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It's a figment of our
imagination
Dear Family of the Heart:
Our mutual friend Ziauddin Ahmed is working overtime again.
I have still not recovered from his
heavy-duty essay of yesteryear, "The Nature of Nature," and now
comes his latest bombshell, "Mutual Influence of the Metaphysical and
Physical," to baffle us with the dichotomy of the physical and the
metaphysical.
I get the feeling he's trying to
explain body and spirit, heart and soul, the physical and the metaphysical
as if these dualities actually existed. They exist only in our minds.
Our mutual friend says the sixth
sense, which can be developed, "gives one the capacity to tap into the
realm of the metaphysical and fathom certain superhuman phenomena."
On the strength of that cliche, he makes his quantum leap into the realm of the
unknown, a place where such questions concerning the paranormal and psychic
realities of existence have remained eternally unanswered since the dawn of
time.
The chasm between the physical and
the metaphysical has baffled virtually every philosopher (including
myself!) since some Presocratic soul (possibly
the great-great-great-grandfather of Socrates) came up with the science of
philosophy (ha, that's a good subject, the science of philosophy) to
clarify for us what we're told is the unclarifiable.
I wonder why we don't accept the
fact that man is the physical animal that philosophizes that the Nameless
Thing of a Thousand Names that we call God is the metaphysical reflection
of our own thought which Zia Ahmed has split into the three "aspect[s]
of Nature [permeating] all aspects of ‘thought,’ ‘word’ and ‘deed’ -- the
triad of human existence."
I think it is fair to say that the
animal erroneously called 'human being' has failed to understand the
simplistic messages of the thousands of prophets who, it is claimed, came
and came again and again to educate us to rise and shine as the supremest of creatures in the chaotic galaxies of our
cosmos.
Since man has failed to live by the
Ten Commandments and is happily butchering away his fellow man, how and
when is he ever going to understand Einstein's E equals MC squared, and to
what avail?
The whole edifice of Zia Ahmed's
argument therefore crumbles with his own words, and I quote, "It thus
seems that all creation is really a figment of one’s imagination."
Rashid Mughal
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