FAITH THAT MOVES MOUNTAINS:

The Way of the Peaceful Warrior is a great book that would allow people to see how they can bring about change. It is written by Dan Millman, who brings us the following from another of his books that is worth contemplating.

“On an otherwise ordinary day, an angel appeared to a young merchant and former camel herder, known to everyone in the city where he was born. The angel’s words filled him with awe and awe; he was told that he must defy the ancestral religion, denounce 360 ​​deities carved in stone and worshiped for centuries, declare himself the prophet of one God, abolish a way of life on which countless lives and beliefs were founded, and establish a new religion of Nowhere Surely, he would be met with disbelief, rejection, violent persecution, and exile Could his seemingly mad pursuit bring more than failure or, at best, the death of a martyr?

Or would this mortal, obedient to the divine command of an angel, achieve a victory beyond what reason could have predicted?

He was born in Mecca in AD 570. C. His father died before his birth. His devastated mother, unable to breastfeed him, named Muhammad and gave him to a nanny, a shepherdess of a Bedouin band. Muhammad spent his first five years with these nomads, living a rugged existence in the open air following herding flocks through desert grass and scrub, sleeping in tents under a vast desert sky. Once weaned, he drank camel milk and ate mainly rice, dates, wild birds, and oil-fried lobsters. From the beginning, the desert claimed Muhammad as its own. He would always be a Bedouin at heart.

At age six, he returned to his mother, but she died later that year. He ended up living with an uncle, a caravan trader. In the following years, Muhammad traveled through Arabia with his uncle’s caravans, learning the wisdom of the desert, the ways of doing business, and the art of warfare while fighting gangs of marauders. His travels brought him into close contact with various tribes and religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Arab sects that worshiped hundreds of gods and goddesses in the form of stone idols. These experiences left a deep impression on this thoughtful and introspective young man. From these first threads the tapestry of his destiny was woven.

He became a handsome young man admired for his strong character, moral integrity, and sharp mind. But he had come into the life of a merchant more by chance than by choice. Uninterested in money and lured by loneliness, he left the caravan to work as a shepherd in the desert for months.

When he was 25 years old, Muhammad held a position in a business company owned by a beautiful woman 15 years his senior. Her name was Khadija. For two years, he led the Khadija caravans throughout Arabia, rising to the position of director of the company. No wonder Khadija fell in love with him. Finally, she proposed to him through an intermediary. Their marriage, which blessed them with six daughters, would last until Khadija’s death 21 years later.

But almost as soon as the wedding ceremony was over, Muhammad’s mind turned inward. His encounters with so many cultures and religions had planted hidden seeds within him that began to grow. He found himself pondering how the 360 ​​stone gods in the Mecca temple could save souls. Such questions led him to once again search for his own soul in the solitude of the desert.

Muhammad began spending his days in a cave in the hills outside of Mecca, fasting, praying, and meditating. With little sleep, he began to go into altered states {He seems like a man estranged from a woman who has visions that he is a shepherd and a poor person, who might have become attractive in the literary tradition.} And have waking visions – experience the inner life of a mystic. At times, a violent tremor seized him and he lost consciousness. A practical man of robust health who had endured many exhausting journeys through the desert, found these phenomena strange and disturbing. But these inner tremors {The story of the Buddha includes a lot of this kind of thing. What would happen to them today?} What he feared might be the omens of ill health were actually the premonitory tremors of a great awakening.

One night in the holy month of Ramadan in his 40th year, while fasting and praying in his desert cave, Muhammad heard a voice calling out to him with great urgency. Looking into the darkness of his cave, he saw an angel standing in front of him, emanating a dazzling light. Muhammad fainted from fear, when he woke up, he found the angel still standing there.

“Read, you,” the angel commanded in a voice of stern authority.

“I can’t,” Muhammad stammered, because he could barely read.

‘Read,’ the angel commanded again in the verse, ‘in the name of the Lord who created all things, who created man from a clot. Read in the name of the Most High who taught man how to use the pen and taught him what he did not know before. ”

In amazement, Muhammad repeated these words, memorizing each one. Then the angel said: ‘Muhammad, you are the messenger of Allah and I am his angel, Gabriel.’

With that, the angel disappeared.

With astonished exaltation, Muhammad went and told Khadija what had happened. She embraced him and unequivocally expressed her faith in his vision and mission, saying: ‘Rejoice, dear husband. He who holds Khadija’s life in His hands is my witness that you will be the messenger of His people. ‘

But Muhammad could not accept his own vision. How could he, an ordinary man so far from perfection, be such a messenger? He was afraid he was deluded or perhaps insane. The days passed. He waited for another signal, a new confirmation so that he could believe in himself and know how to proceed. But no signal came.

At last, he returned to the cave of Mount Hira in search of the angel Gabriel. He waited and prayed, but to no avail. Desperate, tormented by dire doubts, and assailed by fear of madness, Muhammad climbed over a cliff and prepared to leap to his death. At that very moment, the angel appeared before him again and, raising his hands, he repeated: “I am Gabriel, and you are Muhammad, the Messenger of Allah.” Muhammad froze on the edge of the abyss in a spellbound trance. Hours passed. That night, one of Khadija’s servants arrived and found Muhammad still perched on a rock, lost in ecstasy, and brought him home.

After that event, Muhammad began quietly spreading the revelation of his new faith among only a few close friends and family. But in this tight-knit culture, word spread quickly. In no time, his persecution began: gossip, brutal beatings, plots against him and attempts on his life. Over time, his honesty and virtue, the words of scripture revealed through him, and the mysterious workings of fate brought about the conversions of several of Mecca’s greatest warriors. All of this greatly strengthened the fledgling faith of Islam and brought fear to the hearts of its enemies.

People demanded that he perform miracles as proof of his divine mission. Muhammad replied that he had not come to perform miracles; he had come to preach the word of Allah. With the challenge of moving a mountain, he looked towards it, but did not move, so he spoke the now famous words demonstrating his wisdom, humor and humility: ‘If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad will go to the mountain. .

From start to finish, Muhammad recognized himself as an ordinary man, full of flaws and limitations, a man chosen by God, for reasons he did not understand, to deliver a new revelation of Islam, which means ‘submission to God’. Islam required faith in God, charity, purity, and a life free from idols, lived with the courage of a warrior in battle, with prayer as a purifying immersion in His spirit.

The citizens of Mecca were enraged by Muhammad’s attack on their precious idols, and by his declaration that there was only one God, called Allah, and that he, Muhammad, was His prophet. Forced to flee across the desert to the city of Medina, he began his mission anew, once again a lonely prophet with a handful of followers in a city of unbelievers.

In time, the angel Gabriel revealed the scriptures to Muhammad, which he recited aloud and which Khadija and others wrote. This scripture became known as the Holy Quran (Koran). The Qur’an was the defining miracle of Muhammad: the writing of this masterpiece of poetic religious scriptures by a simple, semi-literate man could have earned him fame as a prophet. But this feat was only one chapter in Muhammad’s life.

Persecuted as a heretic for almost two decades by the people of Mecca {How was Khadijah alive if he spent almost two decades there? The math doesn’t work, but semi-literates may not worry.} Including many of his own relatives and former friends, the once young Bedouin became an intrepid military general in old age. More than once, the Mecca army besieged, seeking to destroy Medina, where Muhammad and his followers lived; their war would not end until Muhammad or Mecca fell. In the final battle, though outnumbered three to one, but filled with the power of Allah, Muhammad and his followers descended like a storm on the Mecca army and destroyed it. This battle turned the tide. “(1)

People who ridicule Indian and native legends are not funny and it is not okay for me to do so. Still, it seems like a bad role model for gaining followers with the sword of Allah or Yahweh (Yahu) or Shiva. We are all paying the price that these storytellers have wrought since the time of Caliph Omar and Constantine, who took the emerging new beliefs and built empires under their spell of ignorance. Omar said that there was no need to read anything other than the Koran, as he ordered one of the raids to destroy the great library of Alexandria that housed all knowledge; we need to really know our roots. Islam has a lot of good and is less intolerant than other religions based on Ur Story. The Caliphate still has its absolute dominion over the souls of the people. He doesn’t want people to be knowledgeable, so he encourages reading old books with limited meaning, as I see it.