Video: What is spiritual guidance?

Welcome everyone, this is Dr. Ibrahim Jaffe and we’re going to be speaking about: What is spiritual guidance? When I entered the Sufi path many years ago – in fact, if I go even before that – when I began my spiritual path, there was no such thing really as guidance. There was intuition; I’d get a sense of something. There were teachings that maybe I picked up from somebody.

Of course, in the West we’re like a hodge podge, you don’t really follow a particular path in the West, you follow some of them simultaneously and then you pick and choose what you want. And unfortunately, a lot of times that doesn’t work because what you’re picking and choosing actually doesn’t fit together in the right way, so the paths have been formed for reasons.

As much as we want to be able to pick and choose what we want, create our own path – we’re very much a smorgasbord world out here – it doesn’t always work that well. When it comes to guidance, guidance is something that I think is very special, and I think that having good guidance is the difference between having a successful life and not having a successful life.

The type of guidance that we teach in the Sufi process is guidance that comes directly from the divine itself, it comes directly from God, and there’s reasons why that guidance is better than other guidance. For one, God is, what we say is ‘al-Habir’, is omniscient. God has omniscience; omniscience means that God knows past, present, and future. So, when you get guidance from God, it’s not like an intuition; “Something’s going to happen so I’ve got to be careful about this,” that’s intuition.

Omniscient guidance is more like God is aware of what’s happening, past, present, and future. God’s aware how that’s going to impact you, present and future. God’s aware of your individuality as a spirit, what’s going to happen to you through the rest of your life, and the guidance that comes through is there to weave you back into the highest possible success, the highest possible spiritual growth that you can attain. So, you see, that’s a whole additional aspect of guidance.

In the Sufi way, we want you to have guidance, we want you to learn to open up to true guidance. True guidance means guidance from the truth; truth is the truth of God, not our individual truth, but God’s truth, which encompasses in it past, present, and future, and all it is. That’s the truth we want you to be guided from. And so we teach that to you, and of course the way you’ll learn that is through the dhikrs, the recitations, through the walking, and through learning the spiritual teachings that allow that guidance to open up inside of you.

It’s a process to have true guidance, it takes time, it doesn’t happen overnight. And if you’re drawn to this teaching, you’re very intuitive and I really respect intuition. Intuition is extremely valuable, but intuition on its own is lacking the comprehensive understanding that divine brings. So, to reach that you have to do that deep walking and come into what we call that the Alim or the Mar’ifa, which is the comprehensive guidance that understands all those things and guides us with the sincere truth of divinity itself.