Minute with a Muslim #349 – Four Stages On The Path To Corruption

You know, our beings are are fluid spiritually, right. So there's a sort of plasticity involved, there's a flexibility we can get better. But that also means that we can get worse. And so if someone is able to improve and train themselves and kind of get better, as a human being and as a soul, then they can also go in the opposite direction, you can be corrupted, you can corrupt your own soul and your own spirit. And there's four kind of steps to this process. So one of them is, is delusion. And that has to do with the at the level of belief and the things that you believe in involves believing in ugly things. Right? Believing in chaos, and randomness, and purposelessness,

these sorts of things, they matter, it matters what you believe, it's going to have consequences and how you live your life that's going to have consequences for your capacity to be a moral person or a moral actor.

And so, the level of belief is the first front, right? If you have delusional beliefs, or you have beliefs that are based on things that are ugly, that are going to lead towards vice and lead towards corrupt corruption, then that's it's only going to naturally unfold from there.

And if someone is entertaining, these sorts of things, and the solution is to try to confront doubts, and try to

think these things through, right? We treat beliefs these days, like opinions, it's like, oh, I believe this, you believe that? We've become uncomfortable when, you know, faced with the proposition of actually having substantial conversational Why do you believe that? You know, what's your evidence for that belief? Does that belief is that belief logically coherent? Right? Does it defy reason? Does it defy experience? Right? We we don't like those conversations in our time, but they're important conversations to have. Sometimes people need to be called out on their phony beliefs or their delusional beliefs, where they're self serving beliefs. The second step to

corruption and corruption and corrupting the soul is groupthink. Right? And this is huge people around you, you're just doing what everybody else is doing. You know, everybody else is smoking weed. You're smoking weed. Everybody else is drinking this, you're drinking. Right? You don't think twice about it. And you reassure yourself that it's okay, because it's what other people are doing. I will never forget when I used to be a waiter. And I was new Muslim. And as you know, Muslims don't gamble. Okay. So we had one of my co workers, they bought a lottery ticket, right? Or something like this. And they they wanted us each one of us to like, pick a number. And then if the number came

out, I don't remember how it worked. But if the number came out, then she would share the winnings with with all of us or something like this. So she asked me for a number. And I said, I'm not going to give you a number. Sorry. I don't believe in gambling. I've never seen someone get so angry and so upset. I didn't even tell her she was doing something wrong. I just said, I don't want to participate.

And she literally like just blew her top and was just like, like, you know, you did that.

She couldn't handle it. Because I was the one voice that was saying that this thing was wrong. Or at least I think that this thing was wrong enough to not participate in it. As long as everybody else was willing to go along with it. It was cool. But I was the one person that was bucking the trend and saying no, no, no, thank you. I don't believe it's right to participate in this. Just the fact that I existed was enough to make her extremely angry. Right. So this is kind of the situation that a lot of people are stuck in. We surround ourselves and it's really bad with social media. We surround ourselves with people that agree with us, or people that enable us

to do what our base self wants us to do. And this is the path to corruption because then you have nobody else checking you. You have nobody else even saying well, you do that. I'm not going to do that. I think that's wrong. I couldn't do that myself.

After you're sort of bad influences. The next step and corruption is heedlessness and idleness. So this is somebody who doesn't feel any sort of duty or motivation to get better, or just to strive as a person. And this is man, we have a lot of this today in our society. Your life has just work. Netflix, like club, sleep, repeat. Whatever it is, you're just stuck in this. You're the perfect consumer. Right? You're not producing

anything really, you're just a consumer, you're a cog in the machine, you're stuck in the matrix, whatever else you want to say, you're just living your life on this hamster wheel. And you just keep on spinning. And it never occurs to you that there's life outside the hamster wheel, that there's bigger and better things beyond the glass case that there is a whole potentiality of self that you can achieve that as a whole potentiality of satisfaction and spiritual development that's out there. You don't care. As long as you've got your habits, your addictions and your your comforts You're happy, right? And then this is the path of corruption.

And then the final stage in, in the path of corruption is vise itself. Okay. Why is it the final stage? Because vise is like habitus, right? It's,

it's like a muscle, right? The more that you do it, the stronger it becomes. And the more the need for doing it, again, is built. And so when you start a vise for the first time, it's way easier to nip it in the bud. If you stop it after the first time, right? After you've done it twice, and it becomes hard. After you do it three times it becomes even harder to stop. And once it's a full blown habit, it becomes extremely, extremely difficult to break a lot of people can relate to this when it comes to looking at the opposite sex pornography.

Obviously substances such as alcohol, but there's all an addiction, an element of addiction to it, right? Not all addictions are just chemical physical, some of them are also mental. Some of them are have to do with your your habits. It's all sort of a psychology of addiction. And the more that you do vice, the more you kind of get drugged down into the habit and the the world of ice and it becomes extremely, extremely difficult to pull yourself out.