al-Raghib al-Isfahani #20 – Technologies of The Self

Don't talk about us for honey, he comes at the sort of the technologies of the self or self reform or purifying yourself from just a different angle. He says, if we look at it in another way, okay, we were talking about the tools, what we need education, restraint, patience, justice, okay? What's the object of that work? What's the part of ourselves that needs to be worked on by those sorts of things, we talked about the tools. Now he's going to talk about the actual capacities that we're targeting, right, the targets of those tools. So the first thing he says is, our thoughts, our intellect, or intelligence. That's the area where we're trying to train that capacity with

education, so that it becomes wisdom, right? When it comes to our patience and restraint. We're talking about our desires, right? Our appetite, our lusts, our urges, and almost all urge can be traced back to either the urge for food, or the urge for sex, or these sorts of urges that we have to train ourselves to have restraint when it comes to these urges, and patients. That's the area, that's what we're targeting, when we're using that sort of tool. And when it comes to when it comes to developing our patients, and also justice, what's the target of that of that work? Is our anger, right? So some people you know, they think that they believe in like positive and negative emotions,

right? Or almost for honey does not believe in that sort of schema. He's saying like, for example, urges not evil, okay? Even we could say, in some sense of the word lust, or, and anger and all these sorts of things, if you find it in yourself, Allah gave it to you. It's something that he created in you. Why do you think he did that just so that you could suffer just so that you could screw up, right, maybe, but also, and maybe more importantly, the purpose that it's in you is to be molded, to be worked on to be developed to be purified so that it becomes something else, right? It's not that anger is just this negative emotion that we need to completely rid ourselves of it. We can never,

ever get angry. If you want to do justice, you have to get angry, you have to be angry at oppression, you have to be angry at falsehood. There's no justice without anger. So there's unproductive anger. And then there's productive anger, you can use your anger to work for you. Or you can use your anger to work against you, you're getting angry at your spouse and your children or for people being annoying and things like that. That's base that's base self, that's lower self, the lower neffs don't blame, anger, blame your lack of training or anger, the urges that we have for sex for food for whatever, right? Is it evil? Are we supposed to be celibate? Are we supposed to be

monks? Are we supposed to not eat? No, you're supposed to develop that cup, that urge or that capacity and train it so that it is used within a certain set of limits certain boundaries, and then it can actually work for you and be productive for you. Right? So there's none of this, you know, good bad, you know, or good evil, sort of binary when it comes to oil so honey and how he's imagining these sorts of things. He's saying all of these things, your your intellect, your urges and your anger, they're in you anyway, Allah gave them to you as gifts so that you will take them develop them, train them so that they start working for your afterlife and not against your

afterlife.