this as being to the True One—glorified be He—what the brain is to a human being: in it He determines what He will do before it comes into being. They make other such claims, which we have explained and shown to be false elsewhere.
Some of them claim to have learned this through unveiling and direct witnessing, but their claim is false. They have merely adopted it from these philosophizers, either blindly following them or agreeing with their unsound approach, as did the authors of the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity and others like them.
What someone has adopted from others may take shape within his own mind, and he then supposes it to be an unveiling, just as a Christian imagines the Trinity in which he believes. He may also see it in a dream and suppose it to be an unveiling, when it is merely an imagined representation of what he believes. Many people who hold false beliefs undertake spiritual exercises that polish their souls; their beliefs then take shape before them, and they suppose these to be unveilings. We have discussed this at length elsewhere.
The point here is that, concerning their claim that the Throne is the ninth sphere, one may say:
They have no evidence for it, whether rational or scriptural.
As for rational evidence:
The leading philosophers expressly acknowledge that they have found no proof that nothing else exists beyond the ninth sphere. Indeed, they have not even established that there are only nine spheres; there may be more. Rather, the differing motions, eclipses, and similar phenomena led them to the conclusions they stated. As for anything whose existence they have no evidence to establish, they know neither that it exists nor that it does not.
For example:
They determined that one celestial body lies below another because the lower one eclipses the upper, but not the reverse. From this they inferred that the upper body lies in a sphere above the lower one. Likewise, from the differing motions they inferred that the spheres are distinct, even positing within a single sphere several