distinction between right and wrong is deliberately awakened, made an active, governing part of our existence, we accept what it means to be human, what it means to acknowledge an authority, a power which transcends the merely human. When we have established that there is a right and wrong, a good and bad not tied to a judiciary or some arbitrary legal system, which might or might not be based on the laws of truth, and which we have to accept on pain of societal punishment, at this moment we find ourself on the path of purity, of truth. The din, a life of purity, is now the way we choose, rejecting the bad and adhering to the good, anchoring ourself in God’s truth and His attributes. When we have an undeviating adherence to the good, avoiding the bad at every point in word, thought and act we are at the second step of our spiritual journey, the tariqat, the path, even though in a way all our life is that path, and it is here we have the capacity to engage the fifth level of wisdom. Now subtle wisdom, that grace awakened wisdom which recognizes the elements as the elements and the soul as the soul begins to understand the limits of sensory perception, to define boundaries for mind and desire, deposing them, restraining them, placing them under it own control. Here we have the first level of consciousness correctly described as wisdom. Because subtle wisdom stands on the threshhold of the reality that God is One, that God is the only permanence, the totality, everything, this level of wisdom opens up the inner obligations accompanying the outer prescriptions of conduct 38 |