VIThe bridge of purification
Four stages across the fire
Here the book stops explaining and starts prescribing. Every stage from this point has a method, a duration, and a way of keeping score.
A person fulfils the four conditions — correctness of belief, learning the important rulings of fiqh, and removing any shortcoming in fulfilling the rights of Allah and His creation. Then, first and foremost, he adopts sincerity of intention, recognising that the entire effort he is employing is for the pleasure of Allah and success in the Hereafter, and not for the sake of fame and name or any material benefit of this temporal world.
Then the bridge.
What each stage does
The four stages
First stage · seven sheets, thirty days each
The seven organs
Second stage · ten levels
The mind
Third stage · ten levels
The heart & soul
Fourth stage · three degrees
The spirit
The method, in one paragraph
How the counting works
Every practice from here on is recorded on a sheet with thirty numbered days across the top and a column of numbered attempts down the side. The instruction printed above each one is the same:
Tick across every day if the condition is met. If however you violate the condition, then stop, put a cross, and start from the beginning — and write the number of the rule you violated in the ‘rules violated’ column.
So the count is not cumulative. It is a streak. Twenty-nine clean days followed by one violation returns you to day one, on the next attempt row — and the book expects this, which is precisely why the sheets have room for eleven, thirteen, fifteen attempts.
That design is the teaching. Falling is assumed. What is being trained is the returning.
The real fall is not that a person has fallen. It is that he does not get up after falling.
And when a cross is marked, the book prescribes the next action rather than leaving the seeker in it: perform Salatul Tawbah, the two units of the prayer of repentance, and rebuild the door.
The seeker is also told to remain in contact with a teacher at least once every forty days — informing him of his state and condition, and acting on the guidance given. The book does not present this path as something to walk unaccompanied. More on the teacher and the seeker →
Why organs first
The heart is a fortress with many doors
A person’s heart is the most valuable and prized jewel amongst all the goods he possesses, and he must actively safeguard it from the devilish thieves who seek to steal it. In the first stage, the seeker is taught how to erect doors that prevent the thieves from entering and stealing what is held in the kingdom of his heart.
The doors are the blocking of sin entering through the seven sensual organs. The kingdom is the heart itself.
When one commits a sin through one or more of those organs, a black dot appears on the heart. If the person does not repent, then gradually the whole heart becomes tarnished with darkness — and as a consequence, one fails to differentiate between truth and falsehood, goodness and evil, which ultimately results in the heart becoming blind and heedless.
The person who indulges in bad deeds, and then after that does good ones, is like a person wearing armour which is strangling his throat. He does a good deed, and one knot of the armour opens up. He does a second good deed, and the second link opens. And as a result of this he begins to walk freely.
The doors of the plane represent the first stage. Each door needs to be closed against the evil which seeks to enter. The winds of desire will enter if the doors are not closed, and the devils seek to enter through them.