 By mentioning “universal” realities in talking about the Third Thing, Ibn ‘Arabî means the divine names and attributes, which become manifest through the particular realities, the entities. He has in view a version of the Tree of Porphyry, though he never uses the expression: Each individual (leaf) is a member of a species (twig), which in turn belongs to a genus (branch), and so on, until all are eventually subsumed under the genus of the genera, the Reality of Realities. This Reality is neither the Necessary Being nor the cosmos. In God it is the divine knowledge of all things, and as such is eternal; in the cosmos, it is the ever-changing totality that is temporal creation. Drawing from terminology he uses elsewhere, his followers call this Reality in God “the Most Holy Effusion” (al-fayd al-aqdas), and they define it as God’s self-disclosure to himself in himself, or the self-knowledge by which he knows every concomitant of his own infinity. They contrast it with “the Holy Effusion” (al-fayd al-muqaddas), the creative act that brings all realities and entities into manifestation.