“Be it known unto you that the man who has in
all certainty beheld the harvest of the Afterlife with his heart must needs
aspire to it, and must long for it and follow its ways, despising thereby the
pleasure and delights which this world contains. For the man who has a bauble
will lose all desire for it when he spies a precious gem, and will long to make
an exchange. Lack of desire for the harvest of the Afterlife and the meeting
with God (Exalted is He!) is the outcome of a lack of faith in God and in the
Last Day. Now, I do not mean by “faith” the discourse of the soul” and the
movement made by the tongue when pronouncing the Two Testimonies in a way which
is devoid of any sincerity or single heartedness, for this would be equivalent
to believing that the gem were better than the bauble while knowing its name
alone, and not its reality. Such a believer will not renounce the bauble,
having grown accustomed to it, and will harbor no passionate yearning for the
gem.
The obstacle which bars us from attaining to
God is therefore our lack of wayfaring, and this in turn proceeds from a lack
of aspirancy, this being the result of an absence of faith, which is in turn
the consequence of a lack of guides and of people who might remind one, and who
know about God (Exalted is He!) and will lead one along the path to Him, who
give men to realize the baseness and impermanence of this world and the great
import and everlasting duration of the next. Mankind is in a state of
heedlessness, having plunged into the desires of this world and fallen deep
into slumber, and there is not a single scholar of the Faith who is working to
arouse it from this plight.
Should anyone happened to awake he will find
himself incapable of following the Path because of his ignorance, when he
questions the scholars about it he finds them to be far removed from it and
disposed instead towards their own whims. Thus it is that weakness in
aspirancy, ignorance of the Path, and the self-interested discourses pronounced
by the scholars, are the causes of the present absence of wayfarers on the Path
of God (Exalted is He!). If the objective be veiled, the guide absent, worldly
desire predominant and the seeker heedless, then attaining unto him is an
impossibility and the Paths must needs fall into desuetude.
But should it happen that a man awake, either
of his own accord or by virtue of the activity of another, and aspire to the
commerce and harvest of the Afterlife, he should be aware that there are
diverse requirements which must be observed at the outset of aspirancy, and
that there exists a place of refuge and a fortress within which he must defend
himself if he is to be safe from those highwaymen who would obstruct him, and
likewise that there are duties which he must perform while on his journey
without cease.
The requirements of aspirancy which must be observed pertain to the
lifting of the veil and the barrier which lies between one and the truth. For
mankind has been deprived of the Truth by reason of a successive establishment
of veils and the presence of a barrier on the Path. God (Exalted is He!) has said, And We have set a barrier before them
and a barrier behind them, and have covered them so that they cannot see (Quran
XXXVI:9)
Now the ‘barrier’ which lies between the aspirant and the Truth is
constituted of four things: wealth, status, imitation, and sin. The veil of
wealth can be lifted only by divesting oneself of it so that no more than the
necessary quantity thereof remains.”
~ An excerpt from
Al-Ghazali’s 12th century treatise on Disciplining the Soul, 22.11, translated
by T.J. Winter, University of Cambridge. 1995.
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