Letters ( revised ) | The Twenty-Ninth Letter | 527
(447-527)

This path is shorter, because it consists of four steps. When impotence causes a person to give up the soul, it turns him directly to the All-Powerful One of Glory. Whereas when a person on the way of ecstatic love, the swiftest way, gives up the soul, his way directs him to a temporary beloved. Only when he discovers the beloved’s impermanence does he turn to the True Beloved.

Also, this path is much safer, because the ravings and high-flown claims of the soul are not present on it. For apart from impotence, poverty, and defect, the soul possesses nothing so that it oversteps its mark.

Also, this path is much broader and more universal. For in order to attain to a constant  awareness  of God’s  presence,  a person  is  not  compelled  to  imagine  the universe to be condemned to non-existence and to declare: “There is no existent but He,” like those who believe in the Unit y of Existence, nor to suppose the universe to be condemned to imprisonment in absolute oblivion and to say, “There is nothing witnessed but He,” like those who believe in the Unity of Witnessing. Rather, since the Qur’an has most explicitly pardoned the universe and released it from execution and  imprisonment,  the  person  on  this  path  disregards  the  above,  and  dismissing beings from working on their own account and employing them on account of the All- Glorious Creator, and in the duty of manifesting the Most Beautiful Names and being mirrors to them, he considers them from the point of view of signifying something other  than  themselves;  and being saved  from  absolute  heedlessness,  he enters  the divine  presence  permanently;  he  finds  a  way  leading  to  the  Almighty  God  in everything.

In Short: Dismissing beings from working on account of other beings, this way is to not look at them as signifying themselves.

No Voice