Original content

English translation

The Christians all gave their hearts to him; what, after all, is the strength of the common people's imitation? They planted love for him within their breasts and imagined him to be Jesus's deputy. But he, in his inner head, was the accursed one-eyed Dajjal. O God, come to our aid, excellent Helper. There are hundreds of thousands of traps and baits, O God; we are like poor greedy birds. Moment by moment we are bound in a new trap, even if each of us becomes a falcon or a Simurgh. You free us every moment, and again we go toward a trap, O Self-Sufficient One. We keep putting wheat into this storehouse, and we lose the gathered wheat. At last, while alert, we do not reflect that this loss in the wheat comes from the mouse's trickery. Since the mouse has made a hole into our storehouse, through its craft our storehouse has been ruined. First, dear soul, repel the evil of the mouse; then strive to gather wheat. Hear from the reports of that chief of chiefs: no prayer is complete except with presence. If there is no thieving mouse in our storehouse, where is the wheat of forty years of deeds? Why does the crumb-by-crumb sincerity of each day not gather in this storehouse of ours? Many a fiery spark leapt from the iron, and the burned heart received and drew it in; but in the darkness a hidden thief puts his finger on the sparks, drawing the sparks away one by one so that no lamp may be lit from heaven. If there are thousands of traps underfoot, when You are with us there is no grief at all. When Your favors abide with us, how could there be fear of that vile thief? Every night You free the spirits from the body's trap and make the tablets blank. Every night the spirits are freed from this cage, unoccupied, neither ruling nor ruled by anyone. At night prisoners are unaware of prison; at night kings are unaware of sovereignty. No grief or thought of profit and loss, no imagining of this person and that person. This is the state of the gnostic even without sleep; God said, 'They are asleep': do not turn away from this. Asleep to the conditions of the world by day and night, like a pen in the hand of the Lord's turning. The one who does not see the hand in the writing supposes the act comes from the pen's movement. A trace of this state of the gnostic was shown; sensory sleep carried off the intellect too. Their souls had gone into the desert beyond quality; their spirits were at rest, and so were their bodies. And with a whistle You draw them back into the trap, drawing them all into giving and into judgment before the Judge. When the dawn-light raises its head and the golden vulture of the sky spreads its wing, the Cleaver of the morning, Israfil-like, brings them all from that realm into form. He makes bodies for the expanded spirits; He makes each body pregnant again. He strips the horse of the souls bare of the saddle; this is the secret: sleep is the brother of death. But so that they may return by day, He places a long tether on their feet, so that daytime draws them back from that meadow and brings them from the pasture under the burden. Would that He had preserved this soul like the Companions of the Cave, or like Noah's ark, so that from this flood of wakefulness and consciousness this inner mind, eye, and ear might have been freed. O how many Companions of the Cave there are in the world, beside you, before you, at this very moment. The friend is with him, the cave is with him, in song; but there is a seal on your eye and on your ear, so what use is it?