spirits, are like words. They are spoken and written down, then disappear. But in place of their own existences, they leave behind numerous existences which may be counted as second degree existences, like their meanings, their similitudes and forms, and their results, and if they are blessed, their rewards and their realities. Only then do they pass beneath the veil.

In just the same way, when they depart from external existence, my existence and the existences of all living creatures, leave behind them their spirits, if they possess them, and their meanings, and realities, and similitudes, and the worldly results and fruits of the hereafter produced by them individually; they leave their forms and their identities behind in memories and on the Preserved Tablet, and in the films displaying eternal vistas, and in the exhibitions of pre-eternal knowledge; and they leave the Divine glorifications offered by their essential beings, which represent them and give them permanence, in the notebooks of their deeds; and their innate responses to the manifestations of the Divine Names and what the Names necessitate, and their being existent mirrors to them, they leave in the sphere of the Names. They leave behind in their places numerous non-physical existences like these, more valuable than their external existences, then they depart. This I knew with ‘the knowledge of certainty.’

Thus, through belief and the insight and relationship resulting from belief, one may lay claim to the above-mentioned everlasting, immaterial existences. In the absence of belief, besides being deprived of all those other existences, even one’s own existence goes for nothing, for oneself, and is lost in non-existence.

At one time, I felt great sorrow at the speedy destruction of the spring flowers; I even pitied those delicate creatures. But the above-mentioned truth arising from belief shows that such flowers become flowers in the world of meaning. Each like a fruit-producing tree or a shoot, —in respect of the lights of existence— all those existences apart from spirit produce a hundredfold profit. Their external existences do not go to non-existence, they are hidden. They are also the new forms of the permanent reality of a species. For the beings of last spring such as the leaves, flowers, and fruits, are the same as those of this spring; the difference is only apparent. I realized that the apparent difference, even, was to allow those words