Junayd and his followers prefer sobriety to intoxication. They say that intoxication is evil, because it involves the disturbance of one’s normal state and loss of sanity and self-control; and inasmuch as the principle of all things is sought either by way of annihilation or subsistence, or of effacement or affirmation, the principle of verification cannot be attained unless the seeker is sane. Blindness will never release anyone from the bondage and corruption of phenomena. The fact that people remain in phenomena and forget God is due to their not seeing things as they really are; for if they saw, they would escape. Seeing is of two kinds: he who looks at anything sees it either with the eye of subsistence (_baqá_) or with the eye of annihilation (_faná_). If with the eye of subsistence, he perceives that the whole universe is imperfect in comparison with his own subsistence, for he does not regard phenomena as self-subsistent; and if he looks with the eye of annihilation, he perceives that all created things are non-existent beside the subsistence of God. In either case he turns away from created things. On this account the Apostle said in his prayer: “O God, show us things as they are,” because whoever thus sees them finds rest. Now, such vision cannot be properly attained except in the state of sobriety, and the intoxicated have no knowledge thereof. For example, Moses was intoxicated; he could not endure the manifestation of one epiphany, but fell in a swoon (Kor. vii, 139): but our Apostle was sober; he beheld the same glory continuously, with ever-increasing consciousness, all the way from Mecca, until he stood at the space of two bow-lengths from the Divine presence (Kor. liii, 9).