The Stuff of Life

By Asif Zaidi

Although Asif Zaidi is a banker and a business leadership advisor by profession, he is fundamentally a thinker of broad understanding and interests. In The Stuff of Life, he offers an anthology of thoughts on diverse subjects, attempting to see the problems of life in the light of human reasoning.

Asif Zaidi is endlessly curious, and leaves no big question untouched. While turning his gaze from one intellectual pursuit to the next, in this collection of essays he addresses nature, evolution, religion, literature, psychology, and scientists, sages, prophets, philosophers, thinkers, and poets who have, down the ages, contributed to human development, making life meaningful. From the personal to the societal to the universal, he turns his spirit of inquiry to a wide swathe of topics:

the love of learning:
mans search for meaning:
faith, tradition, and rationality: and
the moral dimension of existence.

Simple and direct, The Stuff of Life articulates a viewpoint grounded in a rational approach to life and this world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781532009570

Asif Zaidi

Asif Zaidi is a former managing director with a top Wall Street firm and an entrepreneur who has fulfilled leadership roles around the world. He understands the world of leadership and business like few others, and he is passionate to help people improve their sales skills for life. A keynote speaker who has also taught at an elite business school, Zaidi is author of The Stuff of Life and Happiness: A Way of Life.

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Copyright © 2016 Asif Zaidi.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-0956-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-0958-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-0957-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016919405

iUniverse rev. date: 11/18/2016

CONTENTS

Preface

I TO LIVE IS TO LEARN

1 What Is a Life Well Lived?

2 The Economics of the Mind

3 Know Thyself

4 A Journey of Becoming

5 On Forgiveness

6 Now: It’s All We Have

7 Is the Internet Stealing Your Life?

8 Life Lessons

II THE DIGNITY OF MAN

9 The Divine Dimension of Man

10 Man’s Destiny on Earth

11 The Wonder of Two-Pronged Growth

12 In Search of an Awakened Existence

13 From Self-respect to Spirituality

14 Humanity’s Glory Lies in the Individual

15 The Morphology of Intellect

III THE LOVE OF WISDOM

16 Self-realization through Self-knowledge

17 The Purpose of Education

18 Vision Sees Beyond, Not Around

19 Meditation and the Forces of Life

20 Free Expression and the Modern Media

21 The Art of Public Speaking

22 The Joy of Reading

23 Reading to Purpose in the Internet Age

24 Moral Action: From Knowledge to Wisdom

25 A Tribute to Art and Literature

IV REASON, SCIENCE, AND RELIGION

26 Man, the Religious Animal

27 Rational Thought and Religion

28 Religion and Its Relevance

29 Rationality and Mysticism

30 God or No God: A Moral Question?

31 Man’s Experience of God

32 Perversion of Faith and Secularization

33 Science and Human Knowledge

34 Addressing a Question on Human Evolution

V SOULFUL REFLECTIONS

35 Homage to Mother Earth

36 Death, the Eternal Mystery

37 The Starry Nights of Tian Shan Mountains

38 The Real Heritage of Pakistan and India

39 Saying Goodbye to Corporate Life

40 On Liberalism

VI HUMAN RELATIONS

41 Childhood and Growth Today

42 On Duty and Parenthood

43 The Joy of Parenting Siblings

44 Loneliness and Connectivity

VII IN HOMAGE

45 The Soul of Sind

46 A Tribute to Almaty

47 Ghalib: India’s Grand Poet

48 Sartre: The Man Who Spurned the Nobel Prize

49 Faiz Ahmed Faiz: A Poet of His Time

50 Adieu Madiba!

51 Aitzaz Hasan: A Noble Young Wonder

PREFACE

T HIS BOOK REPRESENTS A COLLECTION of some of the essays I have written and a few of the addresses I have delivered during the past few years on a variety of topics. It results from a great deal of persuasion by friends and correspondents to get some of my views printed in the form of a book. This book mostly articulates a viewpoint grounded in a rational approach to life and this world. These are merely thoughts of a mind that continues to grow. I have no pretensions to represent the absolute truth for, to me, anyone who claims to have discovered the absolute truth is not worth taking seriously. However, the preoccupation with discerning the basic truths concerning human life and its habitat plays an instrumental role in providing the incentives to inspire our daily conduct.

I feel fortunate to exist in times when the world we live in can be increasingly, though by no means fully, explained in terms of data that human senses subject to our consciousness. We live in probably the most interesting times in the history of human knowledge. There is so much we have to know that our capacity to feel is often not able to match the vast array of facts and happenings we are obliged to keep abreast of. Thanks to the Internet and social media, we are unavoidably exposed to information about a large body of events. A Facebook friend I may never meet in person can be a permanent fixture in my life, but my real neighbour next door may be a stranger. So, while the scale of our contact with the world has become enormous, we have little leisure to cultivate deep relationships with the world we come across.

Our ancestors knew relatively far fewer people but they knew them closely and intimately and, hence, were able to live a lot more intensely. Not only do we have too much to know but we also have so much more to do and, therefore, our capacity for intense living is diminishing. Instead, we are contented to become weary spectators, even though we know a great deal more than any other generation of what is happening in our world. Our emotional energy gets spread out thinly on a large surface of world happenings. Our ability to distinguish between standard of living and standard of life is getting blurred.

Against this backdrop, this book is an anthology of thoughts on diverse subjects, attempting to see the problems of life in the light of human reasoning. It is about nature, evolution, scientists, sages, prophets, philosophers, thinkers, and poets who have, down the ages, contributed to our development, making our lives meaningful for us.

I

TO LIVE IS TO LEARN

1

WHAT IS A LIFE WELL LIVED?

One can learn a lot from the modern leadership mantras.

R ECENTLY I ATTENDED A LEADERSHIP training program for executives. This intense five-day program featured lectures from top executives and leadership gurus like Marshall Goldsmith, Thomas J. Delong, Robert Steven Kaplan, and Jim Loehr. While it was useful, I was amused to see how man’s age-old love for wisdom and quest for knowledge of how best to live have been distilled into skills for success in the corporate world.

These skills aim at maximizing our prospects for happiness and calibrating our morals to succeed, while remaining compliant with the law and grounded in the relevant ethos. In an echo of Russian literary colossus Fyodor Dostoevsky—perhaps the first western thinker to subject conscience to such tough and honest scrutiny—human conscience is seen as inconsistent and irrational. Socrates’s motto ‘Know thyself’ is elevated into deifying the self.

However, apart from using this knowledge to climb the corporate ladder higher and faster, one can learn a lot from the modern leadership mantras. For instance, they afford tools and opportunity for an intellectual self-examination leading to greater self-awareness, thus helping us learn the imperative of emotional self-transparency and become more emotionally attuned people. This enables us, without having to grasp Freudian psychoanalytical concepts, to relate to a much wider range of emotions.

Self-awareness lessens our risk of being enslaved by unacknowledged feelings. It helps us relate to the cold facts in a more rational manner, rather than letting our emotions cherry-pick the facts for us. As British philosopher Jonathan Glover writes: ‘Knowledge of the possibility of unconscious factors distorting our view of our situation places on us a special duty of scrutiny.’

The desire to succeed in the modern corporate world is surely a legitimate passion. It affords one a tremendous opportunity for doing good and achieving multidimensional personal growth. And thanks to better management systems, people who work the system to get ahead at all costs are increasingly in the minority.

Though in practical life one has to often contend with psychic hard-drives with embedded programs to succeed at any price. If training programs like this one can convince a few of those people to examine the position that their hard-nosed ambition spells out, that is every bit worth the effort. Yes, some will continue to claim credit they don’t deserve. Some others will remain stuck on fawning and sucking up—which remain ubiquitous in most corporations—or will continue to fall for the super-skilled suck-up of the modern corporate genre. Yet most people can improve, if they want to, by working on their foibles when they are shown the mirror.

As I listened to the speakers, some of whom were quite erudite, I reflected on a couple of things. First, this is all about what we expect from life and how best to get it. Does life also expect something from us and, if so, what? Second, the success of a life is not about winning a race. Rather it should be judged by the fulfilment of the purpose we assign to it, which in turn determines what we deem valuable and important in life.

So what, then, is a life well lived? It is up to each of us to define the standards by which to mark the distinction between our life’s successes and its failures. The quality of a life lived must depend on the totality of acts, work, commissions, and omissions ascribed to that life. At the end this alone determines the productivity and quality of life to the one who lived or those who watched or examine its course; this is the setting in which life should be viewed.

Great people are usually judged in the context of a span of time that is much greater than their own lives. The judgement of their contemporaries can never decide their worth as a force in human history. In fact, all of us have the power to exert influence beyond our lifespan by sowing the seeds of our legacy as teachers, parents, doctors, and so on.

An individual’s life is a cross-section of a larger whole. What we are at a given moment is not fully known to us, much less to those around us. With hindsight, in our own eyes, we appear in diverse garbs as if we have all along been playing a role, as Shakespeare said. Much of what we do, in retrospect, appears to be passing phases. Our worries look absolutely pointless, our pursuits seem a fading shadow, and most of our accomplishments are like transient melodies whose reverberations are quickly vanishing.

We should, then, judge ourselves in a transcendental context, examining our successes and failures in the perspective of some cosmic purpose. As I thus ponder over the course of my own life, I try and figure out what credentials my life must present before I could call it well lived.

To start with, the human-in-itself is a creature of instinct. It is moved by the forces of life, like other animals. Its body is its instrument of action. Its biological needs are aligned with nature’s purpose of preserving individual life as well as the existence of the species to which it belongs. The instincts of human life, though, are regulated by the ability to reason. So even its lowest manifestation is at a level higher than those of animals. Hence, being decent human beings and sincerely fulfilling our commitments as parents, friends, citizens, and so on, forms the core of our existence—the base we strive to build from. As we rise above the base, wealth, power, distinctions, and fame may be important, but they do not provide a dependable gauge to measure the real value or quality of life.

These factors are, of course, of varying importance to different people and can thus be helpful in assessing life’s quality, but they are not at all decisive. I have come across a number of people who scored high on these criteria but appeared devoid of any real inner worth or significance. This may be because there is some kind of indescribable sense or significance of our life without which our external achievements do not suffice. Unless our life is connected with that world of universal significance, we cannot live our life to its full purpose, use, service, or worth.

This connection helps us to reflect upon our work and our pursuits and match them against the life we want to live. Thereby we ensure the best use of the highest expression of life’s hidden power in our capacity for conscious thought and action. The more aware we become of our role in the scheme of things in relation to the kind of world in which our lot is cast, the more the power of our life finds its fulcrum, and more we are able to put our life to better and more effective use and service.

When I survey my own life’s course, I can say that I have lived reasonably happily. Yet as years roll on, probably engendering a greater self-awareness, I do feel that somewhere deep down in my heart exists a void that remains to be filled. So I ask myself what it is that—in addition to endeavouring to be a good son, father, etc., and a decent human being—should happen for me to feel convinced that I have not lived in vain. At times I wish that someone with greater insight into my being could appear and reveal the answer to me.

Even though in the economic field we now have ever-increasing access to such help through coaching, mentoring, and training. But unfortunately, such a recipe is not usually available to us in matters of the heart and soul. ‘In the sweat of thy brow thou must earn daily bread’ is mostly the ruling in matters spiritual. Despite sages’ teachings over the centuries for securing our moral and spiritual reinforcement, there is no easy way to it. Often our critical faculties make it difficult to assume the attitude prescribed by a simple and unsophisticated, and usually black-and-white life of faith.

While we still crave religion for emotional satisfaction, its ability to explain our world has significantly eroded in the face of scientific and intellectual advancement. The progression of knowledge and liberation of thought have combined to disrupt the functional unity of the spiritual apparatus of life. It has become increasingly difficult for us to accept uncritically the assumptions that are inherent in a religion. One such piece of dogma is the prophecy of a Messiah to appear.

According to many philosophies of faith, a Messiah will arrive to eternally annihilate the forces of darkness. Thereafter mankind will witness a reign of unity (within its fold, claims every faith), peace, love, and true well-being. I have neither the ability nor the intention to comment on the metaphysical (or other) legitimacy of such a belief. But I cannot suppress the temptation to mention that, often, such belief breeds inaction and complacency and fosters an attitude of quietism. It makes it easy for us to sit and wait for someone to arrive who will transform the world and solve all our problems. This view diminishes man’s obligation to strive and sacrifice to realize higher ends for this world.

I believe that our moral and spiritual regeneration in this age can only occur through a conscious effort and initiative to define and fulfil our mission on earth. What counts the most in this respect is a craving to grow by outgrowing our limitations, which enables us to expand our consciousness to a level where it begins to mirror the universal goodness.

We may not all become a Tolstoy, Einstein, Mandela, or Gates—an individual who virtually becomes a part of the Cosmic Spirit. However, we can definitely make progress in improving the landscape of our inner being while striving to consciously play our role in making this world better than we inherited it. Progress in this respect rests on individual effort alone, and any external aid is of little consequence because in most situations in life we know the way but have to be morally prepared and inwardly advanced to harness the will and energy to follow its path. The course of time is absolutely irreversible and our portion of it cruelly limited. This fact casts upon us a duty to exploit the present to its fullest and to be constantly mindful and vigilant in abiding by our chosen course to define a life well lived.

It may be said that in discussing my conception of a life well lived, I seem possessed by the objective of personal perfection in consonance with the universal scheme of things and have not noticed the importance of realizing the collective objectives of an enterprise or a society. That may be a valid criticism but I believe that only individuals who are well integrated in their inner growth and outer adjustment can truly make society and organizations better.

Individual growth is primary to all human growth. Individual growth fosters peace and modifies the obsession with money and power, as it alone can redeem individuals from the grip of our baser impulses. The forces that change society and business are released by the liberated individual acting in isolation. For example, the world of business is transformed by individuals like Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gates, and Zuckerberg, and not by slick corporate rats. The contributions of such individuals are akin to beholding the light, as Plato suggests in his parable of the Cave in The Republic.

Now, did I leave you more confused at the end of this piece than when you began? That is because you did not start it thinking that you already knew the answer to a life well lived—and I have no answer to offer. The answer, for yourself, is your own to find. And you will only find it deep within yourself.

2

THE ECONOMICS OF THE MIND

If we control the mind by the mind, the mind stays.

M OST OF THE KNOWLEDGE OUR mind possesses is conceptual. For example, if I say I have a red car, even if you are not seeing a red car, your mind manages to come up with a picture of a red car. However, a person who is born blind cannot discern ‘red’ and will not be able to comprehend my statement evocatively. Much as I may describe it, I can never give the person a precise idea of what ‘red’ is. Further, if I write the word red in black ink, it does not alter the conception of ‘red’. Thus, things are independent of our conception or our nominalistic expression of them.

Most of our scientific knowledge is also conceptual, rooted in concepts and their relationships. This type of knowledge proceeds by abstraction, often far removed from observable reality. Abstractions are generally defined by irreducible minimum attributes. For example, ‘vegetable’ is an abstraction; it is a general word for all kinds of vegetables. Similarly, ‘man’ is an abstraction, summing up all the types of people that we know of.

Concept is the only currency in which we trade our thoughts. As conceptual knowledge is abstract in its very nature, it cannot tell us much about the truth of things that our senses discover. Thus, it does not give much information about reality.

Scientific laws of nature are mathematical equations describing the relationships between facets of reality. Scientific knowledge communicates abstract concepts necessary for the purpose of action to control matter and its motion. For example, a person opening a door with a control button need have no idea of the shape and substance of the door, but that would not matter, as the only objective was to open the door. Similarly, scientific laws are based on the consistency of nature’s behaviour and thus help us harness the powers of nature in the service of man. This is how scientific knowledge has transformed the world.

However, this type of knowledge does not help in understanding the nature of reality and cannot really help us understand the nature of life. For example, it cannot tell us what is beautiful. The method does not work to answer certain moral or philosophical questions. In this case, knowledge has to be viewed from a different angle. Since matter and motion are only a part of reality, the knowledge that has been developed to secure the control of matter and its motion cannot adequately address the whole reality. Some philosophers have suggested that intuition is the faculty to address complex metaphysical questions. When intuition sparks, our understanding rises above the conventional experiential limitations and we really begin to understand the nature of the universe and also who we are.

Through the ages, our mind has evolved to primarily handle the practical conduct of life. Thus it is prone to distort reality in order for us to control our environment. In order to be able to see things as they are, we have to begin by preventing our mind from distorting reality. The question, then, is: How do we control the mind?

If we control the mind by the mind, the mind stays. The objective is to step out of the world of mind, somewhat like when Galileo said, ‘If you can show me a spot where I can take my stand away from the earth, I can move the earth.’ It is not easy. Try to empty your mind for only one minute and you will see that it is not possible. The thoughts keep coming; as you try to control thought by thought, you are still thinking. This quandary is aptly described by Buddha, when he says, ‘Mind is the slayer of the real.’ Mind twists reality by forcing its own notions upon reality. Like fishers who are more concerned about the fish they catch than understanding what fish is, our mind catches reality solely in order to be able to act upon it.

As humans we are conditioned to think dualistically in terms of subject-predicate equations. The lens of our mind determines the colour of the reality we see through it. So on the one hand, the mind has raised man to the apex of knowledge and discovery. On the other hand, the same mind distorts reality for us.

It is impossible to silence the mind’s activity completely, even in our sleep. It is only when we get some deep and dream-free sleep that we feel fresh and rested when we wake up. Mind is fuelled by energy, and involuntary thinking tires us out.

This reminds me of a well-known fable of a dialogue between a snake and a scorpion. The snake asks the scorpion, ‘Despite the fact that your poison is far deadlier than mine, how come my bite kills and your sting does not?’ The scorpion replies, ‘The reason is simple. Since I am blind, every object I come across I regard as my enemy and sting it, thus wasting my poison. Whereas you have eyes and you don’t waste your energy. Hence, your poison is concentrated and when you come across an enemy you have the bite to kill it.’

The same economics applies to our energy and consciousness. The ceaseless friction of our thinking, feeling, and acting mechanism continues to gnaw at our energy. The more we minimize this friction, the more energy we save. If we could stop our involuntary thinking and feeling even for a while, we could save a great deal of energy. It is like a gardener weeding out whatever is not needed. In order to preserve and better use our energy, we have to constantly pluck out the weeds of daydreaming, involuntary thinking, reflexive emotions, and mindless action. These mechanical freeloaders leave us

Reviews for The Stuff of Life

[pardamustang · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

**This book was reviewed for the Manhattan Book Review**Asif Zaidi’s The Stuff of Life is a veritable treasure trove of essays bridging a wide variety of philosophical topics. There are several sections, each with a general focus. This book is stuffed with the type of philosophical questions that I, as a philosopher myself, particularly enjoy, even where the spiritual dipped into the religious. Many of the essays reminded me of my own meanderings, while others had me stopping to marinate in a new way of thinking about something. The very first essay, What is a Life Well Lived, really spoke to me. I often get in a brown study, musing over if my own life actually matters. In truth, everyone's does. For better or worse, we cast ripples that go far wider and longer than ever we could know. This essay reminds us that our legacies long outpace us, and not just in the immediately physical sense of children, and that it is for each person to discover for themselves the meaning of a life well lived. It won't mean the same to everyone. Several essays, including one entitled On Forgiveness, deal with just that most difficult of topics. Forgiveness comes easy to some, and never to others. It's a matter of how you choose to think, and to interact with life. It's a topic dear to me, as I learned just how different I am from the majority of my family when my cousin was murdered. While the rest of them clamoured for the death penalty, I advocated against it. One mother's heart had been broken over this. Another didn't need to be. Oh, but this author’s, nay, this philosopher's words ring within me. This is a person sharing a similar mind-frame, and with whom I would love to sit and discuss things long into the shadowed night. The myriad topics tie in science, psychology, spirituality, and religion, along with the notion that all we really have are perceptions. Everyone sees the world through different lens, crafted in different ways. There are so many other great essays, to discuss them all would be an essay itself! If you enjoy being challenged in your thinking, and musing over the deeper things in life, you are sure to enjoy this book. The writing itself is beautiful, though another grammar and spellcheck would not be amiss. That's the only thing holding back a fifth star.????