The Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) is reported to have said:
“Do not attend the circle of a learned person unless that individual asks you to give up five things in favor of accepting five other things:
-- Doubt in favor of belief;
-- Hypocrisy in favor of sincerity;
-- Worldliness in favor of asceticism;
-- Pride in favor of humility;
-- Enmity in favor of love. “
One could, of course, explore the nuances of what might be meant by ‘doubt’, ‘belief’, ‘hypocrisy’, ‘sincerity’, ‘worldliness’, ‘asceticism’, ‘pride’, ‘humility’, ‘enmity’ and ‘love’. For example, should one exercise belief rather than doubt when someone makes a statement that might not be true, or, should one exercise asceticism rather than a certain amount of worldliness when one’s family is hungry and one needs to work in order to acquire the food that is necessary to feed them, or should one love Iblis when the Qur’an indicates that he is an enemy to human beings, and, if in such circumstances ‘enmity’ of some kind were warranted, what quality should it have?
The Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) also is reported to have said:
“The movements of nafs are more difficult to detect than the movements of a black ant on a smooth rock in the dead of night.”
Some people equate the notion of “nafs” with the ego. However, the latter term does not accurately reflect the complexity of the 'nafs'.
To have a better sense of the subtleties entailed by the 'nafs', one must add dimensions such as: Desire, aspiration, negative emotion, instinct, dishonesty, duplicity, manipulation, lack of conscience, secrecy, cruelty, cleverness, exploitation, fantasy, and delusion to the sort of rationalizations, self-centeredness, and limited forms of intelligence that tend to be associated with the notion of “ego”. We are warned against the machinations of dunya – which some translate as worldliness – but 'dunya' is nothing but the manifestation of 'nafs' writ large in a collective fashion and through which all of the entanglements of worldly existence come into being.
My spiritual guide use to preface the word “nafs” with the term: “wretched.” Indeed, the inclinations of 'nafs' are truly wretched for it is constantly lobbying and seeking to exert undue influence with respect to our choices concerning, among things: doubt with respect to belief, or hypocrisy rather than sincerity, or worldliness versus asceticism, or pride instead of humility, or enmity over love.
One of the primary tasks of life is to struggle toward, God willing, gaining mastery over the tendencies of 'nafs' as it moves about within our consciousness and seeks to push us here or pull us there or orient us in one way rather than another. This is the greater jihad about which the Prophet informed Muslims – the need to struggle against the capacity for wretchedness within each of us that has been seeded into humans as a potential by God, and this can only be accomplished through engaging in a process of rigorous critical reflection that leads, if God wishes, to an insightful discernment concerning the nature and character of the dynamics of 'nafs', and its more entangled form known as 'dunya', as well as how it – and to that extent our world -- might be transformed, God willing, to some degree.
One has the opportunity to acquire such discernment if one is able to associate with a truly learned person, such as an authentic shaykh, who not only knows the difference between: doubt and belief, hypocrisy and sincerity, worldliness and asceticism, pride and humility, as well as enmity and love, but acts in accordance with that knowledge on a second-by-second basis.
Human beings tend to absorb something of the qualities of the individuals with whom they associate. This is why one should choose carefully the sort of circle in which one sits or interacts for a stone that spends its time in an outhouse smells differently than a stone that spends its time in a rose garden.
