The test

Metin Karabaþoðlu

WHÝLE WE WERE CHATTÝNG WÝTH a friend of mine, a man, as an intruder of the conversation, interrupted our words suddenly and started to talk to us. “All of our personality is shaped till we reached seven years of age. Since then, our life, our character, is shaped by our experiences till that day.”

Then, he, subsequently, arrayed the sentences such as “for instance me… After these sentences to which we listened with a great patience, finally, the words came to an end, and we could managed to turn the private/special course of our conversation.

Remarkably, this very fresh instance that I experienced in the centre of Istanbul, was connected to the meaning that came into my mind, during calling on my homeland for visiting my relatives, at a night time in the garden of our house in which I lived large part of my childhood.

Also, while my childhood’s memories flowing from my imagination like a movie band in that garden, the psychoanalysts who started their sessions, “please tell me about your daddy?” kept recurring to my mind. How they can, supposedly, penetrating childhoods depths, make analyses about people’s today’s psychological situations and personalities. In this way, then I thought how all people have been turned to the ‘victims of the destiny’. How a fault that could be displayed at someone’s later time slice could be confined in the explanation scope of merciless and anachronistic determinism. From that point, my thoughts have gone towards the people who display weaknesses of personality, commit serious faults and even injustices in human relationships, instead of their consciences having torturing them, and in this way leading them to the truth and right, could escape from this open gate.

Thanks to God, when I was wandering among memories of my childhood in the garden of that modest house, there was not any residue on my heart. There was not any complaining in any spot of my spirit like this: “My dad behave in this way, my mummy said such, or they have done to me like this.”

Did I lead an excellent childhood, then? Did I live my life light pink? Have any greyness, any sorrow, any sadness not been allowed to enter in to my childhood life? Were they causes of this lack of any residues?

No. Unlike the lives of today’s ‘greenhouse product’ children who being tried to brought with an excess care by parents who are under the exorbitant effect of psychoanalysts who attribute to the infancy, minority we experienced was a childhood in which we could face to almost all instances of life.

Yet, thanks to God, in retrospect, when I looked my past, there was no residue in my inner soul regarding those childhood days.

In that state, my intellect thought that the determinist psychoanalytic conditioning, which ascribes all weaknesses that we display today to our parents and the backgrounds in which we were born and brought up, ignores a great truth.

That the great truth that can be expressed with a sentence.

This approach ascribing the weaknesses that we have today to the yesterday’s conditions, while transforming the man virtually ‘a destiny-doomed ’ and, in a way cleansing him of all sins, ignores the secret of the test.

Indeed, this approach records the responsibilities of the distracters that we marked in the life test to the others, instead of us.

Good deeds, things are from us, bad things are from the backgrounds, environments, parents and destiny...

Nevertheless, we observe in our life experiences that the way of becoming ‘a good person’ does not go through from ‘the excellent backgrounds’.

In other words, nor our destiny has been brought to the hands of our parents in that they having shaped our personality doomed us to the present personality, neither our children’s destiny and personality has been given to us.

Quite the contrary, it is necessary to put the sentence in the following way: the way our parents treat us is their test, and the way we internalize, construe and shape it is ours.

Otherwise, why the humans have been bestowed the thing called will?

Is the will a motor that has been reduced to a robot in order to operate at the age of seven, or is it, in reality, a great divine gift that we can manage using it after seven years, or in particular, after age of fifteen?

If we regard ourselves as a convicts of destiny, captives of circumstances, victims of parents, lets consider that we are captives of souls which are captives of weak-willed and keen to blame everyone including the Sustainer of All the Worlds in order to cleansing herself of shortcomings and weaknesses…

Note: I would like now, merely to take notice, as a thing, which is worth reflecting on. We see empathetic warning of the Qur’an about parents’ rights, prophetic encourages on visiting relatives and pungent prophetic warnings on cutting these visiting, moreover, cursing of the Prophet (pbuh) to those claim to be the son of someone besides his father and mother. Can, all of these bear a warning dimension against deterministic conditioning which tries to present the childhood as an origin of today’s weaknesses and a garbage of it?

Translated by
Muhammet Þeviker

  27.07.2009

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