because of the greatness of the station, attained only by the perfect among the men. When it gleamed for al-Shibli through the young man’s words, its incoming was stronger than al-Shibli’s locus, and therefore produced fainting within him. Every incoming stronger than the locus’s strength similarly produces fainting and swooning within it. God’s people have no footing in patience apart from God according to the common people’s interpretation.
Patience has three hundred and twenty-three degrees among the knowers who are people of lights, and two hundred and ninety-three among their people of innermost secrets. Among the People of Blame who are people of lights it has two hundred and ninety-two, and among their people of innermost secrets two hundred and sixty-two degrees.
Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Five: On Knowing the Station of Leaving Patience and Its Secrets
Among patience’s poor ways is that
it resists the Real’s overpowering at every advance.
The knowers have no patience, for
through weakness they are in a sea overflowing its shore.
Know—may God teach you—that the patience known among the common people contains resistance to divine overpowering,
