In the name of God, the All-Merciful, the Most Merciful.
Chapter Two Hundred and Eleven: On Glimmers
The Real’s glimmers are what appear to my innermost secrets
through ascent and from state to state.
They may also be what appears to His beholder
without a bodily organ, through knowledge and state,
among descriptions whose witness gives you
their proof: among the folk they are like a mirage.
(The Meaning of Glimmers and the Condition of Increased Knowledge)
Know that glimmers among the Folk are what gleam to the outward innermost secrets through ascent from state to state. In our view they are what gleam to sight, when it is not restricted to the bodily organ, of essential lights and the Face’s glories, from affirmation, not negation; and what gleams of the divine names’ lights when their effects are witnessed, so that they become known through their lights.
Ascent from state to state means not returning to the state left behind while in the state one has reached, having passed to what is above it. What is meant is what the state brings of divine incoming things
Notes
Translator’s note TN5329-1: The poem repeats āl, which can mean folk or family and also mirage. The first is provisionally rendered ‘folk,’ the second ‘mirage.’ In the prose, al-ẓāhirah is taken with ‘innermost secrets’; its attachment in the compressed wording remains uncertain.
