do not change into one another. His words “through your reality with your Lord” mean that, when you look into your own reality, you find yourself a pure servant: incapable, dead, weak, nonexistent, possessing no existence. You are like this substance, which, unless it is clothed in forms, displays no entity in existence.
(The Self-Disclosure of the Names and the Persistence of the Reality of Servanthood)
This servant clothes himself in the forms of the divine Names, through which his entity appears. The first Name he puts on is Existence, so that he appears existent to himself and can receive everything an existent can receive insofar as it is existent. He thus receives all the divine Names that the Real bestows upon him as robes.
He is then characterized as the Living, the Powerful, the Knowing, the Willing, the Hearing, the Seeing, the Speaking, the Thankful, the Ever-Merciful, the Creator, the Giver of Form, and by all the Names, just as this body is characterized as stone, gold, silver, copper, water, or air. The reality of corporeality does not depart from any of these despite the presence of these attributes. Likewise, the reality of a human being’s being a human servant does not depart from him despite the presence of these divine Names within him.
This is the meaning of his words “through your reality with your Lord”: that is, because of your reality’s connection with your Lord. You are therefore never without a divine form in which you appear, just as this body is never without a form in which it appears. Just as you vary through the forms of the divine Names and, according to each form, a Name is applied to you different from the others, so the names of being stone and being gold apply to this substance because of the description, not because of its entity.
(The Scope of the Terminology and the Poles of the Dwelling)
