Hamza Yusuf – Education, Philosophy And Science In Our Times
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the negative perception of society and the importance of acknowledging and measuring things that humans can change quickly. They also talk about the loss of community and the use of drugs to stimulate suicide, as well as the struggles of people with addiction and mental health. The speakers emphasize the need for everyone to take responsibility and take responsibility for their actions, and provide advice on how to practice their values and avoid physical boundaries.
AI: Summary ©
Salam, Aleikum salatu salam ala rasulillah.
In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate person peace be upon all of the prophets.
And upon our messenger, Prophet Mohammed.
First of all, I want to say that
one of the
benefits for me about hearing what I just heard
from somebody
have not considerably but an older age and I met and more life experience and more teaching experience
can come to the conclusions that I came to, which makes me realize that I might not be crazy after all.
And that in itself, I think is one of the benefits of hearing an alternative perspective
is that
what you surprisingly find is that there are actually many people out there that are having the same Inklings. Something's wrong, something's wrong with the present situation, the condition that we're in. And I think the primary reason for that is the extraordinary factor that is never
placed into their equation, which is the human soul. This is not in the social engineers equation. And I think the the thing that sums it up best, there was a book written by a man named Crosby
about his basic thesis was that the, the incredible control that has taken place in the last 500 years is based on the ability to measure things that human beings have have have, have obtained a power of measurement, they can measure the air, they can measure the ocean, they can measure the stratosphere, and measurement gives you power. In fact, the Arabic word to measure and to have power is the same word.
But one of the verses in the Quran says marco de la haka de, they didn't measure God.
They didn't measure God. He's not in the equation.
And one of the things that we see that is so prominent in modern society is the attempt to remove the sacred,
whether it be Christian sanctity, whether it be Islamic, whether it be any type
of vision of a sacred world, it is removed, and when it is included, it's included in a way that takes the teeth out of it.
It's included in a way that makes it an object of study. As an anthropology, we can look at the quaint natives, the quaint beliefs that they held, I took a course in in the university called
Magic, religion and science.
And you can see from the order
where they were taking you, in other words, we live in a magical period, where people believe that there were gods up on Mount Olympus.
And they did extraordinary things. And then we move to the religious period, a little more rationalism, introducing elements that the intellect could share, but still retaining fragments of that previous period, that period, the magical period. So the belief in angels, despite the fact that every culture on this planet has some concept of the angelic realm,
coincidence,
that every plant every culture on this planet, has some concept of the demonic realm.
And every traditional culture on this planet has some concept of the Sacred Realm.
But these are our remnants. And then the religious period was superseded by the rational scientific period. And then the religious person becomes irrational.
As if irrationality was not part of the human makeup.
Human beings have irrational elements. Why do you fall in love? Is there anything rational
about falling in love and yet a large part of my life
has been affected by the fact that I fell in love with a woman. And it was a completely irrational event. I couldn't tell you why it happened.
I couldn't even tell you how it happened. But it happened. And I've got some children running around as a result.
It was irrational.
But it was one of the best things that I ever did.
So we do do irrational things. And we shouldn't be ashamed of those irrational things that we do if there's some type of
satisfaction that comes out of it is if there's some meaningful
event, if there's some purpose,
if it fulfills something necessary to our humanity to our being, then we cannot say it's irrational. But what becomes irrational is a society that claims to be the most rational society on the planet. And yet, it has the most irrational premises at its foundation.
The premise that human beings can be controlled. The human being is a loose cannon on this planet.
And, and we have to thank God for that.
The human being is unpredictable.
The human being will do things because he's told he can't do them. Because it's impossible.
And sometimes, because he was told he can't do it, he does something extraordinary, or she does something extraordinary. That changes the world for the better, and sometimes for the worse. And that's being human as well.
The ability to make human mistakes, there are people now who would say,
what do we do? We've got this system.
What john Taylor Gatto just said it would seem as he's saying, throw the whole thing out.
And we're told there's no turning back the clock. You can't go against progress.
There are people that will say that they'll say this is human progress, you can't go against progress. And yet one has to question the intelligence
of somebody who recognizes that they've made a wrong turn down the wrong road, and it's taking them to the wrong destination, and they see a sign you see, you're going to a place called paradise, South Dakota.
And you turn on the wrong fork, and suddenly it says, *, Arizona.
You have to question the sanity of that person
to not turn his car around, and head back to where he made that mistake. Because that's a sign of intelligence, to make a mistake and to rectify the mistake that you've made. And if you can't do that, then you're stupid. And those are the people that are supposed to get the F's.
Really, we have to question a society now of lemmings headed for a precipice and nobody
is saying stop.
And the people that are saying stop, are called radicals are called extremists.
A lot of people don't realize that some of the greatest most celebrated people in these so called universities, these higher centers of learning were radicals in their time, some of them were killed, because of their ideas burnt at the stake, put under house arrest.
And then
we can honor them.
Like they used to say the only good Indian is a dead Indian.
That's what the Americans used to say the only good Indian is a dead Indian. Well now you can have Hollywood films in which Geronimo's the hero he's the hero the bad guys are these these stupid white guys.
We can do that now but Rowan to Geronimo when he was calling his people to rebel against control
of free people.
A free people. Look at the south western Indians. I want to take one example the Anasazi Indians.
They lived in a place there's a place now called Chaco Canyon.
Chaco Canyon. Nobody knows what it is. But there was a woman, she's an anthropologist who also happened to be an astronomer.
And she was one day, examining some glyphs up on a hill, on a rock, a mesa that overlook this, this site of these Native Americans. They weren't called Native Americans when they were living there. They got that title later.
I've never understood why
the Aboriginal peoples of America have accepted that idea of being a Native American.
And some haven't, but some do. And it always intrigued me that but they weren't, they obviously weren't called that then this woman was up on this rock. And she was looking at this glyph, it was a circle. And it had a spiral that looked oddly enough, like what we now know, as a galaxy. Galaxies are spirals, you always you see these pictures from the Hubble telescopes of these spirals? And you wonder about order. What Why is it a spiral?
I mean, why do you see that in a seashell? That same spiral down here on planet Earth? That what is that in nature? The seculars word for the divine? What is it that in nature that that like spirals?
In fact, our whole bodies are spirals, it's called a double helix.
It's everywhere.
So she was looking at this, and suddenly, there was a flash of light that went right through this spiral from the rock. And she looked back, and there was a slight sliver in rocks that had been placed there. And she thought, What's today, and she realized it was the equinox.
And she realized that she was actually seeing the zenith point.
And she said, Is this some kind of astronomical glyph? So she began to study it not no longer as an anthropologist, but now as an astronomer, which is, we have to ask, how do these coincidences happen?
You have to wonder, I mean, one of the fascinating things for me to in my travels around the world is to, to ponder the fact that you've got 6 billion people according to the control paradigms, latest estimate, I don't know who know that has anybody gone and counted 6 billion people.
But anyway, they extrapolate somehow, in that mystical science called statistics, which actually got an A in and I can't remember a whole lot, I remember the bell curve, and a few other things about that. But
which is part of the plan, you can take those classes do very well in them, and they don't serve you very well later on down the road. So
6 billion people, each one of them has a best seller, if they could just write it down in good language.
Every single person on this planet that's reached any age of maturity has a best selling novel of their life, if they could just write it down in good language. And the amazing thing about it is those other 5,900,000,000 or 99, whatever, those other they're all, in that novel, somehow. They're either
they're either supporting actors, or small time parts, or extras.
And each one of them has that going on. In other words, we have a cosmic event of incredible complexity going on here, which is the fact that each one of you is the center of the universe. each human being in this room is the center of the universe. And right now, I just happened to be part of your experience. Each one of you, I'm just part of your experience, I'm gonna leave and you go back to your lives. And hopefully, they're changed for the better a little bit, or we've learned something, or we go out to make some changes. But we have an extraordinary event going on here. And it took place in that moment in that Mesa, where this woman, an astronomer, who happened to be a
anthropologist studying that people saw this flash of light, she happen to be up there at the right time in the right place, and she had the right tools to understand what she had just witnessed. So they began to study this Chaco Canyon as an Astro astronomical site, and what they found out was
was the entire place was aligned not just to the sunrise and the sunset, to the equinox, the shadows all reach certain corners in this building and the moon rise, and there was the glyph work to determine moon rise and sunrise to determine moonset and sunset at different times of the year and one of the equations would take 18 years to work out. These were ignorant Native Americans,
ignorant Native American savages, savages, so they, they asked these anthropologists to say, What was this place? What did it mean? They're saying? Well, we don't really know. We don't know what it was. But they definitely knew something amazing. They had very high astronomical and geometrical sciences to work all of this out. They asked a Native American from the Hopi Indians, no degree, no diploma, had, in fact, they just said Native American. That was his qualifications to be interviewed.
And he was a
simple looking guy there with these, they asked him, What do you think this place was, he said, you know what this place was? He said, These people were people that looked into the heavens, and they saw older, and they wanted to bring a portion of that order, down to earth.
That's what they saw. They looked up in into the heavens and saw order, we used to say in this culture before it was taken over, as in heaven, As above, so below,
As above, so below, the idea that we live in an orderly universe, an ethical universe, one of my favorite statements ever by a theologian in the history of theology, is Kierkegaard statement, in which he said,
If every human being on Earth was led into heaven,
and only one man was condemned to *, and I was that man.
Then from the depths of the abyss of *, I would declare the eternal justice of God.
That's what these people were looking at. They were looking at adjust universe, a universe of purpose, not an eloquent dance to nowhere as a leading anthropologist at Harvard University called life on Earth, an elegant dance to nowhere
meaningless random events
of extraordinarily complex code coincidences, billions of them that happened to come together at the right time in the right moment.
To make this event, why is there something as opposed to nothing?
I was in a
observatory and we I took my boys to see this.
Planetary was at an planetarium and you'd saw the stars, and we looked up at this dome.
And here's how it began, the suddenly there was just a flash. And suddenly you were in this, all those swirls again.
And the man said, In the beginning, there was the big bang.
That's literally what he said.
The Big Bang didn't happen in any one place. It happened everywhere at the same time.
And you know what my boys said Suhana law
because they knew who did that.
children know that.
One of the things that Edina, Rosie said, if you take our rock, and you look at a two year old and you hide behind a wall, and you throw the rock over his head, the two year old will turn around, and if he can't walk, you'll crawl over to investigate where the rock came from. Why can't that two year old just believe it popped out of nowhere?
Why can't it do that? Why can't that two year old just simply believe that it popped out of nowhere, because inherent in human nature, is the belief that there for every effect, there is a cause for every effect.
There's a cause. And it starts right from the beginning.
And we're told that there was no cause we're told everything on this planet has a cause except the universe, there was no cause. Everything else has a material cause
you study any of the physical sciences in that they'll tell you there was a cause they'll even if you study physiology, they'll tell you about form and function, that every single thing in your body is designed for a function. The form is actually designed for the function and they talk about design, they use that word. And I always wondered about that, because I would ask them, who's the designer?
Natural Selection?
Well, can you tell me a little bit more about this character?
Because there's intelligent design. So his natural selection intelligent? Well, he works a lot at it, he makes a lot of mistakes. And but he improves each time. Well, that's intelligence. I mean, that's a lot more intelligent than a lot of human beings that I know. Right? Because Einstein said, the definition of insanity is keep doing the same thing over and over again, and expect a different result.
Which is what we call school reform.
Really, that's what it is. It's school reform.
So we want, we want to look up at the stars, again, they've done their best to take them out of the sky.
They keep artificial lights in California. Fortunately, the power we're losing it all. So one day, the San Franciscans in a walk out and say, My God, who created that they haven't seen the heavens in at least 30 or 40 years, there's kids there that don't even know that there's stars up there.
And they don't know that the sun shows up every morning. There's a lot of I'm serious. There's a lot of these people that are so disconnected to this universe, that they're not even aware that there's a thing called the solar system.
Again, a system you wonder about that system, that's an engineer's term.
IT systems who makes systems?
You can't blame that one on natural selection. The solar canals was excellent working here on Earth. Who got that one going? Right? I mean, really, there's questions here to be asked. These are called the big questions, but they're left out of those multiple choice tests.
Somebody once had the I, you know, this guy, he's called the telephone man. And this is a true story. He was a telephone man in a yellow book. And I was in a bookstore, Cody's bookstore in Berkeley.
And he came up to me, and there was a camera there. And he said, I'm the telephone book. And I can help you find what you're looking for, and apparently is a commercial, and you get $50 just for doing it. So he asked me, What are you looking for?
And I said, Actually, I was in this section. It's called phenomenology.
And I don't think it's in the phone book.
And he said, No, you'd be surprised. I'm really serious. He said, you'd be surprised he's looking it up. How do you spell that?
Th e, he looked it up. He said, it's not in here.
And I said, you know, God's not in there.
Right? God's not in there. I mean, the big things aren't in the phone book. You can't look them up in the phone book. And that's the truth.
It doesn't have all the answers all these manuals, they give you how to do this and how to do that.
They don't teach you how to nurture your soul, but they're very good at destroying the soul and and what we need to do as a community. All of us together, is we need to wage
we need to wage I don't want to use war, because when Muslims say war, they get in trouble.
But we need we need to wage I'll use Brian Wilson, sir, we need to wage unconditional peace
against a culture controlled by a handful of people and people say, well, that's that. Are you saying there's a conspiracy? I'm saying that you don't hang around long enough, after the movie to read the credits. There's no conspiracy about who made the film.
You just saw a film and that film had an agenda. And if you didn't stay long enough, you'll often miss what the agenda was. For instance, there was a film called executive decision with Steven Seagal and Kirk something or other and a whole bunch of other famous people.
People go and see just because their names are in there. They don't care what the movie is about, but they go to see those people.
This film was about terrorists, Muslim terrorists taking over an airplane. And interestingly enough, the white guy who goes to save the plane is using a plane that can latch on to another plane, which which was actually a pentagon project that was carried by Congress. And the Pentagon was upset about this.
So he latches onto the plane, and then a whole bunch of minorities are under his command, and they go into takeover and get these Arabs out there who are gonna blow up the entire east coast.
How they got that baggage onto that plane is another story. But that's Hollywood. So the interesting thing about this is,
if you stayed till the end of the credits, at the very end, not at the beginning, after Steven Seagal, and all those characters and the producer and this, they said, We'd like to thank the United States Air Force.
We'd like to thank the United States Navy.
We'd like to thank the
the Secretary of Defense
for making this film possible.
That's an agenda. And those people who didn't say long enough to see the credits don't realize that they were being affected by what they saw. There's propaganda there. You can everything that john Taylor Gatto told you, you can find in public libraries, the Library of Congress, or you can get it through interlibrary loan. Some of them you'll have a very hard time finding, and I'm really serious about this.
I tried to find a book called the evil eye, it took me two years. And the book was about
a lot of studies that were done about television, this man's premise was that he felt that there was a lot of brain mind control going on in television, but it's a fascinating book to see the studies of what they knew back in the 50s, about the severe effects that television were having on people. So where do we go beyond schooling? What do we do as, as people we are human beings here together in this in this auditorium. And we're here.
Because we have a sense
of the importance of what we have going on here. We're human beings. Some of us have children, I have children, I'm concerned about my children, I'm concerned about the world they're growing up in, I'm concerned about the commodification of human beings, I'm concerned about human resources. I don't know that one of these guys that went and shot this place up, he killed all these people in the human resource office.
Because they wouldn't give him
a month in advance pay,
so that he could buy Christmas presents for his children.
Now to imagine the stress that this man was under to actually because he was denied that month in advance, pay by the human resources
to go and do something that tragic because it is tragic, but the entire system is tragic. What produced that man is tragic. I lived in the Sonoran Desert, they don't have mass murderers, they don't have children shooting their fathers, they don't have children going to school and shooting their fellow children, they wouldn't even think of it, it wouldn't even occur to their mind or their hearts. They're not more human than we are. They're not less human than we are. They're human beings, but they're in an environment in which their minds have not been manipulated and controlled to the degree to which they're going berserk. They're running amok. Look at these, this last
killing. And I have a map here of the school killing, which is interesting, because they're all over the country. I mean, it's almost it's amazing how they're just, you know, what happens here, then here, and then here. And these are these are tragic events beyond belief. But if you look at these characters, when you see their pictures, the same glazed look in the eye. Those boys you saw that picture that boy in, in San Diego, he doesn't know what he did. He doesn't know why he did it. Our Prophet Muhammad said one of the signs of the end of time he said, Yeah, the naza man layer the real car to be my pattern. Well, I'm actually makuta the killer will not know why he's killing and the
one being killed will not know why he is being killed.
It's a hadith in Sahih Muslim.
The killer will not know why he's killing.
And the one being killed will not know why he's being killed. What is going on what has brought us to that point, we have lost community. We've lost
Family, these things have been taken away from people and they weren't taken with ease. People thought, read history, read what happened 100 years ago in the United States of America, what the farmers did. Now you look at the farms and in America, the highest rate of suicide is in farmers in the United States of America. They're committing suicide when I was a child, we we used to sing a song. Old MacDonald had a farm, E I E, I O. And on his farm, he had a cow, E I O. And what did the cow moo moo. Old MacDonald had his farm taken away from him because he couldn't pay the bank. His cow doesn't go moo moo anymore because he's got foot and mouth disease or mad cows disease.
Really, and all McDonald's has been replaced by McDonald's.
That's who replaced him that's who bought the family farm.
And he's gonna genetically alter,
alter the corn that you're eating, he's gonna genetically alter the food that you're eating in the health food stores in the United States, they have to put out things that say we cannot guarantee the absence of genetically modified food in our foods.
And if you have an ounce of intelligence, to think that this ignoramus that we call homosapien can improve,
can improve
on perfection
can improve on the God given seed, the seed of life, if you believe that man, this is called hubris in the ancient Greeks, this is what destroys man is his arrogance, his belief that he can do things that he is not qualified to do. And the sign of an intelligent man is to know his limits, to know his limits.
Really, we have the question what is going on out there and our silence is complicity. The Silent one is complicit in the crime. If you stand by and watch a crime happening, you're part of that crime. You're aiding and abetting that crime if you don't do something about it.
The Arab say the Hadith says a suku, to Adama to Riva silence is the sign of contentment. Silence is the sign of contentment. We should be standing up the Europeans went out and marched in large numbers to prevent genetically modified food. And yet these things people aren't even debating these things. Because we have a educational system that makes us docile, that makes us think like the the john Taylor Gatto said it makes people accept orders even if they're stupid. It makes them except there's people that
there was an old lady in England.
And she was pouring tea. She had her cream there.
And as she was born, she said, You know something very strange about this cream. When I was young, I remember cream going off really fast. But this cream doesn't go off anymore. It'll last two weeks.
My grandfather said he had an orchard. And he used to tell us if we found a worm in the apple. He said I wouldn't eat an apple a worm would need.
seriously think about that people. I don't want to eat a tomato that doesn't bruise.
You go into supermarkets now. And I you think you're in a science fiction movie. The colors are different. Where are they getting apples like that? I don't remember how it looked like that when I didn't remember strawberries like that. Seriously, you think this is what's happening? You're watching this thing happening before your eyes, we need to wake up and take our lives back.
And the first thing that you can do, the most empowering thing that you can do is take your children out of this system. Protect them, at least for the first 10 years, at least for 10 years. Don't be afraid to educate them in your homes, you can do it and they'll do it themselves. And they will surprise you at how intelligent they are. And you'll see that light in their eyes. It won't go out. After two or three years of public schooling. It'll still be there that brighter. You'll see that child still loves you. It isn't listening to the children at school, telling them how
How much they hate their parents and there are some children in school that they do hate their parents. They beat their children. They do terrible things to their children. And your children are listening to that. And with their pressure, they start hating their parents. They start contributing to the dialogue. My mom's so stupid. My dad's so stupid. You know what he made me do?
Children in in West Africa don't do that. They couldn't imagine saying that their parent was stupid. A child couldn't imagine that. The Arabian Prophet sallallahu Sallam once said to his companions, never curse your parents. And they said,
how could we curse our parents? It wasn't even in their frame of reference. Now look at the subtlety of this meaning. He said by cursing another man's parents,
you cause them to curse your parents. So don't curse another man's parents. But look how he began it. Don't curse your parents.
By cursing another man's parents, you cause them to curse your parents like these poor, unguided Afghani people that just blew up this Buddha that's been there for 1500 years, the greatest Muslims in the history of Islam were living in Afghanistan. And before that some of the greatest Buddhist
bank was a center of Buddhist learning. Many of those scholars became Muslims and actually contributed to the development of Islamic logic.
The greatest scholars never said go blow up those statues of Buddha. But what the press will not tell you is the reason how what brought that about, like those companions who asked how could we curse our parents? How did that Buddha get destroyed? It got destroyed, because for 20 years, the Afghani people have lived under the tyranny of being victims of a cold war game played between two giants called America and Russia, a peaceful people of proud people,
of people with great dignity of people of great strength of people that that are praised in the literature of the English. Further tenacity, one of the prime ministers said in in Parliament, how can we defeat a people speaking of the Afghan is when they look down our barrels, they see the gates of paradise.
How do we defeat those people?
The midwife an educated Afghani woman, a physician, Aviva, Azad, a beautiful Afghani woman, educated erudite knew her poetry newer culture was proud to be an Afghani. She was the obstetrician of my family.
She couldn't go back to her country, she came to this country to learn medicine to go back and practice medicine in her country. And the war broke out.
She was not ashamed of her people. She was proud of her people.
She was a literate person.
People don't talk about that, because history is in a vacuum. History is what cnn tells you. That's not history. That's what happened yesterday. Or today. Whatever the latest headline news is, it's told without any context is told without any ability for people to analyze and look at what's happened.
This is what people are given.
Read history. Really look back. All of this is new. If you want to know a homeschool. I'll give you a great historical example of somebody who was homeschooled a man named Ali and
he was the halifa, the cannith.
He was the fourth kid.
He was a brilliant man. He was a genius. He grew up in the house of the Prophet Mohammed says
he never went a day in school. He never spent a day in school, not one day, because he was in the greatest school, the school
of the Prophet Mohammed.
That's the Center for Muslim son as the tradition of their prophet their Prophet was a homeschooler.
He schooled his children fathima
when the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him was 12 years old, 12 years old. Imagine this. He took a trip with his uncle. to Syria have a month, a commerce trip a trip as a as a merchant? 12 years old. And look at our 12 year olds today. Look at them. It's disgraceful.
It's disgraceful, really.
Look at these poor kids and their victims and you have to see them as victims. And we're complicit in the crime that was done against them because we're more busy making a living and we forgotten we've already been given a life
we've been given a life by God
and your children or your wealth
and Malou will burn on Xena to higher to dunya children wealth and children are are the the ornaments the embellishments of life on earth
but to sacrifice your children for your wealth
if I had to give up one of the two I know which one I'd give up
and I don't have that much to give up. So it's a lot easier choice than it is for some people out there.
We need to retake our communities Really? You need to stop buying these at these corporate really don't don't buy from them don't wear the logos
don't wear the Nike swoosh Why should you give them free advertisement they're not gonna pay you.
Seriously Why? Why advertise for them take them off their their clothes or don't buy their clothes. Make your own clothes.
People used to make their own clothes you can buy buy cloth, go buy cloth, learn how to sew, sewing is a good thing to learn how to do
women feel stupid walking around and homemade clothes? Well, what do you think made you feel stupid? The same people trying to sell you those clothes that they made that look a lot stupider than homemade clothes. We've got kids walking with pants halfway down their bottoms.
With shoes that are so big. I can't I don't some of these young girls walking around my God. How do they walk? And we know it's bad for their spines.
Really, all of this, this is madness. You're not the Mad one. But if you have enough sense of who you are and who's you are, you have some individuality. You have some spine, you have some courage to be different. It takes courage to be different.
People asked me every time they say What about your children being homeschooled. What about socialization? I said, That's why we're homeschooling. For God's sakes. Get that through your brains. That's why I'm homeschooling. I don't want them socialized into that madness
amazes me that question always come What about every single person I've ever said, What? That you That's it? I don't want my my children there. I look out there. I see this kids the same age. They scare me when I was a little kid and I did some Huckleberry Finn things that I'm probably a little ashamed of. But when I was a little kid, if an adult looked at me with any type of disdain, I felt fear.
I'll tell you something, I feel fear looking at these eight year olds.
I really do. And one of them broke a bottle in front of my house and I went outside and I said to him, excuse me, what are you doing? He said, What's it to you, man?
This kid was 10 years old. If I had said that when I was 10 years old in Mill Valley, California. That man would have taken off his belt and whipped me and my mother would have thanked him for doing that.
It wasn't called child abuse in those days. Al Capone, one of the worst criminals in the history of America, according to the history books, was thrown out of school when he was 12 years old for punching a teacher in the mouth. Al Capone, he didn't bring a knife to school and knife his teacher. He didn't shoot him. He punched him in the mouth and he was the worst kid on the block.
Al Capone went on to have a extraordinary career in crime.
But he was a clever fellow he out people don't realize that Al Capone probably did more for the people of Chicago. then most of the multinational corporations that are centered in Chicago. He opened up soup kitchens and fed poor people that didn't they loved him Al Capone. You know why they got angry at him. For Old Owl, right? You know why they got angry at him. They loved out they really did. You can read the history. Al Capone At his trial. When they mentioned that he actually wore they had somebody up there who made his underwear homemade underwear. Al Capone was a rich guy. He wore homemade clothes.
That's what rich people do they they they don't you think rich people are buying that stuff at the gap.
Rich people have they pay somebody to make their own clothes.
They eat organic produce, right? Really they do. They eat
From homemade bowls, they don't buy mass produced stuff. You can make your own bowls. Rich people they right they're too busy ruining the world to make their own bowls so they paid other people to make their own bowls but the point is they don't need from mass produce things. the wealthiest people don't they really don't. Al Capone when it was mentioned that he wore silk underwear, blushed.
That's what the reporter said. In other words, the man had some shame in his heart.
We didn't even see Clinton blush.
The President of the United States when he lied to the American people didn't even blush.
Al Capone blushed because his underwear was mentioned.
When Clinton's private parts were mentioned, not his underwear mind use private parts the man didn't blush.
What does that tell you about Al Capone and the president united states? Well, I'll tell you something that tells me that I think Al Capone was probably a better person.
Really, I think he probably had something in his heart.
That gave him a sense of shame. Despite the fact he was a horrific human being.
The reason the Chicago people went against dow components because he killed seven men, allegedly
not it wasn't the killing of the gangsters they could care less you know, what really upset them. He had his cronies dresses, policeman.
That's where our went too far.
That's what really troubled them. The idea of a police officer being a mafioso. In other words, it was too much even for the people of Chicago.
Seven people.
And the people of Chicago were up in arms. We have seven people being killed every hour in Chicago now, really, I mean, look what's going on out there. And people don't they're no longer shocked at these things. My mother told me who grew up in the 1930s, in San Francisco, California, that if a person died, it was front page news for at least a month.
If a person was killed, murdered, it was front page news for at least a month. Why have we allowed this to happen?
Really, something very, very wrong has happened. And what it is, is that your souls are dying. We're literally dying of suffocation, spiritual suffocation, our souls are dying. And, and before the lights are out completely, I would advise all of you to reject this, and to commit your lives to turning the tide. Because the danger of people that can see things another way and have the courage. And the motivation to set out to change those is that very often they succeed. That's why those people are dangerous. People that can see things the way they should be, and not the way they are. Those people are dangerous people. And I hope I'm a dangerous man.
I really do. I hope I'm a dangerous man. And I hope all of you will commit to being dangerous people.
a danger to what's wrong out there.
a danger to what is wrong out there. And I'll tell you something, you can begin it. If you look in here, if the average person here even has two children.
And they raised them to break the cycle to be different to reject it. That can change the history of Toronto.
Really, it can change the history of Toronto and Toronto can change the history of Canada. And this is the way it begins. It begins with an understanding of the power of one because one is the greatest number. It is the greatest number. It's God's number. It's a powerful number. And an idea can change hearts.
An idea can change hearts and if an idea is right, and it's true, it should change hearts. And if it's not, it shouldn't. But we're being bombarded by people who have the power now to inflict on us ideas that are dangerous to our hearts. And they're doing it to our children. So my advice to all of you, to all of you is to turn off your commercial televisions. This is a first and major step in changing the conditions of your households. Turn off your and this is an act of courage. It's an act of courage. It's the coward that allows others to amuse himself. You see, and I agree wholeheartedly. I once heard somebody say
that they'd never been bored in their life. And it always troubled them when they heard people say I'm bored.
children learned boredom. I've never seen my children bored. I've never once I've never heard them say I'm bored. I haven't heard that.
I haven't seen that. Let them run around and do what they want. You put them in a classroom for eight hours a day in training and preparation to living a life of sitting behind a computer terminal for eight hours a day being bored stiff.
Really, and and think that this is life. No, there are there are alternatives out there people, be creative, be creative, there's alternatives. It doesn't have to be this way. And if that's the only message that you take from tonight, it's enough. It does not have to be this way.
We have the power and the ability to change and we have to do that. We have to change
and we have to listen to our hearts. Our Prophet, peace be upon him said listen and take advice from your heart, even if others give you advice.
What is your heart telling you
about what you see out there? If it's not telling you that something's seriously wrong, then as a cardiologist, I would say your hearts dead.
I'm not a cardiologist I'm actually a cardiac nurse.
So I spent a lot of time with cardiologists and, and a cardiologist will tell you your hearts dead if if it's not registering any movement. There's nothing moving in the heart. It's dead, the physical heart and the spiritual heart.
And if your heart is dead, then no like the photon says in the law, the motiva God brings life to the earth after its death. And our scholars say the earth here also means the human heart. Our children's hearts can be brought back to life, it's going to take some some serious measures, resuscitation, sometimes defibrillation.
But it can be done, they can be brought back to life, because humans are amazing. They have awakenings. I had a car accident. That's what brought me out of sleep that I was in, I had a very powerful car accident. And I was confronted without my own mortality. And that's why they don't want to tell you about death. They don't want to let you think about death. They want to feel your lives was empty songs, empty, they'll replace real friends, for friends on a TV sitcom that know nothing about you. They don't care whether you live or die. If you want to know if you live in a community, then somebody said the the best way to assess that is ask yourself, will the person at the grocery
store, realize if you happen to drop dead today that you're no longer buying groceries there?
That's how you know if you have any community whatsoever. Will the person that you buy gas from will the person that that does this or that for you? Will they even remember that you were a person in their life?
Because that's what's been taken away from people. We need community. We need community. We are communal beings. We're beings of community. Every religious tradition, the Sangha, the Buddhists,
the the oma of the Muslims, the ecclesia of the Christians, every religious tradition has a sense of community of bringing people together. And we're difficult to be with each other, you have to set aside differences. Sometimes we are hard to be together that's part of being human. It's learning to deal with that obstinate person over there and that contrarian over there, and you could be the contrarian yourself, and they're having a hard time dealing with you. But that's what life is about.
It's a it's about setting aside differences. For a greater good, coming together, listening to each other.
I, we were at a poetry recital in New Mexico. And we had a spectacular night, everybody read a poem, and we had a beautiful night at Dar Al Islam with all these teachers. And when and when we finished, I said that I would just like to have a moment of silence, I think or a prayer for all those people out there watching television right now.
Who are deprived of the joy of human companionship of sharing poems together, of sharing thoughts together.
And you know what a man came up to you after he was a teacher and he was almost in tears. He said to me,
when you sit down, I just realized something. I've been spending the last 20 years of my life
in front of a TV set every night, and this is the best time that I've had.
And it's not condoned that it happened at borders, don't let them Co Op that because they'll do it. They'll tell you come down, have a poetry thing and we'll even give you borders poetry thing and you can advertise us on the thing make your own coffee houses really be the people of creativity.
The people have creativity. And and the thing I'll end on two notes. One is john Taylor Gatto said they want you to be docile. They want you to obey orders and it reminded me
Have a Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him in which a group of men went out. And he put one of the men as in a mirror over the others, which is a leader on this journey.
And this man is probably a humorous fellow. He told his companions see that fire, I'm commanding you to jump into the fire.
And they looked at each other. And they said, the whole reason we became Muslims was to save ourselves from the fire.
So we're not going to do it.
He said, I'm the Amir. I'm the ruler. They said, well, let's go back and ask the prophet of God. So they went back to the prophets a lot is that um, and they told him the story and he said, la Titi mahalo confy Matthew,
never obey a creature, if it means disobeying the Creator. Never obey a creature, if it means disobeying the Creator. And I would put forth that we are in gross disobedience of natural laws,
laws that are part of nature, we're in a state of disobedience, and we need to atone. Really, we need to redeem ourselves. All of these things that are happening on this planet, I believe that we live in a moral universe that, that there's reasons these things are happening. There's reasons why the ozone has a hole in it. There's reasons why the weather is no longer like it used to be. There's reasons why you don't see birds and bees anymore in many parts of, of our lands. There's reasons why our forests are disappearing. There's reason why our lakes are poisoned and toxic. There's a reason why our food now kills 20,000 people in the United States every year
20,000 people
more than was killed in a year in Vietnam, in their own war statistics are dying from their, the food they're eating.
There's reasons for all these things, because we're out of balance. And we forgotten what the heavens are. The heavens are order, and we need to bring that order down here. And there are many ways to do that. I'm a Muslim, and I'm committed to Islam, but there's people in here that have their wisdom traditions. And if those wisdom traditions are working for them, then the Quran says, Yeah, Khalid kita, bluster Manisha hacer takimoto to an NGO, or people of the book, you're not on anything until you practice your Torah until you practice your gospel.
Guidance has been given to humanity, really guidance has been given. And everybody agrees on certain basic things except the control paradigm out there. They're the only ones that don't agree and the majority of people in Canada and America the majority of people according to the dominant paradigm, statistics, believe in God, believe in an afterlife. So why aren't these things ever even discussed in our public schools? Why aren't there even discuss? So my advice to all of you really is don't obey any creatures, if it means disobeying your Creator. And if you want to know what disobedience to your Creator is, the prophet said disobedience to the your Creator is what doesn't feel right in
your heart.
Listen to your heart.
Listen to your heart.
I thank you very much and apologize for going on little longer than I probably should have. And I hope that that you do what the Quran tells you to do, whether you're a Christian or a Jew or a Buddhist or a Muslim. The Quran gives a beautiful piece of advice and it applies to every human being and living your stem your own and out of your own center. Those who listen to what's been said and they follow the best of it. Thank you very much.