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Eternity
Eternity

Table of Contents
Preface


ARE WE ON THE RIGHT PATH?
Introduction
Fear And Favour
Urge of Dominance
Faith
Middle Eastern Mythology
Revelation


SEMITIC RELIGIONS
Introduction
Judaism
Christianity
Islam
Horrors of Fundamentalism


ORIGIN & DESTINATION
Introduction
Epistemology
The Creative Principle
Mind and Matter
Life After Death
Summary


THE WAY
Introduction
Harmony
Free Will
Ethics
Psychology
Sociology
Law
Politics
Taxation
Economics
Mysticism


Postscript
Glossary
Bibliography

Eternity

 
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ETERNITY

CHAPTER TWO

URGE OF DOMINANCE

Urge of dominance is the arch enemy of a healthy personality, and the well-being of mankind.

Since this is the focal point of discussion, I must state that heading an organization or institution as a duty, is not dominance but leadership. Here, by dominance I mean imposing one's spiritual or secular authority on others with a view to controlling their lives even to minor details. This is the process which allows one person to paralyse the free will of millions by saddling them with his own determination.

What is an Urge?

It is a psychological term which may be described as a driving force. A motor car consists of an engine, a body, wheels and scores of other parts. Yet it cannot move without fuel which actually propels it. What petrol is to a motor car or coal is to a locomotive engine, urge is to man. Drive is just another word for urge. It is a strong emotional force which comes to control the behaviour of a person. Of course, man has many urges - the urge to satisfy hunger, the urge to gratify sexual desire, and so on. When an ordinary desire gains high intensity, it also ranks as an urge. For example, a man falls in love with a woman. If he is just fooling around with her, he is seeking the fulfillment of a desire, but if he becomes obsessed with the woman, and all his dreams and actions are directed by the considerations of her pleasures and displeasures, his desire begins to rank as an urge for being the driving force of his behaviour. Every urge plays an important role in human conduct but the urge that gains ascendancy over the rest is the supreme urge; its right operation and magnitude of success or failure may decide the quality of personality.

Dominance-urge, the root of evil

Of all urges, the urge of dominance is the most severe because it goads its possessor to gain control of other members of the species. It is evil by nature because "A's" dominance over "B" is not possible without the latter surrendering his rights to the former. And, there is nothing more sordid than depriving others of their liberties; it is in fact an act of neutralising the free will of the dominated person for making it a shadow of the dominant's volition. The evil nature of the dominance-urge is displayed by the dominance-hierarchies found in domestic fowl, birds, baboons, bumble bees, crabs etc. It is well explained by what is called "peck order" and is commonly seen amongst chickens where bird "A" pecks the weaker bird "B" who in turn pecks the still weaker bird "C". It follows that pecking or repression is the main characteristic of dominance-hierarchy which is organised on the principle of "might is right". A better understanding of this concept is provided by "Lek behaviour" which refers to a communal area where two or more males of a species perform courtship displays. By a demonstration of brute force, the winner establishes his dominance over all other males of the herd which acknowledge his right to seduce any female, and priority to enjoy food and water. This is what dominance is all about - the mania of self-preference to the total exclusion of others.

Dominance-hierarchy

Dominance-hierarchy, of course, is a must for social organization to avoid chaos, which is another description of death, but even as a pillar of organization, it is virtuous only when every member performs the allotted function as a duty to promote the cause of the society.

In a dominance-hierarchy based on dispensation of duty, it is the chief function of the ruler to establish a fair system of administration for the dispensation of natural justice to safeguard people's rights and liberties. Therefore, his office ought to rank as the most reverential, but in practice this is not the case because, as a rule, he does not administer rights and liberties to advance the cause of people but for the purpose of prolonging his own rule and enhancing his own dignity. As a dominant being, he knows that more freedom for the people means less power for himself. This is against his nature because power to the ruler is what sight is to an eye, lustre to a diamond and usury to a Jew. Since an increase in his power leads to a decrease in people's liberties, he is usually wise enough not to achieve his end with brute force. Therefore, he resorts to hypocrisy and raises the dignity and sanctity of people's duty (except his own) so far above people's rights that the former begins to look holy and the latter, profane. By projecting the state as a goal in itself, he makes it the most powerful and the f nal arbitrator because it is he who wields the state powers and therefore, the state becomes the shadow of his personality. Thus he prepares a highly sophisticated web of gubernatorial wizardry which allures people to get entangled in it to suffer a volitional paralysis of their freedom.

Tamburlaine

A dominance-hierarchy is usually operated by the mechanism of fear and favour to enforce the gubernatorial will which is the child of the dominance-urge. Timur or Tamburlaine, one of the greatest conquerors of history, provides a good specimen of the concept of dominance, and fear and favour.

The entrance to Timur's Palace boasted the inscription:

"The Kingdom belongs to Allah The Sultan is the Shadow of Allah on Earth."

In fact, this inscription sprang from his dominance-urge which prompted him to equate himself with God, though indirectly, as his shadow or viceroy. It is interesting to know the practical implications of this urge.

Timur, the conqueror, believed: "Just as there is only one God in Heaven, so the earth can support only one King". Therefore, he demanded of Bayezid (1360-1403) to acknowledge him as his overlord. Bayezid, the great Turkish Sultan was himself a formidable soldier and enjoyed the reputation of massacring a Christian army of 100,000 at Nicopolis in 1396. Being stunned by this insolence, he challenged Timur to a battle and threatened to take Saray-Mulk-Khanum, Timur's chief wife, as his concubine. In the ensuing battle near Ankara during July 1402, Timur triumphed. To display his dominance, he imprisoned Bayezid in a specially-built iron cage and to magnify the inferiority of the vanquished foe, Timur took his wife for a sexual partner!

His carnage of the Indians in Delhi stood at 75,000. When his chroniclers incorporated this fact into an official record along with the most horrifying details of rape and pillage, Timur became angry. Considering his campaign a glorious victory, he remarked: "A cook ought to be judged by the taste of the dish he prepares and not by the blood on his hands when preparing it".

During his military expeditions against the Arabs, he built high mounds with the decapitated heads of the victims. The heads, which had been secured in position with clay, faced outward to frighten passers-by. The mound at Aleppo was ten cubits high and twenty cubits in circumference.

Tamburlaine and Fear

It seems reasonable to think that a man like Timur would not be afraid of anything. But this view does not hold good when we realise that on his deathbed, he trembled with fear and continuously recited Kalma to acknowledge the lordship of the prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam who claimed to possess intercessory powers for granting his followers the delights of Heaven. Not only that, when his grave was opened up in 1941 by the Russian archeologists, they found two skeletons buried together; the other skeleton was that of Sayyad Imam Baraka, his spiritual protector; they had been buried together in the same mausoleum, and it was Timur's face that had been turned towards Sayyad Baraka who was a descendant of Muhammad and thus endowed with the grace to keep the flames of Hell at bay. Timur was as much afraid of death and Hell as anyone else!

Timur excelled not only in the art of frightening, but he was also generous to his loyal servants. He, like most rulers, secured obedience by activating the instincts of fear and favour to satisfy his urge of dominance. However, this urge is so frantic that its tentacles spread far beyond the grave. Why? This is a complicated question and does not admit a direct answer. Therefore, I shall add the next Chapter to explain it.
 

 
 

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