The Fourth Degree of the Luminous Verse ‘For us God suffices’

One time, when a period of heedlessness coincided with my being shaken by various indispositions like old age, exile, illness, and defeat, I was overcome by a grievous anxiety that my very existence, to which I was intensely attached and by which I was captivated, would cease to be, as would the existences of all creatures. Again I had recourse to the verse For us God suffices. It told me: “Study my meaning and look through the telescope of belief!”

I looked and I saw through the eyes of belief that my miniscule being was the mirror to an infinite existence, and through an infinite expansion was the means of gaining innumerable existences; it was a word of wisdom yielding the fruits of numerous everlasting existences far surpassing itself in value. I understood with ‘the knowledge of certainty’ that due to its relation with that infinite existence, to live for an instant was as valuable as existing eternally. For by understanding through the insight of belief that my being is the work, artefact and manifestation of the Necessarily Existent, I was saved from the endless darkness of desolate fears and the pains of innumerable separations. I knew that within a temporary separation was a permanent union with the beings I loved, with which, through bonds of brotherhood to the number of Divine Names manifested in the acts related to living creatures in particular, I had gained a relation.

It is clear that those who share the same village, town or country, or the same regiment, commander, or master will feel a close brotherhood and warm friendship. While those deprived of such bonds feel a constant painful torment surrounded by darkness. The fruits of a tree, too, if they had intelligence, would feel that they were brothers, companions, and observers of each other. If the tree ceased to exist or they were plucked from it, they would experience separations to the number of fruits.

Thus, through belief and the relation that results from it, my existence —like that of all believers— gains the lights of myriad existences untouched by separation. Even if it departs itself, it is content, for they remain behind as though it had itself remained. Moreover, as is demonstrated in detail in the Twenty-Fourth Letter, the existences of all living creatures and particularly those with