O soul: Separate yourself from nature through your imagination, then look: do you find anything other than your essence and its being? If you describe your essence, then say: it is the formal, fashioned substance, the mover and the moved, the living, rational, discerning, and introspective ¹ toward the meanings of its will and pursuits;

the possessor of noble, virtuous characters which are Justice, Wisdom, Generosity, and Mercy. If you describe your essence with these meanings, and they were natural and essential to you, then you must admit that you are the living, subtle, and managed being. But if you aspire to describe your "dross" (kadarak), do you find for it an essential description or attribute without borrowing for it attributes and descriptions that are external to it? Does it not then follow that you must admit that something with no essential attribute is a dead object, destined by its nature to be utilized? You must understand, O soul, that what you act upon within nature is but a reflection of what the First Cause acts upon within you. Whenever you contemplate this principle within the senses, you will find it to be the very essence of the Sovereign Order.

O soul: Ponder this parable; you may either laugh in wonder or take heed in fear: If two birds of the same species were bound together by a single cord and left as such, their torment would be immense and rest would be far from them. The joy of each would lie solely in being separated from the other. If two birds of identical kind suffer such agony from being bound, imagine then things bound together despite being opposites in form and essence—like a lamb tied to a wolf, a bull tied to a predator, or a living being tied to a corpse! Indeed, is there anyone more wretched than a man of knowledge bound to one of ignorance?