Tom Facchine – You Will Never Believe Until You Know
AI: Summary ©
The speaker discusses the importance of increasing awareness of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala and understanding oneself in order to achieve motivation and faith. They also emphasize the need to increase awareness of Allah's guidance and understanding oneself to build a faith and strengthen one's heart. The importance of knowing oneself is key to achieving motivation and faith.
AI: Summary ©
Our problem in our faith or our religiosity
is not one of information, but it's one
of motivation.
What do we do? Right? What are the
things that we need to kind of learn
or ponder upon or synthesize?
Right? Maybe it's not about just information. Maybe
it's just about synthesizing. Maybe it's about feeling.
Maybe it's about inspiration.
What do we have to do? Where do
we go?
And at Aragua Sojani, he mentions
that
we have to
increase our awareness in a couple of arenas.
First of all, we need to increase our
awareness of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala.
Right? Somebody will never ever want to
adhere
to Allah's guidance if they don't know who
Allah is. That's just plain facts.
Right? That they don't know that Allah is
the most merciful.
Well, then how are they gonna trust that
Allah's rules are fair? They don't know that
Allah is the most wise. How are they
gonna trust in Allah's guidance?
They don't know that Allah
is able to
reward
beyond comprehension
and forgive beyond comprehension. How is this person
going to trust the system? Right? If if
Allah is just an abstraction,
a theory, an idea
without sort of a tangible
felt reality and I mean that in the
sense that, like, a person feels
feels that Allah exists,
you know, then who's going to want to
listen to this rule or that rule? So
the first thing is
increasing your knowledge about who Allah Subhana Wa
Ta'la is and not just knowledge in the
sense of information, but real
embodied
knowledge, feeling it, understanding it, all of your
senses involved.
And then after that, we also have to
understand who we are. That's probably the other
big point,
and that's what Raghu al Sahani mentions, the
author, he says, for first understand Allah then
understand yourself. What is what are we as
human beings?
What's our nature?
What's our potential?
What's our capacity?
If you think that we're all just damned
to go to * from the first day
we come into this world or that we
have some sort of original sin hanging over
us, then it's gonna be really hard to
get that motivation up.
Why would you want to,
if
if getting into paradise
is only about Allah's grace and forgiveness and
has nothing to do at all with what
we do in the world, then why we
even try.
Right? We we act as if differences in
theology are just like differences in culture and
they're not. They actually result in different ways
of being in the world. They result in
different perspectives
and thus different actions
or capacities for action.
Somebody believes in original sin is not like
somebody who doesn't believe in original sin. In
Islam, we don't have original sin.
So we don't have that hanging over us.
Right? We we we're more of
a clean slate. Michael Law says in the
Quran, you came into this world knowing nothing.
We're more of a clean slate and so
that's
that's a much more encouraging starting point,
right, than the starting point of, well, you
have this original sin and you're * bound
unless you
get baptized or accept Jesus or whatever it
is.
Right? So we have to know who we
are. What's what is the nature of a
human being? Right? What are the different things
that are common to all of us that
go inside of all of us? The the
urges, the motivations,
the delusions, the potential,
the potential for good and the potential for
evil.
What are all those things that that make
us up essentially? And the last piece of
the puzzle about us, so, you know, 2
main things: knowing a lot and knowing ourselves.
What's the purpose?
What's the point? Why are we here?
Okay.
I'm here. You're here. We have this urge
and that motivation and this delusion and that
ability and that potentiality
or this capacity, why? What's it all for?
And so if somebody can figure out those
2 things or at least develop themselves in
those two ways, their understanding of who Allah
is and their understanding of who a human
being is,
then we can
then we can go somewhere. Right? Then we
can do the work that
builds the faith,
strengthens the heart to the point where somebody
is actually seeking out Allah's guidance, ready, willing
to submit, and to obey to whatever Allah
says.