Joy and sorrow

There is no belabouring the matter that sorrow not only stalks the land, it is ravaging it. As a result, there are lamentations everywhere one turns.

There are lamentations from want; there are lamentations as a result of violence and wars.

To borrow the words from Dr. Stanley Macebuh of blessed memory, a refreshingly bright and disarmingly deep scholar/ journalist, “Bound to violence.”

A master of prose, he surveyed the land and came with frightening conclusion that the country was bound to violence. It was after an analysis of worrisome happenings in parts of the country.

I am tempted to borrow his words in view of unceasing violence and bloodletting, what a great many mischaracterize as the state of nature in which life is short and brutish.

I say mischaracterize because it is a deviation from the state of nature that it unleashes chaos and confusion, indeed violence and wars. Inherent in nature is orderliness and bliss.

However, this is a subject for some other day. For now, the worry is about sorrow arising from seemingly intractable waves of insecurity sweeping through many parts of this country.

Since 1978 when Stanley, as he was fondly addressed, wrote on violence in his compelling column, there has not been much change.

If anything, the situation the picture of which he vividly painted has gone worse. And going as its accompaniment is the foreboding interlude of joy, sometimes lurking in the shadows.

There is joy, and jubilation in the circles of politicians who have secured listing by INEC for contestation in the year of the Lord 2019.

However, by the way, whence cometh joy, and whence cometh sorrow? The question becomes germane when we consider the fact that wealth, earthly endowments do not necessarily confer joy on a person, despite the comfort and pleasure these can fetch at the press of a button.

It is also observed that a poor or lowly person knows joy and happiness as well as contentment. There is need to understand the nature of joy and the nature of sorrow.

Joy and sorrow are immeasurable quantities. They exist nonetheless; they can be sensed; they can be felt. But they cannot be touched or quantified like energy or work performed by energy.

Yet they exist as that intangible force or pressure or movement within which often radiates without and sometimes even breaks down its coarse receptacle, the tangible body, or tears it apart.

Such phenomenon suggests something besides the motley crowd of familiar computations: a pressure, though tangible, does not exist in a vacuum.

For nothingness cannot give rise to something and tangibility cannot efface into nothingness. As science has decoded in matter, matter can neither be created nor destroyed, although it lends itself to transformation.

What then is this pressure? Is it tangibility of a consistency other than material? If it is, is this tangibility subject to depression or excitation, in this case experiences which, at that level, correspond to the coarser form—sorrow or sadness with which we are familiar?

Current investigations going on under various banners point affirmatively in this direction.

The science of hypnotism suggests, for example, that something other than the familiar day-consciousness can be projected beyond the familiar frame of reference into the “wilderness” unknown, accounts of which in the physically subconscious state have been found to accord with reality.

It was not too long ago that Kellian photography revealed these ‘energy fields’ as ethereal prototypes of all coarse forms have come to be known. I am advised that there are powerful x-ray equipment that record auras.

What I am getting at is that joy and sorrow are not material but spiritual contents experienced in the spiritual core of an earth-man, from where the powerful waves of such experiencing impinge on the physical body which they affect positively or negatively on account of the transformation in blood radiation which they cause.

That is why try as science has, it has not been possible for the mechanistic theorists to attach a weight to joy or to sorrow and why their origin, also, have to be sought beyond the material threshold.

This of necessity calls again for trajectory of the origin of man, that immaterial-animating core of the man on earth, that is earth-man, which will require volumes to scratch even the surface.

Suffice it to say, however, that since this core is non-material and does not lend itself to material probe, it stands to reason that its origin must be beyond the material and any contact with it must be in the realm and with homogeneous instruments.

This contention is not dismissive of any investigation. For all around us, from the bowels of the earth to its top soil and the cosmos, even in this materiality, this invisible world speaks loud and clear and in a language that can be easily understood. It cannot but be so. For like must feel like.

The language contains the guidelines for orderliness, adherence to which brings varying degrees of happiness in correspondence to various degrees of conformity, while repudiation connotes sorrow in like manner.

We are in the realm of natural laws or the laws of nature, also known as the Divine Laws.

Issuing out of Life, and bearing the Creative Will—the Creative Will being the Holy Spirit—Nature is always right.

And through it has everything on earth issued, atom, element, molecule, compound; man or beast, the planetary systems or the gigantic galaxies.

In all these designs, order reigns. And in all these designs the semblance of the smallest is to be found in the greatest and vice versa such that the beginning flows into the end in the unceasing opening and closing of cycles as evidence of order.

Take for example, the atom. Its core is surrounded by shells of electrons, a minute, nay, invisible replication of our solar system which also is diminutive replica of the cluster of solar systems which constitute a galaxy.

This system replicates itself up to the farthest points (82billion miles) observable today through telescopes to nail home the point “as above so below.” Order in nature means proceedings according to natural lawfulness or naturalness.

Man has always striven to recognize this lawfulness because his passage to this vale of matter having been facilitated by nature, he carries slumbering within him this recognition which the material bandage subdues, but which nonetheless he has a natural duty to awaken as a condition for his ascent or resurrection from matter.

Science continues to discover these fundamental principles of order or orderliness in nature and categorize them as laws, Science did not create these laws or anything for that matter.

It stumbles upon or recognizes what already is and utilizes the findings for transformations of matter which themselves can only take place within the context of cooperation with natural laws.

Thus two atoms of hydrogen reacted with one of oxygen can always produce one molecule of water under specific conditions and temperature. So is it that when hot air rises and condensation takes place there is rain!

Until lately, however, the tendency was to assume that this natural lawfulness applied only to the elements, that man was above the law even when he did not create himself but issued from law.

There is even the contention that man can conquer nature, that is subdue it. There is nowhere disregard for the natural law is prevalent and as obvious as in social arena.

In the social arena, therefore, it has not been surprising to find, practically everywhere , wanting disregard for natural lawfulness, whether in the constitution of friendship, marriages, employer-employee relations, business, resolution of conflicts, education, nutrition, medicine, name it, indeed in the formation of nation-states, with the concomitant redress of balance by nature which on its own does not bring pain and sorrow, but the refusal to admit the reality is what does. That refusal bows the spirit, hurts and depresses it.

In the state of depression, the radiations of the spirit change and its hurt and pain rebound on the body. Conversely, conformity with natural lawfulness frees from any constraint of the redress of balance.

That there is disregard for naturalness in the social arena cannot be surprising.

Its roots are to be found in the recognition of violence by researchers that imbalance in brain structure must have a psychic implication on thought and action.

The researchers talk about a “biological misconstruction’ of man which makes prone to violence.

The “misconstruction” is noticed in the cerebrum, the front and larger part of the brains, and cerebellum, the back and smaller part of the brain.

Since the brain is connected with thought generation, analysis and application, the oddity of misconstruction must leave its stamp on the thought process and action. The recognition can be said to accord with naturalness except in respect of the definitive phrase.

For, indeed, it is the body of man, not man himself that has been distorted through a one-sided cultivation of one portion of the brain which has led to the frontal brain being overused and therefore according to law, overdeveloped into the “big brain” to the detriment of the back or “small brain”, which suffering from underuse, must atrophy in complete harmony with natural laws.

The implication of this is serious, as I once pointed out in this column. The frontal brain is the seat of the intellect. The back brain is the spiritually receptive part.

Impressions from the spirit, the man within the vessel, journey in waves through the blood and the silver cord to the solar plexus just below the diaphragm, to register on the hind brain called the small brain in a picture form.

It is from the cerebellum, that is the back brain, that the picture is transferred to the large brain, the cerebrum.

This latter frontal brain decodes the pictures into thoughts or words. From thoughts or words to action! Impressions from without journey to the man within conversely.

But in a situation where the cerebrum has become larger and stronger, it disrupts this balance.

Yet the law of balance pervades nature. This is why there is no small arm or big arm except one is cultivated at the expense of the other, no small kidney or big kidney.

Whatever is in pairs are of the same size except in cases of congenital malformations or overdeveloped or underuse, all of which have their explanation in the law as in the case of the brain.

With the distortion of brain structure spiritual receptivity is hampered and in consequence guidance is rendered blurred and in nearly all cases in the self-inflicted circumstances of the present time barred to us or is non-existent! In other words, through the osmotic law that the stronger must overcome the week, the intellectual brain paralyses the hind brain and access to the language of nature is barred and recognition restricted to where the material kingdom terminates and finer life begins.

Thus a man that limited is rooted in matter, blind and deaf and insensitive to all beyond the material of this earth.

He acts irregularly in relation to law. This is the root cause, indeed the origin of the chaos and confusion in which the earth is enveloped today.

From this it can be recognised that what the law demands is goodness, pure thoughts and noble deeds.

These are what make the spirit light and uplifts it to want to soar and there is warmth and joy while ignoble deeds, murder, man’s inhumanity to man and being base conduct, constitute a burden on the soul, pressing the spirit down.

Regardless of how the world may regard him, he is an unhappy, joyless man.