Tolerating Faith

Eventually I’ve come to terms, so to speak, with faith – to tolerate it. I believed, and still believe, that faith and reason can never be conciliated. They are different, probably clashing, domains. You do need a leap of faith to bridge the horror between faith and reason. The beauty of faith, just like love, lies beyond that horror, far away from reason. You might consider any of them superior, or you might reject any of them altogether, faith or reason, that’s your privilege. But apparently none of them seems to explain the mysteries of existence, if you think there really are any.

Now I might not have sufficient knowledge to reject the validity of faith, and I certainly don’t have it to deny reason. I have my feelings, my biases, my prejudices, my mundane thinking and extremely limited knowledge. But reason certainly is the most efficient tool to tackle with this labyrinth. Faith seems to be the easy way, but it just can’t be enshrouded within reason. That’s impossible. If you think you’ve done that, you’ve only ruined faith.

Differing spheres these are, and reverence be to both. Reject them both. Reject one of them. You’re free and you’re responsible

Abandonment

tho’ coldness enshrouds existence
orisons echo only to nothingness
designs muffle in mere voids
this begins the dawn of freedom
breaks the aurora of hope
to probe thy boundless prowess
in the face of nihility, amid the bleak dimness
you being the focus of noesis
belie the bounds, transcend the confines
define thy aim, subdue the claim
seek the reason within thee
unleash the ken surrounding thee
conquer the world fencing thee!

Scatterbrain.

“Can you believe this?”

“What’s so unbelievable about this?”

“Can’t say for sure. My mind is scattered. I Can’t concentrate on anything for the time being.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Don’t know. I want to run and run and run. I guess this sloth within me is consuming me.”

“And then what?”

“Then what? I’m going to sleep for hours and hours and hours”

“Escaping reality?”

“Yeah, escaping reality. That would be escaping nothing.”

“Let it out, whatever it is.”

“I can’t find the passage to let it out. It might erupt in some violent accident someday. Momentary impulses. I try and try and try but all in vain. Why do you think is so? ”

“That’s a difficult question.”

“That’s because we always evade this question. That’s because this question is the bleak path to bright freedom. See? I’m again getting lost!”

“darn it!”

“I tell you, I won’t give up, what come may. I’m going to find a way out of this hell. This forced dependence would some day yield ultimate independence, I tell you. And I’m not going to die trying. I am, and I repeat, I am going to find a way out!”

“How are you going to do that?”

“I need to break the shackles to get some clarity of though. Clear off the mist then, and finally start the process of creation.”

“A long way that, isn’t it?”

“There’s no short way to freedom, is there?”

“Maybe you are right. I hope you are right. And I hope you finally find some peace and solace.”

“Peace. Yeah, peace of self and solace for ego. I can’t let it down. I simply won’t. I’ll choose it over petty contentment. There I go again!”

“ah..”

“damn!”

Know Thyself!

“I believe man should be wise and powerful enough to formulate and apply on himself, his personally defined moral values and ethical laws. He should not blindly subjugate himself before the long established social morals and religious dogmas, for prostrating without questioning and examining is the toil of animals, deprived of any wisdom, consciousness and sound knowledge and not worthy of a creature possessing all these superior virtues and calling itself the best of all creatures. The very essence of humanity lies beyond the full utilization of mental and physical capacities. Confining man within the bounds of pre-defined moral values and set of ethics is akin to suppressing his spirit and hindering the way to his progress.”

-Initial Meditations, Umer Latif.

Einstein, Heisenberg, and Tipler

Einstein, Heisenberg, and Tipler, after equal invariant intervals in purgatory, find themselves before the Throne of God.

As a man, they exclaim, “What did I do to merit an eternity down (brrrrr) there”?

God thought for a moment; when you’re omnipresent in spacetime there’s no need for haste. He turned first to Einstein.

“Albert,” he said, “you showed your species My creation in its most elegant form, law without Law. Then, inflamed by wartime passion, you urged the transformation of your discovery into a weapon of mass destruction.”

Einstein shuffled his feet and nodded subtly. He resisted the temptation to stick his tongue out. God turned His omniscient Eyes toward Heisenberg.

“Werner, you discovered that I do play dice, and you glimpsed that I have to if anything interesting’s going to happen—your last words were, ‘I will ask Him why there is turbulence’. I will answer you, ‘So there can be Heisenberg’. But you stayed in Germany, Werner! You worked on a reactor for Hitler; you taught physics to brown-shirted Nazi thugs. You’ll recall that my Son is Jewish.”

“Frank, Frank, Frank,” God continued, “didn’t you read my bookk? I read yours, you know. Does the phrase ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’ ring a bell? How about ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending’? You not only wanted to have another God before Me, you wanted to be Him. And the money, Frank…do you know how piddling an advance I got for the Bible? And you assumed causality—you Frank! You should know me better than that.”

Tipler, almost defiant, raised his head and fixed God with a cold stare. “Why are there singularities in Your universe?”

“Because there are things I don’t want you to know,” God responded calmly.

Heisenberg, his dying question answered, remained silent, pondering the choices he’d made during his life on Earth.

Einstein seized the moment, “Look, Old One”, he said, “physics is local. You made it that way; I figured it out. But why is there that spooky action-at-a-distance nonlocality in quantum mechanics?”

God chuckled. Even experiencing all of spacetime at once, such events were rare. “Albert, your greatest talent has always been not finding the right answer—anybody could do that—but asking the right question. Your generation learned physics assuming I was a great watchmaker; you destroyed that notion, but most of you died off before it became evident what I was. I create abstract systems from pure information, Albert. I’m a programmer.

“Quantum nonlocality is a bug.”

God turned to Saint Peter. “Einstein and Heisenberg go to Heaven. Send Tipler to the massive rotating cylinder to try again. Next case.”

God hated these Judgement Days; he couldn’t wait (to the extent that’s possible for an omnipresent being) to get back to his craps game with Wotan, Jove, and Shiva. Saint Peter looked up from his infinite scroll, “Fourth Commandment: blasphemy—eternal damnation. Send in Lederman and Hawking”.

What was it about these physicists, God wondered, as they approached the Throne.

-John Walker.

Clearing the Mist

“I like to formulate a simple logic in my mind regarding God. That goes like this that if a benevolent, most merciful and most caring God would create this world and human beings, he won’t leave them ignorant of the purpose of their creation. Hurling helpless beings in this world without even informing them of the reason of this labor is beyond comprehension. This, if done, can only be done by a God who is sadist and malevolent. And as God cannot be malevolent and sadist, for that would render him Evil, that would mean there isn’t any God.

The purpose of creation is the question that nags any person who believes in a God and creation. Without this belief, this riddle remains no longer unconquerable. And since God himself has presented no answer to this fundamental question ingrained within humans, it’s rather difficult that there is an omnipotent and omniscient, most loving and merciful God who created this universe and everything within.”

- Initial Meditations, Umer Latif.

Am I becoming an existentialist?

Contentment

Of all the conventional religious and social moral phenomena, perhaps the most contemptible and despicable, to me, is contentment! To me it’s merely a sanctioned synonym for cowardice, consoling the weak and exculpating the losers.

The whole thing is misguided. It sort of corrodes the magnificent talents and splendid spirit of human beings. The very beauty of being is in perpetual progress, in conquering one milestone after another and never to think about a final destination. One destination arrived should mark the beginning of a new battle and a fresh struggle. Think about it. Think hard. What is this contentment? It is like a devilish disease that, once having you defected, hems you in like a giant octopus, exhausting your energies and decaying your strength, mental and physical. You start compromising and the downfall never ends. You live a contented life, you stop advancing and utilizing your capacities at their very best and why? Because you think you would be better rewarded in the eternal life. Eternal life, delusions of grandeur! This world belongs to those spirited beings who never allow such pessimistic and bearish morals hinder their way to glory, and only they are worthy of being anticipated as the ‘superior of all creatures’!

Reason

“Two things have always filled me with awe: the starry heaven above (me) and the moral law within (me).”

-Critique of Practical Reason, Immanuel Kant.

You said it man! You said it!

Ego

(An excerpt from the dialogue I’m trying to write, between an egoist and an altruist.)

Egoist: Ego is the efflorescence of your belief in yourself. It is the apex of glory. It is the aureole of soul. There are moments when it makes you feel the transcendental joy of being. Ego assists you maintain yourself firmly at the bright pinnacle of your pride. It saves you from the dreary dungeon of despair and desolation. Ego is the elixir of everlasting life that impels you never to chuck up the sponge while all hope fades away. Ego defines your morality, it manifests your mentality. Ego is the sublime beauty of existence. Absence of ego means presence of disgrace and disappointment.

Altruist: Ego is the strangest of paradoxes, the weirdest of phenomena. There are times when it seems like a terrible specter haunting your soul and hallowing your personality. En-wrapped within the core of ego, you can feel the worth of your self but when this shell hardens, it starts suffocating as if a coffin, cutting off your relations with the outer world. From the summit of your glory, it gradually makes you indifferent to those very steps that carried you to that resplendence. The exquisite beauty of ego, at it’s extremes, degenerates into the achromasia of death.

The Lost Paradise!

Human being undeniably happens to be the most complex of all his ancestral evolutionary forms ever since the dawn of life. It was not too late when he perceived, quite instinctively, that this world is a creation merely for him. But why? What’s the purpose of his being created as a master of world? All his manoeuvre and endeavour ever since he has been casted into this strange wondrous globe revolves around this basic and eternal quest. He strives to win the battle of unknown during his exile in this lonely island to attain his long-lost status – He years for his lost paradise!

Unleashing his divinely gifted imagination, he commeced to ponder upon his very purpose of life. Every passing moment faded away into eternity, but he perpetually struggled to reach the horizon of this eternal reality. Countless lives lost in the infinite depths of the abyss of Time but this intrinsic quest continued on the boulevard leading to unknown destination. Milestones of centuries passed and his chase for everlasting solace remained uninterrupted.

Some called his life an illusion, but where’s the reality? Some referred to it as a stage bearing our performance merely for a few moments after which we have to go, but where to? Silence falls…..

Cave dwellings evolved into groups, groups gathered into villages, villages turned into towns and towns developed into cities. Terra incognita gradually unveiled itself but the mystery remained unsolved, the riddle remained unconquered.

I happen to be a human being and the sole purpose of my life is to resolve the mystery of life – to regain my lost Paradise!