Here the Shaykhs are at variance. Some hold that a “state” may be permanent, while others reject this view. Ḥárith Muḥásibí maintained that a “state” may be permanent. He argued that love and longing and “contraction” (_qabḍ_) and “expansion” (_basṭ_) are “states”: if they cannot be permanent, then the lover would not be a lover, and until a man’s “state” becomes his attribute (_ṣifat_) the name of that “state” is not properly applied to him. It is for this reason that he holds satisfaction to be one of the “states”, and the same view is indicated by the saying of Abú `Uthmán: “During the last forty years God has never put me in a ‘state’ that I disliked.” Other Shaykhs deny that a “state” can be permanent. Junayd says: “‘States’ are like flashes of lightning: their permanence is merely a suggestion of the lower soul (_nafs_).” Some have said, to the same effect: “‘States’ are like their name,” i.e. they vanish almost as soon as they descend (_taḥillu_) on the heart. Whatever is permanent becomes an attribute, and attributes subsist in an object which must be more perfect than the attributes themselves; and this reduces the doctrine that “states” are permanent to an absurdity. I have set forth the distinction between “state” and “station” in order that you may know what is signified by these terms wherever they occur in the phraseology of the Ṣúfís or in the present work. In conclusion, you must know that satisfaction is the end of the “stations” and the beginning of the “states”: it is a place of which one side rests on acquisition and effort, and the other side on love and rapture: there is no “station” above it: at this point mortifications (_mujáhadát_) cease. Hence its beginning is in the class of things acquired by effort, its end in the class of things divinely bestowed. Therefore it may be called either a “station” or a “state”.