A Quote by Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn al-`Arabi on anguish, appearance, divinity, eternity, existence, experience, god, knowledge, maxims, meaning, names, nostalgia, reality, and relatives

The Names . . . have existed from all eternity: these Names are designated as "Lords" (Arbab), who often have all the appearance of hypostases though they cannot strictly be defined as such. We know them only by our knowledge of ourselves (that is the basic maxim). God describes Himself to us through ourselves. Which means that the divine Names are essentially relative to the beings who name them, since these beings discover and experience them in their own mode of being. . . . Thus the divine Names have meaning and full reality only through and for beings . . . in which they are manifested. Likewise from all eternity, these forms, substrate of the divine Names, have existed in the divine Essence (A 'yan thabita). And it is these latent individualities who from all eternity have aspired to concrete being in actu. Their aspiration is itself nothing other than the nostalgia of the divine Names yearning to be revealed. And this nostalgia of the divine Names is nothing other than the sadness of the unrevealed God, the anguish He experiences in His unknownness and occultation.