RAMADAN 2017 has slipped into history. But, in many souls, the memory should linger for a while. It was a month filled with opportunities to cast off the dross of earthly life, clean the physical body of nutritional, environmental and emotional poisons and free the soul for more nurture with the bread of life, so often missing in the hurly burly experiences of material pursuits.
The two-day holiday bridge between the end of the Ramadan and the return to man and mammon offered me and some of my friends an opportunity to refresh and deepen some concepts of the Laws of Nature in which we have been schooled since the 1970s or 80s. I’d always known, for example, that some diseases may be incurable, try as the patient and the physician may try to heal them. For these diseases may be karmaic. A woman may have flushed out of her womb an unwanted pregnancy. A human soul hovering around her, who may have given rise to the formation of that body for his or her use on earth, may be an unforgiving soul who, in his or her disappointment and bitterness, may decide to wreak vengeance by making the intended mother become infertile. Stigmatists all over the earth who bear the wound marks of Jesus Christ during the celebration of Easter find that no medication or healing protocol helps them. In fact, their conditions often get worse on medicaments. Their fate is a testimonial of a grave misdeed of old (“Let His blood be upon us and our children”) from which they would be freed only when they come to the appropriate recognitions of these misdeeds and make the necessary atonement for them. One of the refreshing lessons I learned anew during the Ramadan holiday came from the Law of Motion, one of the Laws of Nature.
The Law of Motion
We encounter this law everyday, but maybe so inwardly obtuse that it may make little or no meaning to us. Yet it is one of the great keys, which unlocks the door to the understanding of many concepts in the Universe. When a river is flowing, that is the Law of Motion at work. It compels everything that exists to be on the move or, if it would not, to wither and then collapse. That is why a baby in the womb begins to kick from about the middle of pregnancy when it is taken over by the human soul, who would inhabit that forming body on earth. A motion of muscles in the womb could be needed later to expel the baby in the birthing process. And this new entrant to the earth would have to cry to get its lungs to begin that life-long motion, which brings about the inhalation of fresh air and the exhalation of spent air, without which life on earth would be impossible.
The heart, like other organs, must similarly work without fail. I enjoy watching the clouds. This minute, they may fuse to form the map of Nigeria. The next minute, it could be that of Canada. It is sometimes as if they forge our impressions on them. If that is correct, and it isn’t that we are seeing what we would like to see or what we believe we are seeing, it takes nothing away from the possibility that our thoughts, nay our spirits, are in flight, in motion, expressing “mind over matter”.
In the last century, a gentleman named YURI GELLER caused a stir on British television whenever he came on a “mind over matter” programme. He would ask his viewers to hold metalic objects. He, too, would hold one. With his mind, he would bend the metallic object in his hand. Simultaneously, the objects in the hands of his viewers would begin to bend. Obviously, he had transferred something from him through the medium of the air into the homes of his viewers. So scary was this for many women that, I believe, the programme was stopped!
If we pay more attention, we would see the Law of Motion at work in the waves of the sea, the gently flowing wind, the whirlwind, the earthquakes and minor earth movements, in the circulation of blood in our bodies, in food intake and voiding of the waste of the food and of the water we drink. We would remember that, even when we go to bed at night, lying on one side of the body, we often find ourselves in the morning lying on another. Scientists have discovered that even the small atom is not a still entity. Electrons are moving round its central core, the nucleus, as planets are moving round the sun in our solar system, and as our solar systems, along with billions and billions and billions of others in our galaxy, are moving round the central core of our galaxy. It is a world of wonders without end in the Law of Motion, which makes our galaxy and uncountable others move around their control center, and all the gigantic universes to also be in motion.
Our thoughts, too, are in motion. More and more theories about motion have been propounded since Isaac Newton observed the apple fall from its mother tree. What I knew about death in 1959 when my mother died is not what I understand it to be today, almost 60 years ago. If my concept about death has not evolved, become deeper and richer, then I haven’t grown up inwardly, that is in spirit, all those intervening years. A growing or evolving soul learns, also, in time that marriage is not a merger of souls, but a union. The author Gibran says of this in his book, THE PROPHET, that, in marriage, couples can drink together, but not from the same cup. Of children, he educates us that they are like arrows we fire from a bow. Once the arrow is fired, you cannot call it back. Many marital and parenting problems arise because these concepts are not well understood. A marriage, for example, is a union in which two complementary persons are expected to share their lives in the bid to help each other achieve the sole purpose of existence, namely spiritual maturity for admittance to Paradise after earthly sojourn. Such marriages are peaceful and it is in them you find those proverbial bed of roses.
Where we are heading is the impact of the Law of Motion on health. We need not be reminded that glaucoma is inadequate evacuation of fluid from the rear of the eye ball through drainage channels in the front. This condition is an infringement of the Law of Motion. The same goes for constipation. When enlarged prostate or prostate cancer inhibits the flow of urine, isn’t this life threatening?
These days, many people suffer from one type of stroke or the other. In a stroke, it is either a clot has blocked free flow of blood in the brain, causing some blood vessels under pressure to burst or depriving some cells of blood and oxygen and, thus, impairing their lives or functions. A heart attack, in like manner, suggests that enough blood did not flow into the heart, causing it to stop working. All of these are peripheral to our goal. We are back again to what we may call mind-over-matter in health and in disease states.
As my friends remembered during the Sallah holiday, the spirit of man, the ego or the I in the “language” forms the human body. That process is not the subject for today. But it is necessary to say that when I refer to “my body”, “I” am talking about something “I” own. For the human spirit to experience life on earth, in a plane of existence different from its own, it has to have a material covering to anchor itself there. Astronauts and divers do the same with protective paraphernalia. The earth or clay body is lifeless. It bursts into life and begins to make the first kicks of life in the womb as evidence of this only after the coming soul has incarnated in it. The soul is distinguishable from the spirit. The spirit is the core descended from the spiritual world. Between that world and the earth are various planes of existence it travelled through to arrive on earth. The spirit, wrapped in the coverings of all these planes minus the earth body, is known as soul. When the soul acquires the earth body, the spirit and all its coverings, including the earth body, become the earth-man. The light and heat of the spirit glow through them all to keep them alive. That is why the spirit is always called the “animating core.”
Now, this is where we are going. The spirit is on earth to sprout, flower and fruit. It is like a seed planted in the soil. Friction with forces of the soil causes the seed to come alive and unfold its potentials. Likewise is it with the human seed germ, which came to this earth, the most suitable place in Creation for it to come alive like the seed of mango or maize planted in the earth soil.
A human spirit on earth, striving to come alive, sprout, flower and fruit must have a spiritual goal. This goal must be evident in its activities. It is the striving towards this goal, which makes it gain connection with spiritual forces from higher regions which imbue it with more power in accordance with its strength. The more power it receives, the more the strengthening of the glow of this power it dispenses to its coverings, including the earthly clay body. Quite naturally, therefore, a dormant spirit will glow less and this would mean less strengthening for the coverings, including the clay, earthly body. I always mention these other “coverings” because any impairment on them may glow on the earth body and affect it also. We should be reminded of this in what happens during dreams. Some people say they are shot by assailants and, soon after, they develop ailments at the sites of the dream gun shot injuries. They call this “spiritual attack.” This is another subject for another day. What I am saying is that, if the spirit does not recharge the physical body adequately, the body would become suboptimaly animated by the spirit and, overtime, the body will become self-consuming. It does not take too long for the tell-tale signals to reveal themselves. What happens to people so soon after they retire from employment and have no engaging pre-occupation? They become bored with life, tire easily, lack focus, deteriorate in thought and physical fitness and probably die prematurely. Many people, who are still active in work may fare no better if what they do has no spiritual content or goal. It is not sufficient to work to become so inwardly glowing as to become homogeneous with those spiritual forces from On High mentioned earlier.
To understand this concept of “forces” above us which “pull” to themselves forces on earth homogeneous with them, I was once asked to wonder how, against the forces of gravity as we still understand them in science today, a seed immersed in the soil, sprouts, pushes the soil aside, comes to top soil and begins to seek energy from sunlight as in phototropism. Actually it is now being recognised that gravity pushes down from above rather than pulling down to the center of the earth from below. Everything precipitates at the level of the density of its mass.
Thus, a lighter soul soars and a heavier one sinks. Not all work imbues the soul with such lightness as pulls it aloft. The work that does has such spiritual value as fashions for the soul a dignifying garment for further experiences in the worlds beyond the earthly. Of what value will it be for a man who builds, say, 100 housing estates all over Nigeria with no spiritual content in this work? If there is nothing in it all which adds something to the value of his soul when he steps into the beyond, then all those pre-occupations on earth may be deemed useless or valueless. If we thoroughly examine ourselves, we may discover that much of our work or those things we strive or hanker after are empty chaff when it comes to the bottom line of life after this earth life. We can say the same for people who are depressed. In their state of depression, these people are often lethargic, have no focus and implode or recoil into themselves. Often, they suffer a personality change in their state of being before their state of depression. They no longer glow with the virtues of a human soul who swings in the Law of Motion. They seem no longer to recognise love and do not give it. They do not express gratitude for any gift or show of love. They are selfish, hardened, defiant, irritable, aggressive and short tempered among many other traits observable in the dull side of existence. They are not vibrant because the spirit, the animating core, is no longer bright.
For me, this is a take-away from Ramadan 2017, not the simplistic assumption that, by observing the fast, I have done my Creator a favour and He is obliged to rain His blessings upon me. It is wrong to assume that the Ramadan is over, there is no harm in returning to the old obtuse ways, which Ramadan sought to correct in us. We should go on expanding and deepening the lessons we took away from the Ramadan and incorporating them in daily life activities. That is when our observance of Ramadan would not be in vain.
