Chapter 3: The Devil’s Statistics

Even numbers have meanings. They have meanings that are. They have meanings that were never meant to be. The Real confused with the illusion. The illusion becoming the Real. In some languages, 4 is a bad number. It means death.

Death is an inescapable  reality.

An end to all madness and tyranny.

A way home,

 so how can it be bad?

In other cultures, 4 is in demand.. It denotes “get” or “achieve”. ‘Achieving’ and ‘getting’ takes up a major part of human life. It is about collecting as many toys as you can. The toys that will inevitably bore you and decay. The toys that will outlive your very existence on earth.  It is also about getting and achieving candies. They are very sweet to the ear and very sweet to the heart. Titles. Glamour. Prestige. Your Excellency! Honour!

Pray tell me sir, why honour me when I destroy God’s earth in the name of civilization?

And did you not bestow me with titles when I ensured poor people have no access to food and homes by raising the price of land?

A cynical thought penetrates Santim’s mind.  The number most liked are those that denote money. Thousands. Millions. Billions. Humans are born with accurate judgement skills. We grow up undoing those skills. Our judgemental ability becomes blurred. Nay, made to be blurred by the system. We measure humans by numbers. The richer you are, the greater respect they give you. They also inwardly envy you.  You are a man of society. You are uno numero.

And ah yes, the injustice I demonstrated in the name of my profession.

You called me a genius!

It does not matter how much you have plundered the life of others to enrich your own. People have short memories. They cannot see what you do. Only what you have.

Truth to many people is what they see,

Sometimes they are blind

Often times they blindfold their eyes

They wish to see only what is outside of them.

That is why they cannot see the transience of their breath

for it is within them.

Statistics - numbers of the learned and of the powers that be. Delilah Al-Karim was a 12 year old girl. She grew up in her home on a land which no State recognized. She was a sweet, pony-tailed girl who only wanted to grow up to be the best daughter of her parents and the best sister of her two elder brothers.  That was her only innocent, childhood dream. Like your sister and mine, like your daughter and mine, she was full of life inspired by the presence of her family’s love.  One day her bubble burst when they were having dinner in her home.

There was a loud explosion. Airplanes and tanks of adults playing war games against each other. This time for real. In the interest of some lofty adult ideals which Delilah could never understand. She was unfortunate to wake up alive in the rubble of what was once her home with her mother’s severed hand on her stomach. She could not cry any tears when she thought she saw the butchered meat of who were once her father, mother and two brothers.

Santim recalls that she told him she heard the radio the following day: “It was a victorious day for our troops. Our casualty was 12 and the enemies were 240”.  Twenty years later, struggling to understand, she could never find the answer to what happened.

Uncle Sam[1] calls it collateral damage.

Others call it unavoidable war casualties.

To Delilah, they will always be her father, mother and brothers whose love has been cruelly snatched away from her.

Santim Raj knows too well that when humans are reduced to statistics, the Devil is in charge. Statistics have no life or form. They are numbers. They are files or profiles. They do not matter. They are dispensable. The death of 20 people in a population of 20 million can be explained away as ‘statistically minimal’.  These are sleeping pills to make us sleep better.

When your only loved one dies,

he or she is 100 per cent of what you had.

As you had ONLY cared for yourself,

When it’s your turn, your loved ones too will only be a statistic to them.

Santim recalls that the Master once told him, “Many worship the Devil though numbers”. I was then too young to understand. How could numbers be an object of worship?

When something consumes your life,

It is that, that you worship

Not the rituals that you

Innovate to deceive yourself of your religiousness.

People do not seek the Truth anymore but they seek numbers of devotees. The greater the number of devotees, the more truthful the belief is they say. A Truth of one is crushed by the millions of deceit, lies and conjectures. Majority reigns arrogantly and oppresses the minority. The might of numbers and not the Truth becomes a god.

Hence, the pathway to the Truth is but a lonely path.

Truly life is a repetition. We repeat the errors of history. We repeat the foolish ways of our forefathers. We honour and encourage development, education and improvement to better our lives. At the same time, we busy ourselves with weapons of mass destruction to destroy the very things we have built over the years. We want peace, stability and prosperity for ourselves but do not want the same for others. We think it is our birthright that the blessings we now enjoy are ours alone.

Hungry children in Ethiopia are not our children. The homeless Palestinians are merely a news report. The poor Indians, Bangladeshis, and Indonesians are below our status. They are not creative and clever like us to deserve the wealth we have. And the poor among us? Well, they too are just…statistics.

  We have bigger problems – which is the best hand phone model for our 12 year old daughter?

The cruelties we unleash creatively shames even the Devil.

Yet we insist that we are people of God, education and civilization.

Santim wonders: has the world gone mad?  He remembers the village he was born. He grew up in a kampong[2] which was surrounded by coconut trees and plants. Everywhere it was green. His wooden house had only one stand fan.  He could step out of his house onto pure sand - mother Earth. There were no fences with his neighbours, but they were not exactly next door like the expensive link houses of today.

Santim remembers a friend he had who built his paradise on earth. Santim shared in his happiness. This friend had told him his paradise is for all. He has no attachments to anything of this world. One day, Santim had, foolishly, asked him if he could bring some mortals who had wanted to taste his paradise. He forbade.

How could I share in your happiness, when you make it exclusive?

Are you now, God?

---

[1] Uncle Sam – colloquial term referring to the United States of America.

[2] Kampong, a Malay village like the kind that existed in the 1950s in Malaysia and Indonesia.

How would you know the scavengers if you never mingle with them?

In the movie "Oblivion", they are called the scavengers.

In the movie, "Total Rekall", they lived in the colony while the powerful and wealthy lived in the United Federation of Britain. The people of the colony are workers for the UFB. They travelled to the UFB via the "Fall".

In every society throughout human history, the scavengers and the people of the colony live and are oppressed.

Today, they are the normal citizens society can do without, do not care - maybe you and I.

How the leaders pretend to serve the scavengers or the people of the colony when they never experienced the experiences of these people?

How can they even pretend to lead these people when they have never lived among them?

How can they understand the pain, the struggles and the real needs of the ordinary people?

Only a leader from the ordinary people can effectively lead the ordinary people - not leaders put on stage by the wealthy and powerful system.

Why do you talk what you talk?

Everywhere you turn your eyes, you will find that people do not stop talking.

Everyone has something to say about anything. It does not matter whether what they is necessary or relevant. It seems to be more important that they say something.

Just look around you. People do not stop moving thier mouths. They just talk and talk and talk.

No one ever pauses to ask why they talk.

No one ever pauses to ask why they talk what they talk.

Because they never pause to ask, they just talk without knowing why they talk.

Because they never pause to ask, they just talk without knowing why they talk what they talk.

Most people love to talk so much without knowing why and hence, most people love talkers. It does not matter what the talker talks about as long as he is able to talk and talk. If the talker is able to talk about the most irrelevant and insignificant matter, he will be held up in high esteem.

If the talker is able to sensationalise his talks, he will be held up in higher esteem. The talker must not pause from his talking, for pause means silence.

Silence is held in contempt by most people. Silence forces them to be confronted with thier inner selves. It forces them to think.

People do not like thinkers. They like talkers.

Talkers entertain and fill up thier self created void in thier lives. Thinkers force them to think about the void in thier lives.

Thinkers advocate silence. Seclusion. To be comfortable in a cave, in darkness, to confront with the Self. To accept the Reality.

Talkers advocate noise. Exclusion of Self. To be comfortable with the crowd, in bright blinding light. To embrace the Illusion.

Most people love illusion as opposed to Reality - cosmetics, superficialities, rationalizations, grandisosity, pomposity, and anything that inflates the ego. Talkers can deliver all these to them. Thus they love talkers.

Talkers talk about laughing and do not encourage crying. Their sense of happiness is limited to the illusion of laughter and the denial of the joy of crying.

Thinkers love simplicity and embrace Reality with total happiness. They love the silence that brings them back to their Self. They neither cry nor laugh within though outwardly they do.

Are you a thinker or a talker?

End

Why Do You Remain in the State of Unhappiness and Misery? – Part 2

Life is a balance.

It is the balance that gives tranquility, serenity and peace. When the balance is tampered, there is no tranquility, serenity nor peace. It is that simple.

The balance in life is natural and eternal. The opposite is transient. You must allow the natural forces to maintain that balance. You must understand and know what the natural forces are. You must swim and flow WITH it, not AGAINST it. Nature left to itself behaves like water – finds and returns to its own balance always. It always returns to a state of tranquility, serenity and peace.

But you are different. You are human. You are a part of nature but have been given the power to choose to be WITH or AGAINST the forces of nature. Either decision will determine whether you will be happy and not miserable or otherwise.

Choice is not necessarily a good or bad thing.

It can either lead you down the garden path or down the path of fire. The power of choice without wisdom is devastating. Choice in the hands of the foolish is destructive. You need wisdom to make the right choices.

Wisdom is not knowledge alone.

There are many knowledgeable fools roaming the earth causing further untold unhappiness and misery. There are many more who are confused between the accumulation of information and knowledge. Can we call a computer knowledgeable despite the vast information it may have?

Understanding and knowing is the essence that differentiates the fool from the wise.

Wisdom comes from being one with nature. Wisdom comes when we learn to understand nature NOT as we want to but as how nature itself wants to be understood. You simply let the cards fall where they may and learn from the natural design.

The true understanding of nature leads to acceptance of nature and hence ourselves. It is like the rain that falls onto a mountain and flows all the way to the sea. You may call it a waterfall at one stage, a stream at another, or a river, or the sea at the end.

Water knows that it is water at all of these stages. It does not confuse the stages with its true nature. It does confuse the process with itself. It accepts the natural process without rebellion nor hesitation while not losing sense of its own nature.

But you are different. Being a human living this life based on beliefs which you do not know, you confuse the stages in your life with your true nature. In the process, you forget who you really are. You forget your nature. You cause a conflict between your beliefs and your true nature upsetting the balance within you.

Thus, you end up being unhappy and miserable and keep repeating this cycle all your life.

While nature will find its own balance naturally, you, the human, have been given choices. So, you have to choose to find the balance again – if you want to.

To find this balance, you have to return to its source – you.

You have to get to know yourself putting aside what you believe about yourself. Belief without knowing is mostly futile.

Are you ready to know yourself?

Will you allow yourself to be known to you?

Do you want to know why you are reading this in the first place?

The key to breaking the cycle of unhappiness and misery to know your self, your nature.

END.

NEXT: Why Do You Remain in the State of Unhappiness and Misery? – Part 3 (IF it is meant to be written)

If you want happiness and freedom from misery why do you keep walking away from it?

Human beings almost always do the opposite of what they consciously want.

You say you want happiness and freedom from misery but you keep doing everything possible that will make you more unhappy and more miserable.

You try to chase for that “happiness” when you do not even know what “happiness” all about.

You set a goal and tell yourself that the achievement of your goal will make you happy. You work hard at achieving that goal. You neglect everything else. Someone has told you that you have to be focused to achieve that. You believed without knowing.

Focus is good but you are focusing on achieving something that you believe will make you happy. You believe that it will make you happy but you do not know if it will. You just proceed with your belief without ever making the effort to know what is it that you are chasing. You have never tried to know if achieving that goal will really make you happy.

You have never tried to know what happiness is for you. How could you when you have never really even tried to know yourself?

Since you have never known yourself, you keep chasing after things that satisfy your ego, your desires and your beliefs. You mistake these things for what you want.

Since they are not what you need but believed they are what you wanted, you end up unhappier than before. You become more miserable and set up another goal that you believe will make you happy.

As long as you keep living in this cycle of belief after belief without knowing, you will repeat the cycle of unhappiness and misery in your life.

If you want to be happy, you must know.

If you want to be free from misery, you must know.

You must first know what causes unhappiness and misery.

Only then can you avoid the cycle of unhappiness and the ensuing misery.

END.

NEXT: What causes unhappiness and misery (IF it is meant to be written)

Do I have to explain everything to you?

You came to me uninvited.

I was just traveling on the path and you came. You could come since the space is much yours to use as much as it is mine. You could stay for the same reason but you asked me to stay for a while. I did for I am of that nature. You made a request that I could fulfill and I fulfilled it. A while. That could have been all.

But you asked and you asked me many questions. I answered them because you asked. I answered what I knew, what I thought and what I could. I did not ask you to ask or need to be asked. I am fine being silent, and alone traveling through this transient path. You broke my silence and encroached on my loneliness and yet I did not complain.

When you asked, I answered. You did not like my answer. I did not ask you to like my answer or have a need for you to like it. I answered because you asked. I did not answer to make you like it or to like me. I do not think of you less or more based on how you reacted to my answer. I was only thinking of your question and of my answer. That should have been that. Simple. Questions and answers.

When I answered you, I do not cling on to your question – or to your reaction to my answer. I have no power over whether you like it or not. I do not wish to have that power for I do not need more burden than the burden of passing through this transient life. I get no pleasure from wanting to influence you for that too is transient. I have no interest in transience.

Having asked the question, you clinged on to my answer. You did not like it. You were upset that I had given you the answer that I know. How can I give you any other answer than the answer that I know? How can I lie to myself? I did not intend to appease you or to upset you with my answer. When you asked I intended to only answer your question and continue walking.

What other intention can there be when a question is asked? A question is asked to elicit an answer. If you had any other motives than just to get an answer from me, then that is from you. That must be your nature or you may have made it your nature. I do not fault you for what you are or chose to be. Day does not begrudge night nor vice versa. They simply exist. Should we not?

You were upset with my answer and I recognize that. I want to continue my walking. Idleness will delay my entry onto the next path. But you hold me back even when I recognize that you were upset with my answer. There is nothing more I can give from myself but you still try to hold me back. You think you are holding me back but that is an illusion. You cannot hold back what you do not have.

When I continue the path I was on when you came with the question, you think I am walking away from you. I cannot move away from you for I was never near. Like day and night, we were just there. Neither near nor far but just there when it was meant to be.

But you did not want to let me go until I give you the answer that you want. But how can I give an answer that I do not have? I can only give you from myself, not from without. You want something that I do not have and you fault me for that.

If it pleases you that the entire miseries of the transient world should be placed on my shoulders, so be it. I will neither accept nor reject it but I will let it be.

You seek the illusion. I seek the reality. Transience is an illusion to me but a reality to you. So be it, I say, for I have no control over your perception. Neither do I want to control it for that is impossible.

I have seen this in my mind many times before.

And I see it again and again.

Do I have to explain everything to you? I have no explanations but only answers from within.

My answers, not yours.

END.

Chapter

The Judge

It was a cold winter morning. Darkness at 11 am. Snow forming a thick carpet on the ground. Santim, however was freezing not from the winter but from the injustice he just saw dispensed. His face was all blue and he felt his soul withering. His mind numb. ‘Was that the Council of Elders or a flock of cattle?’ The question kept recurring. Unable to make earthly sense, he slowly let his eye lids close and fell into the deep dark bottomless hole . As he kept falling with closed eyes, he kept seeing.

“This is the day when all justice shall be dispensed. All with grievances with anyone including the King shall assemble”. The officious voice promisingly called out to the crowd that began to swell. The trumpet was blown and soon thereafter the 5 fat, aristocrats with fine clothing took their position on the stage. Each sitting in a red, throne- like chair. The Elders. The Dispensers of Justice

.

The roll call always so promising to the innocent peasants, the sheep, the masses. The rituals dazzles the mind and unsuspectingly hides the Farce.

“Your Wise Elders,” begins the paid, fat prosecutor, “This man, Sikara Jamili, stands before ye charged for stealing a loaf of bread. A heinous crime indeed for this land condones no criminal conduct. I ask for the maximum sentence that ye deem fit to impose. O Wise Elders”. Pleased with his speech, he sits down.

Being charged for stealing a loaf of bread, an advocate is the last person he was able to afford. He was blessed with relatives, equally poor that he was unable to even think of bail money. Sikara therefore had decided to conduct his own defence. He had great faith in the compassion and listening ability of the Wise Ones. But for this crime, he has a clean record. All his friends know him to be a kind and honest man. He will relate all these to the Wise Ones and they will understand. They must have children too. He has heard about the Garden of Justice. He has faith in them.

The Wise Elders look down at the accused man in tattered clothes standing in the specially made dock. ‘What have ye to plea?. The Elder in the middle asks him. Sikara mumbles something which inspires the Elder to present a lecture to the crowd. He lectures on the virtue of speaking up in the Garden of Justice” The man attempt to speak again and immediately gets stopped by the Elder, now visibly angry.

“You did not address me as O Wise One! You did not address me as O Wise One! Don’t you know decorum?. And he proceeds to give another one hour of lecture on decorum in the Garden of Justice.

How very often do we sacrifice justice at the altar of decorum and man made rituals?

A sharp arrow darts through Santim’s heart. It does not matter that Sikara is uneducated and unprepared from birth to appear before the Wise Ones. It does not matter he thinks it is important to explain why he stole the bread. It is does not matter. For justice to be dispensed at all, one must begin with the rituals. Decorum. Santim keeps falling and seeing.

There was a loud thunder in the sky. ‘Hear one, Hear all. The clouds are dark and rain is soon to come. The Wise Elders shall now adjourn. All accused to be kept in the dungeon until the Wise Elders sit again in four months from now’,

Sikara’s trial, therefore, gets postponed. The dungeon, Santim knows, is the prison where the accused are kept until they are tried before the Wise Ones. In one cell which is about 12 feet by 12 feet, there can be as many as 10 prisoners. All supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. They may sleep on the cold floor but are given one blanket each. He will be fed with what they call ‘food’. Occasionally, the dungeon wardens will come to kick them around for sport. Since he carries the sin of poverty, he has to atone for it by being punished before being found guilty. For Sikara, the 4 months pass slowly like 40 years.

In the dungeon, Sikara sees the face of Zirasha, his 4 year old sickly daughter, his angel. He loves his wife and his other 4 children too, but Zirasha is special to him. She was born sickly and had a kind of disease which required her to be fed more often than normal children. The Medicine Man had predicted her death one month after birth but Nature intended otherwise. Lack of feeding can be fatal for her as her abnormal stomach walls will be gradually destroyed through lack of food. Whenever she does not eat, her eyes roll until only the white is seen due to the pain. He begins to cry. He does not care that he is punished but why his child too?

‘I have been a useless father’, his mind tells him as he cries. He feels the pain Zirasha must have felt from not eating for the 2 days he was in hiding with the loaf of bread. As a provider, he has failed. Who can he complain to when fate had decided this?

Santim’s eyes gets blurred by the pool of tears. Life is a chain reaction. One event affects the other. We all know it. It is in Nature. When you put your hand in the fire, you know what ensues. When you place you hand in the ice, you know what results. Nothing stands in isolation. Nothing. But Santim’s heart cannot accept why Sikara’s daughter ought to be punished for the deeds of her father. Justice on earth is indeed blind and dented.

Exchanging jokes, smiling a lot and laughing loudly are the domain of the rich, powerful, famous and the successful lot. If you cannot, you will never be one.

Never mind that others are dying from lack of everything.

Its their fate!

Tears fall from Santim’s closed eyes. Man made laws by the exalted few supported by the foolish mob called the people. The People. Where are they now to stand in defence of Sikara? Do they not see that what befalls Sikara crime was poverty and wanting his sick daughter to eat, to live? Not a mortal cares when it touches not their own skin.

Santim did not know whether to be angry or to be sad though his tears had a life of its own. In this confusion, he experiences numbness and surrender to the laws of nature. Then his mind looked at the image of the 5 Wise ones whom the people are applauding and bowing down to.

Five Old Shameless Man, knocking on grave’s door – yet unrepenting!

Make an exit when you willingly can for unwillingly you will be exited from life when the Angel of Death punctually knocks on your heart.

Then, you may no time for redemption.

Santim awoke from his drowsiness and realized the Supreme One still wants him alive on this earth. Why? I am a spectator and a traveler on this earth. There are too many scorpions on earth and I cannot ask why a scorpion stings. It is its nature. The rule of nature and the rule of human base desires are at total variance. Clarity in one, confusion in the other. Of all the scorpions, the most vile one is the unbridled “Me” which is the ultimate cause of injustices on earth.

.

What is the rule?

Me. My family, my children,

ME!!!!!

Me! Me! Me!

NO,

These are exceptions to the rule, so says the Balancer.

END.