Month: July 2014
Gravity of Unity
“Everything in this universe attracts others with a force which is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance in between.”
Every item of this entire universe is attracting the others but according to the myth the force of attraction keeps on decreasing as things keep on becoming distant. I was in my high school when I first read this law and I remember myself asking me the very obvious question that if I am being attracted by the objects around, why don’t I feel that attraction? Apparently the forces tend to cancel out each other being equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. But I completely neglected one very obvious part of the myth.
It was the night of 27th of Ramadan and religiously it’s considered to be a very precious night. People tend to worship the entire night and ask for forgiveness, success, love, money and happiness believing that all the things would be granted to them for just worshipping one single night. Seeing all the people getting busy in their worships, I always ask myself how should I worship or after reward of what service should I be asking for missing and shuffled pieces of my life.
I was sitting in my room when my cousin called me and informed that he’s picking me up on his way to Badshahi Mosque, a highly ranked Mughal heritage of subcontinent situated in Pakistan. I don’t happen to be a conventionally religious person and tried to resist it but eventually had to give up. A lot of other people also came there to religiously celebrate and spend the night in worship. Not everyone was worshipping, some were just roaming around like me enjoying the beautiful mosque, the amazing interiors and a beautiful architecture telling the story of hundreds of years.
While roaming around when I looked at all the people, I felt a strange and a strong bond between all the children, men and women. They weren’t there for any personal reason, they weren’t there because they had any business with each other, they weren’t forced to get there rather they were there for something bigger than the materialistic needs. They were all there to celebrate some sacred moments, though separately but like the flow of individual particles which seem to make a bigger united flow when they are seen from some distance. Like individual drops of water travelling in the same direction unaware of the fact that they are the flow of one single ocean.
For all the Muslims, it’s compulsory to perform Pilgrimage atleast once in a lifetime, which happen to be the largest and the most marvelous and sacred gathering of people in one place in Mecca and people often tell that the journey changed them and their lives altogether putting them in entirely different dimension. And I always used to question the authority of that statement. But that day I realized that it could be true because that day I probably discovered the neglected part of the myth of attraction between objects of the universe that says that attraction goes on decreasing as the distance increases. I had never been closer to those people but when I got a bit closer, it felt different and probably the people performing Pilgrimage speak true when they describe the journey as a marvelous spiritual journey and probably people speak true of loving each other when they get closer to each other because the myth dictates that force of attraction dominates in these circumstances.
Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.
Aliens of the Planet I Live In
The quest to find out life in the outer universe has been going on like forever. Some believe that we are the creation of a superior species, just another version of God as the creator. Another school of thought believes that in this vast and ever growing universe, human beings can’t possibly be the only well-grown species. Different versions of the stories have been there in treatises and the longing for the true answer made the race of human beings to try to explore for the ‘truth’ and set out in outer space.
Evolution is indeed another very interesting idea that struck the entire religious history questioning different believes and honestly I could never come up with a theory compiling the two theories namely the theory of evolution and the theory of religion. Curiously speaking, as evolution hit the planet earth, it could equally hit some other planet in a galaxy at hundreds of light years from our galaxy. Since the theory of relativity indicates the mass becomes infinite as one object travels with the speed of light, we just can’t but theoretically speaking, if we did travel with the speed of light, we wouldn’t have hundreds of years to reach the planet of our destination just to say ‘hi’ to our well-evolved brothers and observe the way they greet us finding our invasion in their planet very pleasant.
There’s a shockingly interesting segment of information that some people claim to have found out aliens in their respective regions and also claim to have been invaded, disrespected and murdered by them. The aliens have multiple forms and structures. Some of them resemble human beings while the others are made of metals. They can see in darkness, they can track their movements, they can hear their whispers and they can kill them equally well from a thousand miles away and from a couple of yards away. The people who claim to have discovered these aliens are from Afghanistan, Liberia, Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Yemen, Palestine, Iraq and the list goes on.
Human beings are being murdered continuously and brutally but no one dares to point out neither the aliens in ‘disguised human form’ nor the ‘metallic ones’. They say the metallic ones are the second generation created by the primary generation by the use of science. Apparently these aliens are well equipped and have highly evolved technologies as well as they believe that they themselves have been evolved superior to the humans of the nations they invaded and that wherever they invaded, they invaded for a constructive reason which was necessary for the survival of this planet.
And very recently, the aliens of Israel are bombarding the Palestinians, for the well-being of this planet and to save the humanity from all the possible endangered threats that the Palestinians might have hidden and will only show off at some suitable time. I wonder why Palestinians would hide their ‘weapons of Planet Destruction’ at a time when they are being destructed and for what other ‘suitable time’ they plan to respond to these alien invasions. Clearly they have none and they are filing another petition with their blood that they are witnessing another alien invasion and are calling for help from the ‘humans’ of the planet and apparently there are no humans intelligent enough to recognize the difference between the brutality and conquest for redemption of Earth.
As someone very wisely said:
Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.
Short Life of Moments In Spirituality
The entire Muslim World is celebrating the month of Ramadan which is the most holy of all the months according to beliefs of us Muslims. Homo-sapiens happen to be a very weak species amongst the race of species yet it enjoys the due credits of being the blessed of all. When I was a child, I used to think that the car which stops first at the signal is the winner of the race that just ended at the signal, I used to ask myself that whether the superior one is the one who’s stronger, I used to wonder if I wasn’t born in this world or in this family, where would I be right now and I was always skeptical whether everyone sees for the answers to the same questions.
The concept of religion has always been of particular interest to human beings. As said earlier, homo-sapiens happen to be very weak and mankind has always been in search of some superior force to rely on. This is the place in the journey of history where religion got introduced. Several gods, goddesses and supernatural powers were introduced as being a source of power, courage and guidance to the human beings and the chain is still in progress and like everything else, religions are also under consideration and under modification process.
When it comes to religion, irrespective of the religion we’re talking about, the first thing that attains my utmost attention is common to every religion and that is spirituality. Every religion has some chapters dedicated to the subject matter and I have always been skeptical about what spirituality is. Is it like the software that runs the hardware, is it like the determination you have inside your brain prior to performing a task, is it like the music you hear in the background when you see your loved one, is it like the gratitude when you feel lucky or is it like the rules of nature when you observe different phenomena being operated in complete harmony?
We Muslims fast the entire day forbidding ourselves from food, loose tongue and all the harmful deeds related to one’s eyes, hands, tongue and thoughts just for God. I have experienced spirituality in all the ordinary ways but when it concerns to the matters regarding religion, I don’t know how to define and identify spirituality. Is it the satisfaction of my heart, is it the submission of my will to the will of the One I worship or is it my rebellion against my own desires?
Spirituality lies is becoming content to what’s been awarded to us and being equally content to what’s not been awarded. Spirituality lies in knowing oneself better for the better understanding of this universe and its creator. Spirituality lies in self-training and self-conquer which is perhaps the most difficult of all the things. I may have and may be will spend some moments of spirituality in this holy month of Ramadan but for me the life of the moments spent in spirituality is always too short to be felt, recognized, classified and recorded.
Umair Rehman 