Satan, the accursed one, is constantly trying to pull us astray. How does he pull us astray? He distracts us. What’s his major tool of distraction? Doubt; if he can get you to start doubting what you’re doing, all of a sudden instead of being focused and being engulfed in faith, you become unfocused and are engulfed in doubt. What does doubt do? Basically it pulls you away from the path. What is Satan trying to do? Basically, he’s trying to pull you away from the path so anything that takes you from moving in the appropriate direction, he’s happy with.
He doesn’t need you to commit violent sin, he doesn’t need you to steal, or kill, or do all of the things that the Ten Commandments and all the rest of the laws say you shouldn’t do; all he needs you to do is doubt. All he needs you to do is lose concentration. All he needs you to do is lose faith, and doubt is a loss of faith.
Faith is a very ephemeral thing, sometimes it’s strong and sometimes it’s weak. Because we can’t carry it with us we have to join it in a way that is not always obvious to us. We have to be able to maintain a concentration on the truth with a belief system that says, “Even though we can’t see the truth, even though we can’t see God, even though we can’t see the resonance that drives us, we believe it, we feel it, at the core of ourselves we know it’s true. We know that we can have faith in it and our faith will be fulfilled because our faith is the truth, because we were told by the Qutbs, and by the prophets, and by Allah Himself that He is merciful, and that His mercy will extend to us, and save us, and care for us.”
But then, when doubt creeps in, lots of other things also creep in, we lose our repose, we lose our peace. Doubt makes you tremble. Doubt makes you fearful, and when you become fearful, all of a sudden you can’t do the things that you would normally do. You can’t pray, you can’t be in a state of contentment, because the fear takes the contentment out of you. It overrides contentment, it moves contentment aside and it brings you to the wall of chaos, and in chaos there is no serenity. It’s not possible unless you have passed the areas of time and space, and no matter what the circumstances are you’ve reached serenity. There are those, who are the Friends of God, the Walis, the ones who’ve learned to remain in peace all the time, their peace can’t be shaken. But for those of us who go in and out of peace, who go in and out of states, we have to understand that when fear enters us we lose our state.
So what do we have to do? We have to learn how to go back into the state that is involved in faith. We have to go back into the state that is involved in contentment. We have to learn to know when we are not content and how to make ourselves content. We have to know when we are not peaceful and how to make ourselves peaceful. We have to understand that we have the tools within us to change our state, and that the momentary fear, momentary doubt, momentary chaos that we find ourselves in is not something that we are subject to. We can dismiss it in the same way our faith was dismissed. We can dismiss doubt. We can dismiss fear…
