FRIDAY GEMS

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.
And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart, you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.
And in such of your talking, thinking is half murdered.

You give but little when you give your possessions.
It is when you give yourself that you truly give.
It is well to give when asked, but it is better to give unasked, through understanding.

Someone has said that if it required a person or object to make you happy, you do not know what happiness is. But if you can stand alone in the midst of any hard situation doing a required or routine task with love and peace at heart, you know something about peace.

What is the difference between a person who relies only on himself and a person who has learnt to turn to Allah for help? It is not that one will do bad things while the other will do good things. The self reliant atheist may be a fine, upstanding person. The difference is the atheist is like a bush growing in the desert. If he has only himself to rely on, when he exhausts his internal resources then he runs the risk of running dry and withering.

But the man or woman who turns to Allah is like a tree planted by a stream. What they share with the world is replenished from a source beyond themselves, so they never run dry.

Happiness

"Happiness is a product of mind, of gratitude and thought. It comes FROM you, not TO you.
To be happy, you must think yourself happy. Many people make themselves unhappy because they look for things they have not got or cannot have. Rarely do they take the time to acknowledge and appreciate what they HAVE got.
Look no further than the end of your nose if you want happiness."
- Robert Holden

The Criterion of Truth

"It is customary with weaker intellect to take the men as criterion of the truth, and not the truth as criterion of the men. The intelligent man follows Ali b. Abu Talib (may Allah be pleased with him) when he said: "Do not know the truth by the men, but know the truth, and then you will know who are truthful"
- al Ghazali

YOUR MOTHER

"And your mother's right over you is to recognise that she bore you the way no one bears anyone; and she fed you from the fruit of her heart, the way no one feeds anyone. And that she guarded you with her ears, her eyes, her hands, her feet, her hair, her skin and all her limbs. And she did so happily and cheerfully, enduring the unpleasantness, the pain, the heaviness and the distress of pregnancy. Till such time when Almighty relieved her of you, and brought you to this earth.

And then, she agreed that you be fed while she remained hungry, you be clothed while she remained unclothed, your thirst be quenched while she endured thirst, that you be covered while she suffered from heat. She gave you the bounties while she went deprived, and gave you the taste of sleep while she stayed awake.

Her stomach was the container for you, her laps a secure place for you, her breasts source of food for you. Her entire self was for you a total protection, while she sustained the cold and heat of this world for you and your happiness!

So be grateful to her in that measure!
And you will never be able to do so except
With the help from Allah and success granted
By Him"

Imam Zainul Abedeen (A.S.) in
RISALATUL HUQOOQ (Vol. I)

PARENTS

"O Allah! Fill me with awe of my parents the awe one has toward a strict sovereign; and let me be devoted to them, with a devotion of a compassionate mother.

"O Allah, lower before them my voice, and make my words agreeable to them, make my temper mild before them, and my heart more tender towards them. Turn me into their kind compassion, their living friend.

"They have rights over me which are more incumbent, a precedence of obligations towards me, and kindness which is more profound, than that I should settle accounts with justice or repay them with equivalents. (And if I did so, then) Where, O Allah be their long occupation with bringing me up, the hardship of their toil in taking care of me, the stinting of themselves to provide me with plenty".

Imam Zainul Abedeen (A.S.) in
His prayers for the parents

SCANDAL, RUMOUR, MONGERING

Flies sit at times on the sweet meals kept exposed for sale in the shop of a confectioner, but no sooner does a sweeper pass by with a basketful of filth, then the flies leave the sweet meals and sit upon the filth basket. But the honey bee never sits on filthy objects, and always drinks honey from the flowers.

The worldly men are like flies. At times they get a momentary taste of divine sweetness, but their natural tendency for filth soon brings them back to the dunghill of the world. The good man, on the other hand, is always absorbed in the beatific contemplation of divine beauty!

PROCRASTINATION

Imam Ali (A.S.) said: "Oh, how the hours hasten to change into days, the days into months, the months into years, and then into life's annihilation!" Say not 'tomorrow' or 'the day after tomorrow' for those that perished, perished because they abode always in their hopes, until the truth came upon them suddenly in their heedlessness, and wilful as they were they were carried to their dark narrow graves, abandoned by all their kith and kin.

Shakespeare said: "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day. To the last syllable of recorded time And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death."

'A life devoted to the interests and enjoyments of this world, spent and wasted in the slavery of earthly desires, may be truly called a dream, as having all the shortness, vanity and delusion of a dream; only with this great difference, that when a dream is over, nothing is lost but fictions and fancies; but when the dream of life is ended only by death, all that eternity is lost, for which we were brought into being.'

The Prophet, peace be upon him and his progeny, said: "People are asleep; when they die, they wake".

PRIDE

Other vices fasten onto evil, to the end that it be done; pride alone fastens onto good, to the end that it perish.

All the other vices flee God; pride alone rises up against Him.

Our Prophet, peace be upon him and his progeny, reporting Jesus, son of Mary, said: "The Messiah, (peace be upon him) said: "O company of the disciples, how many lamps has the wind put out, and how many worshippers has self-conceit spoiled!"

For they loved the praise of man more than the praise of God.

Imam Ali (A.S.) said: "The worst man is the one who sees himself as the best".

'Senility is not just a biological disorder. It can also be a manifestation of a refusal to GROW UP, a psychological disorder preventable by any man who embarks on a life time pattern of spiritual growth.

Those who stop learning and growing early in their lives and stop changing and become fixed after, lapse into what is sometimes called their "second childhood". They become whimsy and demanding and self centred.

But this is not because they have entered their second childhood. THEY HAVE NEVER LEFT THEIR FIRST, and the veneer of adulthood is worn thin, revealing the emotional child that lurks underneath".

(M Scott Peck)

"We must all become familiar with the thought of death if we want to grow into really good people. We need not think of it every day or every hour. But when the path of life leads us to some vantage point where the scene around us fades away and we contemplate the distant view right to the end, let us not close our eyes.

Let us pause for a moment; look at the distant view, and then carry on.

Thinking about death IN THIS WAY produces love for life. When we are familiar with death, we accept each week, each day, as a gift. Only if we are able thus to accept life - bit by bit - does it become precious".

(Albert Schwitzer)

It is through the experiences of our lives, our experiences of 'RAHMAT', GRACE, that we have come to what little knowledge we have about God.

In this regard, we are very much like Carl Jung, a scientist. Towards the end of his life, he submitted himself to a film interview. After many rather prosaic questions, the interviewer finally said: "Dr. Jung, a lot of your writing has a religious flavour. Do you believe in God?"

Old Jung puffed on his pipe. "Believe in God?" he mused out loud.