2017-11-04
My typewriter is getting old, almost falling apart and so am I. Before things get any worse let me put some crucial thoughts down. So many hundreds have done this sort of thing before - some of the greatest, noblest beings, those who have reached the pinnacle of spirituality.
What is the purpose of our lives? Have our purposes been determined for us? Or have we been set down upon this earth, as a machine may have been set down, programmed to live through for a certain number of years depending on the vagaries of our environments and the potentialities set down for us? Or are we part of the vast evolutionary processes described by Charles Darwin? Where does God come into all this? And what about the different views held by the different religions of the world ? What about belief and unbelief? What about miracles and what do they do to enlighten us on the way ? What indeed is the meaning of all this wondrous existence of ours? I despair even before I begin to ever find answers to these questions, questions which are nevertheless of utmost importance to our lives, as to how we carry on from day to day, hour to hour and perhaps second to second. I am not like the philosophers or religionists trying to find answers to universal problems, I merely wish to understand things for myself.
First, let me try and resolve this question of whether there is rebirth or not, or whether we have simply to through one lifetime, given the one single chance in life to make it or break it. If not rebirth, why was I born a Muslim? Was it by choice, or was it or is it, I was to have this one single and profound experience which will resolve all things for me or mould me into that perfection by which all things are resolved for me?
As a Muslim I am given to know that God knows all things and we with our puny understanding can know but little and are all but ignorant
To my way of understanding, there is nothing that can possibly explain and resolve the iniquities and inequities replete in this world of ours, the sufferings that human beings have been heir to throughout the annals of human existence, the existence of animals
And creatures lower down the evolutionary scale. Yet why such an apparently endless detour to reach the eventual happiness or goal of life we envisage.
As a Muslim I am given to know that God knows all things and we with our puny understanding can know but little and are all but ignorant . As the Sufis who have as far as we can tell reached the pinnacle of spirituality will tell us it is the final absorption in God, in the Divine through first an entry into states of bliss and into an Heaven that will be the ultimate revelation.
We are given revelations through the Prophets sent down to earth by God as guidance for humanity and finally the revelations sent down to the Prophet Muhammad setting a seal as it were upon all the earlier revelations and therefore perfecting them. Is this then the solution that has been and is available to the billions of beings both human and otherwise, the solution which offers salvation to them all ?
The Sufis moreover tell us that it is Love at its loftiest heights, Love that infuses all things that surely is the grand finale to such a grandiose play which describes our sojourn on earth.
True perhaps as it would seem to many, but is it open to all and to all things and how long does it take finally - an eternity or many eternities? It is known that our Earth in cosmic time is said to be 5 billion years old and human beings have been around for the past 10,000 to 15,000 years- that is a long, long time. The Hindus believe that there have been in the course of time 6 Pralyas (Extinctions) and we are nearing the end in a 7th extinction.
A contemporary Muslim theologian, Sheikh Imran Hussain who has made Islamic eschatology his specialty says that the Akirazaman ( the end of the world) as it is known to Muslims is round the corner and predicts the appearance of the personage known as Dajjal - a one-eyed being who is said to make his appearance in order to mislead humanity. He avers this may be a metaphor for the Zionist State - and also of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ as it has been predicted in the Quran. . He says that all the predictions in the Quran and the Hadis -the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad which include his sayings point to the Malhama or end of the world. I may have no doubt about all these and no doubts about much more Islamic theologians may speak about. My problem, however, is how to reconcile all this in terms of what happens to us in our personal lives, in our relationships with each other, who hold such a diversity of beliefs.
Those who have had Near Death Experiences (NDEs) , gone out of their bodies and beyond our earthly prison to a beyond and returned again to earth reluctantly speak of an inconceivably peaceful world in those other realms. This surely does not accord with the notion of an earthly sojourn which has to end, with a resurrection followed by an eternal life with a hell or heaven in-between. Or as Buddhist and Hindus believe with renewed life again on earth in forms determined by how a beings life was conducted during an earlier lifetime - a form of trial otherwise spoken of in the traditions of the monotheistic religions.
God-realisation may be one thing but how to conceive of a God can be quite puzzling. The Greeks had the conception of gods, goddesses, various powers of nature and of an all-powerful deity controlling all. The Hindu conception encompasses deities too with their multifarious functions like the Greek pantheons. Buddhism although in its original form propounded by the Buddha was purely rationalistic later acquired the trappings of the deistic Hindu religions and though it continued to rebirth as fundamental came to accept Nibbhana - annihilation or as others would have it ultimate bliss as the end of it all..
Will it ever be possible in the course of our brief lives on earth to find consensus, ever to have one religion for the entire humanity and have beliefs and experiences each according to the findings, the revelatory experiences, visions and certitudes in miracles of those belonging to different dispensations ? There are many Christians who believe that Jesus Christ was crucified and died in order to absolve the sins of humanity while Muslims believe Christ was taken up to Heaven bodily. Then there is incontrovertible evidence of stigmata among Christian savants like Father Padre Pio. If one were to ask contemporary Muslim theologians like Sheikh Ismail Menk, Nouman Ali, Hamza Yusuf and others like them they would say we cannot have final answers and would have to stop when it comes to probing what they would call the Unseen. What then?
Do we follow whatever dispensation we take up as the most credible, as the best that should be followed according to the experiences and beliefs which we can come closest to understanding and wait for the rest to unfold in a beyond, whatever that beyond may hold for us ?
“We may not know him as God; we may know him as Nature, our Higher Self, Infinity, some ineffable goal. It was so that the Buddha approached Him. He is accessible even to the Atheist. To the materialist he disguises Himself in matter. For the Nihilist he waits ambushed in the bosom of Annihilation,” says Sri Aurobindo the Hindu sage.
“Man is a transitional being. His is not final. He is the middle term of the evolution, not its end, crown or consummating masterpiece, “he also said.
I shall end with another quote from Sri Aurobindo after which little needs said. It is as follows:
“There is nothing mind can do that can be better done in the mind’s immobility and thought-free stillness.
“When mind is still, then Truth gets a chance to be heard in the purity of the silence.
“....Truth lives in the calm wordless Light of the eternal spaces; she does not intervene in the noise and cackle of logical debate.
“...Cease inwardly from thought and word, be motionless within you, look upward into the light and outward into the vast cosmic consciousness that is around you. Be more and more with brightness and the vastness. Then will Truth dawn on you from above and flow in on you from all around you.”
