Sanai, the poet of Ghazna, wrote of the soul's ascent through the celestial spheres:
"The servant journeys toward the Place of Return, climbing through sphere upon sphere. At each station, a death is required. The coarse self must die for the subtle self to emerge. The subtle self must die for the spirit to be revealed. The spirit itself must dissolve into the Ocean of Being."
And Farid ud-Din, in his Book of Affliction, spoke further:
"Forty stations the seeker must traverse. At each station, suffering awaits. Not punishment, but purification. Not cruelty, but the stripping away of that which is not essential.
"The moth does not avoid the flame but seeks it. The lover does not flee from the pain of love but embraces it. For what is pain but the evidence of transformation?
"I wandered through forty stages of grief before I understood: the affliction was the path. There was no path beyond it, around it, or despite it. The way forward was through.
"And when I had been burned to ash, when nothing remained of what I had called myself, then and only then did the Ocean receive me."
Teaching 2
Suffering is not the obstacle to wisdom but its very substance. Flee from affliction and you flee from transformation itself.