God as deeply mysterious and none of our human words or concepts could adequately express Him, but the soul has the capacity to know God, since it shared his divine nature. We connect to the soul – so we have the capacity to know God.
From the time I was very young, I was interested in identity. My identity and that of everyone I met. Identity seemed real to me. Who was I? Who was anyone? Why did I do the things I did? Why did they? Why did I care about some people and not others? The analysis of relationships became a favourite subject of mine – the relationships I had with myself as well as with others.
So may be because I was interested in the origin of my own identity it intrigued me that there might be more to me than what I was aware of in my conscious mind. Perhaps there were other identities buried deep in my subconscious that I only needed to search for and find.
I was always more interested in what went before than what might come after. I suppose I wasn’t so interested in what would happen to me after I died as I was in what made me the way I was. Therefore when the notion of life before birth first struck me I guess we might say I was curious to explore it.
The present life time is the important one, only sparked now and then by those deja-vu feelings that we have experienced something before or know someone that we’ve never consciously met before in this lifetime. We know those feelings we sometimes get that we’ve been somewhere before only we know we haven’t?
A soul can choose to advance or regress. If it chooses to continually regress, it will eventually lose its humanity and become animal-like with no choices for advancement or moral atonement left to it. That is what was spoken as of hell. If we choose spiritual evolution, we don’t get the chance after a while, and that is hell.
I have always listened with attentiveness to anything to do with physical culture because I understood that it put me more in touch with myself. I respected my body because it was the only one I had. I wanted to make it last. But, my God, it could be painful, especially when I had let myself with no exercise at all to speak of. That was really dumb. It was actually very sad, when I was accused of being ‘unislamic’ at the age of 15, when I questioned about God and Jesus.
I always felt old when I was not in touch with my body. And the process of connecting with my body put me more in touched with real me inside of that body. And what was the real me? What was it that made me question and search and think and feel? Was I just the physical brain, the little grey cells, or was it the mind which was something more than brain? Did ‘mind’ or perhaps ‘personality’, include what people called the ‘soul’. Were they all separate or was being human a recognition that one was the sum of all these parts, and if so, how did they fit together?
I started writing my journal in my attempt to understand myself, my feelings, confusions, my attempts to get in touch with myself. It is about what the experience did to my mind, to my forbearance, to my spirit, and for my patience and belief. It is about the connection between mind, body and spirit. And what I learned as a result that enabled me to get on with the rest of my life as an almost transformed human being. The journal has always been my biggest secret and no one has ever heard or read it, not even part of it. But now I am posting it for any one who wants to read it. That is a big progress as far as I am concerned.
This is about quest for myself – a quest which took me a long journey that was gradually revealing and at all times simply amazing. I tried to keep an open mind as I went because I found myself gently but firmly exposed to dimensions of time and space. People progress according to what they’re ready for.
I’ve travelled to many places : England (4 times), Italy (3 times), France, Germany, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Canada, Mexico, U.S.A. (more than 6 times), Australia (4 times), Thailand (more than a hundred times), Burma, Cambodia, Israel border, Egypt (twice), Singapore (more than 10 times) ….. and mostly alone. But mostly I loved meeting new people and crashing head-on into foreign cultures until I learned to meld into them comfortably.
And the more I travelled and met people, the more my social and political conscience became activated. And the more it became activated the more I found myself identifying. I loved travelling because it helped me gain a more accurate an objective view of the world as well as of myself. And the more I travelled, the more I learnt abut the spiritual dimensions of life that I was growing to understand. My own convictions were taking shape and being confirmed wherever I went.
What were we here for? Did we have a purpose or were we simply a passing accident?
Jaina
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