O you who believe, with the faith of knowledge, for a believer by his entified faith cannot be forgetful in his prayers, draw not near to prayer, that is, do not draw near to the state of presence communion with God when in your state you are, inebriated, by the sleep of forgetfulness or by the wines of desires and the love of this world, until you know what you are saying, in your communions and your hearts are not preoccupied with the distractions of this world and its insinuations lest you be distracted from Him, nor in a state where you are distant from the Truth by the intensity of [your] inclination to the soul and the pursuit of its pleasures, lusts or shares or finding comfort in these, unless you are traversing a way, [unless] you are passing through as you wayfare along one of the paths in which you give it enjoyment [of these things] in the measure that is necessary or beneficial, such as when passing through the path of nourishment by means of food and drink in order to fulfil a need, to preserve your strength and to garb yourselves against heat or cold, or to conceal your private parts, or to engage in sexual relations in order to sustain your lineage without being totally drawn to [any of] that simply on the basis of desire such that it is imprinted on you and cannot be removed or it becomes difficult [to do so], until you have washed yourselves, that is, [until] you have cleansed yourselves of that configuration resulting from your attraction to the lower aspect with the water of repentance and the asking of forgiveness and [from] the springs of apology and absolution. But if you are sick, in heart, having lost its soundness because of the sicknesses that are the corrupt beliefs and the ruinous vile traits, or on a journey, in the wilderness of ignorance and perplexity in pursuit of the pleasures of the soul and abominable matter through covetousness; or if any of you comes from, having been ensconced in the soil of property and the acquisition of transient things, polluted by the configuration of the object of his love and his inclinations, with that configuration deeply embedded in him; or you have touched women, [or] you have adhered to the soul and have embraced it and its [sources of] pleasure and lust; and you can find no water, [no] knowledge to guide you to ridding yourselves of it and to set you right by purging yourselves of it, then resort to wholesome soil, then orient yourselves towards the wholesome soil of your preparedness, seek it and then return to the original preparedness of primordial nature, and wipe, with its light, your faces and your hands, that is, your existing essences and attributes, by alighting [at the stations along the journey] and effacing the configurations that attach you to these and cause you to dispose of them, for that soil effaces their vestiges and leaves them pure as they once were. God is ever Pardoning, of these dark configurations and the embedding of those veiling traits when you abandon them and refrain from them, eliminating them totally so that your preparedness becomes pure and you are prepared for His encounter and the communion with Him, Forgiving, covering your attributes and your essences with His attributes and His essence.