Mirza Yawar Baig – Benefit of Perspective
AI: Summary ©
The importance of writing in life is crucial for updating experiences and learning from long before. The speaker discusses the need for individualism in society and recommends reading books for deeper understanding of the world. The world is deception, and success is over. The importance of protecting from punishment and earned rewards is emphasized.
AI: Summary ©
My dear brothers and sisters,
this is the second in a series that
I started,
the week before last
and which will continue for
the next few weeks,
which
the title of the series is
the road less traveled.
And it's a series in which I am
going to attempt to try to
bring together
and map
our Islamic theology and belief
on what is happening in the world
of technology
as well as
a result of the an outcome of that
in the world politically
and economically.
So those of you who are interested,
come and listen.
The most important thing
that we need
in order to give directions,
in order to chart
a path
is perspective.
For example,
if somebody calls me and says, I want
to come to ISWM,
please give me directions.
What do you think I will say?
I will ask him, where are you?
He said, I don't know where I am.
So then I have 2 choices.
I can tell him,
from wherever you are,
get yourself to
the Amtrak station in Springfield,
and from there,
these are directions.
The point I'm making is
that unless
you have 2 things,
2 pictures in your mind simultaneously
where I am
and where I want to be.
You cannot give directions, you cannot you cannot
have a direction.
It's not possible,
and that ability is called perspective.
Perspective is the ability to hold 2 pictures
simultaneously in your mind
where you are
and where you want to be.
Without that, it's impossible
to give any directions.
Physically, mentally, or spiritually, we need awareness
Only with perspective
can we say what investment we need to
make to reach
our chosen destination,
and that is why we need
the 3 skills that I mentioned by Ras
Kuppa,
reflection,
introspection,
and abstract conceptualization.
These are critical life skills which must be
learned,
and to the best of my knowledge, nobody
teaches this in your regular education system.
All of these skills
need an attention span
longer than that of a monkey or a
goldfish
which is the average duration
of a TikTok
or Youtube shot
videos.
The most popular
social media.
So your choice is either
to pick the most successful monkey or goldfish
that you know
and make them your role model
or
develop
the ability
to focus attention on worthwhile goals
long enough to achieve them.
It's our life.
It's our call
because it is our.
Today, we have situations where
people who come to
lectures,
people who come to listen to
and,
you know, advisory sessions.
Nobody forced them. They came,
and then they will dictate to the speaker
how long he should speak.
I see.
Your choice.
Do it.
But if you think
that anything worthwhile
can be learned in 30 seconds,
good luck to
you.
Our species, the whole sapiens, have been on
earth for about 300000 years.
But when did civilization
begin?
In a 2020
article in Forbes,
the millionaire's magazine,
Remi Blumenfeld
writes,
years ago,
the anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a
student
what she considered to be the first sign
of civilization in a culture.
The student expected Margaret Mead to talk about
clay pots and tools for hunting or grinding
stones or religious artifacts,
But, no,
Mead said that the first evidence of civilization
was a 15,000 year old
healed
fractured
femur
at an archaeological
site.
The femur is the longest bone in the
body which is from the hip to the
knee.
In the wild, a broken femur
is a short death sentence
because any animal,
we are animals,
if you break a fever
then you're dead because you can't move.
You can't hunt, you can't
gather, you can't escape,
you wait to die of starvation or if
you are lucky,
something else will lead you, which is faster.
A broken femur that healed
is evidence that someone had taken the time
to stay with the one who fell,
bound up the wound,
carried the person to safety, and tended the
person
through recovery, which
we are talking
easily weeks,
not days.
Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization
starts.
Now looking at our current state of what
we like to call civilization
where we have not only legitimize but sanctified
fulfilling of personal desires
and where the highest ROI, return on investment
is
in endless war
and human life is suffering as no value
at all.
I wonder what Margaret Mead would have said.
If caring for someone is the mark of
civilization,
what would you call the deliberate annihilation of
people?
Passing over the centuries like you would pass
over days, we come to about 5000 years
ago from 300,000 to 5000
when you find the first writing which is
the Mesopotamian
cuneiform
script invented in Sumer,
present day Iraq,
at about circa 3,200
BCE,
which is the time that Ibrahim alaihi salam
lived in the world,
and this can be traced to the present
day alphabet.
Writing is crucial because
that is what distinguishes us from animals
and enables us to build on the work
of previous generations.
All creatures have languages. They communicate. They have
a life experience. They remember some of them
for a long time, and they even teach
some of them to their offspring, this is
how predators teach offspring to hunt and so
on and so forth. They learn, it's not
a,
one skill.
But none of them have the critical
tool to send the time and generational barrier
so that their experience can be recalled and
relived and learned from
long after they were.
That tool is writing.
In the 300000
years that our species have existed on the
earth, we only know what happened to them
from about 5000 years ago,
and that's why reading is so important. Because
when we read, we see that all success
has been the result of collaboration
and mutual consideration.
Our modern society here in America and all
over the world, however, is primarily based on
individualism.
In the words of one of my dear
friends, he says individualism
as a philosophy
draws from all corners of the lower nafs,
the base desires,
which is the same for all animals.
It is hedonistic,
myopic,
egoistic,
arrogant,
selfish, self preserving,
all masquerading
as positive elements
for self realization.
Human society
is built on cooperative
control of individuals for the greater good.
No wonder that the social order has unraveled
within a couple of generations
since the idea of individualism
went mainstream.
In the American context,
this manifest as arrogance,
which is disguised as self esteem
and given the status of
religious ideology
that feeds into the tyranny of feelings,
which super legitimizes
subjective feelings to the level that if a
person feels a certain way, that is enough
for him or her, not only to act
according to that feeling, but to expect everyone
else to subordinate themselves and their feelings to
his feelings
so that his feelings are not hurt.
And Batista
says very eloquently,
my feelings are justified because they are my
feelings.
I don't need anything else.
My feelings are justified because they are my
feelings.
My feelings at this moment
take precedence
over all other considerations.
I have the right to express my feelings
any way I see fit.
And if I believe that you are causing
my feelings, meaning you're causing me to feel
bad, then you are obligated
to modify your behavior
in order to align with my desired emotional
state.
This
is simply not acceptable in any civilized society
including Islam,
which demands actually the opposite.
That I must subordinate my feelings to the
feelings and needs of others
so that they are not hurt or disrespected
in any way.
And if that means
some inconvenience to me, then so be it.
That is what consideration means.
That is what caring and respect mean.
But in a society that glorifies individualism,
caring for others is at best a secondary
matter.
So we are looking at trying to make
a 180
degree turn, complete opposite direction,
while the external environment, including in some cases,
the law of the land is against this
turn.
What makes this even more urgent
is that whether we like it or not,
this is our problem
as much as that of the societies.
We think
that by studying on zoo,
by homeschooling,
by shielding our children,
you are somehow going to take them out
of the
effect
of society
and preserve them and protect them.
My submission is please wake up.
Please wake up.
This blindness is no good.
You cannot
protect your chill from
in from from being in the society, and
from the effects of society.
In the same way that you cannot protect
them from getting wet
if they fall into the sea.
The only way to protect them
from drowning if they are in the sea
is to teach them how to swim.
There's no other way. There is no other
way. You cannot weld a life jacket onto
the body of your child, doesn't work.
Teach them to swim.
Live in society
and live in a way where they become
role models,
not statistics.
Our children are involved whether you like it
or not.
They are involved no matter how much how
many hours he's sitting inside his house on
zoom,
he's involved. She's involved.
Make no mistake.
I hope you don't have to remember my
words in a negative way
for the on your life.
Seriously.
Because that is why
and if you don't understand this, you will
see this when you grow old,
and this will come home to visit you
in very painful ways.
And that is why you need to deal
with it now.
May Allah make it easy for us.
Aldous Huxley,
the 2 famous authors I wanna talk to
you about, Aldous Huxley
and George Orwell.
Aldous Huxley wrote a book called The Brave
New World, and this was published in 1932.
And George Orwell wrote a book called 1984,
which I read when I was in high
school.
Now Aldous Huxley in his book, Brave New
World, argues that much of the anxiety that
drives modern society
can be traced to, listen carefully,
a widespread
belief in technology as a futuristic
remedy for problems
caused by disease and war.
This was written in 1932.
A wide spread belief in technology
as a futuristic
remedy for problems caused by disease and war.
That technology can solve all my problems is
nothing new.
You think you are smart?
You think Elon Musk is smart? Aldous Huxley
rose that in
1932.
Huxley said, this reliance is naive,
stupid,
and in his book he challenges
this belief in technology taken to its extreme.
George Orwell, the author of 1984,
that's the name of the book, imagines the
world
which believe me looks very much like the
present.
I recommend both of these books as required
reading for you to understand our world.
I quote from
a passage
by Neil Postman in something called amusing ourselves
to death.
He compared Huxley and Orwell.
He said,
what Orwell feared were those who would ban
books.
What Huxley feared was that there would be
no reason to ban a book for there
would be no one who wanted to read
one.
Sounds trivial, right?
Ask yourself how many books did you read
the last one year?
That this
All feared
those who would deprive us of information.
Huxley feared those
who would give us so much
that we would be reduced to passivity and
egoism.
That's what social media has done to us.
6, 7 hours a day on social media
at the end of the day ask yourself,
what did I achieve?
You did not achieve 0, believe me. You
did not if you are achieve 0, you
would be very lucky. You did not receive
0.
You trashed
6 or 7 hours of an unrenewable
asset called your life
so that somebody else got rich on your
life.
Not 0.
Not 0 at all.
What?
Orwell feared
that
the truth would be concealed from us.
Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned
in a sea of irrelevance.
Orwell feared that we would become a captive
culture.
Huxley feared that we would become a trivial
culture.
In 1984,
people are controlled
by inflicting pain. That's the theme of the
book.
In the brand new world, they are controlled
by inflicting pleasure.
Guess which is the
highest
grossing
entertainment industry.
It's a four letter word,
begins with the letter p.
I'll let you finish it.
In short,
Orwell feared
that we
that what we hate
will ruin us.
Huxley feared
that what we love
will ruin us.
Our brothers and sisters,
for us, the challenge is to draw
ourselves and our people back from this abyss,
from the edge of this cliff.
The reason these hedonistic philosophies succeed is because
they free 1 or they seem to free
you from all restraints,
and they raise self indulgence to the level
of a virtue and a right.
They're very seductive and persuasive.
Our way seems to be restrictive and painful,
which it is in a manner of speaking,
but that is essential for the greater good
in this world as well as the hereafter
the afterlife.
However, if you have been raised pandering to
your animal instincts,
this doesn't seem attractive,
and that is why we need schools
which can catch them young,
which teach them the right stuff because too
much damage has been done.
This is one piece of the perspective where
we are.
Now for the second piece of the puzzle,
we need to keep our goal in mind
where do you want to be,
and for that there is no guide better
than the kitab of Allah.
And Allah
said,
Every soul will taste death.
If you are born, you will die.
And you will only receive your full reward
on the day of judgement.
Whoever is spared from the fire and is
admitted to Jannah will indeed triumph. Only that
person who's spared from the fire and entered
into Jannah.
Only one,
nobody else.
And Allah said, whereas the life of this
world is no more
than the delusion of enjoyment.
Now nothing can be clearer than this. Allah
mentioned 3 things.
1, everyone will die,
and we'll be called to account
and rewarded
or punished. We ask Allah to save us
from his punishment.
Number 2,
success
is to be protected from punishment and be
granted paradise, Jannah, on the day of judgement.
No other
no other criteria, no other standard.
Success is not what happens in the world.
Success is over there.
Number 3,
the life of this world
is deception.
What appears is not real.
What is real is hidden.
So let's begin with the first statement
of Allah, every soul will taste death.
As I stand today,
we got news
of the passing away of
Hafiz
Sheikh
Mohammed Omar,
age 32.
The son of our very, very dear
friend and brother,
Sheikh Salim Sheikh,
who was with us for maybe 25 years.
And when I heard about his
this death of his son, I remember the
of
Suratul Suratul Kahf,
the conversation between
Khidr Alaihi Salam and Musa Alaihi Salam,
the three things
that Musa Alaihi Salam experienced in the company
of,
and the last of them was
the treasure which was buried under the wall,
and then Khuzar alaihi salam repaired the wall.
And when Musa alaihi salam asked you for
the reasons,
Musa Alaihi
Salam said to him, Allah
protected
the legacy, protected
the inheritance of these kids,
and the reason was
Their father was a good man.
Father's gone. Father's a good man. The reason
I remember this was because Salim lived here
in America for 22 or 23 years without
going back to Pakistan.
This kid was 32 when he died. Which
means that the last time that Salimbai saw
his son was when the son was 8
or 9 years old, and after that when
he went back now this year, he saw
him when he was 32 years old.
Few months before he died.
So from age 8 or 9 to the
age 32, this child
and his son and his brother, he is
a brother as well.
Only the mother was there, father was not
there.
Both of them became Bufat
Quran. Both of them have halal businesses,
and they served their mother, they served their
families.
Who cared for them?
He was not sending 1,000,000 of dollar back
there. Nothing.
But he
is a good man.
And I will bear witness before Allah.
That my brother, Salim Shaikh.
And to fill his cover with no one
and to grant
to him and to grant to his family.
Every soul will test death.
Let's ask,
does this apply to me?
When will it happen?
It's very important to ask these questions,
and it's very important
to answer them.
It sound like a dumb question.
It's not. It's the most important question
that you will ask yourself and you will
answer,
and if the answer is and the truth
of the answer is that I will die
and I don't know when. That is the
only answer.
Then this answer must be reflected in what
I do with my life going forward from
this minute onwards.
Otherwise, we are lying to ourselves
and that's a very stupid thing to do.
Never lie to yourself.
I ask
Allah to help us to do that which
pleases him and to save us from that
which doesn't please him.
We ask also forgiveness for the sister of
our brother,
Muhammad.
She passed away in Houston. We ask Allah
to
grant her for those and to grant Saba
to the family Insha Allah.