The Conquest of the Soul
– 5 min read
Philosophy Podium | Sep 12, 2003 | Written By Neb Naba Lamoussa Morodenibig
For a long time we have looked at our so-called spiritual leaders advising us on the importance of conventions when it comes to our dreams and aspirations. They do their job with a feeling of helping us stay occupied or preoccupied by the goals that we have set, encouraging us towards everything except that which will lead us to question the world and the society in which we live. They told us to work if we want our bread, and this is without any concern for what we must work for and for whom we should spend our sweat and our strength. They have educated us to believe only in what we can see, touch, feel...etc. They expect us to acknowledge only the material aspects of the world and to keep the hope that we will know how to answer the questions that do not necessarily have their domains within realms in which the laws of materialism do not apply...
Maybe it is better that we focus on the individual and his suffering in this world that does not stop aggressing him with the idea that he must be happy. We will look at the individual forced to choose between a multitude of ideas, dreams and objectives that he simply does not know.
It is very important for one to ask himself adequate questions, and the answers we will find to these questions can reveal in us the dimension of the world in which we live.
The priest Ptahotep of the temple of Memphis has arranged the words very well in this proverb he introduced to the world: "When foolishness is rewarded, wisdom becomes useless." This is the source of our problem. The best way to corrupt an individual is to reward his stupidity. This is the state of the individual fragility; he will find even in foolishness. The goal of his life if society rewards him for it. The goal of life is no longer the survival and transcendence of the soul, but the obtention of bread and the pleasures of the moment, just like an animal walking from pasture to pasture.
It is very important for the individual to ask himself the question of "why". Why do we do what we do? If the honest answers that we find to this question bring us back to the idea of bread and pleasure that we gain, let's have the courage to recognize that we have sold our souls. This society has produced a lot of people just like us, all of them preoccupied by the idea of self-determination, and the social politics classifying us on the basis of the quantity of bread, pleasure and glory it allocates to us. As long as we are making this a sense of our importance, this will stay our world, or let's say, the world in which society has condemned us into. As long as foolishness is being rewarded, the individual will capitalize on his capability to be a fool.
The individual soul is just not that difficult to conquer. Even the societies that have refused to advance in time and space very conveniently maintain the idea of social sacrifice. The fool can go as far as seeing in his life, his own way of contributing to the social sacrifice.
We must recognize that our situation as individuals is not easy. It is the same society that has convinced us of the importance and the need to educate ourselves about what we want to make of ourselves, which is telling us that when it comes to our spirit and our soul, the religion it has chosen for us will be the path to our salvation. And in this domain, our belief and the practice of the cult it has organized will be our way of surviving.
The question of "why" remains. This question will help us guide our steps in life. This question will confront us at any moment and will force us to see the dimensions of the world in which we live. The state of this planet is in the image of its inhabitants. The planet will survive only if it is inhabited by beings interested in the argument of survival. The human being that aims at his bread does not question his acts. He is not different than these maggots that affect a putrefied carcass. Just like these maggots, they do not ask questions about the future.
As we say in my village, "tell me your goal and I will tell you if you are a fool." It is very ironic to see that we will find the same arguments and faults on which we classify other species as inferior to us. It is because the other animal seems to be interested only in what they can eat that they easily fall into the traps we set for them. It is because the animal is interested in food and sex that he finds himself locked in a cycle that makes him available to any being capable of exploiting him. We don't need to furnish a lot of effort to observe that if the animals we are exploiting developed other priorities than the one of eating, we will stop calling them primitive and lacking intelligence.
Maybe our evolution simply went in the direction opposite to what we have wished to take, and in our societies there are individuals or groups of people always ready to give direction to our individual effort. We can only ask them the "why" question. Yes, "why". Why before even our birth people have decided for us the forbidden territories? Why is it that our decision of being the best singer, the best player, the best comedian, the best electrician, the best mechanic, the best engineer...etc., is encouraged to the disadvantage of us working on our own selves with a goal of offering to our soul the possibility of surviving all the aspects of the becoming of what exists? We know very well that society, nowadays, is nothing but an artificial world that we have created with the goal of supporting our improvement in nature and in the world. We can now see that when society becomes the goal of our effort instead of the domain of our development, it is the individual that loses.
Modern society is simply the greatest distraction to the individual; it will sing our glory and reward us as long as we neglect the existential questions that the universe poses. Your idea of your qualities will only be made of nothing other than the qualities your society attributes to them. This society will accompany you towards your entire journey on earth trying to convince you that you are good, intelligent, heroic... until the age of the grave. It will even go as far as providing a golden coffin; it will even build monuments to you, but you will enter this grave alone, and on that side, your value will only be made of your own self as a portion of this universe. This is not a matter of belief.
It is so true that when foolishness is rewarded, the individual will find knowledge and wisdom useless. When it is so, we will use our intelligence to explain what the surrounding world has asked us to believe... a way to convince our own self that there is no need to change. This is how we sacrifice the soul and the spirit. We always do it with a surprising pride and with a feeling that the more we persist in our belief and faith, the more we will succeed in proving to the God we have chosen that we are acceptable. In this way we use our so- called intelligence to force the hand of the divine world into our corruption! Corruption produced by a corrupt soul!
