The Answer: They were the people of truth and reality. They were also saints and experienced direct vision of the realities. They saw correctly what they saw, but since they were not correct in declarations they made while in the state of illumi­nation and witnessing, which is without comprehen­sion, and in their interpretations of their visions, which were like dreams, they were partially incor­rect. People of unveiling and direct vision (ehl-i kesf ve suhud) of that sort cannot interpret their own visions while in such a state, just as a person cannot interpret his own dream while dreaming it. Those who can interpret them are the exact scholars (muhakkik; lit. verifiers) of the legacy of prophet-hood, called "the purified ones (asfiya)." For sure, when they rise to the rank of the purified ones, the people of direct vision belonging to that group understand their errors through the guidance of the Qur'an and the Prophet's (PBUH) practices, and they correct them; and they did correct them.

Listen to this story which is the form of a compar­ison and will illustrate this truth. It is like this:

One time, there were two shepherds who were from among those who approach reality with their hearts. They milked their sheep into a wooden pail and put the pail beside them. They laid their shepherd's pipe on the pail, then one of them stretched out, overcome by sleep. He slept for a while. The other shepherd was watching him carefully when he saw something like a fly emerge from the sleeping man's nose, look at the pail of milk, enter the pipe at one end, emerge from the other, then disappear into a hole under a bush. Some while later the thing emerged again, passed down the shepherd's pipe, entered the sleeping man's nose, whereupon he awoke. He exclaimed: "I had an extraordinary dream!" His friend replied: "May God make good come of it. What was it?" The other man said: "I saw a sea of milk stretching over which was a strange bridge. The upper part of the bridge was closed and contained windows. I passed through the bridge. I saw a grove of oaks, the tops of which were ail pointed. Beneath them was a cave; I entered it, and I saw some treasure full of gold. How can this be interpreted, I  onder?"

His alert friend said to him: "The sea of milk you saw was this wooden pail, and the bridge, our shep­herd's pipe. The pointed oak trees were this bush, while the cave was this small hole. Get the pickaxe and I'll show you the treasure." He brought the pick and they dug under the bush; there they found gold enough to make them both prosperous in this world.

Thus, what the sleeping man dreamt was right, and what he saw, correct, but because he had no comprehension while dreaming and no right to inter­pret the dream, he could not distinguish between the physical world and the non-material world and his assertions were partially wrong; he said: "I saw an actual physical sea." But since the man who was awake could distinguish between the physical world and the World of Similitudes, he had the right to interpret the dream; he said: "What you saw in the dream was right, but it wasn't an actual sea; our milk pail appeared to your imagination as a sea, and. our pipe as a bridge, and so on." That means the physical and spiritual worlds have to be distin­guished from one another. If they are combined, assertions about them appear wrong.