God created shadows lying prostrate to right and left only as clues for you in knowing yourself and Him, that you might know who you are, your relationship with Him, and His with you, and so that you might understand how or according to which divine truth all that is other than God is described as being completely dependent on Him, as being [also] mutually interdependent. Also that you might know how and by what truth God is described as utterly independent of men and all worlds, and how the Cosmos is described as both mutually independent with respect to its parts and mutually dependent.

Without any doubt, the Cosmos is fundamentally dependent on causes, the greatest of which enjoys the causality of the Reality. The divine causality on which the Cosmos depends is the Divine Names, which are every Name on which the Cosmos depends, whether on [a Name manifested in] a cosmos or the divine Essence. Whichever it be, it is [essentially] God, no other. Thus, He says, 0 Men, your need of God is total, while He is the Self-sufficient, the Praised. Besides this it is well known that we are also mutually dependent. Therefore, our [true] names are God's Names, since all depends on Him. At the same time our essential selves are His shadow. He is at once our identity and not our identity. We have paved the way for you, so consider!

From The Wisdom of Light in the Word of Joseph, The Bezels of Wisdom, Ibn’ Al Arabi, Translation by R.W.J Austin, 1980, Paulist Press