Pirates? 21st century? What's going on?

Excuse me. What is this I see on my Gmail RSS feed? What's with this pirates & Somalia business? Weren't this pirate guys dead for good two centuries ago? What's going on on this planet? Where's Google Earth?

We should have a feature of striking such crazies right from our desktops using Google Earth. We spot the pirates in real time, and a satellite can zap them. Somehow.

Ridiculous!

I must sleep.

Pervez Musharraf

Prophecy,

Pervez Musharraf is one of my heroes. This realization just became clearer to me again, as I undertook an exercise identifying my heroes and what I admire about them.

I don't know who else to share this with, so I am sharing this here.

I identified that I regard Musharraf deeply, despite disagreeing with some of his moves, including the Chief Justice fiasco.

What I truly, deeply respect in Pervez Musharraf is his decision-making.

• That he can take decisions independent of how he will be seen, and still be attuned to "ground realities."
• That he takes responsibility for his actions and decisions, and even for the actions and decisions of his team.
• That he does not leave his ground and run, despite adversity.
• That he is tender enough to have cared f women empowerment. According to the biography of Greg Mortenson, a climber who had built 55+ schools in Central Asias rural and mountain communities, Three Cups of Tea, Musharraf put his battle where his heart is, and sent the army to shoo off the ignorant militants who had bombed girls' schools.

[F]ifteen military helicopters flew in formation up the Daryle Valley, a haven of Taliban and Al Qaeda [...], hunting extremists who had bombed eight government girls' schools. Mortenson by then, had come to admire Musharraf, gratified to see that Pakistan's government was prepared to fight for the education of its girls.
-Page 309, Penguin Paperback Edition
Three Cups of Tea

{OK, let me go and get the notebook where I wrote all this.}

• That he is knowledgeable and has foresight.
• That he is a man of the world.
• And that, he is a man.

I admire Musharraf because I draw strength from a mental image of him. I learn that in order to move with life, we have become aware, to balance out the truth of our situation, walk the middle path, take decisions every moment. That we aren't born to please or to gratify victims who control us, but to live our destiny. We breathe to do the right thing - not necessarily the good thing. I learn that it's important to be courageous than to be an all-appeasing goody-two shoes. We can never satisfy the world; the world is in a constant state of deprivation. We aren't here for the world, but for the reason of the creation of everything.

All this led me to wonder about my own weakness as a citizen of Pakistan: of how have I not contributed to the growth and development of my people and nation by entangling myself in lesser affairs? I believe that the entire Universe works at a massive scale which is immediately accessible to us all if we allow ourselves to see the beauty of Design - and then go with the flow. It is crucial to our existence to understand the meaning of our being. It simply makes our lives, "meaningful."

So. I wish to inculcate in me the best of the qualities of the people I admire.

Enough said.

The Very Imminent Death of a Country {a poem for Pakistan}

Only because the Truth shall set us free.
A poem the time for which has come.

You are dying
as you are.

And though I was
once a part of you,
I no longer
identify you
beyond a name
and a shape
on ordinary colored paper.
You're a map upon a map -
all about to disintegrate.

You are no longer the country
that gave me my identity.
Before you rob me
of who I could be
- a human,
a free, alive human -
I shall go.

And though now
I shall not
have a home
that I call home,
perhaps in your destruction,
your inevitable, obvious, fast-approaching, complete annihilation,
I shall learn a lesson.

That though I have loved you
with infinite passion,
with selfless abandon,
and with little bits of service,
it
ultimately
is neither about foolish love nor emotion.
That we, human colonies, create nations
and change maps
to allow our human selves
to be free.
That is the aim of a state.
Any state of being -
to be
must be
an inching towards human freedom. Remember!

Yet you
have housed
too many caged hearts.
You are not,
as we imagined,
our Land of Purity.

You are the Land of Lesson.

The lesson that land maketh, but not really maketh, the Man.
That land, indeed, is a manifestation
of Man.
That names are essential, they have power,
but not above and beyond Man's deepest intent.
You are no Land of The Pure.

You
have housed
too many ill minds.
Who thought
that hiding beneath
your beneficial cloak
was sufficient.
Who thought
that robbing you
and hurting you
will pass unnoticed
by forces that are greater
than both you, and I, the Human.

I will watch the imminent death
by destruction
of the sick intentions
of those
to whom 5000 years of history
taught nothing.
Alas!

Yet, you know,
you are not
above
and beyond
the will of a Human.

You are
the will
of everyday Humans
solidified as Earth.
In your destruction,
your imminent, unavoidable, on-the-horizon, complete annihilation,
the illness of many sick minds shall die too.
You will burn, completely.

But not forever.
You will rise, again
with fewer
yet more enlightened hearts.
Wounded by Truth,
they didn't see in time.

On that day I shall return.
I will embrace your new, raw self.
You a new country,
on the way to becoming
what you were meant to be.
Not dark and evil as you are
right now.
I will return
and embrace you.
For that day,
you shall have
gone through
the alchemical
transformation
that went incomplete
at your birth.

I shall have burnt with you, away from you,
Homeless waif,
all this while.
For you were and you are
meant to be
the realization of me:
The Human
The Free
The Heart of the Pure.

- RA
January 28, 2008

How to split your soul in two

According to Harry Potter, the thing that splits a human's soul in two is committing murder. I think murder merely kills a part of humankind, and in some way chips away at the collective soul of the world, but it's not the crime that splits the soul.

In Maya, a Jostein Gaarder novel that I understood late, the evolutionist-anthropologist protagonist Frank laments the loss of a part of human history in him if he dies without a child. A part of human history that is capsuled deep within his genetic code – thousands and thousands of years' worth of history in danger of being lost forever with his childless death. And so, I think, murder kills a part of human history and evolution of the journey of man.

But it's not committing murder that splits a human's soul in two. The crime that accomplishes that is telling a lie.

One World or Another
There is this popular theory about "possible worlds." Variants of it exist, known as "parallel worlds," "multiverses," etc. Simply, this theory means that every moment, or at every "event node," the world splits in to two (or more) possibilities. For example, the day I decided to join my university, the world splits in two: one in which I joined my university, and another in which I didn't. Where is that world, and what is the rejecter "I" doing in there? I know not. But "I" only know of the world in which I chose the university (and I can tell I'd really really like a little glimpse of the other).

Anyway.

The possible worlds theory is often, as those who can see must be seeing, also tied up closely to the concept of Destiny. You know, that devilish thing we always think of: what if? What if? But destiny is not a matter to be discussed by or with a common mind, so we leave it here.

The fascinating theory of possibilities also has a significant presence in literature. The finest of the possible world stories that I read is also the only one I read: The Garden of Forking Paths. A man commits an essential but unpleasant misdeed, and hopes that in another world, he was caught before he did.

I feel that a lie puts a human in another world intentionally and knowingly. In doing so, a lie splits our memory in two. In Forking Paths, the central character only wondered: what if? And the thought – the subconscious wish that he was stopped before his misdeed – tormented him so that he wrote his story. A liar wittingly divides themselves in two worlds, or more, depending upon the variations of the lie. Memory, as most other intangible functions of the human mind, is retrieved by the human soul. To split one's memory in two places means that the soul is split in two spaces. One of them is true space, another is not – and lying stresses the soul to consistently try to reconcile its split existence.

A lie is different from imagination. Imagination is known to be imagination, and it belongs to the first world that a person is living in. In itself, it is separate from Memory, and the Soul accesses the Imagination as an entity independent, though not exclusive, of Memory. And the Soul accesses many creations of God.

A lie is not known to be imagination; for the audience, it is something that exists in the first world – where they would never find it were they to look. A lie is not part of the Reality that we all share. And it permanently alienates the liar from the truthful, in as much as the lie diverged from reality.

No wonder that the persistent split of the soul, the to and fro drift of the soul from the real to the false world, is hard on the liar who always feels the need to hide their condition and create distractions. It is a painful situation, more painful for those who still share the common reality, and have not permanently drifted mentally off into their false worlds. Nothing can be said about those who have the misfortune to have permanently chosen their false world, constantly powered by a web of more lies, delusions, unnatural beliefs, and tyranny for the humankind. (Certainly, no one can shift into that world without first creating by force conditions around them that would lead others to accept their situation. Sometimes these liars are in positions of power, and make an entire faction of humanity believe in things such as "this war is good.")

Taking Lying Down
I have the experience of knowing at least one terrible liar, other than the many who grace my TV screen everyday. I had the experience of watching that person's soul split, split, and split. It was painful just to watch; by way of a connection of heart, I felt a degree of that torment too.

There are no words to explain the drastic positive difference that I felt when I returned to the world of Reality – which I found rather insipid and detail-less initially upon return, but every bit my home eventually. Not to mention, I have developed, too, the eye that sees the beauty of the real world now that I know how agonizing the false world can be like, no matter what promising perpetual possibilities prosper there.

Purity
They say that the best diamonds are colorless, as color denotes elemental traces. (You know. Minerals & metallic ions give colors to earth and what lies within). The most beautiful things in the world are the purest, the most real, the most untainted. Above all, they have an integrated Self. They are One.

To live in the true world is to be in one place, not needing to hide or allude, always with an undivided one happy soul.

.