The ability to question is a quality that’s specific to brains that can think and contemplate. It is a quality of intelligence. However, only one who is smart in their judgment can duly evaluate the results of their inquisition.

Knowledge that is the answer to an unasked question cannot be acquired! Knowledge is the due right of one who questions!

One who refrains from questioning will forever be deprived of the knowledge contained in the answer.

So, the first quality of a thinker is the ability to question and research!

Especially those things that are going to be of benefit in their eternal life to come. Knowledge that is only applicable to this world will be of no use in the life after death and we’ll only be wasting our time here on earth.

A religious understanding based on blind imitation rather than authentication based on research has always been more popular. People generally prefer the easy way out, one where they don’t have to think too much, and thus prefer to follow alleged ‘scholars’ who don’t encourage them to contemplate. Unfortunately, those who duly live the merit of their humanity are very few in number.

In any case, those who contemplate and research, yet fail to find the truth, are still more valuable than those who imitate the truth. For, one who researches gains the ability to inquire into and discover new things, and uploads these qualities to his spirit, while the latter will live in a paradise that is extremely limited. Going to paradise, as I said before, does not depend on one’s deeds, but what has been predetermined for him by creation.

Are we duly experiencing and fulfilling the requisites of knowledge and gnosis or are we squandering away our lives with hearsay and gossip instead?

If the knowledge we acquire isn’t enhancing our daily lives, then we are only deluding ourselves; wasting away our lives engaging in more ‘sophisticated’ gossip to render ourselves ‘different’!

If you want to experience the merits of your humanity through inquisition and contemplation, then you must first decide on this…

Are you going to fulfill certain religious requisites in order to acquiesce and please the god up there so He may reward you or to grow and develop yourself just as you eat healthy food to gain the benefits therein.

To think yourself safe on a day where “no one is going to be of benefit to any one” just because you’re close to one eminent person or another without fulfilling certain requisites can only be self-delusion.

One wonders which reality of the system the Rasul (saw) was referring to with his words, “If you knew what I knew you could not sleep so comfortably in your beds, but would flee to the mountains yelling out ‘Allah Allah!’”

Why did the Rasul (saw) advise against lying, gossiping, gambling, drinking alcohol and committing adultery and recommend salat, fasting and pilgrimage instead?

Ask the people around you, what is the meaning of salat? Ninety five percent are likely to say it is worshipping god, a physical activity, to appear before god, to acknowledge the greatness of god by prostrating before him, and so on…

Salat is the act of ‘introspective’ turning! It is to feel and experience one’s essential reality! It is to acknowledge one’s nothingness in the sight of the One. It is to experience your individual expression while standing, your inevitability of fulfilling your servitude before His Power while bowing, and the ‘One’ness far beyond any concept of multiplicity and complete inexistence of the ‘self’ while in prostration.

This is the salat that opens the believer’s path to ascension!

The one where a god is worshipped is nothing other than a ritual.

One can only reach paradise with faith and the application of its requisites, and Allah, to the extent he can cleanse his thoughts – of course, as much as it has been allowed for him… No one, including the Rasul of Allah (saw),has ever reached Allah without contemplation and questioning.