Your women are your tillage, so come to your tillage as you like. The servant has a soul and a heart. The soul is from the low world, and its root is water and dust. The heart is from the high world, that is, the lordly subtlety, and its foundation is pure light. The soul's station is absence, and the heart's station is witnessing. MuṣṬafā alluded to this with his words, “There is no heart that is not between two fingers of God.” God gave the soul, which stays absent, the same living quarters as its similars, and He made this a favor. He said, “Your women are your tillage, so come to your tillage as you like.” In another place He said, “Marry the women who seem goodly to you” [4:3]. In another place He said, “That you may rest in them, and He placed between you love and mercy” [30:21]. Finding one's own shares and inclining toward similars in this manner is the portion of the soul, which remains in the lowland of jealousy. As for the heart, it has the station of contemplation, so it is forbidden to incline toward any others or to come down to any creature. Until it cuts itself off from creation and makes its own secret core pure of other than the Real, it will not come under these words: “He loves those who make themselves pure” [2:222]. The Lord of the Worlds loves those who are pure in this manner. He calls them men when He says, “In it are men who love to make themselves pure, and God loves those who make themselves pure” [9:108]. Know also that in this house of the decree, vile things are of two sorts. One is vileness of entity, which can never become pure by washing. If you put a corpse into the ocean a thousand times, it will never become pure, for the impurity belongs to its own entity. The other is vileness of attribute. At root something is pure, but an impurity has reached it. If you wash it, it becomes pure. This impurity, however, is of two sorts. One is flimsy, so it becomes pure with a single water. The other is heavy, so it must be washed with water and dust to become pure.
