The divine man sows on the moon of the soul for the fulfillment of the world. While all prophets - sung and unsung - are divine men, no one knows whom the last prophet shall be because no one has the complete script of Gods purpose of creation and elasticity of eternal action. As long as existence thrives on planet earth, faces shall fill our space who enthrone and question enthroned norms of life. Not the prophet, but what empowers his essence, is the saviour of man. Not the reformer, but what informs his convictions of reformation is the hope of the world. And when any prophet, god or reformer arrives to do some stirring and noble work in the world, our eyes cannot be fixed on his appearance if we are wise. We look inwards to estimate the beauty which beautifies his pious significance, aiding him and the world. Jesus and Mohammed are not the saviours; it is the soul which made and uplifted their personalities to immortal relevance in the cause of man, which several thousands of men and women too truly possessed and used, that boasts any spiritual magnetism of saving humanity. The divine man may or may not profess any religion; his beliefs are an invisibly packaged bail of virtues shown by all mighty men in history, to clean some filth, to grant man his freedom. It was after the death of Jesus that men tagged themselves his followers. It was after the departure of Buddha that his name inspired a pious word in the dictionaries of mortals. The divine man is a man instigated by nature to live an unusual life capable of teaching the world some truth highly required to add another brick to the construction of the infinite Hall of eternity. He may be a Christian, he may be a Muslim, the divine man is a seer of seen and unseen eye-sores; he may be neutral to formal faiths, the divine man is a faith faithfully faithful to the Faith of all faiths. The divine man does not split hairs. He knows every strand of hair occupies its position to adore the head. Places and persons matter not to him. He is the microphone of reason doing the will of heaven among men. He cannot beguile, he cannot use his office to acquire wealth for himself; his creed is against greed. His ideology is kindness to all. When the sons and daughters of the poor from regions of the world dye their joy in the tears of the fear political leaders foster, it is his place as the intervention of God in the affairs of men, to improvise pretty options that make social hindrances impotent at precluding their ordinate aspirations. His school, if he builds any, must not be established with restrictions forbidding the attendance of the downtrodden from all paths of life. The man of God is a man of the devil if the institutions which the yearly accumulated wealth of the people and the good-will he boasts from the patronage of the masses enhance cannot cheaply or freely educate the masses. It is not his place to worry about the cost of maintaining the institutions the money and the good-will from congregants build; the passion that finance the take-off shall attract the task of maintenance if he has faith in the hope immense academic mercy on the academically unprivileged shall bring the world. If I ever I grow into an influential personality tomorrow, my influence shall be employed to prodigally help the noblest cause of the world, I always tell myself each time I see an influential man investing his energy to harm the collective destiny of the world. Whatever the divine man creates is for all of mankind. He does not pray for the expansion of any denomination or sect; his concern is man, not men from this or that religion, sect or denomination. He cannot view any man as anything other than as man. He favours a Christian or a Muslim because this also a fragment of the humanity is. His house, if he is a landlord, cannot make it a taboo for those outside his party, race or nationality to dwell. Followers of all prophets are his neighbours and as a friend to these, he morally pooh-poohs on any evil dished from their ends. The divine man is the Muslim who will never slaughter any man for religious reasons. The divine man is the Christian who will never direct ill-wishes at those his pastor says are the causes of his failure. The divine man is the herbalist whose herbs fetch others health. The divine man is the philosopher, teacher and writer whose thoughts, teachings and writings chart redeeming course of global joy. Every folly is redeemable; every bias defies reform. With fools I can hope to cope, but all minds at pal with prejudice dig the world an abyss more gravely than any grave. The divine man is the glue that holds all factions. He knows the vision of every division and owns the means of ensuring their realization in his all-encompassing mission. All religions are his; all people and nations are his own. He alone nature gives for the world to trust for the calving of a far prettier niche for man in the violent scheme of things by man. He does not live to survive; the divine man cannot adjust to lies to cream his cake. He cannot hide any truth to live his home unuprooted. The divine man is an authority on his own, and all authorities may necessarily pay homage to him; he cannot expect any immoral homage from fellow men if his consecrated and sacred grandeur sources from himself. He loves kings, he respects all villas of power as long as these say or do nothing which diminishes the hope of man. He is an upholder of all laws of man, and also an exception to them as the most reliable lover from God. He shall question the anointed’ and provoke reformers to the valley of accountability. The divine man is a valiant soldier whose military courage ranks among the best no army can conquer without pulling a trigger! He is the smallest island daring the most violent ocean-rage; the deepest valley flouting the order of all ethically dis-oriented Everests. The divine man loves the expectation that paints some acts as heaven-bound, but he cannot encourage men to think themselves qualified for heaven while they desecrate the piety, pollute the beauty and loot the property of earthlings planet. He wants men to make heaven by merit, knowing well that God is not dubious, that though his mill grinds slowly, it grinds exceedingly well still. His only requirements for making heaven are generalized kindness and absolute morals. If he shall hurt, with kindness and morals let the divine man do. The visible evil of man causes invisible trauma he prays and fasts against; let man behave well and charge the world with well-doing and see if the heaven he goes to for redemption cannot be found in himself. Let no man threaten others with the ambition of evil doers! Fortune and misfortune are two interwoven events of existence. Where is the superior mortal, who is wholly delivered from global disaster? Jesus Christ invited only those with no sins to haul stones at the harlot. Where is the human mortal with a clean bill of moral perfection? We love our loved ones in truth I know; but how can our loved ones be truly loved if our love merely shows in words and hardly in deeds? I am surrounded by priests who repeat incessantly that their kingdom is not of this world, and yet they lay their hands on everything they can get, says Napoleon Bonaparte of Europe. Love is the only liberty sought for true existence; liberality the only tool that sails and scrutinizes its harmful excesses. The divine man does not only believe in, he knows and have reasons to insist that God exists. He does not love God by only faith, he feels him by reasonable reasons and positive actions. If a man believes not in God, and consistently says as anchored on his knowledge that God does not exist, he under-rates his own being and denies the presence of the hole through which the heavenly eyes see and stir the world from his soul. He affirms his own non-existence. No truly wise man dupes his own conscience by belatedly believing what he does not know; and that something is unknown does not mean it is not in existence. We laugh at explorers who say they discover rivers and mountains dwelling at others natural addresses long before their great grand parents were born; we despise scholars and philosophers whose personal safety makes them dangle deliriously and sacrifice truth on fear-fostered thesis they mean to say, I will believe in God even if I have no reasons to prove He exists. I will say He is even if he is not what the world thinks him to be. To believe in him and say that he is shall positively favour me in case He lives; I may pay dearly for it if I conclude otherwise and in the end He actually exits! At least, the inaugural speech of a particular Professor of Philosophy elected as Dean of the Faculty of Arts in one of the worlds Universities bears witness to this. He implies in his documented speech that it is wiser to believe in God to forestall all accruable dangers that shall befall those who do not, in case there is God, noting that the believer loses nothing by believing in case God does not exist. I inwardly shuddered with shattered feelings of pitiable scholarship ignorance as I listened to this officially fostered philosophical fool in the early 2000s. I love scholars whose folly is published. I admire philosophers whose sagacity can be told. H.L. Mencken says, Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die, Ill walk up to God in a manly way and say, Sir I made an honest mistake. I cannot encourage anyone to agree with me that God exists; but I refuse to be convinced that He does not exist. It is a mark of divinity in man to bathe his senses in the ray of light that opens his soul to secrets that make him think that God exists or that He does not. I cherish the lines from Oscar Wildes De Profoundis: I have hills far steeper to climb; valleys much darker do pass through. And I have to get it all out myself. Neither religion, morality nor reason can help me at all. Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those born for exception not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something in what one becomes. It is well to have learnt. Religion does not help me. The path that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made with hands, and within the circle of actual experience is my world made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found it not merely by beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also. When I think about religion at all I feel as if I would have to found an order for those who cannot believe; the confraternity of the faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling might celebrate with un- blessed bread and a chalilce empty of wine. Everything to be true, must be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating. Only that is spiritual which makes its own form. If I may not find its secret within myself, I shall never find it, if I have not got it already, it will never come to me. Reason does not help me. It tells me that the laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which I have suffered a wrong an unjust system. But, somehow, I have got to make both of these things just and right to me. And exactly as in art, one is only concerned with what a particular thing is at a particular moment to oneself, so it is also. In the ethical evolution of ones character. I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me Man must make everything which happens to him good for him: Christianity is good for Christians, Buddhism is good for Buddhists, atheism is good for atheists, humanism is good for humanists, and Samaformism is good for Samaformists. Every man believes something; an invitation to God by men is often a call to their own religions. It is fixed foolishness or hideous crime that makes man to search for the God he already owns in the spiritual form flown by the banners of another soul. Do not believe what I hold, but lose not what I believe in your own soul. Hate all religions and berate all spiritual forms, but do not yield yourself into any disadvantage that makes the commencement of a belief from you and for you an impossible feat. There is no piety in pursuing the spiritual paths of others soul; there is no divinity in any humanity sourced from routinal service and worships. Unbelievers of critical stands who question in truth cannot pass as pagans. For paganism is to swallow hook, line and sinker, the soul-detested hope that only the Redeemer of a sect, or of a religion, boasts the means of saving the world. Today, everything benefited from the world came from everyone from the world; a Muslim roasted the corn I ate; a Christian drove the cab that conveyed me from Surulere to Oyingbo; a Buddhist smiled at me when my all gave in to stress; an unbeliever served as a cashier at my bank last week; a pagan was among those I taught literature to this morning. These all already belong to God, man merely disturbs himself by worrying about their status. God is like an house wife who cooks and dishes meals to her children; and while the first dished plate seems special in the hands of the taker, the second and the third plates contain the same type of meal; so there is no sense in the felt-specialness of the child that takes the first plate since all plates contain equal mixture of ingredients that form the heated bulk of meals prepared by their mother, though served at different time, and to different persons. Different things inspire, or arrest the souls of different people; and while it may be by some grand design that this is so, men still impose their private spiritual inspirations on others at all cost; others whose religious beliefs differ from us are so much seen and taken as enemies that Epicurus was alarmed and said in one of his works, If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another. We have just enough religion said Jonathan swift, to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. Among gone and existing men and women of religions which most make and mar man, some truth oozes from the joyous tragedy of their essence. If religion is infallible, then man is. If man is redeemable, then his religions are not as infallible as He claims, -- to the effect that his redeemability is attacked by the fallibility, either of him, or of his religion. The pinnacle of mans morality is divinity; and whether or not he conforms to any popular form, the man is holy in addition to being religious if his heart works for popular good, and his life is a study in the culture of boundless ethical principles. How many religions there would be in the world if men continue to create new moral and spiritual movements from every worthy life that comes and goes? And does it mean that they are less helpful to the cause of the Creator, pretty minds whose lives and convictions outdo the exaggerated feats of grossly exaggerated few? It is not piety to seek divinity from factors external to one; the divine man has the root of his sermons, songs and faith in his own soul. Great it is if this schemed coincidence makes his sentiments similar to other prophets and priests. Greater is the inherent divinity if the felt piety hastens the death of old known truth; for, the arrival of every new prophet, while not necessarily rubbishing the impacts of the old prophets, is the necessary leap of man into the speeding ship of awesome eternity! The propelling moral force in all religious minds is campaigning for God. This is the essence for which He created man. To this moral force, all prophets and priests, professors and philosophers, radicals and laymen, owe their degrees and pedigrees. What the holy book tells me must first be true in my moral constitution before it can turn a followable spiritual guide for me. The souls which show the world the route to joy do so because they are one with their essence. And if what any religion preaches to me cannot be authenticated in me as some truth truthful in truth, what right do I have to manage it in me as if whatever spiritual truth I do desire, which is at present absent, is forever an unattainable spiritual end? The available cannot replace the desirable. Man may try to make a do with it, the beauty of what we truly desire shall fill the horizon of our longing with earnestness that makes the unappreciated expedient an ugly encounter we must divorce with all the force- character we bear. I hate to believe, I love to know. Belief is bane if it flogs our spirit with doubts; the only proof that something better is possible, which fittingly replaces the expedience-brought pander is the consistent inner repulsion we feel against any condition impious priests may have recommended as the best. Glue your all to it if your soul holds it is fine; but do not expect that your soul can be the only merchant of the heaven destined to profitably invest in the cause of life! Man is prophet to man. No prophet helps me more than other prophets may assist me. Those who quench my hunger with food, having no motive evil to the good of feeding the hungry are prophets. Those who offer abodes to the homeless are not being prompted by any spiritual forebears but their own souls. How many prophets now in heaven? One? Two? Three? Wrong answers! Men and women who pass as prophets include consistent ethical figures in the dusty desserts of humble fame. They too are prophets, divine men whose soul-path defeated the Persian Empire. They too are prophets, Americans whose valour and bravery questioned the British dark side. They too are prophets, intrepid journalists whose constant monitoring of social events expose the evil of leaders. And though these too may like or dislike formal prophets, colleagues they all are in the noble business of dragging eternity to all sights! What nobler roles played by any prophet in mortals history than deeds dialing hope with tears, blood and sacrifices to encourage the prevailing of mans cherished moral sentiment? Disaster makes a man more mentally firm than any brand of comfort; sorrow sows in the deep, some tree of creeds whose fruits preserve the soul in the route to self and collective redefinition and realization. Oscar Wilde, again in De Profundis says, If after I am free, a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. I can be perfectly happy by myself. With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy? Besides, feasts are not for me any more. I have given too many to care about them. That side of life is over for me, very fortunately, I dare say. But if after I am free a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me share from it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would come back again and again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me. But that could not be. I have a right to share in sorrow, and he who can look at the loveliness of the world and share its sorrow, and realize something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact with divine things, and has got near to Gods secret as any one can get. The elasticity of the soul, no mathematician can calculate; in those whom the soul casts its moon to the fullest, beauty is the unit of possible conjecture any permutation is foredoomed at knowing. Acts which are beautiful in the world belong to no religion, belongs to no culture; they are the souls. And the unknown face who spreads a ray of smile-- a smile which long ago I never knew when I wore sadness as a right--redeems more than any doctrine of man; the man who, with mercy judges his fellow, neglecting his weaknesses, in that simple but strictly spiritual gesture, is the messiah we love; the providers of food for the poor, and homes for the homeless respond to the spiritual stimulus of the soul to place themselves on equal plain with any prophet known in the clumsy history of man. What the prophets tell the world is part of the world, belongs to the world. And that each native of the world, beast or man, boasts poverty in their possession does not make a given prophet into the Caretaker of heaven and earth; in fact, the prophet cannot redeem, cannot save the world; he can only salvage himself, and from the fine example of this largely published victory of himself, the world may learn and save itself. More than he is happy, his spiritual status is our general envy, the prophets fulfillment lies in the truth that he is worthy of the beauty he preaches or preached. And that nothing as a prophet exists for the wisest of men, to point out from his open or secret conducts that may later be worthy of moral shame. -Culled from THE DIVINE MAN, a chapter in my second book, IMMORTAL INSTRUCTIONS, published by MASSIVE INSPIRATIONS BOOKS in 2010.
Posted on: Fri, 23 May 2014 19:04:06 +0000
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