Those such as break the covenant of God after its solemn binding: this is what is alluded to in His statement: And when your Lord took from the Children of Adam, from their loins, their seed and made them testify against themselves, 'Am I not your Lord?', they said, 'Yea, indeed …' [Q. 7:172]. It is mentioned in a ḥadīth that God, exalted be He, stroked Adam's back with His hand and brought forth his seed from him like particles, [to the end of] the ḥadīth. God's hand is the holiest intellect and the first spirit which is the spirit of the world that is referred to as the right-hand of the Compassionate; Adam is the universal reasoning soul which is itself the heart of the world; His stroking of his back constitutes the effect of the intellect upon it [the soul] and its illuminating of it by His light through the spiritual joining; His bringing forth of his seed from him constitutes the bringing into existence of the individual partial souls that had been inside it in potentiality and bringing them out in actuality; God's covenant with them where He says, 'Am I not your Lord?', is the depositing of the knowledge of [His] Oneness in their essences; the binding of that covenant is the propping up of the proofs of His Oneness in their intellects and His obligating them to that knowledge, making it a binding aspect of their essences, so that upon their disengagement from the attributes of the soul and the coverings of the body such [knowledge] would [immediately] become clear to them and the most manifest and obvious of things would be disclosed to them, namely, their having been made to testify against themselves, since such knowledge would at that instance become necessary. Their response to that [question] with 'Yea, indeed', constitutes their essential acceptance of that [truth]. Their breaking of that covenant is their total engrossment in the carnal pleasures and the trappings of the physical world and their enslavement by their desires and lusts such that they become veiled by these from [the knowledge of] God's Oneness and His worship. [and such as cut what God has commanded should be joined]: their 'cutting of what God has commanded should be joined' is their turning away from the joining with the Holy Spirit, the highest points of origin [of motion] and the heavenly spirits who are the High Council [cf. Q. 37:8] and the inhabitants of the Divine Presence from among those of the realm of the Divine attributes (jabarūt) and the angelic realm (malakūt) who keep company with them in essence and in attribute, being the ones whose nearness they should in reality seek and their manifest ties of kinship which they have been commanded to cement in reality, [turning away instead] by orienting themselves towards the lower world and by their love of dark and corrupted substances and their adoration of and their being smitten by vile and transient matters, which is why the Prophet said: 'Verily God loves exalted and noble matters and dislikes inanities, for the viler the thing demanded by the soul the further it is from the noble world:
'People in love with things come in all shapes and sizes, but those most excused [for such love] are those who have none'.
[and such as do corruption in the land - they shall be the losers] The explanation of 'doing corruption in the land' has already been given; as for the 'great loss' [of the losers], that is the forsaking of the permanent luminous substance in exchange for the transient dark [substance].