| What Should be Africans Attitude to Americans War on Terror? |
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| Written by Ozodi Thomas Osuji | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Thursday, 19 October 2006 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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WHAT SHOULD BE AFRICANS ATTITUDE TO AMERICANS WAR ON TERROR? Ozodi Thomas Osuji I am a very vindictive person. I hold grudges towards every person who has ever done something bad to me, which is practically every human being alive! I hold grudges against white
I hold grudges against Arabs for enslaving Africans and for taking African territories in
Because of my grievances against both Americans and Arabs, when the two began their current war, I said to me: excellent; let the two criminal races go at it with all they have, and may one wipe the other out and the remaining one become so weakened that we, Africans, the oppressed of the world, pick up their pieces. That is to say that I liked the war between white Americans and brown Arabs. My approach to the war was Machiavellian and pragmatic and based on the feeling that the warriors injured African people. My two enemies are fighting and I encourage them to destroy each other. When two equally matched folk fight they tend to fight for a long time and by the time the war is over would have so exhausted each other that their powers are waned and a third party benefits. This happened during the Second World War. The West (
By the time the war was over, the European powers had exhausted themselves, so much so that new powers emerged:
In this light, I wanted the Western world and the Arab world to duke it out. I calculated that it might take those two ten to twenty years to weaken each other. I even prayed for them to use nuclear weapons on each other. The West has nuclear weapons and the Arabs do not. Somehow, I wished that the Arabs could get their hands on dirty bombs and explode them on the streets of
As the Arabs and Westerners destroy each other, I hoped that finally Africans would benefit from that outcome. I wished that Africans would pick up the pieces of the West and East and, for the first time in history, become a world power. I have no love loss for either Arabs or Europeans; in fact, I wanted both to disappear from history. Both, I believed, wronged Africans by enslaving them and I had no business being friendly towards either in their so-called clash of civilizations. Why should an African care for what happens to his oppressors? One must be a fool to wish for ones enemies’ success. My frank attitude to this so-called war on terror is for both parties in it to perish. That is correct, I wanted the demise of the East and West, so that a new human civilization would rise up. As they say, from ashes rises the sphinx. To me, Arabs and Europeans seemed pestilential; they have caused the world tremendous pain; they are like the plague and I felt that it is about time they were eradicated from the human body, so that a new and humane civilization would emerge in the world, one not as violent and predatory as those two barbaric peoples are.
I dare say that my attitude towards the current East-West conflict is probably the attitude of many Africans? I have not talked to most Africans, nor am I able to read minds, so I would not know what most Africans desire from this war on terror. (As George Bush, in his halting English, puts it…is English George Bush’s first language? I have never seen such an inarticulate man in high office anywhere in the world. ) In the nature of things, some Christian Africans probably so identify with Christian Americans that they want Americans to win, while some Muslim Africans are so identified with Arabs that they want Arabs to win? I do not know. Somehow, I suspect that the educated African, particularly those who have lived in the West and understood how vicious the white man is in his racism toward black folk, and those who have read history and know that for over a thousand years Arabs enslaved Africans would not cheer either of these combatants; the enlightened African would probably wish that they destroy each other? At best, the African sees the so-called war on terror as “their war,” not his African war. It is other people’s war and he should not loose sleep over it. To the nationalist African, the business at hand is industrializing
I do not know how all Africans feel about this so-called war on terror. All I know is how I feel about it. I have lived the better part of my life in
I have watched the American (in) justice system clamping innocent young black men into jails and prisons; indeed, it seems that American judges exist to put blacks into jail. Jails are build everywhere in
My honest desire was for the white man to destroy himself. As noted, I also have grudges against Arabs, for enslaving Africans, and have no illusion that if they won their declared war on the West that their new Islamic Caliphate would be better than the old one that enslaved Africans. (Apart from having 9 wives and 27 concubines, did the “seal of the prophets” have slaves, as some Africans claim? A prophet of God with a harem, one woman for every night of the week, and slaves to booth, is interesting, to say the least. I hear that Mary’s son, Joshua Ben Joseph, whom the Greeks called Jesus Christ, had only one wife, Mary Magdalene?) Simply stated, it seemed to me that the best approach to the war on terror is for me to sit on the side lines and urge the two criminal combatants to go at it until they destroy each other; and the sooner, the better.
Asians are currently closest to the West in modernization;
I wanted the war to take its time and slowly bleed the two combatants to death, and last a decade or more, during which time;
(The West currently has almost sole control over nuclear weapons and, like terrorists, uses them to intimidate the rest of us, to cow us, to make us kowtow to its preferred policies. Obviously, no human being likes to be intimidated into doing what he does not want to do, out of fear. But as long as the West has credible means of coercion, she prevails on us to do she wishes or else she clobbers us. The West gets away with murder. My wish is for Africans to develop nuclear weapons and use them to stop the West’s arrogance. Every weapon system developed by mankind, though initially in sole possession of a few and gives them advantage over others, sooner or latter, becomes available to all people. Nuclear physics will soon be known by Africans, and one hopes that Africans would hurry up and develop weapons of mass destruction and start calling the West’s bluff. Never mind if the self serving West tells us that it is trying to prevent the proliferation of these weapons; it is doing so, all right, but for its national interest, not ours; it does so because, like the school yard bully, it uses those weapons to bully powerless folk into submission to its satanic wishes.)
(And
As for the Arabs, I wished that they bled themselves to death, and that eventually black African countries would march up north and reclaim North Africa:
(Americans are so deluded that they do not know how much the rest of the world hates them. They go about fancying themselves good people. Actually, many people out there are struggling to lay their hands on nuclear weapons and use them on Americans. Americans ought to ask themselves why they are hated so much. If they are so good, how come people hate them that much? Six percent of the world’s population consumes 30% of the world’s resources, and enjoys itself while the rest of the world lives in squalor! This is unfair. Osama Bin Laden and his Arab terrorists rejoiced from killing Americans. As I see it, Americans did not do any egregious wrong to Arabs and Osama had no business killing Americans. Americans committed a crime against Africans. I believe that Africans are justified under any law to seek restitution from those who enslaved them and stole their resources to enrich themselves. Just imagine what would happen when Africans finally lay their hands on weapons of mass destruction. It is preferable that we did not even think about that scenario. Better still, it is ideal that we changed the world and helped people to forgive and love one another, as I am proposing in this essay. Oh, another delusion found in white Americans is their belief that blacks are not intelligent enough to study science. Let them keep living in that delusion. It helps if your enemy is psychotic and believes in what is not true as true and underestimate you. In a few decades, I do not believe that White American kids would out perform African kids in the sciences. We shall then see who would have the last laugh. Great empires underestimate those they consider primitive, until the later overrun them.
You get the point. I am not sentimental at all over Samuel Huntington’s so-called clash of civilizations, the war between the East and West; I liked the war and wished for it to exhaust the parties involved and eventually lead to the emergence of my beloved African civilization. I must be honest and state it, as it is: I do not like the white man; I do not like the Arab man, either; so let them kill each other; let them take their time and, while at it, do a good job of it. That was my prayer, the prayer of the grieved, vengeful person.
Nominally, I am supposed to be a Christian, strictly, an apostate Christian. I was raised a Catholic but rejected it while a teenager. (Interestingly, I used to enjoy reading the bible and dare say that I understand it, as much as any human being could?) A Christian does not have the type of cynical attitude exhibited in my thinking, does he? A Christian does not have the type of anger I had towards my oppressors does he? In my early twenties, I could easily have pulled the lever and destroyed the West and Arab world and not feel remorseful. I will let you be the judge whether my position was good or bad. And, while you are at it, may I ask you: are Euro-Americans Christians? If Europeans are Christians, how come they killed off Indians in the
(In one of his despondent moments, my philosophical mentor, Arthur Schopenhauer, wondered what kind of Christian is the white American? Here is a man who went to Church, read his bible and expected to go to heaven, while abusing his black slaves! Right there in his bible, Jesus asked him to love all people, but he was abusing black people! He was rationalizing his abusive behavior by telling himself that black people are not intelligent and are subhuman. So they are not human beings, eh? And you are nevertheless having sex with them, so that over 75% of so-called black Americans were produced by white fathers, fathers who promptly abandoned them and or sold them into slavery! The white American is a peculiar Christian, indeed! If there is hell, a special place is reserved for him in it.)
I will speak for me, only. My attitude towards the so-called war on terror is Machiavellian; it is rooted in power calculus; my position was based on the calculation on what I considered is in Africans best interests. Since I was a child, I have been reason on legs; reason in locomotion; I had no softness, no sentimentality, no sympathy and no misguided compassion for my abusers and oppressors: Arabs and Euro-Americans. I wanted them dead, period. Every time I saw one unemployed black American or saw black Americans in jail, I wanted to kill the next white man I saw.
A CHANGE OF MIND
Though a hard nosed political realist, I found myself reading a metaphorical poem called A course in miracles. This book purports to reinterpret the traditional interpretation of Christianity and gives the actual interpretation of the Christianity taught by Jesus. Indeed, the book is purportedly channeled by Jesus Christ himself. (Interestingly, the idea of channeling made me think multiple personality disorder; I thought that, perhaps, the writer of the book had dissociative disorder and denied that she wrote the book, not consciously, but by unconsciously projecting her ideas to an alter ego that she called Jesus Christ. Hysterical women…who feel inferior… often dissociate from their real selves and claim to be who they are not, say, a man, whom they think is superior and powerful…along the line of Alfred Adler’s notion of compensation. Despite my reservation about this book’s source, its hypothesis intrigued me no end.) Basically, the book argues that we should forgive those who attacked us, as Jesus, apparently, forgave those who attacked and destroyed his body. If you recall, from reading the Christian bible, Jesus essentially preached love and forgiveness. He said that we should do unto other people as we want them to do to us, which is to love us, hence to love them. Love God; love yourself and love your neighbor, Mary’s boy says is the sum of all the laws and prophecies. He said that true love is characterized by forgiveness for those who harmed one. He urged his followers to forgive their enemies. Indeed, he said: if you are slapped on one cheek, turn the other cheek to be slapped, too. He did not urge seeking revenge for harms done to one. Forgiveness is the old boy’s main teaching.
Here are some paraphrases of what the boy from
Apparently, as the old boy sees it, God hears all our prayers and has given us all that we need, for he knows all that we need before we ask him for them. God has already answered all our prayers. But to receive the gifts that God has already given us, peace, happiness and abundance, we have to obey his will. God’s will is that we should love one another; since, as Jesus said, to love is to forgive, to obey God’s will is to forgive one another our evil behaviors.
In the only prayer that the old boy taught his followers, the so-called “Our Lord’s prayer”, he taught them to pray thus: our father, who is heaven, forgive us our sins because we have first forgiven those who sinned against us…give us our daily bread etc, This prayer is obviously a contract, a covenant between God and his separated children that he should forgive them their sins only when we forgive each other‘s sins. To return to God we must forgive each others sins. But until we forgive each other, apparently, God cannot forgive us; we cannot come to God’s presence until we have forgiven all God’s children, ourselves included. No unforgiving soul returns to God. The journey home is embarked on when we forgive our detractors.
And they brought a woman caught in adultery to him (Jesus), to test him, to see where he stands on the issue of sin and punishment. Moses, their (Jews) father, taught them to punish sinners; Jesus taught forgiveness for sin. So here is a woman caught in sin, would the old boy forgive her? If he did, he would have disobeyed the laws of Moses, the extant law of the land during his time. He would himself become a law breaker and be punished. The old boy’s back was now between a rock and a hard place. The die was cast for him; it was a do or die situation; he could not wriggle out of this one. He had to put his hand where his mouth is. He was asked, in effect, to invalidate the old mosaic law of punishment with his new law of forgiveness. Jesus had said that he came to break the old law; he is forced to do it, publicly; to show that his gospel of forgiveness supercedes the old mosaic law of punishment. (I love these either or situations.) Jesus understood that the Pharisees, the lawyers of this world are foxes and thought that they have finally outsmarted him. So, for a while, he seemed to be enjoying matching wits with the phony gatekeepers of the law; he ignored the protectors of the laws of Manu. He diddled on the ground and, at long last, looked up and said: let him who has not sinned be the first to cast the first stone at the sinner.
Check met! Let him who does not live in a glass house throw stones. All have sinned and none has the right to call others sinners; so the people left. Jesus then turned to the adulterous woman and asked her: woman, where are those who accused you of sin? She said that they are gone; they are nowhere. That is to say that all are sinners and no one is any where to accuse one of sin. (Pay attention, you Sharia Mullah; you do not have the right to accuse any one of sin, to stone adulterous women to death.) Jesus told the woman to go home and sin no more, for sin is not good. To sin is to not love other people; one must love other people, so she should love other people.
All these are still in the nature of mere talking, as we all know, talk is cheap; Jesus had to walk his talk, forgive those who attacked him, to prove the truth of his New Testament: forgiveness as the meaning of love (not Moses Old Testament that justice is punishment for our mistakes). So, despite his apparent good works: feeding the hungry, healing the sick, unifying the separated to what he called his father, God, the Jews came and arrested him while he was praying in the
Peter, his tempestuous apostle, brought out his rusted sword and tried to defend Jesus by attacking one of the police men that came to arrest Jesus, but Jesus looked at him, as one looks at a child told what to do, forgive, and he does the wrong thing, fight back. Jesus said: Peter, put away your sward, for those who live by the sword die by the sward. If I had wanted to defend myself, I would have recruited soldiers to fight with me, but I came to show the world a different mode for solving interpersonal and social conflicts, forgiveness, not war.
Jesus allowed him self to be arrested, was tried in kangaroo court, found guilty and put to death. He accepted his death like an innocent lamb; he did not defend himself. Before he died he said what no other prophet of God has ever said: father, forgive them, for they are mistaken in thinking that they can kill your eternal son; they cannot destroy the immortal; so, they have done nothing wrong to me, and you, and, therefore, they should be forgiven. Jesus forgave those who destroyed his body, for, obviously, body is destroyable and what is destroyable has no intrinsic value and ought not to be defended, any way. Jesus knew that his soul could not be destroyed. Jesus seemed to die, only to reappear in a body of light, what Hinduism calls astral body, Davi, to his apostles. (We made ourselves into bodies and the Holy Spirit remade what we made into light bodies; each of us has a light body, Hinduism teaches.) Clearly, the Old boy taught forgiveness and walked his talk. He forgave those who destroyed his body. In forgiving his detractors he resurrected in a new body, a light body.
A course in miracles teaches that the true meaning of Christianity is to forgive those who attacked us, to do what Jesus did, to be forgiving and defenseless at all times. Who is a Christian? The course says that a Christian is a forgiving person.
A NEW STORY OF CREATION
If you are like me, you probably were taught the Big Bang hypothesis regarding the genesis of the universe. This hypothesis says that about fifteen billion years ago, that all energy and matter in the universe was concentrated in a ball no larger than an atom. To appreciate the size of the atom remembers that over 600 atoms would fit into a period (.) That is correct; all that exists in the universe: stars, planets etc were in such a form that they fitted into less than a dot. Incredible. We do not know what that singular state was like, for it is considered different from the phenomena that science studies. (If you insist, it is metaphysical, not physical?) Somehow, whatever is in that tiny ball exploded, hence Big Bang, and in nanoseconds created space (separation) and space between things necessarily created time. Things? Where did things come from? Apparently, whatever was in that tiny ball created sub-particles like quarks and those transformed themselves into particles like neutrons, protons and electrons, and those combined to form atoms? Atoms, in time, transformed themselves into the various elements that we today have on the Chemical table. The various elements somehow combined to form carbon based biological life forms on earth. First, were unicellular organisms, then became multi-cellular ones and eventually plants, then animals, evolving from lower forms to the higher forms, such as mammals? Human beings are supposed to have evolved from the lowest forms of biological life. Charles Darwin, in his Origin of Species, tells us that everything about us is due to our adaptation to our changing physical environment. The environment changes and our bodies mutate, change to adapt to it or else we die. Those who could not change and adapt die out. It is a dog eat dog world; big fish eats small fish; the strong survive and the weak die, Herbert Spencer tells us. (This social Darwinism is perfect rationalization for the exploitation of the workers by the robber barons that built
This cosmological myth of creation is as incredible as the one found in the Christian Bible (Genesis). Of course, both are not true. Apparently, the Big Bang idea is a good enough frame of reference for scientists to do their work, so be it. Religious folk, apparently, insist on having a non-physical hypothesis on the origin of life. A course in miracles provides religious folk with one such metaphysical hypothesis. According to it, originally is God. According to this mythology, God extended his one self into his sons. He has infinite sons, all of whom are his one son. God and his infinite sons share one self and one mind; they are joined together, so that it is inappropriate to relate to either as apart from the other. (Hence spirit is always singular, not plural, not spirits, unless you mean alcohol.) A course in miracles teaches that originally we are unified spirit (and still are unified selves, though we dream that we are separated egos housed in bodies). While in union with our father and brothers, we entertained the thought of experiencing the opposite of union, separation. We wished to create ourselves. As God created us we are all the same and are equal but each of us wished to seem better than other selves. (Specialness) Separation is impossible, for it would mean the death of God and his children. We cannot separate from God and from each other. What we cannot accomplish in reality, we dreamed. In our dream, we see the opposite of reality. Reality is union, in our dream we see separated selves. Reality is spirit, in our dreams we see the separated children of God housed in bodies. Reality is oneness but in our dream we see a world of space, time and matter. The perceptual world is the opposite of God’s non perceptual world. God is knowledge, not perception. Knowledge is permanent, perception varies, changes, and what is changeable is not real; the real is changeless. Our empirical world, the good book teaches, is the opposite of the world of God; it is a world that came into being in opposition to the real world created by God. In our world opposites exist: good and bad, light and darkness, man and woman etc. Ours is a world were everything opposes every thing, for it came into being in opposition to the will of God.
God is eternal, our world, the opposite of eternity is a world were we come to die (not really, for we are immortal, we seem to die only in dreams).God is permanent, our world is changeable. God and his children are love, our world is the opposite of love, is hate filled. To separate from God is to be hateful, so we hate each other. Our world is a world at war with itself and so will always be, for it is a world that came into being in conflict…opposition to the unified will of heaven. The book teaches that the only way to return to the world of God is to forgive those who wronged us. Look at those who attacked you and forgive them. Bear no grudges, seek no vengeance, and do not defend yourself when you are attacked. If you do so, you would have looked beyond the logic that maintains this world of attack and defense. You would have done what Jesus did: overcome the world. Jesus was attacked and he did not defend his separated self and the body that housed it. He believed he has a different self, a spirit self, one that is eternal, so he did not bother defending his mortal body. His body was destroyed but his immortal spirit lives on in God, and in all of us, for in eternity God is in his sons and his sons are in him and in each other; there is no space or gap between God and his children; where God ends and his child begins is nowhere. God is everywhere and since he is in his son and his son is in him, God’s son is everywhere. Jesus, God’s son, is everywhere God is, which is in all of us, for each of us is an extension of God. If we stop defending separated self, we, too, like Jesus would know that we are everywhere, in God and in each other.
Simply put, Professor Helen Schucman’s book, A course in miracles, teaches that forgiveness and defenselessness are the means of overcoming the realities of this world. If you want to leave this empirical world, as Jesus did, then forgive all those that attacked you, and you must do so at all times, with no exception made for little or big attacks, small or big wrongs done to you. But if you want to be in this world then defend yourself when others attack you. The choice is that simple. In truth, we are unified spirit, but now see ourselves as separated selves housed in bodies. The separated self concept, the ego, the self image is a veil across the face of Christ. (Christ is the unified self, the son of God, we all share the one Christ); the ego is darkness; it is a block to the awareness of union, God. As long as we identify with the separated self, we have cast a cloud over the consciousness of our unified self, aka God. To experience God, union, we have to jettison separation. Forgiveness is the means to attaining the experience of union, the book teaches.
A course in miracles, an obviously Gnostic gospel, for it is akin to what Plotinus wrote in his Enneads, and similar to the Gnostic writings of Thomas, Mary Magdalene, Judas and other Gnostic Christians, seems very fascinating to me. Though I characterize myself as agnostic, I have given Dr Schucman’s book some thinking. If I were to accept Christianity, it would be on its terms. I like its thesis that it is us that separated from God and from each other; that we caused ourselves our apparent suffering in this world. I like the fact that it does not present us as victims of the world, as other explanatory systems do. Genetics, for example, sees us as the victim of our genes; social learning theory sees us as the victims of what society did to us. I do not like to see me as any ones victim. I like to think that I am in charge of my life and that my personality somehow influences what happens to me.
Not withstanding my admiration of Christian Gnosticism, as represented by A course in miracles, when my two mortal enemies, Europeans and Arabs, began their war on each other, I knelt down and thanked God for the war. I wished both of these evil groups Godspeed: I want them to hurry it up and destroy each other, so that Africans might have their day in the sun; I am simply tired of Africans always being nonentities. I must reiterate that I cannot possibly sing the praises of the West or East, for both enslaved Africans and I cannot be their apologist.
Traditional Christianity did not appeal to me, for among other reasons, because I associated it with white men, my enemies; Islam did not appeal to me because I associated it with Arab slavers. I could care less for those who enslaved my people. I am not a slave and cannot cry when my slave master dies. In fact, the happiest day of my life ought to be when these two despicable and contemptible civilizations destroyed each other. That was where I was until recently when I began wondering whether I ought to rethink my stance, whether there is a true Christianity and, if, so, how should it respond to the clash of the two evil titans? How should a true Christian respond to the fight by European and Arab coreligionists?
LEARNING FROM DREAMS
I was thinking about this matter when I dozed off and had a dream. I usually pay attention to my dreams. I agree with both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung that dreams teach us a lot about our unconscious, so I pay attention to my dreams. Here is the dream. I was visiting my childhood friend, George Njoku. George had several sisters. In the dream, two of them, Cathy and Julie, were in a room by them selves, fighting. George and I came to the door and saw them going at it. The two girls seemed about the same size, and evenly marched. I asked George: how old are they, and he told me: ten and twelve. I said, well; they are about the same age and seem evenly matched in power, so let us sit back and watch the show. If one of them was bigger than the other, I would feel like I was doing something wrong by not separating them; that is my ego sense of justice, but since they appeared the same size, I felt that it was a fair fight. I felt it is good entertainment and that I ought to kick back, go grab a beer and watch it. To me, human life has always seemed like a freak show, an absurdity; like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I see human beings as god like in their intellect but animalistic in their behaviors. Let us drink to man’s evil, I say. (Arthur Schopenhauer, the cynic, after all, was my philosophical mentor.) Somehow, before I could relax and enjoyed the freak show, the fight by the two girls, I woke up and began thinking about the fight that.
As I laid there on my couch pondering the meaning of the dream, the thought that came into my mind is that the two girls fighting each other were Europeans and Arabs. (Both, in my opinion, are women. For as long as I can remember, I have considered white men and Arabs are immature children, for, to me, a mature person could only love and seek ways to serve his fellow human beings, and not enslave and use them, as those dastardly people did to Africans.) I asked how come I did not want to separate them from their fight. The thought that came to my mind is that I thought that they were evenly matched, that Arabs and Europeans are evenly marched, so let them fight it out, and let us enjoy their freak show. As I was thinking along this line, a thought entered my mind: what does A course in miracles teach about our brothers’ fight. I said: who the heck cares, those fighters enslaved my people, and so I do not care about their killing themselves. My cynicism not withstanding, an inner voice insisted on me giving the answer as I thought the good book would explain the fight. I grudgingly said, okay, it would probably say that the two fighters are fighting because they are identified with their false, separated, special ego selves; that their egos are battling for supremacy, which they are trying to determine which of them would control the world. Whites want to rule the world; Arabs want to rule the world. One, Christendom, the other, a Muslim Caliphate; why should I care for these alien power grabbers? I only care for an afro-centric world.
Okay, now that my mind insists on wondering how the good book would explain what is going on, let me try to see it from its perspective. Of course, I know that you can reduce phenomena to any methodological approach you want, and that does not mean that you have explained phenomena; you can posit a frame of reference and reduce all that is going on in the world to it and it all seems to fit, yet you have explained nothing; Freud and his psychoanalysts reduced human behavior to their Id, ego and superego categories and deluded themselves into thinking that they had explained man; no, they had not. Pavlov, Watson, Skinner and other behaviorists believed that they could reduce man to his behavior but were only amusing themselves. At the moment neuro-scientists believe that they are reducing thinking to brain neuro-chemistry but they, too, will fail. Geneticists chime in with their own reductionism; I have just read what Richard Dawkins have been writing on selfish genes and wished to flog the dumb ass. Man is too complex to be reduced to any frame of reference. Nevertheless, let us try to reduce man to the paradigm of reality posited by Dr Schucman.
The book teaches that only God is real. God has all the power in the universe; his son has derived power, for he is an extension of God. But the son desires to have as much power as his father. He wants to kill his father and take his power; he wants to chase his father out of his creatorship throne and become the creator. He wants to create God, create himself and create his brothers. In other words, the son of God is on a power trip. He replaced the self God created him as, the unified self, with the self he wished to be, the separated ego self. As egos we are on a power trip, we are fighting with one another; the currently more powerful seem to rule the roast. But we are not powerful; only God has power. Arabs and Europeans (and the rest of us) are the sons of God that denied their Christhood and identified as separated ego selves and are fighting for the domination of the world. They are deluded, psychotic; the son cannot be powerful, only God is powerful.
The book teaches that the sane son of God recognizes that only his father has power and that his power is given to him by his father and is meant for him to share it with all his brothers. But those two girls in my dream, Europeans and Arabs, are ego identified and fight each other, each trying to become supreme in the world. As longs they are engaged in this struggle for ego control, neither of them would know peace and happiness.
This conclusion is fine with me; why would I want my enemies to know peace and happiness? But wait a minute, if my enemies are at war, would I know peace? Just think about what could happen if the West’s back is against the wall and it unleashes its nuclear arsenal on the Arab world? If nuclear weapons were exploded in
Radiation would kill many Africans. Damn, I said, so, I am not scoot free as those two criminal groups slug it out!
Okay, wise guy, what do you want me to do, I asked my conscience? What does the book ask you to do, it asked me? It wants you, what it calls its students, to teach an alternative means of solving human problems, a better means for conflict resolution. It wants us to teach forgiveness and defenselessness. It wants to remove the blocks to the awareness of love. It wants us to teach what would give the world peace and joy and make it like the
Finally, it wants the will of God done on earth, as it is done in heaven. The will of God is that we are unified, are one, and are love. The will of God is that his children love each other, as he loves them. Therefore, I am supposed to teach folks, Arab, European, to forgive one another, if they are to obey the will of God.
I got up from the couch, where I was laying and cogitating on the manning of the dream, and walked into my office and started typing this piece.
DISCUSSION
I am an African and have no business supporting whites or Arabs. I see them with impartial eyes, with clarity of vision. I have no illusions about either of them; they do not care for my people and I have no business caring for them. These monsters are out to conquer and control the world; it is as simple as that; the one wants to control people through its weird seventh century religion; the other has a neurotic belief that he is superior to other people. Both are sick human beings and are terribly in need of healing. I actually pity these two groups, for they are powerless clowns. For all their supposed power, to me, they are women; two women engaged in a catfight, they are not relevant to me. If they were intelligent they would not have done what they did to my people, enslave them, and because they did what they did, they must accept the consequences of their behaviors, for human behavior always has consequences. The only things that Arabs have going for them is their desire to live in the seventh century world when Mohammed ruled a primitive Arabian peoples. These people want to impose the Sharia, Muslim law, on the world. You ask yourself: don’t they know that history progresses and does not stand still; how come they want to go back to what may or may not have worked fourteen hundred years ago? So Mohammed and his henchmen said that if a woman commits adultery she should be stoned to death. How about if we ask this question: who should do the stoning, since all of us are sinners? Jesus tells us that none of us has the right to judge others as sinful, at least, not until we have become sinless, which is impossible in this world. Sharia law is mostly a bunch of rubbish. We can use our thinking to determine what constitutes good human behavior and implement it in the extant world, without hacking to the past. At least such is the recommendation of rational humanists like Voltaire. This does not mean doing what the West does. The West is drowning itself with laws for every thing. Soon, it will have laws for how to defecate. All a fellow needs to do is gather followers and he influences the legislature to implement his predilections into laws and we are all supposed to obey them because they are lawful. Never mind whether what is called lawful is, to reason, right or wrong. Thus, these days, such absurd behaviors as homosexuality are said to be lawful and we are all supposed to approve it. Soon, pedophiles will get Western Legislatures to pass laws making sex with one month old children lawful and we will be forced respect it. In time, too, criminals will influence Western legislatures to pass laws making it lawful to steal. Why not? Antisocial tendency is probably inherited, in the genes, as it is in the genes of pedophiles and homosexuals to do what they do. Genes is the current rationalization for every human weakness there is.
Genes do predispose people to certain physical diseases, so should we accept illness or should we seek cure for them? The rationalization of bizarre behavior with genes will bring the West down. Genes or not, certain behaviors ought to be prohibited by society.
The East and the West are heading towards self destruction, their present war not withstanding. Those of us looking at them from the outside can only shake our heads in wonderment.
I am not a partisan for the East or West. Nevertheless, it is my duty to help these two fools see the light and, for the first time in their benighted civilizations, do the right thing. The right thing to do is to love one another, as Jesus said. By Jesus I do not mean the Jesus of traditional Christians, not the Jesus of the Catholic or Protestant or
By Christianity I mean how I, as an African, define it. (See some of my writings on how I do so….I placed some of my writings on the Internet; you can download them and read them, see www.spiritualpsychologytoday.com )
It is time that we saved these two great fools and shown them how to behave appropriately. With regards to the clash of civilizations, the two civilizations are wrong. However, the West is useful in so far that it encourages science and technology. The only thing I like in
As for the Arab world, does it have anything worth imitating? Its religion is obviously a political ideology meant to control the world, to get the people to bow towards Mecca and be ruled by whoever rules Arabia (you have to pray facing Mecca, you have to pray in Arabic, you have to read the Koran in Arabic, you have to behave as Arabians determined that you ought to behave). Islam is simply a means of inculcating folks into the Arab point of view. That weltanschauung is anachronistic and has nothing to recommend it in the modern world.
SCIENCE
Science is a methodological approach to phenomena; it is an approach that seeks facts, that posits a method for verifying claims and accepting only verifiable facts. That methodology is gradually permeating the entire world. By the end of this century, Asia would be operating under scientific culture; it might take
When this happens, few would have any need for the West. In fact, soon,
I am not invested in the West or East; I am invested only in the truth. So what is the truth? Truth is love for all mankind. That truth tells me that neither East nor West knows what love is, and that it is for me and the rest of us to teach these two criminal races the nature of love. As Jesus Christ, the Igbo African, taught us: do unto others as you want them to do to you. How do you want people to do to you? If you are masochistic you probably want to be abused and if you are sadistic you probably want to abuse people, but if you are sane you want to be loved. Therefore, if you are sane, love every human being for you want them to love you. That is the truth, the law of God; love. Love every human being, work for our common interest, and make sure that all human beings are provided with the basic minimum for living in this world: free education, from elementary to university, and technical schools; provide health insurance to all people, work for full employment for all people, within a mixed economy, feed all children etc. I have covered these issues elsewhere.
What is salient is love. Love and the rest are details. The world must be transformed to a loving place. This is the task before us. Christ is love; to be Christ like is to be a loving person. A Christian is a Christ like person. This means a loving person, a person who works for social interests.
CRISIS INTERVENTION
When two people are fighting what should you do? First, you understand why they are fighting. They are fighting because they are identified with their egos, with separated selves, each believing itself better than the other and each out to make the other accept its false superiority. As long as human beings are identified with ego false selves they will fight. Wars are inevitable in the egos world. Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan) got that one right: egos are motivated by self interest and must perpetually be in conflict. When you see two girls, under age twelve, fighting, what should you do? You try to separate them from their fighting and then lecture them on the cause of wars and, hopefully, they would listen? You do not just stand there and let them tear each other up, as I did in my dream and as, so far, I have done with regards to Arab-European war of annihilation. I stepped aside, fence sat, hoping to gain from these criminals self destruction. But the good book tells us that our brother’s injury should not be our gain. Our gain should be our brothers well being. Therefore, I can no longer stand aside as Arabs and Europeans kill each other, for one thing, eventually, they would affect me, Africans. I must, therefore, figure out a way to get involved in this seeming senseless war. How so? I must become the third party that seeks peace. I must become the peace maker. Given that we Africans have been injured by the two fighters, enslaved and discriminated, for me to become involved in this war I must first forgive these people what they did to my people. I must forgive Arabs and Europeans for enslaving Africans. I must forgive these people’s evil past towards Africans.
I FORGIVE THE EAST AND WEST AND INSIST ON LOVE
I forgive you Arabs; I forgive you Europeans. In forgiving you, two, since, in the final analysis, you are part of me, I forgive me. To forgive other people’s past errors is to forgive ones own past errors. In line with A course in miracles, I recognize that the empirical world is our dream; that all of us, as the collective children of God, projected the world out; that the world is a pictorial representation of our warped thinking. We chose separated living and pursuit of specialness. Each of us wants to seem special and better than other people; each of us thinks that he has different interest and pursues it and the result is social conflict. We are responsible for our conflicted world. In the dream of separation, we invented space, time and matter; we invented past, present and future, just as we do in our nightly dreams. But when we wake up from our nightly dreams we recognize that we lay on our beds and that the things we saw in our dreams did not take place, and were figments produced by our imaginations. Our imaginations produced the world of space, time and matter; our imaginations produced our past, present and future; what we produced, the perceptual world, in fact, does not exist. Our dreaming minds produced the people who did all the things we saw done in our dreams. None of those things have been done. The world is dream and none of the evils we see done in it has been done. What is done in dreams have no effect on reality. The murders we see in our dreams at night have not been committed. Therefore, we must forgive those who committed murders in our dreams. In my African dream, I saw Arabs and Europeans enslave Africans and discriminate against Africans. Those dream activities though painful to the dream African, have, in fact, not taken place; they have no effect on Africans. Africans and all people remain as their creator created them: holy, unified with him and with each other. Therefore, Africans must forgive those who did what they did to them in our dreams. It is our mutual dreams, after all; our unified minds projected the dream out and had dream persons do the awful things they did to dream Africans. I, as an African, am partially responsible for the world’s dream; therefore, I forgive the sadistic Arabs and Europeans in my dream.
Recognizing that the world is a bad dream, one wants to awaken from it. One does not want to perpetuate that ugly evil dream. Alas the dream will be around for long, for millions of years longer. The world will exist until all the separated children of God recognize that separation is a mistake and that pursuit of specialness is an error and give them up. The world must continue to exist until each son of God voluntarily accepts his errors and, like the prodigal son, gives up his wish for independence from his father and returns home to his father, returns to unified state: the state of sameness and equality. We are going to be in the dream for a while. In so far that one is still in the world’s dream, one wants to have a pleasant dream. One wants to transform ones dream from nightmarish to happy dream. We may like to dream that we are separate and special but no one enjoys a nightmare. We Africans do not like to be slaves and or discriminated against, unless we are masochist, which I am not.
THE CORRECTION OF THE EVIL DREAM
Whereas I, as an African, do not feel obligated to belong to any religion founded by others, I must confess that Dr Schucman’s book, A course in miracles, fascinates me. Nevertheless, I am not her student, for my name is Dr Osuji, and I am not any doctor’s student. In as much as Dr Schucman’s book interests me, let me continue borrowing from her; actually, I am being disingenuous, for I would not borrow from her, if her thinking is not like my own thinking. In saying that she said this or that, I am really saying that I said this or that. I am projecting my thinking to the good lady. Every thing I write here makes independent sense to me, no matter what book seems to corroborate it. I could care less for the prophets of God whose authority we are supposed to accept. No one has credibility if what he says is not independently true. To me, every thing I say here seems true. Let us continue. She says that God has given us a means to transform our nightmarish dreams into a happy dream. That means is the Holy Spirit, the correction principle. Apparently, when the children of God seemed to have separated from their father, and he could not communicate with them, he realized that they were sleeping and dreaming that they are in this world. Apparently, God, being freedom, could not take away his children’s freedom to sleep and dream that they are separated from him; God could not put a stop to the existence of this world. God did not want to rudely awaken his children but, instead, chose to enter their dreams. God remains transcendent (in spirit, heaven) but created another aspect of him, the immanent God, the Holy Spirit. As the Holy Spirit, God enters the minds of his sleeping children and tries to change their dreams, from dreams of separation to dreams of union, from dreams of hate to dreams of love, from dreams of death to dreams of life. God, as the Holy Spirit, does not end the world; he merely reinterprets what is done in it, so that it is in alignment with heaven’s love. The Holy Spirit teaches us to overlook what is done in dreams, to forgive one another our pest evils and to engage in present good. In our temporal minds are three aspects: the ego (the mind that we are currently aware of), the Holy Spirit and the unified mind of God. The ego is the wrong mind; the Holy Spirit is the right or Christ mind; the one mind of God and his sons is our mind in heaven, and none of us is aware of that mind in the world of space and time, on earth. First, we think with the wrong ego mind, and second, the Holy Spirit rethinks our thought, reinterprets our thinking and behavior and makes them in alignment with heaven’s thinking: love.
Under the influence of the Holy Spirit, Africans would forgive Arabs and Europeans what they did to us in the past. In this light, I forgive Europeans and Arabs their brutalities to Africans, which is the same thing as my brutalities to myself, since what they did I projected out and had them do. I forgive those evil other people means that forgive me my past evil. The world is a dream and had no effect on our status as the eternal son of God. I therefore forgive it. Nevertheless, in the present, I ask for only love. To ask for love is to ask for nothing; one must love. I love all my brothers and wish that they love themselves and love me. In eternity we are love; in time we ought to love ourselves.
CONCLUSION
What is the proper Christian attitude towards the war of the century, the Arab European war? These people began their current war when Islam was invented and swept into what Christians call the Holy land,
Alas, these people’s religions are faulty; their religions are ego based religions; neither so-called Christianity nor Islam teaches love hence is not the correct path to God. God is love; those who come to him must come in love, not war. Those two religions are paths to the ego; they are literally satanic religions, for Satan is the name we give to our egos. European Christianity and Arab Islam are alters to the devil; they are dedicated to separation, to hate. See what the devil has made: a world at perpetual war.
It is now time to teach these two devilish people what true religions is all about. God is love. A true religion is a path to returning to love. Any path that returns to love is a true religion. True Christianity teaches folk to forgive their past and love one another in the present. Christianity, not the stuff of Europe and
A true religion is a means for the separated children of God to return to God, to re-unite with their father and with each other. The prodigal sons who went on a journey to nowhere, since God is everywhere, a journey without distance, must return to his home. True religion teaches us to return to our true home in God. Our true home is love. True religion teaches love. The Holy Spirit and his most manifest human, Jesus Christ, teach us that we must forgive those we love when they err. Forgiveness is the true meaning of love in a world at war with itself. A true Christian must forgive the mistakes men make and teach men to love. To love is to unify, to join all people in the oneness of God. It is in love, union, that human beings obtain peace and happiness. Peace and happiness go together. A true Christian must teach the fighting Euro-Americans and Arabs to forgive each others past evils and love each other in the present. It is in forgiveness and love that the world knows peace. The world deserves peace, so, as a true Christian, I must teach peace.
I am only one man. I cannot prevent those who want to fight from fighting. Arabs and Europeans are egotistical persons out to conquer each other, so as to rule the world. They will not listen to those of us calling for peace. I have no illusions. These people are convinced that they are right; the ego always thinks that it is right, and will fight each other. I do not have the physical means to intervene and prevent the two egotists at war. Nevertheless, I do what is in me to do: talk about the origin of wars in our separated ego selves and ask us to transform our egos, from egos of hate to egos of love, from egos of separation to egos of union, and work for a unified world. All I can do is talk. If other people want to listen to my talk, fine; if not, they have the freedom to keep doing what they are doing. My sole responsibility is to walk my talk, to forgive and love all my fellow man. I can not do for others what only they can do for themselves: choose to forgive and love one another. In this paper, I have done my talking. I try to live my talk, though, as an egotist, I do not always succeed. I leave it to the other egotists, Arabs and Europeans, to choose to listen to the voice of love in them, or not. If they choose to listen to love they must do what love calls upon them to do: forgive each others past mistakes and work for our present good. It is in forgiveness and love that we find the peace that has eluded us, so far in our sojourn on earth.
In the end I think that each individual African should evaluate the war on terror and decide for him what to do about it. If he is interested in listening to my understanding of true Christianity, I suggest that he work to transform the world to a place where human beings forgive and love one another. How he does so is probably going to be in accord with his personality and profession. As for me, I intend to help all people forgive and love one another through my writing on that subject. I am working for a world that operates under that I call scientific culture. This is a world where all people study physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics and their applied forms and use them to adapt to the exigencies of the material universe. A world that nevertheless pays attention to the non-material universe through aspects of the metaphysics elaborated in this essay. One is not interested in escaping from this world, as some metaphysical schools insist; one does not want to negate the material world. On the contrary, one wants to understand the material world and make the most of it. One wants to use science and technology to make the world the best that it can become and use good metaphysics to enable people to make the most of what existentialist writers like Sartre, Camus, Jasper, Heidegger called the intrinsic meaninglessness and purposelessness of Being. A clear eyed assessment of our bodies shows that they are nothing; our bodies are just a bunch of atoms, as Hamlet said: food for worms. Our lives do not seem to have intrinsic worth, for any one who wants to could kill us (Hitler wanted to and killed over 50 million people and no God stopped him) could do so. If you want to you can kill me you could, and if I want to I can kill you, I could; no God would stop each of us from doing what he wants to do; only ones desire to live and ability to fight back would stop a person intent on killing one. Nature snuffs us out as it snuffs out trees and animals. The 2004 tsunami in
Simply stated, our lives seem to have no worth and value that nature or any one respect. Nevertheless, we can make the most of our apparent pointless existence on planet earth. Without exaggerating our worth, we can construct a world where folks have a happy existence, live for a hundred or more years and then disappear into the night train. Dr Schucman employs quaint poetic terms like transforming the world into a happy dream. She wants to bring people to the metaphoric gate of heaven, a place where people live in peace and joy. To her wishes, whether real or illusory, I say, Amen.
Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD October 19, 2006
I can be reached at: ozodiosuji@yahoo.ca (206) 853-4245
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Posted by Robot| 19.10.2006 06:45