Question: The Unity of Existence is consid­ered by many people to be the most elevated station, but there was no explicit sign of it among the Com­panions and foremost the four Rightly-Guided Caliphs, who were at the level of the greatest saint­hood {veldyet-i kiibra), or among the Imams of the Prophet's Family and foremost the five People of the Cloak, or the great interpreters of the law and the generation following the Companions and fore­most the founders of the four schools of law. So did those who lived later advance further than them? Did they find a better highway on which to proceed?

The Answer: God forbid! Nobody at all has the ability to advance further than those purified ones who were the stars and heirs closest to the Sun of Prophethood; the highway is indeed theirs.

As for the Unity of Existence , it is a way and a state, but it is deficient. However, because it is illu­minating and pleasurable, most of those who have reached that degree on their spiritual journeyings have not wanted to leave it; they have remained there and supposed it to be the ultimate degree.

If the spirit of the person who takes this way is divested of materiality and intermediaries and he has rent the veil of causes, and is immersed in a state of witnessing (suhud: direct vision), then an experien­tial - not pertaining to knowledge - unity of exis­tence that arises not from the Unity of Existence but from the Unity of Witnessing (vahdet-iis-suhud), may obtain for him a certain attainment, a spiritual station. He may even reach the degree of denying the universe for God's sake. But if he is submerged in causes and preoccupied with materiality, for him, the Unity of Existence may mean going so far as denying God on account of the universe.

Yes, the great highway is the highway of the Companions, and those that followed them, and the Purified Ones. Their universal rule was, "the reality of things is constant." In accordance with the sense of "There is nothing that resembles Him,"² Almighty God has absolutely nothing that resembles Him. He is utterly beyond being comprehended in place or class and being divided into parts. His rela­tion with beings is creativity. Beings are not imagin­ings or fancies as those who followed the way of the Unity of Existence said. Visible things too are Almighty God's works. Everything is not "Him," everything is "from Him." For events cannot be preeternal. We shall make this matter easier to under­stand with two comparisons: