Your life is the product of the decisions you make. How do you make decisions? Well, you check the facts right? Here's the problem with that. In so many situations there is a kind of fog of war. You don't have all the facts and you have to guess. A decision is due at a certain time. You can't avoid it. You have to make a decision. And all too often people deceive themselves into thinking they can postpone decisions and sometimes they can, but there's usually a very high cost to postponing a key decision and that is in itself a decision. Procrastination is one of the most dangerous things in life because it is a form of self delusion. It's, "Well we haven't made the decision." Well, yeah, you've made a decision to lose a certain amount of blood, or worse, in not making a decision. This doesn't mean you should rush into things, but that is a cold blooded reality which needs to be understood.
PRAYER AND MAKING DECISIONS
So the issue here is how do you make decisions? This goes back to insight. You get to a certain point and you still can't see what's up ahead. So you have to guess and this gets back to the subconscious part of the mind. This gets back to something that is as old as history: the concept of prayer. Prayer means asking the Almighty, or whatever God you believe in, for guidance. What do I do here? It involves simply asking a question in your mind to the Almighty and you wait and think and then make the decision as well as you can. You basically guess. It's like walking into a minefield. You're going to go right rather than left and hope you don't step on a mine. That's a good analogy. So that's the point about making decisions.
WHY WILL GOD HELP YOU?
Now there's a larger point in terms of a theological view of life. If you expect God to help you make decisions, why would he do that? Why is he going to help you or these people who are involved in the occult? Who are they talking to? And why are these people going to help you? This is why we would caution people about getting involved in the occult.
In the world of the spirit, it's like the real world in the sense you rarely get something for nothing. So if you want to be able to make the right decisions, you have to be leading your life in a correct way. It means having a sense of purpose.
RELIGIOUS FRAMEWORK
This is where Islam comes in in terms of imposing some kind of discipline on your life to spiritually focus you so that you can detect the will of the Almighty.
When you look around you, you see things that destroy an awareness of the supernatural power, and the vision, and the overall power of the Almighty. Drugs and alcohol are common problems, but there's a bigger problem with people getting lost in the world of careerism, that their whole life is built around impressing the boss, the company, pleasing other people and some people are so lost in that they're spiritually dead. Spirituality is like exercising. If you don't exercise your body, you will get fat and it can't do stuff, and you can't even hear the voice of the Almighty. You can't even though you are aware of His existence. This is very dangerous. It's like driving a car at increasingly high speeds with the windshield that's clogging up, or even worse, you see imaginary things in the windshield and you think you're heading to paradise when you're heading toward a brick wall. So there's a lesson to lead a disciplined life, a life of faith and then you are likely to get guidance.
MEANING AND SACRIFICE
A final point is that God is not an ATM machine. He's not your personal welfare office. The Almighty has a plan and the Quran very specifically states that if you follow that plan, and follow the tenants of Islam, you will enter paradise. That's the main promise. The promise of the Quran is not that you will have a painless life, and that you will have no problems, that you will have a life of ease and pleasure that is here. No. That is not the promise, and you should think about it as being in an army. If you agree to serve in an army, what would the general say? We're now going into battle, but nobody's going to get hurt? Nobody's even gonna be slightly injured? Obviously if people are going to battle they're going to be horribly injured and killed, but this is faith in the future, and faith in the what's to come.
You need to understand that all aspects of life are under the control of the Almighty. We don't understand and we're not going to understand exactly what He's doing here, and that's just who you are and who He is. But He is the ultimate source of power and that is the most important thing that you need to focus on.