More than twenty years have passed since my first experience with the zodiac, yet I have never stopped researching and reflecting on the nature of human beings and on the factors that influence their traits and character. My first experience was concerned with the traits shared by people of the same sign and by people of signs with the same nature. But are the traits of the signs enough to judge the relationship between people? Or are these traits enough to make a decisive decision to enter into marriage with a particular person? The short answer to these questions is a firm no, because the study of the traits of the signs is not meant to determine the relationship between people, but to help us get to know others and understand their behavior more deeply than before.
If we are looking for sufficient grounds on which to make the decisive decision to marry a certain person, we must look into the factors that affect human character, negatively and positively, and these certainly do not relate to the planets or the stars, but to Satan and the power of his influence over us through the black clot that grows in our hearts according to our conduct in life! I have tried to explain the reality of the black clot and its effect on our human souls in a complete study added to this site under the Psychological Signs, the most realistic and accurate of the signs, whose ideas are taken from the Noble Quran.
Will I be happy if I marry so-and-so?
This question is repeated often in the inquiries of visitors to the Abraj network site, because they are always searching for happiness. But before we try to look for that answer, we must look into the true concept of happiness. I have quoted from a book specialized in happiness and its meaning, which will help us greatly in finding an answer about the true concept of happiness.
What is the true concept of happiness?
Is happiness merriment, pleasure, and enjoyment? There is a great confusion among many people between the concepts of happiness and enjoyment. You enjoy pleasures, but that does not necessarily mean that you are happy with them; perhaps there is no common ground between the two. Pleasure is what you feel during an act, and the same goes for amusement: you feel pleasure when you eat delicious food, you feel it when you have sex, and you feel it when you play or swim or engage in any kind of amusement. But after you finish eating you feel nothing, and after you finish having sex you may feel an unwelcome reaction. And if we review all the pleasures we have gone through in the past, and all the kinds of amusement we engaged in during our childhood or youth, they do not give us a hair’s breadth of pleasure now. Amusement is felt while you are engaged in it, whereas happiness is felt after the act has passed, and it is a deeper and more lasting feeling than fleeting pleasure.
Going to an amusement park or a football match, or watching a movie or a television program, are all diverting activities that help us relax for a while and forget our problems. They may make us roar with laughter. But they do not bring us happiness, because their positive effects vanish as soon as the amusement stops.
People’s clinging to the illusion that a life brimming with amusement and free of pain equals happiness lessens their chances of attaining true happiness. Equating amusement and delight with happiness is like equating pain with misfortune, but the truth is quite the opposite: the things that lead to happiness often involve a measure of pain. As a result, many people avoid the endeavors that contain the spring of real happiness; they tremble in fear of the pain that some things carry, such as marriage, raising children, professional success, religious commitment, doing good, and self-improvement.
Happiness may be accompanied by intense pain. A mother in labor feels agonizing pain, yet she is in the happiest moments of her life, because she is bringing a child into the world. When the delivery is over and she is reassured of her newborn’s health, she rejoices with all her heart, even though she is still in pain. Indeed, whoever does not want to suffer does not want to feel happiness.
Is happiness wealth and riches?
Is happiness the accumulation of money? Especially since all people love money and want to gather it, from the little child to the old man; we all know the value of money, and so we all seek it, guard it, and are stingy with it. We all need it to provide for our needs of food, clothing, and shelter. If you do not own dinars and dirhams, where will you eat from? How will you marry? What will you do? Is money the substance of happiness, as some think? The answer: money is one thing and happiness is another, and so an abundance of money never means an abundance of happiness. Indeed, money may cause its owner misery. When it becomes a goal and goes beyond need, it loses its value, since it enslaves its owner instead of freeing him.
Money may be a cause of happiness if its owner spends it for his own good and the good of others, for money does not benefit you until it leaves you; it honors its owner as long as he gives it away, and humiliates him if he is miserly with it. In truth, there is no shop where you can buy happiness with money. What value does money have if you lose, for its sake, your health, your youth, your energy, your love, your homeland, and your security?
Is happiness in this world lasting and absolute?
One of the wise men said: “The person who thinks he can be happy all his life is nothing but mad. For we all know that the only proof that we enjoy our full mental faculties lies in our ability to feel unhappy when we are struck by an event that disturbs the calm of our lives. True life is the happiness we feel after sorrow; it is in the clearing of hearts after a quarrel; it is in the love after the fight that breaks out between spouses; it is in the success we reach after failure; it is in the hope that fills our chests after we had despaired of our lives and of all that life holds for us. This is life, and this is its philosophy.”
There is nothing absolute in this world: no absolute comfort, no absolute health, no absolute pleasure, and happiness is no exception. It is true that a person yearns for the absolute and wishes to possess every cause of happiness that crosses his mind, but it is better for him to replace the search for absolute happiness with absolute hope. Hope for a day better than your day and a life more honorable than your life is not merely fuel for movement and activity; it is also a principal cause of happiness.
Happiness is a journey, not a station
There is no set time, no set age, no set place, not even a set reason for happiness. So do not wait for it in fixed goals; travel with it from place to place and from time to time. You can be happy at all times, in all circumstances, and in all places. Everything, however (small), if it gives you the feeling of happiness, is a (great) cause of it. The same goes for place: a small room in a country house may give you more happiness than a grand palace on the seashore. Learn from children: they are delighted by little things that we grown-ups consider (trivial), but they consider them great in proportion to the feeling of happiness they give them.
In our childhood days we never tired of striving and moving to achieve our goals, and we believed that once we reached our ends we would find complete comfort. But we were met with some disappointment after arriving, so we immediately looked for other goals, sought to achieve them, and returned once again to movement and activity. We leapt from one goal to another, and the happiness we felt was in the journey toward the goals, not in reaching them. Every goal we reached was like a lodging where we rested temporarily so that we could continue the journey from it to another.
A person finds all the enjoyment during the journey, because it represents creativity, movement, and longing. The painter’s joy in the paintings he paints ends when the painting ends, and so it is for the author, the inventor, and the scientist. A person’s happiness is not complete unless three things are available to him: something to do, something to love, and something to aspire to. If he loses any one of them, he loses happiness.
Happiness lies in what you seek, not in what you obtain. It is that pleasure you want to attain; as for the one you have already obtained and had your fill of, its story is over. Happiness comes more from the longing to achieve what the soul aspires to than from obtaining it.
True and absolute happiness we shall find only in Paradise
Happiness is for the soul to live in contentment and tranquility… There is no happiness without peace of mind, and no peace of mind without faith… and faith grants happiness from two directions. The first is that it keeps you from slipping into the swamps of immorality and crime, which are the most dangerous causes of misery and wretchedness; nothing guarantees that a person’s desires and appetites will not drag him into sins if his heart is empty of faith in his Lord. The second is that it gives you the most important condition of happiness, which is peace of mind: in a sea of problems and crises there is no anchor of salvation except faith. Without faith the causes of fear and anxiety multiply, but with faith nothing deserves fear except the standing before God Almighty. The believing heart makes light of every hardship, because it relies on God, while a heart empty of faith is like a leaf cut from its branch, tossed about by raging winds. What, then, frightens a person more than death and departing from this life? For the believer it is not a cause of fear but also a cause of peace; how beneficial death is for one whose heart faith and piety have filled with feeling. Whoever thinks that happiness lies in getting rid of faith and seeking instead after fleeting pleasures is mistaken. What is the value of a pleasure followed by hours of suffering? What is the value of a rose if reaching it plunges you into a swamp? Truly, whoever seeks pleasure without commitment to responsibility, and without regard for limits and standards, may suffer from a feeling of misery for a long time. The child who eats a great quantity of sweets because of their taste of sugar will suffer greatly, deprived of everything delicious and good, when his teeth decay.
There is no happiness without peace of mind
Will I be happy if I marry so-and-so?
Now that we have learned the true concept of happiness, and have learned that happiness is for the soul to live in contentment and tranquility, that there is no happiness without peace of mind and no peace of mind without faith… and that there is a great difference between temporary enjoyment and lasting happiness, with which we feel no worry about our future… after all this, I think the features of the answer to our question have become clearer… There are certain conditions in the person we think of being joined to if we are truly to be happy… The basic condition is that he has strong faith and a broad understanding of the meaning of his existence on this earth… and that he seeks real, lasting happiness instead of excessive amusement…
What, then, should we be looking for, if there is no lasting happiness in our lives to begin with?!
What is required is that we change our mistaken concept of happiness, because there is no absolute happiness in our lives on this earth. The crux of our problems as human beings is that we have turned the means that we believe will give us lasting happiness into goals, and lost the sublime purpose of our existence on this earth. Many of us make our goal in life owning a spacious house, a luxurious car, a beautiful wife, a huge company, or brilliant fame, and whenever he achieves one of these means he is not satisfied and is eager to achieve another, and he keeps shifting between means until the specter of old age draws near. Then he is stricken with regret for what he missed by not knowing the sublime and true purpose of his existence, which is that his soul live a life of contentment and tranquility in the changing, fluctuating life of this world. And the soul cannot feel contentment and tranquility except by meeting God and coming to know Him.
O mankind, indeed you are laboring toward your Lord with [your] labor and will meet it.
Al-Inshiqaq 6
The true happiness we must seek is to reassure our souls that in the life to come they will find the absolute happiness we look for in the life of this world: happiness without boredom, sickness, old age, or death…
Yes, this is what we must seek
If happiness is in earning money and acquiring precious possessions, then that lasts only a short time, and there is no meaning in owning something forever; rather, it is for a lifetime, that is, until death. But after death all our possessions are taken from us against our will. Yes, now we learn, work, marry, and our days pass quickly while we pant in search of happiness and comfort. What we must do is search for true and lasting happiness: where can it be found?! There is no lasting happiness if the end is sickness, old age, and death. So we must search for the happiness that has no death, old age, or sickness. This lasting happiness is found only in the Paradise of the Creator, where we shall taste the true and lasting flavor of happiness: lasting happiness without sickness, old age, fatigue, or death… true and lasting happiness. Therefore we must strive by every means to reach our required goal, which is true and lasting happiness. How do we get there? We are required to understand the true meaning of our life on the transient planet Earth. We are required to know the true meaning of marriage and of joining with another person to form a family together. If the spouses understand this true meaning, there will be happiness and tranquility, happiness not only for the life of this world but because we are walking the road together toward true happiness, even if we certainly face difficulties on our way, even if we fall ill or grow weary or are overtaken by certain old age, and even if death claims our bodies and they become dust, the origin from which they were created. Our souls will then move to the fourth stage, the one before the last, the life of the Barzakh that separates the life of this world from the life of the Hereafter. In the life of the Barzakh there is certain knowledge of the purpose of life for which we were created, but without the ability to act, whereas the life of this world was certain action without certain knowledge of the Hereafter…
Will I be happy if I marry the person who has proposed to me, given that I am of such-and-such a sign and he is of such-and-such a sign?
Before you look at the subject of the signs, you must think about a more important question: is that person able to help me reach the path to Paradise, true and lasting happiness? Do not be deceived by other reasons that may give you temporary pleasure and illusory happiness; rather, focus on the reasons that help you walk together on the path to Paradise, even if you face some difficulties during your future life… Think carefully: what can bring us to the Paradise of the Creator? What can bring us to His Paradise is His pleasure with us. His pleasure will surely lead to our entering His Paradise, while His wrath, we seek refuge in God, will lead to our entering His Hellfire, which is the peak of loss and true, everlasting regret!!!
The next question that occurs to us now is: how do we please God, Mighty and Majestic? We can please God if we live as He has asked of us, and if the spouses live as God asks of them, they will feel the peak of psychological happiness and tranquility. The period of their married life should be a training of the soul and a persuading of it that we are living in one of the stages of our life, and that it will certainly end whether we like it or not, and that death is not the end for us but a transition to a new stage and then to the final stage… We must always remember this… What you need to know is your fiancé’s concept of life: is he more attached to this world or to the Hereafter? Does he even think about the life of the Hereafter? And is his admiration for you, or yours for him, only because of outward appearance or the perishable body? Because if the only reason is the body, beauty, and money, that would be dangerous. What is required, with or without these, is admiration for the soul that lies within the body, for the ideas each of you is convinced of… Before marriage you must both try to make sure that your ideas are close and that at their end they look toward true and lasting happiness, toward the path to Paradise… And you must know that the true purpose of marriage is that you preserve the religion of God on earth through righteous offspring…
And what about the subject of the signs?
The subject of the signs is secondary, not primary. The subject of the signs can never foretell the future, as many claim! I created a site dedicated to the subject of the signs because many people believe that the signs hold luck, a future, happiness, prediction, and knowledge of the unseen, which none knows but its Creator and the Creator of the universe. The subject of the signs is only for knowing some human traits of the four human natures: earth, air, fire, and water. Each nature has certain traits, and it is not a prediction of the future. When we say that someone born under the sign of Taurus is mostly stubborn, this is a trait, not a prediction of the future, just as when we say that the taste of a red apple is sweet, this is not a prediction of the future but a statement about a quality of the red apple, which we acquired through experience; but that does not mean it is impossible for us to find a sour red apple! But if I say that this apple on the table will fall to the ground the day after tomorrow and split into four equal pieces and then roll across the room, this is a prediction of the unknown future, which none knows but the Creator!! Has the idea of the purpose of the Abraj site reached you? The purpose is to distinguish between the traits of the signs and the prediction of the signs’ future…
The traits specific to each sign are not 100 percent correct; their accuracy does not exceed 70 percent. They are not the deciding factor in any marriage; the deciding factor is a true understanding of life, which will overcome any difference in the traits of the signs… And God, Glorified and Exalted, grants the strength for the success of any marriage to those who married for His pleasure first and last and strove hard to walk the path that their Creator asked of them…
My advice to you: pray Salat al-Istikhara
Salat al-Istikhara means consulting the Lord of the Worlds, the only One who knows the future and the success or failure of any marriage. We must consult the Creator and seek guidance in any perplexing matter, especially the matter of marriage, and the person who comes forward to marry should be reminded of istikhara. You will find the answer, God willing, after the istikhara prayer: either the doors will close before you, or the doors will open for you and your affairs will be made easy… If the intention is pure and sincere for God Almighty, be sure that God Almighty will not let you down in answering your consultation. This sign or signal that reaches your hearts after the prayer will be the first from the Creator. After that, if the marriage takes place with God’s help and will, we must always remember the purpose of our existence on this earth, the certainly transient planet, and the subject of the signs will be merely an understanding of the temperaments of others. You must understand one another, and a difference of opinion does not mean the end; you must always talk things through, and you must know that marital problems are nothing but a test for the two of you, of how you will try to overcome problems with patience, deliberation, and reflection…
How to pray Salat al-Istikhara…
Here is how to pray Salat al-Istikhara, as a reminder…
Salat al-Istikhara, as it came in the hadith of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him. On the authority of Jabir, may God be pleased with him, who said: The Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him, used to teach us istikhara in all matters just as he would teach us a surah of the Quran, saying: “If any one of you is concerned about a matter, let him pray two rak‘ahs other than the obligatory prayer, then say: O Allah, I seek Your guidance by virtue of Your knowledge, and I seek ability by virtue of Your power, and I ask You of Your great bounty. You have power, I have none. And You know, I know not. You are the Knower of hidden things. O Allah, if You know that this matter (and he mentions it by name) is good for my religion, my livelihood and my affairs, immediate and future (or he said: in the present and the future), then ordain it for me, make it easy for me, and bless it for me. And if You know that this matter is bad for my religion, my livelihood and my affairs (or he said: in the present and the future), then turn it away from me, and turn me away from it, and ordain for me the good wherever it may be, and make me pleased with it.” Narrated by al-Bukhari and others.
What is meant is that the servant prays two rak‘ahs for God, whether voluntary or sunnah, and then makes this supplication.