Understand this, if you are living and rational; but if you are dead and ignorant, how far you are from being certain of it or perceiving its significance!

O soul: Indeed, the noble species only descended into the world of generation to examine it. But when they arrived and encountered its meanings, they were made to forget their intellectual realm and became ignorant of their own formal essence. Whenever they recover the memory of what they were made to forget, they become observers of both worlds together, distinguishing between them by nobility and baseness. They possess the choice to dwell within whichever of the two they prefer. Once they perceive, through their intellectual insight, the loftiness of the noble rank over the lowliness of the base rank, they will then prefer the return to what suits them in the sense of what they truly are. They shall separate from that which accompanied them by accident, departing from it and renouncing it. Realize this, O soul, for within it lies great rest, immense benefit, and an eternal, radiant happiness.

O soul: Indeed, exhortations and reminders are the polish that removes rust from souls. A mirror that is rusted by a fleeting, quick-to-vanish accident can be restored by the polisher’s buffing. But the mirror that has accepted rust through a fixed, slow-to-vanish accident—moving from the stage of potentiality to the stage of actuality—that rust has become a firm and dominant nature within it.