על החלומות, ספר א י״טOn Dreams, Book I 19
א׳
1[115] This long course we have run to no other end than to shew how it fares with the Practiser’s mind. Its movements are uneven, sometimes towards fruitfulness, sometimes to the reverse; it is continually, as it were, ascending and descending. In the time of fruitfulness and uplifting, there shine upon it the archetypal and incorporeal rays of the fountain of reason, God the consummator, but when it sinks low and fails to yield, its light is the images of these rays, immortal “words” which it is customary to call angels.
ב׳
2[116] That is why, in this passage, he says “he met a place; for the sun was set” (Gen. 28:11). For when the soul is forsaken by the rays of God, by means of which apprehensions of things are gained in greatest distinctness, there rises the secondary feebler light, not as before of facts but of words, just as is the case in this material world; for the moon, ranking second to the sun when that has set, sends forth upon the earth a dimmer light.
ג׳
3[117] And further, to meet a “place” or “word” is an all-sufficient gift to those who are unable to see God Who is prior to “place” and “word,” inasmuch as they did not find their soul entirely bereft of illumination, but when that glorious undiluted light sank out of their sky, they obtained that which has been diluted. For we read in Exodus (10:23), “For the children of Israel there was light in all their dwellings,” so that night and darkness are for ever banished, with which they live whose blindness is not of the body, but of the soul, who know not virtue’s rays.
ד׳
4[118] Some, supposing that in this passage “sun” is a figurative expression for sense and mind, our own accepted standards of judgement, and “place” for the divine word, have understood the passage in this way: “the Practiser met a divine word when the mortal and human light had gone down.”
ה׳
5[119] For so long as mind and sense-perception imagine that they get a firm grasp, mind of the objects of mind and sense of the objects of sense, and thus move aloft in the sky, the divine Word is far away. But when each of them acknowledges its weakness, and going through a kind of setting passes out of sight, right reason is forward to meet and greet at once the practising soul, whose willing champion he is when it despairs of itself and waits for him who invisibly comes from without to its succour.