by Allah, and that Allah did not know what each creature knew until that creature came to know it—this is a fabrication no one but he has made.

(Fifth)

He claimed that the self-disclosure of the divine Essence takes a form corresponding to the preparedness of the one manifesting, and that the recipient of this disclosure sees nothing but his own form in the mirror of the Real. He further claimed that the recipient cannot see the Real, although he knows that he has seen his own form only in Him. He used the analogy of a mirror, making the Real the mirror and the image within it the recipient’s own form.

This confirms what I have explained about his doctrine: in his view, the existence of the entities is the existence of the Real. The entities were fixed in nonexistence, and the existence of the Real then appeared within them. Thus, the recipient of the disclosure—the servant—does not see existence apart from individual essences; he sees only the essences in which existence has appeared. He therefore has no means of ever seeing existence itself. In his view, this is the ultimate limit for a creature, beyond which there is no further limit, and beyond it lies only pure nonexistence. Thus, He is your mirror in which you see yourself, and you are His mirror in which He sees His names and the manifestation of their effects.

This is because the servant sees himself—his own entity—only within the existence of the Real, which is his own existence. The servant is His mirror in which He sees His names and the manifestation of their effects, because, in his view, the names of the Real are the relations and connections between the entities and the existence of the Real. The effects of the names are the entities fixed in nonexistence, and these effects become manifest through the Real’s self-disclosure within the entities.

The entities, which constitute the reality of what is directly seen, are the mirror of the Real in which He sees His names;