The prayer Salat invokes numerous Masters and Prophets as embodiments of the Spirit of Guidance, named examples of ‘all the illuminated souls’ with whom we journey toward the One, in the words of the Invocation. But as the prayer clearly teaches, the Spirit of Guidance is not limited to those great souls–it is found in all names and forms: in a loving mother, a kind father, an innocent child, and so on. Therefore, in spite of all our doubts and confusions, it must also be found in us.

If the light and love of the Spirit of Guidance is indeed in us, the same divine Spirit that illuminated Moses and Jesus and Mohammed and nourished countless souls with their wisdom, then how do we explain the condition of our lives? If we are honest, most of us are constantly plagued by uncertainty – from the minuscule doubts about mundane things to the large indecisions about where we are going in life and what we are trying to accomplish. And as often as not, when we make a choice, it seems to turn out wrong, or in any case produces a different result from what we expected. So where is that Divine light we are said to contain?

The explanation, of course, is that most of us are a rather mixed bag. The voice of the Spirit of Guidance is certainly speaking, but so are many other voices, some selfish, some trivial, some malign. Before our inner awareness is opened, it is difficult to distinguish one voice from another. As one Sufi explained it, we may hear the voices of angels and of devils, but we have no reliable means to discriminate between them, for as it says in the Gayan, “Satan comes in most beautiful garbs to hide from man’s eyes his highest ideal.”

The remedy is to make the ideal ever more present in our lives; as it grows in presence, all the other voices and distractions become dimmed and lose their importance to us. Then our discrimination sharpens, and guidance helps us more and more.

And how do we make place for our ideal? There are many strategies, but the most fundamental and essential one for the seeker on the Sufi path is prayer. In all ages, prayer has been given by the wise as a way to purify our heart and spirit, and open our eyes to the light. We may think that our modern age has evolved beyond the need for prayer, but that is not possible, for prayer is in fact the very mechanism of evolution.