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Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi – Hikmat al-ishraq [translated by Henry Corbin and Nancy Pearson

The suprasensory realities encountered by the prophets, the Initiates and others appear to them sometimes in the form of lines of writing, sometimes in the hearing of  a voice which may be gentle and sweet and which can also be terrifying.  Sometimes they see human forms of extreme beauty who speak to them in most beautiful words and converse with them intimately about the invisible world; at other times these forms appear to them like those delicate figures proceeding from the most refined art of the painters.  On occasion they are shown as if in an enclosure, at other time the forms and figures appear suspended.  Everything which is perceived in dream – mountains, oceans and continents, extraordinary voices, human personages – all these are so many figures and forms which are self subsistent and need no substratum