By Roya Monajem, Tehran

Payvand.com - While walking aimlessly around the city, feeling the nothingness of individual existence, the familiar singing of nightingales, strangely gave the idea: this earthly life is so nonsensically interesting that what is wrong with being eternally reborn into it!!! Especially on such a beautiful planet! (As though that is an undeniable fact and there can't be any other beautiful or even more beautiful ones!)

Deeply concerned and tearful about what is going on, on this land, another me can't stop laughing at the absurdity of it all: Is it really true and not a dream or a historical movie that more or less the same scenario-drama is getting repeated? Isn't it tragically ridiculous to be accused of the same crimes over and over again and be tortured in more or less the same underground 'no-man's lands"? Isn't it painfully hilarious?

Astonished by the thought that crossed the mind, i.e. the readiness to repeat this earthly life at least until our beautiful planet is still beautiful and we have not ruined it completely, and then the accompanying shock that I must have gone totally out of my mind - another inner voice assured: considering all the inhuman atrocities and evilness going on around us here and all over the world, it is not at all surprising. However, the painful absurdity of the apparent repetition of history in such a short time has this good hope inspiring aspect heard a lot these days too: It is possible to rule with spears, but not by sitting on them....

But really... isn't it tragically hilarious when we think it is now more than a century that we have been shouting for the same rights of freedom of expression, freedom in having access to human knowledge, freedom, freedom, freedom... in vain?

Perhaps the reason for the failure is that we still haven't paid our national Karma, that's for the role we played in the history of the world and humankind as one of the major cradles of civilization. Our first religion, Mehr (love) Mithraism metamorphosed into Christianity led to dark ages of inquisition, prosecution, torture and execution of 'those who did not think as the church dictated.' 

Our next religion Zoroastrianism as the founder of dual thinking of good and evil influencing all philosophical thoughts until now has turned all of us to schizophrenics.

Mazdak movement (just before the advent of Islam) which can be regarded as a primitive form of communism, as an idea which had already been conceived on the earth was then  developed in Marxism later actualized in one of the most terrifying rules in Ex-Soviet Union particularly under Stalin.

And Cyrus' idea of freedom of religion and federative system of government manifested in the United States of America, the superpower of the world today and its international military expeditions following the Europeans is no joke.

Let's make a conscious censorship with our third great religion now re-appearing as the ruling political system called these days religious democracy and instead review the answer for why all once beautiful avant-garde ideas turn into inhuman systems of ruler-ship, by just reminding the basic law of opposites of dialectic or the law of birth, maturity and death of the Nature.

Which immediately brings us back to the beginning and the same old story of good and evil! Isn't it tragically hilarious? This is perhaps the most authentic dilemma of human existence.

Yet, there is another universal law, which we find in Indian and Chinese philosophy as the law of three, and in Christ's father-son-holy spirit, seen also in dialectics in thesis, antithesis and synthesis and finally in Gurdjieff's Law of Three where the third force (only if it is a conscious creative force) can play a reconciliatory role.

On socio-political level this third force is largely played by people, the most needed and yet, the most ignored. As people we have been divided into castes, classes, castle- and slum- dwellers, this and that in order to be exploited in the human search of power. Yet, whenever the time-space is there all these walls collapse and we turn into a great force making all those in search of personal interests to tremble like dogs.

On psychological level, the splitting dominant world view of good and evil is uniquely intensified in Iranians not only as its progenitors, but due to our conversion to a 'foreign' religion one thousand four hundred years ago. An Iranian means an Iranian and a Moslem. The Iranian in us - depending on our familial upbringing and education - while boasting for the good old days of Persian empire automatically regrets our fore-parents' mysterious surrender to the new religion, no matter how much we later Iranianized it. It is enough to take a statistically valid number of modern educated Iranian men and women with even avant-garde ideas and give them a psychological test which can reveal their innermost views in respect to the opposite sex to understand what I mean by that. There you see the Moslem in their sexually different ways.

Persian Mysticism and after the rise of modern western civilization, scienticism have been the main third forces used individually to overcome or reconcile our historical schizophrenia.

From one perspective Islamic revolution offered the opportunity for us to understand our fore-parents at the advent of Islam. Perhaps that's why Kasravi said in one of his books that we owed a state to clergies.

As an ancient nation we have experienced it all. And that can be the main reason for the present green wave refusing leadership, organization, boundary, because both consciously and unconsciously it knows it all.

And why people supported it all over the world? Perhaps because it is representing a Common Pain (using Ahmad Shamlu's term) experienced in one way or another by all the people of the world. And perhaps that is why everybody can identify with it. If it had leaders, organization, ideology, this could not happen.

Hope as a third force we have become subtle enough to keep it this way. We are getting experienced in pulling the 'intelligentsia' to follow us. Let's hope this time nobody dares to see us as 'sheep' in need of a shepherd.

... Payvand News - 08/28/09 ... --