al-Raghib al-Isfahani #48 – Stages of Guidance

On the subject of guidance, our author Araga was for honey, he identifies three stages for guidance are three stages of guidance. So the first stage and these are sequential. So the first stage is being able to distinguish between the good and the bad being able to distinguish between the right way and the wrong way righteousness and wickedness. Right, this is the very first stage of guidance, if you don't have this, you literally can't be guided, right, you think that you're doing something right? It's actually wrong, you think that you're doing something wrong, it's actually the right thing to do. So the very, very first stage is to understand and be able to distinguish the path of

good from the path of evil. The second stage is to walk the path right now that you've identified, which is the right path, which is the wrong path. Okay? That knowledge doesn't do you any good. If you're not going to start walking, right, you have to start walking down the path. And this is where the progress and a sense of progress and success and achievement comes in, marking your progress along the path, noticing that you're developing, noticing that you are becoming a better person and bringing your life more in line with what Allah wants and what the Sharia dictates. And then finally, there's the arrival, right? There's the new he says, it's the light. This is sort of like

the Hadith of the Prophet is that Salam about the sweetness of faith, there's the famous quote from some of the self that you know, I struggled for 20 years to pray at night. And then I enjoyed it the next 20 years, right. So the 20 years of struggle, that's the progress that you're making. And sometimes you're walking, and sometimes you're crawling, and sometimes you take a break, and you sit and then sometimes maybe you're running, but hopefully you're you're making continuous progress. And then someday, someday, it's going to crack and you're going to get there and you're going to have a breakthrough. And you're going to reach this level of lights and this level of internalization, and

the embodiment of all these sorts of things that you've been pursuing the whole time, right, you find yourself more patient, you find yourself more surrendered, you find yourself more generous with other people. Whereas before, you were kind of having to impose it upon yourself, knowing what was good and doing sometimes what was good even despite what you were feeling on the inside, this is a stage of harmony, you've reached the stage of guidance where now you're inside is in harmony with your outside you're doing the actions that everybody knows is righteous, but you're actually doing them out of love. And because you want to be doing them not just because you know that technically

is the right thing to do even though you're kind of struggling on the inside, and you don't want to do them. So those are the three the three stages of of guidance on all of us for how many points out first is distinguishing the right path from the wrong path. The second is progress along the path and the third is finally arriving to this type of light.