Then, after some time, he changed the verse to:

“Indeed, it is right for me to love existence and its inhabitants.”

I asked him about this, and he replied:

“The initial station is to see created things as veils and thus renounce them. Then one sees them as sites of manifestation and disclosure, and so it becomes right to love them, as one poet said:

‘I kiss the ground where her beauty passed …
How much more the house where her beauty moved!’”

He related: Ibn ‘Arabī said, after reciting these two verses by Abū Nuwās:

“The glass grew delicate, the wine grew clear …
Their likeness made the matter indistinct.
As though there were wine but no cup …
As though there were a cup but no wine.”

“He clothed Himself in the form of the world; its outward aspect is His creation, and its inward aspect is His reality.”

One of the predecessors said:

“The very thing you see is an essence you do not see, and the essence you do not see is the very thing you see. Allah alone; multiplicity is an illusion.”

Shaykh Qutb al-Dīn ibn Sab‘īn said:

“A sovereign Lord and a perishing servant—and you are that. Allah alone; multiplicity is an illusion.”

Shaykh Muhyī al-Dīn ibn ‘Arabī said:

“O human form, whose secret is My meaning …
You would not, you see, have been created for the command, were it not for Me.
We willed you and brought you into being as a human creature …
That you might behold Us in the most perfect of things.”