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Governing the world and societies

By Abdu Rafiu
12 October 2017   |   3:51 am
Not many in the whole world can claim lack of familiarity with rules and regulations that govern their societies. In individuals’ lives, there are personal principles. Clubs, associations all have their rules and regulations.

“The court thereby ruled, among other points, that the assault, which resulted in the death of the deceased was unlawful, wrong and a gross violation of the deceased’s right to life.”<br />

Not many in the whole world can claim lack of familiarity with rules and regulations that govern their societies. In individuals’ lives, there are personal principles. Clubs, associations all have their rules and regulations. There are codes of conduct that guide relationships among members of associations. Some say they are constitutions. For the conduct of their business professional bodies have their ethics. In companies there is what is called company policy. There are in some cases departmental policies as well to reinforce the overall policy. There are financial regulations, there are controls and to police them are auditors, internal and external. In some newspaper houses, for example, the use of certain words such as rape, or giving sordid details of a crime, is forbidden, to protect the society from psychic assault and base thoughts being stimulated, and to promote refinement and decency. In homes, there are rules and regulations: You cannot do this, you cannot do that. No girl in this house should come in after 7:00 p.m. For the boys, remember whose son thou art. There are broad rules, there are the specifics. Local councils pass bye-laws. Nearly two decades or so ago, it was ruling by edicts and decrees in Nigeria. Today, they are called laws, alias the Acts of Parliament. The grundnorm is the constitution. In international relations, there are treaties. There are agreements. The trending Paris Club Agreement on Climate Change comes readily to mind, as an example.

Whether they are called codes, ethics, policy, edict, decree, rules and regulations or Acts of Parliament, constitutions, agreements or treaties, they are all laws. Why do we have laws? But first, can we contemplate for a moment, what would happen if there were to be no laws? Police are wont to warn that there would be breakdown of law and order if a certain pattern of behaviour is not curbed. Police and lawyers frown on recourse to self-help. Individual lives are wrecked in situations of lack of personal codes and personal principles. There are written and unwritten codes of behaviour. The expression that where there is no law, there is ipso facto, no sin has become a sing-song. But then, we just know certain things are not right even while they are not written; they run against the grain of propriety. A keen sense of propriety is a personal law. When lawyers get to a sticky point in their advocacy, when all authorities have been cited and they are getting to nowhere, when the judge is unmoved by their submissions, there is recourse to the Law of Natural Justice. I will come back to this hopefully presently.

Where is the sensing for personal code of conduct, for propriety coming from? What is prompting the recourse to the Law of Natural Justice? Without laws, it is obvious that there would be chaos and confusion of untold proportions, there would be war. It would be rule of the mighty and the powerful; it would be survival of the fittest. There would be oppression and enslavement. For there not to plunge the society into such a state, there is clamouring for the rule of law as opposed to the rule of man. The reason for electing the rule of law is to check arbitrariness and injustice, and to protect lives and safeguard property. They are to engender and protect civil rights and liberty as well as expand the gamut of human rights canvass. The laws are for order in a society; it is for harmony; it is for peace. Without laws there can be no progress. There can be no certainty; no one would be able to say if he would live in the next minute and how far he can go in his movement, in his utterance and in any area of human endeavour. Consequently, life would be short and brutish. Man went further. He realised it was not just enough to have laws, there should be police to enforce compliance with them. In sum, there are laws and there are law enforcers. In homes where the recognition of the place of the woman has been sensed or recognised for certainty as standing higher than man, as the one who through the abundance of her intuition can sense much more surely, the woman sets the rules and enforces them, except where masculine countenance is called for. Generally the mere look of the woman sets the agenda and the tone. So was it that De Gaulle’s wife said triumphantly: “Charles, you rule France, and I rule this house, including you.”

If we puny human beings could recognise the imperative of laws, rules and regulations, is it inconceivable that the One who Created all, the Almighty God, who gave us the faculty to sense, to think and to act, would create and He would not set rules and regulations, he would not give laws on how he would want all who shelter and work in His Creation to conduct themselves in there so that there would be peace, harmony, development, unfolding and progress, joy and happiness? Remember there are more than seven billion human beings on earth. The Laws are the expression of the Will of God. A coarse imitation of this is in recognising that the collective wish (will) of our legislators is what becomes the laws of our nation. Not only did the Almighty give the Laws, for ages He was sending down Teachers and Prophets who taught according to the prevailing levels of inner maturity and receptivity of the people of their times. Moses came with the Ten Commandments of God which, if well understood, are as valid today as they were more than 3,000 years ago when he gave them. The Lord Christ came and confirmed them through His parables and direct Teachings.

Hosea in his teaching of one of the Laws, said: “They have sown the wind and they shall reap whirlwind.”(Hosea 8:7). In Deuteronomy we read “Eye for an eye, tooth for tooth.” (Deut.19:21). Much down in the book we also read, “To me belongeth vengeance and recompense.” (Deut. 32: 35). There is also “What a man soweth that shall he reap.” This statement of the Lord Jesus Christ is the one much more frequently quoted by those familiar with it. All these refer to the Law of Sowing and Reaping more correctly called the Law of Reciprocal Action. A great many believe the law refers only to the plant on the field or in the farm. Yes, if we sow maize, we reap maize and if we sow cassava we reap cassava and not yam even though they are both tubers and they look alike. According to Law, if we pray today until kingdom come, as they say, yam can never change to cassava nor can cassava become yam. To a great many in our world, it is little realised that the comprehensive pronouncement of the Lord refers to what we do, what we say, what we think and what we intuitively choose to do and say and that they are seeds planted in the soil of Creation.

At all times, therefore, we stand always amid multiple returns of our sowing—good or bad. We are products of what we had thought, said or done in the past. And what we are doing now will fetch us fateful consequences, with the time of arrival depending on the nature of the seeds sown. A farmer is likely, for example, to tell us that if we plant vegetables, we are likely to harvest it in 10 days, maize in three months and yam in nine months. The harvesting is in multiples. One grain of maize can bring about a giant maize plant and clinging to it cubs and each cub could carry 400 grains. In other words, between 1,300 and 1, 600 grains can be harvested from just one grain planted three months earlier. It is similar multiple yield our conduct attracts to us after our seeds have gone through the necessary maturation process. This is why a great many, indeed the majority of mankind live heavily burdened with suffering the source of which they are unable to unravel or explain. It also explains why a good number are born into enviable circumstances, sometimes bordering on opulence. For, the sower is bound to his own sowing! Through suffering that gives rise to genuine questioning and longing to get out of the circumstances, a person attracts help that may lead him to the recognition of the knowledge of truth of life and existence. The suffering can vary from excruciating bad health to extreme poverty or some other want or lack.

At birth, each is attracted to parental or societal circumstances where he can experience the effects of his shortcomings or to swim in material contentment. The mechanism that goads a person there is the Law of Similarity, that may be called the Law of Homogeneity, but appropriately the Law of Attraction of Homogeneous species. It ensures that people of the same attitudes and tendencies, weaknesses or strengths are drawn together to form a family, friendship, community or a people or ethnic groups. And so the people of old who were much closer to nature learnt from the language of Nature and came with the saying: “Birds of the same feather flock together”; “Show me your friends and I will tell you who you are;” “Oh, he is the son of his father”; “Like father like son.” These associations or unions cannot be legislated against. A person begins to set himself free when he feels disgust for the circumstances he finds himself and there is a firm resolution to do only what is good. He may quit the company of pub crawlers in order to give up smoking or excessive drinking. Since there is no standstill in nature, the endowed in and contented can only build on the foundation that establishes him in riches, moderate or stupendous, else it will be written of him: “Behold, how are the mighty fallen!”

With determined and unceasing improvement a man is freed from his circumstances, if not in the present sojourn, then in the next reincarnation at which time inexplicable opportunities are brought his way—almost effortlessly. As a matter of fact, with such pronounced improvement, his intuition becomes sharper, a receptacle and he can see pictures; ideas begin to flood his mind, and his becomes the “Midas touch.” By virtue of the change and polish, he becomes a citizen of the universe. His is a wider outlook; no tribe, no provincialism, no bigotry and no country even though he has been born into one. He sees only the human spirit that every human being is. He is filled with love for all. He is compassionate and helpful. There is no guile.

The dross we pack around our souls or the refinement we have permitted our souls determines our ethereal weight which determines collaboratively our place of abode on earth and our place in the beyond—Light Region of joy and happiness or the Region of Darkness or Hell. The mechanism that brings this about is known as the Law of Spiritual Gravitation. What is light soars and what is heavy sinks. The dross is the accumulation of our wrong doing and propensities, base conduct, gossips and what have you.

How then do these Laws work? They are activated by the Power of God, the Most High, the Almighty. God is omnipotent; He is omnipresent and omniscient. It should then follow that His laws must be living, immutable, perfect because the Almighty is perfect; they are all pervading and incorruptible; they are automatic in their working; they are eternal as they are the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, and shall ever be. They are uniform in all Realms of existence and they manifest the omnipotence of the Almighty; His omnipresence and His omniscience. And we say the Most High is all wise and ever-present. It is His Power we encounter in the Laws which work to the minutest details, capturing the fleeting stirring within man. They show to us our true nature and stations in life and our carpet of fate. They reveal above all the Truth that is also the Power and Life. True independence and freedom lie only in adherence to the Laws of Nature, the Laws of God. And so Goethe said: “Oh happy he who can still hope to rise out of the flood of errors. What we do not know is just what we need to know and what we know we cannot make use of!”

Next week: The purpose of life and the place of free will.

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