Beautified for mankind is love of lusts, because man is composite of the higher world and the lower one, and from the time of his configuration and his birth, his primordial nature is veiled and the fire of his instinct subsides, while the light of his insight is extinguished by the veils of nature and the corporeal coverings and the bitter water of sensual pleasures as well as the tempestuous winds of animal lusts so that he becomes abandoned by the Truth in the abodes of estrangement and the habitations of darkness, carried along through trials of various kinds of toils and troubles, when suddenly he finds a shimmering light of discernment and a flash of lightning from the world of the intellect and a summoner [all of which are] calling him away from caprice and Satan and so he falls [this summoner] and chances upon an exalted waystation and an elegant garden in which there is all that the souls can desire and the eyes can delight in. He takes up his abode therein, grateful for his effort and satisfied with his [new] dwelling, saying: 'When the morning comes the people praise their night journeying, while the summoner has prepared for them a hospitable reception'. Such is the love of lusts, that is [the love of] the mentioned desired things and the way that these are made beautiful for him, which is an enjoyment given to him in accordance with how much he has of the lower world and of perfection for his life [in this world] by which he has been veiled from the enjoyment of the life of the Hereafter and its perfection in accordance with how much he has of the higher world, while he is inattentive to the fact that this [latter] is more splendid and more pleasurable, purer for that matter and more abiding, which is the meaning of His words: but God - with Him is the more excellent abode. If the divinely-granted success and the alerting of the inner secret should reach him, in conjunction with the prophetic apprising, as He says:
