How do you know what you are listening to is divine guidance or your ego?
This is one of most common questions asked about divine guidance. It is often confusing when you “hear” multiple answers within.
Get Your “First Draft” Guidance
One way to develop discernment is to focus on treating any “guidance” we receive as a “first draft” – meaning that it might be guidance which is “most true” or “partly true” or completely from our ego. No matter. Take this “first draft” into the Sufi practice of Remembrance and ask God (or Allah) to help clarify the guidance. Bring the Remembrance to the “first draft” without trying to change or manipulate it. You want to “see what God (or Allah) makes” with it.
Use Remembrance to Get Your “Second Draft”
During Remembrance the “first draft guidance” may be washed away which means that it wasn’t the real guidance. He might clarify it, or take you “behind” it to show you where it came from. Whatever happens, whatever you end up with you should simply consider to be a “second draft.” Take this into Remembrance and keep repeating the cycle until your heart has certainty that it has been given the Highest answer.
Secondly, if we are triggered by something it is almost impossible to get accurate guidance. Sometimes with deep Remembrance for 15 to 60 minutes we might be given a “state” where we are lifted beyond the trigger sufficiently to receive guidance.
Healing Before Guidance is Given
However, sometimes it seems as if God (or Allah) wants us to heal our issues before guidance is given. In that case, we have to work to clear the triggers by using the Remembrance and other Sufi techniques taught to wash away the trauma, pictures and beliefs held in the heart. Also this sometimes requires us to look at the mirrors and projections and interpretations we’ve generated, taking away blame and judgment and discerning the divine lesson God (or Allah) wants us to learn.
There is so much more to say about this question. These skills are one of the central focuses of the Sufi University curriculum; it is one of the reasons we created the University in the first place: so that people could have the blessing of living a life guided by God.
Join Dr. Ibrahim Jaffe for the free teleclass on June 29, Five Veils that Keep You From Knowing Divine Guidance.
Register here.
Explore more deeply the art of Divine Guidance with Dr. Jaffe in the upcoming distance learning course, Walking with the Divine: Living a Life Full of Divine Love and Wisdom. Learn more and register here.
