Mob action and responsibility

Every now and then we hear or read about mobs moving against people, authority or property. The word “mob” is usually associated with violence or unruliness. It connotes anger or revolt. It sends shivers down our spines once we hear the word and begin to map out a safe area to use out of the reach of the angry crowd. The period they engage in their destructive acts can be described as a season of unreason. They descend in blind vengeful rage, harming, sometimes inflicting fatal injuries on their targets or passers-by, or destroying property—vehicles, houses or business premises or department stores. Buildings have been known to be set ablaze in such moments of madness. Mob action could be spontaneous or long planned.

In saner climes, to forestall destructive action of an angry mob, law enforcement agents could be seen on horse backs in the most unlikely corners and crannies, some on motor-cycles and some simply patrolling neighbourhoods. Many in patrol vehicles are a common sight. They realize that just one careless word can create a combustible climate which requires only a careless cigarette end to ignite a conflagration that can sweep through a considerable swath of streets. When they meet their match in a counter offensive, riots ensue and an already bad situation gets worse; it becomes complicated and complex.

That is one side. There could also be a benevolent mob who is excited their favourite candidate has won an election, the astronauts are back from the moon or their preferred team is carrying the trophy after a keenly, tension-soaked football match. There are exclamations, there are shouts: It is Arsenal! It is ManU!!; it is Enyimba Enyin!!! Members of the team are mobbed; the mob in a feeling of triumph wants the star player Joseph Osadiaye to surrender his jersey and autograph it!! Up Ogun Babes!!! Up Oluyole Babes!!! All eyes are on Barcelona’s Lionel Messi! It is all in a celebratory hour.

The excited crowd hardly constitutes a threat to public order and safety. It is the destructive mob that is naturally cause for concern. The mob gangs in South Africa who targeted Nigerians, their homes and property for destruction in xenophobic attacks must necessarily give cause for worry. After drawing up a list of supposed transgressions against Nigerians, Black South African embarked on an orgy of hate and destruction against Nigerians, fellow Black Africans. Nationals of some other African countries were affected as well. It was Blackman’s inhumanity to Blackman curiously directed at citizens of the old frontline states! Nigerians themselves went on a vengeful destructive spree against Nigerian enterprises in which South African companies have interests, substantial or not so substantial, breaking into stores and shelves, and carting away goods, what Lai Mohammed correctly described as Nigerians shooting themselves in the foot. It was Nigerian companies providing employment to Nigerians that were being destroyed mindlessly and gleefully! An account stated in the weeks of hate on both sides of the divide that no fewer than 32 Nigerians have been killed since the xenophobic fury began about two years ago.

While our worry goes to the hapless victims, we would want to demonstrate greater concerns for the perpetrators of the evil, were we to have a faint idea of how the mechanisms that govern life and existence, the entire Creation, work. How many are convincingly aware that for every thought, every speech how much more deeds, there is responsibility? We are living in a world in which ignorance is bliss! But what we believe is unimportant, once it is stamped with thought volition, the originator bears responsibility and sooner or much, much later he must render account. Why account? It may be asked.

The way it works is that the pure power of the Creator streams unceasingly down to the world in invisible radiation threads holding, urging and furthering life and existence and our world. This pure power is neutral. For every thought, for every activity it is what mankind uses. It can be likened to electric power currents that flow into every home. We can just picture to ourselves the numerous uses to which we can put electric power. It can be used to build and it can be used to destroy. Every time we clamour for electricity in homes, for cooling, for heating, cooking, for pleasure, name it; and in companies, for services and in factories to manufacture products. It is used to run trains and tramps. Aircraft generate electric power to fly. Electric cars are on the way, being tested. It is expected they will flood the roads in the foreseeable future. So important is the use to which the energy electricity provides that mankind is finding various sources from which it can be derived. In the end we see the various sources merely tap from the streams of radiations pouring from the Power of the Creator. The electro-magnetic waves we call sunlight, for example, stream down from an accumulation of spirit- motes that flow down from the highest Heights.

Man, it is revealed, that by virtue of his specific spiritual make-up, like lens that collect the rays of the sun, collects the Power, the pure radiation threads streaming through him using his intuitive faculty to do so. He passes this on through his thoughts. Through thoughts that precede every action, we human beings employ the creative Power of the Almighty God flowing through us for pure or impure use, or guide it to good or evil channels, to harm or to build. The Power works according to the contents of the intuitive perception and the thoughts, bringing joy or sorrow, building constructively and furthering or destroying like electric currents misapplied. When the Power currents are used for good, the Power remains pure and if for ill, it is dimmed. Deposits ensue to the extent of the deposit first on the soul. We can picture a plate of soup not washed. The dross detracts it from a clean plate.

It is a stain. The thoughts take on form. In accordance with natural lawfulness, thought forms congregate on account of their nature, their homogeneity. The thought of a person attracts or it is attracted to form a power centre with similar thought forms of other people from which power centre its currents go out and further attract similar thoughts. The congregation of the thoughts on account of their homogeneity— like little drops of water becoming an ocean as they say— becomes so powerful that in its outworking more and more are attracted becoming the stronger overcoming and influencing the weaker. It cannot, therefore, be surprising that because thoughts of evil and wrong-doing predominate in our world today evil is ever on the rise. Young people, even if in fleeting thoughts, get recruited into mob gangs as a result.

The seriousness of mob action, therefore, is that each participant who may have guided the pure Power of God flowing through him to killings, to destruction or character assassination, has misused the Power and stained it. The impurity gathers as dross on his soul, and by attracting similar deposits on account of homogeneity, the weight of the dross on his soul increases and he is dragged down, becoming more soulless. Through gravitation law, he is dragged down to the Dark Region on discarding his earthly body. Each person is connected through unbreakable threads to every of his deeds.

And as the seed, so the fruit and the harvest. The harvest streams down in multiples. Have we forgotten that when we sow a grain of maize, it is about 400 corns that cling to one cub? Calamities continue to befall an evil doer, his promoters, his sponsors and even bystanders who rejoice at the destruction or harm being inflicted on fellow men until there is recognition of the wrong and there is atonement—which may take hundreds of years. In other words, inexorably, the authors of evil doing, who may have forgotten their deeds of a thousand years ago, are connected to the victims of today. There lies, perhaps, our link with South Africans and our desire for recompense, and of course, our guilt, all of us!