Thus, someone devoted to love, remembrance, and worship experiences a sense of the Lord’s presence in his heart and an intimacy with Him that someone unlike him does not. The same applies to faith in the Messenger: one person may know more about his attributes, while another loves him more. Likewise, with well-known individuals, one man may know more about someone he has seen, while another loves that person more. And:

“Souls are troops assembled: those that recognize one another unite, and those that do not recognize one another remain at odds.”

Their recognition of one another consists in their affinity and similarity in what they know, love, and dislike.

Many of these worshippers, whose hearts witness a mental image and who lose themselves in what they witness, imagine that they have seen Allah with their own eyes. This is because the power of witnessing has overwhelmed their hearts, leaving them without reason by which to distinguish. It is the heart that perceives things, sometimes through the outward senses and sometimes by itself. They therefore cease to distinguish between these two modes of perception. If they lose awareness of the distinction between them, they imagine that they have seen Him with their own eyes. If they lose awareness of the distinction between the one witnessing and the One witnessed, they imagine that they themselves are He, as it is related that Abū Yazīd said:

“There is none in this robe but Allah.”

And as another said:

“In You I lost awareness of myself,
And thought that You were I.”

The beloved had thrown himself into the water, and the lover threw himself in after him.

All this results from the strength of the heart’s witnessing and the weakness of reason. It resembles what a sleeper sees: because his reason is absent during sleep, he imagines that he sees what he sees with his physical eyes, and that he hears what he hears