The heart may be sensitive or insensitive, awake or asleep, healthy or sick, whole or broken, open or closed. In other words, its perceptive ability will depend on its capacity and condition. Life continuously presents us with multiple ambiguous situations. How can we know whether we are following the concealed desire of the false self (nafs) or the guidance of the heart?
When the heart has nourished itself only on the desires of physical existence, it is deprived of life-giving nourishment,and its own desires become less healthy, more sickly.
Purity of the heart refers to the heart’s overall soundness and health. The heart, if it is truly a heart, is in contact with Spirit. But to achive this rapport with Spirit, it must be renovated, purified and made receptive all the way down to the subconscious levels.
Sufism (tasawwuf) offers four stages to the purification of the heart:
1-) Liberating ourselves from the psychological distortions and complexes that prevent us from forming a healthy, integrated individuality.
2-) Freeing ourselves from the slavery to the attractions of the world, all of which are secondary reflections of the qualities within the heart. Through seeing these attractions as veils over our one essential yearning, the veils fall away and the naked reality remains.
3-) Transcending the subtlest veil which is the self and its selfishness.
4-) Devoting oneself and one’s attention to Allah; living in and through Allah, in Haqiqah (truth), in Love.
The first three of these are virtually impossible without the fourth. Without the power of Love,we can only love our nafs and nothing else.