Tuesday, September 9, 2008

9.Preselected persons....( afnta, afnta-questforallah, Allah, God, love for God, quest)

As I mentioned last time (Sep,6), there are certain mystics which are preselected by God ( or His representatives. We have to use the term “representative “ because we do not know how the divine system works). These persons are often renowned for their lifelong piety or good deeds. Often, a unique feature which distinguishes them from other mystics is a spiritual event which occurred in childhood or early adulthood. I will give examples of five great mystics, who fulfill the above mentioned criteria and whose life histories are one hundred percent reliably recorded either by themselves (Shahab, Yogananda, and St. Therese of Lisieux ) or reliable writers who talked with the mystics and wrote down their words (Sri Ramakrishna,Brother Lawrence ). Let me start with Shahab
The author writes about this incident in a book called “Shahabnama “. Unfortunately this book is written in urdu language and is not available in English. I will have to give details to the readers to establish trustworthiness of the author (since, most likely, they cannot read the book themselves, and did not know the author personally). The author, a high-level bureaucrat, was a man of great integrity. He was incorruptible in a corrupt society. He stood up to the British rulers to save a village to be burnt as punishment, and as a consequence was physically assaulted by a high ranking British police officer. He criticized the supreme leader of the country and was persecuted by his minions. An attempt was made to kidnap his son from England. These worries made his wife so sick that she soon died. In the famous famine of Bengal of 1943 in which approximately four million persons died from hunger and flood, and mothers threw their infants (and sometimes themselves too ) from a bridge in Calcutta on Hugli river, he ordered and supervised the distribution of about three hundred tons of stored rice, in violation of the orders of British government (because the rice was stored for the exigencies of war, and second world war was in progress)
The second point to be noted is that nobody knew the full extent of the spiritual side of the author. He did not tell much to anybody. The details came to light only after his death, when the book was published. Even his closest friends (and being a public and literary man he had a large circle of friends and acquaintances) were astonished. My point is that he did not have to gain anything from the praise or censure of anybody because he was already dead. When his autobiography was published, there was a lot of discussion about his life. He was criticized for serving many autocrats, but everybody agreed that he was a truthful man. Being a literary and public man, in a sense, his life had been an open book. Even his harshest critics could not narrate a single lie in all his life. Therefore, we have to accept the astonishing, supernatural, events that he has narrated in his book. Over here we are concerned only with one simple dream from his childhood to establish the claim that he was preselected from childhood.
He was perhaps twelve or thirteen years old when he had a dream. He found himself in a vast desert. He had great trouble walking. His legs would sink up to his knees in sand. He became very short of breath. After a while he could not even walk and started crawling. He developed chest pain. Eventually, he saw prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) sitting on a prayer mat under a palm tree. The holy prophet smiled at him. Just at that moment he woke up.
He started crying on his good fortune. For a Muslim, visitation of holy prophet in a dream is considered the height of good fortune. Hearing the sound of crying his mother woke up. She asked him if he had a bad dream. Then she sniffed in the air and angrily said , “I have told you not to use fragrant oil in your hair. Now with fragrant oil, off course, you will get nightmares.” He hastily told his mother that he did not use any fragrant oil and narrated the whole dream to her. She also started crying.
The two persons that I have mentioned in my accounts of Aug, 14 and Aug, 18, had visitation in their dreams by holy persons/deities who left enchanting scent in the atmosphere.

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