(Reprinted from the Muslim Journal 2-2-07 TO 2-9-07)

Human Creation in the Parable of a Plant

Imam W. Deen Mohammed

(The following is the First Sunday Address by Imam W. Deen Mohammed at the Homewood Hotel, in Homewood, III., on Nov. 5, 2006.)

If the child could not balance itself and walk like is, its life would be very difficult. The world is made for people who stand up on two feet. If you crawl around, your life will be very difficult.

Like the plant has to fix itself firmly in the earth to be nourished and grow to its full size, its maturity, we have to fix our child, our sons and daughters, firmly in reality. We have to situate them firmly in reality, so they will be able to bear their weight that Allah has created them for.

G-d did not create them to stay small. G-d created them to grow, to increase in size, and they need to be given the care and understanding that they need to support their weight and not have to struggle so hard with supporting their weight.

GROWING IN A BALANCE

If he is not growing in a balance, it is going to be very difficult. Just think, the child is going to grow up pretty soon to be 170 to 180 pounds. Imagine if 100 of those pounds were on one side. Imagine how difficult it will be for that child to walk and balance that weight.

But if the weight is balanced correctly, the gait, the walk is so easy. So we have to teach our children balance in reality. Don't fail to teach them what they need to know to be successful in a real world.

A real world requires that they accept more and more responsibility as they grow year after year and grow bigger in size. They are going to have to accept more and more responsibility.

Our First Father, Adam, G-d said was a man made of the ground. People of the ground, made of the ground like Southern farmers, know to prepare their children to live in reality. They prepare their children to provide for themselves, one day, food, clothing and shelter.

They have to be ready to take on a wife for the males and be ready to accept the responsibility to provide living quarters for the female and the children that will be expected from her. The Southern people knew naturally to prepare their children for this reality.

In the modern city world that we live in now, we don't do that. We leave it to the police or to the gangs or to the criminals to teach our children how to live in this world. We've given up, it seems. It seems that we think we can't manage our responsibility as parents anymore.

We turn them over to the world, and we have to change that. I know that many of you are not guilty of that, but there are too many of us who are guilty of turning the child over to the streets.

IMPLANTED IDEAS

We are talking about a noun — this plant can be a thing, a living biological body called plant life, and it could be an establishment. It also can be an idea planted in the mind. It could be something "implanted" or put in the mind, hid away in the mind to produce its affect without the awareness of the person or the mind that was impregnated.

Mr. Fard, the teacher of my father Elijah Muhammad, created many things in the forms of ideas and thoughts and language, that he intended to go into the mind without your awareness, without you being aware of the purpose for which it was put in your mind.

He wanted to have it grow in your mind, in the dark, and affect your life to one day change your life. He was planting seeds in the human mind; that is another meaning of plant.

You plant something in the mind and it grows in the mind. And some of them will grow with your awareness of them growing, while others are slipped into the mind. They grow without your awareness.

If a good Shepard or gardener plants seeds in our mind, the results in the future will be good for us. And we may reap a harvest of wonderful and great things, wonderful and great ideas that we couldn't see or perceive with our own minds or eyes.

It had to manifest itself, produce itself, and show its growth in our life, for us to know, "yes, we are pregnant." Implanting is like impregnating. Implanting in the mind the ideas or seeds of thought is impregnating the mind. Ideas born in the mind are somebody's babies.

I once observed a person talking about the things that he had produced and he was showing them to observers. He said, "I am proud of these. These are my babies."

CREATIVE THOUGHT OUR BABIES

Animals have sex and produce children; they don't have to go to school for eight years and for four more years and four more after that or six more years. They don't have to have all of that education. It is natural for them, habit for them, to have children.

It is no big deal to have sex and to have babies. The big deal is to have creative thought. Then as a people, look at what you have done for the space that you live in. Look at what you have done for the space that was once vacant, barren, not productive.

In a few generations, you look back on that space and see it just blossoming with wonderful creations that came out of the minds of your people. You can look at it and say, 'These are our babies."

That is a human achievement; that's better than an animal. An animal cannot have much of that. Bees build honeycombs and birds build nests and sometimes stay in the trees long after the birds are gone, just like the squirrels.

But they don't leave skyscrapers. They don't leave factories. They don't leave plants that are producing many, many creations.

Plants! See what the industrialist called his factories? Plants! Adam is the first industrialist.

FROM DUST TO INDUSTRY

When I was a young Minister about 30 years ago, I said, "Man means mind." I also said, "We have to go from dust to industry."

The Scripture said that G-d made man from the dust of the earth. It was dry, for it hadn't rained. And He caused the rain to fall down and wet the earth, and He formed the man of the earth. That is just what is happening right now.

There is dust everywhere, and I am trying to bring a light rain down — a rain of your good feelings, a rain of your good concerns, a rain of your good sentiments, a rain of your affection for the right thing. I am trying to bring that water down and let it touch the dust, to give it something to let it hold together.

Praise be to G-d. We have to become producers. We share as a group a history. I am not just thinking of us as Muslims, for first we have to realize that we are descendants of parents who were brought to these shores, to the West, to America to be slaves, part of slave labor.

We share an experience, and it is an experience that has left strong imprints on our very souls. So in this soul life or spiritual life, we have strong ties to one another.

It is because we have experienced over the generations, over a long period of time, things that left hurt and things that left joy and pleasure.

That is what makes us kin-folk. That is what really makes us soul brothers and sisters. It is the experience that we shared that others did not share with us. So we don't have that spiritual bond with them, that depth of soul with them that we have with one another.

The Irish have their own history of suffering and joy, and they are bonded together by their history. Now, if we forget the history or change and don't care anymore about remembering it, we lose the strong ties, the strong bonding. We lose the strong spiritual bonding.

No matter how much we jump and shout, or dkihr ourselves out into space as religious people, soon as we get out of the hypnosis - or even under the hypnosis - we are not really loving one another.

We are just stroking ourselves. For we go right back to kicking each other in the face and killing each other and robbing each other and giving each other drugs.

Why is that? It is because we have been separated from the history of our shared experiences that bonded us spiritually together and made us brothers and sisters. That made us hurt when one of us was hurting. It made us want to do something about bad conditions in our neighborhood.

We have to get that back. And we can get it back. We are getting it back right now, for there is a fine rain falling down. I feel it! It is a fine steady rain coming down on the dust. And the dust is holding together a little better now.

We have to make it all the way. We can't fail those who have paid the big price, so we would be free today. We can't fail the preachers who risked death, knowing the world didn't want them preaching what they preached: Manhood for the Black man.

The White Supremacists didn't call you a man; they called you a boy. Now here comes one who said: "I'm not your boy. I am a man, just like you."

Malcolm responded to one interviewer questioning him on television. The interviewer asked, "What do you all want?" It was a good question, since they were calling all White folks devils and saying they wanted to separate from them. And that their time had come to an end.

If I had been on the other side, the one who was on the side of the world that was going to end, I would be concerned, too. Maybe we could make a deal. So they asked Malcolm, "What do you want?" Malcolm said, "Ask yourself, what do you want?"

Malcolm was saying that he was not a boy anymore. That he was a man talking, and he wanted what a man wants.

"You are a man, and you should know what a man wants." First you want that your wife be "your wife" and not somebody else's wife. And our wife as our community was somebody else's wife!

They are plowing our community. They are implanting in our community. They are producing in our community. And the community is growing, but not by our thinking and not by our efforts and not by our SEEDS, SEEDS, SEEDS!

It has to change and it will. Actually, it is changing. Getting back to establishment. The Hon. Elijah Muhammad, before he passed, saw that we had a plant. He called it the Muhammad Speaks paper plant, and the paper grew to be the largest circulation of any Black or African American newspaper in America. No matter how we got it, we got it.

With that great increase in circulation, the Muhammad Speaks newspaper provided most of the cash flow, more than even the import and export business. It was the greatest producer of cash flow.

It enabled the Hon. Elijah Muhammad to continue to do big things, like buy thousands of acres of farmland in Alabama, Michigan and other places. There was big growth.

I don't know if the Hon. Elijah Muhammad understood the creation of our First Father from dust. I don't know if he understood the parable of the creation of human life as a parable with a plant.

I do know if he were here to hear his son right now, he would jump and shout. I do know that he loved Scripture, and he would be jumping and shouting and my mother would, too.

I doubt that he understood those things, because a person who understands Scripture and is speaking to a religious body, you can't help but to share that with your congregation. So I am sure he would have shared that with his congregation. But you know they say that G-d works in mysterious ways.

G-d can cause things to happen, and if you don't know what is going on, it can look spooky. It will have you saying, "What in the world is this?"

You'll shake your head to see if it will change or look the same afterwards. If it looks the same, then you have to try to grow to understand what is going on.

I look at my father's life, his preaching, his words, his actions, and I know G-d intervened. He could not do that by himself.

He could not have done that by himself, on his own limited education, thinking and mind. In fact, if he had been the most educated Black in America, he couldn't have done it, unless G-d assisted him and intervened in his life.

I know that for a fact, after looking at his words and his life and how it grew over the many years of his leadership and where he left off. He left off where all people should start.

For many years, he just taught us what we called The Lessons or Teachings of the Nation of Islam, Problem Books, First Student Enrollment, Lesson No. 1, Lesson No. 2, English Lesson No. 1, 14 Questions and Answers, 34 Problems. He had students.

Then he put out a book of his own, How To Eat To Live. And that was a good book, so good that one of the high priestess in the Black community in Herbal Foods and Health Foods had it, when I went to her place - Dr. Fultona of Chicago. Dick Gregory, the comedian and political activist, brought a lot of attention to her.