Health And Your Mind
When I said in the last article that Islam as a principle and not as a religion is about conviction, it is a statement that is to prepare us to appreciate the truth of what it means to submit to the will of God; and instead of being about a mode of worship, is about a system of bringing to focus the starting point of what it requires to develop a human being into what a human being ought to be. As I had already stated, it’s submission to the will of God implies the recognition of two wills — the will of God and the will of man. This is because there is really nothing man can submit to the will of God other than his own will.

Jesus said that you should seek first the kingdom of heaven and its righteousness and everything that you need in terms of your material and mundane needs will be given to you, just as God is given to creatures lower than us. He, however, quickly added one vital point that man must reckon with in this factor of heaven before he can get direct benefits from God. He said man, must increase in his little faith. In other words, the real concern about reaching God in Heaven, which makes God and Heaven synonymous is about the true functional understanding of the process of faith. If the true functional understanding of the process of faith is what the various religions of mankind is propagating through their organised modes of worship, peace, prosperity, contentment and love would have enveloped the earth since.

But in giving us the clue to the starting point of the development of faith, Jesus said we must know how to let the will of God be done on earth as it is in heaven. This is another way of saying that man must learn to know how to submit to the will of God. Mohammed called it Islam and put a tone of finality on it that it is the only religion before God. What this means and undoubtedly so about religious matters is that the only thing common to the whole of mankind in the genuine understanding of God and His influence on their lives and affairs is their acknowledgement of the existence of God. But of much more importance to the collective well being of man is in the recognition of the fact that this God has a functional will. This will does not discriminate and accommodates effectively well everything in nature that makes the bible to say that ‘it is in God that we move, live and have our being’.

The starting point for every member of the human race is to accept the reality of God and the truth of the functionality of His will. When a man has a basis in his heart to accept the reality of God and the truth of the functionality of His will, he comes into what is called conviction. Conviction is passionate belief. It is a belief that recognises not only the reality of a supreme influence somewhere but judging from the harmonious relationship of everything he can see in nature also the efficacy of its power to affect things in this world including individual lives. The clear understanding and acceptance of this kind of possible relationship between God and man is what is known as faith.

It becomes a condition of mind development where man comes to know that if he knows how to collaborate practically with this supreme entity, he will get result. It becomes the recognition of the need to know how to submit to the will of God — A Supreme Influence — to get certain results. The true understanding of the meaning of religion now shifts drastically from following the crowd in their organised mode of worship and the letters of conducting their operation and move into the hearts and minds of men to become the spirit of religion, which the true concept of Islam as it applies to the whole of humanity is all about. This made Jesus to say that in that ideal state of religious practice that is to come, people will no longer say let us go to Jerusalem or this mountain to go and worship because it will be a time when those who will truly be worshipping the Father will worship in spirit and in truth.

This is the religion about the proper cultivation of the hearts and minds of men. It will help us to appreciate why Islam as a principle ought to be the only religion before God and why it ought to be believed that it is a principle of the correct development of the human being.

Ayo-Vaughan, a psychologist, lives in Lagos
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