Absolute Justice... and a Little Mercy - 2: Why I'd Rather Not be Treated Justly

Waiting for someone who was late, one day, I felt annoyed and thought of ways such behavior must be punished. It seemed to me, feeling languid at that moment, that punishment was the solution to such problems.

My conscience then quietly reminded me that at times, I am late also. My problem-loving mind suddenly got active at this. It tried to create a mathematical visual where everyone was going to settle scores.

BOOM! BANG! CRASH! - I saw.

Without the need of precision, I realized that it would mean I would somehow perish for all my faults, so far unaccounted or simply forgive by others. This would also be the fate of most of others, and so - I realized that establishment of absolute justice would lead to instantaneous destruction of Existence.

Between action and reaction, there is choice. Between One's first contact with the Other, there is time & space, and adjustment - there is flow of information, and creation of a connection. This little "work-in-progress" area is either directed by the principle of mercy, or the principle of "attack." Love, or hate.

I use this term "attack" to mean a wide variety of active behaviors including hostility, lack of empathy and understanding, desire to modify the Other, intolerance, feeling superiority, etc.

Say we are urban explorers who enter a tribal region. We don't like the way they treat their women. What do we do between the period of our first contact - and until the time they see the light, given that we have light at all in the first place?

Do we understand their position,observe their cultural evolution, and understand their aspirations? And help them towards the light - a process which will take time, effort, and much sacrifice from us?

Or do we impose our values on them in an instant - declaring their ways illegal and barbaric - and try to get them to change either by being obedient to us, or be captives to us?

Or do we decide to finish them there and then - as living being or as a cultural phenomena?

The first is the way of Love, and or mercy. It is dynamic. And it creates the next world.

The second is the way of Attack, Ruthlessness, Un-Compassion. It is dynamic. And it destroys the next world.

The third is the way of Absolute Justice - which is not the absolute prerogative of any human over the other. It is static. It destroys our world instantaneously as neither One nor the Other would remain.

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Absolute Justice... and a Little Mercy - 1: Conversation with a Lawyer

Absolute Justice... and a Little Mercy - 1: Conversation with a Lawyer

On a flight towards the North once, I got to sit along a woman lawyer.

They say that on this planet, seven persons look, and behave like one another. I.e. each person has six doppelgänger(s). This lady seemed as broody and thoughtful as a certain teacher of mine - with facial features, hairstyle, and age to match.

So we struck up a conversation - something I rarely attempts with strangers - with my heart feeling certain sense of familiarity, of having always known her. It was no surprise to me, then, that just my certain teacher would, she delved into a thoughtful exchange. Even her life story was told in a reflective narration. She wondered at every moment how she got to be where she got to be, and what was she doing... not in an edgy, questioning way which elicits the kind of face expression from me that alarms people... but in a way that one who listened to her only would hear in her words.

She told me she was a lawyer.

And somehow (wasn't it predictable!) we started talking about life. Her company stirred in me the kind of thoughtfulness that I always feel in the company of people who are... awake.

I shared with her what I believed was an insight:

This World is Balanced on Justice, But Operated on Mercy.

In Urdu, my words were:

Ye Duniya Insaaf Par Qayem Hai, Aur Reham Par Chalti Hai.

She turned her head away from me, and down, and reflected. I wondered what this lawyer would think. She turned her face back to me after a few moments, smiling that strange, pained smile of my teacher, and said, "True."

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The Design of the Universe - 2

Prophecy,

I was going to speak of the design of the Universe but someone came by. I was interrupted, and had more moments to reflect, and now I think it is not something to be written about here in concrete detail, as I originally planned.

I begin with this:

"Your remedy is within you, but you do not sense it. Your sickness is from you, but you do not perceive it. You presume you are a small entity, but within you is enfolded the entire Universe. You are indeed the Evident Book, by whose alphabet the Hidden becomes Manifest. Therefore you have no need to look beyond yourself. What you seek is within you, if only you reflect."

- Imam Ali Ibne Abu Talib, May Allah be pleased with him

And to conclude what I said of the stars - there is no wonder that stars' paths concur with us. At the same time, I always believed in humans creating their own destiny or influencing it greatly - enough to over-ride the stars.

In the light of all this (apparently contradictory) knowledge, Prophecy, I have reached the simple conclusion about our existence:

We have been looking at it outside-in. It's not the stars that affect human destiny. It is the humans who move the stars - and that is how whoever realized that they could create or destroy something, and took action to do so, indeed did. Single men and women have moved the world - leading it to lofty achievements or dreadful despair. Single-minded single souls. It was possible because of the secret of the Universe.

You see, Prophecy? The humans create the stars and black-holes and the matter and elements of the Universe. It's inside-out.

This is why, in response to the wish of a person, the Universe re-arranges itself and re-aligns its resources. This much, many creative persons and spiritual-minded people now agree upon. The popular theorem of the Law of Attraction alludes to this "secret." But why does the Law of Attraction work that way? They couldn't say.

Whoever believed in either genesis or the Big Bang or any similar mythology of the beginning sees that it all began from a singularity, and expanded. How, then, do we still picture the oddity of something coming from up above? As if the Universe existed as large as it is, and we are in it somehow.

Have we not seen the plant growing? What comes first? The tip of the leaf, or the seed - then the stem, then the unrolled leaf rolling out and the flowers blossoming from a bud? To imagine a single pollen to be contained in the periphery of leaves is not the truth of existence. It is the perception of existence to one who has not seen a plant grow.

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I leave you to reflect upon these images:

The Design of the Universe - 1

Note: This knowledge is blogged for my own remembrance. It is not for the Beginners, but for those on the middle of the way.


Prophecy,

I am going to share with you the pithy result of my years of pondering the question: What is the Universe? Or the Multiverse, as it surely is, but for the sake of simplicity....

Why do stars seem to affect the lives of humans? How do all things co-relate and why? How come so many elements of being are in a dance with humans - above all, I have wondered about Fate.

Once again, I turn to stars which have fascinated the humankind for so long. For the simple reason, perhaps, of them being "above us" - though how have we come to determine that the South Pole is at the "bottom" of the world, and the North Pole is the "top" of the world is a matter of pure arbitration. It should logically be that the stars seen from the Southern End of the Earth must be "below" the people on North if North indeed is the right side up.

So, Prophecy, the human race must learn to embrace duality - the yin and the yang - and understand that the stars are around us. Neither above, nor below.

Perception, however, in relation to the human body of which the head is the de facto right side up, determines that the stars are above our head, and therefore above us. The stars have guided the humans on our travels and navigations. They have, as astrologers have determined over the ages, also shown curious concurrence with the patterns of human life.

Now if concurrence occurs at all, it means two things to our perceptions: the stars affect us; or there exist cycles (of economic activity, of stars' and comets' orbits, of climate change, of life change) that have co-relations with one another. I.e. If I come home only on Sundays - and my neighbor's wife fights with her husband having been impressed by my car, and demanding her husband to furnish one likewise - there will be a pattern of co-relation 1/ by my affect upon her moods; 2/ by the simple fact that I and the neighbors come across each other every Sunday only.

If the neighbors undertake an unrelated activity such as going on a picnic on Sundays, we will still find that every Sunday, I come home, and neighbors go away.


Now what's the co-relation of the Universe to us?

How come there are so many similarities between the Universe's macrocosm and our microcosm and what does it signify? It signifies more than the assumption that we all burst open as part of a giant blob, and have similar patterns/codes inside our organisms (which, if someone agrees to it, is still an astounding belief).

What has concerned me, dear Prophecy, is the expansion of the Universe. The Universe is expanding - at an accelerating speed. Something is going on. We are boggled by the size of the Universe and the point of ever figuring it all out. And why?

Meanwhile the human society has declared several times that it has neared the end of its evolution. How did they reach this conclusion is beyond me. As long as people are hungry, and some of us can still obtain gourmet food - how on Earth could we even reach the mathematical conclusion that it's either a state of equilibrium or perfection or destruction? The human society will never end as long as there is room for either possibility or further hopelessness.

But the human society is in admitted deep trouble - so will we ever embark upon journeys to explore the depths of the Universe?

What shall we do with our fascination with this giant project then? Will we perish before ever setting foot forth? And how far shall we go anyway?

... But I hadn't give up on the Universe, Prophecy. I have alway had a feeling that there is a point here to be seen, and something to be understood, and something I can find out in my own lifetime, without the need to leave it to the eternity of later generations.

So Prophecy, last week some time, I found out what the Universe is.

Where is it "coming from," why and how is it expanding, and why the microcosms within the Universe draw such a true parallel to human micro/macrocosms. And why do stars seem to affect human lives.

Seek-ing

Prophecy -

I have learned that there is no point in seek-ing. As long as one seeks, the Other hides.

How can one seek what's already there? The point, perhaps, is to stop seek-ing, and be sought.

Seek-ing is do-ing. As they say, we are human beings, not human doings.