2006 January 27th to March 31st

Muslim Journal

Focus On Reform

Imam W. Deen Mohammed


(Imam W. Deen Mohammed made this Public Address on the First Sunday of the New Year, which also was New Year's Day, 2006, given at the Homewood Hotel, in Homewood, III.)

We appreciate this opportunity to address our Radio Audience and to be here on this First Sunday of the Year and the First Day of the Year. I wish all of you a Happy New Year and a very prosperous New Year. We pray that the New Year we have now will be better than the year that just went out. And I believe it will be for all of us.

We are addressing the need for reform. The future that we are facing is going to bring about more demand for reform, more support for reform. There is reform for public education in the United States of America, but also there is reform for almost everything we have been supported by.

This is a new world we are living in. This is a new time and a new world. The world was once being one-sighted, seeing one way and not respecting the whole people or the whole population of this planet earth. It was moving very selfishly in the direction of what it wanted and ignoring justice.

Before 1945, the world had no "institution" or legal organization whereby a nation threatened by another nation could take its complaints and be heard.

A Catholic peace building movement publishes a magazine titled "Living City." One of its featured articles says, "After 60 years, the United Nations will be facing the demands for more serious reform. Public education in the United States, respecting the natural environment for the good of the environment itself but also to save human life on this planet, shrinking fuel supplies, poverty and starvation are all on the world scene and on the agenda of conscious nations."

At home in our big and small cities, reform is becoming a more pressing issue. Feeling and perception also need reforming, how we feel about things and how we perceive or understand things. Communities must support efforts to reform popular thinking and attitudes.

Emotions are too high. The human intelligence in the future will be approached more directly. People will be demanded to use their brains more and respect intelligent behavior. As the world tries to keep its old habit of singing and dancing its troubles away, the world gets more messy. Morals become more confused and human abuses more horrified.

Think of the human body as a vehicle, like an automobile or motor vehicle. When I was young, I wanted to drive long before I was of the age to drive. I used to ride in the car with senior or older brothers in the Temple who had cars, and I would sit there and imagine myself under the wheel. My father sometimes would take us out in his car, and I would be imagining myself under the wheel.

I got the opportunity to drive a truck, long before I was of age. This brother asked me when I was about 14 years old, "Would you like to go with me and make some extra money?" And I said, "Yes." He had a nice two and a half ton truck. He would overload it with junk and take the junk to the junkyard and sell glass, metal, paper and cardboard and old rages.

Once we were driving along 431'" Street and he asked me, "Would you like to drive?" I said, "Yes." He stopped, and I got under the wheel. Believe me, I drove well the first time under the wheel, because I had been driving all the time, imagining myself in the driver's seat. It wasn't difficult. I was following what I had been observing and did the same thing.

I had to get use to spaces. I would measure spaces. And observing the other drives, I would imagine the spaces he could get through and the spaces he could not get through.

Seeing all the vehicles now on the road and some of the people in them, I know they passed and got their license. But really they shouldn't be behind the wheel. Some of them look like they are trying to hit me. I am dodging, and they are following me like they are trying to hit me.

This is really an unconscious world. It is a world with a spirit controlling it;
most of the people are controlled by a spirit that is not intelligent and is not the spirit that came from good parents.

It is not the spirit that came from good teachings and education. It is not the spirit that comes from the individual's good thinking. And that spirit is really costing us a lot.

So we are going to have to reform our spirit. And we can reform our spirit. All you have to do is reform the way you think, and everything will change for the better. As the Bible said and as a philosopher said before the Bible, "As a man thinketh, so is he." The Bible says, "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." And the Qur'an says, "Think, for surely thinking will profit you."

W. E. B. DuBois, our political leader who started what we call now the NAACP,
said, "Our people will progress in the measure that we are willing to teach our children to think." Think!

I remember parents correcting us and saying, "You had better use your head; you had better think!" They would insist that we think. Behavior without thought is blind behavior. There are a lot of good habits that are acceptable, but crazy habits are not.

Imagine now that you are in a motor vehicle and you are flying down the street at the speed limit or above. You have no brakes. Your steering doesn't work. It won't turn you left or right - no brakes and no steering. You won't drive a vehicle like that, but many of us are living like that.

Imagine now that you are in a motor vehicle and you are flying down the street at the speed limit or above. You have no brakes. Your steering doesn't work. It won't turn you left or right - no brakes and no steering. You won't drive a vehicle like that, but many of us are living like that.

No brakes. No steering. In fact, when you see the danger, instead of turning away from it, we persist in just going headlong the same way. So we are having a spirit and behavior that is reckless, terrible at-risk behavior. We need to reform it, and we have to reform it.

We don't have homes anymore, the majority of us, that represent intelligent guidance for us. It is not because it is not wanted in those homes. It is because the world scene is a street scene.

The behavior is in the streets. The things that attract your attention are in the streets, the songs you listen to and the music you like, the movies you like.

We need to reform our minds, so that our minds will come up from being so low down. It is a shame that I can't find hardly a decent movie in some of these African American neighborhoods. I was getting a little angry and fed up and said I was going to approach the management.

But something told me not to bother the management. The management is only showing what the people will support. And I recalled watching a nice movie on the weekend, and there was hardly nobody there watching it but me and my little son and maybe two other people.

That has happened several times, that we were watching a nice high class movie and nobody was there but us. It registered on my mind then that people don't support movies like this. The average ones in these African American neighborhoods do not support class, do not support culture, do not support quality.

All they want is violence and sex, and that gets the big crowds to the movies. The decent movies that will feed your mind and help to get your life straight, they don't want to see those. So I have given up appealing to minds like that, whether they are teenagers or the old ones.

My interest is in reaching those who care about life, not those who have given up on it. The others can't help themselves and can't help you. If they could help themselves, they wouldn't be in that condition. And if we could help them, they would be here listening to us.

They have no interest in what we are saying. They have no interest in anything but what has them, what is holding them - vulgarity, violence, love for crime. That is a crime to treat yourself that way. It is a crime to treat your life the way you treat your life.

We want the conscious ones who are in our hearing range, in the radio audience
and here at this facility, to register more the hurt on society, the hurt on human life. Think about it more, so you will do more about it.

They can't help themselves. Spiritually, they are dead. Morally, they are dead. So how can you raise the dead, if they insist upon living in the graveyard? In the big cities, they make more and more room for you and will turn over more land to you, to increase the area for the dead.

They are not running out of space, when it comes to accommodating the dead. You want to die and go six feet under? They have plenty more land, if your graveyard in your area is filling up. They will accommodate you, if you want to go down in the grave of moral decay, moral rot.

We have to reform the behavior. We can save those who are conscious. The best help that a conscious person needs that will help them the most is just to know that somebody else is conscious.

We want you to know who are out there in the radio audience, who are conscious, who are alive and respect things that are conscious, still care about human life and human suffering, we are alive with you. And we want us all to be together.

Let us be together in one spirit. G-d has made us in one spirit. And G-d has made us one life - a human life and human spirit. And if you are in human life and have human spirit, we are one in the same.

I'm thankful to Allah that we still have conscious people on this earth, who will not give in to the pressure to go six feet under.

There is plenty pressure out there to go six feet under, and there's not much help to keep your life in a good condition. But there is a lot of help, if you want to destroy your life.

I was thinking on the subject of reform and words from an old song came to my mind. It goes like this: "I'm gonna change the way I walk. I'm gonna change the way I talk." Whoever wrote that song put something together.

Walking and talking are two developments that come almost at the same time in the life of the human being. Usually a child who is walking can talk a little, too. Walking and talking are like twins in developmental progress of human life and come around the same time.

This world, with its bad influences - the corrupt world, the unconscious world or the Satanic world - is not out to help human life but just to exploit human life, to profit, to make money at the risk of human life.

That world reaches us with its influences and changes the way we think, firstly. Then it changes the way you feel. Because if the way you think changes, then you are open to feel differently, too. First, it changes the way we think, and then it changes the way we feel, and then it changes the way we behave.

When the thinking changes, it is expressed in the language. The talk changes. I don't know how this world managed to be so quick. I read in the Bible, where it says, "One beast has eyes all over it." I took that to mean spies.

That bad society beast had spies everywhere mixed among them, to let it know what was happening, what the mood changes were, what the trends were or what do you see developing.

They will find a youngster walking down the street, who has gone off from the norm and left the old behavior. He will be indicating that he has a different spirit in him and a different behavior. He will be wearing his clothes hanging off his butt.

So they say, "There are a lot of them out there like him or ready to be like him. So let's put him on TV. And we are going to sell a lot of baggy clothes hanging off the butt." Although, I believe there are some good conscious ones out there, who are going around with their clothes hanging off their butts.

That tells the world that cares about money more than anything, the commercial mind in the world, that you are one of their customers, potential or already customer. Let us be conscious and fight the world that takes us down and support the world that lifts life up. That is what we have to do.

This is an effort to reform the way we think. And if we can reform the way we think, we can reform the way we behave. Your behavior doesn't change, until your thinking changes.

I'm sure you recall being home with your parents, and some child - a distant one or a close one - may be in the house. Some parents didn't care who it was. If you behaved in an unconscious way and displayed ignorance and vulgar behavior, they would correct you.

They'd say, "Hey, this is my house." And they were correct. They would see the one behaving that way and say, "What has gotten into your mind?" They weren't psychologists. But common sense told them that if you are behaving differently, something had gotten into your mind.

A lot of us think: "I know they are bad, but you have to love them. Come on, honey, I love you anyway. Give me a hug." You should be giving him a right cross, like Muhammad Ali. That will be love.

But saying that other says, "I like you just like you are, and you don't have to change for me. You aren't bothering me with your bad behavior."

That is not love. That is abuse. You are abusing them with that kind of treatment. If you are conscious, you benefit from everything good. If you are unconscious, morally or spiritually, you are susceptible, you are vulnerable, you are open to everything bad. You will lose everything.

We are a people who value human life. Your bad behavior hurts our feelings. The way you treat yourself pains us right in our hearts. But we are not going to go to the grave with you.

We are going to work with the best of us and hope that one day, our influence in our areas where we live, in our neighborhoods, will be bigger than the influence of those who don't care about anything but money.

There are those who will push every other important issue off the desk, if it hurts their money. They just want to keep the money coming big. They are responsible for all the misery we are seeing now, not only in the streets but in our homes.

This much damage could not be done to us, if it were not for television. Television now brings what is happening from all over the world right into your living room.

You can't be there all the time to know what the children are watching. So you have corruption having free access, free entry. And that is bad.

But you can't go crazy. I know I won't; I insist upon being sane and real. You can't beat them to death, if they keep watching those things. They are teenagers going to school. You just have to keep talking to them and trying to reason with them.

Some of us do that and still lose them. They soon don't want to stay with us, because we irritate them. They will go stay with someone else, and soon we find out that they have left the good life. They have joined those who waste life and destroy life.

We only can do our best and have faith that eventually good wins out. Eventually, G-d takes over. We can only go so far with Satan. After a while, G-d will say, "I will take charge of this matter." Then G-d brings His Judgment and the whole world begins to change.

People on high tolerated the abuse of freedom, freedom to make money at any cost, freedom to take over the culture and make it nothing but a culture for producing dollars. That is almost what our culture is now in the streets and on television.

There will come a time, eventually, that the high ups in government and in church life and for us in Muslim life will get fed up, too.

G-d will put in them the spirit to say, "Hey, this has gone too far. It has to be checked." The high ups in world Christianity - in Europe and everywhere -are meeting and saying, "Something has to be done about this. It has to be checked; it has gone too far."

They express themselves and then the high ups in government hear their concerns. And those who have the same fear and same concern meet with those of the religious establishments.

I'm talking as though this is something that could happen or has happened. But really what I am viewing in my mind right now is what is happening at this particular time.

So don't think everything is lost. No. We have people in high government positions and people in high religious positions - church, synagogue, mosque - with influence and with money and power, people who have looked at this ugly life scene and the public just going to the graveyard.

They say, "Let them go on their own. But we have to stop those who are profiting on their bad behavior."

So privileges that have been given to immoral money makers are being taken away from them. It won't be long. I think you can see the sign of it in the movie theaters now. There are more movies coming out addressing moral issues and the forces of good and evil, how they are in conflict and in battle with each other.

That tells us that the influences of those persons in high places are reaching the movie industry. We don't see it much or hear it much in the record business for songs and music, but it's there. It is coming and growing there,
too.

Don't you know we have plenty of good rappers. But you don't see them in that spirit that is still on us. Although it is going away, it is a thing of the past. That is the spirit where the vulgar guy is welcomed. The nasty mouth guy is welcomed.

The clean mouth guy is told, "We don't want you. There is nothing for you to do. Why don't you go back to get it together again?" The clean mouth guy will have what will really help us. He'll have clean and sweet smelling stuff. The other guy has poison, drugs as a form of music and song.

The time is changing. It's time for reform.

You, who are Muslims in the audience, remember the days of the Nation of Islam under the Hon. Elijah Muhammad. And there are many of you who never became Muslim but appreciated his work for the Black people or African Americans.

The Hon. Elijah Muhammad, if I were to describe him in just one statement, I would say he was a man who wanted to dignify the life of his people. That kind of work, when you look at the whole life and want to make it more respectful and respectable, you are looking at it from the eyes of a reformer. You want to reform your life.

Remember Carter G. Wood-son? We celebrate him every February with Black History Month. He wrote a book challenging us to take on the responsibility for ourselves of educating our children. He took the position that the way we were being educated by the public system was really miseducation. And he was correct.

It has changed a lot since his time, in fact it is a completely new scene. It is not the same scene that Carter G. Woodson was looking at, but it still has a long way to go yet.

It still needs more reforming. I'm not saying this; it is the educators and the conscious teachers and higher education institutions that are saying that we have to reform our system of education.

The textbooks still need more corrections and reforming in the way they are composed and how the knowledge is perceived in education. The time is here to bring about good change for the better.

I am optimistic. I see a good future coming. I think the sickness has reached its course. A healing time is here. Life is going to be beautiful.

Also I want to say to the young people here in the audience is that we have to reform the way we see old people. Human progress on this earth has been made more and better, because the old folks deposited what they had of value from their learning and experiences into the ears and heads of the young.

During the period of time behind us - a long way behind us; some of us still do it, but it is a few - youngsters didn't look at old people and say, "I have nothing to do with them, and they have nothing to do with me." No. They felt a strong bond, child and adult. They felt dependency.

Even the rebellious ones, those of bad behavior, had some respect for elders, some respect for senior citizens, some respect for old folks. But all of that was destroyed, too, with this new, popular culture that took over.

Also, adults, you have to reform the way you see the young people. I hear them saying, "Well, they are just young." They don't add, "...And they don't know." They have stopped doing that. But they used to say it both.

The youngsters have learned so much, until you don't say "they don't know" anymore. They know more than the average one of us, that is for sure - especially about this world and life out there.

We have to change and reform. We have to reform the way we look at the youngsters. Don't look at them and say, "Oh, they are young and caught up in that young life. And I hope they survive it." You have to look at them and say, "If all of them go bad, we all are going to become extinct."

Because our future is in our children, and the good life that G-d puts in human nature had us wanting to deposit the best of ourselves. As we see ourselves getting more and more away from the energetic life and nearing retirement, an urge came over us to share with our children, the young, what we got, so that they will have more to work with for their future.

We have to start looking at them like that again. We look at our children and grandchildren. Imam Rafah mentioned that I am a grandfather. Rafah, I am a great grandfather. I have great grandchildren. See how it is supposed to go? You have a father, then a grandfather, and then a great-grandfather. It is supposed to improve as the family line grows. You are supposed to be achieving more.

He produced me, and he is a father. Now I produce a child from his line and he is a grandfather. They ask me when they see my young son, "Are you his grandfather?" I say, "Yes, I am his Grand Father and he is my Grand Son!" Now it is something to become a Great Grandfather; you are not only grand, you also are great!

Appreciating life is where it all starts. When G-d made man on this earth, the man thought about himself and the world all about him, and he realized that there was more in the world than he could possibly use. It was too much for him. He did not have an appetite to use all of the things out there.

It made him wonder, "Why have I been put in a world like this to think and understand and be free to benefit from all of this beauty and wealth and goods out here?"

He reflected and came up with the idea that it could not have happened, unless somebody was over it and cared about life. That was G-d.

We know that the ancient and those of medieval times and those now, those conscious teachers of religion, say the first bond you should have is with G-d. They say never break that bond. Form a tie or relationship with G-d and never break it. That is the key to survival and good life on this planet earth. They told us that.

Some of us don't want to hear anything. I was speaking once and someone said, "Will you stop talking; I don't want to think." She was a little bit conscious, because she knew I was making her think. Now they have regressed and gone so far away from intelligent human life, that you don't bother them anymore.

They don't even know you are talking. While you are talking, they are chewing and popping gum and shaking the booty. They can't hear a thing you are saying.
That is dead, spiritual and moral death.

Another thing, we should see our youngsters doing well and let everybody know they exist. Those who want to use us and make money on our bad behavior are going to find the bad guy and the bad girl and make sure that they are known. What does that do to our good youngster? It is making them wonder.

Here you are hugging the bad guy, saying, "Come here, honey. I still love you. Give me a hug!" The good guy, the good son, the good friend, is looking at that and saying, "I am living right, and I don't get any attention. He is notoriously bad and getting all of the attention."

We have to reverse that and stop that and start recognizing the good child. Let the good child come up here and speak, and that will help the good child. Also it eventually will tell the bad child, "You have to get popular another way." Some of them are bad just because it is popular to be bad. We can change all of that.

Another area we need to look at is the way we see the city, the public facilities, the sidewalk outside of the house, the curb and streets in front of your house, the lawn, the walk you take to go to the store and to the park, the public vehicles you ride on - the bus and the train. We have to view these things differently. These things belong to all of us.

You have the ghost of the plantation in you. The ghost of the plantation says, "This is the White man's. The White man owns this street. The White man owns this sidewalk, so let me dirty it up. Let me trash it and spit on it. Let me break out a window." We become destructive and destroy our own environment. We make ugly our own environment we are living in.

An ugly environment then makes your spirit ugly or kills it. Or it makes the spirit run out from that environment. It is going to affect you one way or the other. You are going to rebel against it and get away from it, which a lot of people do. They get out of that area and move to a place where people are respecting more intelligent behavior and life.

But most of us don't move out, because we don't have the money to move out. We stay in that area, and sometimes the area corrupts us. Just the environment will corrupt you, when you are waking up in an ugly, filthy, trashy environment. Or it will take your quality spirit away from you, and you will become unconsciously not caring anymore.

I have heard some say, "I can't handle all of this. I had to throw up my hands. Now I see it and just walk by it." It is too much for their spirit to stay straight. So if you want a good spirit and to feel good inside, if you want to feel like going to work, make your environment pretty.

Parents, you should insist that the child keeps the toys where the toys belong. Put your clothes up and put dirty clothes where they go. Insist upon these things. That is the natural, original spirit in life that G-d created the human being with. The original spirit wants to see order and beauty.

Life thrives on order and beauty. So we will get up and make up our beds and put our shoes together, the left shoe with the right shoe. Disorder burdens your life. If you have to go out to a date or to school, and you have to find your shoe, you will nearly go crazy with beads of sweat coming from your head - trying to find your shoe.

Look how you are torturing your life. Let us go back to the old. Let us reform. Reform means to do it again, reform all over.

We have a saying in religion that even a child is going to be made accountable on Judgment Day. And G-d is going to ask the child, "How did you treat the properties that your parents put in your possession?" How did you treat your clothes? How did you treat your books? How did you treat your toys? Did you treat those things with respect?

If he didn't, Judgment is going to fall even on a child. The child will fall in Hellfire. I saw one fall already, like a falling star down into the flames of consuming passions that take life to hell.

We hope that in some way we benefit the living. I think that if the living are benefited, the dead will feel it. We pray that more of the living will grow in the good life that G-d created us for and prosper in the good way.

Don't be afraid to think big, as long as you think right. Don't think small, because thinking is what profits human life. And thinking, G-d says, with Him in mind is the most productive of all thought.

Let us keep G-d in mind, as we think ourselves into a better life and we reform our attitudes and our understanding, our perception, our thinking - reform everything - that is in the way of us having the life that we know is good for us.

Let us look at reform in Scripture. When we read the story of the creation of man, what we have to understand, students, is that it is not talking about the physical creation of man in the way that most people understand it.

The way it is given to most people is that G-d made the first man from the earth, from clay, and formed him and then breathed into him His Spirit, and he became a living creature or living person.

The way most of us understand that kindergarten language and kindergarten knowledge is not the way educated people in religion understand it. But the public is allowed to have these kindergarten pictures of reality, because the public is not trusted with more knowledge.

Do you know that the commercial world, commercial TV, compose their commercials to reach a 12-year-old mind? They don't compose it higher than that, unless they
have changed it recently. I have read documents on this. They compose the commercials to reach no higher than that level.

You can listen to many of them and see that they are designed for children. And that is where most of the public is, right there in a child's state of mind. It's designed for that mind, because they found out that they will reach more of the public when they come that way.

The same goes for religion. Religion has been allowed to stay on a kindergarten level for the public or the masses of people. Pressure is now on the religious establishment to reform the way they preach and the way they perceive the public.

It is coming gradually, and we are going to see a new time when religion is going to come in a way that respects adult minds and adult intelligence. It still will reach children, but it will not ignore or disrespect the intelligence of adult people. The religion now sounds like animation.

What you have to be cautious of now is not to come to conclusions and judge this language with your intelligence and knowledge, if you don't have direct knowledge from learned people or insights into this language. Do not come to hasty judgments and say, "Oh, that's fiction and not real."

It is not fiction; it is real. Metaphor, yes. Fiction, no. Literature, not just religious literature - if you read a good novel, you have to know something of metaphors to get the best of that novel. You have to know that energy, principles, devotions, trends and abstract concerns are put in concrete pictures.

The concrete picture will not be a horse in reality; a horse will be used to say "spirit." In the language on its surface, it will say "horse."

A bad guy in the woods will be given in satire. But he won't be a person; he will be a critical disposition of mind. This will be a person criticizing the world that he is living in. Usually, if it is satire, he is criticizing the politics or government.

W. D. Fard was a satirist, more than any other thing. He even used us and created a living, live theater to criticize the ideas that this society built itself upon and positioned in the mind of the whole world - that it is the Boss, the G-d, the Son of G-d over the whole world. That is what White Supremacy thought.

The White man thought that and built the world in favor of them going up and us going down. But they have repented. I never thought I would live to see them repent, but they have.

Don't be like the story of the man in the Bible, Jonah. G-d revealed to him that the society or order of the day was bad, and He was going to destroy it.

So Jonah, instead of him going to Ninevah and giving G-d's Message to the people of Ninevah, to warn them of impending destruction, he followed the rich people and left the city.

He was traveling with the cargo, the commercial goods. He went to sleep on the commercial goods, down in the hull of the boat.

He could have slept up stairs, but he wanted to be down there with all of that wealth, like a lot of lazy Black folks - sleeping on the White man's wealth. He doesn't own it, but he can rest on the White man's labor, on his pocket book.

Jonah goes to Ninevah and after all of that experience, he expects to find Ninevah destroyed. He gets there and Ninevah is thriving, doing well. Now, he questions G-d.

After going through all of his trouble, being thrown off the boat, etc., he wakes up and remembers that he had a mission to go to Ninevah.

He questions G-d: "Why'd You embarrass me like this? You say You are going to destroy it, and it is flourishing." I don't think G-d even answered him.

G-d had told him in the beginning that if even one repented, He would not destroy Ninevah. He started off with three and then to two and then said that even if one repented, He would not destroy Ninevah.

There are some of us who look at this world today with all of this opportunity for African Americans. In fact, although it is changed a little now, we had an advantage over the White man. I am talking about new opportunities, not the old system.

They are the ones in power and you are not. But there is the opportunity for you to get in power; there are paid scholarships and all kinds of assistance. The White man didn't have it; he got jealous and began working against that.

Then President Reagan got into office and changed all of that. It was fair. All of the opportunity given to us, we took advantage of it and became lazy and greedy and having fun. I know a few of us were serious and doing something with our lives. But more of the majority of us were taking advantage of all of those opportunities, just to live it up.

We weren't saying, "Now we have the opportunity to make more money and live better lives." There should have been a new movement to make the NAACP obsolete. But instead of a new movement, good times were here. So Reagan said, "Your time has come and gone."

One of our political leaders said publicly, "This is our time." And Reagan said, "Yes, your time has come and gone."

I am not a fool, foolishly in love with Democracy. I am sane and sober and doing justice to the situation. The White man has repented; his world has repented the evils that it put on the world of African Americans and other minority people.

We shouldn't keep going on in our spirit and attitude like the White man is the devil, while we are constantly taking over that position of the devil in the world. It is not the White man burning me.

I have proof that I've been burnt by Black folks and burned bad recently. You can't trust your own people, and that is terrible. We have to change the way we look at the reality, so we can make real progress.

I read the Bible, after I decided to go and do a lot of reading and studying and prepare myself for the position I finally accepted and was told by my father that I would come into. That was to be a helper to him and his teacher, Mr. Fard. I studied a lot.

I remember reading the Bible where it said, "There was seen a scroll." Scroll is a rolled up paper, like the graduates carry at graduation ceremonies with the ribbon around it. The scroll was seen flying in the midst of the heavens and coming with the warning of the End of Times.

Then I read in the Qur'an and it is also in the Bible, that there is going to come a time when the people will no longer live in the new world or hereafter or new creation and will no more live by the light of the sun or the moon. All of that will go away. It said that a new heaven and a new earth would be brought about.

In the Qur'an, Allah said that the sky and all that we see up there are going to be rolled back as a scroll. A Scroll is something to read. It has a message. What this is saying is that we won't see heaven with our uneducated minds anymore as a foreign life or foreign creation or foreign world to this one.

But we will see this one with new eyes, with new perception, with new understanding. And it will give us a message, as though a message coming off of a scroll. It is prophesied.

There is coming the prophesied event. Oh, what a wonderful cinch, when the stars are sent, sent out from under their cover. When rich and poor, when young and old behold the heavens being rolled back as a scroll.

We are living in that time right now, and this is a wonderful time that we are living in. When those things that mystified us are not going to mystify us anymore but will speak to us in intelligent human voice, it is going to free our souls. Freeing the soul is going to free the mind to do better and greater things.

We are living in the best times that human beings have experienced on this planet earth. No human being has even imagined a time like what we are in, in its full picture. They had hints of it and predicted it and prophesied it. But they could not imagine the full picture we are seeing now.

Could you imagine our great religious teachers of the past, living a thousand or two thousand years ago, what would happen to their minds, if they were suddenly put where we are right now? The little things we are talking about, they won't hear a thing we are saying. They will marvel at an airplane taking off, saying, "This is more than I imagined!"

But they knew the world was going to do bigger and better and greater things. They knew that the time was going to come, when the intellect was completely free. The old orders from government feared what people thought and feared that you would think something that would challenge them and sell to their public something better than what they had for the public.

They persecuted and killed people, killing off the minds to preserve the order that they had. They did not want anything coming in to disturb that order.

We read about the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ, which is the death of Socrates told all over again. This is why this whole passage is left out of the Qur'an. The Qur'an says, no, he (Jesus) was not crucified: "They neither crucified him nor killed him."

Why? Jesus was the Word and Spirit that come from G-d, and you cannot kill the Spirit that comes from G-d. You cannot crucify it. You cannot kill or crucify the Word that comes from G-d.

We should be prepared for education in religion that respects our adult minds and adult intelligence. I went to churches, because I wanted to hear and see for myself.

I said to myself, "If I am going to preach to Christians" - and that was who we were preaching to, inviting them to the Temple - "I should understand what they have."

I read the Bible and also went to the churches. I went to the Presbyterian Church and to the Catholic Church, but first I went to the Holiness Church. My people were closest to the Holiness Church. I went to the Baptist Church. I respected the Church. I won't even hint anything that would disrespect it.

We have to reform, too. The truth comes like nature comes. The natural world comes at us and mystifies us. Before education, when people heard the thunder roar and saw the lightning flashing, they were terrified.

It mystified them, and they started fearing things and started to perceive those things to have powers much greater than them. They made them gods and started praying to those things. They worshipped those things that they could not understand.

So the process of learning also has been a process of elimination. You perceive things and thought they had power and thought they were god, and finally you had to say "no" to them. Abraham finally said, "La illaha illal-lah" - "There is no deity except The One G-d, The Creator of Everything."

This is the position that Abraham came to. He is called the Father of all people, of all nations. Understand this. I am not saying that there was not a man named Abraham, who did great religious work. I am not saying that he as a man did not exist.

But for the greatest benefit from this knowledge, understand that when we say Father Abraham, that he is the Second Father, like Adam was the First Father, we are talking about a disposition of mind, an orientation in the intellect. We are not talking about a physical person.

That disposition in mind and orientation for the intellect are what made it possible for the intelligence, the human mental curiosity to engage the material world, the material universe, and come to understand that everything G-d created embodies science and knowledge.

That is what began the real process of higher learning and education. So he is the Father for our intellect. Abraham's thinking was different than Adams, so we have to reform the way we perceive these creatures.

His thinking was different from Adam's mainly in this respect. Adam describes every common person in his natural ability, without insight into matter.

So G-d made man a thinker, who thinks and reflects, thinks and looks at what made him think.

G-d made the higher man an analytical thinker. That is the man who fathered education.

That is the position of man that all of you have to come to before you graduate from college. You have to think analytically, not just thinking and seeing things on the surface.

Even in grammar, you have sentence analogy. You analyze the sentence. Then you have to analyze pieces of literature. Everything becomes analytical. It takes us into actually analyzing matter, to understand the nature and composition of matter. The doctor analyzes the disease.

This is the kind of thinking that G-d created the human brain to come to. All of us cannot come to that level, for all of us don't even have an interest to be on that level. But some of us needed to have that kind of thinking and be on that higher level.

It was needed for us to compete with other societies and other people who have that and cherish that, who value that. We need to appreciate human creation much, much more.

Change the way we look at human life to have a higher appreciation for G-d's creation. No creation is as valuable to human society as is the human creation, itself.

The human creation is the most valuable of all life. And all life comes to its fruition or its maturity through human life. I know this is heavily philosophical for you, but I am the lowest form of life expressed in the highest form of life.

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