In the name of Allah, the Most-Merciful, the All-Compassionate

 

"May the Peace and Blessings of Allah be Upon You"

 

Bismillah Walhamdulillah Was Salaatu Was Salaam 'ala Rasulillah

As-Salaam Alaykum Wa-Rahmatullahi Wa-Barakaatuh

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1) DISJOINTED APPEARANCE...... Superb thought provoking messages from the Quran.

 

If the QURAN is the Message of the Creator of the heavens and the earth, if it constitutes the words which were engraved on the mind of the Arabian Prophet by the 'Master of the sun and the moon., if it really is the Last Lesson of the First Teacher and the Original Guide to the dwellers of the earth, then it’s being disjointed in the eyes of the unknowing is its greatest virtue. Its harmony can become manifest only to those who have probed every nook and corner of the Universe, who have acquired substantial knowledge of the INNERMOST MYSTERY of the Book of Nature, who have been elevated by the loftiness of knowledge and spaciousness of truth to the higher horizon of the heavens and the stars; who, indifferent to the petty quibbling of lowly logic, are pursuing the inner realities of things; who are aware of the secret tunes of acceptability in this supreme music of condition and consequence, cause and effect, basis and outcome; who know the hidden melody of the Providential decisions; who, in this apparently unshapely, unguided, unarranged, and tyrannous world of contradictions, find an amazing balance, a surprising justness and harmony, supreme equilibrium and arrangement. The Creator of the heavens and the earth could not afford, while revealing His Message, first to teach man like the initiators, the letters, then arrange letters and words, and subsequently explain what connection various sentences have with each other. His declaration that the book Is complete, detailed, and a treasure-house of knowledge and wisdom Is In Itself a great favour; It is not in man's power to produce the like of It; It Is easy, open, and free from contradictions; It Is meant for a people which knows and reflects; It Is a guide and mercy, light and purity; It Is perfectly consistent. These qualities themselves make it as resplendent as the sun. It is now for man to make utmost efforts to look for these qualities, to test the Quran on the touchstone of knowledge, scrutinize it as wisdom, try to establish harmony between its various parts, prove it as having a single objective from the beginning to the end; or, reject it. The greatest proof of its being CONSISTENT and EFFECTUAL is that a man (PBUH) adopted it as his programme; by making it manifest to the people during the 23 years of blood-curdling hardships, he established between each letter, word and sentence such an abiding connection, such a logical continuity, such a definite and practical environment of cause and consequence, that the entire world was dazzled. If today this divine embodiment of cause and effect, the immense framework of Providential logic, the final verdict of God, the unchangeable compilation of the Divine Will has, through man's own neglect and oblivion, been rendered illogical and Incongruous, how could the Heavenly authorship be held responsible.

 

If God's Words are distracted and inconsistent in the eyes of the common and ignorant people, the god-created nature has, from the earliest till today, appeared to them even more disorderly. The unknowing even today finds no connection between most of what God has created; to him much of this creation is purposeless and unnecessary; much of it is ‘superfluous and incongruous’. He thinks that the world could have continued without most of these things; life would have been more orderly and comfortable in their absence. He sees an unpleasant disorderliness in the branches of  a tree; bends in the Interwoven paths of the river are annoying; trees of a jungle, incalculable creatures of the sea, seasonal Insects, the stars scattered across the sky, all, in his view, are unnecessary. He is unhappy with the mosquito; he considers the fly an intruder; to him cat's devouring of the lovely pigeon is a tyranny; it is a sin for the cock to swallow the Insect; he trembles at the sight of a born-blind. The heart-rending cries of an orphan, a youth's sudden death, a leprosy eaten leg the death-infested tatters of the holy, the towering buildings of the adulterous, all appear to him--from the beginning to the end--an uneven distribution, a purposeless confusion, a baseless tyranny, an unwanted oppression, and an outright authoritarianism. Viewing superficially, he finds in this world no system, no plan or scheme in accord with the accepted notions of order and discipline, equality and justice, correction and chaos, necessity and invention. On witnessing these strange ways and ugliness of the world, he has often denied even the existence of the Supreme Planner. He thinks that whatever he comes across is merely a perplexing and enchanting exhibit of chance, or a nauseous and confounding spectacle of bad planning, but it is absolutely without balance and harmony; it is utterly without logic, mostly without a cause-and-effect relationship. Precisely for this reason was man's attention diverted at the various stages of his knowledge and ignorance from the One God to a host of gods. Whatever was found to be wondrous itself became god. Somewhere sun was worshipped as god, somewhere a river; somewhere fire became a symbol of Godhood, and somewhere occurred division between land and water in the names of deities. Diseases came to be attributed to evil spirits; separate· authors were invented of plagues and bad omens. Where in the presence of effect no cause was available one was invented; where existed a cause, there an effect was supposed. This mental confusion for long did not allow man first of all to arrange these manifestations in a natural order by allotting in his brain a proper place to each, then to show among them a relationship of cause and effect, reason and reward, justice and balance, and by relating them to One Basic Cause, to establish the Unity of this immense creation. Even today, where ignorance holds sway, the outward disharmony of Nature is splitting God into separate gods. And though the Divine Word is emphatic in proclaiming, "Had there been gods other than God there would have been nothing but chaos" it is well-nigh impossible to view the Universe as a connected whole, or to accept the Oneness of its First Cause as long as the ignorant witnesses chaos in the world, as long as is not established, through the spread of knowledge, a manifest unity and an abiding connection between the east and the west, the north and the south the heavens and the earth, nay between water and fire: the fly and the flower; as long as the mean and narrow concept of tyranny and justice does not evolve to become part of the Divine spaciousness and prove the unfair as totally fair, the wrong as wholly night, and the earth as part of the heavens. On this basis has the Quran protested to the non-believers:

 

"Do not the Unbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were joined (as one Unit of Creation) before We clove them asunder? We made from water every living thing. Will they not then believe (in the Unity of the Creator and the Unity of the Creation}"? (21 :31)

 

[Source:  Disjointed Appearance by Late Allama Mashriqi]

 

2) Do your best work by challenging the way you did things yesterday.

 

Do your best work by allowing your passion to see the light of day.

Do your best work by becoming part of the solution versus growing the problem.

Do your best work by expecting nothing less than you playing at world-class.

Do your best work by giving away the credit (especially when you crave it)

Do your best work by practicing your skills so you become a virtuoso.

Do your best work by releasing excuses and doing important things.

Do your best work by getting up when you’ve been knocked down.

Do your best work by keeping your promises; to others and to yourself.

Do your best work by showing integrity.

Do your best work by delivering more value than anyone could ever expect from you.

Do your best work by making time to refill your well.

Do your best work by having a strong foundation at home.

Do your best work by becoming as fit as a pro athlete.

Do your best work by doing work that makes a difference and inspires others to do the same.

As Chuck Palahniuk once said: “The goal isn’t to live forever. The goal is to create something that will.”

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