And We made, the night of engendered being and the darkness of the body and the day of origination [from nothing] and the light of the spirit means by which and by knowledge of which one arrives at the spiritual knowledge of the Essence and the attributes. Then We effaced the sign of the night, through corruption and annihilation, and made the sign of the day, a clear sign that subsists forever, light-giving by virtue of its perfectedness and by virtue of whose light realities are perceived, that you may seek bounty from your Lord, that is, your perfection, for which you prepare yourselves, and that you may know the number of, [spiritual] levels and stations, in other words, that you may count them from the first state of your beginning to the advanced age of your end by rising through them and that you may reckon your deeds, your character traits and your states so that whenever you find an evil deed your expunge it with a good one that is its counterpart from the same genus [of action], or [whenever you find] a vice amongst your character traits you expunge it by its opposite virtue or [if it should be] a sin of one of your states you expunge it by returning repentant to the Side of the Truth; and everything, in the way of forms of knowledge and wisdoms, We have detailed, by the light of your intellects at the point of perfectedness and the descent of the Discriminating Intellect, very distinctly, that is, as differentiated knowledge that is present, as opposed to undifferentiated [knowledge] of which you are unaware, as is the case with the Discriminating Intellect at the beginning.
