Question: How do I know what I hear is right?
When I feel fear or am attached to an outcome, how can I trust that the guidance I receive is from the Highest?
Treat any “guidance” we receive as a “first draft” – meaning that it might be guidance which is “mostly true” or “partly true” or completely from our ego. No matter.
Take this “first draft” into Remembrance and ask 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 Allah makes” with it. He might wash it 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 divine 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.
However, sometimes it seems as if 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 techniques taught at the Sufi University 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 judgement and discerning the divine lesson 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.
~Comments from a teleclass taught by Dr. John Wadude Laird, President of UOS
