An Introspection

into one's insignificant Self.

72 years ago, no one knew I would be born, until my parents, due to their love for each other, entered into a pact to take full responsibility for the consequences of their action, and my mother conceived me, and later on a cold December night, eight days before Christmas, gave birth to her fifth child and named him Walter.

The parish church, at Hampankatta was the Milagres Church, and it was just a few minutes walk from where my mother stayed, so it was decided to baptize me the next day, and I was given also the name of my grandfather. It was in the same Church, I had the good fortune to receive my first Communion, my first confession and Confirmation. My first eight years of my school education was also in the Milagres parish school.

After 72 years I feel like asking myself, what was my whole life about? Why do I do things in a particular way and why do I believe in some things which others do not?

I came into this life as a blank slate, but endowed with all the gadgets needed for my existence on this earth. I did not question any time as to why were these things given to me. All these things were taken for granted. As time went on, I perceived things around me and grew to absorb the concepts of things and learnt to name them, as over and over again, those around me were calling these things by those names. In the early days, it was in their mother tongue, called Konkani. It was blissful ignorance and innocence in the early five years, until they put me in school and I started interacting with new people born in different households with different standards of up bringing. We were introduced to a language known to my parents and that was English which was the language of our Rulers. They all had felt that knowing it, would better our prospects for a good job later on in life.

It was from the cradle that I was told by my mother and those elder to me about the spiritual nature of things around us and that is where I first heard about God, Jesus and all the rest that comes with Him. In the school, which was run by Catholics, by beliefs were reinforced. I was not aware that not everybody thought the same way as my parents and other parents had different approaches and explanations for their children, but we did not discuss about these. We all concentrated in scholarly excellence competing with one another as to who will stand first in class. In my first year, I stood first, but laziness got the better of me, and from the second class onwards, others overtook me, and then I did not bother. I was always inquisitive and wanted answers for things I did not know, and I questioned my parents, friends and my teachers. I remember once in my first class, we had to sing a song called "Good Bye Teacher" to our class teacher was getting married, and as I did not know the spellings of the words at that age, I heard the word sounded as "boy" which was not meant for a lady teacher so I asked my class mate why it was so and it was he who told me the correct meaning of "Good Bye".. This is how, our misunderstandings usually got cleared.

Until the age of puberty, one goes along with life without much concern, but as new emotions start showing up, we realize that there is a wider meaning in this world, around us. Our consciousness of the other sex becomes more acute and we start getting our early crushes. This is a most crucial time of one's existence as we do not consult our parents as much as our friends, and invariably they may not have the right answer and many are led astray at this time of their lives. The folly of youth leads to many heart breaks and unintended consequences. As for me I was lucky to have a wise and prudent mother and was safe in the worldly sense, but had to contend with personal tensions arising from one's own natural inclinations. The questioning nature always prevented me from taking risks and so I can say that my adolescence passed without any major hitches.

Later in life I noticed that we tended to have different attitudes at different times in our lives. Till we are pre-teens, we tend to follow our parents' advice. During the Teen-Age years, we get influenced by peer-pressure and our friends. After we cross our teens, we tend to feel that we know everything and that our parents are old-timers and do not know the current age events. This omnipotent feeling lasts till we are around 35. We come to see the finiteness of things at that age, as we see our elders, of whom we thought of as invincible, passing away and dying one by one. I have noticed a distinct change at this age, in people of all faiths. They tend to become aware of the Infinite Being. They recall their childhood teachings and go back to their faith. We see people of this age joining the little ones together with the elderly, in Churches, Mosques and Temples.

As our knowledge of the Infinite Being differs and depends upon our early teachings imbued from our parents, many start to question these. Many contradictory teachings have come from people who have rebelled. Their motives might have been different, but as for me my inquisitive nature has always wanted to know and figure out these things.

Religions, besides having rituals adorning their beliefs, also state some sacrosanct laws of behavior, which keeps the society in which it exists from descending into chaos. Thus Christianity was adhered to without questioning until the Reformation period in the 1500s. This brought about an empire where all were Catholics in the West and Orthodox in the East. In 700s Islam came about in Arabia with a new explanation of events in Palestine, where Judaism grew and Christianity was born. Mohammed accepted the Jewish prophets, including Jesus, but as a prophet and teacher, together with his Virgin mother. This was not in conformity with the beliefs of neither the Orthodox Jews nor the Christians of that time. The eastern churches were already in turmoil due to the heresy of Nestorius, and it did not come as a surprise to many and thus Mohammed's teachings were accepted and it became the religion of many within the Middle East. North Africa, which was the cradle of the Eastern Church, and the birth place of great Christian Saints and Philosophers, became entirely a Muslim area..

Religious adherents are also political animals. They are part of a society and not everyone in that society may adhere to one belief or understand that belief uniformly. In the political management of a society various vested interests come into play. Since the adherents of a religious belief need not only spiritual guidance but also have material needs of land, jobs, money etc which can not be disassociated from their individual needs, the problem arises. Thus for a Ruler, it becomes easy to cater to the majority and hold the society together, but pacifying the minority with appropriate escape routes. The Ruler thus enacts laws to govern his society, so that there would be uniformity in decision making.

Thus the Holy Roman Empire of the Catholics, the Byzantine Empire of the Orthodox, and the Caliphates of the Muslims all had laws governing their lands as they felt they were needed in the management of their affairs. Palestine belonged to Byzantium and when the Caliphs of Baghdad took it over, the wars that ensued called, the Crusades is not a religious war but a political war, in which the Muslims won. As religion is not well understood by people, they tend to mix up their religious belief and the political gain and in the bargain bring disgrace to the religion, in the eyes of outside watchers.

The Reformation ushered in by Martin Luther too had political flavor in it, as the politicians hijacked the spiritual nature of Martin Luther's disagreement, By breaking away from the Roman Pontiff, they had to break away from its Canon Law and introduce changes in it to come out with their own laws. Many who felt burdened by the laws of the Catholic Church, made changes in these, and the greatest change was in the law of marriage, where they agreed to sanction divorce. In my opinion, this one departure cost the West most of its spiritual force, and ultimately has degenerated into fights for gay rights and gay marriage. Saddled the society with new disease like Aids. Materialism, Rationalism, Communism etc arose as corollaries. Once the West gained wealth in the Americas and in their Eastern possessions, they felt the need to excuse their greed and had to find reasons to liberalize the hold of Religious laws on the perpetrators. This was an essential component of liberalism to protect the business interests of the powerful. The Perpetrators can still carry on calling themselves as adherent of their faith, so a change in its laws was needed and a philosophical reason to bolster that change.

Money became a powerful tool in the hands of the politicians and ways were sought to have control over it. Rulers who were saddled with lands and their management of people living on these were often led to wars with contending parties. In this environment, they needed money to bolster their armies, which they could not raise from their vassals, so had to borrow. This led to the banking industry and Bankers became the powerful brokers as they needed a small patch of land to rent out to hold their profession and made huge profits in lending to the Rulers at high interest and borrowing from the public at low interest. Natives were always tied to the land, and it was always the 'outsiders', the Jews who felt comfortable with this trade, as they were not given free access to owning lands they built great fortunes in banking. They traded in gold and silver from where they get their names Goldstein and Silverstein. This was at the root of anti-Semitism which was fuelled by the monopoly of the Jews of money..

All wars have been fuelled by these money merchants, among whom one counts the military industrialists, gold dealing companies, oil dealing companies, diamond dealers and bankers who fuel all of the preceding industries. This should give an insight into the complex web of politics today in which the USA feels bound to protect Israel at the expense of all political sense. This also explains the rise of the Neocons among whom the most important ones are Jews. This does not mean that every Jew is a Neocon. It is the other way round: Some of the influential Jews happen to be the ones, because of their association with power. There are sincere Jews who do not like what these people do in their name. Click Here

Amidst this chaos, the ordinary person is lost. One wonders what has happened to the life we knew 70 years ago. It was free of all the compulsions that we see today. These compulsions started when the Bankers set their sights on Palestine, at their Zionist conference in Vienna in 1897. Until that time, whole of Europe was governed by Royal dynasties. After the first world war, they all disappeared and were replaced by democracies. US and British democracy did not give women the voting rights during the 1920s but then the women rebelled and wanted it too, as these same Governments insisted Germany to do after the first world war. Why this sudden change? In my opinion, the Bankers gave the loans to the Royals and the debt was always within the family and was carried from generation to generation. The Bankers wanted the reward fast. If the Royals were ousted and the power given the People's representatives, it would be "Vox Populi, est Vox Dei" - Voice of the People is the Voice of God, so the Europeans would accept this willingly, and then once the Representatives were voted into power, the Bankers could bank roll their requirements and get in exchange laws which favored them, which has finally got for them the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Anticipating this dichotomy, Karl Marx had written his book "Das Kapital" and Lenin picked from it and started his Bolshevik party and overthrew the Czar and this Communism was manipulated into its death by the Western Capitalists who rule today.

As I sit in my chair and ponder on the days that have passed, and am now at the threshold of leaving this earth, I wonder what all this life is about. Looking back at the Scriptures it talks about the Spirit, the Creator of all this visible and invisible. This is what I learnt at the feet of my mother. Others learnt different stories. Some treat the Sun as their God, but with all our present day astronomical knowledge we know it could not have created life, as it was itself the result of other events. So the majority presume a Spiritual Creator, that is himself who is not matter. Just as the scripture writers, we too see a dichotomy if our surrounding world. The only intelligent beings are the human beings. The non-intelligent creation follows laws that have been implanted in their natures. Human beings too have laws implanted in their natures over which their intelligence has no power, like the way the heart works, or the lungs breathe. All he can do with his intelligence is how he can manipulate the surroundings to continue the existence of himself and his progeny.

As past history has shown, how man has used his intelligence to live on, once he comes to life until he has to leave it in spite of all his wisdom. While on earth, he has to live in some sort of arrangement with this neighbors so that there is mutual respect for their individual needs. These laws have been enshrined into religions, civil laws and national laws. When these laws tend to be cumbersome, man tends to rebel and pay the consequences. He wonders why he should not cheat his brother, and it should be possible if there was no Superior Overseer. So he plots and conjures theories to disprove his existence and gets enough people to follow him, and they start running roughshod over the weak and become powerful and make more money at their expense. When the powerful get destroyed eventually people say, "God has vindicated". But the Creator has put in place a built in mechanism. The powerful in order to keep their power will spend their money which they get by wrenching it from the weak. The weak will resist and suffer, but eventually they will find ways of pricking the Goliath and the Goliath will become more angry and ruthless and spend more money, and eventually become bankrupt, as he gets no more income. This weakens him and ultimately leads to his defeat and the give rise of the Weak as the next to become the Powerful. What the Holy Scriptures have written is just stories that corroborate these events as they really happened in the past.

What about us individuals, who do not participate in these fights. What about our personal combats with our own natures. The Creator knows what he has endowed each of us with. Our Loyalty Meters waver from left to right through out our life time. God is not upset on account of it, as long as we use our intelligence to bright them to the middle. That is what we struggle to do, when we have lost our temper, or over eaten our food, or been disloyal to our spouses and children, or even to our own selves.

At the moment of departure, we have to review our dealings, our debit and credit columns, and we will note that we have sinned but also done some good. It is this credit column that God will not forget when drawing the Balance Sheet. Let us always try to have a Credit Balance on our account at the time of our departure.

We remember all those who have left us. They live in our memories. Then how much more is it precious to know that we shall live in the Memory of God through eternity !