So be patient, and your patience is only by [the help of] God: know that patience is of several types: patience for God, patience in God, patience with God, patience away from God and patience by God. Patience for God is one of the concomitants of faith and the first degree for the people of Islam. The Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him: 'Faith consists of two halves: half is patience and half is gratitude'. This [kind of patience] is to restrain the soul from anxiety when a desired thing has eluded [it] or when something undesirable has befallen [it], and this is one of the most excellent of character traits bestowed [as gift] from the bounty of God for the folk of His religion and His obedience, and is [the patience] that entails the plenteous reward. Patience in God is to remain firm in wayfaring along the path of the Truth and to habituate the soul to spiritual struggle voluntarily and to refraining from familiars and pleasures and to [train it to] endure afflictions and [to exercise] strong resolve in orienting itself to the source of perfections, and this is a station belonging to the wayfarers which God bestows [as gift] upon whomever He will from among the people of the [spiritual] path out of His bounty. Patience with God is for the people of the Presence and the Unveiling upon [their] disengagement from the garments of the acts and the attributes and [upon their] exposure to the self-disclosures of the Beauty and the Majesty and the flow of the inrushes of intimacy and awe - thus this [type of patience] comes with presence of the heart, for the one who has a heart and with guarding against forgetfulness and absence during variegations resulting from the manifestation of the soul, which is more exacting upon the soul than being beaten on the head, even if it be extremely pleasurable. Patience away from God is for the people of crudeness and of the veil, whether it be luminous or dark, and this [type] is very loathsome and the person in question is deservedly blameworthy; and the more that he exercises this [kind of] patience the worse and the more remote that his state becomes, and the more that he is vehement therein the more blameworthy and the cruder he is; or it is for the people of the eyewitnessing and the witnessing from among the fervent lovers and the yearners who are turned about between the various stages of the self-disclosure and the self-concealment and who shun the human realm and are illumined by the light of the divine realm, subsisting without a heart and without a description. Each time that a light of the august glories of the lights of the Beauty appears to them they are consumed [by it] and are annihilated [therein], and each time that a veil is thrust infront of them and their faces are turned back as a way of making them yearn and an exaltation for them they taste of the pain of yearning and the burning of separation what their patience can no longer bear and their death is verified. That is of the states belonging to the lovers [of God] and there is nothing more burdensome than this [type of] patience and more difficult to bear and more deadly. If the lover is able to bear it then he is hidden and if he is unable to he is annihilated and destroyed in it. Shiblī [famously] said [the following] with regard to this station:
He vied patiently against patience until patience called out for his help
Whereupon the lover cried out: 'Patience, with patience!'
In other words, the lover vied against patience patiently until patience sought his help when he was on the verge of being exhausted, whereupon the lover cried out 'be patient and endure patiently' exhaustion and destruction for therein lies success and prosperity. Patience by [means of] God is for the people of fixity at the station of uprightness, those whom God has totally annihilated and in whom He has left no remnant of ego or duality, and upon whom He then bestows existence from His Essence such that they subsist in Him and act through His attributes. That is one of God's character traits, exalted be He, and none has any share in it, which is why He enjoined it upon him [the Prophet] and then clarified that that patience to which you have been enjoined does not belong with the other types of patience such that it can exist by means of your soul or your heart. Rather it is My patience, one which you can exercise only by means of Me and which you can bear only by means of My strength. It is because of the inability of his [the Prophet's] strength to fulfil [the requirements of] this [type of] patience that he [once] said: 'Sūrat Hūd has made my hairs turn grey'.
And do not grieve for them, by [succumbing to] variegations at the heart manifesting itself through its attribute, because the person who enjoys this [type of] patience sees things with the eye of the truth, so that everything that issues from them he sees as being an act of God, and every attribute manifested in them, he sees as one of His self-disclosures and he also rejects what is morally indecent by means of His judgement, since God has made him see various kinds of self-disclosures, those of vanquishing, gentleness, wrath and satisfaction, and [because] He has made him aware of His judgements and has commanded him to execute [His] judgements in their [proper] places; nor be in distress because of that which they scheme, as your breast is opened up to Me. So be with them as you see how I am with them, conducting yourself as I do and subsisting through Me and by My command.