The child sports with it, plays, and rejoices in his delight 1 , while the bird, throughout all of this, swallows the agonies of death and encounters various types of torment. Likewise, O soul, you must beware of drinking and intoxication; for intoxication renders the soul like a ship sailing amidst the water's current and waves with no sailor or manager to direct it. Similarly, when the soul departs from the Intellect, nature carries it away in a wandering, erratic flow that has neither order nor system, leading it to perish and waste away.
O soul: Regarding the thing whose knowledge comes to you, and then its forgetfulness returns to haunt you—be certain that its knowledge only comes to you from without, through a "matter" that mediates between you and the knowledge of that thing. When forgetfulness returns to you, it is only due to the darkness of the body, its discord, its weight, and its pulling of you toward its own essence. It hinders you through the multiplicity of its opposites and its composition; thus you return, O soul, forgetting what you had remembered and ignorant of what you had known.
O soul: An example of this is like the sight, the objects of vision, darkness, and light. The sight may exist in darkness while the objects of vision are present before it, yet it does not see them and is too weak to perceive them. But when the radiant light reaches it, it aids the sight in perceiving its objects and sensations, which were previously absent from it. Thus, that light acts as a guide toward them, a completer of its perception of them, and makes that perception exist within it "in actuality" (bi-l-fi'l), after it had been there only "in potentiality" (bi-l-quwwa).