and the “soul” attached to it. They sometimes likened its relation to the True One—glorified is He—to that of the brain to a human being, where actions are planned before they take place. These are among the assertions we have explained and shown to be false elsewhere.
Some of them claim to have learned this through unveiling and direct witnessing, yet their claim is a lie. They have merely taken it from these philosophizers, either blindly following them or agreeing with their corrupt method, as did the authors of the “Epistles of the Brethren of Purity” and others like them. What someone has uncritically adopted from others may take shape within his own soul, and he may mistake it for unveiling, just as a Christian pictures the “Trinity” in which he believes. He may even see it in a dream and suppose it to be unveiling, when it is merely an imagined representation of what he believes. Many people with corrupt beliefs undertake spiritual exercises that polish their souls, so that their beliefs take shape before them and they mistake them for unveiling. We have discussed this at length elsewhere.
(The point here is that, concerning their assertion that the “Throne” is the ninth sphere, it may be said that they have no evidence for it, whether rational or scriptural. As for “rational evidence,” the leading philosophers explicitly acknowledge that they have no proof that nothing else exists beyond the ninth sphere. Indeed, they have no proof even that there are only nine spheres; there may be more. Rather, the differing motions, eclipses, and similar phenomena have led them to the conclusions they have stated. As for anything whose existence they have no evidence to establish, they know neither that it exists nor that it does not.