Thus he continued, he opposing his corporeal faculties, and they opposing him, and mutually struggling one against another. Then, when he observed that the negative attributes consisted in separation from bodily things, he began to strip himself of all bodily properties--to remove and reject all those things from himself, as being in no wise consistent with that state which he was now in search of.
Thus he continued, confining himself to rest in the bottom of his cave, with his head bowed down and his eyes shut, and turning himself altogether from all sensible things and the corporeal faculties, and turning all his thoughts and meditations upon the _necessarily self-existent Being_ without admitting anything else besides him: and if any other object presented itself to his imagination, he rejected it with his utmost force, and persisted therein to that degree that sometimes he did neither eat nor stir for many days together.
When he succeeded in preventing the admission of an extraneous object into that contemplation, he endeavoured as it were to disappear from himself--to detach himself entirely from his corporeal faculties, so as to be wholly taken up in the vision of that true Being.
And, thereto when at last he attained both the heaven and the earth, all spiritual forms and corporeal faculties, and all those powers that are separate from matter, all disappeared and vanished, and were as if they had never been. And amongst these his own being disappeared too, till at last there remained nothing but this _One, True, Perpetually Self-existent Being_, who spoke thus in that saying of his (the Koran): To whom now belongs the Kingdom? To this One, the Almighty God.
Thus he deeply immersed himself into this state, and witnessed “that which neither eye hath seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it ever entered into the heart of man to conceive.”
When he came to himself from that state which was like drunkenness--he began to think that his own essence did not at all differ from the essence of that True Being, and that there was nothing in him but this true essence. It appeared to him that this True, Powerful, and Glorious Being was not by any means capable of multiplicity, and that his knowledge of his essence was his very essence, from whence he argued thus: “He that has the knowledge of this essence, has the essence itself, but I have the knowledge of this essence. Ergo, I have the essence itself.”