Written transcript of the lecture
The Meshkat-e Noor teachings series🌼🔆🌼“Insight into Tradition” “A Special Definition of Knowledge”🌼🔆🌼
🔅🌹“God is the buyer who cherishes the believers” “The human being is God’s banner” Summary with supplement: “Session 221: Commentary on Supplication 20 of al-Sahifa al-Sajjadiyya” “Humility: the root of the tree of growth” “The crowning line on choosing the best” and more… 1402.11.12 Ali Saei (Abdullah Meshkat) 110.141(903) 🌹🔅
🌹🔅☘️ بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمنِ الرَّحيمِ ☘️🔅🌹
🔅🌼O God, bring me to the station of protection from sin. 🌼🔅
🌼وَ اعْصِمْنِي مِنَ الْفَخْر 🌼
O God, keep me safe from self-conceit.
🔅🌼O God, be the breaker of my idols. 🌼🔅
🌹To take pride in oneself is to fashion an idol out of oneself. We must break our own idol, and ask our God to be the idol-breaker of our carnal self.
🌹O God, break me within myself! O God, if I seek to fashion an idol of myself, restrain me! Show me Your grace, so that I do not turn myself into the greatest idol of all! O God, make my heart a sanctuary, and purify it of every idol.
🌹If the sprout of idolatry within a person’s soul is not dried up, it will grow into the loathsome tree of conceit, arrogance and pride.
🔅🌼Selling oneself for nothing in the marketplace of vainglory🌼🔅
🌹The marketplace of vainglory has no customers; those who boast are left with no choice but to sell themselves for nothing.
🌹The self-absorbed braggart imagines himself to be his own sign, and busies himself with worshipping himself.
🌹God Himself is the buyer of the human being. Where could one find a customer more cherished than God, the Most Cherished?!
🌻🔆Al-Tawbah: 111 إِنَّ اللَّهَ اشْتَرى مِنَ الْمُؤْمِنينَ أَنْفُسَهُمْ وَ أَمْوالَهُمْ بِأَنَّ لَهُمُ الْجَنَّةَ يُقاتِلُونَ في سَبيلِ اللَّهِ فَيَقْتُلُونَ وَ يُقْتَلُونَ وَعْداً عَلَيْهِ حَقًّا فِي التَّوْراةِ وَ الْإِنْجيلِ وَ الْقُرْآنِ وَ مَنْ أَوْفى بِعَهْدِهِ مِنَ اللَّهِ فَاسْتَبْشِرُوا بِبَيْعِكُمُ الَّذي بايَعْتُمْ بِهِ وَ ذلِكَ هُوَ الْفَوْزُ الْعَظيمُ
🔆Indeed, God has purchased from the believers their lives and their wealth in exchange for Paradise. They fight in God’s cause, killing and being killed. This is a true promise He has made in the Torah, the Gospel and the Qur’an. And who is more faithful to His covenant than God? So rejoice in the bargain you have made; that is the supreme triumph.
🌹God is the buyer of our wealth, our lives and our pride. Let us not sell ourselves cheaply.
🔅🌼O God, make me free from vainglory. 🌼🔅
🌹“و اعصمنی من الفخر” In truth, we beseech the presence of the Almighty Creator to grant us protection from the blameworthy trait of vainglory.
🌹Self-admiration, self-regard, self-aggrandizement and vainglory confine and shut a person in. They constrict the heart, close off its openings, and turn it into a cold, dark black hole.
🌹A person should take pride in God alone. The moment of true pride is when one hears the call: «فتبارک الله احسن الخالقین» «عبدی» «یا ایتها النفس المطمئنه».
🌹Until a person opens the locks of conceit, arrogance, pride and vainglory with the key of humility and reverence, they will never attain the opening of servitude. Conceit, arrogance, pride and vainglory are obstacles to human progress and flight.
🌹Let us unlock the wings that bind us by fleeing from vainglory.
🌹The self-regarding fall into the pit of their own making.
🌹If we look only at ourselves, we become confined by ourselves; if we look to our God, we step into the realm of the infinite, and our worth surpasses all measure and price.
🌻🔆Al-An‘am: 125 فَمَنْ يُرِدِ اللَّهُ أَنْ يَهْدِيَهُ يَشْرَحْ صَدْرَهُ لِلْإِسْلامِ وَ مَنْ يُرِدْ أَنْ يُضِلَّهُ يَجْعَلْ صَدْرَهُ ضَيِّقاً حَرَجاً كَأَنَّما يَصَّعَّدُ فِي السَّماءِ كَذلِكَ يَجْعَلُ اللَّهُ الرِّجْسَ عَلَى الَّذينَ لا يُؤْمِنُونَ
🌻🔆Whomever God wills to guide, He opens their breast to Islam; and whomever He wills to let go astray because of their wrongful deeds, He makes their breast so constricted that it is as if they were climbing up to the sky. Thus does God place impurity upon those who do not believe!
🌹What a severe punishment: a person becomes deserving of being led astray. The chest has no opening; its passages for breathing become blocked.
🔅🌼A person’s true worth transcends all measures of value🌼🔅
🌷🔆 قَالَ أَمِيرُ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ ع قِيمَةُ كُلِ امْرِئٍ مَا يُحْسِنُه[1]
🔆The worth of each person lies in what they regard as worthy.
🌹What is the most precious thing to us? Do I consider myself the most precious? Then I have made myself my own price. The human being is «poor before God»; having chosen the self, all that remains is poverty. Does a person own anything to boast of—not even themselves?
🌹To choose oneself is to make oneself small, to the measure of one’s own self.
🌹The worth of our worship, too, depends on what we worship God for. If it is solely for Paradise, then Paradise will be the price of our worship. The worship of the free and the loving cannot be weighed or priced in stones. Worship, too, is the finest measure of a person’s worth.
🌹If a person chooses the Bestower of goodness instead of goodness itself, they rise beyond the horizon of goodness.
🌹My God, I know and recognize nothing but You and Your love. You are beyond my pretensions.
🌹My God, You before whom the very attributes that describe You bend low and break.
🌼وَ لَا تَرْفَعْنِي فِي النَّاسِ دَرَجَةً إِلَّا حَطَطْتَنِي عِنْدَ نَفْسِي مِثْلَهَا 🌼
🌹And do not raise my standing among people unless You lower me just as much in my own eyes
🌹The highest worldly distinction reaches only as far as the horizon of this world; spiritual distinction, by contrast, has no limit to its highest horizon.
🌹Initial distinctions are seed money and capital, not the entirety of one’s wealth. They are held in trust, lent for a time: if their recipient proves unworthy, they will be taken away; if they prove worthy, more will be granted to them.
🌹The higher you rise among people, the lower you should become in your own eyes.
🌹A person may rise among people to worldly rank or to spiritual rank. In either case, they must remain humble. The highest heights a person can reach are those of knowledge and spiritual rank—and they call for still greater humility.
🌹How beautiful it is to rise through knowledge and strengthen and safeguard it through humility.
🔅🌼The wing of this world reaches no higher than the world itself🌼🔅
🌹One who sees nothing beyond the self is afflicted with the blindness of self-absorption; one who sees nothing beyond this world is blinded by the world.
🌹The seeker of this world can at most conquer the world—and even then, only the fleeting world. In the contests of knowledge and spirituality, a person can conquer the entire realm of the unseen.
🌹Nothing can lift a person to the highest degrees of ascent as the Qur’an and the Ahl al-Bayt can. The Qur’an’s verses and the narrations are mighty wings that carry a person toward the highest horizon of wisdom.
🔅🌼A narration, when understood with insight, is like the sun🌼🔅
Nothing gives a person wings like knowledge; nothing raises a person to greater heights like knowledge.
🌷🔆قَالَ أَبُو جَعْفَرٍ عَلَيْهِ السَّلَامُ: يَا بُنَيَّ، اعْرِفْ مَنَازِلَ الشِّيعَةِ عَلَى قَدْرِ رِوَايَتِهِمْ وَ مَعْرِفَتِهِمْ؛ فَإِنَّ الْمَعْرِفَةَ هِيَ الدِّرَايَةُ لِلرِّوَايَةِ، وَ بِالدِّرَايَاتِ لِلرِّوَايَاتِ يَعْلُو الْمُؤْمِنُ إِلَى أَقْصَى دَرَجَاتِ الْإِيمَانِ.
إِنِّي نَظَرْتُ فِي كِتَابِ عَلِيٍّ عَلَيْهِ السَّلَامُ فَوَجَدْتُ فِي الْكِتَابِ أَنَّ قِيمَةَ كُلِ امْرِئٍ وَ قَدْرَهُ مَعْرِفَتُهُ؛ إِنَّ اللَّهَ تَبَارَكَ وَ تَعَالَى يُحَاسِبُ النَّاسَ عَلَى قَدْرِ مَا آتَاهُمْ مِنَ الْعُقُولِ فِي دَارِ الدُّنْيَا[2]
🔆Imam Muhammad al-Baqir, peace be upon him: My dear son, recognise the standing of the Shia by the extent of their narrations and their knowledge. Knowledge means discerning and understanding a narration: grasping what we mean by the words we speak. Through such discernment, a believer attains the highest degrees of faith. I was looking at a document written by Imam Ali, peace be upon him, and saw that he said: A person’s worth and standing depend on their knowledge and understanding. God Almighty has likewise made the accounting on the Day of Resurrection commensurate with the degree of people’s intellect in this world.
🌹“Discernment of a narration” means understanding a hadith precisely; it means grasping its legal meaning and fully absorbing and assimilating it. It means uncovering the jewel buried in the heart of the narration, finding one’s way to its aim and essence, unlocking its immense power, and reaping its effects and blessings.
🌹Food transforms both body and soul. Just as certain foods and fruits affect a developing child, enhancing its beauty and abilities, the effects of spiritual nourishment on the human soul are far greater. Knowledge transforms a person’s very constitution, and each narration is a vast storehouse of knowledge. We should never take narrations lightly: they are a mighty source of knowledge, for they issue from the sacred source of knowledge and wisdom, the gateway to the Prophet’s knowledge.
🌹Through “discernment of a narration,” a person’s beauty continually increases, and their horizons become more exalted.
🌹Every narration is a mighty wing for flight, a healing remedy, and a vast source of life-giving, knowledge-kindling power.
🌹Only through “discernment of a narration” is its immense power unleashed.
🌹Through discernment, the narration’s highest flavour is revealed.
🌹In his hadith on “discernment of a narration,” Imam al-Baqir, peace be upon him, reveals the whole treasure, the full span of its wings.
🌹True knowledge lies in joining discernment to narration. In one sense, discernment means extracting the honey and oil of a narration.
🌹The narrations of the Imams, peace be upon them, are a vast world of power. We must delve into the heart of a narration to witness its immense force.
🌹Discernment of a narration means tasting its flavour, breathing in its fragrance, and experiencing its purity and effects.
🌹A narration is nourishment for the intellect, nourishment from heaven and the realm of the unseen. Through discernment, this exalted nourishment is absorbed into the human soul.
🌹A jurisprudential understanding of a narration is possible only with alert, living senses and through the faculties of the Two Weighty Things, ethics and reason.
🌹Only when we read the Ṣaḥīfa Sajjadiyya with discernment will we witness its miracles.
🌹Through the narrations of the Ahl al-Bayt, peace be upon them, we must feel ourselves taking flight and witness our own rebirth.
🌹The narrations are rubies from the Lote Tree of the Farthest Boundary, carrying us all the way to “or nearer still.” This gift comes through discerning the narrations.
🌹The narrations make what has fallen away flourish and extinguish fires; they heal pains, remedy deficiencies, and restore sight, hearing and speech to the blind, deaf and mute.
🌹The narrations adorn the human soul with beauty.
🌹The effect of knowledge on the human body and soul is like the effect of fruit and food on a child in the womb.
🌹In the womb of existence, the human being is reborn with knowledge at every moment.
🔅🌼God’s Showcase 🌼🔅
🌹A flag identifies a land; a human being, too, is a sign and banner of God. Through their very being, they should make God known. A person should be a showcase for the One they worship, not indulge in self-display, self-praise or self-aggrandisement. Rather, they should reflect God, remember their Lord, and continually, with their whole being, praise, glorify, magnify, sanctify and exalt their God.
🌹God’s true servant sings the praises of the One they worship and proclaims Him; they do not seek to show off.
🔅🌼The Crown Jewel of Choosing the Worthiest 🌼🔅
🌹If you wish to know your rank and standing, consider how deeply humility is woven into your knowledge and understanding.
🌹A worthy person has two special qualities: knowledge and humility.
🌹Humility is the root of a person’s virtues. Without it, the tree of those virtues stands outside the soil of servitude and is surely doomed to fall.
🌹What qualities make someone worthy of being chosen? In marriage, in choosing a representative, a religious authority or a friend, and in leadership and governance, what is the crowning quality? To possess excellence while remaining humble is the crown jewel of choosing the best.
🌹How can we become worthy? How can we become among those chosen and favoured by Allah and His saints? When will we be given wings, strength and extraordinary abilities?
🌹Initial advantages are a test: we must show ourselves worthy before the true reward is granted!
🌼Ali Saei (Abdullah Meshkat) 110.141 (903)🌼
[1] Al-Amālī (al-Ṣadūq); text; p. 447 Ibn Bābawayh, Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī, Ketābchi Publications—Tehran, sixth edition, 1376 SH.
[2] Al-Uṣūl al-Sittah ʿAshar (Dār al-Ḥadīth edition); p. 36 A group of scholars, Dār al-Ḥadīth Cultural Institute—Iran, Qom, first edition, 1423 AH / 1381 SH.
