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Deep knowledge (maarifat) is characterised by three subordinate forms of knowledge. The first is the wisdom of how each word or agent acts. The second is the recognition of each agent in the ‘work’. The third is the recognition of the agent through thought. The man who recognises instantaneously the meanings of happenings and actions, without ordinary reflection, is the arif, the Wise, the ‘arrived’ Sufi, or the Mature One.
There are forms of understanding and re-understanding knowledge. These are described as:
The Science of Inner Wisdom;
The Wisdom of Science;
The Science of the Wisdom of Wisdom.
These are the simplest terms in which the succession of refinements of knowledge and wisdom can be rendered.

Those concentrating upon exercises connected with the past or the future are in a state of destruction. ‘The safety and the salvation of the people is in their being engaged in the ordinance of the time.’

The Science of Certainty is the revelation of truth (objective reality) through special states by experience, not by cerebration as we understand it in the conventional world.
There are three phases of the Science (practice and perception) of Certainty, allegorised by calling the Sun objectivity: The first, seeking guidance from the splendour and understanding of the heat of the Sun. The second, by actually seeing the body of the Sun. The third, the dispersing of the eyes’ light in the light of the Sun itself.
There are three stages of ‘certainty’, then, which Suhrawardi summarises as:
The Knowledge of Certitude, in which it is known, verified and evident;
The Essence of Certainty, manifest and witnessed;
The Truth (Reality) of Certainty, a double way in which there is a conjoining of the witnesser and witnessed.
Beyond this point words do not suffice, and the dervish is accused of pantheism and more. An attempt at explaining produces the word sequence, ‘The seer becometh the eye, the eye, the seer.’ A distortion of meaning, originating from the attempt to enunciate the process in formal terms, is perpetuated by the reader, who cannot penetrate by the unaided intellect the real significance of the phrase.