Why Science fails to explain God

This is my life story. I am Dr.M.Mahmood Rafiq,
President: Islamic Rah-e-Rast (N.G.O.)
medical director :
Rah-e-Rast Therapeutic community
For Rehabilitation of Drug Addicts.
101 Jaffar Tn. ; 2km Raiwind Rd.
Lahore ; Pakistan;Tel #
Landline: 0092-42-5300187;
Cell ; 0092-0300-4119461


THE LIFE STORY


I was born on July 17th 1960.

Early childhood;

I am one of pre-mature twins. Our mother could not nurse us due to the hypertension and diabetes that she developed during her pregnancy. Her neighbors helped her nurse us; more so because my twin had asthma.

Very soon we were sent to a Saudi primary school for pre-school training. I remember feeling estranged at school.

At age 5 we were sent to live and study at a hostel in Pakistan. I remember a very ugly, fat, short and biased house mistress “Mrs. Moses”. Biased as she was always kind to everyone and punishing me; by caning my knuckles. I learned to cheat her, to fabricate stories for getting away unpunished for my mistakes. I would ask my twin to sit in for me while I watched the Saturday night movie; most Saturdays I was not allowed to watch the movie show as punishment.

The male nurse who was in charge of our toilet training was a staunch believer in physical piety but also a sadist. We feared his wrath. Every time he bathed us, the cold water on our skins would loosen our bladder sphincters and that would elicit pushes and shoves from him and eventual caning by Mrs. Moses.

My first hobby was the love of swimming.

Best childhood memory:

My best childhood memory is a dream. I dreamt that I was in a train, going from the hostel to our house at Lahore.…When I woke up I realized that I truly was in a train compartment and was going home.

Back to my motherland:

About a year later, we were called back by our dad … back to Saudi, to our mom and dad.
My mother was always busy instructing my four elder sisters. She rarely had any say in the affairs of her sons. I feared her more than my dad.

My dad did not tolerate indiscipline; of speech, or action. He introduced me to chess, and reading story books. He was very opposed to comic books, so I read them at friends’ houses. We, the boys, were allowed to sit in the company of his guests and I remember my dad being “always right”. He had a natural ability to dissuade us of our mistakes, and convince us of our abilities, and to work harder. He personally coached us, every day, in mathematics and English.

I remember having stood second in my promotion exams from class 4th to the 5th and boasting about it to my dad, who simply told me that I could have been first had I tried harder. I agreed. That was the nature of our relationship all my life.

Later in my late teens, when I fell in love with a married woman, to the extent of virtual insanity, my dad simply explained the damage I was doing to my own future by stealing someone else’s wife; thus playing the devil’s disciple and triggering the “as you sow, so shall you reap” law of nature.
This single meeting that lasted less than 5 minutes changed all the love I felt for her into an embarrassing memory.

We were not allowed to criticize others in their absence.

I never told lies to my dad … probably because I knew he would extract the truth with his cross-questioning, and when it came to making me face the consequences of any mistakes I made, he was never lenient. I never lost respect for my dad. I never stopped thinking of him as my hero. Today, at age 45 and with him gone for 23 years, I still feel he was a hero. Especially because my six siblings and I never heard him utter a lie nor did we ever see him being pretentious ; even in jest.

My adolescence was spent as a Punjabi at home, an Indian at school, an Arab in our neighborhood, being molded (by the schooling and the media) to be a westerner.

To me, success meant being like any of the men I saw on screens. Unaware then, that they were acting out someone else’s life, under someone else’s directions, for someone else’s benefit. This juvenile folly was my predicament for the next 28 years of my life. My love for being adventurous, convinced me to join the Pakistani Army; at age 12. I landed back in Pakistan into a Cadet College, very far from my dad’s principled supervision.

There :

(i) My very first feeling, upon interacting with my immediate seniors was that authority bestowed by official decree, is unjust.
(ii) I understood the word “amazed”; to express the way I felt that day, that month, when I learned about the biology of a “cell”. Amazed at what I learned about the genes and how intelligent a design went into making the tiniest of creatures. Simultaneously, we were being taught about the atom, and molecules. I interpreted it as the life and order of constant motion in things that I had always considered dead.
(iii) I learned about sex, and perversions, from western pornographic literature widely read in the hostel.
(iv) My riding school coach taught me, in a single sentence, to ‘ride my fears’
(v) During a relay race in a swimming competition in which our entire wing could have won the first position, instead of the second, had I not decided to be content with the second position during the last lap of the deciding race, I learned that my dad was right!
(vi) During the vacations following my matriculation(high school) exams, I spent 5 months at my maternal grandparents house, in a small town of Punjab, without my parents. I was 15. My cousin, a senior to me by at least 4 or 5 years, introduced me to smoking and I also learned to view members of the opposite sex with a one-track mind. I also developed an affinity for leisure and luxury. I think I lost all the disciplining my dad and the cadet college infused, during those 5 months.

While there, I realized that the people, unlike the Saudis (of the 60’s) were very unsure of themselves and that caused them to connive. I also realized that criticizing others in their absence was not frowned upon. I remember making up my mind at that very young stage in life, to walk a straight course in my social interactions; to be straight forward. I made that choice because it seemed easier.
(vii) When I returned to the cadet college, I was a regular smoker. I became adept at dodging authority and keeping appearances. My dad only received my exam results, and doing good in my studies needed no effort. Especially because I liked the subjects I had…. mainly biology, physics and chemistry.

The principal recognized my delinquency and gave me the choice to leave; I did.

I landed in Lahore, and lived there for 5 months without any senior supervision. I was 17 then. During that period I learned about street fights, gangs, gambling, cheating, using others and selfishness ... cold blooded, pre-meditated selfishness. Very soon I forgot that I had acquired the trait of selfishness . It became second nature. I began to despise discipline or uniformity of any kind. I wanted to be a commercial pilot because it meant limitless traveling and partying.

My dad, however, told me to take the fellow-of-sciences exams and promised to buy me a new car if I qualified with 75% score, enough to get me admitted to a medical college. I was 18 then. Motivated by that, I resumed my study of the sciences.

At that stage I LEARNED THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN MY LIFE, THUS FAR… through ”Einstein’s Theory of Relativity”. He had proved that ‘motion’ and ‘time’ were relative realities, not absolute. I took it further to understand that everything is relative…day is recognized relative to night, hate relative to love, good relative to bad, beginning relative to end and neutral relative to charged … thus an entire universe composed of such relative (not absolute) realities could only exist relative to some opposing factor. That opposing dimension or pole had to be;
1-Independent of any need for relatives/comparatives to be defined/recognized against
2- and by virtue of such independence and autonomy, it was/is absolute; free of any flaws or designs or limitations any virtually/relatively existent entity could imagine/ascribe/enumerate.
3-and that all existence (tangible and abstract) owed its presence to that Absolute pole of reference, made Him the Real Deserving of all Praise and Focus.

This ,to my Arabic-versed mind ,was a literal translation of the basic definition for the Islamic God ; ALLAH.

Very swiftly, everything I had learned about the “cell” and the “atom” became entirely, logically explicable. I agreed, because I found that definition for a God to be truly irrevocably, unequivocal, and absolutely indisputable.

However; I decided to give in to the entire Islamic code, when and if I saw it being practiced. I decided on that because I had not seen it being practiced as the books taught in school, had told. I focused on my studies diligently and managed scoring my dad’s satisfaction. I developed an admiration for Urdu poetry which wore off when I realized that poets pointed out social problems, and none gave a solution to any.

My success won me a trip to Thailand. I was confused. Why had my dad allowed that? I was 19 years of age. My trip to that society taught me that whatever charm I had, was bought by my father’s money.
I also witnessed an acquaintance’s heart attack, and the locals’ indifference towards him. I realized that as long as the pulse runs and the lungs breathe, no one has the right to pity oneself.


Out of sympathy for her child, I befriended a prostitute who gave her 3 year old daughter, whiskey to drink because she thought it fed her the needed calories. I also concluded that copulation without emotions was synonymous with nausea and vomiting. I asked the locals if they were disallowed display of emotions in public by religious diktat. They affirmed and asked if I had studied Buddhism. I had only studied Buddhists.

I arrived at Lahore a changed person. I had seen too much misery, suffering and indifference. I had seen how painful and taxing life would be if the scruples for social morality were “convenience- based”. I did not understand then, but do today, that, that was the reason my father had allowed that trip. I gave up being sociable, stayed home and visited the local mosque regularly, though not punctually. I did not understand Islam, but I had developed a reverence for it ever since I saw Thailand.

When my parents arrived a few months later, I had a beard that prevented my mother from recognizing me at the airport. My dad immediately disapproved. He lectured me about maturity and the time needed to experience it, and that I had a long way to go before I could actually decide on an ascetic code for my social life. He shaved off my beard, without exerting to explain.. I made the blunder of considering it a green signal for indulging in whatever pleasure I chose, however I chose.

Then came a string of events one after the other. The adulterous affair that I later abandoned left me cherishing the idea of being emotionally desired by someone of the fairer sex. Her brother had introduced me to cannabis. This new found recreation lead to other less clandestine episodes of using and emotional manipulation; this caused my moral values to degenerate progressively. In the medical college my academic ability, along with the glitter of my father’s wealth hastened the downward descent of my morality. I did not do that intentionally. My affinity for unearned/quick pleasure, comfort, and attention; guided my faculties of mind and body to go down that path of decay.

I wanted a regular mate for intimacy. Inwardly, I knew it would be a mere toy-like manipulation of another living individual. When I did find a sincere mate, my guilt for abusing her naivety made cannabis feel like a pain killer. The routine was - pretend affection, feel guilty of myself and sorry for her, use cannabis, feel more intensely guilty and remorseful, rationalize my crimes by analyzing others through altruistic spectacles.

By the time I was in second year medical school, I had a firm habit of using cannabis every day, and was very philanthropic/antisocial in my imagination. However; I did wish to get rid of the smoking habit. My mind became a library that gathered lists of flaws in culture, and society. I yearned to find fault with the Islamic philosophy but every effort actually verified it. My perception patterns operated only to accumulate new incriminating data. That slowly poisoned my attitude and behavior and made me erratic. Like others around me, I lost trust in my actions and reactions. Cannabis became a very reassuring friend in deed.

My father learned of my disease very late. He asked me, ”If you are enslaved by ‘dead’ smoke, how will you resist living temptations?”. “You will never be humane until you give up smoking”. I did not register that sentence into my consciousness, unlike everything else he had ever said to me. Probably because when he spoke it, I was stoned, or that I had heard too many lectures already from a thousand other mouths. My dad suddenly passed away in a road accident. I was then 21. The fact that my mother was too used to her husband’s company, made her loose her will to live, and left us within a year. I did not perceive her demise, unlike my father’s, as a tragedy.

My cannabis habit had resumed only 36 days after she became a widow and though she never said it, I knew that my unruliness catalyzed her loss of urge to go on. My incorrect, traditional interpretation of Islam, coupled with devious perceptions filled me with rage against god.

My part-time wife, who was also my classmate at the medical college couldn’t stand my selfishness any longer and deserted me. I was 24 then. Searching for the buzz and euphoria of better days, I took a trip to England. I felt it was a modern village, with fancy shops and found the common aspirations, and thus the culture, very similar to Thailand’s. My heart was too guilty and aggrieved to get pleasure from anything. I came back to an empty house. My siblings were all married and settled while I was single, and I truly felt homeless. My links among the drug abusers introduced me to heroine. It did give the desired euphoria, but its withdrawal scared me. After 8 months of flirting with heroine I resumed my convenient habit of “only cannabis”.

In April 1985 I had the opportunity to visit the Pak-Afghan border with a friend who was gathering intelligence for the Pak-army. I met the Arabs who were resisting the communist onslaught. I realized that they practiced all the principles of wartime ethics I had read of in books; of selfless, sincere and honest servitude to God and thus other humans, to the letter.

I had unknowingly, stumbled onto evidence of a truly practicing Muslim community. My own excuse for not giving in to the Islamic code of life had gone void, but I did not get the time or room for ruminating. While there, my captain friend received his commanding officer’s call on a hotline, telling him to ask me to leave for Lahore.

My twin told me that my siblings had found an honorable bride for me. Also, that an arranged marriage would put an end to my stray life and that the entire family expected me to comply and thus stop upsetting their lives. In my Cannabis induced oblivion, I thought my innate sincerity was directing me to surrender. Considering it to be a wise choice to encircle myself with the disciplining bounds of an arranged wedlock, I married. It failed, of course.

At 28 I had tons of guilt and unresolved grief processes. My wife was parenting our 2 children, singularly. I had no further intimacy with her. We lived in the same house, but separate rooms. I had given up cannabis and was addicted to heroine. My children often cried for my company but I had no time or patience for them. The only constructive activities I managed was visiting the hospital (occasionally) and spending some time with my books. My behavior was totally distorted.

My relationships with all healthy people had terminated. The only friends I had were vultures that sated their heroine appetites through my funds. I was aware of that abuse, but couldn’t help it. I repeatedly tried getting out of the torture of heroine but failed. Meanwhile, I was selling my belongings in fractions. I made several geographic migrations, but had a talent for finding heroine wherever I went. God was always there to ask of, for obtaining heroine After the fix I would ask God to stop me, and He never grabbed me by the arms. I believed in Him, but wanted to see him before I gave in. That was the new excuse I had for continuing what I knew was wrong by all standards of common sense.

I passed my final exams for the Bachelor’s degree to practice medicine (M.B.B.S) in 1989, after my wife persuaded me to not give up my profession. The subsequent waste of talent and knowledge became another source of very, very wearing remorse and guilt.

In 1990 when I was 30, my family had me abducted and locked in an addiction treatment cage that passed for a clinic. I was to see the sun three months later. While there, the medical director asked me to translate into Urdu some literature in the English language. I realized it was the 12 step program. It meant nothing to me, but as I worked through to the third step, I saw God.

He had grabbed me by my arms and made me drug free and forced me to read….and the 12 steps science was repeating the literal translation of the word “Islam”; ‘surrender’. I then took it to heart.

When I came home, the excuses of being married to a stranger, and the fatigue of parenting and of the internship validated my relapse.

In December of 1991, my wife suggested that I leave for Saudi Arabia and find myself a job. She thought I would stay away from heroine there. I did, only to find alcohol as an easily available substitute .2 years later, I was apprehended drunk and stoned on cannabis and given 80 lashes. Banking on my inherited, financial well-being, I resigned from my job. The resignation however, proved to be to heroine, to which I sped after right from the airport at Karachi.

My wife, who had probably grown wiser during the 2 years she spent in her father’s company, had the sense to desert me then. She took our children with her. I wished her to feel free and so divorced her.
I was 33 then.

I learned of a new treatment facility that preached/practiced the 12-step program. The meticulously principled Scandinavians/Europeans funded it. That certified its ethical credibility to me. I was given admission.. I received the 40 day intensive treatment. I followed the routine of action and thought prescribed by the program, but I felt that the bracketed phrase after the third step, “god as we understood him” gave my ease-loving nature, room enough to maneuver negativity.

That left traces of guilt and remorse, which poisoned my perceptions and the resultant acts. The group elders were very allergic to Islam, although the biblical prayers were repeated every time we met. Soon I realized that the ‘greater power’ (nearly all members of the N.A. meetings) including myself, were focused upon SURRENDERING TO, was not god, because all of them were Muslims and the Islamic definition of god contradicts any additions/deletions from the God-given definition of Himself. Instead we had surrendered to “fear”. Fear of relapsing. None of us was treading real life grounds; we were instead living next to the fence of fear, and expending all our faculties, fearing. I explained my misgivings to the ex-addict director of the facility, and N.A (by proxy) and also told him that he too would soon relapse.

He did. When I met him 3 years later he had subdued the fear by creating a new philosophy that substituted the theory of absolute abstinence with the phrase of “ manageable drug abuse and choices”. Within 6 months of treatment, I had relapsed.

During those six months, someone I had met in Saudi Arabia, came visiting. I respected her opinions about life because she was very senior by age and in experience. She understood my desire to be sober. She said something that went as deep as only my father’s words had ever gone. She said, “the kind of awareness you have of the absolute values suggested by Islam; make it impossible to achieve happiness without practicing”.

That was a very profound statement, by someone who herself was a very new Muslim.
I was aware that staying in Pakistan would not allow escape from heroine, so I left for the newly independent communist states. I married my landlady and fell in love. I was 34 to 35 then.
Beer was tolerable for her, but slowly I progressed to harder drinks and quarrelling which soon started to end in her physical abuse. I inwardly hated myself for breaking her generous heart every time she forgave me.

I tried Alcoholics Anonymous. One senior member that I confided in gave me abundant literature for reading. Both only strengthened my suspicion that the third step eventually acquired the form of traditional religion, and any religion but Islam was acceptable.

The semi-surrender kept me clean for a month but very ugly and unsettled within. I knew what I needed to do to sober up, but did not have the courage to do it. Surrendering meant to me, the Islamic code of living, and I felt it was too intimidating.

My wife’s sincerity was evident from the pains she took to help me control my use of alcohol. When dry, I would be a walking cadaver, and when drunk - I’d be a monster. She finally asked me to forget the marriage after 11 months, and I agreed, for her sake. I spent two more years in that society. One morning, partying with alcohol, purely by chance and with absolutely no intent; I found myself visiting a “School for the deaf and dumb”. Mistaking my foreign look to infer that I was interested in supporting the institute, the director offered me an orientation tour of the facility that my drunken curiosity accepted.

That tour was the most loud, blunt, harsh, demeaning and agonizing rebuke my conscience had ever delivered to me. I could not eat for a few days after that, and alcohol or whatever did nothing for elevating my spirits. I left for Pakistan. I was 37.

At home, I discovered that a civil suit forfeited my funds. I had no choice but to follow an ascetic style of life. It gradually seemed like a blessing. I chose to spend some time with a group of people who wished to improve their spiritual health through the Islamic code for living.

I was convinced by what I heard and saw. I realized that that interpretation of Islam was absolutely true but totally absent in the Muslim world. That the antipathy I and others had towards Islam was due to the practices of those (like myself) that professed it verbally but denied it in practice and made Islam seem like an inherited feature of shape and structure. I also concluded that the most damaging to humanity was the hypocrisy being exercised by the verbal claimants, but practical deniers of Islam.
However, as soon as my funds sprung free, I chose to continue partying.

I told my self that God had given everyone the freedom for choosing between indulgence or abstinence, and that it would be more gratifying to choose abstinence by free will instead of being caged in by circumstances. I migrated to another city and started working for a Govt. Hospital while I substituted heroine with injectable synthetic opiates sold freely (to date) in Pakistani pharmacies.
I developed gangrene on my right arm at the only available site where I could main-line opiates. I ran to Sri-Lanka, believing that non-availability of synthetic opiates there would help my wound heal. It did, but heroine was easily accessible there so I came back snorting. This shuffle to and from Sri-lanka lasted 9 months till my car had a head-on collision with a drunk driver. I was on the verge of 40 years then.

My twin, also a doctor, intervened; brought me to his city to live with him. I spent the year 2000 at his residence, vacillating. In December of the same year, he had me locked up in the same addiction treatment cage that I had been in, during 1990. I was told that I would stay there for 9 months or one year.

During my second week there, I got weary of lying awake at nights and decided to recite whatever I had memorized of the Holy Quran. I did not only repeat the words, but reflected upon the meanings. When the Quran mentioned “infidels/deniers” I felt it addressing me. Then it became an early morning routine too. A few days later I was saying my obligatory prayers, regularly. A few more and I started physically exercising to rejuvenate my body.

I then had my own agenda and so, in spite of the 140 plus addicts locked there, I had no company or friends.
I came to the conclusion; that everything in nature is at peace and in harmony with its environment, except myself and others of my species. That I had blundered to have considered myself among the believers, when actually I was “infidelity personified”.

The words of the Holy Quran pointed out to me the very specific faults of perception, attitude and behavior that had brought me misery; and also described the kind of misery each specific flaw would lead to. All in such absolute words and styles that I was dumbfounded and convinced that only whoever made me and knew my innermost self could know that.

I also realized that like me, everyone who dwelled upon the meanings of the Holy Book, analyzed the meanings through the sieve of every possible frame of reference and personal experience, thus (unknowingly) verified it’s Divine Nature, by the inability to find any faults. I became very determined to learn about Islam.

Three months later I was released. I left with the Tablighi Jamaat - a group of people who travel and learn to practice Islam ( to practice surrendering) while journeying. I learned that God had created me such that I was only free to think, feel and perceive…and that gave me freedom to wish for what I wanted to do, but not freedom to do all that I chose because actions were subject to laws of mechanics/physics/society. And that my wishes and desires regulated the ebb and flow of my serenity and contentment…and they, being abstract entities, made them totally independent of all tangible matter.

I also learned that God had not left me without guidance in the evernew, and always virginal territories of my thoughts, sentiments, emotions and feelings. Verily The Engineer of such a complex craft as myself, had to send a “users’ manual” and an “instructor” to teach me how to use my faculties optimally. The ‘instructor’, to be perfectly aware of how I felt and for being absolutely imitable; had to be only human and nothing more or less.

So for me to be content, I had to observe every moment, movement, thought, intent, utterance and act of the ‘instructor’ in every, and any God given, situation. For such detailed learning I needed a lifetime, but the Creator had made it evident through the history of the instructors He sent for my species, that journeying makes it a necessity to learn instantaneously; the urgency intrinsic to traveling, disallows carelessness. This awareness caused me to experience a kind of euphoria that I had never known. I felt a greed for knowing everything about the instructor (the Holy Prophet, Muhammad). How he thought, perceived, behaved, spoke and acted in poverty and in richness, in health and in sickness, during times of peace and while at war, in compassion and in distaste, in youth and in old age, at home and while traveling, in anger and in complacency, while loosing and while gaining, while grieving and when content, when teaching and while learning, while living and while dying, with men and with women, with the rich and the poor, the friends and the foes, the wise and the vain, the neighbors and the strangers, the created and The Creator. I felt absolutely free of my disease of addiction.

I returned 4 months later to my twin’s residence following a healthier routine. I became engrossed in shaping and then employing my plans to make up for the time I had lost to drugs. I said the 5 obligatory daily prayers regularly, and I followed the prescribed routines like a ritual. This ritualistic practice and the unwavering focus on My Plans, took my mind off the road of social co-existence and obligations to others and I started bumping into people’s comfort zones.

My twin informed me that I was becoming a pain for others and warned me that I was becoming my old self again.
The high grounds of drug free living made his advice inaudible and I continued in my frenzy to fulfill My Plans.

In October 2001, I fell off that high pedestal and into the ditch of heroine. I asked my twin for guidance and he said I knew the answers. “Go back”, he said, “to your Creator’s prescribed path for
Peaceful living; back to focusing on growing and helping others grow”. I needed to be detoxified. He committed me to the same cage of absolute decadence and anarchy that I had been to twice previously.
I was to stay there for 40 days, this was a precondition. Only this time my twin accepted my complaints about the atmosphere in there and promised me he would monitor my treatment himself through periodic visits and calls.

The air of incorrigible immorality that enveloped that ‘cage’ filled with over 170 patients, cornered me into the perfectly airtight isolation and seclusion I needed for analyzing the reasons for relapsing. I was praying regularly by the third day, inspite of being heavily drugged with antipsychotics. By the seventh day I had started searching for the cause of my relapse. I had enough faith in God, to know that whatever caused my relapse had to be of my own doing. It had to be something that made me too distant from the Omni-beneficent and The Omni-merciful’s Mercy. I was quick to realize that it was in someway related to my plans. I had unknowingly arrested my growth by remaining entrapped in my own plans whose accomplishment, I thought, signified growth.

My unwavering focus on only my plans had caused my thoughts to stagnate by remaining focused on whatever became “past” in the next moment. That kept me from looking ahead and around. The ritualistic performance of religious routines disrupted my conscious connection with God and thus myself and my plans could not be continuously adjusted to remain in harmony with the constant change within me and around me. Instead of chasing after heroine, I had spent nearly 4 months running after my plans.

That blind chase had created enough turbulence in the harmony that The Sustainer of equilibrium (God), provides for His creation, to warrant my arrest through the leash of heroine. I understood why Mao-Tse-Tung had said that religion was opium. Like any mood altering chemical, I had used religion to serve my pleasure. To prolong that placid sensation of feeling right, I had fortified my denial in not heeding to the feedback I received. And by not heeding to feedback, I had become a selfish mammal, addicted again to “My plans for personal gratification”. So instead of surrendering to, I had tried enslaving the Islamic way of living. I decided to surrender completely, absolutely.

I realized the toughest for me to surrender to was the dress code in Islam. The cap, the 3 inches long beard, the long shirt and the baggy pants that left the ankles bare. I had the choice between that and the torture of addiction, so I chose the dress code. Forty days later, I was released and I left again with the Tablighi jamaat. During our journeying I adopted the dress code. The attitude of people changed towards me palpably. They treated me and spoke to me as an inferior. It helped weaken the grandiosity I carried within. At first it bothered me but with time I grew oblivious to it. Changing my appearance gradually changed my social priorities. I realized it was a blessing.
That people no longer faced me with their guards raised. They were never conscious of my intellect, intelligence, or position and thus were truly themselves while interacting with me. If anyone treated me with courtesy it was genuine beyond doubt. All this made it very easy for me to socialize. I felt very original and genuine. It dawned on me then that competing for attention had been a major cause in my life’s decay.

Next, I realized that I used my intellect to subdue my peers. Since English is translated as literacy in my society, I decided to speak it only when something unfair pressed on my welfare. I started speaking in my native language, Punjabi. It made my life easier but it also showed me for the first time ever, how agonizing and lonely life is made by wishing to seem different, or tangibly superior. This led me to the inference that since my material wealth had only contributed to my downfall, I had to invest all of it and live a life of minimal needs. I opted for feedback from my friends in the jamaat, and they said they had always expected me to start a rehabilitation facility for Muslim drug addicts.

I told them that would be a 24 hours/day, 7days/week and 52 weeks/year job. They said they knew and expected me to make up for my thrown away time, talent and youth by doing exactly that. It was tough to the limit that it sounded impossible, but it was the absolute truth and an absolute technique for reparation.

Four months later when I returned from the spiritual excursion, my personal plans for a General hospital had been modified for something better by a social plan for a Therapeutic community. The sub-urban location for the hospital I planned had been replaced by a piece of land that was urban in location, but populated and designed in a very sub-urban manner. Everything fell in place smoothly and abruptly. I could visualize God’s words “Be willing to subject your wills to me, and I Shall Do even that which you willed. Be unwilling to subject your will to me and I shall fill your heart with worries, tax you with malcontent, and Shall Do as I Will.”

Today it has been nearly four years since I last abused my life for fun. I have given up plain cigarettes too. I walk 4 kilometers every day. The Therapeutic community I direct is proceeding in proportion to the work load I can manage. I have authored, and published a book that describes the details of drug addiction; ranging from the Neuro-& Bio-chemical changes by each drug of abuse to the resultant processes of psycho-social decay and all the stages of it plus the treatment modality conducive to a cure.The book has been endorsed by senior psychiatrists and doctors, especially by addicts ,a few of which learned from it to give up addiction without treatment The rule of thumb for me to remaining sober is:

“ I must change 100%…I am only aware…not yet there”.

Sobriety for me is a process. Each day, hour, and minute a choice is given to me. I can use it to fatten my pride, my illusions, my self-centeredness and descend a rung on the ladder of true contentment, or I can feed my humility, my sense of being a servant to my Creator and ascend to a higher level of feeling content. When I choose to be arrogant (which is often), I actually loose sight of the science hidden within that moment./ occurrence .When I view the same situation with my actual self that peeps through God-given and God-sustained apertures called my eyes, I feel humble. Avenues open to recognition of such extraordinary Divine Designs of Blessings hidden behind the mundane, that I feel infinitely loved and cared for by His Merciful Grace.

I continue to say the 5 obligatory prayers each day. In which I repeatedly remind myself that I am simply a grain of existence honored and decorated by the freedom to think, feel and wish and that the tangible results of all endeavors are controlled, Mercifully by Someone Else.

I ask for Guidance from Him Who Regulates and Oversees everything and everyone. I ask His protection against my greatest enemy within. Each prayer each day leaves me feeling blessed and warned. Warned to not wish for any vices, lest I be granted them - and blessed with serenity in the absolute truth that “there is naught for man except that which he toils for”.(The Holy Quran)

I wish to keep toiling to be a better human, better than yesterday, better than today, better than now.(amen)


.





---
dr.abukhaleel mahmood rafiq

[ Report abuse | # ]