Taqwa is Allah’s consciousness. It can be many things. We are going to concentrate on this one. And then, second one is ittiqa, watching Allah’s pleasure over your actions. And this will bring you, insha Allah, to tawakkul, putting your trust in Allah. So, taqwa, in the most basic sense, is the practice of turning to Allah again and again and again.

Why should we practice taqwa? 

Human beings are created to be able to know Allah, to be able to communicate with Allah and love Allah as our Prophet, peace be upon him, has been an example to us and all the other prophets, peace be upon them all, have been an example to us. 

And how do you do that without connection? 

So, this is why Allah created human being with the ability to connect. We are called social beings, all the human beings. We need that social layer around us. And not only that, we have literally, in our energetic being, energetic level, we have literally places for connection, your lata’if points being one of them, but I am not really talking about that. 

I am talking about connection to your family, connection to your friends, connection to people around you, community, world, nature, animals, your kids, knowledge. We have places for these connections basically in our body so we can activate them or not activate them, but Allah wants us to activate them. 

And where is your place of connection to Allah? 

Your heart! Our heart is our place of communication to Allah. Now these connections, and the ability to connect. Just think about it, Allah created us as His khalifa because we can, if we choose to, we get to a certain level to represent Allah on Earth. We can see that Allah created everything and that means Allah is connected to everything just like you are connected to everything! 

Allah created human being, this combination of soul and nafs, and physical body, our earth, which is also our nafs. So here we are and we are connected to the spiritual world. We are connected to Earth, and then out of all these comes you, child of stars and Earth, of this world and the next world, because we are going back. 

I would like you to imagine, just visualize. I would like you to visualize that literally we are a being of connectivity. We are connected to nature. We are connected to everything, because our very being, our basic atoms are same physically, and then spiritually we are connected to all universes, and especially of course to Allah.

These connections, are they formed to the nafs or to Allah? At all times, we have this one choice: do you choose Allah, or do you choose your nafs? 

When you are connected to everything and in everything, if you choose to connect through your nafs, it becomes an “attachment.” If you choose to connect through your heart, it becomes a connection. Ya Allah!

That is your choice. So, what do we do? Our attachments pollute our heart connection and our other connections. They cause confusion, they cause angst, you know it, I know it, we all have it. Do not let anybody tell you they are above having any nafs. This is not true, because Hazrat Abdul Qadir Geylani says so, right? Even though he got rid of his nafs, found a shortcut, but he was guided by his teacher to accept the nafs back. We need the nafs. 

So do not hate anybody or anything. 

Everybody has their jobs and they give us an opportunity. What nafs offers us is an opportunity. When we are connecting things through our nafs, we have an ownership to them. This is that song, that ilahi:

Give up what you have and what you do not have, and then come dervish. 

Varînî yoğunu atta gel derviş ~ Ruhi