The ingrained habits that were acquired in this world might...

The ingrained habits that were acquired in this world might become entrenched and become veils when the heart becomes focused on this world and neglects the truth. These aptitudes could also be the opposite, for example, in abandoning the adornments of this world, renouncing this vile world and cutting the attachments to it –as the necessity of attachment to the material world demands-, and turning towards what exist beyond the material world and becoming intimately acquainted with it.

Therefore, this soul, after detaching itself from materiality, spiritually surveys the forms in the world of the imaginal and spiritual lights that are in harmony with its essence.

This soul had been familiar with these forms in the past and so it has become cognizant of*“ease, abundance and a garden of bliss,” Quran 56:89,* and the forms of perfection of the soul and its spiritual pleasures will multiply and increase in relation to the descending imaginal world that is prior to the material world. The completely immaterial realm is also similar to this by necessity with respect to the increase of acquired knowledge in the material realm.

Accordingly, it witnesses lights, secrets, imaginal angels, spirits whose forms are of the intermediate world and in the most desirable way possible, all kinds of pleasures that the soul had witnessed while being attached to materiality in its realm, like eating, drinking, clothes, sex, hearing, seeing and other things. All these pleasures in this realm will be acquired through representative forms higher than them in capacity and in the same manner as the levels below it.

In the immaterial world there is no suffering, whether material or imagined nor is there any pain or sickness, for all of these [deficiencies] do not exist in the imaginal world.

If the self*(nafs)* has certain aptitudes that are not veiled from the universals, it will in certain times oversee the lights of the immaterial world and its existence, and it will acquire radiance, sublimity, beauty and perfection in a way that cannot be compared by forms or cannot be measured with imaginal measurements.

This overseeing of the self-repeats itself until the self completely masters itself and takes it as its station*(maqam),* elevating it level by level until it then oversees the realm of the Names*(al-Asma’)* , which is the realm of the pure nature*(mahd)* of all meanings and the sheer form of all radiance and sublimity.