The beginning

With all its activities, life keeps me too occupied to reflect on where my journey is leading me. I've spent so much effort on the journey that the destination has disappeared from my sight.

The destination is where I will be forever, so I've decided that it is time now to redeem my soul - to pull it out of this materialistic realm and give it what it needs to make the journey successful and the destination, a place to look forward to.

I've started listening to lectures by Dr. Shumali on Self Development. As interesting and captivating as they are I cannot remember everything I hear. My mind has the concentration span of a fish, I forget things almost instantly. So as a solution, I've decided to blog what I've heard - hopefully this will help in retaining all this wisdom in the challenged upper works.

The key thing to keep in mind, when trying to gain control over and develop your soul, is to know what your aim is. What am I really after? Is it for the status? Or the sense of tranquility and peace that I get? For some it is the attraction of extra ordinary powers, such as predicting the future, reading minds and interpreting dreams - in effect, releasing the soul from the material element, our body.

Yes, spirituality has lots of benefits, but the main aim should be to get closer to Allah. To seek his pleasure. Every thing else that is good will come along side. All the other powers are positive side effects of achieving a higher spiritual level, but getting these things should never be your aim.

A good example is Hajj. What is the aim of the exercise? Yes, its a good way to make new friends, travel to a new country, get a holiday, stay in a nice hotel, increase business prospects - but is that the aim of Hajj? The aim is to seek Allah's pleasure and to bring us closer to him. Allah, though, planned Hajj in such a way that it brings us all the other benefits.

A subtle point to mention here is this. Allah mentions in Surah Al- Zariyat, that he did not create us but so we worship him. However, even our intention must not be to 'worship' him. It's important to worship Allah because he wants us to. In fact, there is the danger of becoming so lost in the act of worship that we forget what Allah really wants from us.

Iblis had 6000 years of constant worship under his belt when Allah asked him to bow down before Adam. Iblis was so accustomed to his act of worship, he had begun to enjoy it so much for its own sake, that when he was tested with Allah's command - he lost. At that point, if his real aim was to seek Allah's pleasure he would have bowed. All that worship - who was he doing it for? Allah's will or his own enjoyment? It has it in a Hadith that Allah then asked Iblis: Do you want to worship me the way YOU want to? Iblis's test was that of obedience. Obedience is testing not with something that you are already happy to oblige to do - the real test is to obey when placed in a challenging situation.

So in conclusion: think about your aim - it is to seek closeness to Allah. And the first step to that is purifying yourself. You can't enter the sacred and pure state, that is heaven, without being pure.

How to purify the self? That is the topic of the next blog.