Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem. Alhamdulillahi rabbil alamin wa sallallahu ala Sayyidina Muhammadin wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salam. As-salamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi. Alhamdulillahi. Thank you all for taking the time to join. We are just having some technical difficulties. Just going to get this all set up and finalized. Bismillah. All right. So we are starting this conversation today about deceptive desires. And really the goal of this conversation is to help us understand in detail what desires are, help us understand and find ways to curb these desires, and to help us figure out ways to channel the energy that we channel towards desires in a little bit of a different direction. We're in a world right now where all of us, every single person is obeying some desire or another. You and I, we are created to worship. We will either worship God, we will worship money, we will worship fame, we will worship followers, we will worship something or another. And the human being has a desire inside of them. It is a desire to want to worship something, but not all of us worship the right thing. That's just something for us to keep in mind. We live in a time where people say, oh, why do you worship God? Why do you have a religion? Well, even if somebody doesn't actually say outwardly that they're worshiping God, inwardly they are worshiping something and they're just making that thing on a pedestal. They're putting that goal that they have on a pedestal, right? So in the, in the old days, you would have the idea of very, very formal shirk. There's a, there's a statue that somebody, you know, makes and they're going to bow down to the statue. And now those statues are more figurative statues that people erect and they bow down to those statues. And those are the different types of things that you and I worship. So Allah actually asks in the Quran, have you seen the one who takes his hawa, his desire as his Lord? And that's an important consideration for us to keep in mind because you and I can actually be worshiping our desire.  Somebody who is not able to stop yelling at people and who's always getting mad at people, they're just worshiping their anger. They're really, really not able to control their anger. So in these conversations, we're going to be going through one desire a week, inshallah, if Allah gives us assistance. And we're just going to be talking frankly, we're going to talk frankly about things like sexual desire, talk frankly about the desire for fame, talk frankly about the desire for followers in this world of Instagram and TikTok and Facebook and YouTube and every single other social media platform that exists. Many of us, we are trying to always gain more followers. We're trying to get more likes. We're trying to get more people to validate us. And so we're going to talk a little bit about why that happens and what we can do to tame it and curb that energy in the right direction. So let's start a little bit with just what the framework for our desires is. So let's try and establish the framework for desires by thinking about how you and I are created. Allah says in the Quran that you and I are created weak. He says We are actually created with a very, very significant weakness inside of us. And this weakness actually makes us susceptible to so much more than we would want to be susceptible to. So you know, you would have those moments where you're like, I got everything under control. I'm conquering this. I'm conquering that. And the next thing you know, we screw up again. We fall short again. We slip again. And that's because that weakness that we have. Now, desire is also not something easy for us to control. Desire is something that is created by God to be strong. It's not supposed to be weak because it's not supposed to be easy. That's one framework. I want all of us to keep in mind as we have these conversations that the framework for success in life is that life has challenges and life has tests. And if everything were to be super easy, well, where is the test, right? If God is trying to reward us with heaven, then there has to be certain tests along the way. And it kind of an exam to see, okay, does this person going to get an A? Is this person going to get a B? Is this person going to get a C? What type of grades are they going to get? And then based on that is the final outcome. So the natural propensities that we have are supposed to be difficult to conquer. Imam al-Razali, one of the chief scholars in the religion of Islam, he actually says that the most difficult propensity inside the human being to deal with is that of desire. And he says it is the oldest capacity in humans, in the man. And it is the first thing to be created in a child. Now, so this opens up the conversation, is a desire a bad thing? Like, should we just eliminate desires? The answer is no, right? You have to have the desire to eat. I'm hungry right now. I need to go eat food at some point. If I don't eat, if I have no desire to eat, what's going to happen to me? Well, I'm going to eventually lose energy. I'm not going to be able to do anything. I'm not going to be able to do the work that it is that I need to do. I'm not going to be able to contribute in whatever way that is possible to society.  The desire for the sexual desire that's created in the human being for a reason. You're not supposed to eliminate it. You're supposed to channel it in the right direction. You're supposed to channel that desire in the direction of permissible marriage. And then that allows somebody to, you know, appropriate, have kids and spread goodness and spread children in the world and hopefully spread Muslims in the world. So there are all these different types of desires. Again, our goal is not to eliminate them. The goal is to channel them in the right direction and to curb them and to make sure that they don't control us. One thing for us to always keep in mind how we can evaluate where we're at as human beings. If something is controlling us, if something is controlling you and me, something's wrong. If you and I are in control of whatever it is that's inside of us, right? Ultimately, Allah is in control. But if we are able to control ourselves, then that means we're progressing along the path well. So never let something control you.  Never let the different things that you and I might be tempted to do, might be tempted to look at, might be tempted to engage with. Don't let anything control you because you and I are supposed to be the ones in control of our inner world. So let's talk a little bit about what desire is. And then let's talk a little bit about how we go about balancing it. So desire is a natural propensity inside of the human being, a natural propensity which makes us want to engage in whatever activity it is that we are talking about, right? So our goal is to bring this desire into a state of moderation. It is to bring the desire into a state of moderation. Just one second here, just want to check something. All right, sorry about that. So the goal is to bring the desire into a state of moderation. We want to bring it into equilibrium. So I'll give you an example. Let's say that somebody is like always overeating, like just all the time they're overeating, right? Well, the goal there would be to bring that desire of overeating into moderation of eating at normal times by doing what? What would we have to do? What the scholars recommend is you actually have to fast in order to bring the overeating into balance, right? How does that work? Well, if you fast, if you on one end of the spectrum is somebody who just eats everything it is that they see, and on the other end of the spectrum is somebody who is trying to regularly and constantly fast in order to bring the person who's overeating into the middle. You can't just reduce the food by a little bit. You actually have to start fasting and go on the other side of the spectrum, because if you go on the other side of the spectrum, you are now able to balance this desire and bring it into the equilibrium that you need to bring it into, right? So that's something for us to really keep in mind. The goal is not to eliminate it is to bring this desire into equilibrium. This is going to be the case with every single thing it is that we're talking about, right? You can use the desire for food to eat everything that's halal and that's haram. You can use the desire to enjoy, to drink, and to drink alcohol and to party. You can use those desires in the wrong direction. Your goal is going to be to channel them in the right way and ultimately to bring all these desires into a state of equilibrium. So another very, very common desire that we have. What is it? That desire would be the desire for the desire for anger, right? It's a very, very normal tendency in the human being to get angry. So how do we balance this tendency to get angry? Well, what we're supposed to do is we're not supposed to eliminate anger. You don't get rid of anger, but you channel anger in the right direction because Allah says in the Quran that those who restrain their anger, He says, that those who restrain their anger, so when you're really upset, when you're just about to unleash on somebody, the goal is to restrain anger. It's something I know personally I need to work on, right? That if I'm getting in a moment of anger, how do I go about restraining it? Now if the human being completely eliminated anger, let's say that desire for anger was just gone inside of you, well, how are you going to get upset about wrongs that are happening in the world? How are you going to get out of sight about social injustices? How are you going to get upset about things that people are doing that they shouldn't be doing, right, about corruption and all these other problems that happen in the world? How are we going to get upset about that? Well, that faculty of anger and the desire of anger is in there to help us get upset about the right things and to not focus on the petty stuff that is that we get angry about. So it's to again bring it into equilibrium. So in this kind of treatment of desires, you have a variety of different types of people. So we're just going to roughly categorize the types of people that you have when we're talking about desires. And again, class is focused on deceptive desires. We're going to be talking, inshallah, at a different desire every single week. And the focus for right now is just to help us give a little bit of a framework for what a desire is, how do we go about understanding it. So you have somebody, and these are from Imam al-Khazali, he says, you have somebody who's like never really ever had their desires aroused. And so they can really quickly respond to treatment. They can really quickly treat the desires and bring them all into equilibrium. That category of person I doubt exists in the modern world today, but maybe there's a couple people out there. If so, let us know how you're doing. But then there's a second category. This is the category of somebody who recognizes when they're following desires. They recognize their kind of foul acts. And at the same time, they sometimes behave in the proper ways, but they're not necessarily in the habit of behaving righteously or of taming their desires. This person has to uproot the corruption and uproot the desires and then go through a process of self-discipline in order to actually tame the desires. That's the goal for this person. Then you have somebody, this third category, is someone who actually thinks that following your desires, like just unleashed following our desires is a good thing. And this person is generally going to struggle to change, but it's still possible.  They boast about how many girls they slept with, how many people they've hooked up with illicitly about all the different partying it is that they've done. They boast about these types of things. Now, again, there's nothing wrong with changing your life after you and I slip up in those areas. But there's definitely something problematic about boasting about all of the things that we've done that are actually bringing negativity and negative energy inside of ourselves and in society. So the person who loves corruption, who loves evil, they're very difficult to change. Somebody like the president of the United States who just left the presidency, thank God, just completely just obviously corrupt inside. And then his corruption was so bad inside that it just seeped throughout the whole country. You have hundreds of thousands of millions of people in fact who are corrupt now because of the fact that one person's corruption was so strong, it impacted others. Keep that in mind. You can have a light that's so strong inside that impacts others and you can have a darkness that's so strong inside that it impacts others. So those are the couple categories of people. Now let's think a little bit about how do we channel these desires. So we talked about what these desires are and we spoke about the different categories of people that exist and we also spoke about the fact that we need to bring these desires into some state of equilibrium. That is the goal, bring the desires into a state of equilibrium. You and I have to understand ourselves in order to really ever succeed in life. Keep that in mind. We cannot succeed in life if we don't understand ourselves in some way or another. What does that mean? Look, I can understand myself outwardly.  I'm this tall. I weigh this much. I like these things. I'm interested in this. I'm not interested in this. This is a basic level of understanding. You can do that. But the goal of the human being, there's actually a statement that one of the righteous said that the one who knows themself, himself or herself knows their Lord. The first process of starting to discover the meaning, you know, people ask you, what's the meaning of life? The first way to start to discover the whole meaning of this whole place that we're in is to start to get to know yourself. And it's to get to know the good and the bad. It's not difficult to get to know the good. Everybody likes to get to know the good. We love when people tell us, oh, you're like this.  It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, keep it coming. You know what I mean? Like, keep the praise coming, keep the likes coming. They love, it loves that. But what's hard to get to know, so that's easy to get to know the good about yourself. And it's important to know the good about yourself so you can amplify it. What's difficult is to get to know the bad about yourself. The things like, you know what, where am I weak? What are my blind spots? Where do I struggle? What are the things that I'm that I'm that are challenged for me? That's difficult, right? But that doesn't mean it's impossible. It does not mean that you cannot know the bad about yourself. It just takes a little bit more work. And so this is a very, very important aspect of this journey of spiritual purification and this journey of spiritual progress to actually uncover and deeply think about the parts inside of us that we need to work on. But in order to know that, you got to know what your inner world looks like. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. So you and I see every day we see the outer world, right? We see everything going on, everything that's that's happening in the outside that our eyes are able to see. There's also something called the inner eye. The inner eye is a part in us that's able to penetrate and see the inner realities of people. And first and foremost, understand our own inner reality. This is something that the more somebody progresses spiritually, if Allah wishes to gift them with this, they are given this gift. And this is based on Hadith of the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. He says, beware of the Firasah of the Motmin, beware of the piercing inner sight of the believer, because barely the believer sees by a very, very powerful piercing sight. So let's understand what this inner world looks like. You and I have a couple parts. You have what's called the nafs. So imagine the nafs is in the middle. Then you have the nafs is the ego. It's the lower self. Then you have the door to the spiritual world. And that's called the Ruh, the spirit. And then you have the nafs, which is the door to the dunya.  So that's the nafs. The nafs is the door to the dunya and the world. The spirit is the door to the spiritual world, the unseen. The idea of spirituality is the more you work on refining your spirit, the more access you have to these unseen lights and unseen breezes which bring about tranquility and calmness and all these other wonderful gifts that help somebody. In the middle, I misspoke earlier, in the middle you have the heart. So there's a little heart. You have the heart in the middle, you've got the spirit on this side, you have the nafs on this side. Now, the more you obey your desires, the stronger the nafs gets. So the nafs is like, so you're working it out, or you're working out this arm, the stronger the nafs gets, right? The more you obey and sorry, that you don't obey the desires and that you follow the practice of self-discipline and you work on yourself, the stronger the spirit gets, right? So now the spirit is getting a chance to work out. And then in the middle is the heart. Now the heart is going to be influenced by whichever side is stronger. The heart is just kind of like, you could almost say this like innocent bystander and all this that's getting influenced by these two sides, right? This isn't easy. The heart has, the spirit has angels that are helping it. The nafs has the devil and are the Shayat, the various Shayatin that are helping it, right? So these are the different types of desires that these are the different categories of the inner world of the human being. Now, what is our goal? The goal is when people say the idea of like purifying the heart, right? It is about taming the desires so that the nafs doesn't get strong, you want to weaken the nafs, right? So like my non-existent biceps here, you want to make them completely go away on the side of the nafs and you want to make the other the spirit strong. You want to make the spiritual biceps strong, you want to make the spirit in a very, very formidable place, right? That is really the goal. What happens then is the heart starts to get purified and now you can actually start to listen to your heart. People say, right, this idea of like, oh, you got to listen to your heart, but you can actually start to listen to your heart because you know that the heart is in a state of... Sorry about this. The heart is in a state of purity, right? So when the heart is in a state of purity, you can start listening to the heart, but don't follow your heart when it's not pure. That's going to mess you up because you actually could be following the nafs. Most of the time, we are following the nafs. Most of the time when people say that I'm going to listen to the heart, it's the nafs has been working on us for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years. And so really the heart is like this small little thing that's just gotten overtaken by our desires. So that's very, very important to keep in mind. And then, and I don't want to get too, you know, hopefully it's not too confusing.  Hopefully you'll be, you know, able to read it. I've heard that my head writing is very legible, but Claire, that's why we have keyboards and you can type. All right, I'm the la. So the inside of the nafs, the last thing is there's this thing called hawa. That is the word for desire. The hawa is like speaking to the nafs, right? In addition to Sheytan, it's like, oh, do this. Oh, do that. Do this. Come on. Just look one more time. Do, you know, go.  It's all good if you drink a little bit. A couple more hits of that pipe. It's not going to do anything. Go take a hit of your pay pen, right? It's the hawa is literally like whispering things partly inside of us. It's a desire inside of us. It can also get strong and makes enough strong. And we haven't even spoken really much about Sheytan. Like the devils are here to make things even worse for us, right? They actually continue to nudge at us, nudge at us, nudge at us in order to make the nafs stronger. So all this to say, goal is what? Eliminate, sorry, curb the desire, make the nafs weak, make the spirit strong, you become strong, life becomes easier to navigate, and inshallah it ends in a good outcome. That's the kind of very, very basic formula that you and I have. But our goal then, as these desires come, is we just want to keep trying to bring them into equilibrium. We want to bring these desires into equilibrium. So now I'm just going to talk at a very, very high level about the ways in which these desires are formed inside. So you have different parts in you. And these are all based on a framework established by the scholars of the spirituality, especially Imam al-Hazali. And they basically talk about, like I said, the nafs, the rouh, which is the spirit and the heart. You also have these faculties working inside of you. And they're basically teaching you or they're bringing you down. So you have what's called the rational faculty, which is the intellect. The rational faculty is supposed to be in control and in charge. The intellect is supposed to be telling you what to do. So do this, don't do that. That's why knowledge is so important. Gaining knowledge is so important because the intellect becomes more powerful. The more powerful the intellect is, the more in a good way. We're talking about spiritual knowledge here, not just like going and learning a bunch of facts and figures and then, you know, being intellectually arrogant. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the more and more the intellect knows and understands the religion, the more it's able to guide the rest of the body. Got it? Then you have another thing inside of you called the appetitive faculty. The appetitive faculty is the faculty inside of you, which primarily governs the desire for sex and the desire for food. These are what are called the chief mother desires inside the human being. Somebody who cannot control these will not be able to control any desires, which is usually what you'll see really corrupt people. Again, like the past president of the US who completely was just unleashed with his sexual desires and just was not able to control any other desire on top of that. It eventually led for a corrupt desire for power. He tried to even hold on to power, tried to stage a coup. You see where this leads. You see how evil just one or two untamed desires can make somebody and then how far that darkness spreads. So this appetite of faculty, it governs the desires inside of you, the appetite of faculty, talking about the desire for food and sex. We'll talk about those in the coming weeks, inshallah. The person who's able to control, right, the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, he said, he said, the one who's able to guarantee me what's in between their mouth and what's in between their private parts, I can guarantee for them heaven. That's talking about the food, right, according to many of the scholars and the tongue overall, like in terms of being able to control your tongue. And so you could also say anger and the private parts, meaning sexual relations. Some, excuse me, somebody's able to control these two. The Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said, he can guarantee them heaven because they're very, very difficult to control. Excuse me.  That's what you and I want. We want the rational faculty to be in charge. And then we have the appetite of faculty, which is the faculty which controls most of our desires. We want that faculty to be in submission to the intellect. Those are the two basic ones that we want to cover for today. So our goal then over time is any desire that we have, we just think about it. This works for all traits, but specifically for desires, you just want to bring it into equilibrium. So it's like somebody is completely doing, we mentioned food earlier, let's say sexual desire. Someone is just on Tinder all the time or they're addicted to pornography, all the things that are very, very prevalent today. And if you're a parent of somebody who is a teenager, especially teenage boys, just be very aware that it's highly likely that they're getting exposed to very, very dangerous and haram imagery out there that in a time when their desires are just developing and stimulating the desires in a very, very wrong way. So conversations are very important to have as families. So we have this desire that can get out of control. Someone in that state would need to regulate that desire, right? There's spiritual medicine someone can apply it. Proposal something indicated to us that if somebody, sexual desires are out of control, they should fast and that will help tame them. Why? Because these ones are linked, as we just mentioned, and they help clean the inner world and they clean the desires and they bring it into equilibrium or they can get married and permissively they can then engage in sexual relations. That will help channel and that desire in the right direction. So that's a perfect example of how to bring something in to balance. We just want to slowly and slowly bring these things into balance. And so our goal then over the course of these conversations is we're just going to be talking about the very, very obvious desires and then eventually we'll get into the more subtle desires that exist inside of the human being. The more subtle desires are those desires that the desire for religious people to notice you in religious gatherings, the desire for people to praise you, those types of things. And then of course we'll talk about the more obvious ones like sexual desire, desire for food, desire for excessive desire for money, the desire for being in charge, the desire for power, the desire for people to listen to you, the desire for arguing, all those types of things we'll try to cover. And then the more we can bring this into equilibrium, if Allah wills, the more successful we're going to be in our life. And so we'll end here with a story of somebody who's a very, very important figure in the history of Islam in America, Malcolm X. So for those who know the story of Malcolm, Malcolm, every single desire it is that was out there, Malcolm before his Islam was engaged in it, right? Hustling, dealing, gambling, drinking, smoking. I mean, everything it is that you could think of, right? Sexual relationships. But then Malcolm X, he eventually found, right, the nation of Islam, and then eventually he found Islam. And you saw somebody who, and it's not like it's just like a magic switch that happens, and someone just completely stops all the stuff that they were doing before Islam. There's still work that has to be put in. And you saw somebody who they might have been the most deeply engaged wherever they were on the streets, let's say, or when they were hustling. There might have been most deeply engaged in certain desires, and then they were able to curb those desires. And then what happened? Not only did he curb those desires, he got all of his desires into equilibrium, and then he channeled the most powerful desire. This is a secret. The most powerful desire are not the weak ones. It's called the highest desire that you and I have is the desire for knowledge. If somebody becomes really into learning, especially having the desire to know Allah, the knowledge of Allah, then the desires that are inside of them, the other desires will automatically start to get tamed, inshaAllah, because they will be focused on a higher purpose. And they will already put some work into taming those desires. So what happened with Malcolm? When Malcolm was in jail, he would read an insane amount. He would literally be reading, and they would close the jail, they would close the lights at a certain time, and Malcolm would have a light that he would be reading with. And then when the guard would come by to just check on every single cell, Malcolm would close the light and close the book. And then the guard would leave and he would keep reading. That's how much his desire for knowledge increased. And then his desire for learning about Allah, learning about Allah's religion increased, such that he became somebody who was into learning and then into spreading knowledge and spreading justice. And that desire became so strong. It's a good desire. It's a good desire because our goal is to channel the desires that pull us down. You and I have desires that are pulling us this way. There's to slowly channel them, bring them onto the horizontal playing field, and then slowly channel them vertically towards Allah. What does that mean? We can desire Allah. You can desire Jannah. You can desire getting to know Allah. You can desire the love of Allah, all positive things. If those desires become powerful enough in the human being, these lowly desires that you and I have, we stop wanting to follow them. Because you're like, dude, there's so much more I could be doing. Who cares about this? Who cares about getting high when I could be getting spiritually high in the right way? Who cares about these things? So these desires, he channeled the desires from literally being dragged down and then he started to be pulled up, a magnetic pull. He channeled these desires in the most positive direction, alhamdulillah. He was then able to go out and he was able to spread immense good, bring people who are struggling with significant parts of their life back into goodness. And he was able to become one of the most, if not the most significant Islamic figure in the history of the United States. I mean Subhanallah, Malcolm X. Look at this type of impact that he had all because he was able to control his desires and he was able to bring them into a state of equilibrium. So that is the type of potential that you and I have. We can't let the lowliness of desires, the lowliness of this dunya, the lowliness of all these appetites that we have bring us down. That's what animals do. The animals, they just, all they want to do is like they want to eat, they want to be with other animal, they want to copulate. That's all animals want to do. That's not what you and I were created for. We do that stuff at a limited level. We bring it into equilibrium and we focus on what's important in life. What's important in life is getting the desire to be focused vertically on getting to know Allah, the desire for loving Allah, the desire for loving the messenger of Allah, the desire for spreading clear, the desire for spreading good, the desire for serving, all these types of desires are positive ones that we can bring about once we tackle the basic ones. So inshallah we'll spend the next couple of weeks talking about the basic ones. We'll talk about how we work on them. And then of course the work comes in and we have to, it's a lifelong struggle. It's a lifelong journey that we put in, that we have to put work in, detaining each and every single desire. We work on ourselves, then we try to help our families and then our communities, societies and so on and so forth. Allah says in the Quran that He does not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves. So we got to work on what's in ourselves and Allah will start to change our condition, change the condition of our family, and then hopefully He will allow us to help change the condition of the society that we live in to help bring it out of the state of immense corruption and immense obsession with the wrong type of desires, bring it into equilibrium. So we pray that Allah blesses everybody. We pray that He blesses the efforts that we're trying to make and we pray that He assists everybody. We'll do a short prayer, a short dua and then we'll go ahead and end. We're going to try to keep these classes 30, the 35 minutes inshallah. So we'll do Wednesday every evening, 7 p.m. PST inshallah, 7 to 7. 30. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. We ask that you accept this. We ask that you pardon us. We ask that you allow us to curb our desires and to channel our desires in the right way and to bring them into a state of equilibrium. We ask that you put barakah and all of the efforts it is that people are doing Allah to spread your religion. We ask that you allow the Prophet to be pleased with all of us and we ask that you are pleased with all of us and we ask that you forgive all of those it is that have passed away from COVID and from any other disease amongst the ummah of the Prophet ﷺ in the recent days and in the recent weeks and that you grant them the highest stations of paradise and all those who are sick in our families and are the families of our loved ones that you cure them and that you remove all difficulty from our life and from their life and that you bring immense barakah and immense khair into our life and anybody who it is that is here that is struggling or that intended to be here or that is just making any good intention anywhere in the world that has any difficulty Ya Rabbil Alameen that you remove all their difficulty that you bring khair and ease and positivity and happiness and optimism into their life that you remove all of our anxieties and depressions that it should bless all of our affairs inwardly and outwardly in this world and the next. Thank you so much. So today we are going to be talking about the different types of desires that a human being has and we're going to just do a quick recap in terms of what we covered last time and then we're going to dive into a couple of the different categories of desires that you can think of that you and I might have. So last time we just talked more about the introduction and the framework for how desires work, what are the types of desires that we have and this time really the goal is to help us develop a deeper understanding of why desires can be so negative for us, why they can hurt us and why obeying our desires can be so harmful for us as human beings. So a couple of things for us to keep in mind first is that Allah mentioned in the Quran that the one who restrains their nuts from following its desires that for them heaven is the reward for that right. So Allah alludes to this in the Quran regularly that if you control yourself inshallah you're going to get a reward, you're going to get heaven or you're going to get some other type of reward for it and so that's important because what we're seeing is that the path to heaven, the path to the pleasure of God, the path to goodness is facilitated and really the path is set up in a way that we have to control our desires in order to get to the end goal right. So if we control these desires, if we control our sexual desire, our desire for food, our desire for fame and wealth and all these other things that we have inside of us we will be able to travel that path in a more effective way but if you obey your desires, whether they are the apparent ones or the subtle ones, whether you're following the desire to outwardly go and do something that you shouldn't be doing because of a carnal appetite or whether you're obeying some inner desire to get noticed and you pray only so people can praise you and you give charity only so people can tell you how awesome you are and how wealthy and generous you are, whatever desire you're following that that leads away from the path of heaven and so that's just one major point for us to keep in mind here. And as you know folks have questions, the live chat feature at least in YouTube is working so please feel free to chime in with questions I'll do my best to address them which I love. So we covered, we discussed this just briefly, the types of desires that you have I want to dive into it a little bit more in this class so our goal is to go from basic carnal appetites to what are called the stronger spiritual desires. So as I mentioned, the goal is not to eliminate your desires, you do not have to get rid and be a desire-free person. Islam is not the type of religion that says that you have to become completely abstinent in everything and you have to achieve kind of a monk type of status. No, alhamdulillah, the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam was our role model. He married, he ate food, he fasted and he broke his fast. He didn't fast every single day, not feel fast, of course in Ramadan he did, but he would pray at night and he would also sleep at night. He married, he engaged in relationships. So this idea of complete abstinence from the desires that we have to completely eliminate them, that's not what we're talking about here. The goal though is to curb our desires, it's to get them in control. You don't want anything controlling you. Think about this as a human being, only Allah should control you. Don't let something else your lust or some desire for food or some bank account or some money or all these types of things control you. No, when you get an inclination, they're like, oh, I have a decision I could make.  Or you could get the super fancy, the Mercedes, the BMW or whatever it is and it requires you taking on an interest loan. Well, desire leads you to Haram.  We might not think of it as a big deal, 1% APR, 2% APR, but that's technically, I mean, not technically, it's very validly Haram. But which part of us, how do we go about controlling that? It's about limiting the desire for the person who doesn't have a desire in the first place to go beyond their means, who doesn't have a desire in the first place for significant wealth or all these luxuries or status or these types of things, they're not going to go and do these types of things. So that's something for us to keep in mind. So now let's get to the way for us to travel from following these carnal appetites to actually achieving these more spiritual desires it is that the human being has. So the basic appetites that you and I have, we had the basic appetites of sexual appetite, the appetite for food, those that's what everything's built on and then the appetite for money and the desire for wealth and the desire for status, those are those are other ones. Those are the things that pull us down. Okay, those things pull us down. What you want to go to is you want to traverse up spiritual journey is a journey upwards, it's a journey towards a closer relationship with Allah. So in order to traverse upward, you have to desire up things that are high up there. Does that make sense? So hopefully we want to desire what are called spiritual desires. So what does that mean? It means that we want to have a couple of things. There is a way to transform yourself. There is a way for Allah to transform you for an inner alchemy to happen that rather than desiring these base things, you start desiring high things like what? You start desiring love of Allah. You start desiring tranquility. You start desiring peaceful moments so you can worship Allah. You start desiring knowledge. You start desiring moments where you can learn. You start desiring sitting with wise people who can teach you. These are the types of things that human beings can actually start to channel their desires. So rather than somebody who's like parting all the time or clubbing or just caught up in all the different things that we can be caught up with especially in Western society, you start to channel those desires into the right direction and start to focus on what would be called these higher value spiritual desires. So that is very, very important. That is the goal of this path for us to take the carnal desires and for us to traverse instead of just following the carnal appetites, we try to shift those carnal appetites upwards and we instead eliminate the carnal aspect of them and we start to channel them towards spiritual desires. So now you and I know the goal. What's the goal? We got to get from A to B. We got to get from the situation we're in right now to a higher situation where we start desiring the right types of things. Now this is a journey though. It's not easy. This journey requires inner work and inner balancing. What you and I want is we want to figure out what are the different keys that will unlock different parts of us that will allow us to traverse this journey. So self mastery is what becomes important here. You and I might have heard of this concept self mastery. It is the idea of literally mastering your nafs, of mastering yourself.  You are not a slave to your nafs. You are not a slave to your desires.  If you were a slave to Allah, you would desire Allah. You will love Allah. You will want Allah. You will yearn for Him. Allah says in the Quran, those people who have a yearning and they're aspiring to Allah. He mentions that. So that's what we want to be from. We want to be from the people who have this desire to get close to our Lord. That's not going to work if we're caught up in all these other types of things. So we have to reduce those things. We have to channel the energy in the right direction. But it requires hard work. It does require hard work. So just think about it like this. If somebody who wants to play a game, let's say they're playing a sports game, right? The Super Bowl just happened. And the team that won the Super Bowl, for them to win is Tom Brady and his team. For them to win the Super Bowl, you think it was just like there's chilling all the time, drinking and hanging out and eating food? I doubt that. No, they were working out. They were hustling. They were practicing. They were up early and working out. They are in different various games. They are of course winning all the different games in the season. And then they get to the Super Bowl and then they have to work really hard in that game to actually win. So that required work. But the work paid off, right? It paid off in a reward. You got a ring and you get a trophy and all these types of things. And you get bragging rights to say you won. But other than that, the reward is limited to this world. But they put in the hard work, the sweat, the blood, sweat and tears in the hard work in order to hustle to make it happen. Now think about this. You and I, we have a chance to put in the hard work to conquer ourselves. And we get way more reward than the simple reward of winning a Super Bowl or getting some money or some prize or status in this life. That's nothing. We get the reward of, inshallah, eternal jannah, eternal jannah, eternal paradise, no worries, no sicknesses, no problems, no challenges, all calmness and tranquility and hanging out with the prophets. May Allah bless all of them and bestow peace and blessings upon all of them, right? No family tensions and problems and illnesses and COVID and all these types of things. And let alone blessings upon blessings upon blessings, abundant blessings that Allah showers upon His servants in paradise. But it takes hard work to get there, right? It comes in the hadith of the Prophet Sallam. He said that paradise is surrounded by difficult things. And so it makes it easy to get to. And that hellfire is surrounded by beautiful things. And so it's you, you, you, you will yearn and incline that the desire in you will incline towards the path of the hellfire unless you and I tame our desires. When we start to tame our desires, our self becomes okay with the hard work and the self mastery needed in order to achieve the best outcome, which is the outcome of traversing the path to paradise. So let's talk a little bit about what types of desires exist. So you have the obvious ones and then you have the subtle ones. So I think I've already mentioned the obvious ones like a lot, but I'll just mention again, sexual appetite, appetite for food, the desire for money, the desire for fame, the desire for significant amounts of wealth, the desire to be in charge, the desire to be famous, the desire to have followers. These are all like in the last couple are very much linked, right? You'll see people in this society, they will do everything it is that they could and they'll be really promiscuous. And generally speaking, they have no control over their food and their diet many times. And then after they get to a certain point, it's not about that stuff. Like, well, now I got to make as much money as possible through whatever means as possible. And then while they're doing that, what are they spending their money on? They're spending, many people are spending their money on, you know, activities that they shouldn't be doing, going clubbing and this type of thing, open drinking, having tabs at the bar that are like thousands of dollars, right? Just overdoing and living this excessively lavish, unnecessarily exuberant, extravagant life. Then, oh, that's not enough. Well, now I got to be in charge. Maybe I'll run for office. Maybe I'll be, maybe I'll try to get to the CEO status of my company. That's still not enough because the NUS is never full. Now I want to be famous. I got to run for office and be famous. I got to be in charge of people. I got to be powerful. I want followers. Now everybody can get followers because of these different social media platforms. You'll see the desire goes on and on and on. And it never leaves you. It never leaves you. Different desires target different people depending on the age you're at, but you see this in politicians all the time. I mean, I see it even in the President of the United States, the past president, all these desires were extremely manifest in his life journey. And up to the point where the desire to be in charge was so manifest that he was trying to stage a coup in order to stay in charge. That's just desire and all NUS. Definition of NUS is that, right? The NUS cannot handle losing. The NUS cannot handle people when they don't praise you. And so that example was an example of pure NUS. You and I follow an example of spirit, of the Prophet ﷺ, who is a spiritual, who is our spiritual guide, right? He is the Prophet ﷺ. He is the one who teaches us how to attain stations of spirituality that draw us nearer to, nearer to Allah. Excuse me. So those are their parent desires. Those are obvious. The NUS, it likes those desires, you know? It likes those desires. And so it's obvious. But remember this, the NUS, one time, one of my teachers told me, he said that the NUS will try to take its share of everything, including obedience. It will take its share in obedience. And Ibn Ata'illah in the Hikm, he mentions this, that the NUS wants its share in everything. So now let's get into obedience. Why does the NUS want its share in obedience? Well, what the NUS wants here is it wants to be noticed in some way or another. So with disobedience, it's very clear. What is the NUS getting? It's getting fulfillment of these different appetites. But when you start worshiping Allah and you start trying to get close to him, you start following the religion, you want to, now what the NUS says is like, how can I get a portion of this?   Oh, you should say this so that people can praise you.  Oh, you should post this religious statement or any statement, whatever, so people can praise you in this way or another. Oh, you should do this, give this much money so people can tell you how generous you are. Oh, you should learn knowledge so people can say, wow, look at this guy, look at this girl. She knows so much. This is the NUS trying to get its share in obedience. And this is very much a possibility. It comes in a very, very, very famous hadith with the Prophets of Islam indicated that one of the first people to be thrown in the Hellfire will be the scholar who taught people so that people could say he was knowledgeable and the scholar who recited Quran so that people could praise him, not for the sake of Allah. And this is what's happening here is that the desire, the NUS is taking its portion of the worship and the desire, this is called, these are called apparent subtle desires. So you have obvious desires, you have the subtle ones that are hidden. Once you break past the obvious desires, you've got to work on the subtle desires. Because if you don't, you can still be ruined. You can still be ruined in this life and in the next, Allah protect us, but it's not just about defeating the apparent ones. But Allah starts to help you. Allah helps always. Allah says that he, that he takes the believers out of darkness and into light. And Allah is the protecting friend of the believers and he takes them out of darkness into light. And so know that Allah can take you out of the darkness, desire into the light of trying to obey him and the darkness of obeying him for the wrong reason into the light of obeying him for the right reason. And the darkness of insincerity to the light of sincerity. As allah to Allah, he will inshallah do it. But we have to put in the effort Allah says in the Quran that whoever strives in our way surely we shall guide them. So you and I put in the effort and we know that hadith where you go to Allah walking and Allah comes running, right?  So we put in that effort. But the apparent desires are there. So don't discount them.  I'm not smoking. I'm not clubbing. I'm not, you know, on tinder all the time. I'm not doing, if you are doing all those things, there's a lot of hope. Allah will forgive you inshallah and Allah will facilitate a path to goodness.  No, nobody has that right to say anything. Allah is a Rahim. But some people might think that, oh, you're caught up in these types of things. And once I leave them, oh, I'm good. I figured it out. I'm bound for heaven. I got my spot reserved in heaven. You know, it's not how it works, right? Because there's still work to be done. And I have to work on a daily basis on a weekly basis on ourselves. The nafs will always try to trick us with something or another. It's tricks that are up its sleeve, trying to get to you. And the desires have to be conquered in order for the nafs to be defeated. So as we just mentioned, now there are a couple other things to keep in mind. The more you obey anyone desire, the stronger it gets. As I mentioned last time, it's like feeding.  So the more you follow, let's say with sexual appetite, this one's obvious. The more one follows their sexual appetites, the more they're going to want to continue to engage in illicit sexual relations, right? And so you have somebody who's just not able to control themselves here. The more you eat and overeat, the more you're going to want to overeat. So this culture in the U.S. of buffets and this type of thing, it encourages regular overeating and unhealthy foods don't help with that. And then of course, you know that the country has no obesity problem. So this is because desires are followed. And then you have like ads come up like seven up or a sprite, whichever one says obey your thirst, right? These are targeted ads to make you obey the nuffs. It's really just saying obey the nuffs, right? Obey your thirst, obey your desire. So it tries to get you to obey that desire for food or for beverages and whatnot. So that being said, simple solution here, you lessen that amount that you do of that thing and it will start to get better, right? People who have pornography addictions, let's say, which is a very big problem in the Muslim community, unfortunately, but it is a problem. And unfortunately, it's not talked about that much either. The more one works on themselves and reduces the amount that they are engaging in or watching, the more they will be able to conquer that desire. It doesn't go away completely. That desire has to be eventually curved then into a halal situation or one gets married is able to release that in the right way. So that's the kind of high level path. But here's the tricky thing. When you get into this subtle desires, we have a parent ones and subtle ones. When you get into the subtle ones, the more you follow the subtle ones, the more your nuffs will trick you into thinking that you're all that and you don't really need work on yourself. So the other ones, it's obvious that you and I know, okay, for, you know, doing something very obviously haram like, okay, I got to stop. But the nuffs doesn't work like that. When you start to say, oh, I'm going to worship so people can notice me or I'm going to speak or I'm going to, I'm going to learn so people can say this about me, this type of thing. I'm going to, I'm going to try to get followers so that I can be, get more and more influence in the hearts of people. What's happening here is that their words affect you in a way you don't know. And the people's eyes and their gaze at you and all the different ways that they're following you affect you in ways you don't know. And that gets subtle because it makes the nuffs stronger, but the nuffs tricks you into thinking that it's becoming weaker.   And nobody else does that. Look at you. And then what people end up doing is the nuffs tricks them so much. And I've seen this happen that they'll spend all this time talking back, talking smack about other people because they're going to look at this person and that person doesn't do this. And this person doesn't cover theirs. And this person doesn't dress like this. And they're just losing all their good deeds and backbiting. Meanwhile, they're puffed up thinking that there's something. That's the nuffs, that's desire being followed. And we ask that Allah protect us because they're very subtle things that can completely ruin our good actions. Right. So the path then is a path of self-control and the path is a path of working on ourselves and rejecting these impulses and rejecting these desires when they come. And we have to just be on guard for whatever subtle one comes up or apparent one comes up. So I'm going to just give a kind of very general review of how the scholars recommend curing this stuff. And then we'll get into specific ones in the future conversations. So at a general level, if you and I are into something, if we can reduce it, stop completely, it's good. But gradual reduction is better than not stopping at all. So let's say that somebody like smokes a lot of weed, right? Okay, smoking a lot of weed. It's very common nowadays. It's legal in many states in California. It's legal. People are smoking. Okay. Well, you're like, okay, I want to stop smoking weed. Hopefully you should want to stop. It's not good. It's an intoxicant. It's considered haram by contents of the scholars. I'm sure people already know that. There's not really any need to discuss that. But so you want to stop. Well, you might not be able to stop clean. If you can stop clean, Alhamdulillah. But what you do is you gradually reduce it. So you're doing this much. You reduce it to a little bit less. Okay, less frequently, less frequently, whatever device you're using, you use less of it and less of it, right? And you slowly reduce the amount such that the desire goes away and you replace it with something less evil. Okay, so you might go from weed to like hookah.  And then you eventually leave it completely, right? The entire idea of the smoking. So those are those are ways gradual reduction works for obvious desires. But leaving at the completely is better. That's better. But it's not easy always to do that. So gradual reduction is a method that we have and that we're able to follow. Now there are a couple of remedies for us to keep in mind. They're what are called over the counter remedies. And then they're called specific remedies. Okay, so over the counter, these are like, you know, basic remedies of scholars have given us that, okay, this will work in general to curb all of your desires. And then there's specific prescriptions you and I need to be given for individual things that we're going through and a very qualified spiritual guide can help us with those things. So over the counter, five things are needed. You can nail these five things. If we can nail these five things, we'll be inshallah in a very good place and may Allah assist us. First is you and I have to have the determination and the intention to work on ourselves. We have to say, I want to work on myself. I'm not just going to be a person who's complacent. I'm going to improve. I'm going to work on myself. That's the first. The second is we add in regular doses of being hungry and fasting. So fasting curbed desires. It diminishes desires. We all know this and Ramadan is coming up. May Allah allow us to reach Ramadan and give us the full barakah. But Ramadan helps to eliminate these desires. So what you do is in your daily regimen has some portion, even if you don't fast for the whole day, where you just don't eat all the time. You want to have hunger because when hunger is there for portions of time, hunger facilitates this oppression of desire because a full, when you give yourself everything it is that your nuffs wants, I want food now. I want this now. I want french fries now. I want ice cream now. Just get it as soon as you get an instant gratification, the nuffs gets built stronger and stronger and stronger. So you and I have to curb that. So the first is determination and intention. Second is some regular amounts of hunger and fasting. Third is consistent amounts of worship and thicker. So we have, if you and I are trying to work on ourselves, we've got to get in a worship regimen, a worship routine, not just like, this is in addition to the basics. The basics are important. This is five prayers and beyond. So you add in extra prayers, right? You add in noato prayers. You add in the Hajr prayer. You add in extra adhkar that somebody would do. The three things I would recommend adding when somebody is doing their farth in order to help curb this. First is the regular one called sunna muakada. They emphasize sunna after each prayer or before each prayer of which in the Hanafi school at least is two before fajr, two after al-Bohr and two after maghrib and two after isha. So those would be good prayers for us to make sure we do. Second thing then is to do the sunna adhkar, sunna dhikr of the morning and the evening. You can find this dhikr in compilations. There's one called where the latif that I would recommend. W-I-R-D, a latif that is a compilation of the sunna dhikr of the morning and every evening. Try to do that at least once a day in the morning time. In addition to that surah yasin would be good to read every day based on various hadith or the problems. I'm encouraged us to do that, especially in the morning time. And then the third thing is to add in the hadjad prayer when possible. So the hadjad prayer is a prayer that is a special connection and brings a special prayer between you and your Lord. This is a prayer at any time from after isha and before fajr. So ideally somebody gets up 20 minutes before fajr and just prays two rakat, the hadjad, and asks Allah to help them in whatever situations they're facing. This is known as the hour of, Allah's asking. There's a hadith could see that indicates Allah comes down in no anthropomorphic way. He comes down at that time and asks, is anybody asking that I may grant them? Is anybody asking forgiveness that I may forgive them? Is anybody have a need that I may fulfill? This is the time to be close with your Lord. So determination and intention, hunger and fasting, worship and dhikr, and regular, then the fourth is turning to Allah in complete sincerity and begging him for help. Begging him for help. If you and I want to work on ourselves, we can't just like take this stuff, you know, in a relaxed way. We got to ask, we got to ask with sincerity and beg Allah, Allah help me. The scholars recommend doing it in a way that as though you were drowning, like you were so in need of help, not like, Allah help me, Allah help, like really from the bottom of your heart, begging him and inshallah Allah will answer. And the fifth is spending time alone. This is an important ingredient. We can't always have our devices with us. This means virtually as well. We can't always be with people who right now most of us are alone anyways in quarantine or in, you know, COVID situation. We have to have some moments. It's just us in solitude, just solitude, thinking about what's going on in life, giving ourselves time to process our thoughts, spending time alone with our Lord. Here's the five intention and determination, hunger and fasting, worship with and dhikr, turning to Allah and begging him for help and spending time alone. You'll see that somebody who's gotten the basics already down and then starts doing this stuff, you will start to go through spiritual transformation. This is tried and tested. This is a science. This is not just some made up thing. Tried and tested science by, of course, the Prophet ﷺ and Sahaba to begin with and then all of the greats who came after them that have continued it. So this works, but we have to put in the effort. This is the medicine. You and I need medicine. We have sicknesses. We now have the medicine. What do we do in order to curb our desires? Let's know what they are. Let's figure out the subtle ones and the apparent ones. And then let's know that when we embark on a path to work on ourselves, a level facilitated for us. Allah rewards the intention. The intention of the believer as it comes in a hadith is better than the action. So make the intention now. Whenever you are able to, when you're watching this or afterwards or some other period of time, make the intention you want to work on yourself. You want to work on your desires. You want to work on curbing these desires and you want to work on getting closer to Allah and inshallah Allah will facilitate that and may he make this immensely easy for you and immensely easy for all of us and facilitate all hair and all goodness. We see some questions in this live chat. So if anybody has questions, please post them and we will answer them inshallah. So somebody posted here, I'm conflicted. My ADHD is something that is making me shift my focus and struggle with khushu. Please talk about people who suffer from these mental struggles every day. So this is regarding focus in prayer and concentration from my understanding and your struggles are limiting you with that. So first of all, thank you for sharing and thank you for asking me the question. The first thing to note here is that Allah only tasks you with as much as you can bear. So Allah says in the Quran that he only burdens the soul with as much as he can bear. So Allah will not burden you with the difficulty or with the limitation or with the struggle more than you can bear. If you can bear it, Allah knows what you can bear. You and I don't know. Allah believes in us more than we believe in ourselves. So Allah says, okay, you can do this. I'm going to put you to the test but I believe you can do it. You and I can't do this. But Allah knows we can do this. So that's the first thing to keep in mind. And if you're struggling with something, it's a test from Allah and inshallah Allah will leave you from it and Allah give you complete shifa and cure from these difficulties. Just know though that Allah is testing you and that he believes that you can improve and get better and work on yourself through that test and that difficulty. Second thing to keep in mind then is don't beat yourself all over when you don't have khushu when you're not able to focus because of the situation that you are in. It's okay because Allah is testing you in that situation. He knows you're going to have weaknesses but the desire for you to want to improve is already that's the third thing is take basic steps. For khushu in the prayer it's recommended in the beginning to recite before you start the prayer. Then before you engage in your farth prayer, engage in at least some sunnah raka, right? Some sunnah raka is where you try to get focused. The third thing is to make sure that the area you are praying in or that you are trying to do dhikr in or whatever it is is clear. It's not full a bunch of stuff and because you need focus and concentration and then try to make sure that the noise is fairly limited and then just try to have focus. Okay I'm going to make it a goal to be focused in one raka or half of one raka or a quarter of a raka or in two raka whatever you're at. It's okay if you don't achieve full khushu in four raka. I mean that would be such a miracle if we had that. Allah give that to us but just start with something basic. It's okay if at fajr time you're tired and you're not able to focus necessarily. You and I know we have those things to work on but begin with these solutions and inshallah it will help. So try that out and let's inshallah see how it goes. If anybody else has any questions please feel free to type them into this chat. Any questions related to this conversation about desires or something else that's relevant please feel free to type it in. We'll wait just another 30 seconds or so and if not then we will go ahead and end with the dua. Okay well I'll see if anything comes up and if not then I'll just go ahead and end and anything comes up please type it in. Ya fatah ya Allah please open up the doors of your mercy for us ya Allah please please pour your mercy upon us ya Allah please facilitate goodness for us and our loved ones and all the people it is that are watching and that intended to watch and that intend to work on themselves in our Muslim community and anywhere in this world ya Allah inwardly and outwardly assist them ya Allah with your special assistance please help us with all of our problems and challenges please remove the anxieties and difficulties and stresses and problems and challenges and illnesses whether those are mental or physical or spiritual or psychological that we have ya Allah. Ya Allah you are a companion and our sister and our source of assistance and you are the one who helps us please help us ya Allah please help us ya Allah you are the one who assists please help us with all of our problems please cure us of all of our difficulties and our challenges and please give us the ability to get close to you and please allow us to control our desires and to live a life that is pleasing to you. Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa rahmatullahi Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa rahmatullahi Assalamu alaikum inshallah we'll see you next week. So we are talking about deceptive desires so we're just going to continue this discussion inshallah and today we're really just reviewing this framework that we've set up for deceptive desires and talk a little bit more about what the desires are that human being has and then from there inshallah we are going to go over a specific desire in each class so what we've been doing is on Wednesday nights inshallah we're doing a class once a once a week 7 p.m. just for about 20 or 30 minutes or so we're going to be covering different desires that you and I have so today's topic we'll be focusing on this kind of framework of desire and then we'll be talking specifically about the desire for food and what impact that has on our on ourselves and on our spirituality cool all right inshallah so let's go ahead and dive in as we've been chatting about you know we live in a world where everybody is really obeying their desires and God says in the Quran that you and I can be slaves to him or we can be slaves to our desires we can take our desires as our Lord we don't want to be that type of person that's not the type of life that we want to live where something material is controlling us or some carnal lust is controlling us no we want God to control us we want to submit to God that's really the type of approach that we want to have to our life so Allah says in the Quran that whoever restrains their desire is going to be able to have enter paradise so that is one of the ways enter paradise is if somebody is able to restrain their their desire and they're able to restrain and control themselves so it's like right when you're about to do something haram something that you shouldn't do right when you're about to look at someone you shouldn't look at right when you're about to eat something you shouldn't eat right when you're about to drink something you shouldn't drink you control yourself and that is at the essence of this religion is it's all about self control it's all about self discipline it's all about trying to find ways in order to calm your nuts down which is the ego that you and I have and then find ways to grow our spirit that there's a constant war inside of us between what's called our nuts which is our lower self and our spirit which is the spiritual self it is trying to help us ascend the spirit is trying to help you ascend to higher places the nuts is trying to pull you down to lower places it's your job it's your task rather it's your goal to control the lower part and to tame the nuts and then to focus your energies on cultivating the spirit that's what spirituality is about spirituality is the idea of achieving a station achieving a nearness to god by cultivating your spirit let's talk a little bit about how to do that and let's talk a little bit about how desires play into this so first of all we all have desires desires are not a bad thing that we've been chatting about um it's it's normal to have like a sexual desire you are now going to be attracted to people that's normal we are going to have desire to eat if we didn't we would starve again i want to eat we're going to want to eat good things it's all normal things we're going to want to have a desire to like earn some money so we can have a home we're going to want to have desire to have clean clothes all those things are there it's when those desires get out of control that problems start happening so it's when you and I start to obey our sexual desire let's say to the point that we start you know doing things we shouldn't be doing we started you know scrolling on tinder and swiping all the time and trying to just like release that desire or we start to engage in watching pornography right or somebody is channeling that desire in by having illicit relationships or someone starts to have an affair or somebody starts to have um any other type of relationship that we know we know we shouldn't be in that's when that desire becomes problematic but the human being who controls that desire is going to be rewarded significantly right and that's in this life and the next nobody likes somebody who can't control themselves and you see how ruined human beings are who can't control themselves even the last president of the united states that we've mentioned before i mean literally all throughout his life no ability to control himself like none right and then to the point where um uh you know when he was younger he was engaged in a variety of different affairs sexual assault rape cases against him and then it became about the desire for money and he got that and then the desire for fame and he got that and then for followers and then from there it keeps going now you want power okay i want to be the president now i'm not going to let go of the power i'm gonna stage a coup these are all because the inner self is not tamed when the inner self becomes tamed and inshallah you and i are able to achieve the levels of success because you walk around and you're like dude i'm not going to submit to that thing you're submitting to it's it gives you almost a type of freedom it's a really beautiful thing that when you are not a slave to a desire you have freedom when you are slaves to a desire you do not have freedom so those are the obvious desires then we've mentioned um subtle desires and what are subtle desires these are desires that are as you get closer and closer to god as you get closer and closer in spirituality your these subtle things start to pop up and you have to be on guard for these as well these are desires like wanting people to notice you oh i'm worshiping someone watching me oh i am reading extra prayers is someone gonna notice oh i'm gonna post this this this comment i'm gonna post this video is somebody going to take notice um of what i'm doing right it's it's this idea of validation from other human beings for your religious actions it's called ostentation or in the hadith with the prophet son said it's called the riyadh in arabic the word is a riyadh it's called this kind of bragging ostentation or it's just like being full of yourself oh you think you're all that right and all of us have met people we've all met people um unfortunately and we might have been there ourselves where uh it's like this type of judgment because somebody says they're more religious than you and so they make you feel like i know what i'm doing and you don't know anything and that's as a result of that i'm better than you well in the Quran the one who says i'm better than you is satan shaytan says uh i'm not like i am better than adam i'm better than adam alay salam because and he has a faulty reasoning of course he thinks because he's great for fire and adam's greater from play alay salam that that's why he's better but that's what religious people can also become arrogant and that is a very very big problem because that's called a subtle desire it's you using your religion to become arrogant and when that arrogance starts to enter into yourself that desire becomes difficult to control because now you're impressed with yourself and then you'll see people start to fall this happens all the time you know really really famous people who gain fame through religion and we see this a lot i was reading about like different creatures and these mega churches and what not that um you know for whatever reason these people gain a lot of fame uh and then they think that they're all that and then they get caught up in affairs they get caught up in scandals caught up in all these other things it's because their desires were never controlled they just shifted the desire from a basic desire that you and i might have to a more um unique subtle desire that somebody who's on a specific path might start to have so that is something to be on guard for now the goal is not to eliminate desire and we need that we need our desire to live in order to function the goal is to channel our desire in the right direction that's our goal so what does that mean it means that what is the right direction there is a way for you and me to take our desires and to rather than fall for material things it's to have spiritual desires high aspiration so we want to channel these desires to three areas to loving god first and foremost we want to have love of knowledge number two love of knowledge and wisdom and number three will one actually enjoy worship these are again high aspiration that you're probably thinking like how am i supposed to get here i'm the same way i'm like this is really hard this is what this is what the scholars mentioned is what's kind of mentioned is the higher stations and so we know the goal that's gold medal that's the first place okay now how am i going to get there it's slow and steady process to get there but if you make the intention the door opens that one of the great saints of our religion said and with the one intention if you make it sincerely 70 doors 70 doors of toffee meaning divine assistance and blessings and guidance open for you if you make that sincere intention so right now one thing all of us should do make an intention especially because we were in a blessed month of rajab and because ramadan is right around the corner we got two months before uh yeah right about two months or so make an intention that i want to change this is the year i want to change we all know in life when we've had major changes and the intention is the first thing that comes when you want you and you and i want to change so have that high aspiration that high him but it's called the high goal right and then start working towards the goal so there's a general method for controlling desires and then there's specific methods for each desire the general method is that you and i have to bring every part of us into um you and i have to bring rather than every part of us we have to bring certain faculties that are inside of us into an equilibrium what does that mean that means that like let's say this works for all character traits by the way let's say somebody's like super cheap makes someone's like super cheap they just they're known as being you know stingy for them in order for them to become moderate in their spending they need to go to the extreme of generosity this is what the scholars prescribe go to the extreme of generosity always be the one to pay always be the one to donate always be the one to give upfront right and then they will go from this this place and they they they force themselves to go here they'll end up in the middle that's called equilibrium so in ramadan we have a whole month of fasting not because god wants us to be hungry all of the time like we don't have to fast 12 months out of the year but it's because 11 months out of the year most of us are in this category we're always eating we're always engaging desires we're always caught up in something or another he says yo for one month stop all that stuff at least turning the daytime to stop all that stuff and then you will be calibrated because you would think logically god would say six months you do this six months you do this but god says in ramadan that like the blessings are multiplied by 10 50 100 times thousand times depending on god's generosity right and his generosity is limitless one of his names is a kareem the generous that in ramadan that generosity is so amplified that whatever we do it's one month but god's helps us become bring that brings us into an equal degree right in that one month and then we leave ramadan emerging emerging from the month of ramadan hopefully like okay i'm feeling better i'm feeling more balanced and then we got to start that kind of struggle again so desires have to be conquered but it's a slow process right and by the way as you as anybody has questions whether you're just post them in the in the comments and inshallah we will or in the chat or whatever it is and we'll try to get to them at the end inshallah would love for this to be a discussion as well so that is the the goal from the equilibrium perspective now the general kind of over the counter you know remedy for this is first you have to learn knowledge is a medicine and knowledge the lights first we have to learn second you have to put in the struggle okay i got to put in the work i'm just like when you want to go to you know want to work out you got to like lift you got to put in the hard work you've got to run you've got to train same thing with spirituality in order to grow in order to gain in control desires you've got to put in the work so you put in the work right you gain learn the knowledge you put in the work but the most important thing is you beg a lot of help you because you and i are not about to do this alone i mean this world is full of craziness there's too much going on it's not easy we can't do this by ourselves so we ask a lot yeah a lot i'm really struggling with this thing like i cannot for the life of me control myself in this in this situation or that situation if somebody's struggling with you know smoking or drinking or partying or in illicit relationships or with you know on another side like someone is trying to do good good deeds but it's struggling with people noticing them and wanting to be noticed and wanting to be praised you just turn it to Allah you turn the affair over to him and you say ya Allah i'm trying my best that i need you to help me because Allah says in the Quran those who strive in our ways surely we shall guide them you and i just have to try remember that this religion is not about getting an a plus it's not sometimes we think that we got to be perfect you weren't we weren't created to be perfect Allah says in the Quran that we created mankind weak we he's created us weak we're weak we're we got to sleep we got to eat we got to use the restroom we're weak people we get tired we we we we we can't lift like an insane amount of things at the same right at one time there's we're weak in so many ways we're weak with our knowledge we're weak with our abilities but in our weakness is our strength because when you show weakness before Allah Allah assists you with his strength and then he gives you the ability to succeed in ways you never knew but when you rely on yourself well we're weak so how can you rely on something weak when you have Allah who is the Al Qawiyul Mateen who is the strong and the mighty one right he can assist you so when you and I are focused on our desires or if not focused on just focused on trying to control our desires remember it's about not this is the general kind of over-the-counter remedy that's given by the scholars by the promises are learn the knowledge it's the light put it into practice spiritual struggle and then rely on Allah beg Allah Allah help me whatever it is you can do and never let anybody I don't care who they are don't let anybody ever close the door if some religious person or a family member or even a parent has closed the door and says you're never going to change you're never going to be fixed you're never going to do this you've just done too much bad just ignore them and remember your relation with Allah is unique Allah forgives whoever he wants he forgives whoever he wants there's so many stories in the idea that one time there was a prostitute a prostitute and she was um she she went to super thirsty and so there was a well and you know back in the days they had wells come to the now we have like access to running water and we have like give water all those people in the world who don't have access to clean water so she went down to the well to super thirsty and she she used um some way to to to get water there was no bucket so she just kind of used her hand right and then she came back up and she saw there was a dog who was super thirsty just like her so she's like yo this dog is thirsty I would I needed water I should figure out a way to get this dog some water so she takes her shoe and she goes back into the well and she brings water uh in the shoe and gives it to the dog and the dog punches his thirst and Allah forgave the promises and said to him that Allah forgave her for that action he forgave all the sins that she again is a prostitute right who's committed you know uh promiscuous sexual action we shouldn't be doing um and but she had a certain softness in her heart which led her to do this good deed and Allah forgave her for that so you and I like Allah's mercy is limitless it's not an excuse for us to do whatever we want and be like yeah I'm not gonna forgive you that's another extreme but what it is is it's a way for us to remember that our Lord is forgiving and don't let someone constrict Islam into this like narrow view of you gotta do one two and three and then you get into heaven if you do a dnc you're going to hell and other one that's it and their interpretation of religion is the only interpretation now religion is vast there's room for everybody there's room for us in our mistakes and there's room for us always to turn back to Allah so begin that process now inshallah so that's the overall method so let's talk specifically about this desire now for food um and why am I talking about the desire for food but we live in a time when um the country that especially you know in the west uh food is like everywhere right so we have buffets you have immediate you know apps that you can just order food on there's always snacks in our pantries we're just always eating now what does food have to do with desire it's interesting so food is actually known as the mother desire it's literally the chief desire and i didn't know this at all until i started reading about it how important controlling the stomach is to controlling the rest of your body so think about it like this you and i have a muscle an internal spiritual muscle called discipline that spiritual muscle is primarily governed by what we eat and how much we eat so if we eat a lot then it's going to be covered in a certain way if we don't eat a lot then uh or if we eat a lot and if we eat to excess then that muscle won't grow if we reduce our food intake and we fast and we control ourselves then that muscle begins to um build itself the muscle of discipline so food is this kind of mother desires we don't have to we have to control it which is why Ramadan is so important and why the Prophet ﷺ fasted in Ramadan and many times outside of the month of Ramadan i mean it was so important because he taught us that patience is half of faith in hadith and he said fasting is half of patience so if you have faith patience is one half fasting is one half of that you can say fasting is like a fourth of faith you know in this hadith and then we know the five pillars of Islam fasting is one of the five pillars right so we know how important it is so food control is important but this is not just food control with regards to fasting from uh from from pre dawn until sunset like in Ramadan that's not what we're talking about only talking about food control in all the situations right so when you and i have a full stomach this is what the scholars mentioned when you and i have a full stomach we start to get more energy and we start to have the desire to do more things now it sounds kind of weird because most of us are always right but think about the times when you've been hungry and the weakness that you feel and the like overall lack of desire to sin that you feel right ain't nobody about to be hungry sitting there like hungry and thirsty and then i'm gonna be like oh let me you know swipe right here and let me do this like that's not gonna happen right or like oh let me go and you know smoke some weed because i'm really hungry like you know that's just gonna make you more hungry and give you the munchies so that's not gonna work right so usually when you're hungry there's a lot of humility that forms remember this is a spiritual alchemy so alchemy is the process of transforming lead into gold that used to be done back in the day by like proper alchemists now spiritual alchemy is an internal process of transforming yourself transforming yourself in a in an amazing way from from the weak state that we're in right now to a more developed state food controlling what we eat is one of the best ways to do that right because this internal humility starts to to form and the desires are then tamed in other ways so the food is the chief desire and then the next desire that follows that which we're talking about later inshallah probably next week is sexual desire so immediately right the desire that governs our not ability to lower gaze or all watching things we should be watching or watching pornography whether it's clear pornography or soft pornography or watching or just you know engaging in illicit sexual relations we're living in a culture where like marriage is not really a priority anymore everybody's just hooking up with each other it's people are having sex younger and younger ages and like we got to talk about this stuff i mean these are things that are happening so we shouldn't shy away from having the discussions of what's important of what's actually happening in what's relevant in our society because we know we struggle and we know we've got to control these things um so food is this mother desire though that's contenting to be controlled what does overeating do it brings a level so this is like from a scientific and a spiritual perspective it's mentioned that it's you make somebody lazy it clogs the mind it impairs thinking and then it makes your desire stronger and from from a from a spiritual perspective so you get more desire to want to do more things so discipline is this muscle that's built and hunger is the medicine that allows you to build this muscle of discipline secret if somebody has discipline you're going to be very successful in your life inshallah you just never mind doesn't matter what you're doing human beings who are disciplined who have routines who are able to control themselves who are able to control their impulses there's a different level of success that they're able to achieve i'm talking about in this life not even getting to the next life and Allah says in the next life that uh those who are able to control their desires inshallah will achieve a state of jannah right so that's where discipline becomes so critical and so important and the desire to control our food intake um is so linked to that right so what is this medicine of hunger and control of the food so when you and i lose our discipline when we lose our when we start overeating we start to lose our discipline and then we start to fall into all these other sorts of things let's talk a little bit about what the benefits are there's a hadith where the prophet said that the devil courses through the blood in the children of Adam and you and i should limit the devil coursing through our blood like kind of running through our blood with hunger and thirst and a paraphrase in the hadith prophet indicated that type of meaning and he also said in the hadith hadith is a statement of the prophet's son that we use is kind of an authentic religious teaching to help guide us where the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam said that the son of adam fills no container worse than their belly and a few small mouthfuls of food should suffice them but if he or she can't stick to that and they should have one third for food one third of their stomach for food one third for water and one third for for breath so room to just breathe it do thicker and just kind of you know be able to exhale and inhale in our society it's like three thirds for food one third for water one third for juice one third for something else like until you have two or three stomachs right so remember the devil is coursing through your blood promises them said this is some spiritual knowledge he's teaching us you limit the devil with hunger and thirst you say no i'm not going to let you run me you you're not going to control me i'm going to just cut you off i'm not going to let you be inside of me all the time i'm going to limit you with just restraining my food intake it doesn't mean you go to extremes and you're anorexic or that you you know that's a different type of topic it doesn't mean you go to extreme and you stop eating no but you limit you stop a couple bites short you limit that so what are some of the benefits of hunger that the scholars mentioned these are mentioned by some of the greatest scholars in the history of our religion spiritual masters is what they call it says the benefits of hunger among them are first that hunger purifies the heart and it illuminates the soul second is hunger sharpens your insight right and so this desire the ability to control desires comes when your intellect is working you and i all know the opposite of this so we said hunger purifies the heart and sharpens your mind the opposite of this is when you are not uh when you're overeat we all know the word food coma we've all gotten it food coma form was likely and we just overeat just like oh i'm so full and then you just want to like do all these other things right because the the fullness now leads to a route for as we indicated as the heavy vindicated for shaythan to have more control over us the second thing is it does is it brings a softness and impurity to the heart and it allows the heart to be more impacted more impacted right so you want your heart to be soft right have you ever met people who like they cry easily like something just small that they see or that they watch and they start crying and they start weeping that's an amazing thing we should not take light of that that crying and so easily coming to tears means the heart is soft the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam our messenger our master our leader sallallahu alaihi wasallam may Allah bless him preserve him increase him send salutations upon him that he had a very soft heart he would regularly be weeping regularly be crying there is no idea of like men not crying no men should cry women should cry crying is very very important very important but the softness that an individual has and and sometimes we feel bad about it oh my god every little thing makes me cry that's not a that's not a bad thing no so it means your heart is soft and when the heart is soft it's impacted more seriously so you want your heart to be able to get impacted that's what you want right so when somebody gives you a reminder or when you hear something or when you are just reflecting or when you're praying or when you're just about to do something bad the softness kicks in it's like no you're not going to do that because softness and purity are linked you want your heart to be pure it's one of the goals of this life Allah says in the Qur'an it's successful is the one who purifies oneself and destroyed is the one who isn't purifying yourself is about controlling your desires and beginning this journey of meaning the inner self that is what we are trying to accomplish inshaAllah and food is a very very important aspect of that so let's let's you know which other world we're going to try to just kind of wrap this up and summarize a little bit and again if anybody has any questions please post them in the comments we don't think see anything now let me see yeah i don't think i see any questions so cool um so let's let's talk a little about the the uh yes i'll mention that in a second inshaAllah so let's talk a little bit about what some of this how do we practically implement some of this so we first just have to decrease when it comes to the desire for food right when we know number one that it's linked to everything else that we're doing and number two we know that it is linked to um increasing our other desires what we have to do is decrease number one just the amount that we that we eat just a little by little just even one bite can go a long way just a little bit and number two we decrease how often we're eating so let's say that like we eat five times a day a bunch of snacks we just slowly reduce it to four times a day and then you get to a healthy medium of three times a day right and let's say you're eating like this big of a portion size you just reduce it slightly just by a couple bites and then a little bit more don't just throw out a whole meal or something like that no no no just slightly right and then and then um from there you have to decrease the quality like taste of the food so you don't always give your nuffs the nuffs is the lower self and it thrives off of um the nuffs thrives off of um fulfilling its desire it loves delicious things i want a cake i want cookies i want brownies i want this i want chips i want fries you know my nuffs loves fries for example right so you and i have to give it okay if it does if it listens you give it good things but you have to treat the nuffs like an animal that okay if it doesn't give behave you have to have and you're not going to get this thing that you wanted today that's going to start to result in spiritual cultivation that is going to result in a successful cultivation of purity inside of you and a successful taming of the desires so then there's then that's the tips for reducing the desire and then there's channeling the desire in the right direction how do we do that all these desires are meant to be god created them in us right so it's not a bad thing that we obviously we're going to eat we want to do all these things the first thing is okay we try to eat cleanly number one and number and number two by clean here i mean eat halal as well so if we aren't eating halal food okay we slowly work our way towards that we try to aspire i'm gonna try to eat halal meat i'm gonna try to eat some fish even if i'm not able to do all the time try to eat halal meat because there's a spiritual secret and spiritual benefit in halal meat that that only the person who eats it um will be able to feel that benefit and comes in a narration that person who eats halal for 40 days is able to achieve a state of light inside so it's okay for not doing it but we just slowly work on that right and a more kind of haram that we limit um not in like a way that we are so negative on ourselves that we feel like we want to get despair or quick but the more that we limit and the more that we start to add good things the more we're going to be able to progress spiritually the more we're going to be able to tame these things the second aspect is for us to eat cleanly eat clean pure food these days a lot of the food is manufactured a lot of it has msgs a lot of it has uh it's been you know food has been raised in very very problematic ways and so we just have to also try to eat in a clean way and the more you are not going to eat in a clean way the more pure we are going to be able to become because what you are what you eat you've heard that saying right so if you're eating some like animal that has had all this anxiety and all these other types of things that have manifested because of the way some corporate farm is treating that animal it will manifest inside of you no doubt it will and we asked a lot of tech desk but that type of stuff is real so eating allow ideally then eating cleanly and then the third thing is just kind of stopping before we're full just stop a couple bites short this will start to impact our other desires in the right way now some of us might be thinking like dude talking about food over here i am you know i am like struggling with all these big things and you're talking about food you know i'm struggling with drinking i'm struggling with smoking i'm struggling with partying and so all this is a framework keep that in mind so anything this will work for any desire whatever you and i are following or struggling with we just simply reduce that so we three methods you decrease the amount you decrease how often you do it the cadence the frequency and you decrease the overall like you could say deliciousness of it when for the food instance or you could say the uh what's the right word the overall pleasure it gives you does that make sense so that somebody is watching something that shouldn't be watching they should reduce the amount they should reduce the quality of that and they should reduce how often they're doing it these types of things are going to give us the inner cultivation that we need and it's going to help us tame our desires in the right way and so if we do that inshallah we will start to feel we'll start to feel closer to god we'll start to feel this type of spirituality manifesting inside and we live in a world where there's too much focus on the outward and not enough focus on the inward remember this islam is an inward path the outer rules are like if i take this water bottle the outer rules are just the like shell and the casing of the water bottle you've got to follow the outer rules we know that we struggle with them but we've got to follow them but the goal is to get to what's inside which in this case you're not down thirsty this case is water right you want to get what's inside the inside of it is the spirituality so there's so many people that are focused on you this and that this that just make this black and white difficult thing that constricts you because they have never tasted the sweetness of what's inside you and i have to have the outer framework and then be able to arrive at what's inside if we do that Allah inshallah will not let us down he will give us success because he says that if you strive in his way he will guide you and you there's hadith which indicates if you come to him handspan he comes to an armspan if you come to him walking he comes to you running you and i just have to take the first step so let's make that intention right now inshallah today that we're going to take that step we're going to work on taming our desires on channeling our desires in the right direction on trying to control ourselves on not being like every single other person in this world who broadly speaking is just caught up and is a slave for our desires let's be slaves of god and not slaves of anybody else and certainly not slaves of our own nafus of our own lower selves and of our egos let's try to submit to him and he will help us inshallah not only in this life and inshallah he will help us in this life but also in the next life we pray that Allah give everybody tofiq and success and tasir and easiness in this path and now we'll go ahead and you know feel any questions or comments that are posted so i'm seeing here this moment somebody asks salamu alaykum how often should one cry should one make oneself cry to soften the heart i cried out okay how does one okay got it so there's not like a prescribed amount that one should force themselves i think it's one one when you are feeling overpowered by emotions or by crying that you should release that you should not control it it can actually result in internal emotional blockages when somebody doesn't release the emotions that they're feeling i'm sure some of us have seen this movie inside out a Pixar movie which kind of shows this in a very very nicely crafted way right that what happens when you and i don't allow ourselves to express our emotions but the second thing is if we are able to we should try to just it's like the watering of the heart crying waters the spiritual heart with the heart doesn't get water it's not going to flourish spiritually so you have to engage in moments where you just feel like humbled before god and just saying i'm sorry for this or i'm scared of this or i love you for this and so these types of things will inculcate a type of softness and the crying should come from that so hopefully that's helpful and then somebody says how does one reduce the anxiety about the afterlife um e.g. death so good question um i would say that it's not a bad thing to be worried about death like that's not a bad thing at all the believer should regularly remember death like we're gonna die i'm gonna go in a grave i'm gonna be like it's a very very real thing in today's society they try to hide death from us they try to just completely not talk about it it's like a weird subject in in in in muslim society it's not supposed to be like that right like you know there's certain time you shouldn't speak about that like when somebody eating and whatnot but otherwise it's something that like should be discussed and it should be thought of because it can immediately i mean i don't remember when i when i really tried to like change in my life was when a couple people really close to me back in college just they started dying and i was like dang death can come at any moment i better wake up but i have to stop some of this stuff right so um that anxiety actually in that case helped but it shouldn't be an overwhelming anxiety what should we should be balanced so uh the way to do that is to actually be okay like i'm looking because when you die that's when you can meet a lot and a lot says that a lot loves the one who loves to meet him right a lot loves to meet the one who loves to meet him and i'm paraphrasing here like that will be the moment that you can kind of be released from the pains of this world so it shouldn't be a negative thing we should feel like death is going to be positive and positively beneficial for us so hopefully that makes sense um but this question about how does one reduce the anxiety about it uh and the the anxiety should not become overwhelming should be balanced and we should remember that it will be positive hopefully that the one who lives their life in a good way we should pray for good ending and we should hope and pray that it will be a positive experience for us uh inshallah so hopefully that helps let's see if there any other questions if anybody has questions just please post them in the q and a or um in the chat okay somebody asked a question here how does one help someone who is having a crisis in faith okay so this is a very good question how do you help somebody who's having a crisis in faith um inshallah first and foremost do not overwhelm them and try to convince them of all the intellectual reasons to like come back to the religion that's not the way to do it you don't want to overwhelm any human being what you do when somebody's having a crisis with their faith is first you got to try to pray for them like sincerely if you really care about them sincere levels of prayer ideally in the in the middle of the night at the Hajj of time if possible at the time right before fajir if possible that that's the first thing especially if it's a loved one or somebody you really care about that's very important second is um try to understand why they're having a crisis just talk to them ask questions don't give them a lecture ask questions what's going on what is it that's leading to this crisis what is it that's leading to this issue right so try to understand a little bit more of the details and then the third thing is you give them okay you know this is what helped me in this situation this is what helped me in that situation don't don't make it a um what's the right word don't make it about you but also don't make it like such a bad thing that oh my god they're having this crisis and like what are they gonna do they're gonna leave us long ultimately guidance is in Allah's hands you have to keep that in mind it's where the law helps but if somebody is having a crisis in their faith which is the question first pray for them second um try and ask them a lot of questions and third give them examples of times that you or somebody else you know struggled with something and how they overcame it that will be the first step and then remember you put in a little bit of effort and Allah will take care of the rest don't don't worry if uh you know they're they're really really really struggling um and if they are having a trauma as somebody just asks if it's a trauma a lot of us are traumatized with the spiritual upbringing that was problematic and if that's the case then try to point them to like beautiful examples of people who don't have that background so many people came from a very very strict black and white halal haram this is it this is the only way everything else is innovation everything else is this you can't do anything in your religion you can't even live your life because you're going to go to hell type of approach i see a lot of muslims and they eventually leave like the major practices of religion because it's just too constricting and that's not a swamp try to work help them work through what the trauma is you mentioned that you said i told the loved one that life is a test that works only when somebody has the spiritual framework for understanding what a test did you can't tell somebody it's a test if they don't even understand why tests come right the first step is belief that tests are going to help them get closer to god that's a hard belief to cultivate it's not easy so i wouldn't start with that i would kind of go at that um when you feel like they're ready but try to work through the trauma and have them seek like a proper spiritual counselor or spiritual guide in order to work through that crisis so that was the question um inshallah that helps uh and inshallah they'll that situation will get better inshallah don't worry just pray and allah will help inshallah does anybody have any other questions see anything popped up here somebody mentioned sorry it's just hard to find balance between beings and seren soft hearted in some world today society um that is a really really good point that somebody mentioned um so it is it is certainly difficult to find a balance between beings and seren soft hearted thank you for mentioning that point uh it's it's important though to not lose the beautiful aspects of our religion and the beautiful aspects of our tradition because this society just limits us don't let this society limit you don't let the society that's been created by the white man to do the things that serve the white man and serve their corporate interests limit the way you and i operate no you and i should be sincere you and i should be soft hearted you and i should follow the example of the promises on to the best of our ability in balanced ways that we can do it in this society but not let the frameworks and the colonizing frameworks and the problematic frameworks and the subjugating frameworks and the subverting paradigm and all these types of things prevent us from the inner inner beautiful traits that are really has to offer this is what islam has to offer the world we have character to offer we have spiritual development to offer we have personal development to offer when a human being has all these things that's really when they start to succeed but that we have to kind of put in that effort first and foremost and then people see that beauty and they will start to be guided inshallah so try to keep that in mind it's a very very good point somebody brought up if anybody has any more questions please post them we'll just wait for another minute and we'll end inshallah i'll just go ahead and close with a quick draw and if any other question pops up inshallah we ask that you guide us you guide all those people we are who are struggling with their deen who are in difficulty who are facing a crisis who are facing a trauma who are facing any problems we ask you allow us to curb our desires we ask that you bless this month please put blessings in this month of rajab inshallah and allow us to reach Ramadan yahrab and anameen yallah allow us to get closer to you please don't allow us to be discouraged please don't allow us to have despair please don't allow us to have any worry yahab or anameen yallah anybody who's struggling with any aspect of their life any sin that we're struggling with yallah please yallah forgive us yallah and pardon us yallah and cure us yallah and remove this difficulty from us remove our challenges remove our tribulations give us our sincerity and give us as much as much closeness to you as possible with ease if you have a look for la afia and give us guidance on our ability to get close to you coming directly from you and allow us to strive in your way as much as possible inshallah inshallah we'll continue this every wednesday 7 p.m sorry we're in a little bit late today started a little late today i was having technical difficulties inshallah i'll help we'll get that together next time so we'll start again next wednesday 7 p.m uh juzakum ala khair please keep us in your prayers everybody have a great week asalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wabarakatuh thanks so much bye all right so we are continuing in this conversation that we've been having about desires deceptive desires and today's topic is we're going to focus on the desire for lust so we we've been touching upon this a little bit so we're going to dive a lot deeper today inshallah so uh let's let's let's dive straight into it um what we just what we discussed last time was the kind of mother desire and so there's one mother desire that human being has and a couple things to keep in mind that the human being that's able to successfully control their desires in this life is the one who will be rewarded inshallah the most in the next life there's a direct correlation between how many of our appetites we follow how much of our nests we follow and whether or not we are going to be successful in the next life and so we really want to try to be people who are controlling our desires regularly so we spoke last time about food and how food is this kind of mother desire and now we're going to talk about how other desires stem from food so we'll dive into lust today and sexual desire so sexual desire is not necessarily a bad thing even though many times it's made out to be um in moderation and channeled in the right direction it's a good thing and so what we've been trying to do is talk about all of these desires at a high level and talk about when they are negative and when they are positive and how do we channel the desires in the overall right direction so the way to think about this um you and I have a certain type of desire because Allah has created it within us sexual desire has a couple of reasons according to mama al-azali that god created this desire in us first is the obvious one of allowing the human race to continue right if the human being did not have this desire then the desire for relations uh and obviously that would not result in the human race continuing because we would not have offspring and whatnot um and the second reason is actually what imam al-azali says and where many of the other scholars say is to allow you and i to know the delight of the afterlife that one that there are indications that the desire that one feels in that experience is a very very very very very small portion of the experience one is going to have in the afterlife and the type of euphoria one is going to experience in the afterlife now this is of course when you're talking about channeling it in a permissible way when you're talking about channeling this desire in a halal way now let's talk a little bit about the condition of the society that we live in right so we live in a society right now that is filled with uh overall promiscuity following desires not really like being in touch with ourselves in a deep way such that we try to control these desires or channel them in the right direction so the job of the muslim is to say okay how am i going to ward off the different aspects of the society that are negative and how am i going to channel the desires that i have in the right direction uh such that i can achieve success in this life and the next life we also see in the society of small examples you have apps like tinder and other dating apps where people are literally just like scrolling through these apps in order to uh find you know ways to release their sexual desire and find less to have uh find ways to release their less you have uh phones and devices that every single you know anywhere from a teenager all the way to an adult has access to that literally you have the entire internet at your fingertips and so anybody who wants to engage in some type of impermissible lustful desire they want to watch something that they shouldn't be watching if they want to listen to something that they shouldn't be listening if they want to um chat with somebody or start talking with somebody that's going to lead to an eventually uh uh uh desire a sexual relationship they are able to do that very easily even in a pandemic you're able to engage your lusts and yours and the the the traits of zina uh you're able to engage them in forbidden ways even though you and i might be just literally sitting in our homes right and so we live in a society that is full of promiscuity it's full of pornography it's full of hyper sexualization and it's full of trying to make us follow this desire from a young age so now regularly we see for example in in western society um you see promiscuity at a young age and you also regularly see people getting having sex before marriage right that's very very common uh in fact it's who i believe the statistics show now that more people now engage in relations before marriage than people engage outside or that sorry more people engage in relationships outside of marriage and they do in marriage right and so this is a very very uh big shift even in western society so this is these are the impulses that we're facing these are the lusts that we're facing these are the desires that we're facing but we have to know we have to know that god created us as human beings in order to test us that's that's one of the main why Allah created us and and he created us in order to test us and he created us in order for us to be able to for him to see okay who is going to respond to this desire and who is going to refrain themselves from this desire those are the main reasons why we are created just checking something here so that's up to us now the more tests that somebody has the more reward they're going to have when they resist that test right and so Allah knows our condition and it's not expected that our condition is going to be the same condition as people of past societies that's not an expectation um that that that that exists right now what does Allah say in the Quran with regards to desire and sexual desire and controlling it first is that he commands the believing men and the believing women he says to tells us to lower our gaze and he tells us to lower our gaze because he indicates that lowering your that lowering the gaze is is a way to prevent the desire from developing further that that's what happens when somebody lowers their gaze that the desire doesn't develop further the desire starts to be tamed right because the eye is the entry point and as soon as somebody sees something they see somebody attractive now the thoughts start to stir in the heart right and when the thoughts start to stir in the heart what starts to happen is they start to get ideas and when somebody starts to get ideas then they start to say okay maybe I could reach out to this person maybe I'll start texting this person right and the kind of overall sexual desires are uh uh incited within somebody and all begins with the eye which is why God commands us right to lower our gaze that that is one of the first cures you have to this desire and by the way as as folks have questions please just put them in the comment section and we'll go ahead and get to them and if you're having any issues with the audio just please also put that in the comment section let me know uh I can't 100 tell if the audio is working properly or not so um that that is the uh where was I sorry about this that is the situation of how God tells us to okay this is how you start to reduce this desire by preventing it at the onset to lower your gaze right but then he also gives us many indications that human being is created weak right he says that we created mankind weak we created the human being weak so when you're created weak what does that mean well when you're created weak it means that you and I are going to slip up we're going to fall into things and they're not always going to be able to lower our gaze we're not always going to be able to control ourselves but God gives us routes right to say okay look I know this desire is inside of you and you can release this desire in a permissible way right thus uh he tells us okay you can get married right you are allowed to get married and we are not a tradition that is you're forced to be celibate right you have other traditions that in order to reach certain stations of spirituality you can't get married um our tradition um though that doesn't doesn't have that the prophecy psalm did marry um and he encouraged us to marry it's a sunna of the prophecy psalm but to release that desire in the halal way is what we're taught to do to not let our lust get to the best of us like has happened in most of the societies that we live in so those are some of the ayes of the Quran and then you know Allah describes zina fornication and adultery in very very intense terms in the Quran just saying how uh uh reprehensible these things are to him right so these are things that obviously we do our best to stay away from now we'll talk a little bit about um we will talk a little bit about uh the hadith now so the prophecy psalm he indicates he says that whoever can guarantee me what is between his two lips and what is between his legs right so his uh the food that he eats and the sexual uh uh the sexual relationships that he engages in guaranteed them do them in a permissible way he can guarantee for that person jannah and this is a paraphrase in the hadith here but this is generally what the hadith indicates another hadith of the prophecy psalm says that a lustful gaze is a poisoned arrow from shaitan whoever abstains from that gaze in fear of Allah shall receive an increase in faith and the sweetness of which they feel in their heart so when you and i like are about to look at somebody we're about to check somebody out we're about to go on a haram website we're about to do something we shouldn't be doing and this is especially happening for sure amongst um at certain age groups especially like you know if you're if you are a teenager or if you have teenagers this starts to become more and more of a thing right pornography is a very very big problem in our community unfortunately not discussed enough um and the types of images that people are looking at both hard pornography and soft pornography whereas these the prophecy psalm says poisoned arrows from shaitan now imagine if shaitan shoots a poisoned arrow at you you're screwed you're in trouble right your whole body and your whole system is going to be impacted so whoever abstains from that at the gaze at the onset right whoever abstains from it they will receive an increase in faith and they will feel the sweetness of the faith in their heart because you're like okay i'm doing it for the sake of god remember that it's harder when it comes to worship it's harder to stay away from disobedient things than it is to do obedient things it's actually very once you you can get to a point where it's like okay you got the prayers and a rhythm you're doing your dick or you're doing all the stuff but when when sins get presented in front of you mean you're less get challenged when haram things come up in front of us that becomes difficult to tame right and we see that some of the biggest uh prophets in the history of islam are challenged with this so the story in the quran of say the yusuf aley salam that he was challenged with being seduced right and it's mentioned that he even indicates the ayat in the quran that that he would have given in had there not been assigned from his lord right that this is a desire that's naturally there that that any human being can fall into but of course Allah protected his prophet may Allah grant him mercy and peace from falling into that so this is no small thing this is very very much a uh an easy thing for people to fall into the prophet says cut it off at the beginning and you'll feel the sweetness of faith why a sweetness of faith important because when somebody tastes the sweetness when you taste the dessert when you taste the sweetness um when when you taste sweetness when you taste the dessert you taste something right you want more that you have a really delicious cake and you're like dude i want i want a cake again right you have really good cookies or brownies you're like i want more of those or where did i get those from it's the same thing with the sweetness of faith and when somebody tastes the sweetness of faith you have people like it's like faith is just this kind of burden this like boring intense thing that we feel sluggish doing and then you might have people who they actually enjoy it and you might you and i might see like maybe our parents or others that they're literally enjoying their prayer and they want to pray more and you're like man i can't even do the basics and you want to pray more and for them it's not a burden because they've tasted the sweetness of faith the sweetness of faith is tasted when you and i stay away from haram and when we stay away from things we shouldn't be doing right and when we do engage in them it's we just ask forgiveness and we try to change it's not about um expecting everybody to be perfect remember we said Allah created mankind weak he knows we're going to mess up he created us to mess up but it's about messing up and turning back to him and then the Prophet ﷺ said that every limb fornicates in some way right and he said that eyes fornicate and they do so by looking and the hands do so by touching and this is a very very like this is you know very much uh um comprehensive hadith he said the feet do so by walking to the haram place right um the mouth does so by kissing and the heart does so by forming the thoughts right and wishes and then so on and so forth until the other actions somebody engages in what's uh important about this that if you apply this to our times right you could even be texting and your hands are in a state of fornicating because you're like trying to flirt with somebody you're trying to like you know uh spark up a conversation with somebody and you are doing so with a lustful intention behind it um and so there are a lot more ways now remember every single limb gives account i mean subhanAllah every limb will give account and Allah will ask that limb and the limb will speak out either for us or against us so say she or he was uh the eyes will say that they read Quran and that they watched that they looked at the Quran or that they watched pornography right like which end of the spectrum does somebody want to be on and then of course there's mediums in between the hand will say that they used me to do good and to give charity or no they used me to like you know send flirtatious text message and to swipe right and swipe left on tinder i mean these will be statements and we'll have to stand before a god and answer about these statements and some of them i'm sure many of these things will feel embarrassed right now imagine all of humanity watching us as Allah asks these questions and we ask Allah veil us and protect us on the day of judgment ask these questions about why did you do this why did you do that right and our hands are will speak our limbs will speak that day the mouth is where you and i won't get to give explanation rhetoric will not help it's going to be the other limbs that are speaking in in in their stead in uh uh on that day so we have to keep that in mind and that is the indication that we we try not to engage in any form zina any form of fornication by preventing it from even by even looking at something haram let alone you know reaching out to somebody who we know we have a lustful desire attached to them let alone walking to a place that we know we're going to do something we're going to mess up and so on and so forth this is very very important now what are the challenges though in our times that people struggle with right and again by the way the goal for these talks um and i appreciate some of the comments here that um you know it's often taboo uh good so so the goal for these these conversations to be really real like that it's we're just trying to be real and these are real issues and my understanding is and i could be wrong but that our elders our teachers and of course the prophets and they didn't shy away from addressing the real things that were happening in their society and there were some really serious things right so let's talk about the real stuff let's start with the major thing that i believe that people in our society struggle with when it comes to lustful desires um we'll talk about we'll we'll start with this which is pornography why is pornography so dangerous right pornography is dangerous because first and foremost it is the most intense form of zina of haram that the eye can commit the most intense form of fornication and it is a