BismillahirRahmanirRahim

How do we stop ourselves from feeling negative, even when doing something for the sake of Allah?

The Saints, you understand that their lives are filled with difficulties. Their lives are filled with issues. They are doing everything for the sake of Allah, their intentions are perfect but at every turn there is always difficulty. Now how do they stop themselves from feeling negative? Because you ask a question, you are doing something for the sake of Allah, something good, but negativity always bugs you and doesn’t leave you alone, and it pulls you down and makes you maybe a little bit more depressed, unsure of yourself, uncertain.

Number one, your intentions, are they for the sake of Allah and His Prophet with the consultation of your Sheykh? Is that it? Are you sure? Yes. Did you leave any gap there for your ego to enter? No, because this is good intention, direct order, and he is saying, ‘I’m praying for you.’ So that’s it, you go. You run. So every difficulty that comes with that, Allah swt is saying, ‘with every difficulty, there is ease.’ And He is swearing, ‘Fa inna ma’al usri yusra – verily with every difficulty there is ease.’ So from that point of certainty that you know this is what you are supposed to do, difficulty that comes it is not negativity that makes you to doubt yourself. It is, ‘there is a puzzle that I have to solve. It is a question that I have to answer.’ The answer is there. Because Allah swt is not going to give you a question or a difficulty without an answer and without ease. Allah is swearing on that.

So you are going to say, ‘now we come to this issue here. There is a way out. Ah, I solve it. Now there is another issue. I solve it. Okay, I can go.’ That is when you take the example, not of a movie that you saw how the hero deals with difficulties, not with the book that you read somewhere, not with the story that you hear, but you look, and the example is there in front of you that is your Sheykh, how he deals with difficulties. He doesn’t let that to pull him down, nothing. He said, ‘Okay, now something. Now we have to go this way. Now we have to go this way.’ So what do you do? You have strategies.

We are calling ourselves Seekers of Truth. You have to find the way. We are calling ourselves preparing for Hazreti Mahdi (as), to be on his side, we are calling ourselves those ones who are declaring war on our ego and on sheytan. So what is war? It is strategy. War, it is strategy. So, if war it is strategy, we are going to do what? You are going to plan. You know which side you are on in a war, right? Do you go to war not knowing which side that you are on? No, you already know. Are you going to be unsure now when you are there waiting and you say, ‘oh, am I really on the right side or not?’ You don’t. Ah, the Bosnians they went through war. There’s no doubt there. What are you going to have doubt? Whether you can carry the job or not. But as far as your intention is concern, there is no doubt, correct?

Now, the doubt whether you can do that or not has nothing to do with the intention. It has to do with your skill. And that skill, that skill it is according to what? How much preparation you have, how much training you have. Now we are in training. We are declaring war against our nafs, now we have to train ourselves in this time and we have to strategies. So once you start strategizing, if this doesn’t work, you are going to go another angle. This angle doesn’t work, you are going to go another angle. And you are always thinking and you are always solving. So that’s not difficult for you to do. Because if you have your Sheykh, you have the Prophet (asws), you have the Evliyaullah in front of you, they are always doing that with everything, then you get into that mode. Then you are always going to be awake. Because the enemy is never sleeping. Our nafs is never sleeping. Sheytan is never sleeping, it is always awake. Now you are going to be awake as well. So you are going to use same principle in almost every situation.

You may be sitting and understanding how this world is dajjalic and sheytan has taken over. Now you are going to sit and you are going to say, have a quarrel, disagreement with someone, then you are going to not be involve in that. You are going to pull yourself back, you are going to watch yourself, you are going to watch the person, ‘how much of this is ego? How much of this is really true? How much of this is just me following my nafs?’ and ‘how much of it is really looking for a solution to a situation?’ Then you can make the changes at the ground level. Whether you are talking to your friend, or your husband or your wife, or your children, now you are applying the same thing. And now you are looking at situation, you are not going to caught up in that. Negativity, you don’t have time for that. You don’t have time for doubt, because you’ve already made your choice. Now you have to make it work.

Is there going to be always difficulty? Yes. Because Holy Prophet (asws) is saying, ‘if you take one step towards me (towards the way of Allah), there’s going to be seventy sheytan in front of you.’ The life of the Prophets and the Saints are filled with difficulties. But they didn’t have doubt. Let me tell you when the doubt is going to come, when the depression is going to come: when you look at your Sheykh and you look at your Mursyid and you look at your Prophet (asws), and you’ve done something and you feel like you’ve failed them. And you are not strong enough to get up again and when they look like they are very upset with you, not only that, but when it looks as if they turn their face away from you, that’s when the doubt is going to enter. correct? Not any other things. Any other problems and everything, that’s okay. But when you say, ‘my maksud is to make my Sheykh to be happy with me, and he’s not happy with me,’ then doubt is going to enter. But that doubt, be careful now, this happens to everyone, that doubt you cannot make it to turn to you. You must make it to turn to your ego, ‘what did my ego do?’ because if you make it to turn to you, you personally, then you are going to take that personally, then you are going to say ‘the Sheykh doesn’t like me personally.’

But the Sheykh is not there for personal reason. He is there for you to understand your nafs and to make for you to not be a idiot and not to be a slave to your nafs, not for it to be able to jump out and control you. As human, you want to please the one that you love and when the one that you love is not please with us, we are going to feel something.

We are not here just to be human. We are here to attain the high rank of being the servant. Now when that one is not happy with us, we have to sit and we have to understand why. Easy for the ego to say, ‘oh, he doesn’t like me. That’s why he is not happy with me.’ Why is he not happy? ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. He doesn’t like me, that’s why.’ Very spoiled, very childish. This is what they teach in the society. ‘Please don’t get upset with me. Are you upset with me? Don’t get upset with me.’ It’s not about the person being upset with you, it’s about what you did to make the person upset. So you are not looking at what is this thing that you have done, you are looking at how this person feel. So which means, what you’ve done, even if it’s damaging, you don’t care about it. But you just care how this person, fake or not, is going to like you.

If you understand that you’ve don’t the damage, even if the person is not seeing it, and he’s not upset with you, you are going to be upset with yourself. You’ll say, ‘I did damage, I’m going to try to fix it.’ If it’s all about the person being happy with you without any real reason, then you don’t care about the damage. You hide it under and you can do it again and again and again. So there is no accountability, there’s not responsibility. You sit and you understand, ‘I did this mistake, this is how I’m going to fix this.’ ‘This one I did this mistake, this is how I’m going to fix it.’

We come to situation like that, of course. Time to time, we get a little bit sad. But don’t let that to be something that is going to take over. And what help is being in jamaat. Because when you are feeling that way, all you want to be is alone. ‘I have to think.’ You are really not thinking. ‘I have to think. I don’t want to be around people.’ Because the sheytan says, ‘now is my private time with you. I must have private sohbet with you to tell you how all this time you’ve been fooled. All this time you are wrong and I was right.’ So that is the time, maybe you just want to be quiet a little bit because it’s really not quiet. You want to be quiet because it is buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, buzzing.

Be with the Saliheen. You don’t have to speak about your problem. Just be with them. They are helping to do something, be with them. You are talking about something else, be with them. ‘Even I feel, arrggh, it’s okay, it’s going to pass.’ For example, be at the Dergah. You have so many things you are not going to sit down. People don’t sit down for five minutes to think about Allah but when they have a stupid problem, they spend days, weeks, sitting by themselves, thinking. Correct or not? You don’t spend five minutes thinking and being worried about Allah and His Prophet or your death or something, but something stupid because someone said to you, you are going to spend days thinking, plotting, conspiring, making theories, stop all of that.

That’s why when you have the Dergah, for instance, something hits you like that, move, do something. Be active. You know what you should do? Clean the toilet. For real. When you know your ego is just taking over and you are like arggh going crazy, go to the toilet and clean the toilet. Clean it and look at it and understand, ‘that dirtiness, it’s me. I have that dirtiness more.’ Then because you are stepping on your ego that way, something is going to come to you, to make you change. Insya’Allah ar-Rahman. Khayr. This much is enough. WaminaAllahu Taufiq. Al-Fatiha. SelamAleykum warahmatullahi wabarakatu.

Sheykh Lokman Efendi Hz
Khalifah of SahibulSaif Shaykh Abdulkerim el Kibrisi (qs),
OSMANLI DERGAHI- New York
24 Zul Qaida 1437, August 27, 2016.