Good Actions & Good States

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ 

Shaykh Taj ad-Din Abu al-Fadhl Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn ‘Atha’illah as-Sakandari (q.s.) indicated that, “Good actions are the results of good states.  Good states come from grasping the reality of the stations where you a light.  Actions are movements of the body through striving while states are the movement of the heart through constancy and the heart has tranquility through stations.  An example of that is, for instance, the station of asceticism.  Its beginning is action: striving through abandoning this world and its secondary causes and then being constant in steadfastness with poverty until it becomes a state and then the heart is still and tastes its sweetness and it becomes a station.  It is like that with reliance.  It is striving by abandoning secondary causes and then being constant in steadfastness in the bitterness of the blows of degrees and then it becomes a state and then the heart is still in it and tastes it and so it becomes a station.  It is the same with gnosis.  It is striving by outward action through breaking normal patterns in the self and then constancy in gnosis and recognition with knowledge’s which then becomes a state.  When the spirit is settled and firm in witnessing, it becomes a station.”