also be mistaken, for no one other than the prophets is immune from error.

These people heard the name of Allah and resolved to worship and know Him. They encountered the marks of His handiwork in created things and imagined those marks to be Him—like someone who has only heard of the sun: when he sees its rays spread through air and earth, he thinks the rays are the sun itself, never lifting his physical or inner sight to the sun that hangs in the sky.

Likewise, the insight of their hearts never rises to the Lord of the worlds, who is above everything and distinct from His creatures.

The reason is that their hearts behold a simple, unqualified existence—absolute, without any specific name such as the Living, the All-Knowing, or the All-Powerful; without attributes, without any differentiation whatsoever. This is nothing more than generic, shared existence.

Yet this “witnessing” occurs only within their own minds; it has no reality outside them. Many who speak with them cannot even picture what they claim to witness, so they assume he has failed to grasp their vision.

I have spoken with more than one of them and shown him that what he beholds is merely a mental construct, and that—even if it were assumed to exist outside the mind—it would be only a quality of existing things, or a part of them. Nonetheless, while believing it to be externally real, they also presume that nothing exists outside except what they have witnessed. They become oblivious to the sensory faculty that apprehends concrete particulars, and they disengage their intellects from conceiving them, until they can no longer distinguish one existent from another.

Then they say, “Sense perception introduces differentiation,” and thereafter they bear witness to this undifferentiated existence