On Thought (al-Fikr), and that it is the wellspring of the rest of the angels from Muhammad (God bless him and grant him peace)

Thought is a light in the darkness of the souls / by it the heart of the clever one is guided to what is right.

But its slips grow to [exceed] / the drops of the clouds and the count of the desert's sand.

And it has roots which, if the youth observes them / preserve him from the branch of error in the firebrand.

Those roots, upon the variety of their kind / are two divisions, kept by him who does not shrink back.

Intellect -- and the division of intellect is [either] necessary or ac- / quired by good experiences in the souls.

And transmission is a division -- it is the youth's faith / in an unseen whose fires have not been kindled [for sight].

These two are the root of thought, for the people of discernment / whoever does not measure by them stays in pitch-darkness.

But the masters of [mere] intellects -- their root is / a consideration validated by the ruling of a most-heading intellect.

They do not take by a root of faith, nor / is it, with them, of the radiance of a sun-lit brightness.

And for this they erred, and there escaped them / the very [truth] of what is right, and every most-precious matter.

Know -- may God grant you success in what is right and teach you of wisdom and the decisive word -- that the subtle faculty of Thought (al-raqīqa al-fikriyya) is one of the keys of the Unseen, whose reality none knows but God.

For the keys of the unseen [realms] are [of] a True kind and a created kind. The True kind: it is the reality of the Names and Attributes. The created kind: it is the knowledge of the composition of the indivisible substance (al-jawhar al-fard) from the Essence -- I mean the essence of the human, who faces, by his aspects, the aspects of the All-Merciful.

And Thought is one of those aspects, without doubt; so it is a key of the keys of the Unseen -- but it is a light.

And where is that gleaming light by which one is guided to the seizing of this key?

So "reflect upon the creation of the heavens and the earth" -- not upon [the two of] them [in themselves]; and these are pointings whose meanings are subtle, so they vanish into their hiding-places.

So when the human takes to ascending to the forms of Thought, and reaches the limit of the heaven of this matter, he brings down the spiritual forms to the world of sensation,

and draws forth the concealed matters without [discursive] analogy, and ascends to the heavens and addresses their angels upon the difference of [their] languages.

And this ascent is two kinds:

A kind upon the path of the All-Merciful (ṣirāṭ al-Raḥmān): whoever ascends upon this straight path until he reaches, of Thought, the point of its mighty center, and ranges over the surface of its straight line, attains the guarded self-disclosure, surnamed the Hidden Pearl, in the Hidden Book "which none touches but the purified" (56:79).

And that is a name elided between the kāf and the nūn, and its named [object] is only [this]: "His command, when He wills a thing, is to say to it: Be! and it is" (36:82).

And the ladder of ascent to this subtle faculty is the secret of the Law (sharīʿa) and the Reality (ḥaqīqa).

And as for the other kind, it is the red magic (al-siḥr al-aḥmar): deposited in the imagination and the imaging, and hidden in the Real [while] it veils the false and the counterfeit.

It is the ascent of loss and the path of Satan to the level of abandonment, "like a mirage in a desert plain, which the thirsty one supposes to be water, until, when he comes to it, he finds it to be nothing" (24:39).

So the light turns to fire and the abode to ruin; but if God takes him by the hand and brings him forth by a subtlety with which He aids him, he crosses from it to the second ascent, and "finds God with him" (cf. 24:39).

So he knows then the abode of the Real and that by which it is distinguished, in the seat of truth, from the path of the false.

And whoever goes its going -- and [God] makes firm the divine matter, so He "pays him his reckoning in full"; but if [the wayfarer] is neglected in that abode and left upon that resting-place, [the false ascent] blows its fire upon the garments of his nature and destroys them.

Then its smoke rises to the nostrils of his highest spirit and slays it, so that he is no longer guided to what is right after it, nor understands the meaning of the Mother of the Book.

Rather, everything you cast to him of the meanings of beauty or of the varieties of perfection, he takes off with it to the wastes of misguidance.

So he comes out with it upon the form of what he has of the impossible, so that he cannot return to the Real [with any] return: "those whose striving went astray in the life of this world, while they reckon that they are doing well in deed" (18:104). And indeed I had drowned in this abundant sea, and the wave of its perilous depth nearly destroyed me, and I, on that day, was at a samāʿ [spiritual audition] in the city of Zabīd, in the year seven hundred and seventy-nine [AH].

And this samāʿ was in the house of our brother, the knowing shaykh Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Raddād; and our shaykh, the teacher of the world, the Perfect Pole and the excellent verifier Abū al-Maʿrūf Sharaf al-Dīn Ismāʿīl b. Ibrāhīm al-Jabartī, was present that day at the samāʿ.

So I called out at the top of my voice: "O God, I take refuge in You from the destroying knowledge! Reach me, O my master, reach [me]!" And the shaykh was watching over me in the very [midst of the] samāʿ, the watching of one who has, over the matter, an [intimate] awareness; so God, by his blessing, transferred me to the upright ascent which is upon the straight path -- "the path of God, to whom belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is in the earth; surely to God do [all] matters return" (42:53). Except that between the two ascents is a subtlety, but it is, in its subtlety, mighty and noble; for were we to take to expounding it, or expounding [the state of] one who returned through the absence of knowing it,

or were we to explain the state of one who perished, of the saints, in its seas, so that his light was imprinted by its fire -- we would need, in that, an expansion whose number is many and whose duration is long; and our aim is brevity, not lengthening and increase. So let us return to what we were upon, of the discourse on Thought.

Know that God created the Muhammadan Thought (al-fikr al-muḥammadī) from the light of His Name the Guide, the Right-Directing (al-Hādī al-Rashīd).

And He disclosed Himself upon it by His Name the Originator, the Restorer (al-Mubdiʾ al-Muʿīd); then He gazed upon it by the eye of the Raiser, the Witness (al-Bāʿith al-Shahīd).

So when Thought contained the secrets of these Beautiful Names, and appeared among the world in the garb of these lofty Attributes,

God created, from the thought of Muhammad (God bless him and grant him peace), the spirits of the angels of the heavens and the earth, and entrusted them with the keeping of the lowest and the highest.

So the worlds remain kept as long as they are watched over by these angels; so when the known term arrives and the time of the decreed matter comes, God seizes the spirits of these angels and transfers them to the world of the unseen by that seizing.

So the matter joins, some of it to some, and the heavens with what is in them fall upon the earth, and the matter is transferred to the Hereafter, as the matter of the outward words is transferred to the meanings.

So understand these pointings, and unlock the riddle of these expressions, [that] you may win the concealed secrets, and lift the veils of the imagined coverings.

So when you have come upon these secrets, and journeyed in the radiance of these lights, guard them under the concealment of expressions, and keep them under the seal of allusions, and do not divulge them, for divulging is treachery.

And whoever does that has forbidden himself the reward of the keeping of the trust, and has returned to the rank of the worlds after he had nearly reached the noble angels. This [is so], granting that his divulging only increases the hearer in misguidance, and only profits the one addressed [with] restriction and infirmity. And God says the truth, and He guides to the way.