mission to Him and winning His pleasure, which are the means of obtaining true delight, real solace, painfree pleasure, and friendship untainted by loneliness.
The Seventh is, through sincerity, which is the essential precondition for travelling the Sufi way and its most valuable result, to be delivered from base qualities like implicitly associating partners with God, hypocrisy, and artificiality. It is also to be saved, through purifying the soul, which is like the surgical operation of the Sufi path, from the dangers of the evil-commanding soul and the perils of egotism.
The Eighth: Through the regard, sense of the divine presence, and powerful intentions of the Sufi path, gained by recalling God with the heart and reflecting on Him with the mind, this is to transform customary actions into worship and make mundane dealings into actions benefiting the hereafter. Utilizing the capital of life, it is to make all its minutes into seeds that will produce the shoots of eternal happiness.
The Ninth is to struggle to be a perfect human being through journeying with the heart and striving with the spirit and spiritual progress; that is to say, to be a true believer and total Muslim; that is, to gain not superficial belief, but the reality of belief and the reality of Islam; that is, to be directly the bondsman of the Glorious Creator of the Universe, in the universe and in one respect as the universe’s representative, and to be His addressee, and friend, and beloved, and to be a mirror to Him; and through showing man to be on the best of patterns, it is to prove man’s superiority to the angels. It is to fly through the lofty stations with the Shari‘a’s wings of faith and works, and to behold eternal happiness in this world, and even to enter upon it.
Glory be unto You! We have no knowledge save that which You have taught us; indeed, You are All-Knowing, All-Wise!(2:32)
O God! Grant blessings and peace to the Supreme Help in every age and the Sublime Spiritual Pole at all times, our master Muhammad, the magnificence of whose sainthood was manifested in his Ascension, as was the station of his being the beloved of God, and under the shadow of whose Ascension are included all sainthoods, and to all his Family and Companions. Amen. And all praise be to God, the Sustainer of All the Worlds.