And out of it is the spirit of that created being. Thus, he made clear through this that all the experiential forms [al-suwar al-hissiyyah] existing in plain view, which are witnessed in time, are but reflections of those intellectual forms.

And Jalal al-Din al-Sufi said, narrating a report from some of the divine sages: "Verily, sensory things are pathways to intellectual realities, and the world of visibility ['alam al-shahadah] is a similitude of the world of the unseen ['alam al-ghayb]. For everything within the realm of the dominion ['alam al-malakut] is absent from the world of visibility; we can neither comprehend it nor reach knowledge of it save through a similitude within our own world—the one we witness and rationalize. We come to know, then, the meanings of what is hidden by means of what is present, as a grace from the Creator—majestic is His power. Were it not for that, we would not have understood those secrets, nor would we have rationalized those lights. Furthermore, these four natures were brought into being after the likeness of the flowing stream, the universal fountain, and the foundational substance, from whose illumination emerged the triplicity [al-tathlith] and the quadruplicity [al-tarbi'],