1. en-ashram-N/G
2. 16-07-2019
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Vast majority of the people in this world is like me. They are very much reluctant to look deeper and think about the next steps. Most of us, we don't read ( basically lot of us have no opportunity to read ) and among the readers, a very few of them read with any depth. I am not referring to any religious book at this time. Even among the readers of novels and books,  most of us prefer to read a novel which we can finish in few hours and after few hours forget all about it. Get no moral, no character that can scratch our heart for a long time. That’s why Humayun Ahmed is way more popular to us than Akhteruzzaman Elias or the generation before writer Manik Bandopadhya. Here in the western hemisphere  the picture is also same. J. K. Rowling's  Harry Potter has a huge success over other contemporary good books. Not sure , at present time, if we have a writer like Hermann Hesse, how popular he could be? Well, we have to acknowledge that time has been changed, and moral values has also been changed (! ), thus the taste of readers has been changed. It’s animation time, more illusion and more fantasy time. Not much reality feelings, this generation is suffering from virtual reality sickness. A cell phone or toy is much more friendly to a kid than their real life playmate. Okay.. but problem is, only one motive is working behind all these changes and that is the ' CAPITAL GAIN OF ALL THE  BIG CORPORATIONS..! ', and that is the very alarming thing. The world is now a complete hostage to them. They are the world and for their endless greediness this world is going to create another Frankenstein of its own.

Who can prevent it? What's the way to prevent it? Is there any general formula or common solution to get rid of these monsters or it should be an individual effort? Not sure yet, but one thing is sure that we need to turn back our mind from all these alluring objects of distractions, for those we pay a lot of our hard earned  money and precious time but realistically we make a very little use of it. Time to think for that is now.

Trackless again..?! I think I need to build a fence along my pathway or need a hard liner head master on the top of my head! So, to bring ourselves at a firm stand point like this, it’s very important to develop our Spirituality. We need to educate ourselves to increase our Spiritual Richness. How..? Is religion a pathway to that? How great was its success in past and how much will it be in future? I have already mentioned a bit the role of religions in past and present and its influence on rich and powerful and on poor. Almost all of us, we know about religion through Preachers' or Imams' speeches and sermons. Very few of us read it in depth and even when we do that, right at the beginning we already in firm belief that these holy books are all heavenly book and every alphabet of it is true and we have to obey it from coma to semicolon. But quite a few things of it now has no match with our present world and even our 21st century realization about life. We believe those sermons blindly but to survive we match our activities with crooked and not so straight forward ways of life. Yes, we go to prayer house, which Muslims do even 5 times a day and just doing that we think, oh..  we are doing great things and bring some sort of satisfaction in our mind. And only doing this we start thinking ( few exceptions are every where ) we are great guys and God will save us in this and next world. That's all,  rest of our activities and thinking are full of dishonesty and wickedish. No help for others, very seldomly do we have true contribution towards humanity and the worst thing, few of us find a weird motivation that our way is the best and we are the superior of superiors! If we think, going to prayer houses regularly is the way to build ourselves as a good person then that is only the first step. If it does not clean our inner sight and go through next steps forward in real life practice then it’s just waste of time. So, what is explained up to now about our character just only two words for that. We are just a very Selfish Creature of this planet. And we are doing this for thousands of years! 

Now what our respected Priests, Imams and religious leaders are about? First thing they are not any specially made people to do some special generous thing for human kind. All the needs, appetite, desire and hope we general people have  they are not exception to that – it is important to remember they are human beings too. They just choose or in some way are bound to choose that profession for their living like  we all do. Most of their speech and sermon barely has anything that helps us to increase our spiritual thought. Yes, they talk about lot of good things, like to be very kind and well behaved with relatives and neighbor but mainly it covers more of fear and greediness ( to be rewarded ) about this and next world. Being a Muslim ( or can say by born having more opportunities to get involve with Islamic Rituals ), what I have seen that, Islamic mentors talk more about keeping the women confined within Hijab, Burkah and boundary walls, about hell and heaven, about punishment and reward than how we can develop our heart with spirituality. According to Quran, our soul has three levels. 1. Nafs. Al – Ammarah, 2. Nafs Al – Lawwamah and 3. Nafs Al - Mutma'innah ( at this time not going for description of these levels ). According to Kabbalah, also there are five levels of our soul, in ascending order they are, 1. Nefesh, 2. Ruach, 3. Neshama, 4. Chaya and 5. Yechida ( again not going for details about these levels here ). I have never heard that after or before prayer Muslim Imams discuss about this in easy way to make us understand in our own language. I have also no idea whether it is discussed in other religion groups, such as in Synagogue or Churches by their respective priests. But still it's a simple understanding, if we can enlighten ours soul spiritually then we don't need to worry about all those things. Straight forward, we will do good work not for getting rewarded in this life or next life and neither for fear of anything. We will do this because our logical judgement says to do that. Because our soul wants to do that. 

Believing in God, Hell and Heaven is a blind faith. May be initially it may help us a bit to enrich our soul for time being but unless until logically we stablish in our heart which is good or bad and made accountable to ourselves we will never be able to improve conscience of humanity. Lao Tzu ( 601 BC, China ), Socrates ( 399 BC, Greece ) Shams Tabrizi ( 1185 AD, Iran ) Lalon Shah ( 1172 AD, Bangladesh ) all these great philosophers  were born way apart from each other considering time. They were also from different area and culture of the world but in terms of their philosophy about life they meet at the same junction point. Philosophy they developed barely had any influence of religion. Rather they gathered their perception and realization of a better life from the nature, from the real world experience. So, it’s not mandatory that to be a good human being someone needs to follow a religious path. “ You have to grow from inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul”… Swami Vivekananda.

Often we see, religious sentiment is being used to achieve political gain. I know most common answer for this, oh.. it’s not religion's fault. Sort of tired by listening to this answer. It is clear that politics is not a fair game at present time ( it never was ) and it can't be. Because it’s a game of achieving and securing power. Then why are religions getting involved with this for thousands of years rather than trying to enlighten our soul spiritually? Most of us we know about that famous 'divide and rule' and communal riot which occurred during the 1947 independence process of Indian Sub Continent from British Colony. Political leaders used it. Independent countries divided their territories based on religious division. Which they could not overcome yet! Another example of this is the Babri Mosque issue. Before the demolition of Babri Masjid ( December 6, 1992 ) by the Hindu Activists of Vishva Hindu Parisad and it’s allies anytime before that a maximum of 2 seats BJP had in Indian Lok Sava ( upper assembly ). Their appearance was almost insignificant in Indian politics.  Just only using religious division issue, in the very next election they emerged as  one of the biggest party in India. And now all we know who they are. Possibly same thing could happen in Bangladesh if Jamat E Islam and their wings did not stand on traitor side during our great independence war.

Just a simple question comes to mind. Specially for those who believe in hell and heaven. I assume, the way the picture of heaven is portrayed, no doubt it’s the much better place to be in than any lavish life on earth. Then rather than doing all unethical and evil work to survive and stay here why we don't stay honest and die. Even if we die sooner then what is the problem if we believe we are going to a better place? On the other hand, the soul we have now, after death if we are blessed to get a gate pass of heaven and carry there this soul unchanged then it will not remain heavenly anymore. Rather it will be again tainted with earthly fault and vices. To be continued…

Farid Talukder
Toronto, Canada. 

1. en-ashram-N/G
2. 16-07-2019
4. Tweet