And he said (May Allah be pleased with him):

48. A sign of the heart’s death is the absence of sadness over the acts of obedience that you have neglected and the abandonment of regret over the mistakes that you have made.

49. Let no sin (dhanb) reach such proportion in your eyes that it cuts you off from having a good opinion of Allah, for, indeed, whoever knows his Lord considers his sin as paltry next to His generosity.

50. There is no minor sin (sagheera) when His justice confronts you; and there is no major sin (kabeera) when His grace confronts you.

51. No deed is more fruitful for the heart than the one you are not aware of and which is deemed paltry by you.

52. He only made an inspiration (waarid) come upon you so that you would go (waarid) to Him.

53. He made an inspiration come upon you so as to get you out of the grip of alterities (min yadi’-aghyaar) and free you from bondage to created things (min riqqi’l-aathaar).

54 He made an inspiration come upon you so as to take you out of the prison of your existence to the unlimited space of your contemplation (ilaa fadaa’i shuhoodika).

55. Lights (al-anwaar) are the riding-mounts (mataayaa) of hearts and of their innermost centers (al-asraar).

56. Light is the army of the heart just as darkness is the army of the soul. So when Allah wishes to come to the help of His servant He furnishes him with armies of Lights (junood al-anwaar) and cuts off from him the reinforcements of darkness and alterities (madad adh-dhulm wa’l-aghyaar).

57. Insight (al-Kashf) belongs to the Light (an-nur), discernment (al-hukm) to the intellect (al-basira), and both progression (al-iqbaal) and retrogression (al-idbaar) belong to the heart (al-qalb).

58. Let not obedience make you joyous because it comes from you, but rather, be joyous over it because it comes from Allah to you. “Say: In the grace of Allah and
in His mercy, in that, they should rejoice. It is better than that which they hoard.” [Quran 10:58]

59. He prevents those who are voyaging to Him from witnessing their deeds and those who are united with Him from contemplating their states. He does that for the voyagers because they have not realized sincerity (as-sidq) towards Allah in those works; and He does that for those united with Him because he makes them absent from contemplating those states by contemplating Him (bi-shuhoodihi).

Chapter VII, next