The Stuff Of Life b6r4c

THE

STUFF OF Life

ASIF ZAIDI

THE STUFF OF LIFE

Copyright © 2016 Asif Zaidi.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-0956-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-0958-7 (hc) ISBN: 978-1-5320-0957-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016919405

iUniverse rev. date: 11/18/2016

CONTENTS

Preface

I TO LIVE IS TO LEARN

1 What Is a Life Well Lived?

2 The Economics of the Mind

3 Know Thyself

4 A Journey of Becoming

5 On Forgiveness

6 Now: It’s All We Have

7 Is the Internet Stealing Your Life?

8 Life Lessons

II THE DIGNITY OF MAN

9 The Divine Dimension of Man

10 Man’s Destiny on Earth

11 The Wonder of Two-Pronged Growth

12 In Search of an Awakened Existence

13 From Self-respect to Spirituality

14 Humanity’s Glory Lies in the Individual

15 The Morphology of Intellect

III THE LOVE OF WISDOM

16 Self-realization through Self-knowledge

17 The Purpose of Education

18 Vision Sees Beyond, Not Around

19 Meditation and the Forces of Life

20 Free Expression and the Modern Media

21 The Art of Public Speaking

22 The Joy of Reading

23 Reading to Purpose in the Internet Age

24 Moral Action: From Knowledge to Wisdom

25 A Tribute to Art and Literature

IV REASON, SCIENCE, AND RELIGION

26 Man, the Religious Animal

27 Rational Thought and Religion

28 Religion and Its Relevance

29 Rationality and Mysticism

30 God or No God: A Moral Question?

31 Man’s Experience of God

32 Perversion of Faith and Secularization

33 Science and Human Knowledge

34 Addressing a Question on Human Evolution

V SOULFUL REFLECTIONS

35 Homage to Mother Earth

36 Death, the Eternal Mystery

37 The Starry Nights of Tian Shan Mountains

38 The Real Heritage of Pakistan and India

39 Saying Goodbye to Corporate Life

40 On Liberalism

VI HUMAN RELATIONS

41 Childhood and Growth Today

42 On Duty and Parenthood

43 The Joy of Parenting Siblings

44 Loneliness and Connectivity

VII IN HOMAGE

45 The Soul of Sind

46 A Tribute to Almaty

47 Ghalib: India’s Grand Poet

48 Sartre: The Man Who Spurned the Nobel Prize

49 Faiz Ahmed Faiz: A Poet of His Time

50 Adieu Madiba!

51 Aitzaz Hasan: A Noble Young Wonder

PREFACE

T HIS BOOK REPRESENTS A COLLECTION of some of the essays I have written and a few of the addresses I have delivered during the past few years on a variety of topics. It results from a great deal of persuasion by friends and correspondents to get some of my views printed in the form of a book. This book mostly articulates a viewpoint grounded in a rational approach to life and this world. These are merely thoughts of a mind that continues to grow. I have no pretensions to represent the absolute truth for, to me, anyone who claims to have discovered the absolute truth is not worth taking seriously. However, the preoccupation with discerning the basic truths concerning human life and its habitat plays an instrumental role in providing the incentives to inspire our daily conduct. I feel fortunate to exist in times when the world we live in can be increasingly, though by no means fully, explained in of data that human senses subject to our consciousness. We live in probably the most interesting times in the history of human knowledge. There is so much we have to know that our capacity to feel is often not able to match the vast array of facts and happenings we are obliged to keep abreast of. Thanks to the Internet and social media, we are unavoidably exposed to information about a large body of events. A Facebook friend I may never meet in person can be a permanent fixture in my life, but my real neighbour next door may be a stranger. So, while the scale of our with the world has become enormous, we have little leisure to cultivate deep relationships with the world we come across. Our ancestors knew relatively far fewer people but they knew them closely and intimately and, hence, were able to live a lot more intensely. Not only do we have too much to know but we also have so much more to do and, therefore, our capacity for intense living is diminishing. Instead, we are contented to become weary spectators, even though we know a great deal more than any other generation of what is happening in our world. Our emotional energy gets spread out thinly on a large surface of world happenings. Our ability to distinguish between standard of living and standard of life is getting blurred.

Against this backdrop, this book is an anthology of thoughts on diverse subjects, attempting to see the problems of life in the light of human reasoning. It is about nature, evolution, scientists, sages, prophets, philosophers, thinkers, and poets who have, down the ages, contributed to our development, making our lives meaningful for us.

I TO LIVE IS TO LEARN

1 WHAT IS A LIFE WELL LIVED?

One can learn a lot from the modern leadership mantras.

R ECENTLY I ATTENDED A LEADERSHIP training program for executives. This intense five-day program featured lectures from top executives and leadership gurus like Marshall Goldsmith, Thomas J. Delong, Robert Steven Kaplan, and Jim Loehr. While it was useful, I was amused to see how man’s ageold love for wisdom and quest for knowledge of how best to live have been distilled into skills for success in the corporate world. These skills aim at maximizing our prospects for happiness and calibrating our morals to succeed, while remaining compliant with the law and grounded in the relevant ethos. In an echo of Russian literary colossus Fyodor Dostoevsky— perhaps the first western thinker to subject conscience to such tough and honest scrutiny—human conscience is seen as inconsistent and irrational. Socrates’s motto ‘Know thyself’ is elevated into deifying the self. However, apart from using this knowledge to climb the corporate ladder higher and faster, one can learn a lot from the modern leadership mantras. For instance, they afford tools and opportunity for an intellectual self-examination leading to greater self-awareness, thus helping us learn the imperative of emotional selftransparency and become more emotionally attuned people. This enables us, without having to grasp Freudian psychoanalytical concepts, to relate to a much wider range of emotions. Self-awareness lessens our risk of being enslaved by unacknowledged feelings. It helps us relate to the cold facts in a more rational manner, rather than letting our emotions cherry-pick the facts for us. As British philosopher Jonathan Glover writes: ‘Knowledge of the possibility of unconscious factors distorting our view of our situation places on us a special duty of scrutiny.’

The desire to succeed in the modern corporate world is surely a legitimate ion. It affords one a tremendous opportunity for doing good and achieving multidimensional personal growth. And thanks to better management systems, people who work the system to get ahead at all costs are increasingly in the minority. Though in practical life one has to often contend with psychic hard-drives with embedded programs to succeed at any price. If training programs like this one can convince a few of those people to examine the position that their hard-nosed ambition spells out, that is every bit worth the effort. Yes, some will continue to claim credit they don’t deserve. Some others will remain stuck on fawning and sucking up—which remain ubiquitous in most corporations—or will continue to fall for the super-skilled suck-up of the modern corporate genre. Yet most people can improve, if they want to, by working on their foibles when they are shown the mirror.

As I listened to the speakers, some of whom were quite erudite, I reflected on a couple of things. First, this is all about what we expect from life and how best to get it. Does life also expect something from us and, if so, what? Second, the success of a life is not about winning a race. Rather it should be judged by the fulfilment of the purpose we assign to it, which in turn determines what we deem valuable and important in life. So what, then, is a life well lived? It is up to each of us to define the standards by which to mark the distinction between our life’s successes and its failures. The quality of a life lived must depend on the totality of acts, work, commissions, and omissions ascribed to that life. At the end this alone determines the productivity and quality of life to the one who lived or those who watched or examine its course; this is the setting in which life should be viewed. Great people are usually judged in the context of a span of time that is much greater than their own lives. The judgement of their contemporaries can never decide their worth as a force in human history. In fact, all of us have the power to exert influence beyond our lifespan by sowing the seeds of our legacy as teachers, parents, doctors, and so on. An individual’s life is a cross-section of a larger whole. What we are at a given

moment is not fully known to us, much less to those around us. With hindsight, in our own eyes, we appear in diverse garbs as if we have all along been playing a role, as Shakespeare said. Much of what we do, in retrospect, appears to be ing phases. Our worries look absolutely pointless, our pursuits seem a fading shadow, and most of our accomplishments are like transient melodies whose reverberations are quickly vanishing. We should, then, judge ourselves in a transcendental context, examining our successes and failures in the perspective of some cosmic purpose. As I thus ponder over the course of my own life, I try and figure out what credentials my life must present before I could call it well lived. To start with, the human-in-itself is a creature of instinct. It is moved by the forces of life, like other animals. Its body is its instrument of action. Its biological needs are aligned with nature’s purpose of preserving individual life as well as the existence of the species to which it belongs. The instincts of human life, though, are regulated by the ability to reason. So even its lowest manifestation is at a level higher than those of animals. Hence, being decent human beings and sincerely fulfilling our commitments as parents, friends, citizens, and so on, forms the core of our existence—the base we strive to build from. As we rise above the base, wealth, power, distinctions, and fame may be important, but they do not provide a dependable gauge to measure the real value or quality of life. These factors are, of course, of varying importance to different people and can thus be helpful in assessing life’s quality, but they are not at all decisive. I have come across a number of people who scored high on these criteria but appeared devoid of any real inner worth or significance. This may be because there is some kind of indescribable sense or significance of our life without which our external achievements do not suffice. Unless our life is connected with that world of universal significance, we cannot live our life to its full purpose, use, service, or worth. This connection helps us to reflect upon our work and our pursuits and match them against the life we want to live. Thereby we ensure the best use of the highest expression of life’s hidden power in our capacity for conscious thought and action. The more aware we become of our role in the scheme of things in relation to the kind of world in which our lot is cast, the more the power of our life finds its fulcrum, and more we are able to put our life to better and more

effective use and service.

When I survey my own life’s course, I can say that I have lived reasonably happily. Yet as years roll on, probably engendering a greater self-awareness, I do feel that somewhere deep down in my heart exists a void that remains to be filled. So I ask myself what it is that—in addition to endeavouring to be a good son, father, etc., and a decent human being—should happen for me to feel convinced that I have not lived in vain. At times I wish that someone with greater insight into my being could appear and reveal the answer to me. Even though in the economic field we now have ever-increasing access to such help through coaching, mentoring, and training. But unfortunately, such a recipe is not usually available to us in matters of the heart and soul. ‘In the sweat of thy brow thou must earn daily bread’ is mostly the ruling in matters spiritual. Despite sages’ teachings over the centuries for securing our moral and spiritual reinforcement, there is no easy way to it. Often our critical faculties make it difficult to assume the attitude prescribed by a simple and unsophisticated, and usually black-and-white life of faith. While we still crave religion for emotional satisfaction, its ability to explain our world has significantly eroded in the face of scientific and intellectual advancement. The progression of knowledge and liberation of thought have combined to disrupt the functional unity of the spiritual apparatus of life. It has become increasingly difficult for us to accept uncritically the assumptions that are inherent in a religion. One such piece of dogma is the prophecy of a Messiah to appear. According to many philosophies of faith, a Messiah will arrive to eternally annihilate the forces of darkness. Thereafter mankind will witness a reign of unity (within its fold, claims every faith), peace, love, and true well-being. I have neither the ability nor the intention to comment on the metaphysical (or other) legitimacy of such a belief. But I cannot suppress the temptation to mention that, often, such belief breeds inaction and complacency and fosters an attitude of quietism. It makes it easy for us to sit and wait for someone to arrive who will transform the world and solve all our problems. This view diminishes man’s obligation to strive and sacrifice to realize higher ends for this world.

I believe that our moral and spiritual regeneration in this age can only occur through a conscious effort and initiative to define and fulfil our mission on earth. What counts the most in this respect is a craving to grow by outgrowing our limitations, which enables us to expand our consciousness to a level where it begins to mirror the universal goodness. We may not all become a Tolstoy, Einstein, Mandela, or Gates—an individual who virtually becomes a part of the Cosmic Spirit. However, we can definitely make progress in improving the landscape of our inner being while striving to consciously play our role in making this world better than we inherited it. Progress in this respect rests on individual effort alone, and any external aid is of little consequence because in most situations in life we know the way but have to be morally prepared and inwardly advanced to harness the will and energy to follow its path. The course of time is absolutely irreversible and our portion of it cruelly limited. This fact casts upon us a duty to exploit the present to its fullest and to be constantly mindful and vigilant in abiding by our chosen course to define a life well lived.

It may be said that in discussing my conception of a life well lived, I seem possessed by the objective of personal perfection in consonance with the universal scheme of things and have not noticed the importance of realizing the collective objectives of an enterprise or a society. That may be a valid criticism but I believe that only individuals who are well integrated in their inner growth and outer adjustment can truly make society and organizations better. Individual growth is primary to all human growth. Individual growth fosters peace and modifies the obsession with money and power, as it alone can redeem individuals from the grip of our baser impulses. The forces that change society and business are released by the liberated individual acting in isolation. For example, the world of business is transformed by individuals like Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gates, and Zuckerberg, and not by slick corporate rats. The contributions of such individuals are akin to beholding the light, as Plato suggests in his parable of the Cave in The Republic.

Now, did I leave you more confused at the end of this piece than when you

began? That is because you did not start it thinking that you already knew the answer to a life well lived—and I have no answer to offer. The answer, for yourself, is your own to find. And you will only find it deep within yourself.

2 THE ECONOMICS OF THE MIND

If we control the mind by the mind, the mind stays.

M OST OF THE KNOWLEDGE OUR mind possesses is conceptual. For example, if I say I have a red car, even if you are not seeing a red car, your mind manages to come up with a picture of a red car. However, a person who is born blind cannot discern ‘red’ and will not be able to comprehend my statement evocatively. Much as I may describe it, I can never give the person a precise idea of what ‘red’ is. Further, if I write the word red in black ink, it does not alter the conception of ‘red’. Thus, things are independent of our conception or our nominalistic expression of them. Most of our scientific knowledge is also conceptual, rooted in concepts and their relationships. This type of knowledge proceeds by abstraction, often far removed from observable reality. Abstractions are generally defined by irreducible minimum attributes. For example, ‘vegetable’ is an abstraction; it is a general word for all kinds of vegetables. Similarly, ‘man’ is an abstraction, summing up all the types of people that we know of. Concept is the only currency in which we trade our thoughts. As conceptual knowledge is abstract in its very nature, it cannot tell us much about the truth of things that our senses discover. Thus, it does not give much information about reality. Scientific laws of nature are mathematical equations describing the relationships between facets of reality. Scientific knowledge communicates abstract concepts necessary for the purpose of action to control matter and its motion. For example, a person opening a door with a control button need have no idea of the shape and substance of the door, but that would not matter, as the only objective was to open the door. Similarly, scientific laws are based on the consistency of

nature’s behaviour and thus help us harness the powers of nature in the service of man. This is how scientific knowledge has transformed the world. However, this type of knowledge does not help in understanding the nature of reality and cannot really help us understand the nature of life. For example, it cannot tell us what is beautiful. The method does not work to answer certain moral or philosophical questions. In this case, knowledge has to be viewed from a different angle. Since matter and motion are only a part of reality, the knowledge that has been developed to secure the control of matter and its motion cannot adequately address the whole reality. Some philosophers have suggested that intuition is the faculty to address complex metaphysical questions. When intuition sparks, our understanding rises above the conventional experiential limitations and we really begin to understand the nature of the universe and also who we are.

Through the ages, our mind has evolved to primarily handle the practical conduct of life. Thus it is prone to distort reality in order for us to control our environment. In order to be able to see things as they are, we have to begin by preventing our mind from distorting reality. The question, then, is: How do we control the mind? If we control the mind by the mind, the mind stays. The objective is to step out of the world of mind, somewhat like when Galileo said, ‘If you can show me a spot where I can take my stand away from the earth, I can move the earth.’ It is not easy. Try to empty your mind for only one minute and you will see that it is not possible. The thoughts keep coming; as you try to control thought by thought, you are still thinking. This quandary is aptly described by Buddha, when he says, ‘Mind is the slayer of the real.’ Mind twists reality by forcing its own notions upon reality. Like fishers who are more concerned about the fish they catch than understanding what fish is, our mind catches reality solely in order to be able to act upon it. As humans we are conditioned to think dualistically in of subject-predicate equations. The lens of our mind determines the colour of the reality we see through it. So on the one hand, the mind has raised man to the apex of knowledge and discovery. On the other hand, the same mind distorts reality for us.

It is impossible to silence the mind’s activity completely, even in our sleep. It is only when we get some deep and dream-free sleep that we feel fresh and rested when we wake up. Mind is fuelled by energy, and involuntary thinking tires us out. This reminds me of a well-known fable of a dialogue between a snake and a scorpion. The snake asks the scorpion, ‘Despite the fact that your poison is far deadlier than mine, how come my bite kills and your sting does not?’ The scorpion replies, ‘The reason is simple. Since I am blind, every object I come across I regard as my enemy and sting it, thus wasting my poison. Whereas you have eyes and you don’t waste your energy. Hence, your poison is concentrated and when you come across an enemy you have the bite to kill it.’

The same economics applies to our energy and consciousness. The ceaseless friction of our thinking, feeling, and acting mechanism continues to gnaw at our energy. The more we minimize this friction, the more energy we save. If we could stop our involuntary thinking and feeling even for a while, we could save a great deal of energy. It is like a gardener weeding out whatever is not needed. In order to preserve and better use our energy, we have to constantly pluck out the weeds of daydreaming, involuntary thinking, reflexive emotions, and mindless action. These mechanical freeloaders leave us too exhausted to function at a higher plane. I have learnt that the malfunction in man’s inner life is caused mainly by ego. I have seen, in my life, that there is too much conceit in us that makes us think too much of ourselves and of our own importance. I too have been there. We conduct ourselves as if we could shake the mountains to agitate the very planet on which we crawl like insects. Pride is a sickly spectacle indeed, whereas the truth of man’s situation is bad enough, in Shakespeare’s words, to make even the angels weep. Therefore, I say, it is only the humble people who represent real humanity. The self-important egos are already lost. What, then, can we do about it? I think man’s awareness begins by inquiring: ‘What forces are acting upon me? Where am I headed? Did I come into being for that self-serving use of the five senses? If so, then life seems a travesty of evolution. If not, then what does life offer to me and what can I offer to life?’ This is how we overcome our complacency. For

the sleeper must wake up before making an escape. Without that awakening, we are perennially involved in acting upon the commands of our apparent wakefulness and cannot heed advice from our deep self. That is no surprise, as we are too busy hearing what we should not be hearing. We have to subject ourselves to the discipline needed to clear up the clutter and the mess that keeps slithering into our inner being. When we do that, then we allow intuition to prevail in our life. Instead of being possessed by the demons of our thoughts and emotions, we possess them. The tragedy is that instead of cleansing our existence of this rubbish, we keep on stacking it with more and more thinking/feeling junk. This mechanical friction is parasitic and feeds on our energy. It is only our ego (pride, vanity, arrogance) that makes us complacent in this matter. In order to be fully productive and focused, our mind needs to be calm and empty, just as only a still lake can reflect the image of the faraway moon. In this awareness lies the economics of our mind, which not only ensures an optimal exercise of our energy and will but also allows us to make nourishing choices in each moment of every day of a lifetime.

3 KNOW THYSELF

It is our obligation to keep the spirit of inquiry alive.

T HE WISE ONES FROM SOCRATES till today have exhorted, ‘Know thyself.’ This command is a reminder to us of the measure of our reach. It is only when we see the possibilities within ourselves that we can see them outside and around us. Those who are stuck in the mere immediacies of life are lost in the haze of petty purposes. Those who dwell deep inside themselves are the truly liberated ones. Even when they engage in earthly pursuits they are humble, and in the words of William Wordsworth remain ‘true to the kindred points of heaven and home’. Thus, ‘Know thyself’ is the earliest command uttered by those sages who were preoccupied with helping us understand the mystery of life. The question then arises: How can I know myself? Where is this ‘self’ of mine and what is it made of? When I look introspectively deep inside me to find out what my ‘self’ can be, all I come upon is an inner mechanism of thinking, feeling, and sensing. These are the only states of my being that I am conscious of. But I find it hard to focus my attention for long even on these states. My concentration is continually diluted and my attention in a given moment is robbed of its original objective. But neither any of these states nor the images that take my attention away from them can be considered as my ‘self’. They have hardly any unity or uniformity to be termed as the nucleus of a bigger whole that my being is. The ‘I’ to which these elements are attributable as a thing of cognition is barely discernible from any of the mental processes of which it is supposed to be the owner. As Buddha taught, this feeling of ‘I’ may just be an illusion. Thinking about our inner states dilutes our experience of these states, and we

realize that each of them is a barrier that is difficult to surmount. Mere introspection does not help much. It only rotates our attention between the knower and the thing that is being sensed or contemplated by the knower. This renders ‘Know thyself’ a very tough challenge. The command seems to assume that there is a self to be known. But deep introspection helps us realize that there is no such off-the-rack self to be discerned. The self has to be built. All human experience revolves around happenings and entities that are independent of us and how our will interacts with these to achieve the results it desires. The self in us is an abridged countenance of what we live through. When I am fascinated by the beauty of the stars, enchanted by music, smelling a fragrance, or touching the hand of a loving friend, I experience these things directly and my ‘self’ absorbs these elements, causing what I experience. This incorporates the objective world I experience into the wealth of my ‘self’. The more varied and larger the scope of our experience, the more immense our ‘self’ becomes. What then follows is gaining knowledge of the process that rendered these materials or happenings an organic part of our being. This is rather similar to how a bee sucks honey out of the plants and flowers. Similarly, self needs to be sucked out of the world of happenings and objects by life. In the eternal flow of time, the ‘self’ signifies the part of the stream illuminated by the light of our life. As Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib explains, I am the whole universe because I am the acme of its evolution. Therefore, I embody the essence of its mystery, its glory, and its majesty. But in order to be all that, I have to realize my destiny, without which my being is reduced to some petty objectives and carnal cravings. Hence, Ali explains that it is only by enlarging the scope of our interface with the world that we can nourish our ‘self’ to grow. By a persistent effort, I can make it grow till the ego in me, like everything else around it, dissolves into it. Instead of being conditioned by the forces of nature, a man can reflect eternal thought and action in giving a new direction to these forces. Thus we can rise above our circumstances by transcending the external determination of our personality by the forces of nature and society. Ali indicates that the infinity of time and space is given to us for our free use, and we are free to make of ourselves what we can. This means that nothing for us is excluded from the realm of the possible. However, at the ordinary human level, we are to varying extents the products of the world we inhabit. We are influenced by our heredity as well as the ideas and values of the social milieu where our lives are shaped. But then, the most

decisive advantage bestowed upon man among all creation is the power to think and reason. Whatever our thought’s limitations in discovering the philosophical truth, its utility in acquiring mastery over the forces of nature is beyond doubt. Only the forces of rational criticism can dismantle the biases, preconceptions, and primitive tenets that thwart the progress of humanity. Our knowledge does have certain limitations as an instrument for discovering the metaphysical truth. That’s why we probably cannot fully solve the riddle of the universe. How is man’s existence related to universal force of life? How is man integrated between the world of nature and the world of spirit? What is man’s destiny in the entire scheme of things? These and many other such questions cannot be answered from the level of current human knowledge. Any philosophy that is dogmatic about the finality of answers to these questions cannot be rationally defended. Thus Goethe’s assertion still rings true after more than two hundred years: ‘Man is born not to solve the problem of the Universe, but only to find where the problem begins and then to restrain himself within the limits of comprehensible.’ We ought, that is, to be mindful of the limitations within which the rational faculties can productively function. But as the knowledge that is impossible continues to shrink, we realize that our priority in this great cosmos is the life and destiny of our species and our planet. Which means that our primary duty is with the human race, including ceaseless efforts for improvement in the process of life on earth. Human knowledge is provisional and continues to recreate itself. In that constant recreation lies the genesis of progress. Hence, it is our obligation to keep the spirit of inquiry alive to do our best to discover, to reason, and to understand. As history has proved, no answer can be taken as the final verdict on the nature of reality. Instead, to learn is to live. This is how, from age to age, earthly life continues to evolve into a less imperfect expression of the divine idea. To me, ‘Know thyself’ is the aspiration of the human soul towards progress in ascending from the finite to the infinite, from the known to the unknown, and from actual to ideal. The desire to know is ingrained in us. To learn to know is what energizes our efforts to discover the truth. Only in discovery and change is man’s being made known.

4 A JOURNEY OF BECOMING

Every cognition is creation.

A T VARIOUS STAGES OF OUR personal evolution, as we embody different impulses, life in us assumes different forms—making us different in some sense. And each phase leaves a mark on the ones that succeed it. For instance, there is a wide gulf between childhood and adolescence. The ideas that we held dear in childhood, we are not even prepared to own as we grow older. Change, after all, is the essence of our existence and consciousness, and we cannot tamper with the ideas once held by our previous ‘selves’. Every expression that is accurate and sincere is true in relation to the self that it reflects. Only the expression emanating from the depth of our being can bring out the vital attributes of our self. As the English theologian Thomas Traherne explained, enjoyment of the external world is not possible until we feel it as an integral part of our being. We perceive the externality of objects because the self in us has not yet become one with nature. Montaigne says for each of his essays, ‘It is myself that I portray.’ This makes all higher art an autobiography of the spirit. No wonder that profound artistic impulse creates an expression that can be appreciated universally, whereas shallow art remains the domain of mere specialists. Great art can be enjoyed by each one of us, because its delivery transcends the subjective limitations of the artist’s personality.

The first step in achieving objectivity is complete absorption in the object of our attention. As Ali ibn Abi Talib explained, the more we descend deep into ourselves, the more we are in consonance with nature. The process of

interiorization leads us to the comprehension of nature’s mysteries. A stage then comes when we, like Albert Einstein, appear as external to ourselves—reaching a state where we are both conscious and aware of being conscious. Thus the contemplation of external objects helps in internal growth. The Quran (like other religious scriptures) also says that you will find God in yourself and in the signs of nature. As Alfred, Lord Tennyson claims in his poem ‘Flower in the Crannied Wall’, the comprehension of a small flower can lead us to understand God and man. The universal everywhere is reflected in the particular.

Flower in the crannied wall I pluck you out of the crannies I hold you here root and all, in my hand Little flower—but if I could understand you What you are, root and all, and all in all I should know what God and man is.

All creative activity brings about a union of the object and subject, a marriage between man and nature. Every cognition is creation. In our soul does nature fulfil itself. Creative art shows that nature has been provided with a mirror in our heart in which it appears even more beautiful. We recreate the data provided by sense perception in our own image and transform it through our imagination. A great poet, like Ghalib, transforms the familiar world, heightening the beauty that helps us to perceive more of the significance of creation. Conversely, as Oscar Wilde quipped, nature is always imitating art, perpetually creating things and men in art’s image. For those who seek to travel on the path of truth, the physical is the symbol of the spiritual. It serves as a bridge between here and beyond. When people shut

themselves within the limits of their own organism, they rob themselves of the capacity to beyond their subjective limitations—to enter into and enjoy that which is not themselves. They then become mere animals, conscious only of the impulses that things stir in them. I often feel as if some Divine Power hides the truth from the eyes of the vulgar and impure. But artists exploit the mediums of expression—colour, sound, body —to bring out their deepest intuition in the realm of manifestation. Art is the expression of the capacity to enter into the existence of the other and to be absorbed in it. When artists lose themselves in the reality of that which they depict, they efface themselves but their work becomes a spontaneous expression of themselves. This spontaneity is objective in of the reality of the object that absorbs them. This helps us understand what Jesus meant when he said: ‘He that saveth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life shall keep it unto life eternal.’ When we block the avenues of outpouring of self, we withdraw from the reality of world. We reduce ourselves to mere instincts, habits, and inclinations—and surrender our freedom and creative spontaneity. Artists do not act by the compulsion of rules but by the nature of the reality which they capture. They feel themselves to be tools in the service of the creative impulse in them.

Our existence can be compared to an iceberg. Only a fraction is perceptible to our consciousness; the rest is hidden in a thick, hazy blanket of instinctive life. Hence, the highest attainment of which any one of us is capable is to awaken the sleeping being we are harbouring within. The process of awakening starts with a shift in emphasis from lower to higher being, as if to lift the iceberg to detach it from its moorings. There is no set prescription to achieving self-awakening. In the past, people looked up to spiritual guides to progress on this path. With the liberation of the intellect in the modern world, we now have to rely more on our own inner resources. The age of prophets and Messiahs is gone. The higher intellect places the responsibility on individuals to change the level of our own life and give its energy a direction and a meaning. We can deepen our consciousness today by integrating life’s diverse impulses

under the sovereignty of our self. By living consciously, we can acquire the ability to see more deeply into things than we can inhabiting a superficial layer of consciousness. While it is necessary to open our eyes to see the light, unless there is light the opening of the eyes will achieve nothing. The two factors must converge on a single focus in order to discover its truth. In short, the journey of human life is a journey of becoming. Our self keeps changing, whether or not we consciously try to influence this change. Awakening is what transforms this constant change into evolution. It requires constant focus, effort, and sacrifice. It is not just a chattering luxury for those blessed with personal security and idle time. I will end by quoting the great English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who in ‘Dejection’ states this truth eloquently:

O Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live; Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world, allowed To the poor loveless, ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth— And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element!

5 ON FORGIVENESS

Forgiveness is a choice we make regardless of the content we are grappling with.

T HAT I HAVE ALWAYS FOUND it very easy to forgive those who have wronged me is not because I am a saint, it is because it makes a lot of sense to me. In promoting forgiveness, so much schmaltzy rhetoric is used that eclipses the real thing. One of the things I like about the purportedly revealed religious literature, like the Bible, is that it does not delve into a person’s inner life. It is primarily about what you do. It is not how you feel but what you do that matters. Forgiveness is similar: it is not essentially something that you feel, but something that you do. And it is something that you can train yourself to do. Forgiveness begins with the refusal to respond in kind, the refusal to answer backbiting with backbiting and treachery with treachery, the refusal to answer violence with violence. It is important to note that you can forgive even if you don’t feel it. Forgiveness is not the mushy feeling of glowing with warmth and love for someone who has seriously harmed us. If you harm my family, there is no way I will be overflowing with love for you. But I can still forgive you. I can refuse to get even or take revenge. In modern society, crime deserves punishment in proportion to its gravity. From this perspective, forgiveness appears unjust in that it represents impunity for crime. But at a personal level or at a level below the radar of law, it is a price worth paying. It serves you better and humanity better when you don’t kick the can of resentment down the road. Even from the viewpoint of justice, it is almost impossible to get perfectly even; more often than not there is no end to it as the wheel of anger keeps spinning.

ing by revenge does not make us feel good inside. Friedrich Nietzsche was right in saying that it does the opposite. But it is a price worth paying for selfish reasons. Study after study has established that forgiving is good for the body as well as the soul. People who forgive usually have more and better relationships with others, feel more contented and more optimistic, and score higher on just about every measure of psychological well-being. The problem, very often, is that we do not know how to do it. There is no manual or handbook explaining how to navigate life’s betrayals and hurts with forgiveness. It does not come naturally to most of us; instead, it is a skill to be learnt. It’s not a long journey, as popular psychology would have you believe. It is a simple matter of where you go from the mourning that follows harm. Do you hang onto an existential resentment leading to the revenge that may be in your power, or do you let go and get yourself ready to move on? The world does not owe us fairness, children are killed and girls are raped, and entire groups are subjected to genocides. But the inability to forgive extracts a price. We exist in a fine system of interdependence, and resentment shreds the network of interconnectedness. For example, among my relatives and acquaintances, I have often witnessed sibling quarrels degenerating into intergenerational alienations. When siblings refuse to talk to one another because of some grievance, their children miss out on the joy of strong relationships, sometime even without knowing what caused the chill. All they know is, ‘we do not go to see this uncle’ or ‘we are not close to those cousins’. Lack of forgiveness in a family poisons all its relationships, including those of children. Forgiveness does not mean forgetting. It is not about pretending that it doesn’t hurt when it does. Nor is it an invitation to cover up the cracks in a relationship. It is not all right to be hurt. It is not all right to be betrayed. It is not all right to be abused. But it still makes sense to forgive. Forgiveness also has the power to heal nations. It was the dawn of a cold, windy, and rainy morning in July 1964 when a prisoner named Nelson Mandela was brought to Robben Island. Soon it was evident to the Afrikaner prison officials that their new prisoner was a natural leader who commanded great deference among the prisoners. Thus, they singled him out for punishment and humiliation. His fellow prisoners have recounted how, a few years later, guards ordered him to dig and descend into a grave-like ditch in the prison yard. Prisoners

witnessing the scene wondered whether this was the end of him. Then, as Mandela lay in the muck, the guards unzipped their tros and urinated on him. More than two decades later, Mandela’s aides asked him to provide a list of the people he wanted to invite to his inauguration dinner as the president of South Africa. One name that Mandela insisted on was that of the jailer who had ordered the above incident. Mandela lived forgiveness. He went to see Betsie Verwoerd, widow of apartheid designer Hendrik Verwoerd, sitting down to tea with her in the whites-only community the hardliners had carved out for themselves. He donned a green jersey and cheered vociferously to South Africa’s rugby team in this whitest of sports as they played in the first World Cup after sanctions were lifted. He kept F.W. de Klerk’s peevish personal assistant on as his own, always speaking to her in Afrikaans, which he had learnt from his jailers. And don’t forget that Mandela had been a recalcitrant and militant young man, with an eminently justified rage. He mastered the art of forgiveness along the path of his life.

While the gravity of offences we suffer may vary, the method to forgiveness is the same. The key to forgiveness is to not get caught up in content, which makes each person’s individual story of grievance. For forgiveness, the concept is far simpler than its execution and, thus, it invokes a lot of superficiality. Forgiveness is less of a moral imperative than a practical matter. It involves your self-esteem, the worth of the person who has hurt you, and your relationship with that person and the larger world. Researchers are now using functional magnetic resonance imaging to map the process. A team at the University of Pisa in Italy asked people to imagine forgiving someone and then observed changes in cerebral blood flow, which signalled the parts of the brain that became more active. They found that several regions ‘lit up’, especially areas that regulate emotional responses, moral judgements, perceptions of physical pain, and decision making. By creating this kind of neural map, researchers hope to learn more about how forgiveness works on both a physical and a psychological level. Kathleen Lawler-Row, a psychology professor at East Carolina University, is exploring the relationship between forgiveness and health—physical, emotional, and spiritual.

She thinks the consequences of forgiveness go beyond lowering blood pressure and improving sleep. ‘Once you forgive someone for something very painful, you never experience life the same way again’, she says in her publication ‘Forgiveness, Physiological Reactivity and Health: The Role of Anger’. ‘You’re more flexible, less black-and-white in your expectations of how life or other people will be. If there’s one thing that characterizes people who have experienced forgiveness, it’s that kind of larger perspective: I can’t predict what life will hand me, but I’m going to respond to it in this way.’

Forgiveness is a choice we make regardless of the content we are grappling with. Forgiveness means neither amnesia nor rationalizing the abuse. It is not about condoning the abuse; it is about changing the story of your future. Forgiveness is not an offshoot of love, to be gifted freely to those who have hurt you. Instead it is an equation, benefiting more the person who forgives. Forgiveness is a skill you decide to acquire to deal with many life problems and then work at developing. You can start with decisional forgiveness, such as telling yourself, ‘I am not going to seek revenge’ or ‘I am not going to allow that person to make me feel bitter’. Once you do it, the emotional forgiveness gradually follows as the emotions of hatred, resentment, and hostility start to wither. As Mandela manifested, it all begins with a conscious decision to rise above bitterness and rancour.

And throughout all eternity I forgive you, you forgive me.

—William Blake

6 NOW: IT’S ALL WE HAVE

Living in the moment enables us to open ourselves out completely to the world.

With an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.

—William Wordsworth

T HE OLDER WE GET, THE quicker life seems to be. Life goes more slowly for kids. We all in finest details the summers between school years when we were young. I can recall the details of every journey. Every moment, every day felt like forever. Why is that? Because as grownups we spend too much time thinking about things that happened in the past and fretting over what might happen in the future. In the process we forget to live life, which lies in possession—the moment on hand. As kids we were absorbed in the moment and not in what we did before or what we would do after. Not only do we cease to live fully when we are in the future or in the past, but if we do some serious reckoning, we will also realize that the majority of our thoughts about the past and future are negative and need to be weeded out in any case. Some time ago I read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. Though I generally avoid popular psychology books, this one

was strongly recommended by a friend whose judgement I respect. Initially I thought it would be full of self-indulgent how-to tips, but it turned out to be different. It does have some merit in presenting a few timeless truths in a fashionable manner and context. The book invites the reader to deconstruct the unconscious thinking habits that hinder our ability to see beyond the precincts of our minds. I am not writing this to talk about a bestselling book. Anybody who is interested can read it themselves. But the fundamental theme of the book is being able to live in the moment. This theme has been addressed by many great thinkers over the ages as a key to being contented and authentic and realizing one’s potential to its fullest. The book is a well-wrought and authentic endeavour to communicate the power, depth, and importance of freedom from mind and ego through shifting our attention from ‘mind to being and from time to presence’.

Tolle does not seek to whitewash the darker sides of human nature or make us believe that human ego is simply an illusion that we need not concern ourselves with. Instead he continually reminds us that ego is the most dangerous enemy that man has ever had to contend with and, as I often say, that ‘collective egoic mind’ is the ‘most dangerously insane and destructive entity ever to inhabit this planet’. Ego, in all of its manifestations, cannot survive without the dimension of time. When we remove time from its existence, ego fades away. This reminds me of the Sufi orders that follow the teachings of different spiritual masters. The bond that unites these Sufi orders resides in this very concept of ego annihilation. For them, ‘primary reality is within and secondary reality without’. As the thirteenthcentury Sufi mystic poet Rumi explains: ‘When one es beyond this world and sees that Sovereign (God) without these “veils”, then one will realize that all those things were “veils” and “coverings” and that what they were seeking was in reality that One.’ However, this Sufi approach also has to contend with some cogent criticism, especially from the traditionalists (who cite, for example, the eleventh-century Muslim theologian and philosopher Ghazali). They feel that it does not present a complete and integral path to awakening, which is only possible through prayer and submission to the Will of God that then lead to transformation in the

dynamic and active aspects of our ordinary life without any need for us to turn into ascetic recluses. Awakening in everyday life is also an important subject of the Gita, Bible, Quran and other scriptures.

Within the mind we experience incessant streams of mental, emotional, and sensory experience. Ordinarily our attention wanders a lot; we are lost in our thoughts and are only superficially aware of what is taking place around us. When we are firmly anchored in the moment, we are fully conscious of our experience and grow more aware of what we are seeing, hearing, feeling, and doing. We are more in touch both with ourselves and with the world. When we shift our focus from time to presence, it frees us from reminiscence of the past and fantasies of the future. It brings the reality of the present moment clearly into focus. This is an elemental aspect of all the world’s great contemplative traditions, as awareness is the key to mindful living. The ability to be fully present helps us discover exquisitely wonderful things about the world around us. As the American writer Henry Miller remarked: ‘The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, and indescribably magnificent world in itself.’ It demagnetizes our fixations and enables us to look deeply into reality and see ourselves and our world as they are. The ability to see and understand how and why things are as they are generates insights that develop into wisdom. Being fully present is akin to applying meditation to all our activities and routines. Just as meditation focuses our attention on one object, the ability to be fully present involves a more vibrant, wide-ranging field of observation. This helps us to bring a sense of wonder and awe into every moment, allowing each moment to be one of discovery and revelation. This is what happens when we learn to focus, concentrate, and deal exclusively with the present moment:

• It improves our focus and precision and boosts the lucidity of our thinking and purpose.

• It improves efficiency and cultivates intuition and wisdom. • It enhances the quality of our relationships and communication. • It helps us manage stress better, adds a sense of flow to our life, and inculcates peace of mind. • It rouses authenticity and strengthens self-confidence.

Living in the moment enables us to open ourselves out completely to the world with utter simplicity and a sense of wonder. It sharpens our perceptions to see things as they are. By knowing what we are perceiving, thinking, feeling, wanting, and intending in any given moment, we are more likely to recognize options, make wise decisions, and correctly, effectively, and truthfully communicate with others. With practice we can refine our sensitivity to be able to sense, feel, and alter the patterns of subtle sensation and energy through the power of our awareness. Once we learn to be fully aware of the moment we live in, we can carry this ability into the domain of action. We can be mindful of breathing or walking or thinking or listening, or whatever action we undertake, by keeping our mind wholeheartedly on what we are doing. Knowing we are reading as we read these words, for example. When we eat, we can mindfully enjoy the flow of experience: washing our hands, sitting down, spreading the napkin in our lap, enjoying the appetizing smell, serving ourselves, lifting the food to our mouth, chewing and savouring each morsel with mindfulness. Rather than being mechanical slaves driven by patterns of habitual thoughts and actions, we can be in conscious control of our life, more in charge of the flow of change, and a mindful co-author of our experience and living. As Tolle reminds us, it is not activity that counts but the quality of attention we bring to the activity. Any activity can be used to develop mindfulness, concentration, clarity, and insight. To practise, begin with an activity you enjoy and commit yourself to approaching it with full attention. Doing what you love to do with mindful awareness is an ideal place to start the practice of living in the moment. Start mindfully, stay relaxed, and wholeheartedly focus on what

you are doing. Whenever your attention wanders, gently bring it back to being fully aware of what you are doing. If stress becomes palpable, relax and smile playfully to yourself. Be very gentle with yourself throughout the process. By doing this, we can use all our activities and routines as means to develop our awareness and deepen our concentration. If we practise living in the moment in simple, relaxed, and quiet times, it will be easier to do so when things are more chaotic and hectic. Breathing is an effective tool for inculcating an ability to live in the moment. All we need to do is to be aware of our breathing. As you inhale, know that you are breathing in, and as you exhale, know that you are breathing out. Being aware of your breathing, mindfully experience the moment-to-moment flow of sensations as the breath flows in and out of your nostrils, or as your abdomen naturally rises and falls. Do not try to control, force, or change your breath in any manner; instead, make sure that this process of riding the waves of your breath is as effortless and natural as possible. This is not a yoga or meditation exercise involving breathing deeper, slower, or trying to manipulate the breath in some other fashion. It is a simple, effortless focusing of awareness into what is already going on naturally by itself. Simply relax into your breath, feeling it just as it is, and allow the power of awareness to take over. This accomplishes one of the great changes you can make by bringing your mind and body into sync with each other. In this your breathing can become a balancing rhythm of focusing and flowing attention, creating an awareness that can help you steady yourself through every activity of your life.

Thoughts are the remnants of the living reality of life’s experience. They filter the direct view of the way things really are, thus freezing the flow of direct experience and preventing us from encountering reality in its unspoiled purity. While most of us mistake our beliefs, assumptions, fantasies, and thoughts for reality, thoughts are thoughts and reality is reality. ‘Now’ is reality. Thoughts provide the biggest distraction from living in the now. What we need to realize is that these thoughts are merely thoughts. They only have the power over us that we give to them by identifying with their content. Once we realize that, we know that we are far more and greater than the chatter we hear in our head. Our presence of mind creates an awareness that all thoughts that are

unrelated with the present moment can dissolve. These thoughts are then reduced to mere clouds that arise and in the sky of our mind, as a process that arises and unfolds without the need of a ‘thinker’. We are not compelled to dive in or get carried away or caught up with the contents of our thoughts. As we learn to dis-identify from our thoughts, we can just be aware of the endless flow of the inner voices in our head without getting involved in them. This enables us to live quietly by the stream of our mind.

In the development of wisdom, one quality of mind above all others is the key to practice. This quality is mindfulness, attention or self-recollection. The most direct way to understand our life situation, who we are and how our mind and body operate, is to observe with a mind that simply notices all event equally. This attitude of non-judgmental, direct observation allows all events to occur in a natural way. By keeping the attention in the present moment, we can see more and more clearly the true characteristics of our mind and body process.

—Jack Kornfield

7 IS THE INTERNET STEALING YOUR LIFE?

When my smart phone loses signal or the Internet connection malfunctions, I start to get a heart attack.

I N THE MIDST OF OUR hectic lives these days, all of us need to seek and cultivate calm. Several years ago I realized what a nuisance television has become in our lives and how keeping TV on in the background triggers a negative, numbing, and often demoralizing effect. Thus, I made a decision: no more cable or satellite TV—except for watching, on purpose, the sports I love. Other than sports, I watch no TV. My news comes from Internet sites, where I can choose what I read or watch. More recently, I have realized that now the Internet is gaining unwanted control over my daily routine. I have granted it permission to entangle me at most times and in most places. In fact, I am always looking for ways to get sucked deeper into the world of the Internet. If I am not at my computer, I am fiddling with my phone or ing a new app. The first thing I do when I open my eyes is grab my phone, which sits quietly on the side table next to my bed (disregarding the various theories on why you shouldn’t keep your cell phone next to you while you sleep). It’s not my fault. It’s the dopamine, it’s addiction, with the drug of choice being www. Again, I have decided to apply the brakes by learning to say no. Regardless of whether your job, lifestyle, or education has anything to do with the Internet, if you find yourself spending more time with your gadgets than with your loved ones, you need to find a way to get that addiction under control and put your Internet knowledge to work for you. The Internet has reshaped our life, making it easier for us to fit together all its

bits instead of waiting them to happen in different places. Now you can go shopping at 4 a.m. or chat face-to-face with a friend on the other side of the globe with less effort than knocking on your neighbour’s door. Personally I think the Internet is fundamental. It’s like saying we could do without the printing press, the written word, or recorded sound. As a tool it is a profound enabler, but it is just a tool. People take it as the end when it’s really just the means. I have also seen people addicted to their phones because they love to talk, but the Internet’s spell is more ubiquitous and encoming. The Internet stands as one of the end points of a huge journey of human literacy—the ultimate mash-up of printing press, telephony, and computing that took us hundreds of years to achieve. But the Internet can also steal away many hours out of your day, and when you wake up you could discover that much of what you once loved is no longer there. So, it all comes down to whether or not you feel like you are in control of how much you are using it.

Our world has verily become a village. Everything from the minute details of celebrities’ private lives to the public beheadings by the IS and the Taliban in remote lands can be found almost instantly on the Internet. In my childhood, in the small town of Sargodha, our family was the cynosure of the neighbourhood, not because we were any different but simply because we were the first to install a device called a telephone that would receive calls and allow emergency calls to be made for most households in the neighbourhood. As a child I was weary of this constant encroachment on our privacy and missed the days when we got along just fine without one. Now when my smart phone loses signal or the Internet connection malfunctions, I start to get a heart attack. In civilized surroundings, I only like the smell of air that reeks of Wi-Fi, laden with all the information in the world at my fingertips when I need it. How did I get from there to here? I have only the vaguest idea—it all happened so fast, and it’s still happening. I feel sorry for my ancestors, for the great lives they could have had in our sophisticated modern world where an exile from the Internet is considered a tragedy to bear. One can sit at home all day, gathering news of a world in crisis, hotly debating matters from Liberia to Mongolia that my ancestors would have been contented to die without knowing anything about. They thought that knowledge was power. I would have liked them to know that

now that knowledge is there for the taking, it has been established that only power is power. And power is still attained in the manner that humans have always attained it—through muscle, force, and violence. Perhaps the Internet allows us to know much more about fellow human beings than is prudent. Perhaps the Internet seethes with a lot more prejudice, bigotry, adulation, anger, stress, pain, and violence than is wise for us to know unless we are summoned to handle it. Unless you consciously control all the bits of life for what they mean, the Internet can fill in for almost all of it. I notice that my kids have not acquired the habit of gazing out of the car’s window, which was one of my favourite activities. Often, even when travelling through beautiful scenery, they are looking at their phones, connecting with the outside world while missing out on the one that is there to enjoy. We all recognize this syndrome. I think awareness of our digital consumption is an important aspect or our mental health and overall well-being. Technology addictions can lead to increased stress levels, shorter attention spans (especially in kids), irregular sleep patterns, and poor sleep. So far, I have not come across any thorough research into the long-term effects of dopamine on the human brain in the age of Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail. The most important thing to watch out for while using Internet is time management. The Internet is the most imperceptible thief of our time in today’s world. We need to establish the skills to resist it. To start with, spending time online must be a choice rather than a default setting. Over the past few years, I have wasted too much time ambling on Facebook, doing needless research, looking through pictures on Flickr, and reading my favourite newspapers. From personal experience, I realize that the time I waste unnecessarily on the Internet is important not just for me; instead, it is important for a number of other people in my life. The time I waste online makes me unproductive and has no result to show. With Internet time management, you can make yourself more focused on the important aspects of life. The purpose defines whether or not the time we spend on the Internet is useful. The time spent must be proportionate to the purpose, from serious work-related use to minor online shopping to social networking. Try and be mindful of how much time the task you are using the Internet for needs; otherwise, there is no end to surfing and researching. Reading the coverage of the same news from fifty different sources doesn’t make you better

informed. Online gaming is a total waste of time, for instance. Schedule as many offline activities as possible to minimize the Internet’s interference in your life. The Internet is an effective way of keeping in touch with friends and family, but that is where it should stop—keeping in touch. It is not a substitute for real socializing. Avoid wasting your time looking at the details of other people’s lives unfolding. Allocate time for activities like checking e-mails, scouring online shopping sites, or following friends and family on Facebook. Once the time limit you set is reached, move on to more productive work—to real life. You can also use time management software like Toggl (www.toggl.com) to track and measure your productive and wasted time spent on the Internet. You can switch off your push notifications, and even switch off your Internet connection. Mac and Windows s can use an app like Freedom (https://macfreedom.com) to switch off their Internet connection for up to several hours at a time. Those who need the Internet for work can switch off notifications that tend to distract them. You can also use tools to make sure that you stay focused on the task at hand. Mac s can use Mission Control (http://.apple.com/kb/HT4689) to separate work and pleasure, and Windows s can employ a program like Desktops (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc817881.aspx) to achieve the same effect. When working on computer, commit yourself to focusing over several hours without doing any Facebook or e-mails. Complete the task at hand and then reward yourself with a set amount of time on social media.

8 LIFE LESSONS

The more life happens to me the more I love it.

T ALKING TO A FRIEND TODAY, back home in Canada for vacation, I realized that I am only couple of years away from my fiftieth birthday. The realization comes without warning. Suddenly I am confronted with the feeling of time inexorably ing me by. Earlier, a fiftieth birthday seemed like it could only happen to other people. I find myself guilty of having wasted time—a lot of it, indeed, because I thought there was an endless supply. Now, all of a sudden, there seems so little of it in store. This makes me reflect on the things that I have learnt during my life. Allow me to share a few of them.

LEARN AND GROW: Life is an exercise in discovery and growth. Please excuse the use of a cliché but the most important thing to learn in life is to ‘learn to learn’. It is not only about books, degrees, or training, it is much beyond that. Through awareness you can learn and grow till your last breath. Keep a childlike sense of wonder breathing down your neck. Nothing stifles learning more than dogma, in which I see less hope than in ignorance. The Quran cites the prayers of almost all the major prophets of God. The prayers of the Prophet of Islam appeal to me in that they entreat God to increase the Prophet’s knowledge and to allow the Prophet to observe things in their verity. This is an endless journey with no such destinations as absolute truth or complete knowledge. We must progress with every ing day of our life. As I observe the new generation, I am happy to note that they are much less burdened with the imperative of bargaining their idealism for financial security.

Modern society is better equipped to help them along in the process of growth and self-realization through pursuing their foremost individual interests.

PRESERVE YOUR HAPPINESS: My mother, despite her very difficult life, was always a happy woman. As I observed her over the years, I realized that happiness was not something that existed outside of us, such that we could look to the world to bring us joy. It is also not a role that we play with a smiling face and sparkling teeth. I felt that she instinctively knew the art of being contented with herself and living in the moment. Happiness cannot exist without contentment. I think man is created to be happy, and more often than not we create our own unhappiness. Hence, I have learnt that being happy is about the absence of unhappiness. Freedom from unhappiness is within our reach. Unhappiness leaks into our existence through emotions like greed, fear, envy, and anger, which all create unhappiness. Thus we must guard against these emotions to preserve our happiness.

RISE ABOVE THOUGHT: Let’s not get trapped into the activity of our mind, because our sense of self does not depend on it. Notwithstanding what the popular psychology books may say, life is a journey in self-awareness but never in self-absorption. Often a negative mind preys on us through the thoughts it generates. We must strive to not to allow these thoughts power over ourselves and to learn to merely smile at the voice in our head. Such thinking is 95% repetitive and useless, causes leakage of vital energy, and much of it is harmful because of its dysfunctional and negative nature. This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction. We must avoid the tendency to dive in or get carried away by or caught up with the contents of our thoughts. By being more mindful of what we are thinking, we will be able to direct our thinking as we wish. We should listen to our thoughts to become aware not only of the thought but also of ourselves as witnesses to the thought. The thought then loses its power over us and subsides, as we no longer energize the mind through identification with it. When it subsides, we experience a discontinuity in the mental stream—a gap of ‘blank mind’. When these gaps occur, we feel a certain stillness and peace

inside. Thought does not exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought. As we learn this, sometimes we will find ourselves smiling at the voice in our head, as we would smile at the antics of a child. We can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of our attention into the present moment. We will thus be highly alert and aware, but not thinking. Every activity becomes an end-in-itself. We must realize deeply that the present moment is all we ever have and make it the primary focus of our life. We should make it our practice to withdraw attention from past and future unless they are needed to deal with the present aspects of our situation. The present moment is inseparable from life; it is the field on which the game of life happens. Hence our relationship with the present, more than anything else under our control, determines the quality of our life. As the mind becomes more stable and balanced, simple breath awareness will do. At that point we note that prior to every voluntary action, there is a mental intention. Becoming more mindful of our intentions strengthens our mindfulness in action.

LIVE IN THE PRESENT: The present moment, whether pleasant or difficult, is all we have. In the ego mode the mind is dysfunctional and the present moment hardly exists; only past and future are considered important. The ego is always concerned with keeping the past alive and projecting itself into the future. If we delve into the past, it will become a bottomless pit. When we feel that we need more time to become free of the past, we hope that the future will free us. This is a delusion. Only the present can free us of the past. The best preparation for the future is to deal with the present happily and wisely. The idea is to be happy and at peace in the present. The pain that we create in the present is always some form of non-acceptance of what is. The present moment is all we ever have and it is futile to create inner resistance—either through judgemental thoughts or negative emotions—to something that already is. Accept, then act. What our situation is, and whether our thoughts and emotions about this situation are justified or not, makes no difference. If we resist what is, we make the present moment into an enemy and create unhappiness, which pollutes our inner being and those around us. In a relationship, also, when there is a lot of past, we need to focus on the present or we may continue to recreate

and relive the past. I have learnt that if I find my present intolerable and it makes me unhappy, I have three options: remove myself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If I want to take responsibility for my life, I must choose one of these options and then accept the consequences. No excuses and no negativity that create a false, unhappy self that loves feeling miserable, resentful, or sorry for itself. I try to allow the present moment to be, to offer no resistance to what is, and to accept the impermanent nature of all things and all conditions. I have seen and marvelled at people who have learnt to never allow what they cannot control to upset them.

LET LIFE FLOW: On a personal level, the worth of our life is determined by the quality of our existence, which is the first step. Some lives gain in their utility for their community or broader humanity. And a few—like those of Socrates, Shakespeare, Einstein, and Mother Teresa—become a part of the Cosmic Spirit. Life is about living in the tissues of every moment. There is nothing wrong with striving to improve our life situation, which is different from our life. Life is our existence, our deepest inner being. All religions tell us that it is already whole and complete. Our life situation consists of our circumstances and our experiences. We can set goals and strive to achieve things, but never use that as a substitute for a feeling of life, for existing as the most important creation of God. According to all the scriptures and based on experiential common sense, life is not designed to be easy for a vast majority of humankind. Instead, for most of us, it is likely to be difficult either in parts or predominantly. Therefore, despite our best efforts to shape it, we need to be able to deal with it as it unfolds.

OBSERVE YOUR EMOTIONS: We must make it a habit to ask ourselves: What is going on inside me at this moment? Make it a habit to monitor your mentalemotional state through self-observation. Am I at ease at this moment? This will help us guard against negative emotions imperceptibly creeping up. The driving emotions should be those of contentment, acceptance, joy, enthusiasm, and comion. Most other emotions are likely to feed negativity.

BE A SOCIAL ANIMAL: We must devote ourselves to loving others, to our community around us, and to creating something that gives us purpose and meaning. Invest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a little community of your own, of those you love and who love you. Kindness to others, including strangers, costs nothing and is occasionally repaid in unexpected ways. Too often, we are impatient and hasty in the way we deal with others, particularly those less fortunate than we are. We are reluctant to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to servants or underlings at work. We should treat all human beings with equal dignity regardless of their status. We should always keep the promises we make, and this starts from first keeping the promises we make to ourselves.

NEVER WALLOW IN SELF-PITY: Early in my youth I realized that the most futile human emotion is fear. And it is. However, in the years to follow, as I experienced, observed, and learnt, I came to understand that all forms of selfpity are also very destructive. Some people get angry when we discuss this, as if their sense of who they are is threatened. As if for many years they have unconsciously defined their identity in of their problems and their suffering and they would be nothing without it. Justifying self-pity is like defending our right to suffer. For example, once we realize that a certain kind of food makes us sick, would we carry on eating that food and keep asserting that it is okay to be sick? We should never allow unpleasant experiences to become our life story. We should not allow the mind to keep the past alive unnecessarily and then build an identity around it. Negative emotions can survive inside us for days, weeks, or years. They can become a parasite that lives inside us for years, feeds on our energy, and makes our life miserable.

We can only keep our unhappiness alive by giving it time. Remove time and compulsive thinking from unhappy feelings and they die. They cannot survive without a dwelling place inside us, which we must never allow them in any form whatsoever. We only have to truly want them to die. This also transforms our

outer life, our relationships, and so on. Experience has taught me that we don’t need to subject ourselves to a great deal of suffering before we will relinquish resistance and accept—before we will forgive. The idea is to live in complete acceptance of what is. It is never worth it to not let go of pain because doing so would threaten our identity as a hard-doneby person.

FORGIVE: I have learnt that true forgiveness is what brings a human closest to God’s attributes. True forgiveness is always unconditional; expecting something in return is like cutting a deal. When we don’t forgive, our mind keeps holding on to a grievance pattern—such as blame, self-pity, or resentment—that feeds negative emotions. Forgiveness is to relinquish our grievance and so to let go of grief. In most cases our grievance serves no purpose except to strengthen a false sense of self. We cannot truly forgive ourselves or others as long as we derive our sense of self from the past. True forgiveness renders the past powerless. MANAGE YOUR EGO: The two most important things to manage in life are time and ego. While generally intelligent people realize the importance of time early enough and learn to manage it well, it is surprising how the ego continues to fool and prey upon even the brightest. It plays tricks with us in the guise of our mind. Striving to be absolutely authentic at all times is a great antidote for ego. The old adage ‘Doing is never enough if you neglect being’ carries invaluable wisdom in it. Ego identifies itself with possessions but—as pointed out in all divine wisdom— what nourishes the ego even more than ‘having’ is ‘wanting’. There is no end to letting desires rule our life. We will not find meaning in our life if we keep running around looking for it. We are only thinking of the next car, the next house, the next job. Then we find those things are empty too, and we keep running. Never show off. If we are trying to show off for the people at the top, forget it. They will look down at us anyhow. And if we’re trying to show off for people at the bottom, they will only envy us. Only an open heart will allow us to float equally between everyone. Regardless of the popular psychology bullshit, at

some point in our life—sooner rather than later—we have to become comfortable with who we are. Hence, no matter what, be authentic. So, in a nutshell, I have learnt that on a personal level life is a simple matter of learning, growing, living authentically, being at peace with oneself, and going as far as we can with all we have. Success through truth is the will and purpose of God in mankind. Meanwhile I continue to learn and hope to be able to do so for many years to come. The more life happens to me the more I love it. The accumulated wonder of all that can be encountered in this life—learning, love, family, the sheer privilege of being alive, arts, science, mathematics, literature, philosophy, exploration of nature and of self, philanthropy, service to others, spirituality, transcendental longings—is simply astounding.

II THE DIGNITY OF MAN

9 THE DIVINE DIMENSION OF MAN

The longings of flesh cannot satisfy the basic urge of life.

U NLIKE THE TERRESTRIAL FLOW OF water that never rises above its source, the river of human life constantly endeavours to rise beyond its source. A young hero like Aitzaz Hasan—who gives away his life in a bid to save other children in a Taliban suicide attack at his school—is running against all his biological impulses. The biological instinct ingrained in human life is to save and preserve oneself, but there is an inexplicable heroism in deeds like that of Aitzaz Hassan, who is willing to throw away his only life in an attempt to save others. Many great men in human history have renounced their right to this life so that some higher cause might prevail. Consider the cases of Jesus and of martyrs of Karbala. Judged by worldly standards, giving up one’s life or having one’s thirsty body slashed to death by swords and spears do not seem an attractive bargain. And yet these men of truth acted with the fire of their soul and testified, by giving away their life, that eternal glory awaits those who sacrifice themselves for the consummation of a noble purpose. The life in man is capable of rising beyond its own plateau. The heroes among us always seem to swim upstream against the flow of biological impulses. Now, the fact that this happens shows that man has an instinctive awareness of right from wrong. Otherwise we cannot explain why some people, for the sake of the truth, are prepared to invite ridicule upon themselves. There are people who are willing to stake all they have—their riches, their honour, their reputation, their family, and their own lives—in order to uphold their capacity for speaking truth and doing justice. These are people who, regardless of the odds, wish to live good lives and are prepared to pay all costs to fight evil.

While tyrants are surrounded by sycophants, there are some who will always utter the truth to them. These are manifestations of man’s capacity to rise beyond life’s source, presenting evidence of the moral capacity to go beyond our current ground. While Earth’s gravitation pulls downwards, there is a pull that draws the life of man upwards. Responding to that pull, one transcends oneself to fulfil a Higher Law. That is man’s real ascension.

The imperative of a moral life is such that even immoral people try to justify their acts to themselves to suppress the guilt inside. Even confirmed criminals do not it their role, to themselves or to those whom they love. Despite being aware that one is a rascal, deep down in one’s heart one says: ‘Indeed, this only is a minor aspect of my life; otherwise I am a good fellow.’ One knows that one is lying but one still feels obliged to take a false position against oneself. This, therefore, is the mystery of man’s moral life: somehow, even the evildoer acknowledges integrity as a superior value. Why is evil obliged to constantly pay this compliment to the good? Because somewhere in the inner being of a man the flame of an enduring goodness is caged. We all know Bill Gates, Bono, and the great Pakistani humanitarian Abdul Sattar Edhi, and we all know who developed penicillin. But countless unsung heroes in our societies participate in helping human life surge past its source. For example, whoever invented seatbelts or airbags. We can go through a long list here. Do we know their names? I don’t. Yet they have saved numerous lives and prevented incalculable disabilities. Against all odds, there are those who are driven to do the good. No matter the price, the best among humanity are committed to their code of honour. A man’s inner state has its own rule. One may be wealthy and possess all material things one desires, and yet be unhappy. It seems that the longings of flesh cannot satisfy the basic urge of life. Without corresponding inner fulfilment, acquisition of riches becomes like drinking saline water: the more you drink, the more are you thirsty. Haven’t we all, in our experience, come across people who are miserable although they have everything the wealth can buy? This probably was what urged Prince Siddhartha to give up all he had in order to find the answer to the suffering he saw around him. The big question remains, What am I here for? Unfortunately, we do not easily

find the reply. And when the question is raised but the reply is not found, we struggle to know what to do with ourselves. After all, it is not what we have but what we are that is important. What we have we may lose any time, but what we are is ours forever—often in death, too. We don’t need a prophet to come and tell us that what we are lacking—creating a void that gnaws at our soul—will not be supplied by that which we are trying to grab.

This hunger to search for truth and everlasting peace within, to me, is the divine dimension of man’s being. An open spirit and humility, above all, inculcate this divine dimension. I have an analogy to describe closed-minded people—like religious fanatics— who are obsessed with one idea to the exclusion of all else. It is like a state of dream consciousness, that includes seeing things as real while we are in a dream state. It is impossible to convince people while they are dreaming that they are dreaming, isn’t it? In such a state, it is not possible even to communicate with them. They first have to wake up for us to have any chance of convincing them that they were dreaming. I think many human waking lives are not much different. Only when we really wake up do we see the unreality and illusoriness of what we thought was real. The divine dimension, when enkindled, enables man to wake up in a life that is real. To be awakened, to be enlightened, to be inspired, and to be transformed is the divine dimension of human experience on this earth.

10 MAN’S DESTINY ON EARTH

We are the masters in our own house and we alone can decide how to decorate our interior.

W HEN I REVIEW THE COURSE of my life and think of the credentials that my life ought to present before it can be termed ‘successful’, I encounter not the least hesitation in rejecting conventional answers. Trappings of wealth, worldly distinctions, the ability to exercise economic control, political or istrative power, popular fame, resounding applause about one’s role in the society, or any other conceivable worldly achievements—all these are worthy of attention, but do not supply a dependable measure to assess the real value or quality of life. These criteria are useful in assessing the general worth of a life’s quality, but they are not at all decisive. It is entirely possible that, while these constituents of a successful life may co-exist in an individual’s life, their possessor may still be empty of any real inner worth or significance. There is a self-governing significance of our life, without which all our external attainments or trimmings do not count for anything. Unless our life is anchored in its real significance, nothing we do here below can be of much use or value. Fundamentally, then, this is a question of what we regard as significant. It is clear that what is seen as significant from one viewpoint may be utterly insignificant from another. For example, when a fish pounces on the bait at the end of an angler’s line, in the moment when it gets the mouthful of food it may count itself as triumphant, but the fisherman knows that, in reality, it is he who has been successful. That is why Oscar Wilde would say, ‘When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.’ No wonder, down the ages, that the utmost question for any man to answer remains, ‘If you gain the whole world but lose your soul, would you call it a bargain?’

A closer examination shows that there are certain norms whose achievement can signify a life as successful and others that suggest its failure. However, a lot depends on the historical setting in which a given life is viewed. For example, a smaller or a greater span of time as the basis of our judgement can make all the difference. Temporary triumphs are washed away with time. Wise Greeks were right in saying, ‘Call no man happy until he be dead.’ The quality of life as lived depends on the entirety of deeds and omissions associated with that life; not until the end can one be sure what the sum of a life’s yield will appear to be. Our life is ultimately a cross-section of a larger whole, and what we are at a given point in time is not fully known even to ourselves, much less to others. To our own selves, with hindsight, we come out in diverse garbs, as if we have all along been playing a part. Nor is the judgement of our contemporaries decisive of our worth as agents of history, for history has a curious knack of playing pranks with our name and worth. A Joan of Arc can be canonized long after her death, whereas a Stalin can soon be made the subject of desecration, scorn, and ridicule. This means that any useful judgement that we make about ourselves should be of transcendental significance, as our successes and failures can only be looked at from the perspective of a cosmic purpose. Looking back at our lives, we can all vouch that what we had at one time regarded as being a fabulous performance on our part has turned out to be a discreditable incident, and vice versa. Much of what we do with great intent appears to us years later as devoid of significance— like a fleeting note struck by a voice in the wasteland, like a vanishing shadow as the day wears on.

Man’s faculty for conscious thought and action is the highest expression of life’s hidden power. To be more conscious is to be more alive. To start with, we are a mere capacity and our body the instrument of our action. Two elementary biological needs that set us going are preserving our own life and the life of our species. However, these two functions of nature are also performed by the animals. The difference in man’s case is that our pursuit of these objectives is purposely oriented and regulated by our knowledge and will. In order to effectively use our body as an instrument of action, we must adequately ensure our health and well-being. But over and above satisfying our

primary animal-like needs, we are summoned to satisfy the hunger of our soul by defining and realizing our role in the kind of world in which our lot is cast. It is in this orb that the veiled powers of human life find their axis. The more aware we become of our real role in the scheme of things, the better we are able to put our life to higher and more serviceable use. For this, we must rouse ourselves from our inbred life of sleep and determinedly endeavour to live in the world of objective truth. Our age continues to witness such spectacular scientific, medical, technological, and intellectual advancement. But yet, there is no easy method to bring about our moral and spiritual regeneration. The injunction ‘in the sweat of thy brow thou must earn thy daily bread’ continues to hold fast in matters spiritual, especially as our critical faculties make it difficult for us to assume the attitude which is prescribed by an unsophisticated life of faith. The liberation of intellect in man has made it impossible for us to conduct our life’s operations on the uncritical hypotheses embedded in the life of faith. Interestingly, a common dogma lies at the heart of philosophies of belief. It is the idea of the ‘coming Messiah’. This belief has been upheld with remarkable vigour by various people inhabiting different parts of the globe. Those who subscribe to the arrival of the coming Messiah claim that when the Messiah arrives, the forces of darkness will be routed once and for all, and thereafter, mankind will live in harmony, prosperity, and bliss. Without commenting upon the metaphysical authority of such a belief, I often remark that this belief has been the parent of inaction, as it engenders complacency and quietism. How easy it is to sit and wait for a miracle worker who will transform the world and solve all our problems. Thus it lightens the obligation on man, both individually and collectively, to strive for higher aims. All we have to do is to sit smugly, generation after generation, for someone to eventually turn up. Using all of my faculties to contemplate, I am convinced that no such Messiah will ever arrive. Similarly, the problem of salvation in our life is unlikely to be satisfactorily solved by someone turning up to ensure our deliverance. To me, moral and spiritual regeneration in this age is made possible by man’s creative effort to realize our destiny. We must each learn to walk alone to walk on the path that is mystically defined as being narrower than the breadth of a hair and sharper than a razor’s edge. No one else can help us outgrow our limitations. In summary, we are the masters in our own house and we alone can decide how

to decorate our interior. My experience has also taught me that I cannot wait for someone to turn up. The problem with me is not that I don’t know the way, but that I lack the will to follow it. In that regard, external help cannot be of much consequence.

Every great journey begins with a step. Even a dim awareness of one’s goal is good enough to humbly take the first step. Nobody ever stops travelling for want of seeing the whole path to the destination. We keep seeing further as we progress. This reminds me of Pascal’s contention: ‘Tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne me possédais.’ (You would not look for me if you did not possess me already.) Almost every day life confronts me with complicated situations. Although I have no difficulty in recognizing the right course in each case, I often do not have the moral and spiritual courage to follow that path. Surely, in such cases, any external help is of little import. I must learn to choose the right course of conduct and abide by my choice. The ability to follow the voice of our inner overseer cultivates in us the courage to do the right thing as we go along. For each period of our life, a certain type of response is required. No process can be accelerated beyond its appropriate destiny. Energy of effort, good soil, excellent seeds, adequate water, and abundant sun all combine to great effect, but still have to wait for the ripening season to be able to produce. Similarly, the role of a young man, for example, cannot be fulfilled by a child. Hence, the principles of patience and prayer are taught by all faiths. Also, the time at our disposal is short, being incessantly scythed by the pitiless hand of the reaper, and its outlay is irretrievable. Any opportunity that time presents to us has to be fully exploited forthwith, which means that we are to be extremely vigilant and unremittingly mindful. History shows us that the forces that improve society are unleashed by liberated individuals acting in isolation. Their presence gives the world a direction to change for the better. (For that reason, if you really want to help someone, you must learn to devise distance and not seek to be intimate.) By completely surrendering ourselves to higher cosmic forces, we can reflect the hidden meaning which is animated in the scheme of things and get a glimpse of the purpose that has called this universe to life and evolution. I think it is our earthly

destiny to experience this personal transformation, to be able to directly perceive the total environment in which life’s evolution is taking place.

11 THE WONDER OF TWO-PRONGED GROWTH

If you are following the urge of your conscious drive to earn your living, you are also participating in the preservation of mankind.

O UR BASIC BIOLOGICAL OR PSYCHOLOGICAL needs are linked with nature’s plan to maintain the life of mankind. Thus we can regard all human evolution as bipolar or two-pronged, because what contributes to individual growth also contributes to the overall development of human life. Human evolution simultaneously progresses on two levels—individual development and collective development. The beauty of life, to me, is that if we are true to ourselves then the pursuit of personal objectives will contribute to the accomplishment of social aims and ends. There seems a mystifying law at work in the collective human organism that appropriates the fruits of its individual elements for the development and growth of the life of the whole. Simply put, the fruits of actions resulting from the biological need to avoid death, disease, and misery benefit, ultimately, the whole of humanity. Beyond this come the purposes that rise above the syntax of the basic individual stimulus. The things around us do not of themselves divulge their significance to us. We must endeavour to discover all that for ourselves. It’s only when we discover the secret that lies locked in the bosom of things that we can attempt to define our purpose. And nature is our teacher in this process. All hope for self-improvement begins with our desire to discover the secret of things and the laws that govern them. The rational faculty that man is gifted with allows us to discover the mysteries of the universe. We must each commit intellectual effort to determine our real place in the scheme of things and transform the world, taking into our ideals.

This task is not unrelated to man’s nature or external to our toil, but is an essential part of life itself. Living meaningfully entails interpreting our environs, including the physical circumstances and communal and historical surroundings in which we find ourselves. With the application of our rational abilities to the issues presented by our environment, we gradually discover our right relationship with the external world and shape our convictions about what we ourselves are in the midst of the things that surround us. It is by articulating these convictions that we can hope to feel at home and impress a personal pattern on the change that is taking place in the world around us. This ecology that we live in is for us like a shell is for a snail. It is a blended fibre of many filaments, as our entire heritage—our race, culture, and history— represents a minute ledge in the range of human evolution. As that sage Shakespeare explained, the world is a stage in which we have to display our talent while playing our part, without any say in the beginning or the end of the play. The understanding of one’s part is possible only through the gift of vision bestowed upon us. British academic William Macneile Dixon rightly wrote in The Human Situation (1937):

The most astonishing thing about the human being is not so much his intellect and bodily structure, profoundly mysterious as they are. The astonishing and least comprehensible thing about him is his range of vision; his gaze into the infinite distance; his lonely ion for ideas and ideals, far removed from his material surroundings and animal activities … The inner truth is that every man is himself a creator, by birth and nature, an artist, an architect and fashioner of worlds.

It is this capacity for being ‘the architect and fashioner of worlds’ that I feel is our primary task in the world. Our ability for what we may make of ourselves depends more on our own effort than on anything else. It’s essential to the truth of two-pronged evolution. For example, if you are following the urge of your conscious drive to earn your living, you are also participating in the

preservation of mankind. If you think deeply, you will realize that all truthful, productive, and decent individual life has a gainful influence on the lives of all of our fellow humans. Shakespeare has Polonius, perhaps unwittingly, state it beautifully: ‘To thy own self be true and then it would follow, as night follows the day, thou canst not be false to anyone else.’ There is no clash of interests between one’s motivation for one’s own growth and society’s desire for higher purposes to prevail. Our individual and collective lives have the same focal point; by playing our part well, we each add to the quality of the society of which we are a part. In my corporate career and in observation of business around the world, I have seen that the businesses that thrive in the long run are those which best ensure this two-pronged growth. To me a large part of the recent misery of financial institutions has been wrought by an organizational philosophy that allowed a few so-called star performers to tower above their organizations’ collective ethos. In most instances, the same individuals or businesses which were considered far superior to the organization in general and were disproportionately paid brought their organizations down. The absence of a symbiotic two-pronged evolution hurts every organism.

The best way for individuals to serve the total life is to relentlessly pursue our own individual development to bring out that which is best in us. Therefore, the value of securing our life’s development cannot be overrated. Totalitarian systems, like communism—based on the idea that individuals are not an end-inthemselves but a means for fusion in the universal benevolence of the state or another assemblage of people—are bound to fail. We cannot be productively herded in disregard to our real place in the scheme of things, which alone brings out the best there is in us. All forms of regimentation and of standardized human existence are bound to eventually shipwreck against the individual dignity and value of man. We are artists; we are reformers; we are law-givers. We continually strive to invigorate and modernize society to ensure the smooth unfolding and healthy progress of its processes, laws, and institutions. Human society is always in flux. It is well served by a healthy balance of old

order and change that helps it move forward in response to the challenges posed by changing conditions. This can only be achieved if we are capable of rationally examining the various possibilities open to us. Nothing is so decisive for growth as the development of critical faculty in man, which infuses the spirit of free inquiry. For that we must endeavour to liberate the human brain from the burden of custom, ritual, bias, and intolerance, in order to enable man to face life without prejudices or fixed ideas. In the age we live in, nothing attends to the fullness of life except the forces of rational thought. They alone equip us to judge the relative value of things and to do the right thing under a given circumstance. The world today is ruled by thought. The development of scientific and intellectual thought over the last three centuries is practically a story of the victory of pure intellect over primal ways of dealing with the problems posed by our environment. The progress of human knowledge in its contribution to life is now increasingly faster, because of the abundance of refined intellect as an instrument of discovery and innovation and because we are able to free it from the pressure of immediate existential needs. And this unburdened surplus of intellect, powered by rational thought, has carried the constructive enterprise of modern civilization to heights that would have been unimaginable a few hundred years ago.

12 IN SEARCH OF AN AWAKENED EXISTENCE

Not to realize the fullness of life is a tragedy.

I HAVE ALWAYS HAD A CRAVING to reach deeper into things in order to decipher the reality that sustains the show apparent to the eye. I find the Prophet of Islam’s prayer ‘Oh God, may I see things in their reality!’ an inspiring wish. I like people who unwaveringly negotiate the path of knowledge in a bid to understand the hidden meaning that lies locked up in the bosom of all existence. The path of knowledge is a difficult one to negotiate. It requires its pilgrims to move with painstaking steps. Only those who brave the perils of this demanding journey are likely to see the light. It is man’s privilege to strive for higher ends in order to attain the knowledge of our own reality. As Ali ibn Abi Talib explains, by discovering the manifestation of divine life within the inner recesses of our own being, we can so transform the quality of our consciousness that it offers a transparent medium to the universal. This makes it possible for man to understand the secret of the universe. People like Albert Einstein or Leo Tolstoy manifest this in their own ways. However, while it is possible for man’s consciousness to mirror meta-cosmic life, this is very difficult to achieve. The two most powerful instincts that control our consciousness are the instinct of self-preservation and the instinct of preserving the human species. These two instincts function continuously, consuming most of our energy and attention, and leaving little for any endeavour beyond the biological level. These two instincts are of instrumental value for the preservation of human life, but their satisfaction by man cannot be considered an end-in-itself. The problem is that for most of us, their satisfaction becomes a matter of paramount

importance, polluting our consciousness to the point where we can undertake no other purpose completely. Our biological preservation becomes a halter around our necks, as we live in bondage to those instincts—well beyond the achievement of survival and security—without ever realizing the value of being free from that bondage. Most religions embody a well-calculated attempt to free man from the thraldom of these two instincts by confining their influence within their legitimate limits. But, under the excessive influence of these instincts leading to greed and lust, man manipulates religion too. Except, of course, those few who discover the real joy of giving of themselves and of their belongings—like Mother Teresa, Abdul Sattar Edhi, John D. Rockefeller, Bono, Bill Gates, and so on.

Most of us, myself included, seem content to exist in the basement of the highrise building that is life. We are afraid to make an effort to scale higher levels of human experience. Only a few are fully committed to self-reform. As Bono explained, when after supreme hard work the moment of liberation comes to us, we have a feeling of waking up from slumber and discovering the wakeful state of consciousness. No wonder that outstanding human beings through the ages have been known as awakened ones. People like Edhi or Gates manifest that sacrifices and effort required to achieve higher consciousness and move into a new dimension of life are a worthwhile investment to make on the ‘bargaining counter of time’. The likes of Socrates manifest that man has a higher destiny than mere animal existence. Young Aitzaz Hasan is a vivid example that life offers opportunities to rise above the inevitable end of biological life. Not to realize the fullness of life is a tragedy. Aren’t the deals we make on the ‘time exchange’ worth greater consideration than the ones we trade on the ‘stock exchange’? The injunctions of different religions—such as dictates for prayer, fasting, or pilgrimage—are just methods to draw man’s attention away from these two commanding instincts. The aim of seers and guides has been to make us look at ourselves and the world we inhabit from perspectives other than the mere projections of these biological instincts. The idea is to help us transcend our

limitations for higher objectives, allowing new vistas of existence to enter into our consciousness. From this advanced awareness, man can scan the entirety of the environment—physical, moral, mystical, cerebral, psychological—and can play an effective role in the scheme of things.

My emphasis on the pursuit of higher consciousness is not about advocating the gospel of otherworldliness. Far from it. It is about living fully and effectively on earth and contributing to its well-being. It is also not meant to discourage anyone from actively seeking to get well-heeled. It’s good to be rich or to be successful in a career, just as it is good to be intelligent and smart. What matters in the final analysis is how we use our gifts and our resources, especially beyond the satisfaction of our needs. Almost all the evolved people I have personally known have used their career success to higher ends. My humble voice merely echoes the plea for inspiration by higher ends made by all our sages and saints. Without relating ourselves to higher life, we are apt to be lost in petty personal objectives or ruled by unimportant immediacies of life that distort our perspective. Once we let these immediacies take control of our existence, it is like servants taking over the high-rise of our life—leaving the real master to languish in the basement. It is amazing that we are often so occupied with the means of keeping our life going that we never contemplate its purpose. Most of us only react to what occurs outside the borders of our being; thus, the ground of our action lies outside ourselves and we never really act on our own. As far as our awareness of our development is concerned, we are, at all times, part of nature. We yield to the domination of the powers of nature without objection or protest. Spiritual growth, on the other hand, consists in making a conscious effort by placing emphasis on our identity. The more developed our awareness of ourselves is, the more we are able to change the level of our life and evolve in the true sense. Our life’s experiences expose to us the insufficiency of the authority of our observation and judgement. And we tell ourselves that if we were more evolved we would know the rules of the universe, to make right decisions about our worldly promises and objectives. The more we evolve the more our vision is able to grapple with the problems that confront us in life. Our moral and mental powers are developed not by running away from life but by contending with it.

As a result of our determination to face the tests posed by the logic of the life we live here below, we can reach a higher state of being. We have no other means of evolving.

13 FROM SELF-RESPECT TO SPIRITUALITY

We must approach our own powers and capacities and the grandeur and majesty of world around us with equal respect.

O NLY THOSE WHO CONSCIOUSLY AFFIRM their obligation to respect themselves can understand the real meaning of humility. True humility does not disparage the individual; it elevates the individual. As the Quran teaches, the real servants of the Merciful Maker are those who walk humbly on earth. The respect that is due to one’s self does not entitle us to exult in our own importance. Our importance is not a matter of a claim to be exacted or enforced; it results from devoting our existence, as finite beings and creatures bound by space and time, to a purpose bigger than ourselves. Our job is to define our role and play it within the law of our being. Self-respect arises when an individual does right because it is right, regardless of any unsavoury consequences. The rest is delusionary conceit fuelled by ego. Respect lies in honour distinct from fear and greed. Let me begin with the following immortal message of Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his dramatic monologue Oenone, when Pallas offers her gifts to Paris and he refuses no matter how much Oenone wishes that he would have accepted.

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three alone lead life to sovereign power. Yet not for power (power of herself Would come uncall’d for) but to live by law,

Acting the law we live by without fear; And, because right is right, to follow right Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.

Thomas Carlyle emphasizes that respect for others and the sentiment of reverence play important roles in the development of human character. He describes reverence as ‘honour done to those who are greater and better than ourselves; honour distinct from fear. It is the soul of all religion that has ever been among men, or ever will be.’ I think a man who learns to respect others is inwardly free. Those who cannot truly respect others are blinkered, egocentric, and self-important people who bow to their own ing whims and fancies. Our liberty does not consist in being free from all control; instead, it consists in a voluntary submission to the universal law of life. People who do not respect those around them have not evolved beyond the animal stage and are too involved in the mere animal willto-live. They are likely to pursue the monetary impulses of their biologic being, but do not know happiness in the real sense of that word. Sacrifice of self is the only road to fulfilment, just as a seed sacrifices itself to become a flower. Albert Schweitzer describes it beautifully:

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself but always in the experience which is going all round me. It is an uncomfortable doctrine that the true ethics whispers in my ear. You are happy, it says; therefore, you are called upon to give much. Whatever more than others you have received in health, natural gifts, working capacity, success, a beautiful childhood, harmonious family circumstances, you must not accept as being a matter of course. You must pay a price for them. You must show more than average devotion to life.

In order to sur the limitations of our being, we must first acknowledge them

by recognizing and respecting our parents, our mentors, and the moral standards and civic laws of society. An attitude of respect is where the urge for moral and spiritual regeneration begins. It helps us escape the obligations and curbs of prejudices peculiar to man. Goethe aptly emphasizes that no education is possible unless a person starts by adopting this basic attitude to the problem of personal life. For Goethe the attitude of respect is a matter of paramount importance, as explained in the eternal word of the Bible: ‘When the salt shall have lost its savour wherewith shall it be salted?’

Being technology-savvy, the ability to write software and invent gadgets, or a knack for making money are valuable attainments. But they are not enough to enrich our humanity or to advance our evolution. Without discounting the comforts it brings, one problem with our increasingly impersonal, technologydriven, and web-based society is that no emphasis is laid on the role that interhuman skills play in the development of personality. While an empty politeness is inculcated, the culture of feeling respect is neglected in our schools, as kids are conditioned to become more aggressive and ambitious as they advance in growth. The self-serving approach is hailed as productive, and reverence is considered as dull. Here a memorable incident from ancient Greece comes to mind. The Athenian judges condemned Socrates in 399 BCE to die by drinking a cup of hemlock. He was found guilty of corrupting the youths, of having denied gods, and of having conspired against the government of the day. Even his accs knew that Socrates was innocent of the charges levelled against him. Plato recounts in Crito how an old and reliable friend visited Socrates in prison the night before he was to die and urged Socrates to allow his friends to bribe the jailer for his escape to a safe place. Socrates refused to buy his liberty in this manner because in doing so, he would have disrespected his duty to the laws of his country. Socrates said that even though he was convicted under the law by its dishonest professors, in fleeing in this manner he would be setting a dangerous precedent of undermining the law’s authority. Socrates believed that without an unqualified allegiance to the law, a well-ordered society cannot be sustained. As Ali ibn Abi Talib once explained to Muawiyah (an early Muslim ruler), there is no dishonour for the victim of injustice who suffers in innocence. The dishonour is reserved for the doer of the evil. Socrates’s immortal words

continue to resound through all ages: ‘Leave me then Crito to fulfil the will of God, and to follow whither He leads.’ We can see all around us what happens in countries where the authority and sanctity of the country’s law is flouted by its people. Rabindranath Tagore used to say that, in order to make a process co-extensive with life, education has to be based on the law of personal sympathy. Good teachers are those who influence their students by their being and not by merely imparting information to them. They are to students what sunshine is to plants. Tagore explains that ‘[a teacher’s] real function is not to explain meanings but to knock on the doors of mind’. It is from their parents and teachers that young minds learn to respect their own essential selves and others around them. A young mind must learn to preserve its individuality in a manner that it mirrors the universal life. We must learn not to let the mist of personal importance impede the age of the light of knowledge and wisdom. Every care must be taken that the youth of a country are kept immune from the corruption of a false ideology, favouritism, and intrigue. Let the young learn to surf the web to network and to assimilate information and acquire all the knowledge they need, from the best institutions. Let them drill their minds and express their individuality. But let them also attain that internal discipline needed to keep the will in them within proper confines.

In the context of religious experience, the supreme expression of respect is reserved for those who practise religion not merely in the institutional sense but also seek a direct experience of living in unity with the pulse of reality. Ali ibn Abi Talib has explained that we must approach our own powers and capacities and the grandeur and majesty of world around us with equal respect. It is a false philosophy that teaches that the body must be subjected to suffering in order for the spirit to triumph. Spirit best triumphs when it is assisted by a healthy body. In order to touch the furthest limits of our being we have to be at one with all that is within and without us. This is religious experience par excellence born out of the sentiment of respect for the Creator and the creation in unison. To me, spirituality has no other content, no other meaning except this total purity—outward and inward.

14 HUMANITY’S GLORY LIES IN THE INDIVIDUAL

If greed, viciousness, and egotism claim our loyalty, then evolution has most likely failed us.

A LL HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT IS EPHEMERAL; civilization after civilization has come and gone, mighty empires have been built and ravaged by time. With all our twenty-first century’s conceit about the exploits of modern science, our civilization is still exposed to wars of extermination. Thanks to the progress of modern science and the power it has given to man over the forces of nature, it is a real risk that someday, in our rashness, we may release forces that will destroy all we have built and achieved. In any event, there will come a day when the heat and light of the sun, which sustains life on earth, will be exhausted. What, then, is the definitive worth of all that man on our planet has intended and accomplished? If the ultimate end is death and oblivion, what, then, is the value of the fever and strife of our earthly struggle and sufferings? Friedrich Nietzsche echoes in my mind here. He wrote, in The Dawn of Day (1881), that it is practically impossible to assign any value to man’s life:

In former times people sought to show the feeling man’s greatness by pointing to his divine descent. This, however, has now become a forbidden path, for the ape stands at its entrance … What is to come will drag behind it that which has ed: why should any little star, or even any little species on that star, form an exception to the eternal drama?

Regarded from the viewpoint of man’s earthly career, the only way to make the whole scheme appear significant is to think of another existence after earthly life. When we assume that, everything with which we are connected becomes significant. Hence, most religions regard life after death as an essential element of their faith. The basic quality of life lies in its capacity to impose an inner condition on the external concourse of nature, and its ability to transform the non-living into living by a process of inward assimilation. This applies equally to vegetable, animal, and human life. From a rational viewpoint, death embodies the antithesis of birth as an end of the individual organism. In that sense, death has the same meaning for any form of life. This leaves man with little hope to accept anything beyond the day of our death, as our life could not be prolonged beyond the cessation of our biological organism. However, man is a lot more than the fulfilment of biological functions. Man has been endowed with ‘a sense of wonder which gives a child his right of entry into the treasure house of mystery which is in the heart of his existence’, as Rabindranath Tagore explained. In all major scientific and higher achievements, we find that creative impulse which has no direct relevance to the preservation of the physiological organism but which makes humans a higher form of life than any known. This creativity elevates life’s level, opening to it unlimited intellectual interests and inexhaustible possibilities. It leads thought to discovery.

Tagore explains in his famous essay ‘The Religion of an Artist’ that truth, and not dogma, is the foundation to all religions. He goes on:

It is not as ether waves that we receive light; the morning does not wait for some scientist for its introduction to us. In the same way, we touch the infinite reality immediately within us only when we perceive the pure truth of love or goodness, not through the explanation of theologians, not through the erudite discussion of ethical doctrines.

Well before the advent of religion, humans tried to express their creative genius

and captured the moods of their inner life in the network of external symbols. They had a spiritual relationship with the outside world and tried to express the infinite finitely as they could, while they wondered at mystery of creation. All this experience means evolution in a direction other than a merely biological one. It has meant evolution in an individual of the spiritual and other exalted qualities which define humanity. To deny the spiritual element in man is to rob the whole evolution of its meaning. The truth is that the individual alone is the bearer of value, and the ultimate function of a society is to create conditions under which the individuality of man can grow and develop. A philosophy that sacrifices the individual to social synthesis is, in my opinion, off the mark. While society and individual do interact, the main task of evolution is to nurture individuality to secure the development of human personality. Hence, evolution expects modern man to be more aware of the finer possibilities of life contained in our unique power of consciousness and not just have greater mastery of nature and greater freedom of action. All knowledge is provisional and keeps tweaking or rectifying itself; the question is whether or not it leads to an all-round development of human personality. If greed, viciousness, and egotism claim our loyalty, then evolution has most likely failed us.

So the value of a social organization or of collective existence consists in its capacity to foster the growth of individuality. Creation of a totally conscious and well-integrated personality is the ultimate goal. As human history demonstrates, community came first; the individual with rights is the product of a developed society. Evolution, in its highest manifestation, has been about the growing deliverance of the individual from the drag of society. Any society where the individual is entirely subordinated to the tyranny of social purposes is not of much value. If it is not for the happiness of the individual, the enrichment of one’s awareness, the growth of one’s personality, then what is human society here for? Marxists have failed to build a rational foundation for Marx’s dialectical argument that the individual was an unreal abstraction and society a concrete synthesis of human valuations. It is true that the family, the community, the nation, and mankind all

represent higher formations for an individual to participate in. Therefore, conscientious individuals do not live for themselves alone, as all their nobler impulses relate to supra-personal motives. In fact, no conception of reality is possible except the human conception. While man is a late arrival in the scheme of things, values like honesty, beauty, goodness, and truth cannot be understood without man’s conception of them. Our approach to the world of truth and virtue is essentially a human approach. The human condition is implied in all knowledge situations. Hence the fullness and power of life can only be felt in the life of an individual. As explained by Ali ibn Abi Talib, real individuality swallows up the universal. It is the destiny of man to realize this truth. Human history is an evidence of the outward exhibition of man’s ability to reflect the universal. The only way to discover truth is to make the power of thinking an inward movement and make the intellect co-extensive with life, instead of merely catering to life’s practical interests. It is our destiny to rise above ourselves. In the words of English poet and historian Samuel Daniel:

Unless above himself he can Exalt himself, how poor a thing is Man.

15 THE MORPHOLOGY OF INTELLECT

The age of revelation is gone; this is the age of realization.

W E ALL KNOW, WHETHER IT be in the execution of a policy, the determination of the price of a commodity, the optimal use of space, or the pursuit of a degree. Knowing is always a phase of life and action in an environment on a certain occasion. Our thought, therefore, emerges as a result of our interaction with the environment in which our lot is cast. As soon as we realize that we are something other than what we see around us, we feel the need to devise action to help ourselves to adapt to our environment. What our senses perceive at a given moment is supplemented by our thought’s ability to recall what we have sensed before. This helps us reconstruct the picture of the total environment to which we must adapt in order to survive. This dynamic constitutes man’s initiation into the art of living. What enables us to reconstruct this picture of our total environment is the faculty of rational thought. Rational thought starts with a resolute attempt to think clearly about our total environment so that we can devise the most appropriate action. At one time, when man’s powers of rational thought were not so developed, we looked up to the prophets and the seers for the picture of our total environment. Prophets’ reports are preserved in the various institutions of religion. Devotional literature attempts to describe the environment of which man is a tiny part. There have also been other seers who invited people to fulfil the potential of their relationship with the environment. They urged us to know our place in the overall scheme of things in order to be able to act properly. It appears as if religion was made responsible for bringing about a general progress of man up to a level where we can take up the matter of our growth into our own hands.

The age of revelation is gone; this is the age of realization. Man no longer has to wait for a new way to be shown, it is now up to us to walk in the light of our reason. Man is now free. We must do our walking by ourselves, resorting to our faculty of rational thought. Today we must study, investigate, and reflect as our own guide.

Intellectual progress is not an end-in-itself; it has to serve the purpose of life. Modern psychology and genetics have made that very clear. We are not the slaves of our thinking; instead, thought is the slave of life. Thought has been created by life with a view to gain power over its environment with the help of our senses. Conceptual thought is an act of judgement followed by believing. Belief is ultimately a plan of action, its veritable test. Every idea is an addition to the reach of our personality. For example, the centre of earth’s sphere is known beyond doubt to exist, whether or not it has been reached. This is how our cognitive power lends wings to what is introduced to us by our senses. The evolution of our thought life is a process of fine-tuning our power of perception. It makes the world of the unseen as real as the world revealed to us by our senses, and a significant part of life’s processes have a direct involvement with the unseen world. This renders our perception of the physical world possible. As Immanuel Kant explained, it is in the marriage of ‘percept’ and ‘concept’ that the understandable world arises for our powers of cognition to study and derive pleasure from. Appealing to pure reason, Kant attempted to set the boundaries of human knowledge. He showed the limits within which the powers of reason were on hand for gaining knowledge. Inferring from the operations of human mind as revealed in the act of knowing, Kant showed that without some empiric content provided by our senses, the knowledge of phenomena is not possible. While there have been a number of objections to his views, the main thesis of Kantian epistemology has not yet been successfully challenged. However, having so ably described the operation of normal consciousness, Kant did not proceed to investigate that consciousness itself can be deepened and the existing level of life—of which consciousness is a mere reflex—can be transformed into something higher. If it’s possible to make a change in the character of consciousness, the limits of reason can be removed. When the level of one’s life

changes, its capacity to know also increases.

Human thought has two important aspects. First, it functions as an intellectual reporter of an external object. Second, it delivers expressions that are independent of and are not furnished by our senses. What we perceive refers to the psycho-physiological mechanism by means of which we perceive it. Any change in that mechanism—for instance, by cultivating the powers of concentration or by using drugs—will transform the object itself. The power of reason transcends the frontiers of the psycho-physical environment. Whether or not the intellect furnishes accurate information does not so much depend on our intelligence as on our ability to exclude other motives that interfere with our intellectual faculties. The cognitive bent in man looks for pleasing and sugar-coated beliefs. Our rational faculties must be on guard against embracing attractive, gratifying, and endearing falsehoods—often coated as God’s own truth or sacred traditions. I do not agree with the thought advanced by William James and many others that human intellect is insufficient for understanding the truth of religious experience. This school of thought argues that the conceptual process can classify, define, and interpret facts, but that it does not produce them. There is always an element that feeling alone can for. This distrust of intellect is based on the premise that intellect cannot shape the essence of religious and mystical experience into a conceptual structure. But this thought fails to distinguish between the symbol and its object. It is true that the experience of life’s quality, of time as lived, of emotions as felt cannot be adequately represented by conceptual processes, no matter how advanced. However, as discoveries in psychology and biology have shown, the intellect is increasingly able to develop pointers to the reason and meaning of human experience. We are ever more able to define what engenders feelings and what they suggest. Criticism of intellect is thus out of kilter. With time, intellect is able to decipher the elements of experience which earlier could not be represented as concepts. As any intelligent person knows, criticism of intellect is unwittingly carried on by the intellect itself. The real difference resides in being rational or irrational.

Intellect’s role is to distinguish in its experience the sign of experience that is not present. The nature of its activity does not depend on the success or failure of its endeavour. It proceeds by trial and error. Some beliefs are easy to , but beliefs that lie beyond the realm of experience are not. Cognition, true or false, cannot transcend experience. While there may be differences in the states of our cognition, the truth remains unaltered. We often fancy that we are at liberty to shape our ‘truth’ because we won’t be proven wrong through verification. That’s not right. All false beliefs are taken to task one day. As British surgeon and author Robert Briffault explains, ‘the consequences of the big lies are exactly of the same kind as the consequences of little lies—they are found out’. For example, subjecting religion to the modern intellect can transform its definitions from local to universal and remove dogma and historic inaccuracies unveiled by science. Religious constructions must be confronted with the results of science, and those doctrines proven scientifically absurd must be discarded. The remaining conceptions can be dealt with and tested as hypotheses. Intellect can thus refine innocent, extravagant beliefs and unrealistic symbolism. This can lead to more consensual belief systems. In order to continue to be of use, religion has to abandon metaphysics for criticism and logic. It must transform itself from theology into a science—the science of religion. Modern man must think, reflect, criticize, and appraise thought on a logical scale before the formation of a belief in a metaphysical existence can happen. Non-rational forces of primitive belief must be defeated by the forces of a well-articulated intellectual life. The rational mind has faith in contemplative, investigative, and discursive knowledge. Unlike the spiritualist, it goes beyond achieving communion with reality in endeavouring to discover its relationship with appearances. Mystics, on the contrary, seek the fulfilment of their emotional life more than the cerebral. They use the language of inventive imagery suited only for an unanalysed and directly experienced awareness. Therefore, mysticism has never succeeded in furthering human knowledge, as its experience and awareness can be directly lived but cannot be transferred. The mystical literature of the world is a narrative of power, not an of accurate information that can be ed on. The ancient mystics of India and elsewhere may have realized a higher state of being. But there was no transferable medium to communicate the intensity of feeling and depth of

experience associated with their realization. Hence, their intuitions and realizations perished with them, without being of any use to the pool of human knowledge. Intellectual knowledge, in contrast, can be transferred to anyone who wants to learn. It can be recorded and ed on and improved from generation to generation. Compared to a scientist, a mystic is satisfied with a lower type of intimacy of experience. A scientist knows that it can be analysed into simpler components and then reintegrated into a superior type of intimacy. Scientists like Einstein achieve this superior type of proximity of experience through the investigative and questioning approach they take on towards that intimacy of experience with which a mystic is satisfied.

The primary function of knowledge is to anticipate probable experience in order to gain a direct experience of reality. ‘To know is to transform’ is as true as ‘to know is to conquer’. Biological evolution dictates that man is in transition, making our way to ever more evolved life by satisfying the possibilities of our being. Hence, intellect in man cannot be rational unless it is made co-extensive with life, as the power of rational thought itself has developed in reply to life’s demand for action. Correct action is made possible by making intellect coextensive with life instead of merely regarding it is as a faculty in the service of practical concerns. The world of the soul is not another world. This everyday world in which we live and work can become the world of soul by transforming our plane of awareness. The more we access our deeper self and derive our sustenance from the essential forces of life, the wider becomes the range of world we can engage with. Real salvation lies in achieving cosmic consciousness by raising oneself to a higher level from which one can command a view of the total cosmic order of things—like a Tolstoy or an Einstein. The decisive spiritual power in this age, to me, is not religion but science—it is life expressed as understanding. Science entails the direct experience of the profoundest depth of life on which all existence inwardly depends. Science constantly endeavours to reach that depth. Science makes the auxiliary constructions of the intellect, such as mysticism, unnecessary by transforming the man who seeks truth through exploring and investigating. Science helps

intellect break free from its parasitic moorings and become the life’s ruling centre. Truth cannot be concocted in the crucible of devotional belief. It has to be discovered and verified using all sensual and intellectual faculties at man’s disposal. In science, what is achieved by one or a few becomes the common property of the whole race of mankind to share in the days that lie ahead. The progress of science is increasingly recreating and reconstructing life on the plane of understanding. ‘Bliss it is to be alive’ in this age of realization.

III THE LOVE OF WISDOM

16 SELF-REALIZATION THROUGH SELF-KNOWLEDGE

What we attempt to retain we lose.

B Y AND LARGE MANKIND HAS always has been reluctant to turn its gaze upon the mystery of inner life. Instead, we have been eager to reach out to the distant planets and to survey the outer world of matter and motion. That’s why astronomy was the first science to receive attention, whereas psychology and now genetics are the latest. Man’s knowledge has progressed from the external to the internal, though it is difficult to describe where the frontier of one gives way to the other. Apart from satisfying our curiosity about the nature of things, our favourite pursuit has been evaluating the world in line with our likes and dislikes, and characterizing the changes we notice as beneficent or malevolent. This approach has led us to conclude that our world is an inevitable collection of happenings dictated by the iron law of necessity and that, therefore, there are some aspects of life which man can never control. Some, after searching deeply, have been convinced that this is in any case the best of all possible worlds. They thus accept it for what it is worth and try to adjust themselves to it. For example, Karl Marx, after becoming convinced of the futility of understanding the world, advanced to coordinate human effort to change it, as if one could ever hope to change the world without understanding it. On the extreme end of this spectrum are those like the poet Robert Browning who hold that ‘God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world’, thus stressing that man does not need worry about a situation that is so very beneficent in its own right. Both Marx and Browning have a point, but their views entail some dangerous implications. As I often stress, the fundamental truth about human life is its

responsibility to history. However, one can only be held responsible for what happens if one possesses the capacity to alter the course of history. It is this endless quest of man to realize our ideals that sets us apart from all other forms of life. Therefore, it is important to place man in the heart of the responsibility to the world; all designs to dethrone man in the name of religion or something else must be resisted. Unless we take our rightful place and put together all the conflicting forces within us, it is difficult to expect to engineer any significant change in our world. We mostly see only the world to which our being responds; thus, our perception of the world is a projection of our own being, with our hopes and fears writ large on its canvas. The world reveals its significance to us only to the extent to which we are inwardly prepared to receive it. As we move from one level to another, the world around us also alters its appearance. For example, when we are young and vibrant the world appears lifeless. As we age, with the decline of the life forces in us, the world begins to strike us as more active and alive. As Plato expressed: ‘It is not the eye that sees, it is the “I” that sees.’ Ghazali, a Muslim mystic of the eleventh century, explained that not only our perception but also our knowledge is a function of our being. No wonder, then, that people who live consciously and experience the release of their creative urge see the unfolding of the very promise of life which they experience within the depths of their being. This awareness imparts responsibility, and aims for their active involvement in history. Such people endeavour to change themselves, for the world around them to render itself better in the bargain.

I have always felt that it is only by my personal growth that I can change the world around me for better. Thus I am not a hostage to what philosophers describe as the dilemma of man’s subjectivity. I cheerfully accept the fundamental state of my being, and instead of attempting to escape it, I try to be respectful towards it. I believe that all truth reveals itself to us as a personal truth. My subjectivity has become more elastic and agile as my consciousness has broadened. My experiences become the projections of my personality within the confines of my subjectivity. Worldly thinking has often assigned man a peripheral position in the scheme of things, with man’s coming into being a result of a fortuitous encounter between

indifferent cosmic forces. But our increasing power over the forces of nature has instilled the realization that there is something of transcendental importance within us, capable of understanding and mastering those forces. Though to start with, we may be children of necessity, the breaking in of the powers of liberty and the resulting transformation of the Old Adam have enabled us to become masters of our fate. With man’s mastery over nature and the advances made in the sciences, the question of the inner resources with which to take real pleasure in life has become more important. Whatever our goals for achievement, discovery, or adventure, we still have to come back to and live with ourselves. I see this return to ourselves manifested in the sage, who is embodied by those few in our time who have thought over life and its basic problems. For most of the last century, man wanted nothing but to get on in the world. Modern man is more eager to respond to our ideal of a human being, because we are in many respects more integrated. Genetic sciences have made it easier for us to affirm most practical aspects of life, because it is easier to understand them merely as variations on the theme of that fullness of life which we have already discovered within ourselves. For an evolved modern man, all appearances of life have become transparent and we lovingly accept them. Similarly, we take a stand on our essential freedom and creativity to be able to manipulate knowledge, machines, and technology in the service of life. Man, thus, is less prey to the contagions of external allurements than, let’s say, a hundred years ago. Today, in larger numbers than ever, we realize that our highest doings reside in ensuring our inner development. We are beginning to see the vainness of being dominated by the mere externals of life and are, instead, out to master the externals to make them obedient to the hidden forces of our inner being. We understand that who we are remains more important than what we do or say. This ability to develop our personality through self-study provides us with a sense of security in the world. Those who have mastered themselves are not held hostage by fear and doubt. They know that the vicissitudes of worldly fortunes can lash against the outer tassels of their being, but cannot shake the inner life they have built.

Regarded from the outside, there is little difference between the life of an ape and of an Einstein; there is little differentiation in their external activity. What distinguishes them is the inner dimension of their being. One is a life lived unconsciously, propelled by mechanical instincts, and the other is living cosmically in affording a transparent medium of light to influence the world with his intellect and utterances. This reminds us to avoid blind devotion to the gospel of success, unless we have clearly defined our own meaning of success in keeping with our inner being. Such success is self-realization. History has repeatedly shown that those who fly in the face of the world, to the point of finding themselves flung on the cross, become decisive figures in world history. A Christ, a Socrates, a Buddha succeed beyond the wildest imaginations of their times. Man, particularly in the West, is ever more coming to realize that what we attempt to retain we lose, and only what we give away becomes something that can never be taken away from us. Today, with scientific knowledge discovering the nature of reality, we are able to better relate to our own place in the scheme of things. Our age is growing to be ever more an age of introspection. We are today more anxious to know ourselves as we realize that within our inner depths, the entirety of world’s life is submerged. We know that the path to world dominance lies through selfknowledge. We are endeavouring to wake up, to be liberated from the hold of motorized instincts. This process of self-realization through self-knowledge is the path of an evolved man.

17 THE PURPOSE OF EDUCATION

It requires humility to acknowledge one’s dependence.

A LL OF US ARE HERE to serve a cause that is greater than ourselves. Our own existence becomes significant only when we become aware of our reliance on others, beginning with the early development of our personality through the efforts of our parents and our teachers. Nature, evolution, scientists, sages, prophets, philosophers, thinkers, and poets have, through the ages, contributed to our development, making our lives meaningful. But many of us take these helpful influences that shape our lives for granted. If all that I am is the result of the contribution of those who have preceded me, and the sacrifice and influence of those who constitute my familial, social, and intellectual environment, then what am I doing to pay back this debt of reverence? How am I manifesting my gratefulness, by somehow contributing my share to the universal cause of human development? Many of us never ponder this vital question. We continue to take things for granted and live mechanically. In my view, the main purpose of education must be to make us conscious of our social responsibilities and of the extent of our dependence on others, so that we are mindful of making our own contribution towards improving human life. When we become conscious of our obligations, we can soon see who we are indebted to and why. Thereafter, we cannot shun our responsibility. This universe has the right to make claims on us. Our dependence on Mother Earth is quite evident. We depend for our survival on the very air we breathe, the water we drink, and the nourishment we seek. We would not survive if Mother Earth were not so kind to us. Once we are conscious of dependence on earth, we can never walk disrespectfully and conceitedly on its bosom. We can never deform its lovely

face by hurting and killing our fellow humans. Once we define our attitude to life in the light of this complete dependence of man on earth, shall we not walk humbly on earth and help it become more productive? I agree with the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who said that he who converts this barren and brown earth into green performs the highest act of worship. The same approach should apply to other dependencies. As kids, we depend on our parents for our upbringing. We can never be grateful enough for the sacrifices they have made to secure our development. As students, we depend on our teachers, who familiarize us with the products of human evolution. Then we depend on our country, our society, farmers, labourers, and many others. To further develop as human beings, we depend on the moral and cerebral qualities of those who provide us with examples to grow in the mould we desire.

It requires humility to acknowledge one’s dependence. Only when we are conscious of our dependence do we have a chance to control our lower ions and impulses. Education of the young must, as an irreducible minimum, be able to secure the growth of their humanity. The ultimate aim of education is to reclaim individuals and save them from being dominated by the play of lower ions, by giving them inner resources with which to appreciate and enjoy this great gift of life and to fulfil their duties. Education is as large as life. It represents the most efficient means for raising man’s life from the biological plane to a level where it grows to be the creative and moral expression of man’s urge to move forward. All real progress is progress in giving to one’s fellowmen and progress in showing reverence to this mystifying universe of ours. Without this sense of reverence, in one guise or other, we cannot effectively play our part. The human infant—the most helpless of all young animals—reaches a high-water mark of development because of the ability to use rational thought to incorporate the elements of human experience into a foundation for further development. While a young animal is born with acquired instincts in the service of biological needs, the human child must be familiarized with the past experience of the human race. Thus, what is achieved by heredity in the life cycle of an animal has to be accomplished by education in the case of humans. While learning is the process, there is no set formula for the development of the

human personality. Education is the sovereign activity that transforms the being of a child to grow in a worthwhile mould. In early life it is wrought by the parents’ influence on their child. In adolescence it is brought about by the magnetic impact of the teacher and peers on one’s life, much like sunshine helps plants produce leaves, fruits, and flowers. As seventeenth-century theologian Thomas Traherne says: ‘All spirit is after all mutually attractive even as all matter is—being the ultimate fact beyond which we cannot go. Just as, in water, to face answereth the face, so also, the heart of man to man.’ Hence, the educational process is based not so much upon the law of mechanical causation as upon the law of personal sympathy. With due respect to the efficacy of online and impersonal learning, there is no substitute for a great teacher—just as there is no substitute for a great parent or a great doctor—for the cultivation and growth of human mind and knowledge.

The foundations for such development can only be laid in the formative years, when our being is eagerly receptive to the invigorating influence of good and great things. Otherwise soon, in some societies sooner than others, learning crystallization sets in, with hardening of the arteries. Our real life is kept out by the menial servants—the lower ions fuelled by biological instincts—that begin to command us. Early on, children have to be taught to transcend the claims that mere biological instincts place upon our being. We have to be made conscious of our links with our fellow beings and with the universe. Once basic education has fulfilled its role, then more specialized education takes over. It engenders the professional skills to earn our livelihood by handling various departments of human activity. Education equips us to wage the battle of life through participating in the total venture of organizing the life of the community and contributing our bit to the political, cultural, and economic activity around us. When all is said and done, what is the purpose of education if it does not lay paramount emphasis on the humanization of man? The humanity of a person has to be emphasized as the crowning glory of life, and society must be geared to enriching it so that one is able to live in tune with the spirit of one’s age.

18 VISION SEES BEYOND, NOT AROUND

Great writers show us that the world in which we live and struggle cannot be explained by sense data.

R ECENTLY A FRIEND ASKED ME who my hero in Pakistan is. I answered that there is no one who can be universally acclaimed at this point. In order to agree on a hero, a nation has to first become a nation. All other malaises apart, it is only when we become Pakistanis before Muslims, Muslim sects, and ethnic groups that we can share a hero. In a polarized society, one’s hero becomes someone’s enemy for no fault of his or hers—think Malala. On a personal note, my only hero from Pakistan’s history is the great social worker Abdul Sattar Edhi, who will never get his due in a society where people are brought up to live and act by confirmation biases. Of late Malala and Aitzaz Hasan have been sources of inspiration for me. People who see warriors as their heroes are skewed in my eyes. Warriors are just warriors—good or bad. For instance, I dislike Imran Khan’s favourite Mahmud of Ghazna. You, like Imran, may like him. That’s fine. But invaders can’t be heroes. For me, the likes of Edhi and Hasan make the case for a society to discover and honour its heroes. Heroes exist in all ages and societies, but they are often humble and obscure people, who live without publicity. It is for others to take notice of them. In societies round the world, characters assigned fictional attributes often sow their way into the people’s hearts. Such characters are easy to respect, as they are posthumously made to do what is loved by their followers. These heroes combine the qualities of faith, myth, and legend. They are ired for their strength, impossible feats, infallibility, and so on.

Heroes are the seers, the people of vision and action who inspire us to lead worthwhile lives that can be integrated into a good human society. When a nation begins to honour the real heroes of its own and the broader human history, it will be spared the ravages of chaos and disorder. It will be able to see the light by which to conduct its operations.

For writers to connect with humanity, the minimum requirement is that they must be genuine and earnest people, striving to reach the state of inwardness without which the essence of life cannot be grasped. Only then can they afford their readers a peep into a vision of the world that is furnished by the light that they have kindled in themselves. Only then can writers sincerely articulate viewpoints grounded on their approach to life and its problems. For me, some writers who have made a cogent point of their vision of man’s status in the scheme of things include, in no particular order, Homer, Euripides, Du Fu, Rumi, Dante, Hafiz, Shakespeare, Charles Baudelaire, John Milton, Ivan Turgenev, Lord Byron, Leo Tolstoy, George Orwell, Ghalib, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, William Faulkner, George Bernard Shaw, and Wallace Stevens. These great writers show us that the world in which we live and struggle cannot be explained by data that our senses commit to our consciousness. They are able to transcend the world of appearances and contemplate the truth that reveals itself in creation, but yet is independent of it. What matters is the encounter of the facts provided by our senses with the principle of intelligibility. That is how science works, how art works, and how life progresses. It is as if there is an unseen that helps us to see. This is the faith in the unseen that presents to us a certain image of eternity and enables us to see things as they are. It liberates us, sustains man’s dignity, and lends nobility to the most common state of everyday life. What distinguishes one man from another is the gift of seeing things as they are. This gift is bestowed on people in varying degrees and guises; some are blessed with an ability to see things as they are, and others are caught in the deceptive web of appearances. The artist intercedes by building bridges of communion between the tangible and the intangible, to help us to go beyond the mere appearance of things. Humanity values those who are endowed with the gift of

vision and the ability to communicate the truth of things. Only someone who can see things as they are and can help us to share that vision can truly be our leader, guide, or philosopher. If we contemplate history to understand the decisive forces that have shaped it and have equipped it with that vital impulse for progress, we see that mankind has always owed its fortunes to the few heroes it has produced—the few who are the salt of the earth. It is the function of writers—the ‘Priests of Humanity’ in Thomas Carlyle’s words—to communicate the truth in the vernacular of their age. Providing us with incentives to inspire our daily conduct is, to me, the main concern of any writer worthy of the vocation. The ordinary mass of mankind is so engrossed in the day-to-day task of responding to their biological and mental needs that they neither have the time nor the will to penetrate through the world of appearances. Just as a great scientist deciphers the physical world—from DNA to the farthest known star—a great writer interprets our experience of the world with a view to disclosing its hidden dimension. Carlyle described this role in memorable words: ‘In the true Literary Man, there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world’s Priest;—guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time.’ Now you may say that in our times it is hard to find writers who correspond to Carlyle’s ideal. Not entirely true. First, there are seers who have the gift of discovering and articulating as scientists, like Darwin and Einstein. Second, lately the art of writing—like all else—has been commercialized. Hence the output from genius is dictated by what sells. Writing has become a trade and it has become difficult to select from the prodigious outpouring of printed, electronic, and filmed word what is worthy of attention. There is, alas, so much trash around. But despite that, one still sees inspired writings and movie productions as the hallmark of great souls responsible for them. Thomas Macaulay was right in remarking, ‘As civilization advances, poetry … declines.’ But that is not because man’s quest for truth declines. It is simply because, in our time, the great mind that serves as the tool to apprehend the truth of things is more rationally steered towards science. The vocation of great writers has made way for that of great scientists and inventors. Modern man knows so much that a good knowledge of science is essential to keep pace with the immense range of facts and contexts needed for a good understanding of our world. The scale of modern man’s with the world of experience has

become enormous. Twenty-first century man embraces the whole world through the ability to travel, and through the Internet and electronic media. My favourite TV presenters literally become my housemates, whereas my next-door neighbour may be a disinterested spectator. A remarkable change has taken place in this automated and webbed world. No doubt our ancestors lived a lot more intensely than we do. They were a vital part of their own personal experience. We have lost our ancestors’ ability to know people and places closely and intimately. Not only is there too much to know, but there is also so much more to do. We need a ceaseless stream of energy to cope with the challenges that the world places on us. As a result, we are losing the ability to intensely feel most of what is happening around us. The world of verbalization, picturing, and make-believe is dimming our capacity to emotionally experience the truth of things. Let me explain further: Knowing a great deal more of what is happening in the world causes our emotional energy to spread out on too large a surface of events and concerns. This is why we have become superficial, except regarding our specialized concerns. Preoccupation with too much drives us far away from ourselves. The fulfilment of man’s life lies in a harmonious development of personality. What we cannot emotionally experience is very difficult to understand. Understanding is not merely an intellectual operation; our intellectual encounter with reality may yield information but not understanding. We understand only when our personality responds to the things or thoughts in question. Anything that we say in the absence of this direct personal experience is merely an instinctively projected expression. After all, the ability to communicate is a handmaid of that truth that we have personally experienced. Writers cannot successfully communicate the hidden dimensions of life if they have not been able to discover them for themselves. Woolly verbal expressions cannot make up for the poetic truth of a Ghalib. Another handicap is the belief in the omnipotence of money. Whether or not we acknowledge it, our age exclusively worships the god of money. Prosperity is no substitute for vision. Of old it has been said, ‘Nations without men of vision

perish.’ The great artists, writers, and scientists of whom humanity has reason to be proud were not, by and large, affluent people. Money no doubt can do a lot, but it cannot produce a genius. Immortality is a reward that comes to those who are qualified to point out to us what is important and what is not; what is transient and what is abiding; what is superfluous and what counts in the scheme of things. People like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. I do not mean to say that an affluent society is an enemy of the creative spirit. But, indeed, those who serve no other purpose than to accumulate wealth are obstructed in their life by their possessions. They eventually come to sustain a false relationship with the world in which they live. Societies with a vision are not concerned only with raising people’s living standards, but also with the standard of their lives. In societies with vision, people do make money, a lot of it, but once they have enough to live they do not let carrying wealth become a burden. People—like Bill Gates—who wish to leave a mark on history do not busy themselves with loading their life with the material trappings of wealth, but grow in spirit. They lead lives of constant endeavour to attain something greater and nobler than themselves. In spiritual archery, only when we aim at the heavens can we be at all able to shoot the tree. Life, like the flowing waters of a stream, retains its freshness only when in aspiration it keeps on moving forward.

19 MEDITATION AND THE FORCES OF LIFE

Meditation helps our soul constantly bathe itself in the sunshine of the spirit.

P ROBABLY THE MOST ASKED QUESTION of all is, What is the purpose of life? A vast variety of answers are offered. Some say that the meaning of life is in service through surrender of the self and self-sacrifice; others that the meaning of life lies in delight and enjoyment before death takes it away. Some contend that life is about preparing for the eternal life beyond the grave; others that its purpose is the approach to non-existence. Many claim that the meaning of life is developing and organizing life on earth. And there are those who assert that it is impossible to know the meaning of life. One thing strikes me hard, as I ponder these different conceptions of the meaning of life. All these schools of thought endeavour to ascertain the meaning of life outside of life itself. I think if one thinks deeply, one would find that the meaning of life is not to be found outside of life. Shakespeare rightly explained that ‘ripeness is all’. Or as John Keats regarded it, this world is a ‘vale of Soulmaking’. This leads me to believe that personal perfection is in each individual’s own hands. In order to master life’s forces and harness them to greater purpose, we must cultivate our ability to concentrate. For that we begin by muting our involuntary psychic activity, the continual friction of thinking, feeling, and acting. The productivity of our intellectual apparatus depends, more than anything else, on how we use our energy. We must guard against using our energy like the blind scorpion that stings every object it comes across. Nothing helps more than meditation in integrating a man into a significant whole. Meditation liberates us from mindless thinking and takes us from one level of life to another. Descending within ourselves, we discover the wealth of

mindfulness that lies buried under our mechanical ways of regarding things.

The usual wisdom of the distinction between head and heart or intellect and emotions creates a lot of confusion. No psychological state is exclusively intellectual or emotional. In a state of conflict, it is only one emotion that triumphs over another emotion; it is never intellect over emotion or vice versa. Emotion is the experienced state of being that helps us realize our ideas. All emotions assist knowledge. For example, without experiencing the emotion of love we can never understand how a mother feels for her child. Or without ever experiencing devotion that liberates us from fear and self, we cannot hope to understand what the martyrs of Karbala felt and did on the Day of Ashura in October 680 CE. Karbala offers the perfect example of how the personal element can be detached in enhancing consciousness and the power of emotions. On the contrary, the more that personal elements dominate emotional life, the higher the possibility of delusion. The value of an emotion lies in the idea it realizes. Hence the prayer of a liberated spirit is described by Ali ibn Abi Talib as a serene contemplation of God that is neither emotional nor intellectual, but a fusion of the two in submission to the Almighty. Hence, all contemplation and concentration on a movement of thought that enables the ego to move within is an act of prayer. A solely ceremonial bowing before an invisible power cannot be described as an act of prayer; our faith must manifest itself in the living experience of reverence before all that is great and good in our universe. Awe inspired by understanding is much more valuable than awe in ignorance. This cautions us to be precise in our nature of belief. Belief is an essential part of human life, and it’s impossible to conceive of a normal person who does not believe in something. An integrated person’s outward behaviour is a complete reflection of that belief. Belief is an occurrence of finite consciousness, for infinite consciousness has everything visible to it and thus does not need to believe. Similarly, a theory is not a belief and can only be transformed into a belief by a mind with a certain attitude towards it. A theory—like the Theory of Evolution—is the academic attitude of the human mind towards a subject based on established knowledge about it. It is open both to further development and correction. On the other hand, one may believe in

something without taking it to be theoretically true. For example, some people know there are no evil spirits that are responsible for their miseries. But yet, they believe in amulets that promise to chase such spirits away. That is so because belief arises from the depth of our being, and hence can stir our souls to help us rise above ourselves. However, for a rational mind the spirit of questioning is awake, and no belief is itted without being backed by a theoretical explanation. Rational people are reluctant to relapse into primitive modes of approaching the ideal. They want to march forward in the way of knowledge by thinking, contemplating, questioning, and evaluating their thoughts in a logical manner before they start forming a belief. Therefore, it is not the unfounded powers of primeval belief but the forces of a well-spoken intellectual mind that can help us on our path. Modern man’s heart of awareness lies not in blindly accepting any way of life but in understanding. A fusion of prayer and meditation leads us to metaphysical insight closer to the source of life. Intellect, and not intuition, is the instrument of our spiritual perception. A richer awareness of our status and destiny is what helps our evolution. The times for blind belief in and adherence to an unintelligent philosophy of life are long gone. Rationality in prayer and meditation is the determinant factor.

Modern knowledge about the human personality further emphasizes the value of meditation. The ‘I’ as a nucleus of conscious personality represents only a thin slice. Consciousness of the sort we are directly aware of is not a very important determinant of our personality; it reflects it only casually and incidentally. It is the deepest layer of our personality that we share with each other and that s for our patterns of behaviours. Our consciousness is merely the uppermost tip of the pyramid that is our psychic life. Meditation helps us to exploit our consciousness to reach the innermost depths of our personality, which form the common denominator of human life. It is from this common reservoir that great minds and great acts draw nourishment and inspiration. This probably is the reason why Newton and Leibnitz discovered calculus at around the same time; Darwin, Hebert Spencer, and Lamarck discovered the law of biological evolution almost contemporaneously; and twentieth-century psychologists Freud, Jung, and Adler broke new ground in the fields of

psychoanalysis and analytic psychology. This phenomenon of simultaneous discoveries by different individuals working in different places and circumstances is explained by the fact that each of us is rooted in the same basic psychic soil where new ideas are washed ashore with time by the waves in the ocean of collective humanity. The emergence of these ideas is like a fish in water that is caught by those who lie in wait. Great thinkers in a state of perpetual watchfulness are able to identify and elucidate these ideas in the language of their time because they are in intimacy with the deepest layers of their personality. By letting their consciousness connect with the collective human consciousness, great thinkers let out contents that are crying to appear in the exhibition of time. This process is accelerated by meditation. The better we concentrate, the more sharply we perceive. At the peak of the powers of concentration and perception, a man becomes the voice of the spirit of his age—like Socrates, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Ghalib, Darwin, Newton, Einstein. Such people are possessed by true ideas and seem to be used by the Higher Powers for the communication of higher truth. Meditation can help any of us to integrate our personality into the full range of psychic contents instead of living on the surface of personality. Meditation helps our soul constantly bathe itself in the sunshine of the spirit, ponder over our unique role in the scheme of things, and suck like an infant at the motherly bosom of the infinite. Meditation purifies our being in a world that is too full of corrupting influences and enticing temptations. Meditation helps us stay above the undignified taints of worldly intrigue. Meditation equips us to live serenely in the midst of day-to-day cacophony and nourishes our moral virility for growing in spiritual stature at every opportunity. Through meditation we enhance the process of our personal evolution and comprehend the meaning and worth of life more quickly. Whatever strengthens the forces of life also ensures moral progress. There are many ways to meditate, which those interested can learn and follow. But in essence, all meditation consists in regulating consciousness to keep it in an unmoving state. For this purpose, some methods find it useful to focus on an external object, some recommend focusing on an idea, and some other involve delving into the nothingness. But undoubtedly meditation harnesses our power of concentration, which is the real engine of our psychic mechanism.

20 FREE EXPRESSION AND THE MODERN MEDIA

When the light of freedom enters, the night of ignorance and bigotry disappears.

O F THE IMPORTANT MEDIA OF information in our age, mention must be made of TV and the Internet. In every age, representative social characters become not only bearers of cultural tradition but also assist in the direction of cultural evolution. In that sense, it is the TV anchor and journalist who, in my opinion, more than anyone else, embody the dominant type of our age. It is they who have the power to fashion, for good or for evil, the public mood and information. Especially in countries where the media is basking in the glory of its newfound freedom, a great deal depends on the manner and the spirit in which the media wields that power and plays its expanded role. We have recently witnessed an unprecedented upsurge in individual liberty. Fundamental human rights are understood and enforced more widely than ever before. It is established wisdom that man cannot be regarded as mere means; mankind is an end-in-itself. The dignity and worth of the human personality and the belief in equal rights have become shared articles of faith common to all rational humans. With this comes the responsibility to regard the human personality as something sacred that must not be exploited under any pretext. A farrago of false information undermines the human capacity for clear thinking. Now that the right to be informed is widely accepted and exercised, with the freedom to inform comes the responsibility to correct what is false or distorted. Individuals must be freely allowed to play their role in the society. But the human mind, particularly in its early developmental years, is prone to be impressed by the blarney of the ideology it is born into. Freedom of information necessarily implies freedom of expression, so that any

matter can be viewed from different perspectives. Unfortunately, free expression is still deeply affected by pressure groups in countries that boast a free media. While in some countries, one is under tremendous pressure not to be wrongly accused of being ‘homophobic’ or ‘anti-Semitic’, for instance, in countries like Pakistan freedom of expression takes a back seat to the care that must be shown in discussing some militant Islamist groups. These elements, on the contrary, are free to declare their hostility to the state or any of its subjects. And by recourse to terror and other subterranean devices, they can undermine the foundations of established powers within the state. The cause of the freedom of expression has triumphed in modern times because it is now evident that no progress is possible unless people are allowed to express their opinions freely. If the archaic religious, political, or economic order continues to carry the day in a society, it is only because ideas that challenge the foundations of that order have not yet been allowed. When the light of freedom enters, the night of ignorance and bigotry disappears. Little wonder, therefore, that exponents of narrow-minded religious interpretations shudder in the face of freedom of thought, although they are prepared to ignore the march of powerful terrorists across their frontiers. No opinion can be assumed to be true without subjecting it to refutation. Complete permission to challenge our opinions is the precondition for justifying our assumption of their truth for the purpose of action. On no other can a rational human mind have any assurance of being right in a matter. A rational conviction can only be secured by the fact that it has been freely and fully appealed but has not been shaken. Similarly, the opinion of minorities often represents neglected interests that must be heeded by any decent society. The onslaught of knowledge on the shoulder of ubiquitous media has indeed come as a shock to many self-complacent religious and other philosophies, dislocating the hitherto solid corpus of irrational and one-sided opinions. Huge residues, though, have withstood the erosion simply because popular opinion in the society wants them.

So much about the freedom of individuals to express their opinion. Now a word about the position of the modern media in this dynamic. With the ubiquity of television and increasing use of Internet and social media, the freedom of

ordinary individuals to express themselves can no longer be effectively curbed. The popularity of electronic media, however, does not mean that it has extra privileges, as some anchors seem to think. Such freedom as the media now enjoys is not only because of the removal of restrictions, but also due to the recently entrenched tradition whereby public opinion has to tolerate all opinions as long as they do not cause damage to individuals or endanger a minority. Faced with pressures such as those discussed above, when the media fails to guide public opinion, it then sets itself up to be exploited as an instrument for defeating the freedom of expression. The power of media, as we all know, is enormous. In countries like Pakistan and India, it is probably the most powerful unarmed institution. It can work as an instrument of sanitizing public life, of chastening public taste, and of leading the way in settling questions of public significance. On the other hand, it can demean itself by pandering to low and vulgar tastes and by profiting from the sensational. This was surely not as important in the past, when the media was mostly limited to the press and had limited power in most countries. With power must come, hand in hand, a sense of responsibility. In developed countries, the offending media is consigned to the judgement of public opinion. But in countries where public opinion itself is too weak to act as a powerful brake, the responsibility of the media is doubled. It must not only exercise its powers conscientiously but also guide and instruct public opinion on important issues such as the spectre of religious extremism. Efforts should be invested in building public opinion that will redound to the credit of the country and society. People act upon the picture that is created by the reporting they receive on events. With individuality still not asserted and respected at all levels in our societies, public opinion is nothing but a forceful expression of our social and political environment, the making of which is exploited or misinformed at various grassroots levels. This public opinion, in the last resort, is moulded by the media. The world as it figures in the perception of twenty-first-century man is radically different from the world our predecessors were able to perceive. Events from all over the world are broadcast immediately. Anything of importance that happened while we were asleep is reported to us while we are having our breakfast. Nothing is too irrelevant or too remote for the modern media to capture. With

hundreds of channels competing, everything is news and what was news before is now a scoop. Live reporting provides us with the luxury of checking the factual veracity, at the least. But considerable data on which our thinking and judgement depends is supplied by the media. The complexity of our political, social, and economic problems cannot be fully comprehended by the common man. Here the TV anchor intervenes, trying to explain the intricate in a simple and easily understandable way. An anchor who has a flair for incisive expression has an unbounded opportunity to influence us. The writers of serious books on current topics can no longer compete with TV and social media in influencing public opinion. Their works are too long-winded for the impatient reader. We are eager to be taught, in a short time, the gist of their contribution rather than soaking in the beauty of their expression and the logic of their argument. Most of us are left with no temperament to read original works on important topics. We are content to pick up prevailing opinions from the TV or the Internet. Our attitude resembles that of the resident of a house who, when awakened by a neighbour with the cry ‘Wake up and run, a flood has entered the town!’ before preparing to leave switched on the TV to see how serious the problem was. And then, before fleeing for his life, updated his Facebook status.

We are lucky in that the modern media affords us a direct perception of the events as they unfold. However, we are still hugely dependent on media analyses for our perception of what our eyes see occurring. Our view is ultimately determined by our estimate of the veracity of a particular news channel or commentator, and the extent to which we deem a report to be unbiased. Needless to say, our notion of unbiased is often just a means to feed our ‘confirmation biases’. Take any contemporary situation, say, the recent coup in Egypt or the war in Syria. In each case, our reaction is based not upon a direct perception of the events but upon the picture that is created in our mind by the spoken or electronic word presented by the media we follow. The power that journalists have today makes it important for them to have an intellectual background to appreciate the historical and social significance of the

events they cover. Also, in addition to informing us, modern TV journalists must be able to amuse and entertain us without transgressing the limits of fair and accurate reporting. Journalists in our age must have a universal mind and a capacity for contemplating the totality of the social environment in which a given event is cast. In order to provide meaningful coverage, they must know the whole picture. Their viewpoint must never be narrow and parochial. There is also a need for democratizing the media in some countries. For instance, in today’s Pakistan, major channels and newspapers are owned by a few select individuals who can air or express what they wish in the name of the public opinion. It is thus, in some cases, the mere fact of a thing being reported by the media channels that confers on it the status of public opinion. This monopolistic situation of media ownership must be corrected before the media in a country can be made truly broad-based and democratic.

21 THE ART OF PUBLIC SPEAKING

We have to make sure that our speech is loaded with meaning.

T HE CHARM OF THE SPOKEN word, like the melody and harmony of music, has a way of penetrating our souls. No script can enshrine the full allure of the spoken word of a master. Its appeal, force, and warmth are diminished without the heart of the speaker breathing life in it. The spoken word has been the most potent agent propelling the progress of mankind. Imagine the impact of the few words that Heraclitus spoke, the revolution wrought by a few utterances of Socrates, the inspiration of a few sayings of Buddha, the force of a few moral precepts of Christ, or the endless resonance of Imam Hussain’s words spoken in several instances on the day of Ashura. Indeed, their words have meant a lot more to mankind than the countless volumes written through the ages on those words. The force of their message lies in the fact that all of the speakers were supremely evolved and impeccably integrated personalities. Their word derived its value from the depths from whence it sprang. Were not all the significant ideological movements prompted by the words spoken by their pioneers in a certain manner and in harmony with the pulse of the moment in history?

I have always been intrigued as to what elements animate the speech of a great orator, which cannot be embalmed in the written word to the same effect. I have had the opportunity to listen to and observe some of the great orators—some of them posthumously. These include the likes of Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Mahatma Gandhi, Abul Kalam Azad, Allama Rasheed Turabi, and many others. A study of such

consummate speakers helps one to appreciate the art of speaking in public. What makes a great orator, a skilled debater, or an engaging conversationalist? Based on my observation of great speakers, it is this: great speakers are those who have the knack of establishing a direct communion between themselves and their audience, to the extent that when they speak their listeners find the meaning beneath their words more appealing than the words. This ensures that the perception of meaning becomes the paramount phenomenon. It is not just about the words uttered by the speaker, it is about the process that links up the soul of the speaker with that of the listeners. Thus, for the listener, the ideas and thoughts enshrined in the words are what matters in understanding what the speaker is attempting to convey. It is not the fireworks of high-sounding epithets but the meaning that strikes us. How great speakers strike communion with their audience cannot be understood through an intellectual investigation. It is as mysterious as a great musical symphony. As A.G. Gardiner explains, art is about creating the maximum effect with the minimum effort. Great art derives its power and impact by discarding the unessential. Ghalib’s one ghazal can freeze our blood, whereas a lesser poet may have to write a whole book to create half the effect. Artists reveal through their ability to penetrate deep into the heart of things. I tend to equate oratory to music. Both require the mastery of means before the ability to express. So what can one glean from great orators about the art of public speaking? First of all, a good speaker must have an excellent command of the language and mastery over the subject matter, and must be completely attuned with the thought content of the age. This, plus a cultivated voice and endearing style, constitute the mastery of the means as a prelude to the creation of effect through the art. Breadth of vision illuminated by depth of feelings lends clarity to the speech. A speaker worthy of respect must be factually accurate and comprehensive. Especially in our age, when facts can be easily verified, a speaker has to acquire all relevant details about the subject. The more your speech is loaded with compelling facts, the more your powerful ideas will inspire your listeners.

Politics is the most fertile field for powerful oratory; therefore, most of the

renowned public speakers have been politicians. Political speech ranges from mesmerizing oratory, to inspiring conviction in public, to debating skills for presenting the party viewpoint in the legislature, to the facility of persuasion for advocating one’s interest at the negotiating table. In any country where democratic institutions are rife, there is a great deal of opportunity for public speaking. However, in some countries the art of oratory is yet to be cultivated. For example, I have not seen many talented public speakers in Pakistan. The utterances of mass speakers in Pakistan are often cheap and useless. They are long on rhetoric and short on substance and, more often than not, badly researched and poorly delivered. Most public speeches are devoid of any new or powerful idea. Our politicians are not much different from our religious speakers. They do not, with some respectable exceptions, speak with the object of informing the public mind and providing it with the bearings to reach conclusions on its own. Most of our religious and political speakers shout in an unrefined manner just to win public applause. Their speeches are not focused on what their listeners need but on what they want. Their emotionally charged discourse appeals to the superficial layers of people’s religious or political consciousness. They incite and misguide, instead of focusing people’s minds on the great and the good. Very few have the will to rise above the temptation to win cheap applause and chasten and purify the public taste. In order to rouse the hearts of their audiences to their depths, speakers must themselves have a noble heart of their own that serves the higher cause of truth. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words, we must heed ‘what the years and the centuries say against the hours’. We must be founded in the eternal verities of life. As Nelson Mandela’s life shows us, the bigger the man, the richer the quality of his soul, and greater the level of life he has attained, the stronger is fated to be his appeal and more enduring the effect of the words he chooses to utter. There is no persuasion in the word of a perfidious person, except for what is ugly in life, such as bigotry, ignorance, and hatred. Of such people, we have a glut, unfortunately. Nobility of character allows one to use the rare gift of public speaking in the service of a higher cause. Such people employ this gift to educate and elevate those around them. Such speakers are rare, I hear you mutter. Yes, indeed, but these rare people are the ones who matter the most in human history.

To me the foremost thing about speaking in public is that we must not speak unless we have something to say. Wagging the tongue or babbling is not in itself speech; even animals have the faculty to make noise to draw attention to themselves. We have to make sure that our speech is loaded with meaning, so that our attention is riveted on the meaning of what we have to say while we speak. Only then can we choose the best words for the meaning we are seeking to suggest. Approached like this, speaking becomes an uplifting endeavour and a spiritual experience. Then we have to be clear and avoid being vague or obscure. In order to be clear, we must speak in the logical order of the content—chronological, arithmetical, analytically progressive, and so on. This keeps the audience’s interest alive and helps them follow us point by point. Speakers who are suffering from confusion of thought or lack of knowledge cannot cover it up with enigmatic phraseology. However, in negotiations, sometime it helps to be obscure with a clear purpose in mind. None of the great speakers I have observed deliver their speeches to impress the listeners with their mastery of words. Such ornamental speech is of no enduring worth. Yes, good speakers do use words like embroidery, to enhance the value of speech they stitch together—but never as a substitute for substance. While in Pakistan the desire to impress is unfortunately often synonymous with the desire to persuade and convince, the two are not the same. Great speech is about strong, simple, and concrete words. Lengthy rhetorical perorations are worthless in the hustle and bustle of our world today. We can use our peculiar strengths to save our speech from dullness. For example, some of us have a good command of poetry, some are masters at recounting anecdotes, some tell personal stories with flair, and some excel at telling humorous stories and jokes. However, one must know and draw upon one’s strength instead of trying every trick in the trade. But let’s always be short and relevant. Modern minds don’t forgive irrelevant arguments and unrelated anecdotes. Still, being dull is of greater detriment to a speaker than being irrelevant. We must also know to adjust the sound and speed of our delivery according to

our content, train of thought, and audience. Great speakers know to strike a natural rhythm between the minds of the listeners and the mind of the speaker. I personally hate speakers reading from a written text, except when it is warranted for formal reasons. To me they are public readers and not public speakers, and I have no interest in their reading skills. They may as well e-mail me what they have to say. Lastly, speakers must know when to stop, completely in tune with the appetite, interest, and patience of their listeners. And so should writers!

22 THE JOY OF READING

The pleasure of reading that involved serenity, privacy, and contemplation is now a fading trade.

I had just taken to reading. I had just discovered the art of leaving my body to sit imive in a crumpled up attitude in a chair or sofa, while I wandered over the hills and far away in novel company and new scenes. … My world began to expand very rapidly … the reading habit had got me securely.

—H.G. Wells

W HILE I AM BECOMING INCREASINGLY good at not getting any reading done, I sometimes rue the almost-complete loss of my habit of reading regularly. That habit involved staring at the first few words on the first page until first the lines and then the pages began to make sense, and then thinking about them until I had my own interpretation of what I read. There is no substitute for reading a book even if, more than ever, we seem to be losing the knack. Instead, we have learnt the art of faking cultural literacy. As Karl Taro Greenfield recently wrote in the New York Times: ‘What we all feel now is the constant pressure to know enough, at all times, lest we be revealed as culturally illiterate. … What matters to us, awash in petabytes of data, is not necessarily having actually consumed this content first-hand but simply knowing that it exists.’ This is not, however, something entirely new. Book lovers of the past also accumulated a lot more than they could read. Arthur Schopenhauer said some

170 years ago, ‘One usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents.’ Recently there was a thread of Facebook posts where people asked their friends to name their ten favourite books. When I was asked to do so, I first drew up a list of potential names. As I sat down to shortlist them, I realized that I had unconsciously picked a number of books of which I had at best read just a small part but, on occasion, had lied about reading. I am sure many others have been guilty of doing the same at various points. My generation and a few generations on either side have probably consumed the largest number of books in history, because of books becoming more accessible and affordable than ever while we still had time and ion for paper. Logically the cheap mass availability of e-books should mean that now we read more books than ever before. But that is not the case, because the perennial desire to look more intelligent and informed than we are, coupled with a surfeit of knowledge and text in the digital age, has meant that we increasingly lack the time and drive to engage with anything more than a few lines befitting tweets or Facebook status updates. Also, the Internet has made it so much easier to pretend without having really experienced. The pleasure of reading that involved serenity, privacy, and contemplation is now a fading trade. Books that require true effort are now read less. Man Booker prize winner Eleanor Catton says, ‘Consumerism, requiring its products to be both endlessly desirable and endlessly disposable, cannot make sense of art, which is neither.’ Books like Pride and Prejudice or War and Peace are not meant to be whizzed through. They are intended to deepen our soul and to help us discover the rush of excitement and recognition that occurs when we look up from a great book and think: Yes, the world is like that.

I miss the good old days of sound reading habits when we kept our opinions, in any matter, to ourselves until we were sure what they were. How I wish I could find that commitment again. How I wish I could rediscover the temperament to sit in libraries imbued with a profound silence that made reading irresistible. In intimacy, with the tête-à-tête attention they merit, books are not tools to withdraw from the world, but rather to understand and interact with it. Now, I

have noticed, I have trouble sitting down to read. It is not a malfunction of desire but of focus; the capacity to calm my mind long enough to dwell in someone else’s world and to let that someone else dwell in mine. And my distractions are rarely, if ever, of enduring significance but rather the usual continuing frivolities. Reading is the only art in which we let ourselves merge with the consciousness of another person. While we possess the books we read, they possess us also, filling us with ideas and feelings and, to that extent, becoming a part of us. Books help us grow by affording us access to experience other than ours. But for that to happen, we need a certain calm, which is elusive in a world where every routine is tweeted and d on Facebook. We are the product of a culture that makes reacting quickly more important than thinking. Books slow us down, and that’s why we are wary of them. Where novelty is an imperative, books don’t matter because, by their nature, books are never new enough. I, for instance, am constantly preyed upon by the intrusion of the buzz, the murmur, that there is something out there that demands my attention—something on e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, or the Internet—when in fact it is nothing but the anxiety of our age. In a world that requires us to know everything instantly, it is difficult to give ourselves the space to contemplate. That is where reading becomes so important, because it requires that space. Charles Bowden writes in his book Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: ‘I cannot feel alert unless I push past the point where I have control.’ William James once said, ‘My experience is what I agree to attend to.’ These statements in the context of reading remind me that reading is an activity that helps us both escape and be engaged at the same time. You lose control, but you are more in with yourself and more aware of where you belong in a world of limitless choices, prospects, and distractions.

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

—Anna Quindlen

23 READING TO PURPOSE IN THE INTERNET AGE

The Internet can be useful if we use it not to lose ourselves but to recover ourselves.

C HALLENGED BY THE DIGITAL AGE, one thing I have learnt is that reading, like any other valuable activity, must not be reduced to a dull mechanical level. It must be directed to some well-defined purpose. I have observed that about 70% of our reading is now done on the Internet, from emails to e-books. For the digital generations, the proportion may be much higher. And it is clear that aimless and undiscerning reading is likely to harm the full development of a person’s mental powers. Now that reading is easier than ever, it is not the quantity of the online words that we consume but the quality of our mental attentiveness and our capacity to assimilate that counts. So many folks are untiring readers, reading millions of words per week, and yet they have the emptiest of minds. It is a function of what they choose to read and how they read it. Many people spend hours on the Internet simply killing time. They say that when they have nothing better to do, they might just as well spend their time on social media and read whatever is handy. For them the Internet becomes an escape into an airy nothingness that helps them lose touch with the ugly realities of life. Hence, in a sense, the Internet becomes an addiction—like drinking or use of narcotics—with a goal to cease to be conscious and to escape into oblivion. Often late into night, these s of the Internet scour the web with no other purpose than to prepare the way for the onset of sleep. Addiction to the Internet is a dangerous habit. Spending hours on the Internet just for the sake of killing time atrophies the mind. One thing that life has taught me is that time can never be killed. Its age across our being steadily brings

the inevitable closer when we ‘are to dust equal made’. While death is the end, life is about avoiding accepting the grave as the goal of our life by becoming ever more mindful and fully conscious of life’s potentials. Awareness, and not ignorance, is the ideal of life.

Being sucked in by the Internet from mere habit hampers the evolution of our mental life. Knowledge energizes life; it makes us aware of our place and obligations and equips us with the capacity to construct effective action on the ever-changing concourse of the environment. When reading, instead of increasing our knowledge, guides us away from a conscious use of time, it is not an activity worth treasuring. Such reading on the Internet and social media entails useless expenditure of human energy and prevents us from putting our time to the best possible use. In order to develop a proper approach to reading on the Internet, to begin with, one must be clear about the function of the material one is called upon to read. The Internet is full of the literature of information that makes objective statements about the world we live in, about the discoveries made by man, about the art of living, about the progress of scientific knowledge, and about the laws of moral and historical order. These are empirical or synthetic judgements (in the words of Kant) that inform us of all that is around us so that we engineer appropriate action to secure the adjustment of our life with the ecology in which our lot is cast. The securing of this adjustment is a biological necessity, and the very essence of our individual and collective life. However, one has to be careful about the information that is important from one’s individual or collective perspective, instead of assimilating information that is of no real consequence to one’s life or well-being. We also need to be mindful of the credibility of the source of information and avoid spending our time on dubious sources. One must view the Internet as a great source with ready access to the condensed essence of the wisdom of the ages and cultures. The Internet has made it much easier for us to gain access to the vast storehouse of learning over the course of human history and to be the custodian of this heritage of mankind. By bringing growing minds into with this heritage, the Internet has made it easier than we ever imagined to secure the transmission of the cultural and intellectual

heritage of mankind from area to area and from generation to generation. When it comes to the literature of power, the Internet can be a double-edged sword. While it can help us explore the truth, it is also an effective tool for consolidating and deepening our biases and preconceived notions. One must be careful and discerning. For me the test of useful spiritual literature is that instead of sharpening our differences, it pins our attention on the eternal truths of life and helps us attune ourselves to the infinite. It directs our attention to the intangible, gives us a universal viewpoint, and inculcates in us those internal resources needed to appreciate and enjoy life in its true sense. For an objective mind, the Internet makes it convenient to perceive the relative value, worth, and truth of things and philosophies. When used with purpose, the Internet can educate us in the art of living well; it lubricates the rough mechanism of modern-day social life and makes us feel at home in an increasingly impersonal world. However, in order to make a productive use of the Internet, readers must develop two sharply defined attitudes. First, we must be very clear what we are about. Outside of business purposes, the Internet is valuable for networking with friends, but its real worth comes through as a medium of education. We must realize that the minutes or hours that we invest in the Internet every day must be invested wisely to get good dividends over a period of time. Second, we must use the Internet to read productively in order to learn as much as possible about important subjects of interest. Hence, our use of the Internet must either educate and enrich us or otherwise constitute a good use of our time. We must have the discipline and moral courage to shun material that is meant to beguile us into blind alleys of crude thoughts, unreasonable beliefs, and perverse bigotry. Thanks to the Internet, the amount of literature available to each of us has reached proportions that were beyond our imagination just three decades ago. Therefore, more than ever before, we are called upon to choose that which we ought to read. Given abundant opportunities to waste time, this choice is by no means an easy affair. It requires skill and discipline. I think today it must be an important aim of early education to teach kids how to use the Internet productively for themselves. Hence, kids will know to select consciously and with purpose from its immense pasture. It is for the teacher to use the Internet as an effective tool to implant in the student an early love for reading.

The Internet is also a helpful tool for discovering what each one of us is designed to assimilate. There is no need to read everything that comes our way; instead, we must keep loyal to our choices based on our predilections and needs. We must use the Internet to relate to common denominators of human thinking and feeling instead of creating biases and enhancing hatred. Right moral bearings act as a prophylactic of our taste on the Internet, just as in every other choice we make in life. For a serious reader, an unlimited storehouse of guidance and inspiration is available. It is by the judicious use of the Internet that we come to discover minds akin our own and establish an affinity leading to purpose.

The Internet has brought all the great minds to my desk—minds that are for all people, for all times, and for all occasions. It is always uplifting to go to one of them, when I can. Minds from Socrates to Ali ibn Abi Talib to Ghalib come to my rescue when I am let down by everything else. I feel comforted by their healing influence. To have discovered a few of these souls as kindred spirits is a remarkable achievement that the Internet offers to a thoughtful reader. Thus the Internet can be useful if we use it not to lose ourselves but to recover ourselves. We must use it with the fullness of our being and with a desire to douse our consciousness. If we adopt this attitude, we will be able get a lot more out of the Internet than mindlessly letting it devour our valuable time. And last but not the least, please avoid opinionated and semi-literate narcissists plying their ego or ignorance on Facebook and other social media. The Internet is not the place to collect trolls, and your Facebook or Twitter platforms are no window ledges to be crammed full of these cyber-trolls. The Internet, like any technology, is a tool; it is not entirely a neutral one, but very much gives us the ability to determine how we use it. The tool is in our hands and we get to decide what we do with it. It is like the invention of the printing press. People claimed that it would cause the destruction of society; such were its supposed evils. Everybody had to learn to choose what they wanted to read. The invention of the automobile brought similar concerns with it. We get to choose to drive safely and enhance life and to save ourselves from reckless and irresponsible drivers. More recently the advent

of the cell phone was followed by similar grave concerns about its negative uses. The moral and conscious obligation is not primarily on the tool, it is on us. Putting the tool down does not fix anything, it just leaves us behind. Change comes from learning to handle the tool productively, day in and day out. Go on and use the Internet to enrich your life and your spirit.

24 MORAL ACTION: FROM KNOWLEDGE TO WISDOM

A sage and a child both have a relationship of perfect harmony with the world.

M ORAL ACTION IS DRIVEN BY our desires in relation to the objectives that we consider as ‘good’. Even though we all pursue our desires, how do we know, in the event of conflicting desires, which way to go? This conflict can pertain to one individual or to the desire of one person against that of another for a similar objective. We all know that in a world that knows no scarcity, there would be little problem of evil. But in a world of struggle and toil, strife and tears are normal. Not to desire is to cease to live; hence, the best solution is to transcend the desire, as explained by Ali ibn Abi Talib. We can only transcend by knowing the relative value of desires to determine what is morally more valuable. Ali says that choice is the function of knowledge, as it informs and guides the will. Another view, advocated by Buddha, is to seek Nirvana by achieving the extinction of desire. The problem here is that the extinction of desire is itself a desire, and the desire thus remains. What, then, is the goal of moral endeavour? We must answer this question in order to determine the moral worth of conflicting desires. Conventionally, the end of moral action was the perfection of the individual and the achievement of self-realization. Then ethical idealism was reconciled with the pursuit of happiness and pleasure. Hence, utilitarian thought talked about the greatest good of the greatest number. With the progress of biological sciences, it evolved further into ‘the promotion of the welfare of the race’. With the current level of human progress and liberation of the intellect, the problem of morality cannot be regarded in the manner of traditional societies. With the theistic foundations of moral action undermined, we have to redefine

moral law in consonance with scientific knowledge. Supernatural sanctions of moral obligations are no longer regarded seriously, and it no longer avails the modern man that we need to be ‘good’ just to please our Creator. Inducing belief in the supernatural creates scepticism in the modern mind, which is cultured to believe based on evidence. Indeed, there are those who truly believe in a Supreme Being as the preserver of the moral order. For them, the moral problem does not pose any tormenting questions. They look to do His will. However, a large section of the present-day world is not satisfied that any such Power exists. For them, a ground has to be discovered to justify moral action, as the threat of supernatural sanctions will not do.

Scientists are the first to acknowledge that the findings of the modern sciences are not final. Scientific knowledge progresses on shifting conclusions and transformed findings. Thus a scientific knowledge of human nature is not sufficient. However, certain recognized truths are now viewed as incontestable. We can start with them to establish what is right in human conduct and what is wrong. Modern biology and psychology teach us that the age within an individual’s life span from infancy to maturity is about dominance of momentary pleasure and pain giving way to the control of reality. This makes one’s life a process of securing adjustment between the external environment and one’s internal processes. The constant change in the environment, though, demands that individuals understand its laws and behaviour to be able to design intelligent conduct that can meet all possibilities. This is further complicated by the fact that we ourselves are also changing biologically and psychologically from childhood to old age. Moreover, with the growth of experience and knowledge, the inner life of an individual becomes more elaborate and complex. The power of instinct gives way to the power of consciousness. The challenge, therefore, is to integrate our internal world with our external world to secure permanent moral bearings. Widening and deepening of consciousness is a blessing. The Prophet of Islam’s prayer till his last moment was ‘O God! Increase my knowledge.’ Only by the

light of higher consciousness can adults rediscover that state of bliss which was theirs in their life of instinct as children. A sage and a child both have a relationship of perfect harmony with the world; they don’t expect anything of world which it cannot give. Both of them are at peace within and without. But with a child, that relationship is unconscious; with a sage, it is conscious. The sage has reached a richer harmony with all that is there through conscious endeavour. This adjustment is the goal of moral effort. Walter Lippmann has rightly said that the process of growing lies in a revision of our desires in accordance with our understanding of reality. The choice lies in either fleeing reality by taking refuge in delusion or seeking fusion with reality. Only the second attitude is positive, because no one can flee reality in the absolute sense. In the end we cannot escape from ourselves; no measure of intoxication or daydreaming does the trick. Therefore, in the absolute sense, there is no such thing as running away from life. Asceticism is a method of overcoming immaturity. It can be used only as a temporary measure for the education of soul. Where consciousness has succeeded in synchronizing desires with reality, asceticism is not needed. A positive attitude consists in becoming detached, understanding reality, and being aware of one’s limitations. Understanding is a creative process. When we understand something, we are no longer its slave. A profound understanding of reality transforms it. For example, a trained musician hears in music what the untrained can’t hear. It is the transforming power of creative understanding that shapes a new world for us. Human character is a complex thing. And often, we participate in adult affairs with the attitude and manners of a child. The real purpose of education is to attain harmony of the internal with the external life and help us grow beyond the child in us. An evolved mind sees things in their proper perspective and is aware of its limitations. Human history is testimony to the fact that people having to deal with a world for which they are not inwardly prepared leads to misery. Hence, I argue that it is possible for each one of us to form a harmonious relationship with reality through the help of knowledge. Similarly, our morality also has to seek adjustment to the world of reality through conformity to different codes of behaviour in different situations of life. In order to live life

intently and to its fullest potential, we must boldly face the varying demands it places on us during its course. There is no such thing as a practical guide to living. What we need the most to live life to its fullest potential is wisdom. Wisdom is not merely understanding the mystery of life; it is the ability to apply to the practical details of everyday living the universal principles of wise and noble conduct. Only knowledge that leads to wisdom expands man’s outlook on the ultimate questions of life for living a noble and valuable life.

25 A TRIBUTE TO ART AND LITERATURE

Art delivers our imagination from the limitations of time and space.

P OWER OF EXPRESSION—OUR ABILITY TO express what we experience deep inside—is God’s great gift to man. And the quality of our experience depends on the quality of life inside us, as explained by Plato: ‘It is not the eye that sees, it is the “I” that sees.’ As Longinus has said, ‘Great accents are expected to fall from the lips of those whose thoughts are dignified.’ This is the nature of creative process that lies at the root of great art. The relatively poor quality of contemporary art lies in the fact that artists create not so much to relieve themselves of the fullness of their art but to produce what brings the most money. No wonder there is hardly any inspired speech to be seen among the volumes of words that assail man from all sides, from the Internet to electronic media to the printed word. Commercial motives and mechanical brains are not the recipe to produce a Milton. Economics, and not aesthetics, represents the primary impulse of modern history. Everything now has to be judged by the test of economic success. Being a bestseller is the gauge. And the bestseller must give to mankind not what it needs but what it wants by pandering to its insecurities, lower tastes, or psychological desires. Whither the writings that radiate light and warmth for the hearts that are waiting to receive them?

Depth of experience is essential for great expression. When I say, for instance, ‘Based on what I saw, Wolofs in Senegal are tall people’, the statement is open for further examination. Someone who is sceptical about my statement can contradict me by saying that he has himself been to Senegal and did not find that

Wolofs were taller than normal. But he cannot validly deny the truth of my statement by saying that he came across a few Wolof people in Senegal who were very short. This is so because my statement is not made in a scientific sense but is a generalization based on immediate experience. It is perhaps common experience with those who begin to see that which harshly challenges the character of the real thing they see. Othello, influenced by powerful jealousy, sees much more in the fall of Desdemona’s handkerchief than could have been seen by a detached observer. All perception is essentially a merger of the unbiased order of things as discovered and defined by scientific analysis of reality on one end and the subjective projection of percipient consciousness on the other. Aesthetic perception, which is the subject of all great art, embodies the subjective feelings of the artist in such a way that the objective order of things is rendered more colourful. Art presents truth in its personal facet, whereas scientific truth is abstract because the very self that observes it is eliminated by the scientist from the knowledge situation. Science yields a depersonalized form of information. Art, on the other hand, flourishes by personalizing the objective world. It is the projection of the personal element which transforms nature. Lightning, for instance, is nothing but electromagnetic induction in ether. But once it is subjected to the consciousness of the artist, there is no knowing what it may not become. Robert Briffault makes the same observation: ‘The beauty, grandeur, majesty of the aspects of the universe we hardly need a psychologist to tell us—are not like artistic values, expressions of qualities in creative forces that produce them but of our own moods and affections.’ This is rendered more clear when we move from the phase of merely reporting ordinary and simple perceptions like ‘Wolofs are tall people’, to the phase where we communicate not just what we see but what we believe in and make judgements about. Judgements are attempts to set forth relationships of affirmation or denial between the tangible and the intangible, between the concrete and the abstract, between the particular and the universal. Human communication is an oscillation between these two foci of human experience. When I judge that a sculpture is beautiful, it means the concept of which I am directly aware as a universal idea is affirmed by the sculpture that I see. Now there is likely a greater possibility of agreement among a number of people when I make the statement that ‘Wolofs are tall’ than when I say ‘the sculpture is

beautiful’. It is so because the concept of ‘height’ and the universal idea of beauty are different levels in the hierarchy of universal truths and, thus, are subject to varying degrees of probative value. However, there is no doubt that both statements involve judgement and a transaction between the universal and the particular expressed either in denial or in affirmation. All our experience includes an encounter between the world of the seen and of the unseen. When we set out to express the truth of our perception, the spectator of this transaction is that something in us which we call ‘I’. The emotional colouring of this encounter has an aesthetic significance for the artist. Great artists are people gifted with great receptivity to sense the mystery of life and to make it dance to the heartbeat of reality. Great art is an expression resulting from an attempt to communicate this inwardly felt encounter between the world of the seen and the unseen. As great art expresses the truth of this type of aesthetic experience, it makes its followers—who in themselves are a fleeting note in the cosmic sonata— experience the entire process of orchestration. It helps us find an escape from the prison of our subjectivity. The world of appearances presents us with the raw material of reality from which to construct our actions. Once we rise above the desire to manipulate the raw material, our individuality becomes a part of the wider synthesis. It is like a seed that dissolves itself in the soil to emerge into a wider synthesis as a new shoot promising flowers and fruits.

Art delivers our imagination from the limitations of time and space, by making us feel at one with each other and with the rest of creation, and helping us realize our kinship with the universe. Great art is the only means we have of fitting into the world of universal truth. It is the recognition of oneself in others that contributes the moving element in humanistic art. This is the universal experience. For example, the experience of mothers—from any race, religion, language, or culture—down the ages and across humanity has predominantly been the same—an experience of love and devotion. I firmly subscribe to the view that art is for art’s sake. It is an end-in-itself, and cannot be subordinated to anything outside itself. Those who set out to

subordinate their art to the predetermined agenda of what they believe to be just and sensible are not functioning as artists but toiling on purpose for the fulfilment of other objectives. What such an artist creates in the process may be useful in pursuit of a purpose, but would not be art. Deliberate effort checks spontaneity, thus killing the charm of primitive art. When art is burdened with a purpose, it ceases to reflect that unprompted outpouring of life which is the trademark of great creations. What we then toil to achieve is a question of securing the means to ends and, indeed, can be worthwhile. But it is not art.

So much for the significance of art in general. Let’s now consider: What is literature? The question is complex, but allow me to broadly discuss what I consider to be the main characteristics of literary writing. To start with, there are no limitations as to the topic of literature. Anything from a blade of grass to God can be chosen as a theme for literary activity. All thoughts and imagination, all ions and pleasures, and whatever engages man’s activity of mind or body can be the subject of literature. However, we know that all writing is not literature. How can we tell literary from non-literary writing? To begin with, we need to acknowledge that human language itself is a social product. It is only where there is a desire to communicate with each other that human language comes into play as an instrument of communication. It is a tool that evolved to ensure concerted action of all those engaged in consummating a common end. Once we understand the emergence of human language, it makes sense to suggest that only that class of writing which bears reference to some extraordinary or novel perception, recording the unusual insights of a greatly individuated mind, should deserve to be called literature. In such a mind the desire to communicate emerges essentially because it wants to share its experiences with others. Therefore, great literature is a memorable record of the insights and perceptions of highly evolved minds. The attraction of such writing can be explained by the premise that what the masters have seen, we too are capable of seeing but have not seen for ourselves as we lack in the perception needed to do so. Great literature, thus, helps us to see more than we are normally able to see.

This also s for the use of the term ‘novel’ for the class of writing which is intended to represent highly imaginative human situations. Unless there is something unusual that is to be conveyed, the necessity to report it for the benefit of others will not arise. In that, literature rises above mere communication, which is related to the basic object of life to coordinate social action to a common purpose. The verbal expressions used by poets and writers are charged with emotions that appeal to us. They express themselves because they are quick with deeper truths about life and have to be delivered of them. The beauty of their style and expression is owed to the intensity of their ion and the clarity of their thinking. Literature is the type of writing that influences the progress of our powers of perception, as creation by an artist is a manner of dealing with a unique perception. Literature grants our everyday experience a new sense by making those experiences appear as extraordinary. Thus we can see that the creation of literature is a mere reflex of our power of perception that lifts the curtain that shrouds the mystery. Our life is defined by two poles of mystery: first, the external mystery of our physical existence comprising all matter, seasons, ecology, and so on; and second, the mystery of the world inside of us comprising our mind, our ideas, our imagination, and our emotions. As our consciousness navigates between the inner and outer worlds, it is the light of our mind that reveals a portion of the outer world’s mystery and illuminates the innermost alcoves of our being. During these pilgrimages between boundless inner and outer worlds, when we discover something or hit upon new meanings, our desire to communicate our findings to each other becomes the making of literature. Therefore, literature helps people who are living together strive towards the goal of realizing a universal life. Literature is a moral weapon that reveals our weaknesses to us and leads to personal and social reform. The study of literature helps us to liberate ourselves from a constricted, provincial, biased, shallow, or pedantic outlook. Great literature helps us to know the world of truth and to develop our powers of perception. Just as our perception of form and colour is expanded by studying the works of great painters, so also, by continual reading of great literature, we begin to acquire an insight into the hidden side of life.

All art is creative, and so is literature. It provides a ladder from the world of the familiar to the unfamiliar. That I can enjoy Hindi, Bengali, Russian, and other literatures as much as my own shows that all humanity is one and the differences that separate us are not real. That we can relish classical literature as much contemporary writings shows the oneness of feeling that binds us with our ancestors. Literature thus helps us transcend the barriers of space and time. Often it is said that literature is a mirror of life, but that is not entirely right. A mirror throws back exactly what it receives, whereas artists transform reality by imposing their personal pattern on what they create. The mind of a poet, writer, or dramatist is not just a reflecting mirror; instead, it is either a prism that breaks the original stimulus into different elements or a convex lens that unites different rays of light falling upon an object.

IV REASON, SCIENCE, AND RELIGION

26 MAN, THE RELIGIOUS ANIMAL

Religious experience lies in our feeling bound in some way to something that is not us.

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion—several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbour as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven. … The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste.

—Mark Twain

R ELIGIOUS SYMBOLISM AS REFLECTED IN the myths of mankind often deciphers the wonder of life’s evolution from the animal to the human plane as a miraculous intervention of a power whose manifestation we see all round and within ourselves, but whose operations our present plane of consciousness is not yet qualified to understand. The mystery of life defies us at all levels. The metaphysical explanation for the upholding of a certain religious conviction or its relevance to life has to be furnished by our meagre powers of reason, and these explanations need to be treated by us for what they are worth. But regardless of the relative worth of different religious beliefs, the way we are correlated to the environment indubitably substantiates mankind’s emergence from the forms of life which precede us in evolution and which continue to be a part of our psychic nature.

Thus religious awareness is a need to affirm some supra-personal ground in order to impart meaning to our existence. This explains the phenomenon of moral choice as seeking to move out from the spot we are in to another which our imaginative reconstruction presents to us as desirable. We talk about one conduct being right and leading to an end which is good, and the other as being wrong and leading to evil. This engenders in us the craving to move on to ever newer phases of existence, because of our link with an unchanging suprapersonal plane. It is the perception of this plane that gives us a sense of moral direction and formulates our conception of a good life in the unfolding succession of events. This consciousness of the moral quandary of man and our destiny as an agent of change in our environment and history is reinforced by our with that abiding ground of our being which is other than us. It gives us a sense of responsibility in all we do or do not do. Edmund Burke was right, I often say: man is indeed a religious animal. As we become aware of ourselves, we begin to see that we have transcended ourselves. Our awareness of ourselves originates from our going out of ourselves in an encounter with nothingness. Just as the eye needs a mirror to see itself, the self in us has no direct awareness of itself except as it sees itself reflected in an undifferentiated ensemble outside of itself. At heart, religious experience lies in our feeling bound in some way to something that is not us; that other could be a focus of worship, a way of life, a scheme of beliefs, or a set of practices. Etymologically, too, the word ‘religion’ conveys the idea of being connected to something. Our being and our actions are a manifestation of this connection we have with the world around us. Our life is an endeavour to elaborate this connection and to discover our own ground for affirming it. Human life is about this transcendence. Everything else in the universe just exists, whereas man knows what man is and what we recognize as our true existence. Our rational powers are born in the very struggle to control the forces of nature. But the quest for discovery of truth stems from our being a religious animal, our inborn longing to reach beyond ourselves. Animals’ motivation is fuelled by the craving to seek satisfaction of their biological needs, enabled through a series of complicated instinctive responses

that call into play a process of stimulus and response. However, man’s higher degree of evolution teaches us to rise above the demands made by our instincts, and thus confronts us with a choice between good and evil for a moral bearing. It is at this point that the religious attitude is born, as man seeks to act upon a view which is not solely presented to us by our sensory powers but is rooted in the need for explanation of the ‘why’. Systems of religious faith and practice are anchored in man’s need to go beyond ourselves. That a certain type of religious belief is valid or not is a different debate, and is entirely independent of what I am saying here. What I am saying is that man’s being a religious animal is an inevitable phenomenon of our being a life higher than that of animals. The life that is absolutely immanent in animals becomes partly transcendent in man.

Sometimes our perception of our environment gets brusquely cancelled out by a failure of action. This leads us to revise, from time to time, the picture we have in our mind of the world outside. Thus our views progressive change in accordance with our experiences, and our consciousness grows as we correct the picture in our head and make it more accurate. The discoveries of the cognitive adventure of man’s life are valid only insofar as they help develop a plan to deal with the environment. As life advances, it realizes that the real ground of action lies outside the constricted confines of our immediate consciousness. For example, when architects are invited to design an edifice, the ground of their action is not their immediate perceptual consciousness; rather, it has to do with the imaginative construction of their creative faculties. Direct discernment of the world of the unseen thus gets drawn in. This same phenomenon is echoed by the mystical traditions when they state that there are certain needs of our real self which can only be fulfilled if we blend our self with a wider being that swallows it up. No wonder the combined wisdom of mankind’s religious heritage reminds us to realize the truth of this relationship, in order to give man’s toil a sense and a purpose. There are three main mind-sets in understanding man’s relationship with the ground of experience. The first is the theocentric mind-set, where man treats the

ground as a higher magnificent presence. We surrender to the will of this higher presence and respect and worship Him. Thus the foremost consideration in all we do is our relationship with this supreme presence. For this mind-set, man is the primary and most sacrosanct constituent in the scheme of things. The human person is unique in our characteristics and is completely original in the world in which our lot is cast. To my mind Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and some systems of Hindu religious thought belong in the theocentric group. For this group, personal life is understood as a meta-cosmic reality which manifests itself in the world of appearances, ruled by a higher being with whom human dialogue is possible. In of life after death, for the theocentric mind-set, the immortality of soul is the quintessence of human existence. Any experiences gained by man’s soul in earthly life would be available for further growth and expansion after we have thrown away the mortal coil. The second is the anthropocentric mind-set, where man endeavours to understand the law or process of the ground in order to plan action to alter the world of appearances. This is a mind-set of expediency rooted in man’s desire to exploit the forces at work in the universe. In this mind-set, we regard ourselves as the measure of all things. For this mind-set, man has emerged from what has preceded us and is understandable in connection with the cosmos, as we share in our being that which exists outside us in our environment. Thus, we are just the children of the cosmos and nothing unique. However, as the final product of creative evolution, we are superior to all that has contributed in our existence. I think many of the Hindu metaphysical doctrines, Confucianism, Taoism, and Theistic Existentialism belong in the anthropocentric group. For this group, man has to use to our advantage our knowledge of the laws and processes of a supranatural ground. For the anthropocentric mind-set, the survival of the human soul after death is debatable, because it treats human personality as the highest of life’s evolution operating in the cosmos. For most groups in this mind-set, the immortality of soul is not a birth right of man but can be attained as a reward for our work on earth. For them there is a possibility that something may survive the end of bodily life in order to continue the evolution of life and, therefore, the possibility of the soul’s survival after man’s death remains an open question. The third mind-set is the nihilistic one, where man considers the relationship with the supra-personal ground as pointless and immaterial for satisfying the

basic needs of our earthly life. This mind-set discards any codes of behaviour based on a supra-personal source, but it is, in itself, a positive philosophy of action. For this mind-set, the idea of personality is an illusion. The most supreme end available to man is to reject this illusion and to adjust ourselves in an unfriendly universe in which our life has emerged by the interplay of forces which had no prevision of man as an end. I would say atheistic existentialism, Buddhism, and all forms of materialism—as philosophies of life—belong in the nihilistic group. For this group, the salvation of man consists in giving ourselves up to a wider synthesis—to Nirvana, to the state, and so on. For the nihilistic mind-set, the further continuance of man’s life after death is of no real consequence. In its view, with the disintegration of the body, the bubble that is human personality bursts and man disappears into absolute oblivion. To elaborate on the nihilistic mind-set, I believe that a total denial of belief in religion and morals is itself a positive basis of action and a religious attitude. When Marx declared war on religion, he was not merely attacking the religious belief and practice sanctioned by traditional forms of religion. He was, in fact, out to establish another religion, just as Buddhism does not recognize God in the Abrahamic sense but still is a religion. Communism makes a god of economic force. Similarly, modern atheism’s evangelical rejection of God is also a religion in itself. But as an aside, I have never been impressed by evangelists of any type. If at all, you have to judge evangelists on what they do, rather than on what they believe. The contradictions of traditional religions are certainly confusing, but so are those of other belief systems, such as atheism or communism. In fact, the modern atheist is in agreement with the religious fundamentalist that a person’s attitude towards God is the most important aspect of their character. Richard Dawkins, for instance, is a classic example of someone who uses dogma to justify a particular viewpoint and bellow it at the population. He is principally aiming at folks with far less scientific knowledge than he has, knowing full well that those with enough knowledge to make an informed decision regarding belief in God will not fall for his crude arguments. Much like the clergy do, he seeks to cash in on his own academic credentials. As Ali ibn Abi Talib explains, the slave is doomed to worship out of trepidation and the merchant bows in greed. But it is greater to think of God greatly and to

feel His boundless splendour. Such thought makes one a free man when one bows to divinity to absorb it to make it a part of oneself. Bertrand Russell echoes this when he writes:

To abandon the struggle of private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with ion for eternal things—this is emancipation and this is free man’s worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of time.

To conclude, we started by saying that there is a primary nexus that links man with something other than ourselves. Then we examined that, broadly speaking, this ‘other’ can be perceived in three different manners. First, as some supreme force or law underpinning the cosmos. Second, as some presence of a sort reflected in our fellow beings. Third, in what an empirical self feels and finds in the self that is ed when we introspectively attempt to recover our real self hidden by the glacial screen of a false ‘I’ which goes on impersonating the self. I take these three interpretations of supra-personal ground as three types of religious symbolism, since they present various levels of communication through the very link we have with the ‘other’ based on the available evidence. The evolution of man on earth, I feel, may have something to do with man’s yearning for a communion of our deeper self with the meta-cosmic Reality unknown to any existing form of consciousness. Man thus, in quintessence, remains a religious animal even in our most profound atheistic convictions.

27 RATIONAL THOUGHT AND RELIGION

The age of revelation has given way to an age of awareness and growth.

R ELIGION OFTEN DISTRUSTS RATIONAL THOUGHT because of its inability to build the essence of religious or mystical experience into a conceptual framework. However, not only can rational thought accommodate the intuitive knowledge of metaphysical reality manifested by faith, it can also foster mediation between different faiths by creating a consensus around the common and essential, as compared to what is parochial and local. During recent discussions with a philanthropist of some renown, we talked about the limitations of reason in acquiring knowledge. Being a devout believer, my friend argued that pure reason is not competent to deal with metaphysical problems. For example, he said, the ultimate cause that has brought the universe into being cannot be answered by resorting to mere rational thought. While I do not believe in subordinating reason to faith, I do think that in today’s world rational thought—driven by ‘empirical realism’—and religion—nourished by ‘transcendental idealism’—can exist amicably side by side within an individual or a society. Carrying on from there, let’s discuss if religion can reside in the premises of rational thought and if practical reason is incapable of dealing with certain aspects of our existence. Human thought not only functions as a cerebral correspondent to our external environment, but it is also an instrument for expressing connotations that are independent of our sense perception. The knowledge produced by the first function has been worked out by man. The use of the second function consists in creative understanding of truths and concepts beyond the perception of senses. The human intellect draws on both of these functions. Not only does it have faith in analytic knowledge in unity with the senses, but it also endeavours to unravel

the relationship of the world of appearance with reality. Thus, thought is a salve of life and is called upon by life to help it control its environment. This defines the functional utility of rational thought in relation to biological evolution. The evolution of our thought life mirrors the progress of our powers of perception. Thought empowers our senses, heightens our reach, and leads to judgement and belief. Belief is a plan of action founded in our concept of what we believe is reality. The determinability of our mind by abstraction is an important ingredient of the human constitution. The intellect also evolves a language, based on shared experience, which serves as a pointer to the meaning of experience; for example, pain as suffered, love as felt, beauty as seen, sound as heard, food as tasted, and fear as experienced. The quality of human intellect, though overall higher than ever before, has also suffered a decline in some respects. Intellect is no longer regarded as a source of guidance and enlightenment for man. In fact, the intellect has ceased to drive the forces of life and has largely become, instead, a means to acquire material things. It has become the special industry of its foremost owners to indulge in the rat race for worldly possessions. Not that the present day’s calculating approach is a useless outflow of human intellect, but it does seem odd, as though intellect were nothing but a means to accumulate the trappings of worldly success. At one time the intellect was considered to be fountain of wisdom and its possessors wise people, benefactors of humanity, and friends and guides to those around them. They were not known so much for their worldly success as for their wisdom and the high quality of their soul. But the credentials of an intelligent mind today, generally, are of another variety altogether. It is not necessarily a bad thing, but today’s intellect has no inhibitions in pursuing the desires which intellectuals in the past did not have the courage to own up to and fulfil, whereas they often came to be possessed by them. This shift in the productivity of human intellect has engendered a period of bleak and barren output by man in fields like literature and philosophy. No wonder that, for the past many decades, we are not producing writers, painters, poets, or philosophers of significant stature. The modern human intellect’s preoccupation with pragmatism and empiricism has also eroded the sense of synthesis in life by extension of scientific methods to the field of religion, turning our age’s most developed societies into avowedly

ungodly ones. Embodying science’s resolute endeavour to think lucidly about the universe and knowledge in order to design the best action for their further discovery and better use, the modern human intellect displays a much greater and more general tough-mindedness towards matters of faith than before. Modern progress in fields like health, genetics, and transportation is the highest fruit of this incessant intellectual focus. Religion is fuelled more by conceptual thought than by rational thought. The unseen world of conceptual thought manifested as faith is a mode of believers’ manner of regarding the physical world they explore through their senses, establishing its relationship with what they regard as ‘unseen’. This leads to an interplay of precepts and concepts that is called faith. People look up to religion to seek the satisfaction of their emotional needs more than the intellectual ones, using imaginative symbolism in describing a state of consciousness that is not based on analysed or experienced knowledge. Religion has never succeeded in advancing the cause of human knowledge, whereas scientific/rational knowledge can be ed on to any person who chooses to further it or benefit from it. This is how it is accurately maintained and developed from generation to generation. Religious literature does not contain accurate information and thus cannot be handled in the same manner. Religious experience is thus an experience of deep feelings and profundity based on the believer’s convictions and intuition.

Man has always been keen to explore methods allowing us to live our life to its full potential while also pursuing spiritual awakening. However, I think that the modern educated man of the twenty-first century should not relapse into primitive modes of approaching this task. We must think, criticize, appraise, reconcile, and weigh our thoughts in a rational balance before forming a belief regarding the metaphysical. We must be guided by the forces of a wellarticulated intellectual life and not by the non-rational forces of primitive belief. Rational thought must be employed by an intelligent mind to raise life to a higher level from which we can command a view of the cosmic order beyond our own existence, a part of which is revealed by our senses and another is explained by our conceptual knowledge. Rational thought should aim for a synthesis of mind and soul to construct life on the plane of understanding. Faith

should have the same relationship with other areas of human learning as life has with the separate organs evolved by it in a physiological system. Faith should teach man how to illuminate the world of human experience with the light of the spirit, and rational thought should invigorate and unify the whole system of man’s knowledge. The limitations of scientific knowledge are often cited by religionists as the limits to human reason and intellect. To be fair, it has never been claimed by the defenders of scientific knowledge that the human intellect knows all that is beyond experience. Within the framework of our experience, rational thought furnishes accurate and certain knowledge without any adulteration of the deliverance of our intellectual powers. From a practical standpoint, the trite contention that there are things our intellect cannot know must be founded in an assumption that we know enough of those things to know that they cannot be known. Rational thought can be employed to remove such historic baloney or dogma from faith. By disputing impulsive religious constructions with the results of empirical sciences, rational thought can also remove doctrines that have now been established by science as absurd or false. Sorting through in this manner, rational thought will then be left with a residue of beliefs that are, as a minimum, possible if not verifiable. Thus we can distinguish between what is naive overbelief and imagery in the expression of a faith and what can be taken literally by its followers. In earlier ages, when man’s faculty of rational thought was not much developed, the depiction of the universe and the environment was furnished by the prophets, seers, and preachers. Their s are preserved in the religious literature. Devotional literature is full of descriptions of nature and the world to which man is related. While it is no more accurate according to modern knowledge, it is at least evidence of its vision in inviting people to relate to and build a relationship with their entire surroundings in order to determine their place in the scheme of things. Religion was useful in ensuring the development of man up to a point, after which one could take up the responsibility of one’s development in one’s own hands. The age of revelation has given way to an age of awareness and growth. The need for institutionalized religion has ebbed. Endowed with the power of rational thought, modern man must observe, read, search, and reflect in order to be one’s

own guide. However, the cognitive tendency in man still yearns to accept pleasant, attractive, satisfying, and sugar-coated beliefs and assumptions as reality or the revelations of God’s own truth.

The paradox between religion’s implausibility and its emotional satisfaction continues to intrigue human minds. While some folks like to pick holes in religious doctrines and others, like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, go all-out to slay God, most people need comforting rituals and sanctioned devotional celebrations to steer them through life. For them, faith provides an answer to the deeply human need for guidance and meaning, as they use their creeds to make sense of the human condition. Even though faith may not be profoundly entrenched in the tempo of everyday life for most believers, rites and scriptures still lend life a reassuring sense of legitimacy. Scientific s have by no means exhausted the mystery of our existence and our world. Religions can play a transformative role for individuals and societies by showing us how to approach living with ourselves and within the world. These ways are inculcated through pilgrimage and prayer and then integrated with arts, politics, and business through embedding faith in the rhythms of the everyday. The atheists who term faiths as delusional based on lack of proof miss the point. Faiths are not scientific plans, but ways of life consisting in voyages into mystery, means of emotional fulfilment, and responses to human needs. Faiths focus on the subjective and emotional perspective of what it is like to be a human in the world. In that, their purpose, appeal, and mystery cannot be dismissed as delusional. Faiths add guidance and meaning to the fundamental aspects of our human experience in living with ‘self’, which, even if illusory, remains our lived reality. Faiths try to articulate the ethical codes we live by and endeavour to help us reach a reasonably accurate understanding of the moral landscape of our lives. The lived experience of religious practice can play a constructive role, as believers can draw on the wisdom garnered by their faith over centuries to better deal with life’s challenges. It can be argued that in today’s more developed societies, we probably do not need religion to create better communities. But at the individual level, religion remains valuable to guide our ethical conduct, as

even in liberal societies individuals are often in need of reassurance, direction, and comion. Religion can fill in that void, as it is never shy to shepherd us through life even in an impersonal and detached modern society. The rituals ordained by faith—such as prayer, meditation, cleansing, and communal activities—help individuals and communities to relate their actions to their cosmic environment, thus imparting needed form and character to life. The intellectual troubles of belief and the areas of disagreement between science and religion notwithstanding, religion still makes a very important contribution to our ethical debates. This is borne out by the reality that religions continue to thrive even though many of their claims about our physical and biological world have been demystified by science. I think it is more important for a religion to be internally coherent than rational. Realizing that we all have complex emotional needs that cannot be simply dispelled by science, a rational mind finds its way to navigate between the hard facts of science and the lived reality of being. Hence, I feel religion is likely to remain a powerful institution. Even a secular society should be unafraid to acknowledge its need and to learn from the wisdom embodied in religious traditions, especially in preparing us to meet life’s challenges and to become better human beings. Thus religion is still capable of playing a useful role in the modern world, even though it may be fast losing its historic seat of power and authority where its votaries and manipulators both would like to see it.

In conclusion, the significance of a belief is either in of our experience, whether sensory or affective, or in apprehension of inapplicability of those forms of our experience. Some beliefs are simple and are plainly a matter of conviction. There are other beliefs, however, which lie within the realm of human experience and can be questioned and checked. The questions to these beliefs arise out of experience—resulting in ever-increasing human knowledge —and prompt cognition to check the validity of the belief in question. Hence science has severely curtailed our liberty to shape our ‘truth’, as it often comes up with evidence contradictory to beliefs. It has always done it and will continue to pull us and our children up. I think a rational believer has faith in both reflective and analytic knowledge, as one keeps pace with human discoveries and tries to formulate the relationship that the absolute reality has

with the world of appearance. This approach is positive. Rather than bowing to the language of vague imaginative symbolism echoing an unanalysed state of consciousness, one seeks the satisfaction of one’s rational faculties as well as one’s emotional nature. Rational thought thus makes the intellect co-extensive with life rather than making intellect a mere tool to serve our practical interests. Rational thought nudges us to attain a higher state of insight by acknowledging the fallibility of conceptual knowledge without being blind to the spiritual needs of our being. ‘To know is to transform’ is as much true as is the modern scientific and technological belief ‘to know is to conquer’. This, as I hear it, is the call of rational thought and faith in unison.

28 RELIGION AND ITS RELEVANCE

Religion consoles us in our worst hour, satisfies the heart by opening a horizon of hope, and gives soul and reason to the ideals of duty and right.

M ANY OF MY FRIENDS HAVE criticized my defence of the possible utility (or validity) of religion in the modern world. The most frequent criticism is that I fail to see the contradiction between asg a value to religion and a scientific and philosophical approach to life and its issues. Most of them maintain that religion has no further role to play in elevating the moral tenor of man’s conduct. It is said that a rational mind does not need servile dependence on the comforts which religion offers and the sense of security it nurtures in its followers’ minds. However, I argue that a philosophical outlook is mostly indistinguishable from an ideological expression of the individuality of a given mind or person. Atheism, thus, is also an ideology and its believers’ thinking and philosophical outlook, too, are rooted in their ideology. Otherwise, they would not feel compelled to ‘prove’ why they are right. While religion has traditionally been condemned in the name of the scientific spirit, it has recently fallen into unprecedented disrepute due to spiralling violence and terrorism in its name. Indeed, religion has a bad reputation and religious history is a gruesome testimony to brutal torments and infamies. However, this is largely because it has been exploited by those who have had an interest in its continuance in a crude form, and they deliberately misinterpret it in the interest of advancing their goals—a phenomenon that is in currency in the contemporary Muslim world. Karl Marx was right when he observed that religion has been used as an opiate by the clergy and its cohorts down the ages, to degrade the masses into the service of obscurantist reactionary and unjustifiable designs.

I feel that priesthood is in direct conflict with the supreme function of religion to liberate mankind. It perverts the spirit of religion to secure a parochial orthodoxy to the tune of mere ritualized and formalistic beliefs. Those who constitute themselves as the custodians of religion either tamper with or mutilate the interpretation of the original spoken word or writings in which religious teachings came to be embodied. Hence, religion is used to throw dust into the eyes of the naively religious, who gather around it to seek light. In my observation religion does have a utility as ‘a last solace of earthly misery’ as Thomas Babington Macaulay said. For example, those who have been deeply wronged and driven into the depths of despair, and who are unable to muster any earthly help, may yet feel comforted by the thought that if not here, elsewhere at least, they will see justice. Do not most of us, in times of misery, discover the therapeutic power of religious consolation? For me this embodies the practical value of religion, when being religious suits the human situation. Professor R.B. Perry writes in his book Realms of Value:

It is a good thing in some sense, to have some religious belief whether the belief is or is not true, and whether the interests in whose behalf it speaks are high or low. The believer is spared the pangs of indecision. The un-believer is troubled with doubt and desires to escape that particular trouble. The believer escapes not only from the trouble of doubt, but from its Hamlet-like paralysis. His belief imparts to his life a certain consistency and momentum.

To me, this rings quite true for human life at the average intellectual level. Which means that the denunciation of religion is relevant only to the extent that religious beliefs and practices are being abused for power or dominance. Anthropological studies show that religion emanates from man’s reaction to the environment, which makes religion a correlate of man’s finitude. The savage mind reacted to its environment, which it hardly understood, and thus unfurled the thinking faculty that has gone on to lead man to our present glory. Religion came to primitive people’s rescue to resolve the discord that they encountered between their knowledge and their environment. In each culture it provided a satisfactory answer as to the cause of the world and man’s relation to this cause.

Percy Bysshe Shelley puts it eloquently:

What is the cause of life? that is, how was it produced, or what agencies distinct from life have acted or act upon life? All recorded generations of mankind have wearily busied themselves in inventing answers to this question; and the result has been,—Religion.

Now that science has provided answers to most of the questions about man’s immediate environment, it is argued that the institution of religion is obsolete and we possess enough knowledge to conduct ourselves solely in accordance with experimentally established truth. I feel, though, that it is not right to whittle down religion’s efficacy and relevance to an ordinary person’s life situations. Rationality and religiosity are not irreconcilable features of the human brain. The problem arises when the evolution of a religion is throttled. It is by our powers of thinking that we have ensured continued refinement in those primitive religious notions which our ancestors used in their attempt to define their relationship to the universe. The primitive view of the cosmos was bound to be that whole universe was ruled by some will or wills determining its constantly changing conditions. Favourable changes were construed as rewards from the Deity, and miseries as its wrath. Rites were thus devised to appease the Deity. However, this explanation was abandoned as man honed a more detached spirit of inquiry. The more human knowledge progressed, the more we thrived in our ability to experiment and to produce results. As we discovered immediate antecedents to explain changes, the Will of God was no longer needed to define them. However, submission to the laws of nature remains essential, as it is not in our power to alter them. Nonetheless, we no longer need to think of the laws of nature as a command of some superior being to be unquestioningly obeyed. Instead, constant laws of nature are nothing but measured formulations in of which processes of nature can be deciphered and its powers harnessed. Our present ideal of rationality is a logical evolution of man’s primitive reaction to the environment influenced by the demands of practical life to press nature in the service of man’s needs.

But all these laws of nature neither interpret man’s experience of deepest awareness nor inspire comprehension of values that we regard highly and for which we are willing to sacrifice. Science does not shape man’s outlook in the moral sphere. Hence, science concerns itself with only a part of man’s reality. It is here that religion can play an important role. It enables us to evolve for ourselves and to secure consistency in our conduct. Even atheists, if they are logically consistent, partake of an attitude which takes them beyond the evidence that is available. They cannot disregard factors like the mechanism of perception, the nature of reality, and the time that writes changes in relation to that reality. In this sense, religion is a universal institution. Even communism was branded by its critics as a religion, as it exalted proletarian revolution above all ends and held that its success was guaranteed by the laws of nature and history—beliefs not much different from any major religion. Similarly, Buddhism recognizes no God in the Abrahamic sense, but teaches that Nirvana is the supreme good and that the composition of things, the law of Karma, and the illusoriness of existence permit Nirvana to be achieved. Buddhism is, therefore, a religion in conjuring a hierarchy of value adjunct to a cosmology. Hence, religion equips man with the essentials of spiritual nature and furnishes us with a philosophy of things which we don’t yet understand ourselves. But religion does not stop man from exploring and investigating to understand. Very simply, it gives a wide majority of people a sense of security in this world. It may be argued in opposition that when science uncovers all that is to be known, we will have a full and complete measure of security, and the function of religion will be fulfilled by science. But no knowledge of the laws of nature, however thorough, will give the assurance that the great web of laws governing the universe works to a higher end and that goodness dominates and pervades existence. The law of evolution is replete with scientific evidence of life’s growth, but it does not explain how the crude sexual ions of apes led to a high order of being, capable of producing the likes of Newton, Einstein, and Goethe. Knowledge of the laws of nature will give us security as long as we obey them,

but it does not show how despotism evolves into liberty, slavery into freedom, ignorance into enlightenment, might into right, lust into love, and selfishness into morality. This gap can be filled by religion because it says that the nature of things is grounded in goodness and sets forth values for which humanity as a whole has to battle. Religion consoles us in our worst hour, satisfies the heart by opening a horizon of hope, and gives soul and reason to the ideals of duty and right, which otherwise have no deep root in the constitution of man’s being. Religion gives ordinary people a balance on which to evaluate their moral worth and makes them feel at home in this universe. Everything put to man’s service entails the hazard of misuse, and religion (like science) has been no different. While a modern state must have no recourse to religion in delivering equality and justice to all its subjects, religion can play a constructive role in an individual’s life. To me, that moral self-improvement is the essence of the religious attitude.

29 RATIONALITY AND MYSTICISM

Mystics aim to seek satisfaction of their emotional nature more than the intellectual.

I AM INTRIGUED BY THE RELATIONSHIP between rationality and mysticism. To begin with, there is some commonality of purpose between the two. However, a mystic’s method is very different. Mystics have a distrust of discursive and analytic knowledge. They believe, based often on their direct experience, that there is a higher knowledge than mere analytic knowledge and that this higher knowledge alone is capable of affording an insight into the inner meaning of things. For instance, at times, some of us, under the power of an inward ion, experience a sudden feeling of such insight. The tenets of faith and belief to which mystics adhere are arrived at independently of any analytical process, and the reasoning that we see in their writings comes post facto in of the conviction which mystics lend to the infallibility of higher knowledge. Bertrand Russell explains it thus: ‘Reality is regarded [by them] with an iration often amounting to worship; it is felt to be always and everywhere close at hand, thinly veiled by the show of sense.’ Mystics claim to know of that knowledge besides which all other knowledge is ignorance. Instead of trying to explain the relationship of reality with appearance, mystics are in communion with reality. Rationalists, on the other hand, have complete faith in the powers of cognition and the supremacy of intellect and rely on knowledge gained through the intellectual method. They are reluctant to repose trust in so-called higher knowledge. While I will not attempt to challenge the limitations of analytic knowledge, I have the right to make some general critical observations. First of all, the intellect has never claimed that it can know all. Instead it knows that all that is

beyond experience cannot be known. However, I contend that within the setting of our human experience, the intellect can supply precise and firm knowledge. In my view, whether or not intellect provides such knowledge depends more on our desire to exclude other motives that contaminate the liberation of our intellectual powers than on the proper application or technical perfection of our powers of thought. Even the hackneyed declaration that there are things that our intellect cannot know assumes that we know enough of these things to be certain that they cannot be known. Man has a natural impulse to fall for pleasant, sugar-coated myths. We must always watch against embracing attractive and satisfying falsehoods as if they were the revelation of God’s truth. Here, as an example, I would like to examine the criticism of intellect made by William James, one of the wisest of men. James argues that intellect is inadequate to understand the true nature of human experience. In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, James concludes that it is impossible to demonstrate, by a purely intellectual process, the truth of the deliverance of direct religious experience. His key argument is that conceptual processes can define and interpret facts, but they do not produce them, nor can they reproduce their individuality. There is always a plus which feelings alone can answer. James writes as follows:

The spontaneous intellect of man always defines the divine which it feels in ways that harmonize with its temporary intellectual prepossessions. Philosophy can by comparison eliminate the local and the accidental from these definitions. Both from dogma and from worship she can remove historic incrustations. By confronting the spontaneous religious constructions with the results of natural science, philosophy can also eliminate doctrines that are now known to be scientifically absurd or incongruous.

As we see, James echoes the familiar distrust of intellect—that it is not able to render into a conceptual framework the essence of mystical, religious, or spiritual experiences. To me the central fault in this mode of thinking is the failure to distinguish between the symbol and the things it symbolizes. It is true

that the quality of life as breathed, of love as felt, of time as lived, cannot be adequately represented by any conceptual process. But at the same time, it is only intellect that develops a language of pointers to the meaning of experience. For example, writing the word ‘white’ in black does not alter the meaning of the word ‘white’. Or a line AB drawn to show the distance between the two points A and B does not represent the experience of physical continuity of travelling between the two points. Therefore, attacks against intellect miss the mark. The intellect allows us to capture the essential framework of experience. The experiences that cannot be fully represented in the language of concepts are then symbolized by the intellect so that they may serve as signs for any other projected or possible experience. Doubts about the power of intellect inevitably involve the assumption that the intellect has the capacity of showing that it cannot be trusted, which in turn means that its deliverances are trustworthy. All criticism against intellect, therefore, is unwittingly carried out by the intellect. The role of intellect is to disentangle, in the present experience, the sign of experience that is not present. Whether or not it succeeds in doing so has no relevance to the nature of its activity, which proceeds by trial and error. Some beliefs can be verified by an appeal to facts, whereas others lie beyond experience and cannot be checked. Intellect does not transcend experience. Only the relation to experience can check the validity of answers. But the important difference is that intellect exercises a direct control of experience. Hence, it often pulls up stern contradictory experiences and chastises the ‘truth’ fancied by the mystics or the religious. Throughout history false cognitions have been questioned and corrected by intellect, and we and our children will continue to do so. The ‘lies’—big or small—will continue to be found out.

The intellect has faith in reflective and analytic knowledge and, unlike the mystic, it is not content merely with achieving communion with reality and stopping there. Intellect tries to discover and formulate the relationship that reality has with the world of appearances. Mystics instead seek satisfaction of their emotional nature more than the intellectual, and they use the language of nebulous imaginative symbolism designed to suggest an unanalysed state of consciousness. Mysticism, therefore, has never succeeded in advancing the cause of human knowledge because its knowledge cannot be transferred.

Intellectual knowledge, on the other hand, can be accurately maintained and ed on from generation to generation. The mystical literature of mankind is not a literature of accurate information. Mystics can realize a higher state of life through their devotion, but the intensity of feeling and depth of experience which they realize in their consciousness cannot be transferred to others. Thus the rest of the mankind does not share the benefits that may have accrued to them. Mystics are satisfied with a lower type of immediacy of experience whereas scientists, for instance, achieve a higher type of immediacy through the critical and analytical knowledge they adopt towards the immediacy of experience. For a rational mind, the regard for truth should decide any issue on hand. No prejudice should be allowed to prevail upon knowledge. Rationality will free us from superstition, from blind beliefs, and from an unconscious animal-like life. It is possible that our knowledge, in the end, will show us the limitations of our understanding. It is possible that after enough scientific studies, we may be convinced that these deeper convictions of which poets and mystics have spoken —about the liberty and immortality of the soul and about the destiny of man— are after all mere subjective illusions inculcated in us by circumstances over which we have no control. But then, at least, we will possess the confidence that we have put in our utmost efforts to study the mysteries of our inner life and the secrets of the external world. And, having done what we could do as rational beings, we should accept whatever insignificant position we are logically compelled to for human life and its destiny in the scheme of things. To think freely, unburdened by any consideration except that of truth, is a privilege unique to man. We must exercise that prerogative to create a state of being higher than the mere life of animals. The ion for knowing and discovering truth exercised with our deepest intuitions will lead us from darkness to light and from light to sun. It will yield to us an intellectual attitude to life and its problems.

30 GOD OR NO GOD: A MORAL QUESTION?

The God puzzle cannot be solved with the certainty of an algebraic solution.

N EO-ATHEISTS, A LA RICHARD DAWKINS and Sam Harris, are characterized by their disdainful derision towards anyone who differs with them. Their contempt is not limited to religious people; it also does not spare agnostics and other atheists who do not partake of their evangelical fervour. They seem arrogant, imbued with a zeal for proselytizing that is unheard of beyond the followers of Holy Scriptures. Dawkins, for instance, asserts that bringing children up Catholic is a bigger tragedy than their abuse by some priests. This moral certitude reeks of dogma, thus far associated only with religious extremists. They also ignore that God has a powerful constructive role to play in life in poor and underdeveloped societies, where people look up to religion to seek the satisfaction of their emotional needs as well as a psychological anchor. There is little doubt that religious beliefs and differences have often driven violence. Even today, one can easily perceive the helping hand religion lends to violent outfits like the Taliban, ISIS, and Boko Haram in rousing them to be so violent against their fellow human beings and even co-religionists. The heartlessness of shooting or beheading an innocent person merely because of a difference in inherited beliefs is revolting. However, neo-atheists are neither alone nor the first to feel this revulsion. This moral ion is as old as recorded human history. That Greeks harboured it can be seen in Plato’s dialogues, and its experience by Europeans across centuries is articulated by the likes of Diderot, Ingersoll, and Russell. Other societies have also been continually racked by the pangs of moral ion. The problem with neo-atheists is not that they think that believing in God is illogical; the problem

is that they argue that it is a moral flaw to believe in an Almighty. The main issue is not religion in all its multiplicity and intricacy; it is whether or not there exists a God. And to many, belief in God is an issue of morality.

The problem is that the God puzzle cannot be solved with the certainty of an algebraic solution. There are arguments both for and against. For example, one of the innumerable lines of argument for God goes something like this: Why do we have the universe, galaxies, planets, and life? The Big Bang or what preceded it does not for the fact of existence in the first place. What explains the mind-boggling interdependence of innumerable parts in service of the whole? It cannot just happen. Brain sciences can explain how we think, but not why we think in the first place. Can such an amazing cosmos be without a point or a purpose? Is the existence of prophets and seers nothing but a charade? Are remarkable human sacrifices like Karbala nothing but a manifestation of human spirit? It makes no sense that there should be no reckoning for the ills perpetrated and suffered in this worldly life. While man may control the forms of matter, we have no control of the overall sum of matter that exists in the cosmos. Also time remains totally beyond man’s control, as we can neither subtract nor add one nanosecond to it. On the other end, one of the many lines of reasoning against God is as follows: If God is supposed to be so loving and benevolent, how can He allow so much human suffering? If only one or a few religions represent the true path leading unto God’s blessing, then how is He fair to myriad generations born in remote parts and cultures without ever being properly exposed to the beliefs purported to be the truth? If He wants all humanity to adhere to some particular belief, or even more generally to monotheism, why does He allow such an astounding variety of alternative beliefs to thrive? What purpose does human life extinguished in its infancy serve? While there are a number of question marks around theistic beliefs, many people continue to take their religious beliefs seriously. In societies that encourage free thinking and questioning, people feel empowered to harbour and voice doubts about God or religion. However, in parts of the world where they are indoctrinated from childhood and are not welcomed to express doubts in adulthood, people continue with unquestioning allegiance to their religious

beliefs. Many people who live in societies that allow the freedom to think, express, and decide for themselves are afraid of death or what happens after it and thus hedge their bets by staying religious. I think many of my readers can identify with this to some extent. When my mother died at forty-four years of age just before my wedding that she had so fondly planned, it gave me a good reason, for a long time, to believe in God and thus the afterlife, where I would see her again. Irrational? Perhaps, but not unlike the reasoning that motivates many to believe but does not incite them to fight for one religion over all others. The people around me shared those beliefs and were generally kind, just, and well-intentioned human beings. What often miffed me, though, was the claim that we are right and everybody else is wrong. When I considered the size of my sect against the population and history of the world, I realized that the possibility of this being true was negligible. Humans can often need a belief of one kind or another just to get through their days; there is nothing morally wrong with that unless we insist that our belief is the sole truth and underpins the very existence of the universe. Constantly increasing knowledge of the world means that we are being left with fewer and fewer gaps in which to hide our dogmas.

Having said that, benign belief can often be ominous. It may be fine to espouse a myth to explain a phenomenon that would otherwise require a lot of hard work and investigation. But it is not acceptable to use it to justify hate, such as when societies use their time and energy ing blasphemy laws or beheading infidels. This creates an ecology that breeds religious zealots and intolerance. When people are willing to kill and maim in the name of religion that, indeed, is morally repulsive. This is the kind of irrational behaviour that makes it morally repugnant for nonbelievers to live in a world ruled by the God of such beliefs. This moral revulsion is only increased when one sees self-deception inducing people to accept religious claims without thinking and on paltry evidence. This is probably what prompts neo-atheists to see theism as a moral matter. The argument they proffer is that beliefs influence conduct, and believing certain religious doctrines leads to certain behaviours. When people are prone to judging you as being evil for being unimpressed by their doctrines, that indeed is morally

repugnant. They also say that whether it entails paradise or reincarnation, a belief in an afterlife makes us willing to accept the injustices of man, consoling ourselves with ideas of better to come, whereas atheism offers a more responsible but arduous path, requiring us to evaluate all our prejudices on our own. Their morality lies in the belief that our one opportunity at sentience brings an obligation to be as good, fair, and kind a person as we can be in this lifetime. As a rational being, I am open to the arguments of both sides. They make me think and drive me to investigate more. I also do not have an issue with the fact that neo-atheists are motivated more by moral than by merely factual concerns. But, just as I abhor religious self-righteousness, I am not taken by the contentions of evangelical neo-atheists who are not different from any religion in that they claim they are right and everybody else is wrong. That reeks of an intuitive disdain that was hitherto reserved for religious and racial dogma. I do not care what you believe. Just do not try to palm it off on me. And get over yourself, for crying it out loud. That there is a God or there is no God is not a mathematical question that can be scientifically proven. It is more a question of ‘should’ than ‘is’. Those who believe in God are convinced that they should believe in God because that is the right course of action. Atheists are equally convinced that one should not believe in God. Both consider those who differ either ignorant or nutty. For me this is no longer an intellectually stimulating debate. Instead I find it an annoying and exhausting web of diatribes that do little to bring us enlightenment or reciprocal benevolence. I think the more important questions include how to live symbiotically in a diverse world, how to lead a good life with a purpose, and how to make peace with the inevitability of death. For some like me, their own humanity is their moral com, but for many others, their faith is their com. As long as the needle on our com points the same moral direction, I do not care. Rather than spending my energy attacking others needlessly, I would stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone who is humble about their own humanity and willing to focus their energy on things that can have a tangible impact on human life and its future. To me the intellectual drawback of uned belief in anything is that it

inculcates a lack of reasoning, making one amenable to entertaining uned belief in other areas of thought as well. This is probably why we often see credulous millions subscribing to illogical and unfounded theories that are not necessarily religious in nature. Hence, in matters more philosophical, I find my scepticism a fine refuge from the certitude of both religious and irreligious extremists.

31 MAN’S EXPERIENCE OF GOD

What we worship is what we will ourselves become.

H OW DO WE DISCUSS MAN’S experience of God? To begin with, I think of a man sitting in Hawaii by the shore of Pacific Ocean. He wants to know what Pacific Ocean is all about. And he has a water glass in his hand. Can he adequately measure the ocean? No, it’s not possible. Human understanding in its encounter with the Divine is similar. Before we summon any religious teachings or dogma to our rescue in our comprehension of God, we need to see whether or not our finite, imperfect, and limited human experience holds some signs of a self who is higher and more enduring than our own. Thus man’s experience of God can only be tackled with a scrutiny of human experience itself. Let’s begin to explore that. Human experience contains an inherent indication of the existence of God, who is the source of all that is good and the custodian of moral order. In surrender to the altar of Higher Law, we find a fulfilment of our own destiny. When one closely examines and scrutinizes one’s direct experience of the mystery of life, one comes across inimitable indications of a presence that limits one’s life and sets the direction of its motion. Now, to realize that God exists is the easy bit; the problem arises in developing, with our finite consciousness, a convincing conception of God. The fact that we have a finite consciousness shows that there is an infinite which surrounds it and makes it seem finite. However, for the religious consciousness, merely acknowledging that God exists does not suffice. Religious consciousness requires man to have some idea of who God is. Hence, the need for prophets to point man to a more coherent conception of God. Our thinking can only indicate to us the limits of our comprehension. In that

sense it frees us, as it establishes the limits of our understanding and liberates us to rise to a higher level of awareness. So, in demarcating our knowledge, our thinking liberates our knowledge, as it defines to us the limits of our reason. Contemplation does for us what it can do. That is, by setting the limits of our knowledge, our consciousness, and our familiarity, it indicates that there exist other possible sources of a greater comprehension. For a wide majority of people, it is impossible to escape the necessity of affirming God’s existence. However, the difficulty arises in a reasonable interpretation of God’s traits. Even the rejection of God can be an affirmation, because with regard to absolute propositions, denials become noteworthy affirmations.

In human experience the existence of God is implicated in our finitude. And I have seen that the kind of God we worship eventually shapes our outlook and influences our growth. In some strange way, what we worship is what we are in the process of becoming. A man can be discovered by what he loves and therefore by what he worships, because as Ali ibn Abi Talib explained, worship is the highest form of love. This is a perspicacious observation by Ali, for we are indeed what we love. If people loves money too much, that reality is their God, and—regardless of what they say—for them God is not anything other than that. If a man loves paradise and the women he expects to get there, and for which he is willing to blow himself up along with unsuspecting fellow humans, then his God is that concept of paradise which he covets and nothing else. I have seen from personal experience that when I find out what people want, I realize that comprises their longing for God as they perceive Him, because that is the form in which God appears to them. They know nothing beyond it. Hence our concept of God needs to be continuously and steadily refined. God has no need for our acknowledgement, let alone our worship. It’s we who need His grace, His love, and His touch. We must never forget that what we worship is what we will ourselves become. Without a feeling of humility, without a sentiment of reverence, we cannot even be a good human; the attitude of arrogance only injures us. Thus a religious belief which contributes to our conceit and arrogance is detrimental. While religion may have become easy for a modern critical mind to discard because of

its contradictions, the belief in God is not capable of being so easily discarded. The thing is that God cannot be created in the process of our knowledge of Him. He has to exist in His own right. In spiritual , the desire consciousness is something we live on. The question is how to be aware of this link and cultivate your awareness of His presence.

32 PERVERSION OF FAITH AND SECULARIZATION

Separating church from state went a long way in promoting peace.

W ARS OF RELIGION HAVE ALWAYS been a part of human history. Hence, it is hardly surprising if even today acts of terrorism are perpetrated by people motivated by an abuse of religion. It is a perversion of faith. However, like other perverts, the people of violence don’t see themselves as perverting their religion —they see themselves as advocating a correct version, a pure version, of their religion. The real problem is that of clerics’ power: where clerics have excessive political power, that power is used to promote tyranny. This is what is being manifested by political Islam through its protagonists like ISIS, Taliban, and Boko Haram. Christianity, too, has a very shameful history of murder and torture for precisely that reason. And when the power of the Catholic priests was diminished (by the Enlightenment), their power to kill and tyrannize was taken away. The same has to happen to the places in the world of Islam which are now troubled by overpowerful clerics. In order to diminish the power of clerics, we have to expose the lies, distortions, and sheer rubbish which lie at the heart of religion. In other words, people need to give up believing self-evident nonsense. What might mitigate the conflict that organized religion leads to is rational education, with such subjects as anthropology from the first year of school right through to the last. These courses would include a disionate look at the religions of the world and at the benefit and harm they have caused. As for the twenty-first-century battles, they could be fought on grounds of cultural or doctrinal differences, but what more probably should give rise to these battles is poverty, hunger, lack of potable water, lack of arable land, and

extreme inequality. Instead, as we watch the warriors of the Islamic State (ISIS) running amok through the Middle East, wrecking the modern nation-states of Syria and Iraq that were created by departing European colonialists, it may be difficult to believe we are living in the twenty-first century. The sight of throngs of refugees and the brutal and arbitrary cruelty is all too redolent of barbarian tribes sweeping away the Roman Empire, or the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan cutting a swathe through China, Anatolia, Russia, and Eastern Europe, devastating entire cities and massacring their inhabitants. Only the ubiquitous media and instant coverage remind us that this is a very modern war. The brutal spite of these warriors, quoting the Quran as they sever their victims’ heads, reminds us of the connection between religion and violence. The violence perpetrated by ISIS reminds me of Sam Harris saying that ‘religion itself produces a perverse solidarity that we must find some way to undercut’. It is dumbfounding that even in this day and age religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such madness in a relatively central part of the world—the Middle East. How can religion inspire such tolerance of violence? It is because there is a vicious core intrinsic in religion, which inexorably radicalizes any difference. When the opposing sides or the aggressors believe that God is on their side, there is little possibility of a compromise and cruelty is sanctioned. The fixated chauvinism which religion seems often to let loose can only be controlled by the creation of a liberal state that separates politics and religion. The Muslim world has to learn to not to permit this bigoted fervour to intrude on political life, as the West has learnt not very long ago. That theocracy is a bad idea is all too obvious.

The West, too, did not arrive at this solution without problems. It was after centuries of mayhem and internecine strife that the West developed its view of religion as an entirely private pursuit, fundamentally discrete from other human activities, and particularly separate from politics. Religion was not always a separate activity, sealed off from all others; rather, it permeated all human undertakings, including economics, state-building, politics, and warfare. Before 1700 it would have been impossible for people to say where politics ended and religion began. The Crusades were definitely motivated by religious fervour, but they were also

deeply political: Pope Urban II let the knights of Christendom loose on the Muslim world to extend the power of the church eastwards and create a papal monarchy that would control Christian Europe. The Spanish Inquisition was, in effect, an attempt to secure the internal order of Spain after a divisive civil war, at a time when an attack by the Ottoman Empire seemed imminent. Similarly, the European wars of religion and the Thirty Years’ War were surely aggravated by the sectarian quarrels of Protestants and Catholics, but their violence reflected the birth pangs of the modern nation-state. These European wars, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, created the myth of religious violence. This development required a new understanding of religion. It was provided by Martin Luther, who was the first European to propose the separation of church and state. Luther advocated the absolute states that would not become a political reality for another hundred years. The sovereign, independent state reflected his vision of the independent and sovereign individual and his view of religion, as an essentially subjective and private quest over which the state had no jurisdiction. He thus laid the foundation of the modern secular ideal.

It is true that warfare and violence have always been a part of politics, but separating church from state went a long way in promoting peace. Secularism now appears a crucial prerequisite of any society’s advancement into modernity, though it would be naive to believe that it should evolve in the same manner in every culture in every part of the world. The word ‘religion’, as we understand it in the West today, did not always have the same meaning. In truth, the only institution that fulfils the modern criterion of religion as a purely private pursuit is Protestant Christianity, which was also a formation of the early modern period. Prior to the 18th century, religion being a private matter would have been inconceivable even to European Catholics. Similarly, the Arabic word din signifies an entire way of life, and the Sanskrit dharma covers law, politics, and social institutions as well as piety. The Hebrew Bible expressly foresaw bringing the whole of human life into the ambit of the sacred. By the late seventeenth century, philosophers had devised a more sophisticated adaptation of the secular ideal. Along with the market economy that was brewing in the West and would shortly transform the world, the liberal state was

another radical innovation. Owing to the brutal zeal it aroused, John Locke insisted that the segregation of religion from government was ‘above all things necessary’ for the creation of a peaceful society. Hence Locke was resolute that the liberal state was the way forward, condemning the confusion of politics and religion as dangerously perverse. As the nation-state came into its own in the nineteenth century along with the industrial revolution, its citizens had to be bound tightly together and mobilized for industry. Modern communications allowed governments to produce and propagate a national ethos, and allowed states to intrude into the lives of their citizens more than ever. Even if they spoke a different language from their rulers, subjects now belonged to the ‘nation’, whether they liked it or not. When secularization was applied in the developing world, it was experienced as an intense disruption—just as it had at first been in Europe. As it usually came with colonial rule, it was seen as a foreign import and rejected as deeply aberrant. In almost every region of the world where secular governments have been established with a goal of separating religion and politics, a countercultural movement has developed in response, determined to bring religion back into public life. This has been tragically apparent in the Middle East. Secularizing rulers such as Ataturk often wanted their countries to look modern, that is, European. In Iran in 1928, Reza Shah Pahlavi issued the laws of uniformity of dress: his soldiers tore off women’s veils with bayonets and ripped them to pieces in the street. In 1935, the police were ordered to open fire on a crowd who had staged a peaceful demonstration against the dress laws in one of the holiest shrines of Iran, killing hundreds of unarmed civilians. Policies like this made veiling an emblem of Islamic authenticity in many parts of the Muslim world. Not all Muslims today are sceptical of secularism because they have been brainwashed by their faith, but many do so because they have often experienced efforts at secularization in a particularly virulent form. Even today many regard the West’s devotion to the separation of religion and politics as incompatible with democracy and freedom. Very often modernizing rulers have embodied secularism at its worst and have made it unpalatable to their subjects. When secularization has been applied by force, it has provoked a fundamentalist reaction—and history shows that fundamentalist movements which come under attack invariably grow even more extreme. The fruits of this error are on display

across the Middle East.

33 SCIENCE AND HUMAN KNOWLEDGE

As rational beings, we cannot be contented with blind beliefs.

T HE SPELL OF SCIENCE IS upon us all, and we cannot deny it. Science stands out by dint of its practical uses, its detached approach, its impersonal viewpoint, and its ethical neutrality. Only the objective cosmic attitude of science can help us forego all other desires in order to fulfil the desire to know and confront the pitfalls, the besetting dogmas, and the inhibitions that stop our thinking from realizing its fullest potential. Science—physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy—carries its meaning on its face. Its quest for knowledge is co-extensive with the entire field of human learning. Science initially evolved as a subject matter of philosophy. Scientists are the sages of our day, just as the early Greek philosophers were the wise ones who knew all there was to be known in their day. With the progress of human knowledge, specialization became inevitable, as the branches of learning were detached from the parent stalks. The last of the sciences that was detached from philosophy was psychology. Confined within our human condition, we cannot help reconstructing in our thoughts the relationship between our direct experience and the order of things that appears to control that experience. This makes us investigate how the ‘changing’ and ‘permanent’ elements in our experience are related. Science takes it as an obligation to think constantly about these seemingly conflicting facts of human experience. Hence, science is a mode of deciphering human experience in a rational way to discover the truth of the matter. A scientist is one who sees life in its fullness, surveying not only all that there is but also that that has yet to be.

Science keeps the specialized modes of perceiving truth within the sphere of their allotted jurisdiction and, overall, assists human life in improving its quality. It enables power and the human spirit in understanding its own place in the scheme of things. Old forms of thought and belief have been dealt a death blow by the progress made in the various fields of science, and historical studies and rational foundations are being furnished for the fabric of human values. Archaeology has opened up vistas in man’s history. Physics and astronomy have shown man that we are not situated in the centre of the cosmos and are not the sole recipient of attention from Higher Powers. Instead we live in a peripheral position on a tiny planet in the universe. The question for man today is not of obtaining external help but of undergoing internal transformation. And to achieve this higher being, we have to rely on our own resources. Therefore, as Ali ibn Abi Talib explains, in each one of us God has already placed a guide—as the voice of reason and of conscience—who, from the profoundest depths of our being, calls our attention to the things that really count and demands our allegiance to the eternal law. The last of the prophets, of an Abrahamic religion at least, declared that the age of revelation was over. Any Messiah anticipated by religion is supposed to come to ‘wrap things up’ and not to make a new start. Man is no longer under tutelage. There is no need for prophets to come to guide us. We have outgrown our immaturity and have been declared free. We are free to make what we can of the time at our disposal. We have the option to walk upon the path to truth or walk down the path to perdition. Ali ibn Abi Talib describes that the only condition set for the pursuit of man’s mission on earth is to ‘contemplate’, ‘reflect’, ‘reason’, ‘investigate’, and ‘consider’ all that we are a witness of. Then we would find that the evidence of what we are called upon to do is engraved in the very layers of our own being as well as upon the face of the world that lies outside us. This is the reason the great Persian poet Saadi Shirazi rightly claimed: ‘The green leaf for the sight of the wise is like the book that furnishes knowledge of the Creator.’ From the age of the sophists in ancient Greece to modern times, human history has often witnessed that lack of faith in the power of rational thought leads to intellectual anarchy and destruction through man’s indiscriminate use of intellect. There is no other method for creating a durable foundation for human conduct, private and public, except by the power of rational thought. Its earliest

demonstration was when the age of sophists was followed by the golden age of the liberators of mankind like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who recovered an ideological basis upon which to maintain ethical values and religious sentiments. In the post-modern era, we have questioned and successfully defied the insufficient sanctions on which our moral life has been reared. Unless we let the powers of rational thought once again provide a lasting basis for the values that make for human progress, peace, and prosperity, many parts of our civilization will continue to live in despair. In other words, lending a philosophical outlook to scientific progress has become a necessity.

As rational beings, we cannot be contented with blind beliefs. We cannot be committed to a course of conduct based on beliefs whose very foundation and rationale we do not know. As we unravel the mysteries of the universe, we must also inculcate beliefs that strengthen our kinship with the world in which our lot is cast. Yes, questions such as the precise nature of the human soul and the truth of spiritual life are yet to be adequately answered, and thus the ideal of intellectual consistency still lies unachieved. However, we must learn to use scientific progress to engender in the human mind a ion for evolving a synthetic attitude to life—to attain the highest expression of human knowledge to its ultimate end. Science is a ‘divine delight’, to borrow Milton’s words, ‘whose mode of thinking is more important than the fruits of its endeavour’. That we do not yet know, with any finality, the answers to many questions that have agitated the minds of many thinkers since Socrates does not undermine the value of science. In fact, it adds to its beauty. Scientist are indifferent to what the ultimate answer may be to what they are trying to understand. They look all their facts in the face, without hope and fear and regardless of emotional, religious, or mystical partiality. They are concerned only with truth and no other consideration. When the great German thinker Friedrich von Schelling was asked whether he would prefer to have all the knowledge to which a man may lay claim or to have merely the desire to know, he responded that he preferred the desire to know. And, as we can all feel, his answer was the right one.

34 ADDRESSING A QUESTION ON HUMAN EVOLUTION

Evolution is a process that continues to march on.

A FRIEND WROTE TO SEEK MY views on the question that if there are millions of apes and billions of sapiens then where are the species deemed to represent the intermediate stages in evolution from apes to sapiens. While the question is quite unscientific and I avoid ‘nontechnical’ discussions in most matters, particularly science, I find it apt to comment on this to address the doubts it may create in some minds. The question itself is ‘naive’ because whether or not a species form is extant, there is substantial evidence of its past existence through transitional fossils and other scientific means. While craftily designed to create doubts about evolution, the question covers only the evolutionary history of primates, in particular the genus Homo, and the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species of hominids (or ‘great apes’). The study of human evolution involves many scientific disciplines, including physical anthropology, primatology, archaeology, linguistics, evolutionary psychology, embryology, and genetics. Evolutionary biology is a strong and vigorous field of science. It is a theoretical structure that involves several basic mechanisms and is consistent with the patterns seen in nature. And there is abundant evidence demonstrating the action of these mechanisms as well as their contributions to nature. Hence, evolution is both a theory and a set of established facts that the theory explains. Like every other science, there is scientific debate about some aspects of evolution, but none of these debates appears likely to shake the foundations of this field. No other scientific explanation can for all the patterns in nature, only nonscientific explanations.

THE QUESTION ABOUT THE MISSING LINK: By geological standards, we humans are a very young species. The average ‘lifespan’ of a mammal species, measured by its duration in the fossil record, is around 10 million years. While hominids have followed a separate evolutionary path since their divergence from the ape lineage, around 7 million years ago, our own species (Homo sapiens) is much younger. Fossils classified as archaic Homo sapiens appear about 400,000 years ago, and the earliest known modern humans date back only 170,000 years. Our knowledge of human evolution is evolving fast, as new fossils continue to be discovered and described. Thirty-five years ago, it was generally accepted that humans and the great apes last shared a common ancestor perhaps 16 to 20 million years ago, and that the separate human branch was occupied by only a few species, each evolving from the one before. Now we know, through a combination of new fossil finds and molecular biology, that humans and chimpanzees diverged as little as 7 million years ago, and that our own lineage is ‘bushy’, with many different species in existence at the same time. The evidence on which scientific s of human evolution is based comes from many fields of natural science. The main source of knowledge about the evolutionary process has traditionally been the fossil record. However, with the development of genetics, DNA analyses now lead the body of evidence. Darwin was remarkably prescient when he wrote in The Descent of Man (1871) that humans had evolved in Africa and were closely related to the great apes (gorilla, chimpanzee, orangutan). Recent breakthroughs in genetics render resounding homage to his unparalleled genius. Current DNA evidence suggests that several haplotypes of Neanderthal origin are present among all non-African populations, and Neanderthals and other hominids, such as Denisova hominin, may have contributed up to 6% of their genome to present-day humans. Anatomically modern humans evolved from archaic Homo sapiens in the Middle Palaeolithic, about 200,000 years ago. The transition to behavioural modernity— with the development of symbolic culture, language, and specialized lithic technology—happened around 50,000 years ago, according to many anthropologists, although some suggest a gradual change in behaviour over a longer time span. As there are thousands of fossils, mostly fragmentary, often consisting of single bones or isolated teeth with complete skulls and skeletons rare, this overview is not meant to be complete, but the species’ evolutionary trajectory represents the current consensus. If there is no clear scientific consensus, other possible classifications are indicated; that is the beauty of

science—prospering through accommodating alternate views. Homo rhodesiensis was the immediate ancestor of modern humans which evidently displaced the Neanderthals in Europe and the island ‘hobbits’ of Southeast Asia. Homo rhodesiensis evolved from Homo erectus about half a million years ago, but still retained some primitive characteristics such as relatively thick bones and molars larger than modern humans. Each time a certain mutation (single nucleotide polymorphism) appears in an individual and is ed on to that individual’s descendants, a haplogroup is formed, including all of the descendants who also carry that mutation. By comparing mitochondrial DNA which is inherited only from the mother, geneticists have concluded that the last female common ancestor whose genetic marker is found in all modern humans, the so-called mitochondrial Eve, must have lived around 200,000 years ago. We can detect the influence of evolution on the present-day human gene pool just as easily as we can view the development of our species’ family tree. This clearly means the whole idea of a simple ‘missing link’ between humans and our ape cousins is false. There was no single moment when humans leapt from the trees to find a new existence on land. It happened gradually, over millennia, with different individuals from different species testing out what it would mean to live far from the protection of sheltering forests. Instead of thinking of transition stages as a ‘missing link’, it would be more accurate to say the transition was a long chain, in which one kind of life gradually shaded into the other. To explain it in simpler , evolution reflects the growing up of an individual as a long exercise in intermediacy. For example, we do not suddenly become adults at the stroke of midnight on our eighteenth birthday. Similarly, human evolution, from something like Australopithecus afarensis to Homo sapiens, consisted of an unbroken series of parents giving birth to children who were mutating to evolve, but yet each successive generation belonged to the same species as their parents. Hence there is no absence of intermediates in the process.

EVOLUTION ON THE MARCH: Evolution is a process that continues to

march on. In the developed world, the combination of modern medicine, new agricultural and technological techniques, and cultural changes has considerably reduced the effects of natural selection. But in developing countries people are still exposed to these selection pressures, so this is where we look for evidence of evolutionary change, for example, the spread of alleles giving resistance to diseases such as malaria. In regions where malaria is endemic, anyone with a genotype giving resistance to malaria would be at an advantage in evolutionary , because they would be more likely to survive and reproduce, ing their advantageous combination of genes on to at least some of their children. The overlap between the geographic spread of malaria in Africa with the presence of the sickle-cell allele is an example: individuals heterozygous for this allele are at a selective advantage over unaffected individuals (and those homozygous for the allele) where malaria is present. The ‘CCR5’ gene is another example. This gene codes for CCR5, a surface protein on white blood cells that is also the docking site for the HIV virus. People homozygous for the ‘delta 32’ mutation in this gene are resistant to attack by HIV, and so they are at a selective advantage in populations where HIV infection is common. But surprisingly, the mutation is most common in white Europeans and very rare in other ethnic groups, including Africans, whereas AIDS is far more common in Africa than in Europe. Scientists have dated the origin of the delta 32 mutation to around seven hundred years ago, and the current hypothesis is that it provided protection against an epidemic disease of that time, perhaps plague or smallpox that were then common in Europe. Obesity and all its related health problems, such as adult-onset (type II) diabetes and cardiovascular disease, are most common in populations of people who have only recently taken up westernized lifestyles, such as Nauru Islanders and the Pima Indians of North America. In both of these groups, 70% of sixty-year-olds have type II diabetes. In both populations, many people die before sixty of diseases related to diabetes and/or obesity. Because there are genotypes— beneficial for hunter-gatherer populations—that can predispose to these ‘western’ diseases, it should be possible to see natural selection working upon them. In such populations we can predict strong selection against the genotypes that predispose individuals to western health problems. When Europeans and non-Europeans are matched for diet and lifestyle, the Europeans have a lower frequency of type II diabetes. This simply means that natural selection had already reduced European frequencies of those genotypes in previous centuries, as the western lifestyle was developing in Europe.

Another example of natural selection is increased oxygen-carrying capacity in the blood. Tibetans living at 4,000 metres above sea level are exposed to lower partial pressure of oxygen, compared to people living at sea level. Researchers studying Tibetan villagers have discovered that women whose blood has a higher oxygen-carrying capacity tend to have more children that survive to adulthood. The highest villages in Tibet have a blood-oxygen concentration 10% higher than normal, and examination of their family trees indicates that this difference is controlled by a single gene. Children of women with the apparent high-oxygen genotype are more likely to survive to have their own children. This suggests that the genotype has a significant reproductive advantage and so is likely to spread through the population—an example of evolution in progress. There are numerous other pieces of recorded evidence of the process of natural selection continuing to work on all life, including us humans.

EVOLUTION AND FAITH: Science provides us with a compelling explanation of changing life on Earth. Accepting evolutionary premises does not require faith, but is based on evidence. While religious faith can exist in spite of the evidence, science always follows it. When the evidence is not complete, science withholds judgement and continues to explore. Hence, in a body of scientific work, there are always some pieces which are under scrutiny. Supernatural explanations based solely on faith lie outside of science, which can neither prove nor disprove miracles. To the rational believer, science is a means of using the God-given gift of reason to understand how God has actually done things. At one point in history, believers used to think that the Sun revolved around the Earth, because they thought the Bible revealed this infallible truth. Science, however, revealed that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Although some believers bitterly resisted this discovery at first, mistaking their own interpretations for the infallible word of God, virtually all eventually came to understand that God could not have set things up the way they had thought. While believers will find the scientific view of the world enhanced and enriched by their religious beliefs, it is folly to insist upon a point of doctrine, grounded in intuition and the authority of tradition, when scientific evidence indicates its falsity. The time will hopefully come when the creationists, like the geocentrists of old, set aside their dogmas and follow the light of reason so that they, too, may learn the great wonders that science

teaches of the universe and of God. Having been born to Muslim parents, I will only comment on the Quran. For me, the Quran and the Theory of Evolution are neither opposites nor alternatives to each other. Hence there is no direct clash. The Quran I read does not say that life began with Adam. It says God chose Adam as His deputy on earth. It says man is born of a lifeless object (semen). If God can create man from a lifeless object, then why can’t He start life from a lifeless object? If some folks do not want to accept certain parts of the Theory of Evolution because they are not in conformity with certain interpretations of the Quran, then that is their prerogative and I will respect it. But they should also refrain from disproving matters of science in an unscientific manner, just as I studied ‘Ilm ur Rijaal’ for years before allowing myself to discuss ‘Hadith’. The Quran suffices for guidance in moral, ethical, and spiritual matters. However, it is not a book of physics, chemistry, biology, or medicine. The problem arises when people brand it as a repository of all that there is to know. Is it intended to have it all? No, it spurs people to be good human beings and good Muslims and to explore. It urges us to think, reflect, and to continue to learn. When you set it up as carrying knowledge about everything, then you set it up for rational failure. We should not needlessly set the Quran up against science, because when the integrity of something deemed to be absolute is undermined, it never recovers. To say that man has design or physical defects does not prove that God did not create man. In fact, according to all scriptures, man and other things in the world are supposed to be imperfect. Man is imperfect not only physically but also biologically, emotionally, and psychologically.

CONCLUSION: While we have addressed the issue of missing links, we need to let go of the myth that there were radical distinctions between early human species. Evolution is a chaotic process, and it will never stop being chaotic. Modern humans are continuing the process, and in another million years, we may have evolved an entirely new way of getting around. If we have, it won’t be because one day everybody woke up with a brand-new bone structure. It will be because over thousands of years and millions of false starts, we slowly and irregularly transformed into a kind of human distinct from the ones who lived

before and mutated to evolve. Each fossil discovered since Darwin’s time either actively s or is compatible with evolution. Not a single fossil has been found to contradict evolution. And moreover, evidence from molecular genetics and DNA in our time would force the conclusion that Darwin was right. The biogeographic evidence of evolution is now so powerful that it cannot be wished away by pretending that the evidence does not exist.

V SOULFUL REFLECTIONS

35 HOMAGE TO MOTHER EARTH

The rotation and revolution of Mother Earth is her dance.

F OR AGES IT HAS BEEN said: ‘The Earth is of the Lord’ (Psalm 24:1). However, only a few of us actually meditate upon this timeless Biblical truth. Reverence to our Mother Earth has always seemed to me the cardinal, the paramount, the most distinctive attitude worthy of man. One of the things that inspires me the most in the Quran is when it onishes man to walk humbly on earth. These Biblical and Quranic teachings, to me, spell out the basic framework in which any man must view our role on earth. The humanity in man rises to a high level of excellence when we treat Mother Earth with reverence and devotion. The man who, on the contrary, is irreverent and walks proudly on earth is ungrateful to the very abode in which we must live and have our being. Man’s complete dependence on earth is not only physical and biological but also aesthetic and spiritual. We depend on earth for everything—for the supply of food, drink, and air as well as for all our materials and tools. Significant atmospheric and thermal changes in our ecology can be fatal. Man is too close to earth and has no conception of life without this earthly abode. Therefore, it is ungrateful to forget our extreme dependence on earth. One of the great examples of treating earth with respect and love is that of the renowned mystic Basher Ibn e Haris, who always walked barefooted on earth. When asked, ‘Why don’t you wear shoes?’ he said, ‘I was barefooted the day when I made my peace with God and ever since I feel ashamed to wear shoes. As God says He has made earth a carpet for us, it is not fit to tread with shoes on the carpet of kings.’ As Fariduddin Attar explains in his book Tazkaratul Aulia, Basher stands out for this gesture as one of noblest sons of the human race. While earth can live without man, man cannot live without earth. It existed long

before man turned up on its bosom and will survive the disappearance of the human race. The earth is of the Lord, and man, as the Quran explains (88th Chapter), has been appointed as successor to earth, which is considered a living being—aware and pulsating with life.

When the earth is shaken with her shaking And the earth brings forth her burdens And man says what has befallen her? On that day she will tell her tidings.

Mother Earth is, therefore, a designated witness to testify, before the Lord of Creation, what man has done to her and upon her to our fellow beings. If only we could be constantly aware that someone so close as the very earth we tread upon is a vigilant witness to what we do, our life would become a lot more meaningful for us. Earth is not lifeless matter to be trodden upon, but a living presence to be reckoned with, loved, and respected as the very cradle of man’s nurture and evolution. As ‘successor to earth’ man consummates a process in evolution which was initiated with the making and fashioning of earth itself. Man’s evolution is to be seen as a continuation of the creative process reflected in the creation of the earth. Only when we place value on earth can we place some value on ourselves and willingly take up the burden of furthering the evolution of life. Without that, we are condemned to servitude to our lower ions, by going down the way of all flesh and thus failing the purpose of evolution. As Rabindranath Tagore teaches, when a man ceases to be man, that man becomes worse than an animal. People like Einstein show us that it is possible to develop one’s inner resources to a point where visiting the higher truth of universe becomes a concrete and a tangible reality.

The modern world speaks a lot of man’s dignity and our right to be respected for what we are and not to be treated merely as a means. These claims only gain more weight if man is regarded as successor to earth and is made to observe suitable limits. When an abuse of freedom or power takes place, then the dogma of the dignity of man in the abstract serves no real purpose. It is man’s destiny to inherit all that is available on earth for our use, and our duty to fight evil on its own plane. The evildoers are the tresers to and usurpers of the gifts that can be offered by the earth. Morality is the nature of things and, in the end, power is durable only on a moral basis. Earth is man’s abode, ensures our sustenance, and helps the development of our physical and mental powers. It is our guide and governess. Man has learnt from the fish how to triumph over seas and from the birds how to fly. Nature has led man to inventions and discoveries. Through reflective thought, man endeavoured to harness nature’s forces to accomplish the very purpose that nature is trying to pursue. Man’s gifts of comprehension and creation are endlessly inspired by the splendour of earth displayed by its mountains, valleys, fertile plains, deserts, rivers, lakes, and springs; the pageant of day and night; the cadence of seasonal changes; the mystery of precious resources in the depths of the earth; the phenomenon of clouds and precipitation; and the majesty of the sea and its powerful waves. Man has mastered nature only after bowing in humility, as a pupil, before its majesty. Modern science regards the operations discernible in the great laboratory that is earth as in keeping with the same involuntary principle. Biological evolution and the origin and variation of species are explained by fortuitous mutation, and their survival is justified in of successful mechanical adaptations by the species to the varying conditions in their environment. For example, the phenomena of ‘imitation’ and ‘protective resemblance’ are exhibited by various species in the interest of their survival. The great Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky explains the formation of this remarkable identity between the species and their environment in of nature’s tendency to try always to adorn herself and not to be just herself. In Ouspensky’s words:

All the time she is dressing herself up, all the time changing her costumes, all the time turning before a mirror, looking at herself from all sides, iring herself— then again undressing and dressing.

Her actions often appear to us as accidental and aimless because we always try to attribute to them some utilitarian meaning. In reality, however, nothing can be further from Nature’s intentions than a working towards ‘utility’. Utility is attained only by the way, only casually. What can be regarded as permanent and intentional is the tendency towards decorativeness, the endless disguise, the endless masquerade, by which Nature lives.

Much of medieval European literature and philosophy is imbued with the view that man as such is more important than the totality of the cosmos and is the measure of everything. This is a false notion. I will borrow the words of an Indian sage, Dandemis, living round the times of Alexander the Great, to describe man’s psychology of vanity, egotism, and arrogance.

Man, who is truly but a mote in the wide expanse, believes the whole world to have been created only for him; he thinks the whole frame of nature is only interested in his wellbeing. As a fool, when the images tremble on the face of water, thinks that the trees, towns, and the whole wide horizon are dancing to his pleasure, so also man, while nature performs her destined course, believes that all her motions are but to entertain his eye. While he counts the rays of the sun to warm him, he supposes that it was made only to be of use to him, and while he traces the moon in her nightly path, he thinks she was created simply to entertain him. Man is not the cause why the world holds its course; for him only were not made the vicissitudes of summer and winter. No change would follow even if whole human race would cease to exist: man is but one, only one of millions of species that are placed in the creation.

Words of sobering wisdom, aren’t they? Man must work humbly on earth. We must constantly remind ourselves that we are not necessary for earth’s survival,

although we cannot survive without earth for our abode. We of this age have no right to treat the earth as it was our exclusive property. For example, infusing it with excessive fertilizers that, over time, will diminish its reproductive capacity. Our generation, after all, is no more than a link in the long chain of mankind and therefore has to be loyal to the claims of the total life of humanity on this planet. We are only here as trustees and must strive to put the earth to minimum misuse. No generation has the right to tamper with the delicate equilibrium of life’s forces on earth and expose the human race to dangerous consequences of its reckless actions. Our nuclear arsenals and explosions are a rash attempt to irritate our Mother Earth. It is possible that this reckless enterprise of modern man may eventually go so far as to reach a point of no return.

I have always strived, in my humble way, to become more aware of and better acquainted with the personality of earth to be able to relate to its maternal touch. I feel that anyone who is out of touch with earth becomes, to borrow the language of psychology, an alienated individual pulling away from the natural habitat. All culture and art draw nourishment from indigenous sources, as all great cultures have had their nourishment and from the earthly surroundings in which they took their form and shape. Whatever our creed and faith, it is clear that God loves the earth and has appointed man to service the needs of the earth and to make it a fit place for the best of the creatures to live in. Anyone who aspires to be a great soul in heaven has to begin by being a great soul on earth. That’s why the poet John Keats called this earth ‘the vale of Soul-making’. My travels around many countries have taught me that life is so earthbound that it has no option but to respond to the call of earth-spirit. In my wanderings on earth I have realized that the great structures built by man have a lasting meaning and beauty only if they are contextualized with their earthly setting, exuding a kinship between earth and man’s creation on it. Shifting landscapes, fauna and flora, languages and customs, races and manners have led me to believe that Mother Earth herself must be a beautiful being indeed to be able to put on fancy dresses with every change of places, the sunset and sunrise, and the seasons.

The soul of man provides Mother Earth with a mirror to see herself in. As explained by Al ibn Abi Talib, it is in the inner life of man that nature reaches the apex of creative vigour and sublimity. This has now been borne out by genetic science. I believe that the interaction between earth and man is a mode of transcendental experience, a sort of fusion in oneness, a confluence of life and the beauty that animates Mother Earth and man, who is, after all, her child. The rotation and revolution of Mother Earth is her dance, a wonder whose tempo sustains our life. Like the ancient Pythagoreans, I believe in the music of the earth. Can you hear it?

36 DEATH, THE ETERNAL MYSTERY

Death and dying have a majestic aura and scope.

I N EVERY CULTURE WE KNOW of, whether secular or religious, cosmopolitan or tribal, the ultimate question of life remains the inevitability of death and how to prepare for it. As Seneca the Younger famously wrote to his friend Marcia in consolation for the loss of her son Metilius, ‘We are dying every day.’ In the first twenty-five years of my life many of the people closest to me died, including my parents. Some of them were quite young. The next twenty-five years were relatively much kinder. I have seen my kids grow from learning to sit to driving a car. Now as grey hair and the initial signs of ageing mark my appearance, it does not bother me how it looks, but I do think about what it means. It reminds me that eventually I am going to die. If I am lucky I will get to grow very old first, watching my body slowly morph into something distant from what it is now. And then I will die. Things that I love, like sports, will happen and people will wish that I was there to see them, but I won’t be. We can call it an awareness of death. I will not know new babies in the family or new players or new songs. I do know that whenever I die, I will leave something unfinished—such is the business of life and death. Meanwhile, I can see no reason to be anything but happy, and death is not, and never has been, frightening. If it didn’t bother me not existing before I was born, perhaps it won’t bother me not existing again. Death wields a sinister appeal. Nobody hears of an aircraft accident without contemplating the engers’ terrible final moments. Even little children, sensing a death in the family, innocently but persistently question in order to probe what they sense to be a giant mystery.

Death unwillingly intrudes on most people’s thoughts during a day. Death strikes in all forms. Death by accident or killing is the cruel interruption by violence which prevents a life from reaching its end as it should be reached. But even in the most natural of deaths, the body can fail in ways that are awfully painful, slowly and excruciatingly, demanding much stoicism. Or it can switch off with little more than a faint gust. Hence, it is not unwise to hope for an easy death.

What happens when we die? Where do we go after death? Do we just cease to exist, disappearing definitively? Is death a door opening unto another existence? Death is the great mystery of life. Amusingly, scientific research into singlecelled organisms shows that the nature of life, on a cellular level, does not by design contain a self-destruct mechanism, thus making death an unnatural part of life. Yet nevertheless, all that lives on earth eventually dies. All through time, every religion, philosophy, and spiritual scheme has wanted to explain this mystery. Death is not just a time in which one’s heart ceases to beat. In fact, at every stage, death is a significant part of human life, as the inevitable end feared by many and contemplated by all. Its certainty makes it a very popular topic. Death affects many people beyond the deceased. Everyone is deeply affected by someone’s death at one time or another. Through the ages, innumerable beliefs about death have been rife. Interestingly, most of these beliefs hold that the soul continues to live on after death, maintaining that recollections, ing, and prayers keep the souls of the departed alive. While this has never been confirmed with certitude, most religions and cultures assert that the soul continues on in some inexplicable manner which is yet to be known. In some religions people live their lives around death, as groundwork for death and the hereafter. Regardless of vast divergence in beliefs and images of death that different people cling to, individuals’ notion of death is very important to them. We all want to arrive at death with something to say. We all crave to see death as something we could be ready to meet when it knocks on our door, something we could be respectful of without being afraid of.

Often when death is not properly explained to the kids, they become fascinated

with it in a morbid way. They want to talk about gladiators and fighting to the death. Topics like medieval torture and Inquisition death sentences become appealing. In the past, death was such a part of everyday life, it was plainly and bluntly discussed. The Egyptians, for instance, were completely unafraid of death and suffered no lasting negativity from it. We still crave to have frank conversations about our mortality. We venerate and celebrate our dead, telling stories and talking endlessly about the glory in their death. Innumerable folklores, legends, books, and movies about those having to deal with death or those with a quasi-immortality continue to captivate us. In the absence of the imperative of vulnerability to loss and death, there would be little reason to get anything done. Without an engagement with death, there would be no wisdom that time is limited and must not be wasted. Without the inevitability of death, there would be no thought for legacy, ensuring that we are ed well. Death brings a sense that we are preparing for something, thus reminding us to keep our house in order and to leave things better than we found them. When death is foretold, by a terminal illness or some other cause, people have time to gradually adjust and make peace with death, to set their affairs in order, and to say goodbye to loved ones. However, many deaths occur suddenly, striking without a word of caution. When facing their mortality, many people turn to religion, as most religions glorify death by promising rewards in one way or the other in the afterlife, often making death more attractive than life. Religious thought simply accepts the inescapability of death and tries to paint better alternatives that await the faithful after death. These ideas are a great source of comfort for countless people. Perhaps there are, in reality, many paths leading to God and the mystery of death will unfold differently to each person, depending upon their beliefs. Perhaps life is a biochemical accident and death brings nothing but a descent into eternal nothingness. What is incontrovertible, though, is that the mystery of death is so deep that— despite thousands of years of religious doctrines, myths, traditions, scientific research, and countless other theories ing for death—we are today more confused about death than ever before. What remains a constant is that death and dying have a majestic aura and scope that dwarf preoccupation with wealth creation, career, old-age care, and estate planning. Education for the end of life remains an extremely important part of a lifetime’s learning. The intricacy we face when coping with the death of loved ones is enforced by our discomfort at

declaring our own finitude. In this age of re-examination, human finitude seems a good place to start, specifically because it is a complex issue. It is an issue that must be dealt with imaginatively because we can never realistically experience mortality. While we fail to find time and will to do anything about the slaughter of innocents around the world, the death of someone close heralds a lapse in one’s indifference. Still, one’s own death seems so abnormal, like an error by the reaper, a cosmic crime. To sum up, death is a reality which we are struggling to make sense of. What happens after crossing the bridge of death is sheer speculation. But we cannot do away with death without doing away with life. In reality, life feeds on death. We exist on the substratum of our ancestors’ bones. Our evolution to Homo sapiens is a result of the ceaseless weeding out of the unfit and the unfortunate. It is worth paying homage to all our ancestors, whose dying made our lives possible.

37 THE STARRY NIGHTS OF TIAN SHAN MOUNTAINS

This is a boundless journey.

S UMMER NIGHTS AT THE HEIGHTS of the Tian Shan Mountains are simply magnificent—mostly cloudless and clear. It is an amazing experience each time I go camping and sit under the sparkling sky, lit with the majesty, magic, and brilliance of stars. I prefer to camp at vantage points or saddles affording a 360degree view of the sky hanging above the mountain tops, with only the sound of the wind ruffling pine needles beneath on hillsides. During my troubled moments I look up towards the sky and surrender, reminding myself how insignificant my problems are in a universal context. Sometimes I philosophize with friends as we lie on our backs and study the stars above. While we may be perched just a couple of thousand metres up, the sky seems to come down here at night by thousands of kilometres, and stars look bigger and brighter. Fascinated by their mystery, I can relate to Immanuel Kant when he said, ‘Two things have always filled me with wonder; the starry sky above and the moral law within.’ This beautiful allegory views man’s outer world extending to the farthest stars and our inner world, consisting of the voice of conscience, in the depth of our being. While observing the magnificence and splendour of the interstellar spaces within whose womb the countless heavenly stars move, I seem to touch an eclectic being and drift away into an expanse whose edges it is difficult to determine. It explains to me what the Quran means when it says: ‘And He has made subservient to you the sun and the moon, pursuing their courses and He has made subservient to you the night and the day’ (Surah Ibrahim: 33). Although the planets, the sun, and the stars are pursuing their independent courses, the Quran them ‘subservient’ to man because of man’s faculty of

reason and ability to discover the truth of things. With our capacity to think, we know to predict their movements and for their formation. Hence a man can plunge into the heart of things and feel the heartbeat of the whole creation. While the will of man does not rule the universe, man is totally free to ascertain the truth of things and the ground of their being. As I sit there and ponder, the stars represent the utmost limit of my physical sight, and my thoughts carry me to them unshackled by my body. My imagination exclaims that there are worlds beyond these stars too and, even though I cannot envision them in my earthly abode, I feel myself a part of the spiritual process of the universe—much of it yet unknown to me. As the night wears on, on the eastern horizon, the moon seems to furtively wander from China into Kazakhstan. The nights when it is fuller, its light cloaks the brightness of the stars, the borrowed light of the moon eclipsing the luminosity of the stars. This reminds me how we, bound by time and space, are prisoners of our perspective, asg prominence in relation to nearness. I feel humble and continue to look at the starry sky as a new significance reveals itself to me.

The object of man’s life is to see past the appearance to discern the truth of things. Our imagination supplies the third and the hidden dimensions of what our eye reveals to us. As Plato tells us: ‘It is not the eye that sees, it is the “I” that sees.’ This is man’s destiny in the world; to perceive, to contemplate, to realize, to discover the universe, to understand nature, and to relate to the external world while being moored in one’s inner soul. To consciously integrate these two worlds is to live spiritually. Spirituality has no other connotation, no other substance. To bequeath upon man this ability and opportunity of discerning the truth of things is the greater gift of the Maker to man. This is a boundless journey, as Milton describes: Others apart sat on a hill retired In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high Of Providence, Fore-knowledge, Will and Fate— Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute—

And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.

The universe is a maze of interrelated arrangements of divergent bodies and domains of manifestations of the spirit. If one does not reflect on the totality of all there is and see the relationships among various parts as well as of each part to the whole, one remains a prisoner to one’s perspective. The evolution of human life reflects the highest manifestation of the primordial impulse of creation. All our aspirations and instincts emanate from the depths of life itself. They can be traced to the deeper strata of human personality and often hark back to the animal, the botanical, the chemical, and other levels of life’s evolution. Man is thus rooted in a supra-individual reality that gives direction to our life. This illustrates the primeval unity of the individual life with the whole universe. We have seen that when love takes possession of the soul of man, we cease to belong to the fixed formation of a clan, religion, or community and are transported into the world of universal. All those shackles that bound us disappear in submission to the infinite power of love. Similarly, we have seen that faith makes a man look to the yet unborn future with hope and courage. This is how the starry sky in the rough country of Tian Shan Mountains reminds me of the measure of our reach and the essence and universality of life. To end, I will borrow Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s words to seek our Lord’s grace.

Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be: They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

We have but faith: we cannot know; For knowledge is of things we see;

And yet we trust it comes from thee, A beam in darkness: let it grow.

Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell; That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before,

But vaster. We are fools and slight, We mock thee when we do not fear But help thy foolish ones to bear; Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.

38 THE REAL HERITAGE OF PAKISTAN AND INDIA

One feels as if it was only yesterday that Alexander crossed the Indus.

I RECENTLY VISITED THE WORLD-RENOWNED PETROGLYPHS (rock carvings) at Tamgaly, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Set around the lush Tamgaly Gorge, amidst the vast and arid Chu-Ili Mountains, is a remarkable concentration of some five thousand petroglyphs. The main part of these petroglyphs belongs to the Bronze Age. Distributed among several complexes with associated settlements and burial grounds, they are testimonies to the husbandry, social organization, and rituals of pastoral peoples. Human settlements in the site are often multi-layered and show occupation through the ages. A huge number of ancient tombs are also to be found, including stone enclosures with boxes and cists (middle and late Bronze Age), and mounds (kurgans) of stone and earth (early Iron Age to the present). The central canyon contains the densest concentration of engravings and what are believed to be altars, suggesting that these places were used for sacrificial offerings. While I stood on the ruins of Tamgaly, my mind tried to reconstruct the past that lies wrecked here. I realized that decline and destruction are wrought large on everything we behold, as Percy Bysshe Shelley explains in his timeless short poem ‘Ozymandias’. The last three lines of this sonnet are worth repeating here:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

As I reflected on these monuments of human history in Central Asia, my mind wandered back to South Asia—the place of my origin. I have had the good fortune to visit many of the archaeological sites in Pakistan, which afford us a vivid glimpse of how the people in Indus Valley lived a few thousand years before the Christ. A visit to Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa, or Taxila is an extraordinary reminder of the sheer unreality of time and the vanity of man.

The ruins scattered across Pakistan bear testimony to how the people in India lived fifty centuries ago. In fact, the word India is derived from ‘Indos’ (Indus) in Greek, and the region fed by Indus and its tributaries was the then existent India. The vast Indo-Pakistan mainland, with its fertile alluvial plains and hospitable climate, beyond the high ramparts of the mighty Himalayas, presented itself as a new world to those who ventured here from the north or the west. These adventurers from barren and hostile Iranian and Central Asian plateaus must have taken great delight in discovering and settling down in this new world. They descended from all directions, from Central Asia to the extreme west. In that context, the arrival of the Aryans some 4,500 years ago is only a recent phenomenon. Though the historical evidence does not offer much precision about the races that inhabited India prior to the Aryans, it bears out that the area covered by this civilization was twice that of Old Kingdom Egypt and nearly four times that of Sumer and Akkad together. The material culture over this entire area was amazingly uniform and even more remarkably uniform in time.

As per Ronald Latham:

The seven levels excavated at Mohenjo-Daro (perhaps covering the period from 3,000 to 2,500 B.C.) are scarcely distinguishable, except that the later buildings are inferior to the earlier ones. It is evident that a civilization so highly developed, widespread, and stable must have a long past behind it, so that it may quite conceivably be older than either the Egyptian or the Mesopotamian.

Latham goes on to explain that the Indus people used wheeled vehicles, cultivated many plants and crops, and domesticated various animals. The earliest record of human history in India, as elsewhere, introduces the wars of dominance, the conquest of the weak by the strong that has ever since remained the fate of the human history. Appreciating the exhibits revealed by excavation at Taxila, one feels as if it was only yesterday that Alexander crossed the Indus on a bridge of boats just above the confluence of the Kabul River. As the ancient Indians were averse to recording the annals, we have to look to Greek historians for s of the events in the history of ancient India. From them we also learn a lot about the interaction of ancient Iranian and Indian cultures since the time of Cyrus (558–529 B.C.), whose empire extended to the Punjab and survived till the end of Darius. It is difficult to determine the religion followed by the Dravidians, who lived here before the arrival of Aryans, thus making it tough to examine various phases of the religious development that eventually climaxed in the literature of the Vedas. What we do know, though, is that the Dravidian cults left a mark on the early life of India. The reverence of idols and the worship of deities, mostly female, hark back to Dravidian influence. Then came Gautama Buddha and his creed. Humanity owes immense gratitude to Buddha who, in the Orient at the least, was the first person to focus man’s attention on the vital question of our personal salvation and deliverance. In bringing philosophy down from the clouds to the hearths and households of men, Buddha did for India what Socrates did for Greece. Though so little is known about the life of Buddha that it becomes difficult to sift history from legend and mystery, the religious significance of his mission—as accepted and preserved by Buddhist scholars—cannot be underestimated. After receiving illumination under the Bodhi tree for forty-four years, he went about preaching as his disciples garnered teachings directly from the Master himself. Buddha’s greatness comes through in the impatience he showed towards meaningless metaphysical questions—nurtured in ancient Indian religious thought and creed —that had become a staple commodity. He refused to answer these questions and thus spoke: ‘I have come to deliver you from sorrow, from suffering, and from pain. What matters it to you to know all that is implied in the solution of the problems of creation, of the reality of God, if you are not properly directed on just the one thing that counts, namely, your escape from the wheel of life.’ And he set about urging people to practise virtue in order to disentangle

themselves from the cycles of birth and death. The path led the Master to peace, to love, to knowledge, to illumination, to Nirvana. What the Master meant by Nirvana has been the subject of much debate. To most, however, it is a state of man’s being where one resides in peace and contentment. Buddha was a great seer who not only delivered the individual from the peril of worldly suffering but also liberated those who came to believe in him from the dogma of the ancient religious thoughts of which the Brahmans of his day were the custodians. All this denial was the historic necessity to focus man’s mind on the practical task of being able to fight the dogmatism, the formalism, and the rigid ritualism that pervaded pre-Buddhism religious teachings. Buddha did in India exactly what Christ was to do four centuries later, to wean man’s mind away from selfish ends by highlighting the utter unreality of this life. It’s a pity that following the end of Ashoka’s regime, Buddhism disappeared from the Indian mainland and found refuge in bordering lands. Brahmanic revival meant the disappearance of Buddhism. However, the archaeological treasures in Pakistan continue to articulate the force of Buddhism.

Although wedged firmly between the forces of life and death, man often becomes unmindful of man’s real place in the scheme of things. We then walk insolently on earth instead of learning to tread softly and humbly. The world is a theatre of time that perennially announces to man the value of humility. As Somerset Maugham explains: ‘All sensible people know that vanity is the most devastating, the most universal and the most ineradicable of all the ions that afflict the soul of man, and it is only vanity that makes him deny its power. It is more consuming than love.’ Jonathan Swift elucidated it even better: ‘The strongest ion allows us some rest, but vanity keeps us perpetually in motion. What a dust do I raise! says the fly upon a coach-wheel. And at what a rate do I drive says the fly on the horse’s back.’ The vestiges of our history scattered all across Pakistan and India remind us to let humility take possession of our soul whenever we contemplate the inevitable end of all things. A culture that placed emphasis on humility is not only a heritage we must preserve but also India’s remarkable gift to the world.

39 SAYING GOODBYE TO CORPORATE LIFE

We can spend our lives building a professional identity only to end up yearning to divest ourselves of its trappings.

A LOT IN LIFE IS ABOUT farewells and leave-taking—moving from school to college, from college to professional life, from employment to employment, from love to love, from country to country, and from life phase to life phase. The year 2014 marked another major leave-taking for me. When I left Citi that year, it was not easy doing so. Not because of the security and trappings of corporate success, but because I liked the organization and loved working for it. Citi, indeed, is as good an institution as any multinational. For me, it has been essential to have a clear purpose in my life. The choice and successful pursuit of a profession can be an effective tool for achieving your purpose. Decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent become easier. I want my life to be assessed not by dollars but the individuals whose lives have come into with mine. Hence, the part of my job I relished the most over the years was the opportunity it brought to connect with and to build and develop people and teams. Management is a noble profession if it is practised well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, practise values of responsibility and fairness, and contribute to the success of a team. However, the twinge of separation was far sured by the excitement of charting out a new course on my own. Yes, I was anxious. For the first time in my working life, I had no company to associate with my name. I was moving to a new place and was somewhat wary of meeting new people without being able to announce what I did. When your name was once a constant on many phone screens but is now rare, the void has to be dealt with.

However, excitement is the key word to define what I felt. Excitement about no longer living life through a great brand in the corporate world where organizations incessantly pressure their people to achieve and people are valued for their utility in fulfilling their organizations’ dream and little else. Ironically, in a society which defines itself through work, we can spend our lives building a professional identity only to end up yearning to divest ourselves of its trappings.

Citi stands out as an institution in that it is a great school—a fabulous training ground for bankers, especially in the emerging markets. It is a highly structured organization, and yet it moves with great alacrity for a behemoth of its size and range. Its geographical reach and diversity mean that you can often switch jobs with a change in career dimension without having to leave the company. The general quality of people is remarkably good for an unsexy giant, and you get to work with a lot of clever people. By dint of its vast range of activities and operations, the company provides many opportunities to acquire diplomacy and political skills. However, the organization has lost quite a bit of its character and some of its lustre in the midst of the series of problems it has had to face over the last fifteen years. It has become over-compartmentalized with a labyrinth of matrices and bureaucracy. Compared to twenty years ago, Citi today loses a lot more of its time and energy in internal manoeuvring and friction. The organization has surely receded from its baseline in optimizing the deployment of the sum of its energy. Its reward system has drifted away from merit, and the annual performance reviews have become more cumbersome and complex. The upheavals in the past years have also unleashed a continuing saga of shifting strategies and whims as the organization tries to recreate itself after every major setback. As Frederick Herzberg asserts, the powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements. Good corporations strive to ensure that their career offerings are designed to fulfil all of these four aspects. For people with a high need of achievement, their careers provide the most concrete evidence that they are moving forward. The best years in corporate life are the early years when the opportunities for

learning and personal and career growth are abundant. However, instead of life getting continuously more exciting as we grow in a career, opening up greater freedom and a lot more options, life gets narrower at one stage or the other for most people as they advance. It is not uncommon to see people living out the last ten to fifteen years of their careers for a cosy retirement as if those years did not represent precious life to be lived to its fullest. Perhaps we get addicted to constancy and the security of monthly and yearly cash flows into our pockets. It is this addiction that is the most difficult to surmount when making difficult choices. In hindsight I realize that the corporate career should be engineered only around two choices: step up or step off. To sit tight and hope is, more often than not, not worth the years of our life we trade in the process.

Working for a big corporation has many charms: it entails learning and personal growth, it brings status and respect, it enhances social acceptability to make networking easier, it is filled with adrenalin-pumping moments in a competitive environment, and it affords opportunities to build a wealth of lifetime relationships with colleagues and peers. It teaches you to network, as in the corporate world invisibility is a crime far worse than failure. You should always be reaching out to others. I miss all that. But I do not miss the dose of regimentation that comes with it. Too many people are unduly afraid of not knowing the right answers or of questioning, because they know that questioning their superiors is not the way they will get to the top of the ladder. Looking good and not making mistakes is the way to go. Corporations are crammed with people who know how to run on the treill with the least amount of energy. When you are on your own after spending over two decades in a structured and ive work environment, you realize that it is not so much what you know that counts —not the least because what you know becomes dated—it is how fast you learn. That skill is priceless in the real world outside a cocoon, priceless in reacting as well as finding faster and better access to opportunities. It is about continually retooling and reinvesting yourself. Interestingly, faced with a lack of the structure I was used to and disoriented by the lack of some imposed purpose, initially I would feel guilty that I was not working hard enough. After twenty years of institutionalized office life of five

days a week, forty-seven weeks a year, and checking the BlackBerry round the clock, not to have to get up and go to the office takes some getting used to. But then you start enjoying the freedom it entails: freedom to choose to whom you give your time, freedom to make your own decisions, and freedom to lend your days and weeks structure as you want. What happens in life only just happens; then inevitability is bestowed upon it. In the long run, memory builds a refuge in which what happened and what almost did become blurred. To me the difference between the lived and not-so-lived lives lies in the little word ‘if’. ‘If’ constitutes an invitation to the vast realm of the hypothetical, the imaginary, and all the various paths not taken over the course of a life. ‘If’ is ever so harsh on what happened in the absence of what might have happened. It is not as simple to change as it is made out to be. Realistically speaking, one needs countless lives to outlive the tyranny of ‘if’. Still I would want my kids to live in a manner that leaves as few ‘ifs’ as possible for the later years of life, which are about savouring those drops of life that we swallowed in huge swigs when we were young. Luckily for me, life is still a lot more about ‘what now’ than ‘if’.

Leaving my job also helped me learn the value of money for the first time. Better late than never, as the cliché goes. When you have a comfortable student life and then walk into a cosy job even before you get your final result, it can lead you into a totally false sense of security year after year. As long as money was easy and plentiful, I never thought much about it; I misused and wasted it. But when I found myself without money, I started to value it. I learnt how it feels to have no cash inflow. I am glad to have learnt this lesson to be able to commit to and to educate my kids to building wealth rather than chasing the buck and spending the dough. The bottom line is that this move I made brought me a great deal of digging deep inside. When I left, I decided to devote the next year to myself and my family. A year of the Holy Grail, when who you are is what makes you happy as opposed to the tasks that you do. To my surprise, those twelve months ebbed away too fast. There is a lot of joy and freedom in discovering your truths, when you are on the brink of living differently. I have uncovered my love of exploring, writing,

reading, and speaking. It has helped me learn, develop, and above all, to find out who I am in addition to the me who had spent the past twenty years in an officebound life. Such transition time is a project full of self-discovery, of discovering how you want to live. We all deserve at least a year of our lives solely for ourselves and the ones we love the most. To accept life’s challenge to learn, to survive, to adapt, to change—while doing it on your own —is not necessarily stepping off, it may as well be stepping up. I now feel infused with enthusiasm and hope for my next undertaking in life.

40 ON LIBERALISM

The method of liberalism is not militancy, it is democracy.

I HAVE NOTICED THAT THERE ARE various misconceptions in different parts of the world about what makes someone a liberal. For example, in the Muslim world people often think that anyone who consumes alcohol and likes to dance is a liberal. That is far from the truth; drinking or dancing are attributes of individual or collective conduct which have nothing to do with liberalism. In most societies, minorities pretend to be liberals in order to become more acceptable. So pseudo-liberals, who are very bandwagon oriented, are also present. When the political winds are at their backs, they have an overwhelming desire to cheer and march with clenched fists raised in triumph. Pseudo-liberals are often wishful thinkers, but they are not critical enough to decipher the information they love to memorize. They like to dish it out, but they cannot take it and never it that they are wrong. Let’s attempt to set forth the elements of the political creed defined as liberalism. I hold that liberalism has no conflict with any major religion including Islam and, therefore, always argue for the adoption and implementation of the liberal precepts in the politics and sociology of Islamic countries. Many of these countries continue to struggle in framing the relationship that ought to exist between the individual and the state. The history of the deliverance of the masses from slavery, bondage, and totalitarian rules and their advancement to political dominance illustrates that the change in their social and political status has been progressively caused by certain liberalizing forces. Liberalism has its roots in the censure of the totalitarian order. The fight for liberty is manifest everywhere in the postRenaissance period of modern history. After the Renaissance—with

improvements in means of communication, education, and quality of life— political power steadily started to embrace the lower strata of society. The general level of masses rose everywhere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The advent of modern states after the collapse of clerical power in Europe led to a widening of the political base which, in turn, conduced to democratization of the social order. The growth of civil liberty made the fight for personal freedom easier. People suffering under arbitrary rule, countries colonized by other powers, races held in bondage to notions of others’ racial superiority, and entrepreneurism that was undermined by social or government privilege were all liberated. This liberation from the yoke of tyranny still remains the main struggle in some societies of the world. While its concepts are age-old, liberalism burgeoned in nineteenth-century Europe. Political liberty was spurred by the discovery of biological evidence of the evolutionary continuity of creation, the start of the industrial revolution, and the progress of scientific education unfolding the wider world of truth about the universe and life. Representative government became first possible and then inevitable. The nineteenth century resonated with the demands for all types of liberty—civic, government, political, social, personal, economic, and business. Religious liberty and tolerance also became popular. This upheaval in Europe was the result of the civilizing stimulus of liberalism. This is where liberalism became an effective historical force to shape every aspect of modern man’s life. There was a spread of education, an expansion of human knowledge, and an empowerment of rational thought against the dead weight of tradition and the tyranny of dogmatic authority. Jean-Jacques Rousseau set the stage for the French Revolution by writing his social contract, heralding an era of government by consent. The democratic movement stimulated by the French Revolution nourished the political philosophy of the Jeremy Bentham school and the teachings of economists developing the ideas of Adam Smith. The antithesis between personal freedom and the necessity of social control began to diminish. The main function of state control turned into ensuring personal freedom for all its citizens. The individual is organic to society as the sole bearer of value. Hence, in a modern state, there can be no place for the formation of a totalitarian order. The collective life of the state does not progress by coercion.

The more firmly the government of a state is instituted in freedom, the more free it is to transcend individuals’ limitations through collective action. It is a modern state’s responsibility to ensure that coercion and force are never used against the liberty of the individual. The method of liberalism is not militancy, it is democracy. It looks to settle conflicting claims through organized intelligence. Liberalism has ensured that today’s great social changes are taking place without resorting to violence. To summarize, liberalism is a belief in the value of human personality and a conviction that the source of human progress lies in the free exercise of individual energy. Liberalism emancipates individuals and groups to exercise their powers without jeopardizing others. The state power is used to create conditions within which the individual can thrive. Liberalism consists in thwarting all misuse of power, providing every citizen with the means to exploit their unique capacities, and ensuring equality of opportunity for everyone. Liberalism ens significant efforts on the part of man to fight against the forces of poverty, ignorance, and suffering. Hence, it is understandable why in totalitarian countries it is maligned by forces of bigotry, intolerance, and conservatism.

VI HUMAN RELATIONS

41 CHILDHOOD AND GROWTH TODAY

The laws of the mental world are experiencing a metamorphosis.

A LMOST EVERY GENERATION OF ADULTS has had it as pastime to reminisce about the ‘good old days’ and disapprove of what they would name as ‘today’s generation’. However, it is a fact that urbanization, fast-paced lifestyles, and technological developments have combined to make parenting children more difficult today than it was before. At the outset, let’s notice that conflict of a sort between age and youth seems to be inborn in the human state of affairs. Youth is the clime in human life which instils a high degree of confidence in one’s ability to alter the world according to one’s ideals. A young person’s ideals and confidence in the ability to realize them makes one somewhat impatient with the status quo. One longs for the opportunity to put one’s designs into practice. This attitude, which is a characteristic of youth of all epochs, has been complicated today by some extraordinary factors that have significantly closed the gap between youth and age—most importantly, the psychological gap. Younger folks today have access, thanks to ubiquitous electronic and social media, to practically everything that is capable of being known. Nothing, in knowledge or happenings, is immune from their gaze, inquiry, and analysis. Internet and media have eroded the insulation that could keep children immune from any prejudicial or premature impressions from the external world. The awareness of children in relation to the world outside of their own being can no longer be controlled by parents or teachers. Our children are exposed to content that is intended solely for adults, and parents must know to help them deal with undesirable impressions without their sensibility being either tarnished or dulled. With abundant means to anything at children’s disposal, denial or

dithering are not options anymore. A false attitude to life would further challenge and even distort young minds, making children cynical about their cultural environment and sceptical of their teachers’ or parents’ authority. Children are increasingly aware that they know as much as, if not more than, their parents and teachers. The challenge is to train young minds to absorb the right kind of knowledge, to know how to treat information, and to be able to handle their often premature awareness of the world and life’s facts.

Children have full access to prejudicial opinion without possessing the inner maturity to sift and critically examine the facts. Confronted with this situation, children develop the feeling that they are capable of coming to judgement on any issue that interests them. This has meant that—in of psychology if not biology—the conventional harmonious connection of youth and age reflecting different seasons of life is under considerable pressure. On the one hand, children know very much more than they should. On the other, the mature element of society, mostly represented by parents and teachers, tends to become superficial or evasive. We have long known that a growing child in infancy continues to be part of the psychological organism of the mother’s being and thereafter—to a lesser extent —the father’s and teacher’s beings. A part of the mother’s thoughts and being crystallizes into the infant’s personality. Similarly, the authority of human tradition and values embodied by the father, the teacher, and others close to the child has a direct bearing upon the child’s development. Thus we need to understand that we have an ever greater role to play in the psychological environment to which our children are called upon to adjust, thus making the presence of immature parents and half-educated teachers disruptive. While the laws of the physical world of human growth have not altered much, the laws of the mental world are experiencing a metamorphosis. Ever more, our bodies live in our minds and not our minds in our bodies. It is increasingly imperative to get the young child’s mental make-up right from the very early stage of life. Today’s children are better equipped for seeing through the superficiality and fake erudition of their guides and mentors. The spirit of this digital age is such that the conventional psychological gulf between youth and age is fast vanishing.

In fact, the distinction between the characteristics of youth and adult consciousness has been lost. While the work of personal growth is never finished, it is our responsibility to inculcate the courage and commitment for authentic personal growth in the children we are responsible for. There is an old dictum that says, every wave is as big as the water underneath it. The same can be said for an individual’s personality. Personality is as deep as the cultural background in which it is formed. For instance, a wise person and a child both are at peace with the world, but the wise person represents a much higher expression of life. The wise person’s peace with the world has a much richer background in of evolution wrought by personal experiences and ability to learn. The automated world in which we live has reduced most of us to anonymity. This, in varying measures, is true of the automated work that most people do in order to participate in the contemporary economic venture. Socially also, Internet networking affords little opportunity to become the cynosure of neighbouring eyes. It is difficult to claim acknowledgement of true magnificence amidst the welter of voices that are so loudly projected everywhere. In most cases the only sure way of drawing attention to oneself is to make a nuisance of oneself.

In order to seek true self-improvement, one has to learn the difficult art of getting away from oneself, from one’s immediate physical environment and from the conditions which hold one in their grip. When one gets away from oneself, one can see oneself as imperfect and try to improve oneself. We are all at the centre of our own universes; our personal awareness that a universe exists is entirely dependent on the fact that we are in it. For most of us, trying to imagine an infinite universe is overwhelming, as is trying to imagine what’s beyond a universe that—even more unthinkable—is not infinite. I am grateful that I live in a time when I can literally ground myself, reminding myself of where I am, on the revolving planet Earth. I have seen photographs of Earth, within the solar system, revolving around the revolving sun, which I can see, as regular and predictable as the fact that night follows day, so to speak. Simple, basic scientific fact, easy to take for granted. I am lucky that I live in a time and a culture that knows something of its physical place in the cosmos.

Science is a comfort and a balm. But it is worth thinking about what it must have been like to manage without it. The idea of being a human trying to make sense of existence without such knowledge—life could be one long panic attack. Unless, of course, you could console yourself with the idea that making sense of it all was the responsibility of some other all-powerful being, who expected of you nothing more than adherence to a few simple rules. What a great relief that would have been, what a soothing alternative to a long and tortuous nightmare of existential fear. And for many people, it still is. Campaigning rationalists, like Richard Dawkins, would do well to think a little about the importance of the psychological they are trying to wrest off people, when they try to wrest away their God. The fact is, we don’t know about the vast majority of the universe—we don’t even know what’s at the bottom of the sea! Each discovery unfolds other mysteries. We should not feel compelled to postulate an absolute in order to compensate for the Absolute postulated by the theologians.

42 ON DUTY AND PARENTHOOD

In the final analysis, nothing belongs to us except our effort.

N OT LONG AGO, MY SON and I were wandering around, looking for the signs of a spring that has been usurped by an unusually obstinate winter. I remarked, in response to something, that all man’s efforts are selfish except what we deem as our duty. This got us discussing the concept of duty and the importance of being able to define it with reason and without ion and prejudice. Then my son asked what I think a parent’s duty is to a child, apart from looking after and providing for the child in the traditional manner. And we rambled on … ‘He who has done his duty let him ask for no other happiness. Do thy duty which lies nearest thee, which thou knowest to be thy duty, and second duty will already have become clearer’, said Thomas Carlyle. To me, the concept of duty is the foundation of every moral order; it is the way of life which acclaims and ennobles it. Let’s look at the justification for the attitude of surrendering oneself to duty. Consider what it is that can be regarded as truly our own. I am not thinking of merely holding the title to something. Our possessions are mere add-ons, and often we turn them into a heavy load whose burden weighs us down. Now, is our body truly our own? Was it not handed to us by our parents, and has it not benefited from an incessant process of refinement called evolution? Once we inherit it, it is nurtured and refreshed by a biological process which is independent of our will. Then, is our mind our own? Its individuality, value, and character are hugely influenced by the world outside us. Do we know what this thing called ‘I’ is that pretends to be the owner and possessor of everything? Has anyone seen it?

Hence, in the final analysis, nothing belongs to us except our effort. Our body, our mind, and the ‘I’ in us are all supplied in a mystifying way by the universe in which we exist for a while and then vanish, leaving ‘not a rack behind’. Can then we have any nobler attitude than one of duty towards the universe? The word ‘duty’ stems from debt, and we all owe a debt to the universe. Carlyle yet again resonates in my mind: ‘Labour is life … Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working: the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic-vortices, till we try it and fix it … If this is not “worship” … the more pity for worship.’ The categorical imperative in the words of Carlyle is, ‘Work while it is called Today for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.’ All knowledge is born out of action. According to Goethe, ‘We come to know ourselves—never by speculation but by action. Try to do your duty and you will know at once what is your worth.’ Then he describes our duty as ‘the demands of the day’. What we learn in theory or through books is mere hypothesis, unless we turn it into the means of our being. The wise ones have always said that life is the art of drawing sufficient inferences from insufficient premises. Practise what you know and it will help to make clear what you now don’t know and inquire about. Shakespeare urges through Edgar speaking in King Lear: ‘What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.’ Yes, indeed, ripeness is all.

The highest merit to claim our labour is ethical in nature. Moral causation is as real as natural causation. Evil actions are foes of life’s facility for growth. The course of human history bears out this truth. Man is summoned to defy injustice, inequality, and oppression for no other reason except that moral values are supreme. Many chase happiness as if happiness by itself is a meaningful purpose to follow. They forget that happiness is not, and cannot be, an end-in-itself. It is a mere spin-off of a charge determinedly assumed as a duty. It is also a duty to earn one’s livelihood lawfully and to resolutely resist corrupt enticements to sell one’s birth right for a mess of pottage. While bribery and overt inducements have been largely controlled in the developed world, other

forms of corruption remain rife. We regularly find bands of men upright in outward appearance but low buccaneers in reality, pursuing jobs which are sinecure, contracts on public revenues which are assigned without merit, orders which never insist on value for money, and similar means for profits without merit or effort. The whole spectacle is as sickening as the sight of corrupt officials in poorer countries and even more scavenging. We cannot flout moral law except at the expense of our own evolutionary development. It is true that individuals disregarding the moral law may not see the retribution, even though their development is penalized and their values are falsified. Poetic justice is more a theme for dramatists than a reality of life. In real life, fraud and injustice can often triumph, and right may go unredressed till the end. But what is inevitable is that the society and the community in which the disregard of right becomes common and acceptable worsens and perishes. While individuals may profit by injustice, the society of which they are a part and the class which enjoys the fruit of that injustice undergo an inevitable decline. Such is the inexorable law of nature.

Those who have such humble confidence in their rectitude as to be ready to open their bosom to the scrutiny of the world own one of the strongest attributes of human character. The life’s course of such people will be determined and steady, because they have nothing to fear from the world. To me, all education must be directed towards making its subjects courageous in wise and diligent cultivation of intellect with the dignity of a disciplined mind. I regard it as the primary task of parents to help their children develop a wellbalanced and disciplined mind that is equipped to rectify the wickedness of worldly ions. We must teach our kids to obtain self-discipline, the habit of subjecting ion and prejudice to an honest and reasoning will. If you succeed in achieving that for your kids, not only will you have done well as a parent but you will also have contributed to alleviating misery from society. Education is nothing else but the application of the best means endorsed by the collective wisdom of humanity in order to resolutely thrive. The foundations of civilizations are laid in knowledge, not in wealth; and a society’s scorn at education, intellect, and liberty, ultimately brings about national degeneration

and wreckage. It is the duty of parents to bring about intellectual and moral awakening among their children. Parent must help their kids to grow up as serviceable instruments in consummating life’s purpose. Parenthood is the greatest institution for cultivating the human mind. Only a mind that is disciplined can be free, because freedom is possible when the human mind nurtures the law of inner restraint necessary to distinguish it from the mind of a savage or an animal. As parents it is our duty to help in evolving in our children those capacities that are needed to face with confidence the work of the world that is waiting for them. The problems of life are too numerous for any parent to hope to provide a child with set solutions. Instead the ideal to pursue is to strive that our children evolve a balanced mind, a power of judgement, and a sure capability for that detached and unbiased observation which is a must for anyone to perceive in the complicated state of life’s affairs the heart of the problem begging for attention.

43 THE JOY OF PARENTING SIBLINGS

They crawled and toddled one after the other and now march together.

We know one another’s faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws.

—Rose Macaulay

S IBLINGS KNOW ONE ANOTHER AS they always were. As siblings we know each other’s hearts, share private family jokes, and live untouched by time. Siblings know to band together to often outlast marriages, to survive the death of parents, and to become closer after every quarrel. They thrive in a life of proximity and distance, affection and aversion, devotion and distrust. Love, loyalty, friendship, empathy, comion, competition, faith, forgiveness—so many basic elements of a life well lived are polished by their bond. For parents nothing compares to the joy of seeing their kids casting themselves in life-long relationships and in the process becoming who they were each meant to be. They have their own games, jokes, songs, and habits. Even as grownups today most of what they do on a given day makes sense only to the three of them. They make one another laugh, they make one another cry, and they make one another mad. Their roles ebb and flow with remarkable ease. Imran is the conciliator when Rida is the brat. Fati is the bowler when Imran is the batsman. Rida has a way to get under other two’s skin but knows to be of strength to them when they need it. When one is distressed, the others comfort.

When Rida was born, I was attending a course at a university in Europe and couldn’t travel home in time to welcome her into this world. I had to wait another two months before I first saw her when she arrived in Paris. One look at the animated baby in my wife’s arms and I was hooked for life, even before I carefully settled her in my lap. From there onwards she had our undivided attention till Imran arrived three years later. While Rida gave every indication of growing up as the endearingly mouthy thing that she is, Imran took his time in starting to talk. Perhaps he didn’t need words, as he had Rida. Whenever Imran would fidget, mewl, cry, or indicate his discomfort in some fashion, before we could press him on what he wanted and perhaps coax a few words from him, Rida would barge in to solve the conundrum. ‘He’s cold’, she would say, for example, and she would be right. With Rida around, Imran was safe, though she extracted her price in obedience from Imran for being his caretaker and magician, an authority that she later found very difficult to relinquish except when faced with physical threat from an enraged strapping lad. Then came Fati, seven years after Imran. She was the baby of the family. From the tenor of her sob or the glint in her eyes, Imran knew which toy Fati was eyeing or what she wanted. He decoded the signs and produced the goods. Imran became Fati’s psychic and spokesperson, her soothsayer and her chaperone. With Imran around, Fati is always looked after and protected. They crawled and toddled one after the other and now march together. Acrimony, geography, or their quirks do not pull the sisters and the brother apart, as my wife and I bask in the joy of parenting the wonderful siblings they make. ‘Siblings are the only relatives, and perhaps the only people you’ll ever know, who are with you through the entire arc of your life. Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in most inchoate form.’ So said the writer Jeffrey Kluger in The Sibling Effect, published in 2011. I always made sure that the siblings we brought into this world stay together to witness one another’s development, living as fellow engers of life and growing up in sync with shared memories, a deep understanding, t heritage, and a common culture at personal levels—yet each of them so different from the

other two. Family closeness does not just happen by chance, a fortuitous blend of characters. It’s a decision, a priority made and followed, often at a personal cost. During my shifting job postings, I always made it a priority that the siblings stayed together rather than separating them for my emotional convenience. It’s an accretion of these often aching decisions that has given our children so many overlapping corners of personality to serve as their glue for life.

Being together helps them in other ways too. If you are let down by one, you can get rid of those feelings with the other. It’s good to always have someone else to turn to, or to turn to different sibling for different things. Because the three of them belong to the same generation, each understands the others better than even I or their mother does. While we gave them shared values, they have intuitively allocated themselves the roles they play. Popularity comes relatively easily to Imran, Rida resolved to be the more diligent student, and Fati is looking to find her way to stand out in studies. Imran and Fati make relatively more conventional choices and Rida prefers less conventional ones, perhaps her claim to a distinct identity. Letting them resolve their squabbles on their own helps them learn important problemsolving and relationship skills, as well as bringing them closer as siblings. That’s how it goes in the pack of siblings in our family. The challenges and comforts of a pack of siblings are multiple, at least in my lucky experience as a parent. With siblings to help shoulder the burden of the parents’ plans, one can lag in some respects without attracting much notice. So siblings pick up the slack and act as decoys to distract the parents. Our three are natural harbours in a family that has made succeeding in closeness a priority. They all look a part of larger parti-coloured quilt. While they may have to be more mindful with their friends, among themselves they can be at their most primal and childishly emotional self—and they often are. They have created a centre of gravity for themselves, an audience that never averts its gaze, and two friends who never bolt. They are partly responsible for one another’s idiosyncrasies. They know how to exploit one another. What is fulfilling is that they live and experience the world at the same eye level. They are different versions of one another that are similar in ways that matter the most. We hope the grooves that they’ve made in one another’s psyches will fit together and

soothe the three of them for a lifetime.

44 LONELINESS AND CONNECTIVITY

Loneliness is not just a matter of external conditions; it is a state of being.

F AMILY AND FRIENDSHIPS HELP PEOPLE develop resilience to life’s tribulations and to bounce back from setbacks. There is no greater antidote to life’s stresses than satisfying human relationships. One of the main costs of our automated and impersonalized modern life is that our capacity to connect well to other people is being diminished. For example, in my neighbourhood, our automated garage and home doors make it almost impossible for neighbours to bump into one another. Hence, I do not get to see my neighbours except on purpose. While national, religious, and tribal loyalties are easier to feign, today we are surely less loyal to the primary human relationships of family, friends, classmates, fellow workers, and so on. In an increasingly individualistic pursuit of wealth and by treating Internet networks as ‘social’, we often forego meeting real people—a part of life that keeps us happier and healthier. Regardless of one’s bank or success ‘capital’, people with low ‘social capital’ are more likely to lack empathy with others and to feel disliked. As a result they fear rejection, which nourishes their tendency to be lonely. When misfortune strikes, they feel they are the only ones suffering. Feeling isolated can disrupt sleep, raise blood pressure, weaken immunity, increase depression, and lower subjective well-being. Loneliness is frequently the root cause of feelings of rage, melancholy, despair, worthlessness, bitterness, meaninglessness, helplessness, and gloom. John Cacioppo, the director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, is the world’s leading expert on loneliness. In his landmark book, Loneliness, he revealed just how profoundly the epidemic of loneliness is affecting the basic functions of human physiology. He found higher levels of epinephrine, the stress

hormone, in the morning urine of lonely people. Loneliness burrows deep. ‘When we drew blood from our older adults and analyzed their white cells,’ Cacioppo writes, ‘we found that loneliness somehow penetrated the deepest recesses of the cell to alter the way genes were being expressed.’ Loneliness affects not only the brain, then, but the basic process of DNA transcription. When you are lonely, your whole body is lonely. Mother Teresa had seen it all to know: ‘The biggest disease today is not leprosy or cancer or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for and deserted by everybody.’ The problem has, if anything, become more serious since Mother Teresa spoke these words three decades ago. The latest medical research shows that lonely people are almost two times more prone to die prematurely than those who do not suffer from loneliness. And we must also take into the impact of loneliness on one’s quality of life. Overall, being lonely can be more distressing than, for instance, having diabetes. And it is more painful.

We live faster, travel more, and spend more time by ourselves than at any moment in human history. While social scientists continue to unravel the consequences of these changes, one thing is clear—loneliness is our harvest. The great irony of our age is that we look to be better ‘connected’ to become lonelier. Lonely adults remind me of a kid in my school who always ate lunch by himself on a bench, without ever sharing with other children. In the long run such behaviour means a movement away from concern for others and being focused on your own short-term interests. This runs counter to the age-old wisdom that we are social animals who work most effectively in a collective. I grew up in a small town, where nobody would even consider ing another human and not offering a greeting. When I moved to Karachi, I realized that the denser an area is with people, the less likely we are to acknowledge each other. We take other people for granted. They are not people to connect with; we see them as a nuisance or an obstacle to overcome. In the West, a number of studies have researched the loneliness of old people. That surely is a problem, but aren’t we missing something here? I am convinced that a sense of isolation does not arrive with grey hair; instead it is bred by an

individual and fostered by a society. Yes, students have to work hard in isolation and researchers have to toil in seclusion. But that has always been the case. We need to understand that being alone is not the same as being lonely. Plenty of people have always chosen to go through periods of seclusion. The problem arises when our regular lifestyle diminishes our capacity to connect and our sense of reconnection. This deficiency becomes a lot harder to bear when we get old and live a less active life. Loneliness is not just a matter of external conditions; it is a state of being. In an extreme example of what a modern lifestyle can bring, in Britain, a young woman named Joyce Carol Vincent died and wasn’t discovered for over two years. Neighbours ignored the strange smell coming from her apartment and, when her body was finally found, the TV was still on. She became the subject of morbid fascination, a documentary, and a movie by Carol Morley. A number of other such cases have also occurred.

Mind you, my writings never reek of nostalgia for the good old days. That would be not only useless but also ungrateful for the efficiency and elegance that technology brings. It is up to us to learn to use it to our optimal benefit. For example, after fooling around a bit on Facebook, I learnt that a connection is not the same thing as a bond and that Facebook is not meant to create bonds. The problem arises when we look for intimacy in Internet connections and communications. As John Cacioppo explains: ‘Forming connections with pets or online friends or even God is a noble attempt by an obligatorily gregarious creature to satisfy a compelling need. But surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing.’ The ‘real thing’ being actual people, in the flesh. ‘For the most part,’ he says, ‘people are bringing their old friends, and feelings of loneliness or connectedness, to Facebook.’ Facebook is merely a tool, he says, and like any tool, its effectiveness depends on its . ‘If you use Facebook to increase faceto-face ,’ he says, ‘it increases social capital.’ So if social media let you organize a game of football among your friends, that’s healthy. If you turn to social media instead of playing football, however, that’s unhealthy. Yes, our web of connections has grown broader, but, to mind the cost, it has become a lot shallower. We have never been more accessible, but we have also

never lived in greater isolation. Technology continues to create a world in which we cannot afford to be out of for a fraction of a second. In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fibre-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet, we have never been more detached from one another. More and more of social media means less and less of actual society. We live in bedsits of individual existence along the freeways of connectivity and information, many of us addicted to Facebook—a company whose market value is bigger than, for instance, the global coffee industry. Social networking could be furthering the same isolation that many people use it to conquer. Yes, it serves a purpose, but the idea that a website could deliver a more friendly, interconnected world is bogus. The depth of one’s social network outside social media is what determines the depth of one’s social network within Facebook, not the other way around. Using social media doesn’t create new social networks; it just transfers established networks from one platform to another, and it can be used productively to maintain and reinforce those. Social media can never compensate for the joy of making new acquaintances at a party, for the annoyance at the odours of someone next to you, or the disbelief of someone spilling her drinks onto you. People in most households continue to debate whether technology makes us feel more connected or more isolated. Is the jury still out? Probably, though not for me. A detailed study by the University of Michigan showed that using Facebook increased feelings of loneliness and alienation: ‘On the surface,’ the researchers wrote, ‘Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however … Facebook may undermine it.’ In my personal observation, the lonelier people seem to be the hungrier they are for the hollow online world of ‘friends’, ‘likes’, and ‘retweets’. In my view, while it is not a cure for loneliness, Facebook in itself does not create loneliness for a normal person. The people who experience loneliness on Facebook are lonely away from Facebook too and merely use Facebook as a platform for lonely skulking. As everywhere else, correlation is not causation. What matters is how you use it. Initially I also wasted a lot of time on Facebook through ive consumption of others’ activities and thoughts and broadcasting my own status updates. Over a period of time, I have disciplined myself to use it more productively or, shall we say, less harmfully.

First, I keep the number of friends very restricted to the people I know personally. I only accept friend requests from people who at least have one close acquaintance as a ‘mutual friend’. This means that the activities of a majority of my Facebook ‘friends’ are of personal interest to me. Second, instead of meaninglessly scanning status updates, I use it for more personalized small messages. Third, when something merits my attention, instead of clicking the meaningless ‘like’ button, I try and make a brief comment to communicate my feelings. Fourth, I have decided to eliminate all unhappy interaction with and reaction to Facebook. To summarize, the truth is that loneliness is not something that Facebook or the social media is doing to us. We are doing it to ourselves and are using the social media as a tool, just as we can use a car to travel alone or to pick our friends on the way. Most of our life’s pursuits exhibit a direct correlation between valuation and achievement. We can use social media as a means to achieve or preserve what we value and not as a refuge.

It is ironical that, despite its harmful effects, loneliness is something we spend our wealth cultivating. For example, moving from cramped districts into bigger and more isolated houses, preferring to travel alone in cars rather than on public transport, working in cubicles instead of open plans, buying online instead of buying at stores. Blaming technology as some fuzzy, unfriendly force of history that drives our actions is a poor explanation. We make decisions about how we use our machines, not the other way around. I try and keep a balance in deciding when to by the circus of our world to serve myself. I try and retain a modicum of pleasurable human interactions with some salespeople, insurance agents, travel agents whom I choose because I enjoy dealing with them. New studies continue to enhance our understanding of loneliness. People who are married are less lonely than single people, one journal article suggests, but only if their spouses are confidants. If one’s spouse is not a confidant, marriage may not decrease loneliness. A belief in God also helps. A German study relating levels of religious belief to levels of loneliness found that believers who saw God as abstract and helpful rather than as a wrathful, immediate presence were

less lonely. ‘The mere belief in God’, the researchers concluded, ‘was relatively independent of loneliness.’ What remains irrefutable, though, is that real person-to-person social interaction matters. If we meet fewer people and get together less, then when we do get together our bonds are less important and less fluid. To me, the decrease in the quality of social connections has been the single most important cause for the rise in loneliness that we are witnessing. We all have far fewer personal confidants than our ancestors did, a void that we try to fill by hiring professional carers—battalions of clinical psychologists, social workers, marriage (and all kinds of) therapists, mental-health counsellors, substance-abuse counsellors, life coaches, and whatnot. In the absence of a psychiatric diagnosis, these psychic attendants merely help us cope with regular problems of life. The biggest antidote to the epidemic of loneliness is to create a life and a society which does not outsource the work of everyday caring. As simple as this!

VII IN HOMAGE

45 THE SOUL OF SIND

Sind has served, down the ages, as a confluence of many minds and diverse cultures.

F OR ME, HOME HAS BEEN an illusion for a long time now. Sargodha, Pakistan, was my first hometown; I was born and raised in its flourishing fields and orchards. Lahore, where I would summers with my father and uncle at 29 Rajgarh Road, was also familiar. Then I moved to Karachi for studies and to live with my maternal grandparents. Since then, Karachi has always felt like home, being the city where I have spent more years than in any other single place. So, even though for me, home is not just one place but wherever I choose to be, there is something that irks me about the recent attempts to dissociate Karachi’s identity from its province of Sind. It is stupid and myopic on the part of both major political streams in Sind. Regarded as a purely geographical entity, Sind represents a fascinating land of the river, the delta, the sea, islands, lakes, deserts, forests, mountains, valleys, sand-dunes, marshlands, and fertile farmlands. However, what inspires me the most about Sind is its ‘soul’. As we know, the term ‘soul’ is generally used to denote the highest and intangible essence of an organism. Just as a rose is judged by the beauty and fragrance it offers to our senses.

Ancient history knows of only two cultural entities in the subcontinent nurtured by the Indus and the Ganges rivers, respectively. We have ample evidence to know that over five thousand years ago a self-sufficient civilization was firmly settled in the lush plains and broad valleys of Lower-Indus River, which—

without excessive claims on the Indus River upstream—was then a far more fertile region than today. Having conquered the pre-Aryan inhabitants of the area, these settlers established a life of agricultural prosperity conducing to the growth of a high culture and civilization. All the evidence points to centralized organization in the region, with full control over production and distribution and indications of an efficient taxation system. Sind, therefore, represents a historical continuity in settled civilization and a high quality of life. The emergence of a united India is a much later occurrence. Sind has served, down the ages, as a confluence of many minds and diverse cultures. Sind, in sage ivity, has given back to all those who came to it a richer honour than it has received from them. Sind has been a cradle of the progressive blossoming of that new life which emerged in the valley of the Indus as one of the earliest exercises in integrated civic existence. That process is still going on. At the moment of Pakistan’s creation, Sind, more than any other region in Pakistan, welcomed the many refugees who came to its fold, having found it impossible to continue living in India after the partition of the subcontinent. Therefore, of the number of immigrants and expellees from India that came to Pakistan, the greatest number came to find new homes in Sind. All that needs to be said of Sind’s hospitality is that no other province—neither Punjab nor NWFP nor Baluchistan nor East Bengal—accepted so many ‘nonprovincial’ immigrants. Even long years into Pakistan’s life, this record continues to be sured in the large and liberal-hearted land of Sind as it plays generous host to those who care to come to it. It is very unfortunate that these immigrants often fail to reciprocate with the same understanding and care for the province’s loving soil.

Sind’s poets and Sufi saints have also made significant contribution to the enrichment of literature. Shah Abdul Latif’s (1689–1752) poetry is a mine of wisdom, a storehouse of inspiration, and is regarded as a ‘direct emanation of Rumi’s spirituality in South Asia.’ Shah Latif is essentially a poet of love and man’s longing to respond to the call of universal life. Sachal Sarmast (1739– 1829) is another remarkable Sufi poet who has effectively portrayed the experience of a man of devotion who is in search of his Maker. While the eighteenth century was the dreariest and most barren period of Persian

poetry in Iran and elsewhere, Sindhi poets richly contributed to Persian poetry, as around that period many Sindhi poets chanted their melodies in Persian. It is understandable because during Aurangzeb’s ‘pious’ rule there was little scope for Persian poetry, and India ceased to be the El Dorado of the Persian emigrants. Paradoxically, this was the golden age of Persian poetry in the remote province of Sind under the rule of Kalhoras. Sindhi saints, mystics, and poets reached new heights on their way up to occult leading to the Divine and were able to contribute a great deal, by writing in Persian, to the philosophical and devotional literature of the time. As Professor Sada Rangani explains, ‘Sufism rose to transcendental heights both in theory and practice and found some of its best exponents in Allama Muinuddin of Thatta (in prose) and Syed Jallaluddin Shah Mir of Rohri (in poetry).’ Mohammad Mohsin and Alir Shir Qavi of Thatta were also fine exponents of ghazal. This is just an example to illustrate the point. Otherwise, Sind’s contribution is no less significant in other departments of the thought life and culture of the day. Thatta, Mathiari, and Rohri were the chief centres of learning. The soul of Sind—in its large and liberal attitude, its catholicity of taste, and its exemplary hospitality—has much to do with the soil that has been blessed with the life-giving water of the Indus. It has a long human history of self-realization through spiritual introspection. Sind of the olden days included Multan, Bahawalpur, and Jaissalmir to the north and extended right up to Kutch region in the south. Sind’s liberated spirit has a long history, dating from the times even before it extended its warm hospitality to Buddhist religious culture and art during the regime of Ashoka. The soul of Sind has never betrayed Sind’s inhabitants but, unfortunately, its hospitality is often misused by those who call it their home. Their egotism in disregarding the role of Sind in enriching their life and their arrogance against the humility of its soul result only in the disfiguration of the land that countenances the sublime soul of Sind.

46 A TRIBUTE TO ALMATY

My romance with the city resides in the lofty, beautiful, and green surroundings that envelope Almaty.

I LIVED IN ALMATY FOR THREE years and I think I ought to be able to express how I feel about it. I realize that during my short time here I was occupied with professional work, whereas most of my free time was spent exploring the Tian Shan Mountains and other vast natural environments on offer in Kazakhstan. Therefore, I did not have much time to study all those aspects that need to be taken into before the civic, social, and political life of this place can be truly appreciated. However, I do have a strong feel for the city. When it comes to appreciating places or understanding the cultural characteristics that reside in the soul of a people, I tend to discard the conceptual or analytic approach and rely mainly on my inward sense of understanding. When I wanted to explore the Tian Shan Mountains around Almaty, I decided to be with them, in their company, off the beaten track and at night rather than during the day. It was not just about seeing the natural beauty in the visual sense or capturing its glamour in photographs, it was about discovering them at a time when my senses might least interfere with the truth of my perception. I have always wanted to live with nature, to make a way deep into every place’s bosom where its inner significance lies. This helps establish a communion between my inner being and the outer surroundings which I am out to explore and appreciate. Hence, after providing the initial data, I try not to allow the senses to obstruct this communion with the beauty of creation. Consequently, it is as a man who feels people and places rather than as a man who knows them that I would let my mind ruminate over the rich harvest of emotional experiences from my days (and nights) in Almaty.

Almaty and Astana are the two cities of significance in Kazakhstan, but they belong to two different worlds within a young country. There is something wonderfully psychic about Almaty which is hard to describe. Astana is a young city which presents no colour, no individuality, and no gusto. Its population is amorphous, lacking in homogeneity and social cohesion. It is dull and mechanical like many other purposely created capitals around the world. Almaty, on the other hand, presents itself as a unified whole with its population sharing a commonality. It is like those cities which have a personality beyond what can be discerned with the mere senses. I felt that Almaty seems to have a traditional dimension to it as a city that is rooted in the past and intently looks to the future. In this respect, life in Almaty is richer and more human than it is in Astana. The cultural perspective that the streets of Almaty present to you is more vivid and vital than the kind of academic knowledge that could be acquired from the books or the Internet. It is true that Tashkent has played an important role in the history of Central Asia. There stand monuments, mausoleums, and shrines that consecrate many of the things known about the history of Central Asia. Founded less than hundred years ago, Almaty is not a historical city in that sense. But the city bears a colourful testimony to the Soviet era. Its entire history coincides with the Soviet reign. Almaty is delightfully green. Most of its major arteries are bordered on both sides by at least two rows of trees. The city’s tall, graceful trees seem to greet you everywhere you go, and its spacious parks and flower beds welcome you wherever you turn. And mountains and lakes surround the city. Here I have lived in intimate relationship with nature. So often have I rambled in the valleys and orchards around the city, feeling as though I were in another world. On top of this earthly splendour of wonderful colours and ubiquitous flowers, Almaty boasts beautiful weather. Here one can live all four seasons in their full magnificence, and the sun shines almost year round except when it is raining or snowing. Most nights offer a clear sky ever so full of stars. The sunrise and sunset moments conspire with the hills on the horizon, glowing with the colours of the season to add a heavenly lustre to the start and end of the day. Of course, in this context, I am not referring to the spectacle of new housing schemes,

malls, and other projects springing up in Almaty. My romance with the city resides in the lofty and beautiful surroundings that envelope Almaty to the eternal delight of those who love to venture into them. Having lived in some of the greenest landscapes on earth, I arrived in Almaty sensitive to the world of colours that you find fashioned in the rich texture spread out here, right in the middle of the vast, barren territory of the steppes. Thus the impression that Almaty’s verdure has made on me is that of densely wooded mountains surrounding a city characterized by an endless array of tall and graceful trees—a sight rarely to be met in the steppes. My stay in Almaty also made me glaringly aware of the fact that all this sublimity so generously lavished by nature could be considerably improved if only the people who live in Almaty and are responsible for managing its affairs would care more about making this beautiful city more beautiful. Poorly planned new housing societies are an eyesore, for instance. It is up to the citizens of Almaty and the Almaty Oblast istration to realize what an earthly paradise Almaty can be, if only they care more and help nature to assert itself more in the city. The climate of Almaty is refreshing, exhilarating, and wonderfully charming. Hence, for mental workers, it is far superior than extremely cold, dry, and (in winter) depressing climate of Astana. Yes, extreme temperatures are sometimes reached in Almaty too, but the thermometer is not the deciding authority in the assessment of its climate. Given the candour about Almaty’s weather, each season can be purposefully dealt with on its own . Nature allows the human body ample time to adjust itself to this seasonal concourse of thermal conditions. I have met many wonderful people here in Almaty. I have made some great friends and benefited from the company of some exceptionally gentle, kind, and affectionate people. While many of them are expatriates here, perhaps some of the kindness in them was inspired by the remarkable beauty of the environment where they their days. For all these things I have felt in Almaty, I offer the city and its citizens my gratitude.

47 GHALIB: INDIA’S GRAND POET

Ghalib’s writing and life illumined and mirrored the different facets of human existence.

Y EARS AGO, ON BECOMING A citizen of Canada, I needed a book that I held in great esteem to take the oath of allegiance to my adopted and beloved country. The books that I instantly thought worthy of such deference were The Complete Works of Shakespeare and Diwan e Ghalib . In the end I chose the latter. In hindsight, it was probably not so much an act of homage to the great man as, on a deeply personal level, an act of atonement and a pilgrimage, an effort to overcome the sense of inadequacy many of my generation have felt growing up in such culturally nondescript climes. I find it interesting that Ghalib, and so much else of the subcontinent’s cultural heritage, has survived despite the post1947 generations following the partition of India. While no writer equals Shakespeare in any language I am familiar with, I opted for Diwan e Ghalib because no single piece of work of a similar size can withstand years of careful examination and unhurried reflection like this small book—a collection of Ghalib’s Urdu poetry. Ghalib’s writing and life illumined and mirrored the different facets of human existence, its hopes, disappointments, tribulations, diversions, confusions, pettiness, grandeur, connection, achievements, temptations, compunctions, and despairs in a manner rarely seen even among the masters. Thus, in Diwan e Ghalib we can find almost all aspects of human wisdom and thought, every warning we need to hear, every misery we detest, and every joy we need to cultivate. Pondering over Diwan e Ghalib at a young age developed my muscles of thoughtfulness, the use of which is the greatest pleasure, as it shows what it means to be fully human.

Ghalib lived in Delhi through a fascinating period. Mughal power was fast fading away. The British had established themselves as rulers in all but name. Ghalib, who prided himself in being a part of feudal nobility, was torn between his loyalty to the Mughal Empire and the need to cultivate the new rulers from whom he sought his monetary sustenance. He has reflected the sentiment with remarkable imagery.

My struggle resembles what doth captive birds engage Gathering twigs to build a nest still in their cage

The period of Mughal decline coincided with a phase of unmatched literary efflorescence spurred by Urdu’s emergence at the expense of Persian. This manifested itself in many ways, one of which was the powerful sway of Sufi customs and secularism over Delhi’s way of life. Ghalib’s works mirror Delhi’s tribulations and pains to eternal literary greatness. Ghalib’s vision of the past stood in prickly contrast to his indigence in the present. Not unexpectedly, he fancied to invoke the past in protest against the present. One sign of this was his emphatic and overt preference of Persian over Urdu in a time when Urdu had largely eclipsed Persian at popular level. Urdu was the fashionable and vibrant language of his time, exhibiting the effervescence and energy of a young language that had come into its own, both in literary and as the lingua franca. There was a profound piquancy in the situation. A literary renaissance in a modern language was taking place within a decaying and stultifying feudal-monarchic order desperately clinging to Persian. Hence, Ghalib did not view writing in Urdu as an accomplishment; he viewed it as lending legitimacy to the situation. There was a point when Ghalib almost stopped writing in Urdu for about thirty years. Ghalib wrote many classical letters and made sure that even his conversations were handed down to posterity. Altaf Hussain Hali paints a vivid picture of the poet’s life and times, and is worth reading on this . His guiding thread is that Ghalib did not believe one should privilege intellectual issues over bodily,

more immediate ones. Mind thus was not more important than the body because neither could exist alone. To be fair, Ghalib was clearly concerned with the details of everyday life and found satisfaction in them. He liked his glass of wine, took time to suggest cures to friends when they fell ill, enjoyed a pretty face, and loved dance. However, rather than sending us on a journey towards personal happiness, his works often warn against paths of self-indulgence and self-delusion. By infusing philosophical knowledge into his mode of thinking, Ghalib provided that inner impulse which is so characteristic of his thought. It was not by rejecting a genuine study of nature, but by working in harmony with nature, that he wished to reach the heights of a spiritual conception of the universe. We shall only understand this inner impulse aright if we follow the movement of ideas in his epoch, and if we realize that within this cultural environment Ghalib’s aims and ideas met with no response. For this reason Ghalib is nearer today to those who are seeking knowledge of the spirit. He often felt himself a stranger to his age, whereas all seekers after the spirit feel themselves perfectly at home with him today. Ghalib asserted the validity of all life’s experiences and summoned the courage to enjoy them all, despite the inevitability of sorrow and trauma being a part of them. For him life was to be savoured in all its hues as long as one was alive:

O heart, regard even sorrow’s hymn to be of solace For one day, this existence will descend into utter silence

The hand may be unmoving but the eyes can still see Leave the cup and the wine yet placed before me

Ghalib would rather welcome pain then sequester himself from the colour and spectacle of life in its plenitude to avoid misery:

If it is not by now asunder thrust a dagger and pierce the heart If thy lashes are not soaked in blood pick a knife and pierce the heart’

The heart that is not aflame is a disgrace in the bosom If each breath is not on fire the heart is mortified’

Like the reflection of a hunched bridge in torrent, be happy in disaster—dance Extricating thyself from thyself, keep thyself poised—dance The search itself is a delight, so why fret over the end of the journey? At the sound of camel-bell be not afraid to wobble—dance Even the howling of an owl should sound like a melody Even in the tempest of the phoenix fluttering wings—dance The pleasure of the desert’s immensity cannot be found in love Become a whirlwind of dust and mounting in the air—dance Shove aside the old-fashioned traditions of thy honoured friends Grieve in the wedding feast and in the assembly of mourners—dance Unlike the rage of the pious and the friendship of the hypocrite Be not self-centred, but in the full view of all—dance Search not sorrow in burning, or enchantment in blooming Be it blustery tempest or gentle breeze, abandon thyself—dance

Ghalib with this exultant joy to whom art thou bound? Wax great in thyself alone, don the fetters of disaster—dance

Ghalib took great delight in poking fun at the hypocrisy of the religious selfrighteous:

The entrance to pub and the preacher are indeed poles apart All I know is yesterday I saw him enter as I walked out to depart

Ghalib thought that a preoccupation with religious appearances dulled comion, produced intolerance, and inhibited spiritual growth.

One who is intoxicated with the lust for reward has to struggle with heaven and hell But he who longs for only His bountiful mercy sees no distinction between the flame and the rose

He relished targeting the sentinels of orthodoxy:

Proud of what special wisdom are the pretenders of perception When they are merely fettered by constant ritual and convention

Ghalib had a profound faith in eclecticism, holding all humans as symbols of

divinity and love of the one Almighty. The most inspired example of his catholicity is his Persian poem ‘Chiragh e Dair’ exalting the splendour of the temple city of Banaras. In a letter to a friend he wrote, ‘I wish I had renounced the faith, taken a rosary in my hand, put a mark of abnegation on my forehead, tied a sacred thread on my waist and seated myself on the bank of the Ganges so that I could wash the contamination of existence away from myself and like a drop be one with the river.’ This is absolute synthesis, manifesting the spiritual quest completely liberated from the limitations and parochialism of organized religion and rendering the bulwarks of religions irrelevant. The unity of existence was a matter of deep intellectual conviction for Ghalib.

In faith we are monotheist and all rituals we abjure Only when symbols vanish doth faith become pure

Ghalib subscribed to the unity of faith in its purity:

Unfaltering devotion is the heart of all faith If the Brahmin es on in the temple, inter him in the Kaaba

The intellectual integrity and the conviction that suffuse Ghalib’s secular outlook enable him to state:

In the Kaaba I will play the conch-shell In the temple I have wrapped the ‘ahram’

Eclectic Ghalib had devious ways to undermine parochialism in beliefs:

While faith pulls me back, disbelief tugs at me The Kaaba is behind me, the church in front of me

Ghalib repeatedly manifests a profound sense of detachment from the temporal experience:

Asad, do not be ensnared by the being’s deception The world is nothing but a ruse of thought and conception

In dream though did thought with you bargain Upon awakening, there was neither loss nor gain

In the mirage of existence do not get caught While it seems it is, in truth it is naught

That which seems emergent is in fact veiled He who awakes in a reverie is still in a dream

He can see divinity all round him and views the Absolute as munificence incarnate:

By the heat of the sun is the dew taught of its end I too am until a benevolent glance consigns me to nothingness

A hundred visions are there to be seen should one raise the eyelids But who has the strength to stand the bounty of the spectacle

The Glory which suffuses all creation from earth to heaven Drunk in its magnificence are the most minuscule crumb and atom

The evidence of His unity is instituted in His multiplicity All the innumerable figures have one common denominator

This effulgent radiance is the basis of thine continuation A fleck not caught in the rays of sun is destined for extinction

The bead, the wave, the froth, the vortex—all are countenance of the stream The contention of this ‘I’ and ‘Mine’ is nothing but a screen

Ghalib could not stand hypocrisy:

Ghalib cannot be blemished with the mark of hypocrisy His patched robe washed in wine is spotless

Ghalib thought that enduring joy lies only in the consciousness of the real essence behind the transitory phenomena:

To leaves, branches, and stems only the root grants the essence All that bears articulation stems from silence

Ghalib articulates how, wrapped up in the tiniest of daily struggles, one yearns for spiritual transcendence:

Oh God, how long must I suffer the lowliness of craving Grant me the loftiness of hands raised up for praying

Ghalib enjoyed his drink. His personal preference was French wine:

Like offerings of flowers see my speech surge If only someone sets a goblet of wine before me

Once the tavern is not accessible then for place what objection? Be it a mosque, a place of learning, or any other accommodation

Later in his life when there was a scarcity of wine, Ghalib had to grudgingly make do with the satisfying qualities of rum:

To the last residue we imbibe even if it is Jamshed’s cup that is presented Shame on that liquor, which from grapes is not fermented

I will never betray the oath I took upon Diwan e Ghalib, ‘so help me God’.

48 SARTRE: THE MAN WHO SPURNED THE NOBEL PRIZE

Sartre giftedly identified the existential dilemma of humanity, the absurdities of life, our moral choices, and our political responsibilities.

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

O N OCTOBER 22, 1964, JEAN-PAUL Sartre declined the Nobel Prize for literature, saying, ‘I have always declined official honours. A writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution. This attitude is based on my conception of the writer’s enterprise. A writer who adopts political, social or literary positions must act only within the means that are his own—that is, the written word.’ Sartre learnt from Le Figaro littéraire that he was in the reckoning for the award. He then wrote to the Swedish Academy saying he did not want the prize. The prize was awarded to him nevertheless. ‘I was not aware at the time that the Nobel Prize is awarded without consulting the opinion of the recipient’, he said. ‘But I now understand that when the Swedish Academy has made a decision, it cannot subsequently revoke it.’ His honourable stance cost him 250,000 kronor, prize money that, he regretfully reflected in his refusal declaration, he could have donated to a worthy cause like the ‘apartheid committee in London’.

SARTRE’S VIEWS OF LITERATURE: Sartre always tormented himself about the purpose of literature, advocating that literature must have a dyed-in-the-wool social purpose. However, Sartre’s later writings betray despondency over that purpose. In his memoir Words, a dazzling piece of work, he wrote: ‘For a long time I looked on my pen as a sword; now I know how powerless we are.’ He thought that politically committed literature makes nothing happen and fretted that the Nobel was reserved for ‘the writers of the west or the rebels of the east’. He said that he would have deserved the Nobel much more if it had been awarded to him for his ionate antagonism to ’s war of occupation in Algeria, because the award would then have helped his struggle rather than turning Sartre into a depoliticized brand or institution. I have always had a great respect for his qualms.

WHY HE WAS GIVEN THE PRIZE: The Swedish Academy selected Sartre for having ‘exerted a far-reaching influence on our age’, though that hardly seemed the case at that moment. Although widely acknowledged as a colossal thinker of his times, his reputation as a philosopher was on the decline by the time the award was offered to him. His trademark existentialism had been put into the shade and derided by the structuralists and post-structuralists. While he was still glorified by student radicals in , the Anglo-Saxon world was predominantly sceptical about Sartre’s merit as a philosopher. He was relentlessly described as a typical pantomime figure, allegedly repulsive, unintelligible, quixotic, and caught up in philosophical jargon. He deserved better treatment. The Swedish Academy was right. Much of Sartre’s intellectual output and work are still relevant. Even today, when we read his assertion that we can, through head and action, transform our destiny, we feel the eternal burden of responsibility of choice to become moral beings. His lifetime dedication to opposing fascism and imperialism still reverberates in a world of rampant religious fascism and a uni-polar chemistry of international politics. Sartre’s play Huis Clos—which contains the famous line ‘Hell is other people’— reminds us of the irony of our relations with others. We need them to validate our self-image, whereas they—much to our irritation—require us to confirm

theirs. Sartre makes us think about the paradox of being a human that makes us yearn for a complete control over our destiny and identity, and at the same time, forces us to acknowledge the futility of that desire. Sartre giftedly identified the existential dilemma of humanity, the absurdities of life, our moral choices, and our political responsibilities that still resonate with us as loud as ever.

SARTRE AS AN ACTIVIST: A resolute philosophical position is the heart of Sartre’s artistic life. Declaring that ‘commitment is an act, not a word’, Sartre often participated in street riots, in the promotion of left-wing literature, and in other activities to advocate the revolution. He was a vocal backer of the student movement in of May 1968, soaring to unusual height in his indictment of the Communist Party as having betrayed the May revolution. He remained politically involved by editing and supervising the publication of various leftist publications.

SARTRE’S WRITINGS: While the publication of his early, largely psychological studies, L’Imagination (1936), Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions (Outline of a Theory of the Emotions, 1939), and L’Imaginaire: Psychologie Phénoménologique de l’Imagination (The Psychology of Imagination, 1940), did not gain much attention, La Nausée (Nausea, 1938) and the collection of stories Le Mur (Intimacy, 1938) quickly brought him recognition. Both in the novel and in these stories one can find the currents of Sartre’s interest in existentialism and its themes. In La Nausée, his first novel, the central character, Antoine Roquetin, discovers the obscene unreasonableness of the world around him, inducing in his own loneliness experiences of a totalizing, psychological nausea. It is a story of life without purpose, in which Sartre portrays an awful rationality and fixity of the ordinary nature of bourgeois culture, which he compares to an imposing strength of stones on the seashore. Although we can see many influences, the existentialism Sartre devised and popularized is very much original. Its recognition and that of its author reached a pinnacle in the forties, and Sartre’s writings as well as his novels and plays make up an inspirational source of modern literature. His philosophical outlook takes

atheism for granted, and the loss of God is not mourned. Man is designed for a freedom from all power, which we may try to escape, twist, or reject but which we cannot avoid dealing with if we are to become moral beings. Once we acknowledge our freedom, we have to establish the meaning of our life, as this meaning is not established before our existence. Thus we have to commit ourselves, our freedom, to a role in the world. Sartre sets forth in ‘Qu’est-ce que la littérature?’ (What Is Literature?, 1948) that literature is not an activity for itself, nor first and foremost expressive of characters and situations, but deals with human freedom. In his view, literature has to be committed and artistic creation has to be a moral activity. These existentialist themes of alienation and commitment and of salvation through art dominate his life’s work. The existentialist humanism which Sartre constructs in his popular essay ‘L’Existentialisme est un humanisme’ (Existentialism Is a Humanism, 1946), is propagated in the series of novels Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom, 1945–49). His fundamental philosophical work, L’Etre et le Néant (Being and Nothingness, 1943), is a gigantic articulation of his concept of being, from which much of modern existentialism develops. This is his most powerful work, in which he makes the distinction between things that exist in themselves (en-soi) and human beings who exist for themselves (pour-soi). Human beings live with an understanding of the limits of knowledge and mortality, therefore in a state of existential dread. The loss of God is not mourned, for humankind is condemned to freedom from all authority if one is to become a moral being. The acceptance of this dreadful freedom then requires us to make meaning for ourselves (by the detachment of oneself from things so as to lend them meaning) and commit to a role within this world—and this is useless without the solidarity of others. Sartre’s Cartesian view of the world extended to the creation of the world by the self through detachment, by rebelling against authority and accepting personal responsibility for one’s own actions, without aid of society, traditional ideas of morality, or religious faith. The realm or the human world, as differentiated from the non-human, is characterized by nothingness, by the human capacity for negation and rebellion. The recognition of one’s absolute freedom of choice is the fundamental condition for authentic human existence.

SARTRE’S EXISTENTIALISM: Sartre considers that existentialism is of two main types: religious existentialism and atheistic existentialism. He says that his philosophy comprises atheistic existentialism. The cardinal principle of existential philosophy, religious or atheistic, is that existence precedes essence. Which means that, regarded logically, the starting point for any rationalization of man’s experience is in the realm of subjectivity. Existentialism proposes that there is nothing prior to the act of existence, of which man is aware directly and immediately. Immediacy of existence gives us the act of existence, and there is nothing that precedes existence. Thus the principle of ‘cogito, ergo sum’ is the starting point of existential philosophy. In practical , this viewpoint eliminates anything that may be regarded as a metaphysical ground of existence. Existential philosophy asserts that because existence is prior to essence, in all our choices and all our decisions we act freely, in complete freedom from all the factors that are independent of our will. In my view, just as proponents of the philosophy of determinism commit the mistake of denying the creative nature of human consciousness and make the will appear servile to the forces that drive it, Sartre and existentialists commit the opposite mistake of totally denying the influence of environment, heredity, and other factors that are an essential part of man’s genetic and psychological constitution. However, I still regard Sartre as the outstanding intellectual of his times. The variety and quality of Sartre’s opus suffice in themselves to make him the most eminent French writer of twentieth century—ahead of the likes of André Gide, Albert Camus, and Marcel Proust. His eminence as a philosopher also remains intact because so many central points of his study of the human reality are right and true and involve palpable consequences for our lives as individuals and societies. Sartre’s contribution as a politically engaged activist was also phenomenal, most notably his staunch opposition to French rule in Algeria and to Vietnam War.

If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

49 FAIZ AHMED FAIZ: A POET OF HIS TIME

For Faiz, to expose the follies and ignorance of a society is the best way of salvaging and liberating it.

I T HAS NOW BEEN OVER thirty years since the élan vital that was Faiz Ahmed Faiz withdrew from this world. Let’s briefly discuss the full value of what he felt and what he wrote to the age in which he lived. His was a full and a rich life. His stature as Urdu’s finest poet in the latter years of his life and his vibrant human characteristics it of no controversy. Even those who differ from him do not deny his phenomenal influence on the literature of his generation. The value of his poetic work is colossal. His works chronicle the evolution, mood, and decay of Pakistan’s politics. One might be cynical about the ultimate worth of his life’s work, but one cannot deny that he has left an important mark on his time.

From the munificence of your sweet lips, my beloved Bestow on me just one word of intimacy

The eminence and reputation of a man is not something which is unqualified and immutable; instead, it is subject to the vagaries of time. With that in mind, how shall we speak of Faiz? Looked at in the larger perspective of history, Faiz does not have the halo and splendour of some of the giant literary figures of the subcontinent like Khusro, Mir, Ghalib, or Tagore. In comparison with these spectators of all time and all existence, Faiz appears as a remarkable child of his

age. However, while discussing the significance of his work and life, let’s attempt to discover what is enduring and abiding in what he endeavoured to achieve. I want to discover the crucial and outstanding features of his work. He was a teacher, a journalist, a political activist, and a poet. A lot has been written on how he fulfilled these roles. Here, let’s try to define his place in history and, to the extent possible, the influence which his life and work are likely to have on posterity. For that we need to grasp not only the essence but the incarnation of his poetry; the substance and not the mere husk of what he stood for.

At least for once, the dawn should begin from the corner of your lips At least for once, the scented night should descend as you loosen your hair

In my view, Faiz was basically a social campaigner. Everything he has written is imbued with his relentless ion for social justice. He subordinated the art of poetry, of which he was a recognized master, to that purpose. Like Ghalib, Faiz realized that in order to reform a society we need a clear understanding of the problems of social and individual life. For Faiz, to expose the follies and ignorance of a society is the best way of salvaging and liberating it. As the voice of newly created country, he hoped that by criticizing Pakistan’s society and pointing out its follies, he would be in a position to chart the way forward for social reconstruction and reform that the new state needed.

Whatever the pain I endured matters not, but oh forlorn night My tears have safeguarded your bliss, here and beyond

Among all the factors that bestow power, the ideas that one expresses are probably the greatest source of power. This power of the idea is the power that a writer possesses. It is by proliferating right ideas that a writer creates a situation

ripe for a social revolution. For example, the French Revolution owed its ideology and timing to the ideas of equality and liberty that Voltaire and Rousseau had popularized. The ideas of Christ and the Prophet Mohammed have also played a great role in changing the lives of innumerable human beings down the ages. A hundred years after his death, the abstract speculation of Descartes became a practical force controlling the conduct of men. All struggles against arbitrary authority, oppression, tyranny, and dogmatism have been carried on by those who knew the explosive power of a true idea. In the face of Liaquat Ali Khan and his successors armed with the powers of imprisonment, torture, and death, Faiz only had the power of idea. Alas, his ideas have not yet prevailed because, apart from Faiz, Pakistan has not had any thinkers of note to win the victories of mind in every age. That’s why, while Faiz’s poetry won sweeping acclaim in the intellectual field, it produced almost no effect anywhere else.

Now there will be neither light nor gloom anywhere, After me the path of devotion lies quieted like my heart. What will become of the caravan sworn to love’s suffering? Someone else now must nurture the garden of sorrow.

A man’s way of life is, in any case, the manifestation of his thought. Faiz was a literary centre of influence and one who radiated light and warmth to all those who came in with him. Faiz’s calling as a poet is strictly practical. He does not believe in the halfway reform frequently touted by our politicians. These politicians, of course, never succeed because they are not earnest enough. For Faiz, transformation must first be directed to transforming the life of the common people; it is only by liberating them from shackles and oppression, need, and ignorance that a foundation can be laid for guiding the society and the country towards an equitable and nobler life. Faiz pressed into the service of his poetry everything which could give an effective and appealing literary expression to the ideas he believed in. In the

brief preface that he wrote from Hyderabad jail to his second book, Dast e Saba, Faiz sets forth his conception of his life’s work in a simple and forceful manner. Faiz’s fight was for the eradication of poverty and for equality of rights. Faiz saw his fellow humans in so intimate a sense that for him the misery and deprivation of one is the misery and deprivation of all. He insisted that all of us, as citizens, have a collective responsibility. In a country where power has never been wielded by morally weighty personages, Faiz saw it as his duty to continually expose mock democracy and other systems of governance our country has suffered. He was arrested in 1951 and spent four years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement while on death row.

We yearned for spring in autumn’s bosom We claimed love’s sight from the dark night

Faiz thinks that the age of blind faith, of unquestionable authority, is over. This is the age of intellection, of realization. And if a new country has to surmount the obstacles in its path, then it must discover what it ought to do to evolve and to become better. He saw in his country the liberty of man struggling against forces of feudalism, forces of blind faith, and the albatross of tradition. He knew that it would take a lot of will, intelligence, and hard work to create a well-ordered and harmonious Pakistan. Unfortunately, that is yet to be. As a poet he saw it as his role to prepare the ground for the onset of those values which we have been taught to realize by higher philosophies and morality.

Will someone sound the march! For an age nearly has elapsed That the heavens have halted the procession of day and night

And now let’s briefly discuss his style as a poet. Faiz’s style is a function of what

he considers his calling. He is not as such obsessed with the fineries of style in the sense of traditional Urdu poetry; it is the content and the truth of his message that matters for him. While he shows remarkable poetic genius, his style is mainly derived from his desire to be lucid, eloquent, and forceful. Each poem is crystal clear and sharp in driving home its intended meaning while using the conventional metaphors of Urdu poetry. His conviction carries him. However, his mastery of poetic expression notwithstanding, if Faiz at all continues to live as a legend, it will be due to the wisdom and struggles of Pakistan’s young years that are contained in the poetry he wrote.

May I become a martyr for your glory, oh motherland, where It has been ordained that no one shall walk with his head high

My overall view of his life’s work is that he was a man of high and thoughtful intent. He saw his role in exposing the injustice and social ills that were taking root in his new country. If I were to sum up his life’s value in one word, I would say it is ‘genuineness’. Faiz is a creature of his age. He demands what he thought would become serviceable elements for social justice in his country. He is definitely not of ‘eternity’ like Aristotle and Shakespeare, nor does he scale the timeless stature of the likes of Hafiz, Mir, Ghalib, Pushkin, and Tagore. But that renders him more relevant and serviceable to his contemporaries. Faiz is essentially the creature of the first few decades around and after Pakistan’s creation, a much-loved child of the times that marked his existence. His work is therefore relevant mainly to those times but will always remain useful in the context of Pakistan’s early social and political history. I feel from where he is, Faiz still looks at the country he loved so much and speaks softly, as he always did, musing over his own words:

So many crucifixes are planted in my casement Each one reddened with the blood of its Messiah

Each one longing for God’s mercy On one the climes of spring are crucified The bright moon is hanged on another The blooming bower ripped dead on yet another The zephyr is martyred on one more

Every so often these deities of benevolence and beauty Dripping in their lifeblood come to adorn my grove of sorrow

And every so often in front of my eyes, their Martyred bodies are raised, whole and fresh

50 ADIEU MADIBA!

His life is a testament to love.

G OODBYE, MADIBA, AS YOU LEAVE us in awe of you. We say adieu to a gifted leader, an exceptional statesman, and an extraordinary human being who became a symbol of human worth. I still feel myself mesmerized by his tenderness, humility, and introspection that nobody expected as apartheid melted away and Nelson Mandela emerged from three decades of persecution and imprisonment. Madiba never looked backed. He showed no bitterness, did not fulminate or gloat, did not even ponder long. He just went about the work of building a nation. He was not satisfied with his victory; he was determined to do one thing only, and that is to serve life itself, for he clearly saw how each race is stitched together by life. Mandela’s life is a shining field of light, because he felt one with all humans and never alone, not even during the years consigned to solitary confinement. He rediscovered a beautiful country with all its difficulty, beauty, and diversity, free from the constraints of this or that ideology, free from narrow-minded thinking, and free from the notions of racial prejudice. His life is a testament to love. Only love knows how to forgive truly as Mandela did. Mandela simply radiated legitimacy, uprightness, and a commitment to the ideals that his country had been aching for. He was so courteous, so uncluttered, so accessible that he made politics seem as natural and good as breathing. There was no guile, only authenticity. He had a longing seldom articulated but profoundly lived, a longing that politics be conducted in a different way and that from the change would emerge an egalitarian South Africa. He tapped into that longing and simply moved on—a nation followed. That difference was by no means merely an end to acrimony, an end to the abusive, vituperative practice of the apartheid. The difference was

also, and critically, a fundamentally different way of viewing the future of South Africa. His remarkable conduct made it absolutely clear that this was not an opportunity to avenge; instead, it was a time to heal.

To us who remain, Mandela’s ing is shocking, an unkind cut, maybe even a vexation. But Mandela has taught us that to be alive is inestimably precious, a privilege that must not be taken for granted, a trust reposed in us that must be paid back. The consciousness of interdependence and connectedness in humanity is Mandela’s legacy. This is how he will live. His physical presence has vanished into a mystery we will all follow but never fully understand because nobody has ever returned to tell what it is like. His dream, his yearning for racial harmony to bring blacks, whites, and coloured together into one being burns in a flame that will live on in his country and round the world. South Africans are the most blessed of the nations to have had Mandela. Never in the collective lifetime of our present generations have we seen such an outpouring, so much emotional intensity, from every corner of the world. When have we witnessed so much love, iration, and respect for an individual? Madiba leaves humanity with a shocked sense of loss. The entire world may bear the grief which his death inspires, for his character and legacy are international property. I am reminded of one of the most eloquent tributes paid in history. These were the first words spoken after Lincoln’s death by his Secretary of War Stanton —‘Now he belongs to the ages.’ It was verdict and prophecy alike. Likewise, Madiba is not just Africa’s, he is the world’s; he belongs not to our age, but to the ages. No sooner did his captors put him in that solitary confinement than his soul escaped the cell and became a part of the Cosmic Spirit. Little did they know that every moment Mandela was to spend in that cell will weave itself into eternity, and eternity cannot be confined in time and space or creed and race. He knew no black, white, Muslim, or Christian, but only the humanity which holds us all in its blessed circle. His countrymen can find solace in the knowledge that their grief is as widespread as the bounds of land on the planet. This reminds me of the eminent Indian novelist, activist, and feminist Arundhati Roy, who once wrote: ‘Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I

can hear her breathing.’ Adieu Madiba! We will always be thankful for your good life.

51 AITZAZ HASAN: A NOBLE YOUNG WONDER

It speaks of unimaginable courage to let others’ life take precedence over your own.

D EATH TAKES THE APPLAUSE AS humanity’s foremost leveller. Once we cross the gate into our eternal abode, just about everybody is a nobody. Billionaires and the wretchedly poor are nobodies alike. Almost every worthwhile philosophy regards death as the simplest example to stress that all men are created equal. However, every once in a long while someone defies death’s cruel pull to nothingness and becomes a ‘somebody’ in death. Aitzaz Hasan (1998–2014) was one such fine lad, who may most likely have lived an ordinary life like his fellow beings in his small town that does not encourage anyone to dream big, but who knew to embrace death to timeless glory for himself. When I recently wrote an obituary for Mandela, I thought that would be it for a long time to come, as I don’t usually feel up to writing obituaries. I feel that an obituary is not about death the leveller; it is about life, and life is in the surges. The dash that separates the deceased date of birth and date of death matters not at all. I wrote about Mandela’s long life because it embodied one unwavering surge throughout its existence, and now I write about a young boy who in one decisive moment has surged well beyond what we can imagine. So here goes the story of our young Aitzaz Hasan.

As a new year began, the Islamist militants of the Taliban and Lashkar e Jhangvi were transported with the idea of doing something unique to celebrate its advent in their own way. Thus, they planned the first-ever suicide attack inside a school

building in Pakistan. For this they chose a school with some two thousand students within its fold, in the small terror-stricken town of Hangu in northern Pakistan. The target identified was in a Shia neighbourhood, to make sure that most of the kids slaughtered and injured are ‘infidels’. Hence, as planned, the morning of January 6, 2014, saw a suicide bomber showing up at the gate of the school with the bombs, meant to kill and maim as many children as possible, strapped around his torso. Here, Aitzaz Hasan steps into picture for upsetting this well-thought-through attempt at mass-murdering children. Till that morning, Aitzaz had lived a quiet life without any flash and like any other fifteen-year-old grade nine student. His family included his parents, a brother, and two sisters. His friends him as brave, sincere, and kind, whereas Aitzaz’s teachers have described him as an asset to the campus. ‘He loved us and we loved him’, they all say. As fate would have it, that Monday morning Aitzaz was late to the school—like my teenagers too have been prone to be. I am sure, had he lived on, this was not the last time Aitzaz was going to be late in arriving at the school. Like a few other kids that morning, Aitzaz was not allowed to enter the school till after the assembly and was asked to wait outside the gate. The rest is narrated by the eyewitnesses. As the kids under punishment stood outside the gate, they saw the approaching killer and someone spotted that he was laced up with bombs. Frightened, the kids ran away shouting. But our young Aitzaz, ignoring his friends urging him to run for safety, dashed at the suicide bomber as the bomber tried to hurriedly enter the school. A blast marked the end of Aitzaz’s young life, along with the sick existence of the bomber. A teacher at the school told investigators that he saw Aitzaz chasing the attacker and then saw the attacker detonate the bomb that killed the teen. All the other students lived. So this is the story of this noble young wonder who, in an amazing testimony to the courage that lay in his bosom, stepped up as the saviour of two thousand kids in the school. He made the ultimate sacrifice, gave his life so that others could live. It speaks of unimaginable courage to let others’ life take precedence over your own precious existence. Let’s hope in heaven God gives him a glimpse how his schoolmates’ lives will turn out as a result of his sacrifice.

By sacrificing his life where his manhood was starting to kiss its morning, this young man has become a star of hope in the night that is now Pakistan. We owe Aitzaz more than mere awards. We need to create scholarships and institutions that will preserve his memory to our good. Generations of our children ought to be taught how a child died saving many other children. Aitzaz felt love for his fellows in his tender heart and, well beyond the choice between guns and talks that bedevils the nation, all he needed was courage in his marrow to throw himself at the suicide vest that was intended to kill his schoolmates. In refusing the scraps of life available to him while his fellows would be reduced to blood and dust, Aitzaz taught us that in a single, lonely, quiet, and selfless act, life can surge beyond the equalizer that death is meant to be. Finally, Aitzaz, we are sorry and our heads hang in shame, as no nation should ever require its schoolchildren to be so brave.