The Nerve Centre of Worship

📖 Weekly Session on the Commentary and Interpretation of the Ṣaḥīfa Sajjādiyya (Supplication 20)
📅 Date: 1403/09/22 — 10 Jumada al-Thani 1446
✨ Session: Meshkat-e Noor
🎤 Speaker: Master Ali Saei
🎥 Watch the full talk at the link below:

🌟 Seeking Guidance and Sincere Worship

My God and Lord, grant me the support of sound guidance, the path of truth, and an aspiration to grow; devote my life to Your worship. When my life has become a pasture for Satan, take my soul before Your anger and wrath overtake and overwhelm me.
My God, do not leave me to myself even for an instant. Set the power of worshipping You in motion within my soul and being, and take charge of it Yourself. I do not know the way of worshipping You; make me understand it Yourself. What can I do so that I never abandon the bounds of Your worship? Make me captive to Your worship and love. Let me sink so deeply into love and devotion to You that there is no possibility of escape.
O God, grant me success in this greatest of blessings. Moment by moment, I must examine the inner workings of my worship and servitude, and reflect with my reason and innate nature, so that I may understand where I stand in this world of being.

🧠 Rational and Innate Reflection

Have I succeeded in worshipping and serving You, or not? My thinking must be rational and grounded in my innate nature. Otherwise, I will think according to my carnal desires and passions, and cast myself and others into the swamp of idolatry.
What can I do to attain sound servitude to You? May my worship be sound, my heart wholesome and pure, and may I worship You in a state of spiritual health.
O God, You are the way and the healer of worship. You are the One who tends to Your servant: perfect their worship and guide them to serve You rightly.
May the spirit never depart from my worship; may I never succumb to the afflictions and sicknesses of worship. May I never be afflicted with the disease of idolatry without knowing it, mistaking it for monotheism.
When I serve my own thoughts and beliefs, I have fallen prey to both hidden and manifest idolatry.

💰 Worshipping Coins and Cash

Worshipping coins and cash is easy. Whoever worships coins and cash is accursed. These are the words of the Messenger of Allah:
“Accursed is whoever worships coins and cash.”
How do coins and cash become idols, become gods, become objects of love and beloveds? When I become enslaved to this world, when greed and covetousness take hold of me, when I resist paying my obligatory religious dues and turn away from giving in the way of God, I have become a servant of coins and cash.
Worse still is the accursed one who worships their own base and vile thoughts.

👁 Blindness to Guidance

Accursed is whoever makes the blind even blinder—leaving them blind from birth and multiplying their blindness a hundredfold.
Accursed is whoever points those seeking guidance in the opposite direction from the path of guidance.
Accursed is whoever turns those seeking guidance away from the guardianship of the Ahl al-Bayt (علیهم‌السلام) and steers them toward shallow and base ideas.
Whoever does not know God has worshipped themselves.

🎯 The Purpose of Servitude

Does God have a purpose of His own? Does He perfect His creations, or renew them?
By God, God does not perfect His creations; each of His acts of will is the perfection of creation.
God only renews His will. His will endures, while His creation is renewed and transformed. Each act of His will is an end and a culmination.
What we call a “purpose” is merely one of God’s means.
God creates a particular means for His servants who are travelling the path of spiritual wayfaring. He sets a purpose for them—that is, a means to guide them toward their destination in servitude.
Purpose is created for the servant, not for God.

🕊 The Purpose of Servitude and the Divine Will

For every being that strives to attain a station in the service of God, God appoints a goal. A goal is an idea for the future, a specific plan that requires effort and striving. But does God need effort? Does He need a model in order to attain something?
God is absolute power and absolute knowledge; every will of His is the very summit of perfection. The creation of a seed, a tree, and a fruit is the same for the All-Knowing Creator. Origin and return are one and the same for this peerless Creator. First and last make no difference to Him.

🌌 The Distance Between Origin and Return

He is He, and no one other than He knows who He is! A goal is a kind of creation in which the Creator of existence establishes a distance between origin and return. God is the One who sets the distance between first and last; that is, He opens a path so that His servant may journey from origin to return. He shows the destination and the return, and appoints a fixed term, so that the servant may traverse the path of servitude beautifully.
All are at the final stage of worship and servitude to God, so that they may prove their worthiness and the champion be made known.

🛤 Purposeful Creation

He it is who creates the distance. Creation is purposeful; that is, creation is multi-layered, and these layers are joined together by His will. If He did not create and appoint the goal, there would be no movement at all. Unless He creates the road and the foot, there will be no path.
He is the All-Knowing Creator and knows the outcome from the very beginning. He encompasses the origin and the destination—with an encompassing of knowledge and of power. So the goal is for us, not for Him. Purpose and goal belong to God’s creatures, but God has no goal.

🌿 The Why and the How of Creation

God appoints the origin and the return. The will of the origin is realized, and the will of the return is created. Why did He create? The “why” is one of God’s creations. The why and the how have no place in God’s essence, for neither of them has any external existence.
When He willed, the “why” and the “how” became manifest. The how has no meaning for the essence of the Truth. The station of origin and return is the same for God.

⏳ God Is Beyond Time and Space

The Lord is not imprisoned by time, waiting for an outcome. He has an encompassing of knowledge and of power. Goal and purpose can be defined within the bounds of time and space, but God is the Creator of time and space. He is beyond every description.

🔍 God and the Concept of Knowledge

How am I to know God? Did God wish to see Himself through His creation, or did He wish His creatures to see Him? Such talk is a limiting of the Creator. If we say that God wished to see Himself in the mirror of creation, we have limited Him. If we say that God wished for other than Him to see Him, we have lowered Him to the level of His creatures.
The Creator does not create a limited creation in order to see Himself. He is infinite, and whatever He has created, finite or infinite, is beyond our description.

📜 The Divine Names and Attributes

God’s names, attributes, and acts have no limit—let alone His peerless essence. God is both the Creator of the finite and the Creator of the infinite, and He cannot be described by either.
To say that God wished to see Himself is a kind of attempt to limit Him. Knowledge is from Him, and He has no need to acquire knowledge. Seeing and hearing are means of acquiring knowledge, and God, the All-Knowing, has no need of these means.

🔄 The Relationship Between Creation and Creator

Does God wish to display His names to those very names? Or to make the creation acquainted with His creatures? Such statements carry the sense of limiting the Creator. God does not limit Himself by any mirror. He is the absolute Creator, and He has created the whole of creation for His servants, not for Himself.

🌱 Genetically Modified Organisms and Their Effects

I shall call them long-lived; whatever they are, where do these genetically modified organisms come from? They are food for Satan. Beyond genetically modified plants, we come to genetically modified human beings.

👹 Satan and the Destruction of Humanity

Satan uses human beings themselves to further his aims. He turns them into agents of their own destruction.
When we make Satan the ruler of our hearts, we become his temple—his latrine. Irreligion becomes a foul source from which devils spring.
Wealth and capital that come from Satan carry no blessing. An economy that is not Islamic is devoid of blessing: it destroys a person’s faith and afterlife, strips all storehouses of blessing, and leaves people destitute.

🧭 Returning to Our Innate Nature

What should we do? The measure and standard is human nature. We must return to our innate nature if we are to find ourselves.
Who does not recognise purity or turn away from justice? Who cannot distinguish the small from the great, or mistakes eternity for something finite?
Anyone who strays from their innate nature sees this world not merely as equal to the Hereafter, but as greater than it. They sacrifice the Hereafter for this world, choosing impurity over purity, fleeing all that is good and occupying themselves with ugliness.

🌌 Connecting to the Network of Our Innate Nature

What should we do? We must connect to the network of our innate nature.
This network is the Two Weighty Things. Without them, we will go astray and stray from the right path.
Our sworn enemy is changing every particle of our being. He lurks behind our thoughts and lies in wait for our hearts; he has them surrounded and wants first to disgrace us, then to destroy us.
Satan’s front line is closer than we imagine.

🛡 The Boundaries of Belief

Satan lies in wait beyond the borders of our beliefs. He devours them and puts in their sacred place whatever he wants.

🌌 The Creator and the Limits of Knowledge

What can be seen is creation itself. God forbid, if the Creator wished to show Himself in a mirror, He would have to place something of Himself in that mirror. Whatever can be seen is God’s creation, not God Himself. God’s creation is a sign of God, and through His signs we reach Him.
To say that the Creator wishes to see Himself, or for others to see Him, raises countless questions: Why does He wish to be known? Why must He be seen? These questions of why and how pertain to God’s creation, not the Creator. For Him, why and how have no meaning.

🔍 Why and How in the Pursuit of Knowledge

Why and how are tools for attaining knowledge and dispelling ignorance. They apply to created beings, not to the Creator.

🌾 Becoming God’s Field

O God, if You do not help me, I will become Satan’s pasture. What must I do to become God’s field and escape the disgrace of Satan?
The human being is God’s field. God Himself tends its cultivation. If I do not turn away from His threshold, He will also tend and harvest it.

🌀 Satan’s Pasture

Why am I so sweet to Satan’s taste? Why have I become his antidote? A human being should become a paradise for God’s servants; but through idolatry and irreligion, he becomes Satan’s pasture and grazing ground.

🌟 The True Pleasure of Worship

Has anyone ever experienced true worship? Has anyone tasted its pleasure and can tell us what it is like?
The Ṣaḥīfa Sajjādiyya is the wine of servitude: it reveals its taste and conveys the feeling of worship. Worship is the reflection of God’s knowledge in the souls of His servants. When a person lays their highest feelings before the One they worship, they approach the threshold of true worship of God.

⏳ The Time of Birth into the Beyond Is Near

This world lies in the womb of the beyond and is nearing birth. Time and space are drawing close to birth into a realm beyond time and space.
Everything that exists is a sprout putting forth shoots. Our thoughts and actions are shoots growing from our lives. From this life, eternity and everlastingness should spring forth—not a fall into the lowest abyss.

⚔️ Satan’s Interference in Creation

Satan has sworn to lead human beings astray, keep them occupied with empty wishes, and interfere in God’s creation.
He urges people to alter their genes, undergo surgery, and tamper with their limbs and organs. He changes God’s command and religion, and tampers with His creation.