thought their Lord did not know much of what they did instead thought God would not take them to task for an offense because of His pardon and passing over offenses, and their collectedness upon this veiled them from His assault and severe punishment, He would not have taken them to task. Their opinion would have attached only to something possible.
(Aspiration of Reality and the Ranks’ Gradation)
Aspiration of reality, gathering aspirations through inspiration’s purity, is the aspiration of the great shaykhs among the people of God. They collect their aspirations upon the Real and make them one through their object’s oneness, fleeing multiplicity and seeking to make multiplicity one or to affirm oneness. Gnostics disdain multiplicity, not its oneness, whether within attributes, relations, or names.
They differ in this, occupying differing levels. God deals with them according to what they possess, without turning them back from it, for every station has a face toward the Real. He does this only to distinguish the servant with a great special relation to God, whom He fashioned for Himself, from other servants.
God set the cosmos according to ranks to inhabit the ranks. Without gradation within the cosmos, some ranks would be empty and uninhabited, whereas nothing within existence is empty: all is inhabited. Every rank must have an inhabitant whose ruling accords with it. Hence parts of the cosmos surpass others.
(Knowledge, Will, and Power)
Its root within divine matters is the divine names. How does the Knower’s encompassing compare with the One Who Wills’ encompassing, and with the encompassing of
