When I was in Pakistan, I saw some people with small heads, usually found where people gave food and money to the poor as charity. At that time, there was no knowledge of the Zika virus, so it’s not something new. Today, we’re trying to connect it with the virus, but back then, it was accepted as fate. I have no scientific knowledge, and I’m not going to assume, but I understand that people would blame God and accept it rapidly as fate, considering themselves insignificant and helpless.
Looking back in history, from plague to Ebola to Zika, all kinds of human diseases have been controlled or eradicated by human beings with scientific knowledge, not by the prayers of religious leaders. Religion, or spirituality, can be one of the best medicines for suffering human beings because it delves deep into the cause of ailments. Several disorders are connected to stress, and stress is usually related to individual thoughts.
Where I’m going with this is, if you have knowledge of the Zika virus coupled with ultrasound, you can see what’s going on inside the human body. If there’s something wrong with the baby, should you follow the advice of the religious leader or the scientist?
I personally believe God is living through us, so logically, I am against abortion. But if millions of babies are born with Zika, it can be a real threat not only to humanity but to God’s existence as well. That’s why I don’t take a firm stance against abortion in special circumstances because God functions with functioning human beings, thus it’s a right move by the United Nations to make it an international emergency.
The internet, space station, and our diseases all point toward an urgent need for religions, scientists, communities, and the ordinary individual to work together instead of bickering. I feel there’s a tug of war between religions and the scientific community to win over the individual. The scientific community has been working hard to convince individuals that religions are not the true way of life. This is an egotistic assumption. Our knowledge is not complete, so we can’t assume that science is the only way to go. In some cultures, it has its followers, but then again, we have billions of people following their religions religiously. The problem is that both extremes should think about the usability of brainpower. There’s a lot of scientifically unproven knowledge yet proven to help, like the placebo effect, spirituality, God, love, and a whole lot of emotional issues we don’t really understand but strongly feel.
Lately, it’s become more pronounced that nature is asking us to work together spiritually instead of religiously or nationally for humanity. My question to people like Donald Trump is, how do you create walls for these kinds of problems? We’re a lot more connected to each other than we think. You can make the walls, but you can’t protect yourself in a glass bowl or an iron dome because we die from the inside out as well as from the outside. Divisions only make us vulnerable; working together is a necessity, not a choice.
In Pakistan, we use a term called “goomraah.” If anybody starts to think outside of the box, questions the status quo, or challenges the necessity of certain boundaries, passionate extremists will call them “goomraah.” I find it very interesting that those people who question and challenge are the ones who find new pathways to new worlds, new directions, and inventions that are helpful to humanity, helping humanity move forward and evolve. Yet they are called “goomraah.” The question is, why does one have to lose their way to find the way? A good CEO knows that you don’t have to be imprisoned by an ideology to be free. You can’t judge if you’re blindfolded by the influences of politics related to belonging groups; you have to be an individual who is free and a CEO. Real freedom resides in justice for all departments of life, self, and others around, including God because we are more than the body, even more than the soul, because the soul has to experience this life by living with the body. We interact with a whole lot of other people in the same situation but with different belief systems. Everyone is a package of body, soul, life story, future plans, past history, and present circumstances. If we all identify ourselves with just the body or soul, it’s not enough because of our mortality. The body eventually gets old and dies, and the soul has to leave; thus, beauty, power, and job title should not be the basis of real happiness. If one finds happiness in these things, that happiness is ego-related.
I can be the biggest proponent of individualism, and my whole theme is to strengthen the individual, but my purpose behind all that is to strengthen humanity as a whole because I believe if the thread is strong, the fabric can be real strong.
Originally, human beings are compelled to gather together because of their social nature and security, but in the process, they gave up important elements of their individuality. In return for their contribution to society, it was their right to be protected and provided for by their society. Human beings grouped together and gravitated towards the areas of the world which provided the most comfort and richest resources. This need for survival, resources, and security has been going on for as long as societies have existed.
Today, if you look at societies, people are molded and brainwashed to follow customs and traditions regardless of the evolution of time. Every society judges others as inferior to them because of the education passed on through the generations. Religious people think that since they pray and sacrifice for God, they will go to heaven, and all others who don’t follow their way of living will go to hell.
The other extremists think that it’s backward to even think about the existence of God. Either way, they try to mold their young ones to the way they have been living. Right or wrong is not easily judged by the individual because of common and accepted views of the societies they belong to. That is the fundamental cause of prejudice in an individual’s life and human societies simultaneously. This flawed education system has been haunting humans since the dawn of civilization, yet it all starts at home.
If the individual has to live in a society, the rules have to be followed. The personal view of a mortal being is not valued even by the individual. For instance, western liberated women would not even think twice to be like eastern women because of their ways of living, and eastern women would think that being wild and liberated is against their values. Both sides look down at each other because of their upbringing, which is influenced by their respected societies. Social influences dictate even personal values; there is very little focus on personal happiness and contentment, which is very dangerous for a mortal being individually.
A while back, I picked up a Christian magazine called Awake April 22, 1993, just wanted to read about the religion’s role in Man’s wars. The start of the article says (quote) “There has never been a people that did not have some form of religion,” says “The World Book of Encyclopedia (1970 edition).” Yet historians Will and Ariel Durant wrote: war is one of the constants of history. Are those two constants, war and religion, somehow connected? Indeed throughout history, war and religion have been inseparable.”
On the next page, it says Anne Fremantle wrote in the book
“Age of Faith”: Quote, “Of all the wars men have waged, none have been more zealously undertaken than those on behalf of a faith. And of these ‘holy wars,’ none have been bloodier and more protracted than the Christian Crusades of the Middle Ages.” End quote.
Since I’m on the subject, I have to mention another author who wrote in Time magazine on April 25th, 2011. Jon Meacham writes an article titled “Is Hell Dead?” He writes about Rob Bell, who is a Pastor of the Mars Hill Bible Church, and I quote: “When we get to what happens when we die, we don’t have any video footage,” says Bell. “So let’s at least be honest that we are speculating, because we are.” End quote.
These kinds of discussions are needed for the ordinary individual, so we all can stand up, judge, and ask questions about our own group politics, instead of following it like sheep.
The individual has been domesticated by all societies according to their social agreement. This has created repercussions for the individual. They have been made to feel inadequate and dependent. They are taught that God, religion, politics, and society itself are more important than the individual. When you become part of a group or a gang, you become inferior. Yet society is created by and made up of individuals. It is the individual’s responsibility to do justice to the belonging group and to him/herself at the same time.
We need to create balance inside the individual so that the individual will not be corrupted by or affected by group politics. That individual is my ideal CEO. If we let ourselves be treated like cattle, we cannot even dream of the potential God has in store for us. Religions have been the stepping stones to create a proper speed to evolve and adopt changes gradually; they are not the end, spirituality is.
I believe that we each come into the world with the right to live in peace and raise our children without any dangers to ourselves and our generations. Our human rights should surpass any religious opinion, regardless of our country, race, gender, or sexual orientation. We have to grow as the world turns. There is no inferior or superior human race. It is all one spiritual entity, the life force which is carried by the individual or who carries the individual. At that level, everybody is the same; you could vary in size, gender, sexual orientation, color, race, nation, or religion, but the fact remains the same: we all bleed and die the same way, or if you want to look at it scientifically, it is proven genetically connected by the carbon.
I am an idealist. I see the world with my idealist eyes that do not recognize the lines and boundaries of a political group or, in general, today’s world. There are no political lines in the natural and physical world. These boundary lines are created either from our territory-marking animal side or by the weaker individual who gave up his individual liberty and potential powers to the group politics in order to attain security.
If we look at our evolution in other areas of life, we should have evolved in our security department too. This is not only for security but for comfort and development as well. Human beings are social creatures. We cannot live alone or without the earth. Humans are not endangered as much from external elements as from each other with our weapons and wars and the potential annihilation. By creating the socio-political boundaries called society, country, and religion, are we really doing any good for our security, or are we going against it?
In society, every law and order and every religion has at least started on the basis of justice, yet it gets complicated and compromised by group politics. Most of today’s problems are related to issues of injustice. Whether it is somebody’s land being taken or somebody was killed and revenge is sought for the love loss. It all comes down to people seeking justice for a wrong done to them. In order to attain peace, whether external or internal, you have to seek not to do the things that you do not want done to you. You have to live a just life. If you start living with yourself that way, you will let others live that way also. A good CEO is judged by the actions, so it is important to establish the identity as an individual, so when it comes to decision-making, you don’t just follow the order.
If you are told to kill an innocent individual on the name of God, you have to think logically that certain realities should stay in the forefront. God is a reality no one understands one hundred percent, so no one should kill an innocent individual because that is a physical reality. You can’t kill someone over a reality you don’t understand, so listening to a politically charged leader is a self-demotion from your CEO status.
Since God is an alcohol for humans just like catnip for a cat, it is important to have the understanding for our free will because we enjoy it and even by choice, we get drunk on it. It’s a known fact that drinking to get drunk is destructive for the individual and the surrounding people. With free will, we are supposed to be a CEO of our lives and evolve as the time and the world evolves around us. It’s one’s duty to understand how to be a CEO of his/her life.
The basic facts of life include that we are mortal individually yet we always break world records, discover new things and technologies, and inventions for our comfort all the time. Looking at the human brain and the body, it all points towards limitless potential. We are like the ocean; you can’t see the seashore when you go in the middle of it. And that is the reason I believe that God lives through the human and evolves as we evolve. Sure, as a single cell, we are just a part of the bigger picture, but the strength of the fabric depends on the thread.
The knowledge of the past is researched by us today. Regardless of proven wrong over and over, we still kill each other and claim being right. Egyptians took their belongings with them, believing that they would need them in the afterlife. Today, we excavate their tombs and research their lives and belief systems. Yet we still believe in the afterlife without a doubt. Does this mean we should not believe in the afterlife? I still believe, but not in the same way. I leave the unknown as unknown. We will learn more as we evolve to our potential. In the meantime, we should know one thing for a fact: we should not fight over and kill each other passionately over what is unknown.
Religious stories and political disagreements can start secondary groups within larger ones. For example, the Shia faith was created as a sect of Islam after a political war. These religious stories are like wounds nobody wants to heal. A person who carries past wounds robs his/her own happiness, sometimes for life. It is hard for me to understand why a whole society can’t see that if past wounds can rob an individual of happiness, what kind of devastating effects it can have on a group of people, unless there are people who benefit from the politics of division.
Collectively, we should have the knowledge to heal the individual and society. The individual should know by now that political entities reap benefits from these continuous conflicts. If you keep scratching the wound, it does not heal, even after thousands of years. We are still passionate about the atrocities done to our group by the other group. Regardless of every religious teaching of forgiveness and forgetting to carry on to the future, human societies should evolve from the politics of divisions, bring peace to the present, and forge into the future as an evolving entity for the better. Just look at the Syrian conflict and its toll; it’s a prime example of the sense of belonging to a group. The remedy is not more bombing; it is the individual awakening with the knowledge of belonging to humanity as a whole.
Genghis Khan, Hitler, Hiroshima, Darfur, and countless other past histories show that humans have the capacity to forgive and carry on, to excel and evolve. An individual having troubles in life with past experiences, anxiety, depression, or mental health issues is one thing; you deal with the medicine and counseling. But when nations or races have problems, we need to come up with evolved thinking as international counseling for evolved solutions.