Four things that feel the same from the inside

This matters more than anything else in the lesson, because these four go to four different places and getting it wrong costs people years.

Futoor. The feeling has drained out of a practice you are still doing, and the flatness is mostly about worship.

Depression. The flatness is everywhere. Food, people, work and the things you used to enjoy have all gone the same way. That is not a spiritual state wearing a spiritual name, and it goes to a doctor.

Scrupulosity. You are not empty, you are flooded. Repeating wudu, checking whether something invalidated the prayer, unable to be satisfied. That is a different condition with a different treatment.

Doubt about belief itself. A question about whether any of it is true. That is not dryness and it does not respond to being treated as dryness.

The third of those four has a name outside the religious vocabulary, and it is worth knowing that it has one. Scrupulosity is a recognised presentation of obsessive compulsive disorder, with the same obsessions, the same compulsions and the same distress as any other presentation of it. It is not a quantity of piety and it is not a quantity of doubt.