognizes the Divine everywhere
Book 11, Chapter 73
19 March 2024
His single Oneness is external to the ruling determination of the intellect and beyond its limit.
Book 11, Chapter 73
14 March 2024
The single oneness belongs to God, and the unification of diverse entities belongs to the creature – not single oneness. This is because creatures cannot understand themselves except by another, not by themselves, so they will never acquire a whiff of single oneness.
Book 11, Chapter 73
13 March 2024
Thinking is part of the natural element rule. This is why the angels do not speculate, while human beings do – because humans are composed of elemental Nature and intellect.
Book 11, Chapter 73
12 March 2024
God is the Guide!
Book 11, Chapter 73
8 March 2024
No one celebrates God but God, and no one praises hu but hu.
Book 11, Chapter 73
7 March 2024
We are stopped from discussing the station of the messenger and the prophet who is someone with the Law, because of a stipulation of the people of the path concerning what they report about stations and states: that the discussion should be from tasting. And we have no such tasting, nor does anyone else, nor anyone who is not a prophet who has a sharīʿah – with regard to the Law-making prophethood – nor anyone with regard to the message. How can we speak about a station we have not come to, or about a state we have not tasted? Not I, nor anyone else who is not a prophet with a sharīʿah from God, or a messenger. Speaking about it is forbidden to us. We will speak only about what we have a taste of.
Book 11, Chapter 73
6 March 2024
The Spirit – the Spirit who helps, the Holy Spirit – in-blows into our souls Divine inspiration and knowledge of His Side, the end result of the kindness that God provides from Himself to whomever He pleases among His creatures.
Book 11, Chapter 73
4 March 2024
Abū Yazīd al-Basṭāmī was asked, ‘Does the ʿārif* sin?’ He said, ‘The affair of God is a predestined measure.’ Thus, disobedience occurs among the ʿārifīn, the people of grace, according to the decree predetermined – so as to play out the decision that had come before.
* ʿárif (pl. ʿārifīn): the one who recognizes the Divine everywhere
Book 11, Chapter 73
Quotations: 2024, February
29 February 2024
The complete inheritor is the one who is given in inheritance knowledge, practice, and state.
Book 11, Chapter 73
28 February 2024
He ﷺ said, ‘The “ones who know” are inheritors of the prophets.’ Our teacher Abū Madyan used to say about this station: ‘One of the signs of the sincerity of the aspiration of the one who aspires (the murīd, the student) is your fleeing from creation; and one of the signs of the sincerity of your fleeing from creation is when your being belongs to the True; and one of the signs of the sincerity of your being belonging to the True is your return to creation.’ This is the condition of inheriting the Prophet ﷺ had.
Book 11, Chapter 73
27 February 2024
God is the one who inspires.
Book 11, Chapter 73
26 February 2024
People who are according to the rule of what is cast to them do not operate except from a Divine command; thus, they are no true friend or companion to anyone, ever. Whoever among the faithful would take a true friend other than God is unaware of what the station of true friendship entails. If they knew what true friendship and companionship were, and they were fully faithful to these rights with their true friend – because the true friend is one’s real determiner – they would have disproved their faith. When they give friends the rights of true friendship, they vacate the rights of God; thus, there is no true friend except God. The station is truly magnificent, and its affair is momentous indeed. God is the giver of success, no Lord but Him.
Book 11, Chapter 73
22 February 2024
The Prophet did not have a ‘true friend’, nor was he was a ‘companion’ (ṣāḥib) to anything but his prophethood. In this way, the faithful have no true friend or companion except their faith – just as the king has no companion except his kingdom.
Book 11, Chapter 73
21 February 2024
How many a friend of God, great in stature, long of life, dies and has not achieved a prostration of the heart – and knowledge that there even is such a thing as a prostration of the heart at all, even though they are verified as having spiritual authority and an anchored stance! Indeed, if the prostration of the heart is achieved, you do not raise your head ever from your prostration.
Book 11, Chapter 73
20 February 2024
Abū Yazīd al-Basṭāmī […] was asked about zuhd (asceticism). He said: ‘It is nothing; it has no value in my eyes. I was an ascetic for only three days. The first day I relinquished this world. The second day I relinquished the next world. The third day I relinquished everything other than God. I was asked by God, “What do you want?” I replied, “I wish to not want! If only I would be the one wanted (murād) – and You would be the One wanting (murīd) me!”’ He took zuhd to be the relinquishing of everything other than God.
Book 11, Chapter 73
19 February 2024
The ascetics […] prefer the True over the creation and over themselves.
Book 11, Chapter 73
16 February 2023
The Ṣūfīs are the ones who collect and gain the generous characteristics. Then also, they – God be pleased with them – know that the matter necessitates that no one be able to please the creatures of God by any one characteristic – and that as much as they please Zayd, they make ʿAmr annoyed. Thus, when they see that achieving a way-station of universal, generous characteristics with everyone is impossible, they consider instead who is the priority that they should practice generous characteristics toward. They will not pay attention to whoever becomes upset by that.
Book 11, Chapter 73
15 February 2024
This world here is an abode of testing trial, and all individuals will gather according to their intention and their experience.
Book 11, Chapter 73
14 February 2024
Ṣūfīs […] are the people of generous characteristics. It is said, ‘Whoever exceeds you in generous characteristics exceeds you in taṣawwuf.’* Their station is the coming together into a single heart. They drop the ‘third yāʾ’,* and they do not say, ‘mine’ or ‘I have’ or ‘my property’ – that is, they do not attach anything to themselves; they have no possession except the good character of God. They are equable with the whole of creation (‘everything other than God’), with their acknowledgment that whatever the creation has belongs to the creation – not seeking from people to have this station.
*taṣawwuf: the Ṣūfī way
*third yāʾ: The third letter yāʾ in kitābī is ‘my’, as in ‘my book’.
Book 11, Chapter 73
13 February 2024
He exalted said, I created the jinn and humans only to worship Me (al-dhāriyāt 51:56) – that is, ‘so that they will be humbled for Me; and they will not be humbled for Me until they recognize Me in the things. Thus, they will be humbled for Me, not for that which I manifest among them, nor that which is manifested in their core beings – given that they are visibly emergent sites for Me. Therefore, their being is I, and they do not witness in their entities anything but their being’ – so understand this. God is the Guide, the illuminator of sights!
Book 11, Chapter 73
12 February 2024
Abū Yazīd said, ‘O Lord, how shall I approach You?’ He said, ‘By means of what is not Mine: humility and dependency.’
Book 11, Chapter 73
9 February 2024
There is no more fine and nigh-invisible flowing of the True to the created beings, and the flowing of some of them to others. It is His word, We shall display Our signs in the horizons, and in your selves (fuṣṣilat 41:53). ‘Signs’ here are the indications that they are a site for the visible emergence of the True.
Book 11, Chapter 73
8 February 2024
The True has reported in the authentic report, ‘God is the hearing of the creature and its seeing and its hand’.
Book 11, Chapter 73
1 February 2024
The people are veiled from seeing the things as being from God.
Book 11, Chapter 73
Quotations: 2024, January
31 January 2024
God is the One to seek help from.
Book 11, Chapter 73
29 January 2024
When God speaks in revelation, it is like an iron chain against rocks that makes the angels swoon as if struck by thunderbolts.
Book 11, Chapter 73
26 January 2024
The intended goal for everything other than God is that it worship God.
Book 11, Chapter 73
24 January 2024
Learn that the Men of God in this path are the ones named by ‘the world of breaths’, and this is a name that is universal over all of them. They are positioned over many degrees and have different states.
Book 11, Chapter 73
23 January 2024
The being of your ʿayn* is the Being of the True.
* ʿayn: eye, point, dot, source, well, entity
Book 11, Chapter 73
19 January 2024
Ignorance is non-being.
Book 11, Chapter 73
18 January 2024
The True clothes the ʿayn* f with a robe of His Being, so her self is invisible in her being, and her being is an ʿayn of the One who gave her being. Thus, only the True emerges visibly – no one else. The ʿayn of the creature m stays in his root, but he is amply provided for as long as he has with himself some knowledge of his dhát* and the One who clothed him with a robe of His Being, and he recognizes his similarity to other creatures and sees the cosmos – piece by piece – with the (seeing) eye (ʿayn) of being of (belonging to) his Lord (who becomes the eye by which he sees).
* ʿayn: eye, point, dot, source, well, entity
* dhát: essence, core; essential identity
Book 11, Chapter 73
17 January 2024
There is no division in your core being.
Book 11, Chapter 73
15 January 2024
The time period in reality – in the true dimension, as we have informed you – is a relation (of one body, e.g. the Sun, to another), not an existing thing.
Book 11, Chapter 73
12 January 2024
Learn that the True exalted beyond, concerning the vision of His creatures of His, has two correlations: a correlation of transcendence and a correlation of making an allegory in the imagination. The transcendence correlation is His tajallì* in there is nothing like Him (al-shūrā 42:11 ). And the other correlation is His tajallì in his ﷺ word, ‘Worship God as if you see Him’; and his word, ‘God is in the qiblah of the one praying’; and His word, Wherever you turn, there indeed is a face of God (al-baqarah 2:115). And ‘there’ is an adjective of place, and ‘face of God’ is His dhát* and His truth.
* tajallì: brilliant radiance of Being; Divine self-disclosure
* dhát: essence, core; essential identity
Book 11, Chapter 73
8 January 2024
The prophethood (nubuwwat f) that was cut off by the being of the Messenger of God ﷺ is in fact the prophethood of making Law, not her station. There is no Law that will abrogate his ﷺ Law, and no other Law will add to its rule.
Book 11, Chapter 73
7 January 2024
God’s angels course to us
so as to inform us about the certain annunciation.
They speak of someone protected from error, greatly knowing,
free from the confusion of guesses.
Book 11, Chapter 73
Quotations: 2023, December
22 December 2023
The universe comes out in the form and image of Divine names so as to be His manifest brilliance; thereafter, seen in being is only hu – exalted beyond – no god but hu.
Book 11, Chapter 72
21 December 2023
The gift of knowledge of Him […] is the most noble of gifts He gives to whoever seeks Him.
Book 11, Chapter 72
19 December 2023
‘Satanic’ is a quality of distance from a kindness of God, not distance from God, because everything is in the grip of God and in the Eye of God.
Book 11, Chapter 72
18 December 2023
There is nothing with being or described with being except the True accompanies it – as He said, He is with you wherever you are (al-ḥadīd 57:4).
Book 11, Chapter 72
15 December 2023
Abū Saʿīd al-Kharrāz was asked, ‘By what do you recognize God?’ He replied, ‘By His combining of two opposites’ – meaning, in His description. Then he recited, hu is the First, the Last, the Outward, the Inward (al-ḥadīd 57:3).
Book 11, Chapter 72
14 December 2023
The Muslim is the one who concedes and consigns to God and sees that the circumstances – all of them – are in the Hand of God. So a Muslim will not oppose anything but what one is told to oppose, so then our opposition will actually be an act of worship (ʿibādah).
Book 11, Chapter 72
8 December 2023
How inaccessible is the maʿrifah* of God beyond the people of examination and thinking – and how close she is to the family of God! May God make us part of His family!
* maʿrifah: recognition; the ʿārif is the person with maʿrifah and ʿirfān, recognizing Divinity everywhere.
Book 11, Chapter 72
7 December 2023
The hands on the human beings are like the wings of a bird. You see – just as they (the birds) celebrate God on the Earth with their feet while walking, similarly they celebrate in the water with their hands when they ‘walk’ (swim) there. And human beings walk on their feet, aided by moving their arms as they walk.
As the invisible (inward) of the human beings, their spirit, is an angel in the true dimension – one of the guardian angels, the third kind of angels – and God reported about the angels that they have wings, not specifying one angel apart from another, so we know certainly that our souls, as angels stationed to guard these physical bodies, are beings with wings. And these natural bodies are made to veil us from perceiving them.
Book 11, Chapter 72
5 December 2023
The Prophet ﷺ has reported that the one who makes an effort (the mujtahid) is rewarded even if he errs, and he did not specify that this is only for the branch (the legal detail) and not the basic root; no, it is universal. And His word is confirmed: My kindness vastly encompasses everything (al-aʿrāf 7:156), and His word, ‘My kindness outstrips My wrath.’
Book 11, Chapter 72
4 December 2023
No one looks at any object of worship but they are looking at hu. And this is why, on the Day of Arising for Judgment, He will not hold them accountable for anything except their demanding the objects of worship (to be their God), because that is part of injustices committed by worshipers. It is for these injustices that God will recompense them with wretchedness, not for their worship. The worship is accepted; this is why there is the gentle inclination toward kindness, despite the eternal residence in Jahannam. You see, they are her people.
Book 11, Chapter 72
Quotations: 2023, November
30 November 2023
The True is transcendent above restrictions concerning His creation, so He arranges their (the creatures’) affairs as He pleases.
Book 11, Chapter 72
29 November 2023
There is no comparative excellence of one Divine name over the others.
Book 11, Chapter 72
28 November 2023
If we are afflicted with feelings of lordliness, we are still basically devoted slaves, humble with slave-basis, not liberated. We are not leaders and masters, so concern for the basics is the return to them – and to Him returns the matter, all of it (Hūd 11:123). And this is the root, so understand this verse f with an understanding that honors her, possessing knowledge. And indeed no trace from some chance event disproves the root nor the matter as it really is.
Book 11, Chapter 72
27 November 2023
From Him is the gift plentiful and the bestowal overflowing.
Book 11, Chapter 72
24 November 2023
Does anyone other than God see? Is anyone other than God seen?
Book 11, Chapter 72
22 November 2023
Being is a single abode, and the Cherisher of the abode is One, and the people are the dependent family of God, He encompassing them all in this abode.
Book 11, Chapter 72
21 November 2023
May God give me and you understanding of the intents of the Law, and let not what is apparent veil us from what is invisible.
Book 11, Chapter 72
20 November 2023
Rush forward to accept His rule, whichever kind it may be, with expanded chest, with pure soul, if you want to be faithful. As for people with abundant intelligence – let them rely on and be at ease with God, and the Divine rule will be at ease with them.
Book 11, Chapter 72
17 November 2023
As for us, we know that the Lawgiver is God and that the Messenger is one conveying for God His rule for what God shows him, not speaking from his lower self – It is only revelation revealed (al-najm 53:4).
Book 11, Chapter 72
16 November 2023
The complete intellect knows that he was created for his Lord, not for another. He knows in himself that the One who created him is not Someone he can compete against in any way, and he will not oppose Him in any ruling.
Book 11, Chapter 72
15 November 2023
There is no kinship between the intellect and jealousy (ghayrat) in the true dimension, and therefore God created the intellect in the human being to repel the domination of excessive appetite and attachments, which are the consequences of jealousy in the human being.
Book 11, Chapter 72
14 November 2023
The qualities of the True are not to be taken on unrestrictedly; no, their situations and contexts are designated.
Book 11, Chapter 72
13 November 2023
If you say I am, I am not other than hu;
and hu is I, because hu is not knowable.
As I am ignorant of who hu is, I am;
and hu is I – so who is the one who is doing?
Book 11, Chapter 72
10 November 2023
He sought – and He obligated His seeking it – to create for Himself a form in which He would see Himself.
Book 11, Chapter 72
9 November 2023
Abū Yazīd was told, ‘Approach Me by means of that which is not Mine: humility and dependency.’
Book 11, Chapter 72
8 November 2023
He said, There is nothing like Him (al-shūrā 42:11) – so He banned the world from making a presumed likeness to Him.
Book 11, Chapter 72
7 November 2023
The truths do not change.
Book 11, Chapter 72
6 November 2023
Honey from the bee corresponds to the knowledge that the Prophet ﷺ brought as Qurʾān and as reports.
Book 11, Chapter 72
3 November 2023
The dispatching of messengers from the Side of God to His creatures is so that they may explain to them what will save them and make them ultimately felicitous, if they put something into practice or avoid something.
Book 11, Chapter 72
2 November 2023
As the angels have no greed in them – they are in essence obedient, and no hindrance coming from greed, which will divert them from obedience to their Lord, ever arises – so the dominion of greed does not appear in the potentiality of the angels. You see, there is no contender they have; they have intellects with no opponent.
Book 11, Chapter 72
1 November 2023
Seeking the One precludes seeking the many.
Book 11, Chapter 72
Quotations: 2023, October
30 October 2023
He avenges and torments with a quality of wrath; and He overlooks and He lets be with a quality of generosity; and He guards and He protects with a quality of kindness.
Book 11, Chapter 72
27 October 2023
Spacious vastness is a kindness of God, a kindness that vastly encompasses everything; and constriction is a diminishing of God’s kindness – despite the fact that kindness vastly encompasses it also, where kindness brought constriction into being.
Book 11, Chapter 72
26 October 2023
The mysteries of God about the things are not fenced in; no, ignited in every moment for the people of hearts is something known only to God. But the general population does not know this. This is why the ones singled out among the slaves of God say, ‘There is no repetition’ – because the vastness of the Divine is infinite. In fact, it is the similarities of the images that veil the hearts from this perception – so the general population imagines there is repetition. God is Vast, All-Knowing (al-baqarah 2:247). The one who verifies for oneself the being of this name the Vast will never speak of repetition. As for the others – No, they are in confusion about the New Creation (qāf 50:15).
Book 11, Chapter 72
25 October 2023
The enabled being and the maʿrifah (recognition) of the new being are found only on account of the completeness of the step-level of being and the completeness of the step-level of maʿrifah, not on account of the complete perfection of God; no, He is complete perfection in Himself, whether or not the universe comes to exist and whether or not the New learns maʿrifah. It is just as in the true dimension the enabled being does not recognize hu – only itself.
Book 11, Chapter 72
20 October 2023
The True accepts their request and finds them and creates them for themselves and for the sake of their request – not from a need arising in Him for them.
Book 11, Chapter 72
18 October 2023
The things in the state before their enabled becoming comes into being are seeking and searching for their being.
Book 11, Chapter 72
17 October 2023
One does not say to a thing, Be! and it becomes, until one intensely desires it. This is why He said, In her (the Garden) you will have what your souls intensely desire (fuṣṣilat 41:31).
Book 11, Chapter 72
16 October 2023
There is nothing but slave and Lord, and the slave is not distinguished from the Lord except by neediness.
Book 11, Chapter 72
15 October 2023
One will return to one’s root, certainly, in the end.
Book 10, Chapter 72
9 October 2023
He exalted shines brilliantly in tajallì to the things that He desires to bring out from the state of non-existence, to His name Light exalted. And the lights are vastly diffused over these entities with this tajallì; and they are readied thereby to accept being brought out – the readying of the fetus in the womb of his mother, during the fourth month of his being borne in pregnancy, for the in-breathing of the Spirit into him. And it is said to him during this readying, Be! – and he becomes at his right time without any delay. So look at this wisdom f – how magnificently, brilliantly shining she is!
Book 10, Chapter 72
6 October 2023
Every moment has a witness;
the one with eyes to witness recognizes it.
Book 10, Chapter 72
5 October 2023
If not for the tajallì* of hu to the entities, the attributes would not appear –
– not ‘is’ (verb), not ‘a being’ (noun), not ‘becoming’.
This is why He is called dahr (eternal), having no ending
or beginning.
* tajallì: brilliant radiance of Being; Divine self-disclosure
Book 10, Chapter 72
2 October 2023
If one arises, one arises by Him – or rests, rests by Him.
Book 10, Chapter 72
Quotations: 2023, September
29 September 2023
Knowledge is the most overall-seeing attribute granted to the human animal,
and the one with knowledge is protected, well sheltered.
Book 10, Chapter 72
28 September 2023
I saw in the universe someone whose Desiring said,
when He turned to the things, Be! and they were.
As soon as my eye f could verify for herself His creative procedure –
as by Him is one’s core, no one else – I became.
Book 10, Chapter 72
27 September 2023
Death is a taking-away, not an annihilation, because one transfers from this world to the next.
Book 10, Chapter 72
26 September 2023
Every occurrence and non-occurrence is the intended goal of the True.
Book 10, Chapter 72
25 September 2023
The actions of the created beings are what are measured out vis-à-vis God; and the being of their means and ropes (secondary causes) – all of them, in the origin – is vis-à-vis God. And the creature has no inclusion; the created being has no inclusion in actions at root, except with regard to one’s being their explicit site and the implicit site – the active (effector) noun and the passive (effector) noun.
Book 10, Chapter 72
22 September 2023
The creature is a site for the emergence of the Divine verbs.
Book 10, Chapter 72
21 September 2023
If it is the Creator who is the Designer, then there is no shortcoming in the design at all, because each is the intended goal – as there is no shortfall connected to (Divine) Desiring. Every occurrence and non-occurrence is the intended goal of the True.
Book 10, Chapter 72
20 September 2023
When the human being repels harm from himself, he is not prosecuted by the True.
Book 10, Chapter 72
19 September 2023
When the Pen m wrote, he made order and he placed everything in its proper place; and he valued its proper weight according to the balancing of the Scale.
Book 10, Chapter 72
18 September 2023
The finest design is humanity f, and He paints her with faith in the fahwānīyah* Presence, in the seen realm of iḥsānīyah.*
* fahwānīyah: ‘Divine address heard face to face in the intermediary world’.
* iḥsānīyah: ‘Worship God as if you see Him.’
Book 10, Chapter 72
14 September 2023
As for the one who is oppressively dark to his soul f among the people of shirk* – his own soul will prosecute him before God for her having been oppressed; and there is nothing more intense than oppression of the soul. Do you see the one who kills his soul – that the Garden is forbidden to him?
* shirk: associating gods with God; attributing God’s actions to putative gods.
Book 10, Chapter 72
13 September 2023
Do you see Death? It is an idea – a meaning attributed, adjoined – that is an expression for the separation of the spirit from the body; and God makes an image of him on the Day of Arising before the people in the form of a gray ram, and he will be placed between the Garden and the Fire and will be immolated. It is this way for these likenesses.
Book 10, Chapter 72
12 September 2023
Every worshipper among the idolaters has clung to an imaged likeness of his object of worship that he imagined in himself. So for him this imagined form becomes embodied; and He inserts the embodied image into the Fire with the idolater, because he worshipped only this image that he clung to in himself.
Book 10, Chapter 72
8 September 2023
The rule of God in Nature is greater than that in the skies and the Earth, because the two are from the world of Nature, according to us. From Nature emerges every mass, body, and embodiment in the world of bodies, upper and lower.
Book 10, Chapter 72
7 September 2023
When He radiated brilliantly
with the crescents
To my eye-witness
from behind my gauzy curtain,
And stretched out to me the Right Hand
for the sake of my kiss,
I did not see another.
Lo, He was entirely my whole.
Book 10, Chapter 72
6 September 2023
My love is my station.
Book 10, Chapter 72
5 September 2023
The soul f – if she gets into the habit of breaking a covenant and misappropriating it, nothing from her will ever be brought to life.
Book 10, Chapter 72
4 September 2023
The animals – all of them, according to us – are spiritual beings with intellects with which they understand God; and this is why He exalted said about them, Each knows his ṣalāt and his celebration (tasbīḥ) (al-nūr 24:41).
Book 10, Chapter 72
1 September 2023
The ʿārif* always looks to each enabling, one after another, for the special face that is from God to one. One does not look for the cause – which God informs (us) is from Him and its anchor is in Him – in the direction of causality or conditionally. This is the view of the people of the path of God among our friends.
* ʿárif: the one who recognizes the Divine everywhere
Book 10, Chapter 72
Quotations: 2023, August
31 August 2023
By the kindness f of God, every being other than God is made alive and given sustenance. So kindness is all-encompassing, and she is in every place provided commensurate with that place.
Book 10, Chapter 72
29 August 2023
Even though you are a being, the ruling property of the enabled being is non-being. The verse that rings the truest that the ʿarab ever said is this statement of Labīd:
Is not everything else but God bāţil (null, nothing)?
And ‘nothing’ is non-being.
Book 10, Chapter 72
25 August 2023
The one who seeks the One in its ʿayn* will not receive anything but confusion, because one cannot disengage – in the seeker and the sought – from the collective whole and the manifold. And how can one deny the many, when one has condemned oneself to be a seeker and (condemned) that which one seeks to be something sought?
* ʿayn: eye, point, dot, source, well, entity
Book 10, Chapter 72
24 August 2023
The True does not demand from us faith in anything but the Oneness (tawḥīd) of the Divinity alone, and this means that we should know that there is nothing but a single god, no god but hu. And then He said, al-Raḥmān, al-raḥīm (the Gentle) (al-baqarah 2:163).
Book 10, Chapter 72
23 August 2023
All in being is truth.
Book 10, Chapter 72
22 August 2023
I do not see other than me, but hu is not I;
and that one (I) is His site of His shining brilliant tajallì,* having the slightest of veils.
* tajallì: Divine self-disclosure
Book 10, Chapter 72
21 August 2023
When you remember Him in yourself – and the Qurʾān is a dhikr – the True remembers you in Himself in a way the slave does not realize: that God is remembering you. In fact, when God remembers you in Himself and remembers you in a Presence of timelessness in which there is no New event, then the slave has with this dhikr a foothold in timelessness – in a place the True has made you Present in Himself by dhikr.
Book 10, Chapter 72
18 August 2023
ʿĀʾishah said about Messenger of God ﷺ: ‘He used to remember God all of his life.’ She universalized the whole of his moments, while awake and while sleeping, while moving (doing) and being still (not doing). She meant that he performed only, and was in any of his moments only in, a matter that brought him closer to God – because He sits with the ones who are remembering Him with dhikr.*
*dhikr: the recitation of Divine names; the gathering for the remembrance of the Divine.
Book 10, Chapter 72
17 August 2023
No one recognizes the One except the one who is one.
Book 10, Chapter 72
16 August 2023
As God created you ‘flush against the image’ f (Adam was created upon His form), and she necessitates an inaccessible might, He intended that you have some free will and choice in action.
Book 10, Chapter 72
11 August 2023
The minerals are the (entities) most recognizing of God, and the most worshipful toward God compared with the rest of the reproduced beings. They were in fact created from recognition (maʿrifah), not having intellect or lust, and not discharging; they are discharged only. They are the objects of discharging by another, not by themselves. And there is no one who discharges but God, so they are the discharged by the discharging of God.
Book 10, Chapter 72
10 August 2023
You are, during every moment, a traveler.
Book 10, Chapter 72
7 August 2023
Learn that in being there is not a single moment in which there is not a face (wajh) belonging to God, preserving its being.
Book 10, Chapter 72
4 August 2023
Nothing holds back the one whose vision is the True.
Book 10, Chapter 72
3 August 2023
His tajallì is constant;
His drawing nigh is inescapable.
That which is between this and that is only that
you are indeed sleeping today.
Book 10, Chapter 72
2 August 2023
Learn that God forever gives brilliant tajallì, constantly, not letting timings restrict His tajallì.*
* tajallì: brilliant radiance of Being; Divine self-disclosure
Book 10, Chapter 72
1 August 2023
ʿAlī bin al-Jahm said:
(We place our trust in the Cherisher of the sky,
and we submit willingly to the ways and means of destiny.)
The gates of the kings are guarded by gatekeepers,
but the gate of God is a ramshackle open courtyard.
Book 10, Chapter 72
Quotations: 2023, July
31 July 2023
The Divine tajallì* is an opened door for the one who wants to enter.
* tajallì: brilliant radiance of Being; Divine self-disclosure
Book 10, Chapter 72
28 July 2023
He praises Himself only through us, and we are ennobled and raised to a sweeping, panoramic (sharf) level only by Him. So we are by Him and for Him.
Book 10, Chapter 72
27 July 2023
The highest of stations is the confirmation of the Divine and the one subject to the Divine, and the Lord and the lorded over – that is the perfectly complete Presence of the Divine.
Book 10, Chapter 72
25 July 2023
Just as in the configuration of the human being there is something that God singles out, and He makes it more excellent than the rest of the human configuration f, and He makes it the imām for her – and this is the heart – so, similarly, He made in the configuration of the prayer something that is the most elevated in the prayer. This is the movement in which one says, samiʿ Allāhu li-man ḥamidah (‘God hears the one who praises Him’), because the one praying right then is a substitute taking the place of God – just as the heart is a substitute taking the place of God in supervising the body.
Book 10, Chapter 72
24 July 2023
He made the heavenly motions, which are the orbits, to affect the four elements (water, air, fire, earth) to generate what would be born from them. You are the four elements, because you are composed of four mixtures (humors); and their combination is your physical being itself – which is the body.
Book 10, Chapter 72
21 July 2023
That which is fixed for Him in the determinative property when there is no world is also fixed for Him when the world exists; and He has this absolute Oneness both during the existence of the world and during the non-existence of the world.
Book 10, Chapter 72
20 July 2023
The human being is under the ruling force of each breath. And each breath is an arrival after a long journey.
Book 10, Chapter 72
19 July 2023
Perplexity f is perplexed about herself, because she does not find anyone who is perplexed by her! And the confusion by which she imagines the universe to be described is not as she imagines; no, this is the confusion of confusion. Thus, there is nothing then but hu – and confusion.
Book 10, Chapter 72
18 July 2023
The Law comes down, the First Intellect accepts, and the command is carried out. The New things renew, while the power is Old – primordial and independent – and the scales are set, and the words are never exhausted, and the existent things never go far away.
Book 10, Chapter 72
17 July 2023
Inaccessibly Mighty, the One who has Inaccessible Might and Majesty, and Greatness. Nothing there is but God, the Necessary Being, the One in His dhāt,* the Manifold in His names and His ruling forces, the All-Powerful over the impossible! So how much more so over the merely enabled beings and the possible, when they are under His rule! By God, He only is God, and from Him and to Him returns the affair – all of it.
* dhát: essence, core; essential identity
Book 10, Chapter 72
14 July 2023
The physical senses are a site for His visible emergence, despite their limitation and their coarseness and their shortcomings.
Book 10, Chapter 72
13 July 2023
The moment of the Divine Be! is the moment of the creation of the created being.
Book 10, Chapter 72
7 July 2023
The length of time of the glance is exactly the length of time to connect to the thing glanced at, however far away it may be. The farthest-away things perceptible by the senses are the fixed stars, which are in the orbital mansions, and as soon as you look at them the glance is attached to them. This is physical rapidity – so what do you think about the rapidity of meanings stripped from restrictions, how rapidly they will penetrate?
Book 10, Chapter 72
4 July 2023
Consider then how strangely wondrous is the matter of Being: the ʿayn* of the seeker of the benefit of being is the very ʿayn of the Benefactor.
* ʿayn: eye, point, dot, source, well, entity
Book 10, Chapter 72
Quotations: 2023, June
29 June 2023
I am upon clarification from the One who raises and makes ascend the universe, its heights and its depths, with each breath, for the alteration of the stabilized entities in a single moment. Yes, the root that the entirety of created beings return to – and this is God – described Himself with being every day upon a radiant brilliance (al-Raḥmān 55:29). So it is impossible that a thing remain in the universe in one single state over two time periods. The states differ because of the differences in the tajalliyāt in the Divine shuʾūn each day.*
* tajalliyāt (sg. tajallì): brilliant radiances of Being; Divine self-disclosures
* shuʾūn (sg. shaʾn): radiant brilliances
Book 10, Chapter 72
28 June 2023
The Kaʿbah of God is not other than our dhāt,
a dhāt (essential being – and heart of the cosmos and of the human being, made up) of veils covering the God-fearing, a teaching sign.*
* al-maʿlamah: ‘The place in which is known the existence of the thing’ (Lane).
Book 10, Chapter 72
27 June 2023
You see, the matters – if you relate them to the True – are not comparatively placed in vantage positions; but if you relate them to you, they are comparatively placed with regard to you. The completed ones with us are those whose matters with regard to themselves are as they are related to God, and they are the ones who see a True perspective in every situation.
Book 10, Chapter 72
22 June 2023
The tajallì* is never ceasing, never discontinued –
so the vision of the True is never not abundant.
It is endlessly everlasting to endlessly everlasting,
and tenderly caring for to tenderly caring for –
And transferring to place.
hu is higher than place.
* tajallì: brilliant radiance of Being; Divine self-disclosure
Book 10, Chapter 72
21 June 2023
The ʿārifūn* have no veils over their ears, so they are responders – ceaselessly.
* ʿārifūn: those who recognize the Divine everywhere
Book 10, Chapter 72
20 June 2023
God says, O you who are faithful, respond to God and the messenger when He calls you (al-anfāl 8:24). As the messenger calls based on a command of God, so God is the one responded to.
Book 10, Chapter 72
19 June 2023
God did not create the jinn and the human (ins) except to worship Him – so He called them, as He created them for Him.
Book 10, Chapter 72
15 June 2023
He is not like this, and He is not like that – given that He said, There is nothing that is like Him (al-shūrā 42:11), and Exalt transcendently your Lord, a Lord of Might, Inaccessible beyond what they would ascribe (al-ṣāffāt 37:180). The Inaccessible, the Mighty prevents anyone from ascribing anything to hu; and to exalt transcendently is to free hu from whatever they would ascribe to hu. And transcendent freeing-from makes Him remote from being attributed with having a partner or a child or something else.
Book 10, Chapter 72
13 June 2023
God desires from the slave, through what He alerts us to, that one not do any of the actions that originate from one in the outward matter except when one knows that God is the real Doer of that action – in His word, ‘I become his ears and his eyes, and by Me he hears and by Me he sees, and by Me he moves.’
Book 10, Chapter 72
12 June 2023
His Being is according to the property of the Necessary.
Book 10, Chapter 72
9 June 2023
There is no partner with the True; no, hu is One.
Book 10, Chapter 72
8 June 2023
God is with the creature in one’s vision to the extent one knows Him by Him.
Book 10, Chapter 72
7 June 2023
He calls to you from very near.
Book 10, Chapter 72
6 June 2023
The human being is the nearest indication to Him, given one’s being a being created ‘flush against His image’.
Book 10, Chapter 72
5 June 2023
The dhikr of God for us is greater than our dhikr of Him, unless our remembering is by Him, not by us. Our dhikr by Him is greater in encompassing, because in our dhikr there is us and Him – in His dhikr there is Him without us!
Book 10, Chapter 72
1 June 2023
Every being except God is a dependent correlation to hu, not an independent entity.
Book 10, Chapter 72
Quotations: 2023, May
30 May 2023
The ẓāhir (Visibly Emerging) never stops being described as being, and the maẓhar (site of visible emergence) never stops being described as non-being. When He emerges and becomes outward (visible), the site of visible emergence is provided with a ruling force through the visibly emergent, commensurate with its (your) self-based truths. Applied to the visibly emergent based on these truths that you are flush against – you, this site of visible emergence that is a site of non-being – is a ruling property called human being, or celestial orbit, or angel, or whatever created individual it may be.
Book 10, Chapter 72
26 May 2023
If you look closely then, there is nothing in being but God alone, and everything described as having being – that is, everything other than God – is actually in a particular correlation (to God’s Being). The Divine desiring f is rather her connection to displaying the tajallì* in the site of visible emergence – that is, in some site of emergence; and that is this correlation.
* tajallì: brilliant radiance of Being; Divine self-disclosure
Book 10, Chapter 72
25 May 2023
The Divine Presence is One.
Book 10, Chapter 72
24 May 2023
One is commensurate with what ones sees.
Book 10, Chapter 72
23 May 2023
He is, and we are not.
Book 10, Chapter 72
22 May 2023
It is impossible that anything be unseen to Him.
Book 10, Chapter 72
19 May 2023
We must seek knowledge of the One and to confirm the One and the Oneness.
Book 10, Chapter 72
18 May 2023
Creation is compelled, and especially since
the root is compelled – so where is free will?
Every created being, in one’s temperament,
is in a state of compulsion and under duress.
The created being is distinguished from one’s root
by what one has of humility and dependency.
So be with the True in His qualities,
between compulsion always imposed and choice.
Book 10, Chapter 72
16 May 2023
Being – all of it – is under essential compulsion. It is not that one is compelled by compulsion coming from another.
Book 10, Chapter 72
15 May 2023
With every created being, being compelled accompanies one always – because it is one’s truth. And despite one’s being compelled, one is tasked (and so must have free will).
Book 10, Chapter 72
12 May 2023
Only the living celebrate.
Book 10, Chapter 72
11 May 2023
Your level has been explained for you. He exalted said, with regard to the human being, He subjugated for you what is in the heavens and what is in the Earth, altogether (al-jāthīyah 45:13); and He said, He is the one who created for you what is in the Earth, altogether (al-baqarah 2:29); and He said, I created the jinn and the human only to worship Me (al-dhāriyāt 51:56). And in the Torah sent down to Moses – peace be upon him – ‘O children of Adam, I created the things for your sake, and I created you for My sake; so do not rend and dishonor what was created for Me in what was created for you.’
Book 10, Chapter 72
10 May 2023
You are created only for your Lord; and the things were created for you, so they seek the human being just as the human being seeks his Lord.
Book 10, Chapter 72
9 May 2023
Every necessary means toward cleanliness, outwardly and inwardly, is appropriate for use during every moment – because ‘God is Beauty and loves the beautiful.’
Book 10, Chapter 72
8 May 2023
Purity and cleanliness are the goal for the Law, because His name is the Holy – and there is no name to oppose that name, which would rule over that name.
Book 10, Chapter 72
5 May 2023
You are a king; you are a creature.
You are, in you, a borrowed meaning (mustaʿār).*
And there is no being without entity,
so no one to judge and no one to be dependent.
Whoever is confused about this is confused about someone like me.
There is no compelling, and there is no choosing.
There is no vanishing and no permanence,
and no fleeing and no staying.
* mustaʿār: borrowed, metaphor. You are a metaphor for the One who is, and you borrow the meaning of the One who is.
Book 10, Chapter 72
4 May 2023
If the True wants to bestow on you some lordliness as He pleases, He will come down to you; you do not ascend to Him. He knows you, and He knows your situation and where you are; but you do not recognize Him, so where will you seek Him?
Book 10, Chapter 72
3 May 2023
The correlation of dependency never disappears from the enabled one, ever – not in the state of your non-being and not in the state of your being.
Book 10, Chapter 72
2 May 2023
One angel comes from the west, and another arrives from the east, and another descends from on high, and another ascends from below. Each one asks the other, ‘Where are you coming from?’ Each answers, ‘From God’s Side.’
Book 10, Chapter 72
Quotations: 2023, April
20 April 2023
The intellect will obtain benefit with every state.
Book 10, Chapter 72
18 April 2023
Abū Saʿīd al-Kharrāz and people like him were right when they said, ‘No one knows God but God.’
Book 10, Chapter 72
17 April 2023
Nothing originates from the complete thing except that thing is commensurate with its completeness, as befitting that thing. Thus, there is not in the universe any deficiency (nāqṣ) at all. If not for the happenstances that birth sicknesses, the human being would ‘stroll forth’ (tanazzaha) in the image of the cosmos – just as the one who knows strolls forth and diverts himself in there.
Book 10, Chapter 72
14 April 2023
He gave everything its character-creation (ṭā-hā 20:50) – and it is precisely the full completeness of that thing; therefore, nothing is lacking.
Book 10, Chapter 72
13 April 2023
The Divine matter does not repeat. The vision that arrives to the prior one has no route to arrive to the next one, as we have argued that He does not give tajallì* in one image twice, nor to two persons in a single repeated image – because of the Divine vastness (infinity).
* tajallì: brilliant radiance of Being; Divine self-disclosure
Book 10, Chapter 72
12 April 2023
Do not be hidden from the truths of the matters, because they are included in the force of the observer of them, not in themselves. And whoever is hidden from the truths falls into the abyss of the ignorant things and misses out on a degree of knowledge that God commanded His Prophet to seek increase in, in his prayer (Say: My Lord, increase me in knowledge – zid-nī ʿilm). There is nothing more all-overseeing than knowledge, and one is not told to seek more of any other quality. Indeed, the universal quality that knowledge has is encompassing of every quality and everything having a quality.
Book 10, Chapter 72
11 April 2023
You are commensurate with what the True shows you.
Book 10, Chapter 72
10 April 2023
Weighty valuations of the Divine are not recognized except by their people.
Book 10, Chapter 72
7 April 2023
The Lawgiver does not speak and address except to be listened to, and no one listens except one who has intelligence. The intellect that is entrusted hears the address of the one who tasks; otherwise, if the intellect disappears, tasking is canceled and the Law has no dominion over one or any demonstrable argument. The ones with the kernels and sharp minds – they are the ones tasked.
Book 10, Chapter 72
5 April 2023
Propagating the message from God is one of the most excellent activities for drawing closer to God, and God is one’s employer in propagating despite the fact that one is a slave.
Book 10, Chapter 72
3 April 2023
The recompense for doing something obligatory is higher than the recompense for something not obligatory, given that there is a fulfillment of the core ʿubūdīyah* in the obligatory.
* ʿubūdīyah: the state of being a slave; servanthood
Book 10, Chapter 72
Quotations: 2023, March
31 March 2023
Wealth belongs to God, and the dispensing of it belongs to you to the extent the One made you the agent of it.
Book 10, Chapter 72
30 March 2023
The actions – I mean their creation – belong to God in the true dimension, while the creatures are a site for their visible emergence.
Book 10, Chapter 72
29 March 2023
The world of the truths, which is in the true dimension, is more complete than the superficial trace world.
Book 10, Chapter 72
28 March 2023
There is in the world nothing but the muslim, linguistically, because there is nothing that has not submitted to the Divine command. You see, there is nothing to whom was said Be! and it refused; no, there was not even a pause, so nothing is valid but this.
Book 10, Chapter 72
27 March 2023
The Divine names perform a ḥajj of the house of the heart: they perform a ḥajj to the place where the heart is ‘vastly spacious enough’ for the True.
Book 10, Chapter 72
24 March 2023
We have alerted you to matters that, if you travel along them, you will be given brilliant tajallì* of Divine knowledge – the measure of which is measurable only by God. Yes, today the ʿārif* who really knows the measure of what we are talking about – that is, knowledge of God through tasting – is rare indeed.
* tajallì: brilliant radiance of Being; Divine self-disclosure
*ʿárif: the one who recognizes the Divine everywhere
Book 10, Chapter 72
22 March 2023
Learn that God has stored in the Kaʿbah a treasure. Messenger of God ﷺ wanted to extract it and spend from it, but then there occurred to him another matter concerning societal harmony that he foresaw. Then ʿUmar after him wanted to extract it, but he held back in emulation of Messenger of God ﷺ. It is in there to this day. As for me – there was brought to me from it a gold tablet, sent to me while I was in Tunis in the year 598. It had a crack, and the crack’s thickness was a finger, and its width was an inch, and its length was an inch or more – etched with a handwriting I did not recognize. This happened because of something that had come about between me and God. So I asked God to return it to its proper place, as a courtesy to Messenger of God ﷺ. If I had brought it out to the people, it would have incited a blind panic. I abandoned it also for the sake of societal harmony. He ﷺ did not leave it alone thoughtlessly, but rather he abandoned it to be brought out by the ‘one who stands by God’s command’ during the last time period, ‘the one who fills the Earth with justice and balance – just as she had been filled previously with outrageous acts and oppression.’
Book 10, Chapter 72
21 March 2023
The heart m is the greatest knowledge and the vastest encompassing, because he is a site for all the qualities and adjectives; and he is lifted up in location with God, as God placed in him recognition of Him.
Book 10, Chapter 72
17 March 2023
Just as God prescribes a circling on every circler who is circling – in whatever state one may be in – and forgives one for what one did, in this way the blameworthy incoming thoughts are forgiven by God, as long as their force does not emerge in the limbs into the physical.
Book 10, Chapter 72
16 March 2023
As God made the heart m of His slave to be an honored house, a sanctuary fenced off, magnificent; and as He cited that he was vast enough for Him – while the heavens and the Earth were not vast enough – we know for certain that the heart of the faithful is more all-overseeing than this house in Makkah. He made the incoming thoughts that pass through him to be like the circlers performing ṭawāf (circling of the Kaʿbah). And just as there is among the circlers one who recognizes the sacredness of the House and practices during the ṭawāf what is appropriate to it – such as declaring magnificence and majesty – there are among the circlers some who do not recognize this. They circle it with hearts heedless and distracted and tongues articulating something other than dhikr* of God. No, sometimes they circle with less than excellent words, even falseness, but in this way are the incoming thoughts that pass through the heart of the faithful. You see, some of them are blameworthy and some of them are praiseworthy.
* dhikr: recitation of Divine names; the gathering for the remembrance of the Divine.
Book 10, Chapter 72
15 March 2023
In all the world there is no word description that is praiseworthy absolutely (e.g. ‘truth-telling’ is not always praiseworthy), and there is no word description that is blameworthy absolutely.
Book 9, Chapter 71
13 March 2023
Whoever places things in their proper places has given them what is due – and such a person is the determining ruler (ḥakīm) of one’s moment, because wisdom (ḥikmat) provides for placing everything in its proper place. And God is All-Knowing, Wisely Determining (al-nisāʾ 4:26).
Book 9, Chapter 71
10 March 2023
Messenger of God ﷺ was asked, ‘Who are the friends of God’? He said, ‘The ones who, when they are seen, God is remembered’ – that is, because of their verifying the truth of God. They are hidden in Him from themselves and from the eyes of creation; thus, when the people see them, they see only God – so God is remembered by their being seen, like (the seeing of) other reminding signs.
Book 9, Chapter 71
9 March 2023
We have no path to God except what He made Law.
Book 9, Chapter 71
8 March 2023
Forgetfulness in the human being is a natural matter that the mixture requires, just as memory is also a natural matter in this particular mixture; and it is in this way for all the faculties that are related to the human being.
Book 9, Chapter 71
7 March 2023
This human soul f is an end result of these elemental bodies and the beings generated from them, because she did not emerge except after the evening and balancing of these bodies, and their mixed humors. The souls blown into have a spirit related to Him, like the places where the Sun’s rays are scattered over: the effects of the rays are different according to the differences of the receptivities. Where is the illumination of the light of the Sun on coarse bodies compared with on polished bodies? This is why the souls are comparatively excellent based on the comparative excellence of the mixtures (e.g. coarse or polished). You will find a soul quick to receive good practices and knowledge, and another soul opposite her (in character), and middle ones in between the two. This is how the matter is, if you understand.
Book 9, Chapter 71
6 March 2023
The human being is made innately to be forgetful. Messenger of God ﷺ said, ‘Adam was forgetful, so his children are forgetful; and Adam refused (the truth) and so his children refuse.’ This ḥadīth is a good tiding from the Prophet ﷺ to the people, all of them – because God was kind to Adam, so his children will have kindness too, wherever they may be. Kindness is provided to them, singled out for them – in whatever abode (Fire or Garden) God sends them to, because the matter is secondary. The roots (forgetfulness, kindness) rule over the branches.
Book 9, Chapter 71
3 March 2023
The Divine command is circular, and because of this the command of God for things never ends. The circle has no first and no last, only the property of being notched to mark an arbitrary beginning.
Book 9, Chapter 71
2 March 2023
Seclusion f with God in perpetuity is a path of the people of God, and she has the universal praise; and because of this, her people have the customary speech of
al-ḥamdulillāh ʿalā kulli ḥāl
‘Praise to God in every moment’
– and this is a dhikr of distress, and this is the dhikr that is most universal and most complete. Therefore, when the creature praises Him during distress, how much more so during prosperity?
* dhikr: recitation of Divine names; gathering for the remembrance of the Divine.
Book 9, Chapter 71
1 March 2023
If one stands by God, this is more complete than if one stands for oneself.
Book 9, Chapter 71
Quotations: 2023, February
21 February 2023
One should not depend on a human being, because he is not more recognizing of God than oneself, because of his collectivity and his intellect and his recognition of himself.
Book 9, Chapter 71
16 February 2023
The creature – as much as one wants to be verified in one’s ʿubūdīyah,* one’s measure is made small until one attaches oneself to the nothingness that is one’s root. And there is nothing smaller than nothingness, and there is nothing smaller than the self of the created beings.
* ʿubūdīyah: the state of being a slave; servanthood
Book 9, Chapter 71
15 February 2023
His knowledge of you is rather from His knowledge of Him. If He were not described as being the One who knows Himself, He would not know you.
Book 9, Chapter 71
14 February 2023
His Light makes things appear.
Book 9, Chapter 71
13 February 2023
The action of the True on the existents never ends.
Book 9, Chapter 71
10 February 2023
You will not know the contexts of His traces left on you and on others except by meditative vigilance.
Book 9, Chapter 71
9 February 2023
Make an alert vigil for Him in your heart m, because he is that which vastly encompasses Him – just as he is vigilant over you. You will not know the contexts of His traces left on you and on others except by meditative vigilance.
Book 9, Chapter 71
8 February 2023
God has commanded me on the tongue of his Prophet ﷺ to counsel, for God and for His Messenger, and for the leaders of the Muslims and their general populations, as a universal address (for everyone). Then He addressed me specially without an intermediary more than once, in Makkah and in Damascus, and He said to me, ‘Counsel My creatures!’ It was a joyful tiding that I was shown, and the command was appointed to me more than it is appointed to others. May God make that a grace for me from God and an honor, not a test or something to escape.
Book 9, Chapter 71
7 February 2023
The Divine names veil, some of them over others – even if each one has some veiling and being veiled, according to the dominion of the moment – because some of them are prior in veiling to others; and this flows throughout the entirety of moments of the creation.
Book 9, Chapter 71
6 February 2023
God is ‘according to the good estimation of His slaves of Him’.
Book 9, Chapter 71
1 February 2023
Being is an absolute kindness toward the existent.
Book 9, Chapter 71
Quotations: 2023, January
31 January 2023
Felicity in the Gardens has no termination.
Book 9, Chapter 71
30 January 2023
The Ṣūfī is a guest of God, because they travel away from their personal allotments and the whole of existence, preferring the Divine Side – so they come to Him as a guest.
Book 9, Chapter 71
27 January 2023
Our teacher Abū Madyan found fault with separating the two extremes, and he used to say, ‘The combination of the two extremes is the complete perfection in Sunnah and understanding (maʿrifah).’
Book 9, Chapter 71
26 January 2023
What is God’s is not yours.
Book 9, Chapter 71
25 January 2023
If one is among the people of knowledge of God, the greatest ones – who rule over their selves, and for whom opposing their selves is authenticated – they do not see anyone speaking or commanding or inviting, in all of wujūd,* except God, upon the tongues of the creatures.
* wujūd: being, from wajada (‘found’).
Book 9, Chapter 71
24 January 2023
Abūʾl-ʿAbbās al-Sayyārī, one of the Men cited in the Risālat (Epistle) of al-Qushayrī […] said, ‘The intelligent one does not have pleasure in the vision at all, because the one who has a vision of the True is effaced; there is no pleasure in that.’
Book 9, Chapter 71
23 January 2023
The True is seated unseen before every one remembering.
Book 9, Chapter 71
20 January 2023
It was said to one of them, ‘Remember me in your seclusion with God.’ He replied to him, ‘If I remember you, I will not be in seclusion with God!’
Book 9, Chapter 71
19 January 2023
The Ṣūfī knows that one is under the rule of one’s moment. It is like this in the matter itself. This is why we say, ‘The Ṣūfī is the child of the moment’ – being informed of this and given understanding that one has, concerning which moment is ruling over one, a trace of prophecy (nubuwwat). But not every human being knows this, despite its being like this in the matter itself.
Book 9, Chapter 71
18 January 2023
The masters among the people of God say, ‘The ruling property is determined by the moment’ (al-ḥukm liʾl-waqt) – and the human being, or the Ṣūfī, is a child of one’s moment; and the past does not rule over one, nor the future. However, the human being does not recognize that one is a child of one’s moment, despite the ruling force of the moment over one.
Book 9, Chapter 71
17 January 2023
Hunger is ever continuous for the people of the Fire, and its opposite is in the people of the Garden.
Book 9, Chapter 71
16 January 2023
The True brought out completeness for the most complete of creation, and this is Adam; so none of the days are more complete than the day of gathering (jumʿah, Friday), because in Adam appears the wisdom of the foremeasurement of the creation of the human being that God created upon His form. There does not remain in the Divine measurement any completeness that He created after, as there is nothing more complete than the image of the True.
Book 9, Chapter 71
13 January 2023
If you are the site of a complete tajallì* of the True, there is no beauty you have greater than the beauty of God.
* tajallì: brilliant radiance of Being; Divine self-disclosure
Book 9, Chapter 71
11 January 2023
The heart is spacious enough for the True. This is why the heart m is more vast than the kindness of God! This is one of the most wondrous and strange things; he is created from the kindness f of God, and yet he is more vast than her!
Book 9, Chapter 71
10 January 2023
When God gathered together on Friday the creation of the human being by what He configured him as – as the combination between two forms, a form of the True and a form of the universe – God called this, in the language of Law, the day of gathering.
Book 9, Chapter 71
9 January 2023
The human being is the last of the generated beings. By Friday, God preserves the name Last in the Divine Presence, and God preserves it with the name Last. Last is the one that looks to Adam from among the Divine names.
Book 9, Chapter 71
6 January 2023
The human being is a guardian belonging to God.
Book 9, Chapter 71
5 January 2023
The one who has no kashf* revealing the speech of pebbles, nor faith (in his ﷺ report), who does not affirm that minerals have life-force – then how do they celebrate God? We take refuge in God from the forsaken ones.
* kashf: unveiling
Book 9, Chapter 71
3 January 2023
Something called a mineral can be described as being alive, so much so that the truthful one (ﷺ) reported that the pebbles in his palm celebrated God with His praise.
Book 9, Chapter 71
2 January 2023
Knowledge follows its object of knowledge, and the object of knowledge of this (worldly) knowledge has its dominion in this world, not in the other.
Book 9, Chapter 71
Quotations: 2022, December
30 December 2022
The appearance of the Sun in the mirror of the Moon is the appearance of the True in creation, because the Light is one of God’s names – so He appears by His name the Light in the manifestation of the Moon. He exalted said, He made the Moon in their midst a light (Nūḥ 71:16), and this is a site of tajallì* for the light of the Sun. And He made the Sun as a lamp (Nūḥ 71:16) – because the Light of the True is hu.
* tajallì: brilliant radiance of Being; Divine self-disclosure
Book 9, Chapter 71
29 December 2022
God has created in the otherworld a physical Garden and a meaning Garden; and He permits for them in the physical garden whatever their souls desire, and He lifts from them the pain of need.
Book 9, Chapter 71
28 December 2022
With most animals, after they are satisfied, they do not have the energy to start over again searching for more food. But the human being is not like that; he continues to be worried and anxious about the present and the future. He accumulates and is never satisfied, because he was created anxious. When bad touches him, he is apprehensive; when good touches him, he holds back (and does not give charity) – except the ones who pray, the ones who are ever in their prayers (al-maʿārij 70:19-23).
Book 9, Chapter 71
27 December 2022
There is no right belonging to anything in creation over anyone except God has a right over that thing. So guard yourself! If on the morrow you are in a place of the final Accounting and tajallì,* a differentiation will appear among the splinter sects and the comparatively excellent. How far apart the soul is who gathers on the day of Judgment with a Divine attribute from the soul who is forbidden from having one – (the latter) spending her energy on the Day of Judgment on what she was spending on in this world, skewered together with what she demanded in this natural configuration, such as expanding into things that are above the bare necessity. There is no difference between such a soul and the rest of the animals; this is the animal human being.
* tajallì: brilliant radiance of Being; Divine self-disclosure
Book 9, Chapter 71
26 December 2022
‘Indeed, your soul has a right against you.’ This is the most powerful of the rights of the creation – after the right of God on you – because your antagonist is within you.
Book 9, Chapter 71
23 December 2022
You are singled out in a form f of My Presence,
and a form more perfect than her there has not been made.
Book 9, Chapter 71
21 December 2022
The complete human has completeness. One sees Him with every eye, and one witnesses Him in every form.
Book 9, Chapter 71
20 December 2022
The complete human being f, not the animal human, is the most complete configuration for the truths upon which she was created, and they are the truths of the Divine names and the truths of the universe.
Book 9, Chapter 71
19 December 2022
The human being is more comprehensive in tasting than the angel on account of the comprehensive nature of the human being.
Book 9, Chapter 71
16 December 2022
The human being is the most complete configuration, and the angel is of the most complete level.
Book 9, Chapter 71
15 December 2022
Learn that each month that comes to the human being is a guest coming to you from the Side of the True.
Book 9, Chapter 71
14 December 2022
Knowledge of the wisdom in things is not knowledge belonging to any but the people of God. As for the people of thinking and analogical reasoning – they bump into wisdom by random chance, and it is not even knowledge, according to them.
Book 9, Chapter 71
12 December 2022
Oneness belongs to God in His essence.
Book 9, Chapter 71
9 December 2022
God is Life – no one will contest that.
Book 9, Chapter 71
8 December 2022
No one recognizes One except based on oneself. There is no evidence pointing to and proving His Oneness except your oneness. ‘Whoever recognizes one’s self recognizes one’s Lord’. This is how he ﷺ said it.
Book 9, Chapter 71
7 December 2022
God is a single god, and Oneness f is the most panoramic attribute that the One has compared with the entirety of adjectives; and she flows throughout everything that is.
Book 9, Chapter 71
6 December 2022
One returns to God in every moment, even in every obedience.
Book 9, Chapter 71
5 December 2022
Turning away something before it has come is easier than removing it once it has arrived. You see, the thing to be turned away is a nothing, but that which you want to remove exists and has already arrived.
Book 9, Chapter 71
2 December 2022
God exalted did not teach us any knowledge with which we would contradict what the prophets, may God bless them, came with from God’s Side, spoken of in the reports or sent down by God in a Book. No, all is with us as God reported about His slave Khiḍr – that He gave him kindness from Him and taught him knowledge from His Side (al-māʾidah 5:66).
Book 9, Chapter 71
1 December 2022
Ignorance is the blindest and most erring of ways, one not perceiving how to set down one’s foot nor seeing where to set down one’s foot.
Book 9, Chapter 71
Quotations: 2022, November
30 November 2022
Thankfulness is a Divine quality, because God is Thankful, All-Knowing (al-baqarah 2:158). He seeks more from us by means of this quality of His being Thankful – because He said, If you are thankful, He will give you more (Ibrāhīm 14:7). He has alerted us with what is drawn into thankfulness so that we will do more of the thanked behavior.
Book 9, Chapter 71
29 November 2022
Each person is upon a clarification singled out for one – to the measure one understands the address of God for this – and (upon) guidance.
Book 9, Chapter 71
28 November 2022
There is nothing made obligatory on God, with the conventional courtesy based on the true dimension, except what He Himself makes incumbent on Himself.
Book 9, Chapter 71
25 November 2022
The True calls out to me from my sky,
without any alphabetic letters.
Then He invites me from the earth of my existence,
with every alphabetic letter –
Saying this and that – all – is My speech,
so do not turn toward other than Me,
And do not think there is actually any
other than Me; that is the utmost remoteness.
Book 9, Chapter 71
24 November 2022
The True speaks with you only about you, and He speaks to you only of you. It is this way with everyone tasked in the universe, whether angel or jinn or human being; yes, every created being.
Book 9, Chapter 71
23 November 2022
Your body, your faculties, your climate, your world (body), your flock – you are the one addressed to operate them to the extent that the True defined for you in His Law. You are the shepherd responsible for them, no one but you, because God does not charge anyone with doing anything but according to one’s moment and one’s capacity. No one is charged by the state of another.
Book 9, Chapter 71
22 November 2022
The visible emergence comes about by means of the name the Visible. The True works in this way with the general population of His creatures, being veiled from them with the utmost of veiling – like the sarār (last night) of the Moon – so they do not perceive Him. He said, There is nothing like Him – as a kindness to them. They do not find in their minds nor in the degrees of their states anything to dazzle them. So He comes secretly (sirr) in kindness, as a veiling, in this verse. This is the utmost descent of the True to His creatures, in coming down to a place of kindness for their sakes. Then He gradually introduces, little by little, a likeness: He is the Hearing, the Seeing; and Say: He is God, One, God, Self-Subsisting; and His word, Does he not recognize that God sees? – up until the lights of their sights are strengthened with understanding God. And He familiarizes them, little by little, up until He gives them tajallì* in complete transcendental understanding – which, if He had given such a tajallì to them before, they would have fled from it; and they forget the state of There is nothing like Him.
* tajallì: brilliant radiance of Being; Divine self-disclosure
Book 9, Chapter 71
21 November 2022
With the True, His slave does not approach unless He bestows and He provides for such.
Book 9, Chapter 71
18 November 2022
The sickness of the soul is a leaning of the soul toward the world.
Book 9, Chapter 71
17 November 2022
I do not depart from my ʿubūdīyah for even a blink of the eye.
Book 9, Chapter 71
16 November 2022
Learn that the True – when He makes the creature choose, He has chosen, because its truth is ʿubūdīyah.* The slave does not execute anything, but it is under the rule of compulsion and being compelled.
* ʿubūdīyah: the state of being a slave; servanthood
Book 9, Chapter 71
15 November 2022
God does not newly create a thing randomly, but rather it is created newly from authentic foreknowledge, and desiring something to Be!, and hidden foredestination and foremeasurement. It is so, inescapably, given its being something existent in His knowledge (of all).
Book 9, Chapter 71
14 November 2022
The soul f is in the unseen world – and even though the bodily configuration is her mother, the Divine spirit is her father.
Book 9, Chapter 71
11 November 2022
The single spirit may oversee multiple bodies, if it has the power to do so. This may be, in this world, something the friend has that breaks the fabric of convention. And in the otherworld, the other configuration of the human being provides this. Qaḍīb al-Bān was one who had this power, and Dhūʾl-Nūn al-Miṣrī had it.
Book 9, Chapter 71
10 November 2022
The inclination (hawā) and the intellect (ʿaql) are two rulers over her (the soul): the intellect calls her to salvation, and the inclination calls her to the Fire.
Book 9, Chapter 71
9 November 2022
God produces nearness in the required rituals greater than nearness in the voluntary ones, and the required are more dear to Him.
Book 9, Chapter 71
8 November 2022
The (spiritual) path requires you to be held to account for forgetful moments. Yes, it is a path of being Present. Thus, forgetfulness in the path is rare.
Book 9, Chapter 71
7 November 2022
Our ʿubūdīyah toward God is impossible to lift off and be freed from, because ʿubūdīyah is an essential, core quality of ours.
* ʿubūdīyah: the state of being a slave; servanthood
Book 9, Chapter 71
4 November 2022
God makes the vow obligatory on you because of your making it obligatory on you yourself.
Book 9, Chapter 71
3 November 2022
Existence is in the grip of the Divine names.
Book 9, Chapter 71
2 November 2022
The concept of making it up (compensating) in its root, according to us, is unimaginable on the path, because each time period has an incoming particular to it (and cannot be ‘made up’ later); thus, there is no time period that can then have the same property as the time period that has passed. Therefore, whatever elapses has passed beyond the time period, and its moment has passed. Whatever we are actually in – we are under its dominion; and whatever does not actually come to pass – it can have no ruling power over us.
Book 9, Chapter 71
1 November 2022
There is no journey to Him except by Him.
Book 9, Chapter 71
Quotations: 2022, October
31 October 2022
The Divine names along the path to Him are like the way-stations for the traveler, like the mansions of the Moon measured out for the orbital coursing of the Moon, along the path to a desired goal. The minimum journey is the transfer from one name to another name.
Book 9, Chapter 71
28 October 2022
The travelers journey to Allāh, and it (the name Allāh) is the All-Comprehensive Name, and it is the final goal.
Book 9, Chapter 71
27 October 2022
Humility and dependency […] this is most appropriate for the creature.
Book 9, Chapter 71
26 October 2022
The journeyer is the traveler through way-stations by means of the names of the Divine.
Book 9, Chapter 71
25 October 2022
Wisdom is sought by giving each thing with a right its rightful due.
Book 9, Chapter 71
24 October 2022
The spirit-winds play with the flowers and the bushes in their variegation,
like the play of the verbs with the nouns.
Book 9, Chapter 71
21 October 2022
Intention is aspiration.
Book 9, Chapter 71
20 October 2022
The body never stops having a Divine name determining its property.
Book 9, Chapter 71
19 October 2022
The one who has reached the end knows it and so does not speak. As for the one at the beginning, and this is the youth – such a person has no information about the stations along the way, because one is in a journeying station. You do not learn about them anything but what you taste.
Book 9, Chapter 71
18 October 2022
Abūʾl-ʿAbbās al-Sayyārī, God be kind to him, said, ‘The one with intelligence cannot enjoy the vision, ever,’ because the vision of the True is an annihilation in which is no pleasure.
Book 9, Chapter 71
17 October 2022
The vision of the True is a vanishing, and with vanishing seeking is unimaginable.
Book 9, Chapter 71
13 October 2022
Examination by the intellect is mixed in with the senses from the path of the imagination, because intellect draws from reflection, from imagination, and from the sensory. The intellect m is either based on what the sensory provides him or based on what the imaginal faculty provides him.
Book 9, Chapter 71
12 October 2022
The Divine name rules in whatever moment emerges, so the rule belongs to the name at the present moment of tajallì* and in the future that immediately follows, until there comes another ruling name that then effaces the first ruling.
* tajallì: brilliant radiance of Being; Divine self-disclosure
Book 9, Chapter 71
12 October 2022
The heart’s m fasting […] is where he restrains this vast realm f from her being inhabited by anyone but his Creator – because if anyone inhabits her other than the heart’s Creator, one will have broken the fast during the time period in which it was obligatory, as preferred by one’s Lord, for one to be fasting.
Book 9, Chapter 71
11 October 2022
He said, ‘Vastly spacious enough for Me is the heart of My slave’, while the Earth and the heavens are not.
Book 9, Chapter 71
3 October 2022
With the True nothing is His likeness – the one fasting meets one’s Lord with a description of ‘nothing is His likeness ’ (the Qurʾān’s nothing like Him meets the hadith’s ‘nothing like it’). Thus, one sees Him by Him, and He is the Seer and the Seen. This is why he ﷺ said, ‘one delights in one’s fast’, and he does not say, ‘one delights in a meeting with one’s Lord’. You see, delight does not delight in itself; no, one is delighted by something. And the one in whom the True is one’s sight when one sees and witnesses – such a person will see himself only by His seeing.
Book 9, Chapter 71
Quotations: 2022, September
30 September 2022
Gloriously exalted is the One who evened you out, to be a heart-home (ahlan) for Him,
and He did not bestow this on any but you.
Book 9, Chapter 71
29 September 2022
Knowledge of Him from Him is that you recognize that He combines transcendence (incomparability) and resemblance (similarity), but this – meaning, the combination of two opposites in the object of a ruling – is not tolerated in experimental science.
Book 9, Chapter 70
28 September 2022
Knowledge of God from the direction of the Law is the True’s informing His creatures about what He is, because He knows Himself better than His creatures do.
Book 9, Chapter 70
27 September 2022
God says, ‘I am with the estimation of My creature of Me, so let one estimate Me to be good.’ The fine estimation of God, when it preponderates in you the slave, gives you the end result of felicity in the Garden – just as the bad estimation of God destroys you: That estimation of yours that you are estimating your Lord to be will destroy you (fuṣṣilat 41:23).
Book 9, Chapter 70