Who am I? What am I doing right now? Perhaps I am trying to write something that would make me famous. But is that true? Questions like these tease me so much, as they tease everybody else.

"Why do I exist? Where do I belong? Where am I headed?".... These are some other questions that get my attention. They disturb get my attention. They disturb me when I am unable to find their answers. To find answers to these questions I went through various religious scriptures. I tried to find answers in the philosophical expositions given by famous philosophers. I tried to find them from the scientific researches carried out by famous scientists. But no! I could not find them. Instead, these researches raised even more questions. What to do now?

Where to go and look for the answer to these questions? Imam Al-Ghazali, a distinguished philosopher and a religious authority, once said: " I have looked into every dark recess of my mind, I have made an assault on every dark recess of my mind, I have made an assault on every problem and I have plunged into every abyss; I have scrutinized the creed of every sect; I have tried to lay bare the inmost doctrine of every community.

All this I have done so that I might distinguish between true and false, between sound tradition, and heretical innovation"Al-Ghazali tried everything but could not reach the truth. Ultimately, he had a nervous breakdown. He resigned to solitude and relinquished all his academic pursuits. He joined the mystics (Sufis), and found that intuitive feelings that make us understand God could be found in mystic disciplines.

Whether he was right or wrong, we all have to decide.

Before I proceed further I would like to mention that we fully own the life that we are living, but it's a pity that we don't even know as to what our life is and where it has come from. It's very strange that we go on living our lives without knowing where it has come from and why. Although we like to go to the root of any problem that we may face, but when it comes to knowing our own lives we are unable to answer that.

There is another question: "Should we try to know the answer to these intriguing questions or should we leave them destiny?" I think if we leave these questions to destiny then we will not be able to love our life prudently and will be having various fears and inhibitions which will certainly disturb our prehensile of thinking. As a result, we will think outside of what we have been 'conditioned' to think.

Have we ever analyzed ourselves? We can speak our mother tongue because we have been (from our childhood) conditioned to do so. If we are born in an Urdu speaking family we would be conditioned to speak Urdu. Now the question that raises its head is: can we think and behave independently, because everybody is prone to thinking according to their conditioning? And until there are differences, there are going to be fights and disputes. But even then, why do we indulge in fights and disputes?

Because we are unable to get rid of our conditioning and think afresh. If only we could do that, half of our world's troubles would be gone. The way we are conditioned creates 'patterns' of thinking and for the rest of our lives we tend to think and behave as per that pattern (De BONO). When we do so, we become mechanical.

In the words of Rumi:
"What seems wrong to you is right for him, what seems poison to one is honey to someone else, Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship, these mean nothing to me. I am part from all that, Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better Or worse than one another, Hindus do Hindu things The Dravidian Muslim in India do what they do, It's all praise and it's all right, It's not me that is glorified in acts of worship, It's the worshippers! I don't hear the words, they say. I look inside the humility, that broken-open lowliness is reality, not the language! Forget phraseology, I want burning ... BURNING.

Be friends, with your burning. Burn up your thinking and your forms of expression." Until Shams ad-Din met him, Rumi was a strict Muslim religious scholar. So much so that he don't even listen to music. But when he became enlightened (after meeting Shams ad-Din) he became infatuated with music. So, how to break our patterns and think and behave in a different way? For that to happen one does not have to have a degree in philosophy, science and religion. The human nature knows it all. If a human thoroughly understands his/her own nature, then there is nothing out of reach for him/her. So what Needs to done is to observe one's own self closely. This is the only way to understand the reality of life. "Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, My God, my mind, my thoughts, my soul and my body. Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. Learn how it happens that one watches without willing, loves without willing. If you carefully investigate these matters, you will find him in yourself.