Question:
Assalam O Alaykum wr wb
Please can you tell me if i am progressing in my spiritual path? I want to know if one day i will get to the stage where i can communicate with members of my family who have passed over? and if i will be able to see angels more clearly and communicate with them. I want to become a healer do i have the ability to help other and my family ?
Thankyou i will wait for your reply
Wsalam
Answer:
wa `alaykum salam,
Our shuyukh teach that progress on the spiritual path is best measured by the seekers themselves. Progress is not to be able to perform miracles, but as Mawlana Shaykh Muhammad Nazim al-Haqqani always says, “the greatest karamah (miracle of saints) is to be constant in achieving what Allah likes” (dawam at-tawfiq). By applying the principle of muhasabah, self-accounting, every night, we can determine if we made progress that day or not.
Shaykh Hisham describes this accounting process thus:
How do you audit yourself?
`Umar ibn al-Khattab (r), the second caliph of the Prophet (s), said:
Judge yourselves before you are judged; and weigh your actions in the balance before they are weighed; When you are brought to account tomorrow, it will be much easier for you if you have already brought yourself to account today… [Ahmad and Abu Nu`aym]
This step involves auditing yourself by keeping a journal of your deeds, much as the Recording Angels are doing. Once you begin noting down the wrong actions that you do throughout the day, you will end up with a journal full of negative issues. Those who do not take account cannot repent. How do they know that they have done something wrong? When you audit yourself, you will see your wrongdoing. Anyone who fails to stop his wrong action is an oppressor, a tyrant. Of course everyone is doing wrong, but only those who fail to repent are oppressors.
Do not just say at the end of the day, “O God, I committed many mistakes today, forgive me.” Rather you must write them down and repent for each mistake in turn. Then turn the page for the next day. The next day you make mistakes, and you write them down. Then you correlate them to see if they are new ones or the same. In this way, you enter a period of self-discovery, identifying all kinds of bad manners and harmful traits that you never actually realized that you had. These bad characteristics thereby become known to you, and so you must repent from them. God will remove the ones who do so from the “list of oppressors.”
[Sufi Science of Self-Realization, Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani]
Taher Siddiqui
