God and His creation are one

Dear Friends,

I have said this before and I will say it again one more time so that we may all see spontaneously what there is to see in what one is saying -- that is, to see something together by looking in the same direction, at the same time, on the same level of being, so that we can see the same thing that someone is showing by restraining our own thoughts, computations and extrapolations from interfering and distorting the truth of what one is saying.

The art of seeing is remarkably simple, yet we have eyes and cannot see truly what we are looking at, because our own projections and whatever little learning we've acquired conspire to create so much noise in our little heads that we cannot hear what another is saying or has to say, yet we lie to ourselves and others about having understood all there was to see and understand.

We do this almost unthinkingly by repeating, parrot-fashion, what we believe are truths culled from the Book of Life itself. There is no such book. 

Let's look at Feroz Karmally's point of view.

In his last post, Feroz contends God is something quite apart from His creation. In his offhand and habitual way (going by the miles and miles of screed he has published on this discussion board), he does not agree with my simple unprejudiced contention that the creator and his creation are one. He refuses to see what I have said a few times, that the spirit of God, the creator of the universe, pervades all of existence in its myriad forms, wherever we tiurn -- in the animal and plant kingdom, in non-living things, or in human life.

I keep saying that God is part and parcel of His own creation.

At Family of the Heart, the problem we keep facing in almost every discussion is that too many people appear to be saying all sorts of different things without regard to the topic of discussion, based on what the writers know, or wish to hear. Then there are those who bring religion into everything -- even if it is love and friendship among South Asian men and women, a topic that failed to generate much interest because, I think, some religious moralists in our midst derailed that train of thought.

Religion is truly the bane of our existence. Yet, at Family of the Heart, to be sure, we keep slaughtering each other with our knowledge of God, the Koran and Hadith -- or whatever. Again, out of habit or our natal conditioning, we label each other: right, wrong; Muslim, atheist; blah, blah; blah, blah; blah, blah. 

In a lifetime of writing for and editing newspapers, magazines, specialized journals and books -- both fiction and nonfiction -- I have found many people everywhere who cannot see the wood for the trees. They only want to hear what they know, and they make the mistake of thinking that only they have a monopoly on truth, whatever that means.

The truth is that there is no such thing as truth.

We convince ourselves of what we think truth should be according to this or that holy book, rather than looking at the truth of what is.

This should be is heavily influenced by one's conditioning. In the case of Feroz Karmally, for instance, one can see the heavy influence of the questionable logic of Rashad Khalifa, Ahmed Deedat, and Zakir Naik in suggesting that Islam is the best religion in the world and the Koran the greatest book ever written, thus implying that other religions worship lesser gods or read perverted literature called scriptures.

We tend to forget that all religions worship one God, for there is no other, and there simply cannot be room for another. To add drama to our simple, straightforward understanding of God and His relation to Man, or to Man and his relation to God, we have invented the Devil, this thing we call Shaitaan, who keeps bungling God's best-laid plans for man and beast -- or so the various scriptures tell us, whether these be written by Man or God Himself.

There's a saint and criminal lurking at every corner. Every man is a potential saint, yet each one of us is a potential criminal. Why can't we therefore deduce that God must be struggling with the Satan within Himself? But no; how dare we say that? Tobah, tobah, tobah! we say and leave it at that.

Can't you see how difficult it is to break out of the Matrix of our conditioning! 

Ask yourself why we cannot think for ourselves, why we can't think outside the box, why it is that we must rely on what some cranky prophets of old have said rather than follow some of the refined thinking of highly evolved minds whose thoughts and ideas are shaping the world we live in, not the mythical, historical world of the dead past but the 21st century world of today and tomorrow.

My understanding of God has been influenced from a young age by Socrates, Erasmus, Spinoza and Marcus Aurelius, the Upanishads and the Gita, Gandhi and Nietzsche, and latterly by esoteric philosophy, Buddhism and the teachings of Zen. The list of philosophers and scientists is long, from Aristotle to Zoroaster.

Of course I've read the Bible and the Koran, yet I refrain from quoting chapter and verse for a very good reason.

I believe that repetition of a truth is a lie. Why? Because it is not your truth, and what does it benefit anyone to parrot stuff-and-nonsense from here and there just to appear knowledgeable and intellectual? Our intellectual parrotification prevents us from seeing the actual, the what is, because we're so engrossed in our own intellectualism.

I have always come forward with my own take on the discussions we have here at Family of the Heart without fear or favour -- and I may have hurt the tender feelings of some folks with my way of expressing myself with total freedom from all kinds of dogma (godma would be a better word, eh!).

I like a good debate, and I can listen much, but I don't care much for the pedants or pundits who are out to convert freethinkers to their retrogressive way of life.

I am a lifelong student of comparative religion and spirituality. I have written countless features and articles and published them in some of the best newspapers and magazines in the world. To this day, I haven't had one negative comeback about whatever I have written. However, at Family of the Heart and some other similar forums, many holier-than-thou Muslims simply lose their top because I refuse to rely on their tools of reference -- e.g., the Koran and the Hadith.

Evolution does not mean that if you keep observing an ape long enough, he will turn into a human being; or a giraffe into a dinosaur. Evolution means that we adapt ourselves for survival by espousing change, by changing with the changing times. The code of morality followed by the Arabs, for instance, makes no sense to me. I will never be an Arab in a million years, and nor will all the parrots who espouse the Arabian ideal of heaven and the scores of virgins up there somewhere!

Readers of the Koran and the Bible, especially, are so caught up in their dualities of good and evil, heaven and hell, that they cannot see how all and everything is really one, how we all come from the same source and how we finally return to the same fountainhead.

This conflict of dualities, all due to one's conditioning, makes organized religion the greatest butcher that history has ever known. More people have been killed in the name of God than one can attribute to all the human calamities and natural disasters put together since time began.

So why we do we find it so difficult to kiss goodbye to religion?

Our fragmented and conditioned minds immediately swing into defensive action: What will happen? There will be chaos and hell to pay! What will happen to our God-given identity and morality? Oh, my God! Fear kicks in and we revert back to the magnetic pull of society, our Muslim society and our Christian society, all of which are in conflict with our democratic society. God, what will happen to Pakistan, the burka and hijab which Allah has ordained to protect Muslim women from the lascivious gaze of the sex-hungry pigs out there!

Once we understand that duality and fragmentation are causing all the conflict and havoc in our lives, we arrive at a better vantage point from where we can truly appreciate what it means when one says we live and move and have our being in God, that He is in us as we are in Him, that God and Man are One.

Finally, I believe that God exists because I do.

Rashid Mughal