all his life long,’ because to regard other than God is to be handed over to other than God, and one who is left at the mercy of other than God is lost. Therefore the life of contemplatives is the time during which they enjoy contemplation; time spent in ocular vision they do not reckon as life, for that to them is really death. Thus, when Bāyazīd was asked how old he was, he replied, ‘Four years.’ They said to him, ‘How can that be?’ He answered, ‘I have been veiled from God by this world for seventy years, but I have seen Him during the last four years: the period in which one is veiled does not belong to one’s life.’” I take the following quotation from the _Mawāqif_ of Niffarī, an author with whom we shall become better acquainted as we proceed: “God said to me, ‘The least of the sciences of nearness is that you should see in everything the effects of beholding Me, and that this vision should prevail over you more than your gnosis of Me.’” Explanation by the commentator: “He means that the least of the sciences of nearness (proximity to God) is that when you look at anything, sensibly or intellectually or otherwise, you should be conscious of beholding God with a vision clearer than your vision of that thing. There are diverse degrees in this matter. Some mystics say that they never see anything without seeing God before it. Others say, ‘without seeing God after it,’ or ‘with it’; or they say that they see nothing but God. A certain Sūfī said, ‘I made the pilgrimage and saw the Kaʿba, but not the Lord of the Kaʿba.’ This is the perception of one who is veiled. Then he said, ‘I made the pilgrimage again, and I saw both the Kaʿba and the Lord of the Kaʿba.’ This is contemplation of the Self-subsistence through which everything subsists, _i.e._ he saw the Kaʿba subsisting through the Lord of the Kaʿba. Then he said, ‘I made the pilgrimage a third time, and I saw the Lord of the Kaʿba, but not the Kaʿba.’ This is the ‘station’ of _waqfat_ (passing-away in the essence). In the present case the author is referring to contemplation of the Self-subsistence.” So much concerning the theory of illumination. But, as Mephistopheles says, “_grau ist alle Theorie_”; and though to most of us the living experience is denied, we can hear its loudest echoes and feel its warmest afterglow in the poetry which it has created. Let me translate part of a Persian ode by the dervish-poet, Bābā Kūhī of Shīrāz, who died in 1050 A.D.