The First consists of making known to you all the varieties of all the bounties of the True Bestower, and causing you to offer Him thanks. And you should be aware of this, and offer Him thanks and worship.

The Second is to make known to you by means of those faculties each of all the sorts of the manifestations of the Sacred Divine Names manifested in the world and to cause you to experience them. And you, by recognizing them through experiencing them, should come to believe in them.

Thus, man’s perfections develop through the achievement of these two basic aims. Through them, man becomes a true human being.

Look through the meaning of the following comparison, and see that the faculties of humanity were not given in order to gain worldly life like an animal.

For example, someone gave one of his servants twenty gold pieces, telling him to get himself a suit of clothes made out of a particular cloth. The servant went and got himself a fine suit out of the highest grade of the cloth, and put it on.

Then he saw that his employer had given another of his servants a thousand gold pieces, and putting in the servant’s pocket a piece of paper with some things written on it, had sent him to conclude some business. Now, anyone with any sense would know that the capital was not for getting a suit of clothes, for, since the first servant had bought a suit of the finest cloth with twenty gold pieces, of course these thousand gold pieces were not to be spent on that. So should the second servant not read the paper in his pocket, and looking at the first servant, give all the money to a shopkeeper for a suit of clothes, and then receive the very lowest grade of cloth and a suit fifty times worse that his friend’s, for sure his employer would reprimand him severely for his utter stupidity, and punish him angrily.

O my soul and my friend! Come to your senses! Do not spend the capital and potentialities of your life on pleasures of the flesh and this fleeting life like an animal, or even lower. Otherwise, although you are fifty times superior with regard to capital than the highest animal, you will fall fifty times lower than the lowest.

O my heedless soul! If you want to understand to a degree both the aim of your life and its essence, and the form of your life, and the true meaning of your life, and your life’s perfect happiness, then look!

The summary of the aims of your life consists of nine matters:

The First is this: To weigh up on the scales of the senses put in your being the bounties stored up in the treasuries of Divine Mercy, and to offer universal thanks.