Issue 147 (May - Jun 2022)

“The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” the idiom goes. We tend to underestimate – or ignore totally – what falls on our share, on our side. Our eyes keep scanning across the street and across the horizon seeking more than we already have, which – we feel – is not enough. This…

In its capacity to manifest Divine Names and the many duties assigned to it, earth is as worthy as all the heavens. Each time the outer crust of the earth comes into contact with the atmosphere, it undergoes a mysterious process of formation, layer after layer, to warmly embrace plants and animals…

In daily parlance, feather is used in various idioms or phrases such as “light as a feather,” “feather-brained,” or “featherweight.” The word is often used in a diminutive effort to denote simple, easy, or unimportant things. However, a recent study has revealed that feathers play vital roles and a…

In a March 11, 2021, interview with Philosophy Magazine, Karl Lauterbach, now Germany's health minister, concluded, "Corona policy is covered by Rawls." Lauterbach, who advocates for limiting freedoms in favor of health protection during the current pandemic, had studied with Rawls in the 1990s. Jo…

An ordinary person has to make up to 35,000 trivial decisions every day. Two hundred twenty-seven of them are about food alone. If you make the wrong choice, it is not a significant event in your life if it comes to your coffee; you make a face and move on. What about your decision to choose your s…

Love is one of the few words in the human dictionary that has no clear definition. It is an ignorance of knowing and a force of feeling that keeps humans in a state of churning and longing, no matter what they encounter in the natural world. In universal and historical human experience, it has beco…

The solar system consists of planets, dozens of moons, and millions of asteroids, comets, and meteors revolving around the Sun at its center. Along with all these celestial bodies revolving it, the Sun turns around the Milky Way. This movement model is called the spiral model. The planets in the s…

Denoting abandonment of all (worldly) pleasures and delights, and the affliction and hardship one bears when overcoming corporeality, chila (suffering) is used to express an initiate’s spending at least forty days in strict austerity and self-discipline in the name of spiritual training. During thi…

“They will say: ‘Our Lord! You have made us die twice, and given us life twice, so we acknowledge our sins. Is there, then, any way to get out?” (al-Mu'min 11) The verse refers to dying twice. This entails that one has to be alive before each death. Before fertilization, both sperm and ovum ar…

Tim and Adam work at the same office. It was Monday. They went to Central Park to have their lunch together. It was a beautiful, cool, cloudy fall day. On their walk to the park, they mostly talked about nature. While walking towards an empty bench, dry leaves crunched underfoot. A cool breeze swe…

Constant progress within science and technology helps shed light on secrets related to life as well as wisdom and the real purpose behind many phenomena. Science also helps us to realize that many events we assume to be unconnected actually exist in harmony and solidarity with each other. Our worl…

Many of us must have watched a video in which a mother antelope is sacrificing herself when she saw a crocodile was approaching from behind her fawns. Such incidences in the animal kingdom draw our attention to the innate feeling of compassion in humans and its effects on other emotions. A human w…

On a cool, starry summer night I slumber on my fluffy bed As the ray of the sky’s eye Shines upon my tired body My soul goes to the world of dreams And see spectres staring at me One of them speaks, saying, “I’m dead, you’re alive; change your life,” Asking in a low voice why, They said, “Once…

The true Beloved is our Lord, the Merciful and Everlasting. Company with Him is to feel His presence all the time, with our entire being. One thing we should note before we expand on this companionship is that we need to be careful when we speak about God Almighty, for we cannot conceptualize the D…

Rewinding the clock of human skin cells Gill et al. Multi-omic rejuvenation of human cells by maturation phase transient reprogramming. eLife, April 2022. The cells in our bodies perform their functions slower and begin to dysfunction as we get older. When skin cells age, they produce less collag…