Deception of Greatness
Air Marshal Abdul Latif had 40 years of experience of flying planes. In August 1981, he flew a Russian-made MIG-25 in order to test it. After flying for half an hour, he landed. When he stepped out of the plane, he remarked:
The flight made even the Himalaya’s look small! (The Times of India, August 26, 1981)
When a plane travelling at a speed faster than sound flies over the Himalayas, a passenger sitting inside will naturally see the Himalayas as small and might develop strange assumptions about his own supposed greatness. But this misunderstanding is wiped off if the plane crashes against a Himalayan peak. Even a slight brush against a mountain will immediately cause the plane to go up in flames, reducing it and all the passengers inside to ashes in a trice.
In this world, when someone acquires some perceived greatness, he quickly falls prey to misunderstandings about himself, although every ‘greatness’ in this world is like someone looking at the Himalayas from a high-speed plane. Such a passenger considers his travelling in the plane as a big thing, but it is actually nothing but deception of the imagination. A slight change in conditions is enough to convince him that there is no truth whatsoever in his misunderstanding.
In this world, no one has the capacity to obtain by himself all the innumerable favourable things and factors that are required in order to obtain something. It is only God who puts together various favourable causes and brings into being any particular development. In this entire affair, external causes are simply a curtain, as it were. And so, to be truly realistic, one has to acknowledge God’s Divinity and, in relation to Him, one’s utter servitude. Externally, it may seem that one acquires something through one’s own efforts, but one should actually consider it to have come from God. One may appear, from the outside, to be big; but one should realize oneself to actually be very small. One may appear to be flying high in the skies above, but one must feel oneself to be low.
The test that an individual has to face is to pass by external deception and arrive at the Truth. He must consider and realize every supposed greatness in this world to be false. Few, however, succeed in tearing apart this curtain of deception.
