It is said that there is a difference between wisdom and knowledge. The knowledge I am talking about is wisdom. It is esoteric knowledge; knowledge of the inner.

It is very easy to understand a human being. There are seven souls inside the body; six of them are your helpers. They are responsible for creating a connection with God, communicating with God, making spiritual journey and absorbing the attributes of God — making your compassionate, lovable and forgiving. However, these six souls are dormant.

One soul in the body is the representative of the devil, and that is pretty much awake. The souls which are responsible to bring in you the attributes of God are unconscious. They need to be awakened. If you don’t wake them up, they will continue to be unconscious even if you die.

Since the six souls responsible for introducing you to God and God to you, are in sleeping mode, you have no attribute of God in you. The representative of the devil is awake and active, so you have all the attributes of the devil in you.

Even if you go in the mosque, you will create mischief. You go in the church with this, you will create mischief. Wherever you go, you will create mischief. No woman is ever safe for you. Your lust, greed and ego are ever-rising. All the negativity is always rising.

How will you purify yourself? There is no practice. You need to awaken your souls. When the divine energy comes inside you, that divine energy will then control the representative of devil. This is called purification of the Self.

You are not a trustworthy human being in the eyes of God unless you purify this evil spirit (the Self) in you. This is not written in any book, but you see it.

For example, ISIS/ISIL/Daesh call themselves warriors of God and warriors of Islam, but look at the level of their lust! They’re raping girls from six months to seven years of age. Recently it was reported that a man was arrested in Ohio. There were eighteen girls held captive by him for twelve years. He sexually assaulted them. The youngest he tried to have sex with was six months old. It is not about religion. He was Christian and the same thing is happening in Syria with ISIS. He is reciting the Bible and they’re reciting the Quran, so why are they not holy?

It is not about the religion; it is about purification. It is about spirituality. In the absence of spirituality, religion will not help you.

If it does help people, then why are these people evil even with the Quran in their hands?

It is very strange that more corrupt people are to be found who practise religion, especially the religious leaders.

There was a yoga master in the United States of America a month ago; he raped many young girls. This alone is enough to understand he was not a spiritual master. There are many stories of this sort reported every day in the newspapers in India, America, Pakistan, etc. This is happening because the religion has a missing link.

When you go to a garage to repair your car, you will have two different types of mechanics. One will take care of the body work; he will take out the dents and beautify the body of the car. The other will have expertise in fixing the engine. If the engine is faulty and you have spent all your money on beautifying the body of the car, that is what a religion is today. The car looks beautiful, but the engine is not working. If your religion cannot purify your evil spirit inside you, then your religion is gone.

Your job is to eliminate the evil presence from within you.

Our western society has become so naive to simple understanding of spirituality, because it is a very hard job; it is a fight against yourself.

Even terrorists are afraid of this kind of Jihad. Prophet Mohammad, when the religion was established and everything was accomplished, said to his companions, ‘Lets move froward from lesser Jihad to greater Jihad.’ His companions were really puzzled and asked him, ‘What is a greater Jihad?’ In the battlefield, you fight with people and they kill you or you kill them — but Prophet Mohammad declared this kind of war to be a lesser Jihad. He said, ‘In the Jihad you have done with your sword, you were able to see your enemy. When you see your enemy, you can protect yourself against them and also assault on them. Now I am asking you to wage a war against an enemy which is invisible. It is inside you.’ This is for brave people.

It is easy to beat up others; it is not easy to negating yourself. The normal pattern of the world is that all the time, you want to tell others that you are better, greater than them. You try to show you’re good and the rest is bad.

However, when you want to wage a war against the evil inside you, the weapon of this war is humiliation. It is not easy.

People who have waged a war against their Self and then came out from the unreal world of their own are really great people.

Normally, if someone says something slightly negative to you, you get upset. This is a bad character. If somebody is swearing at you and you swear at him back, then you are pretty below average. How can you be a spiritual man?

If people do something wrong to you and in reply, you do the same — what is special about you? If you do the same, you are the same.

Purification of the Self involves lowering yourself and negating yourself. You go through this process where you tell yourself, ‘I have less importance than others.’ Then, possibly, you can become a generous man. For example there are many people in a room and only one glass of water, but everyone is thirsty. If I give the glass to Mr X first and his Self is purified, he will say to me, ‘No, give it to Mr Y, he needs it more than me.’ If this evil spirit is still evil, then he will immediately want the water for himself.

Without purification of the Self, forget about God, purity and spirituality. The first step towards spirituality is purification of the Self.

The problem is, this purification does not come by any worship, by reciting any name, by reading any book or by making any sacrifice.

This purification is not available in the mosques, churches, synagogues or anywhere else. It comes from the divinely ordained spiritual master.

With his spiritual authority and power, the spiritual master transmits divine energy into your evil spirit. Even in evil spirit located at the belly point, the spiritual guide will inculcate divine energy and teach this evil spirit to repeat the name of God. By this virtue of reciting the name of God, divine energy will start to be generated inside it. Then divine energy will start enlightening and purifying it. The bad energy will leave your body and divine energy will start to accumulate inside you. Then you will mellow down.

When divine energy is settling in your Self, and people are calling you bad, you will be less bothered. You will think, ‘Yes, I am bad. I am trying to be good.’

When you have negative energy in you and your Self is not nurtured or purified, you have unreasonable anger. If people do not listen to you, you get angry. If people do not obey you, so you get angry. You take many things for granted. Sometimes our expectations create an unreal situation and then we get angry. These are the diseases of the evil spirit we have inside us.

When people help the poor and needy ones, they want the media to come and give coverage, so people praise them.

If I praise you for false, it is like poison to your character. Never praise anybody for false.

If you are bad, you will always demand from me to call you good. I know that if I say you are bad, you’ll get angry, so just because of this reason, I will say, ‘You are good.’ This is where we go wrong. You should be brave enough to tell your friend when they are wrong.

Lord Ra Riaz never praised me. I asked the Lord one day, ‘Is there nothing in my life that I have done good?’ The Lord smiled and asked me, ‘Do you want to be known as mine, or do you want to be known as good?’

Humiliation and giving yourself less importance, this is the key to God-realisation, self-realisation.

In spirituality, purification of this evil spirit and awakening of the spiritual heart are the most important. These two things are not available without a perfect, divinely ordained spiritual guide.

This article was originally posted on Younus AlGohar’s Medium page.