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spiritual_alertness

Spiritual Alertness

  • Spiritual alertness is an inner fervent, a deep love, a potentiality of enthusiasm and excitement keeping spiritual feelings active, vitalized and ready for action. Nevertheless, this vitality, too, might become obscured by the debris of habituation and familiarization. Those white cinders inside can cool, feelings and subtle senses can atrophy. One could even enter a period of deflation, withering and even rotting. That spiritual alertness disappears through habituation is, in fact, a requirement of our nature to a certain extent. It is rather difficult and even impossible to overcome this law of nature, especially for those who have not reached a certain depth of faith, whose inner lives have not sufficiently evolved.”1)
  • Spiritual (or metaphysical) alertness is an inward posture, a sort of standing to moral and spiritual attention. In its positive aspect, it means that believers hold an exceptionally strong and determined disposition for all that is good and permitted. They are preoccupied with such matters, and always work to achieve them.”2)
  • Spiritual alertness, or perseverance in the positive and resilience against the negative, on the one hand means operating the ways of service, establishing a mechanism and keeping it working, and on the other hand, engaging in a constant and persistent resistance against the sins and immorality. In other words, spiritual alertness means escaping from unbelief and disbelief as if running away from a venomous snake, by holding on to God and His Messenger and the system brought by the Messenger. In fact, the following hadith explains this point: ‘Whoever possesses the following three qualities will have the sweetness (delight) of faith: The one to whom God and His Messenger becomes dearer than anything else. Who loves a person and he loves him only for God’s sake. Who hates to revert to Atheism (disbelief) as he hates to be thrown into the fire.’”3)
  • “Turkey was exposed to intellectual, conceptual and moral corruption for years; therefore, it may be regarded as the epicenter of metaphysical alertness, since it was mistreated and disturbed in respect to its history and national culture more than the other country.”4)
  • “If a nation, just like training the future generations to be entrusted with our future in the modern sciences, is able to teach all its past with its ups and downs, climbing and fallings, taking us the legendary period when it was at the zenith, and whip their love and excitement and develop in them heroic thoughts and feelings And is able to use the treacherous acts of their enemies, make use of spiritual and material destruction they see from their enemies in the way of establishing in them spiritual alertness, then they would have achieved the best of the best acts, they would have made a great leap forward and inject the elixir of immortality in every member of the nation which it is able to exalt to the level of its own generation.”5)
  • Life blossoms during childhood. During youth it grows through spiritual alertness and striving on the way of truth. During old age it holds its vital energy with the desire to reunite with the beloved ones who have already passed away. How wretched it is for the disbelievers that they experience life sometimes as comedy and sometimes as tragedy, and thereby stifle the instinct for ardent hope and gratitude in humanity.”6)
  • “Another important issue in attaining taqwa or deepining in its new dimensions is to get rid of daily work in certain parts of the year and engage in things that can provide spiritual alertness.”7)

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Footnotes

1)
M. Fethullah Gülen, Fasıldan Fasıla-2, İstanbul: Nil Yayınları, 2008, p. 109.
2)
M. Fethullah Gülen, Questions and Answers about Islam-1, New Jersey: Tughra Books, 2010, p. 53.
3)
M. Fethullah Gülen, Asrın Getirdiği Tereddütler-3, İstanbul: Nil Yayınları, 2011, p. 103.
4)
M. Fethullah Gülen, Buhranlar Anaforunda İnsan (Çağ ve Nesil-2), İstanbul: Nil Yayınları, 2011, p. 19.
5)
M. Fethullah Gülen, Yitirilmiş Cennete Doğru (Çağ ve Nesil-3), İstanbul: Nil Yayınları, 2011, p. 25.
6)
M. Fethullah Gülen, Pearls of Wisdom, New Jersey: Tughra Books, 2013, p. 20.
7)
M. Fethullah Gülen, Prizma-2, İstanbul: Nil Yayınları, 2011, p. 76.
spiritual_alertness.txt · Last modified: 2022/06/19 15:35 by Editor