Gardens of Wisdom

Looking at the Universe as Forces and Objects, Heart is a force that acts on the Mind. The mind acts on a living brain. Life put its effect on RNA or DNA.

The heart competes with another force (the SELF) over the mind. We shall discuss heart now and later discuss the effect of ‘Self’ on the mind Allah willing.

The platform upon which the heart carries out its activities is known as ASH-SHAHWAH. Al-Aql (العقل) and/or Al-Hawa (الهوى) regulate the heart through ash-Shahwah الشهوة))

The effect of the heart is felt in the mind as an urge. The mind interprets the urge as desire and then swings into action. The mind behaves as a servant to the heart.

The physical heart which pumps blood in the body should be differentiated from the heart as a force.

When we talk about the heart of a matter, we mean the base, centre or essence of it. A heartless person is a person without feelings – precisely, a person without mercy. Feeling, particularly love, is the essence of life - the base of consciousness.

By our sense of touch, we detect some basic feelings like taste, smell, pain, temperature and pressure. These are referred to as Objective feelings. They are our usual perception and they are stimulated by the physical objects.

In contrast to objective feelings are the Subjective feelings. Subjective feelings originate from the heart. Feelings of love and joy for example, are felt in the heart – they are not from the physical objects though they may be produced in response to them.

Subjective feelings appear to be coded. They are feelings that carry special meanings for the mind. An emotional feeling is a subjective feeling.

As usual, we may not know precisely how the heart interacts with the mind but it is more than clear that we do have subjective feelings and it is very clear that they are not from the physical objects outside our minds.

What is the nature of these feelings and from where do they come?

Supposing you are walking in a jungle and you come across a lion, what happens? The image of the animal is first taking to your retina. The optic nerves send signals to the brain which, based on the stored information, responds with a reply that what is before you is a wild animal that could attack and tear you into pieces. Suddenly, you find yourself trembling and your heart beating very fast while your body becomes very light. What has happened?

What is the connection between the analysis of the mind and these internal activities?

You have just experienced an emotional feeling called 'FEAR'. Now that you find yourself in danger according to the messages reaching you from the brain, you experience fear – the heart responds with fear.

Fear stimulates the mind into activities. Upon a pre-determined manner, adrenaline is secreted into the blood stream which activates the liver and causes the reserved energy to be readied for use. The heart beats faster and the blood pressure is altered. You feel light and you gain energy that you never had under normal condition. You start running than you ever thought you could and you may even be wounded without any feeling of pain.

What has happened and from where has this fear come?

Again, let us assume you have just listened to an attractive and interesting speech and you so much admired the speaker that you felt like grabbing and putting him inside you. Here, you experience another emotional feeling, 'LOVE'.

There are so many things that could be responsible for love. When a speaker has a lot of attractive features and in addition, the speech is an expression of your deep inner feelings, you become overwhelmed by the speech. You feel like grabbing the speaker as the consequence of your emotional love.

What has happened and from where has this love come?

We all have a sense of happiness and a feeling of sadness. It can be said that the goal of life is to become happy and avoid worries. What is happiness and where does it belong in the physical world?

The heart interacts with the mind from where it understands the world. Broadly speaking, the world (to the heart) is either pleasure or pain. A world that is not associated with pleasure or pain (according to the heart) is useless.

How do the objects in mind (concrete as well as abstract) become associated with pain or pleasure?

Ash-Shahwah can be looked upon as force acting on the heart. The heart is naturally inclined to ash-Shahwah. Nothing attracts the heart except that it contains an element of ash-Shahwah.

The heart responds to the world by inclination and aversion. The inclination is known and felt as love while the aversion is felt as hatred.

What we experience as pleasure is a compound rather than a simple feeling. That is why there is variation in our feeling of pleasure. Pleasure is a combination of love and the affiliated impressions. It is the affiliated impression that creates the differences among the variety of pleasurable feelings.

For example, love associated with awareness is different in pleasure than love associated with sexual feelings.

What really happens when the pleasure zone in our brain is stimulated? Is it that a sensation of pleasure is duplicated as we try to bring it back to mind or that it is created afresh?

If the latter is the case, then we should be able to remove pleasure from one's life by simply damaging the portion of the brain responsible for this sensation. If this is not possible (as we have never seen a person lacking in the feeling regardless of the damage to the brain) we can draw the conclusion that the source of this sensation is not an object but force.

Forces generally, are not defective and not alterable because we have no access to them. We can only manipulate them by indirect means.

The heart is the mother of emotional feelings and the seat of desire and satisfaction. It is the seat of love and what could be referred to as the overall master of our conscious experience. It is not possible to initiate a voluntary act without the involvement of the heart.

We shall try to discuss ash-Shahwah extensively in the subsequent discussion insha Allah.


ASH-SHAHWAH
Human beings grow up to find that they love what they love and hate what they hate. Every human being is inclined to pleasure and averse to pain.

Though all human beings are attracted to pleasant sight and sound, we do have some differences when it comes to what is to be regarded as pleasant. It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Every human being is motivated in life by his search for pleasure and sustenance of that pleasure. Every human being is averse to pain because pain is perceived as detrimental to the state of pleasure and comfort.

All objects in life are valued on the basis of pleasure or pain that they are associated with. An object that is not associated with pleasure or pain is valueless to the heart and consequently to the person concerned.

Basically, there are five categories of pleasure: pleasure of sight; pleasant sound; pleasant taste, pleasant odour; and pleasant feeling.

Unlike feeling, both sight and sound can not be felt directly by the heart – they first have to be converted into impressions to become meaningful to the heart. How is this conversion done?

Feeling is made up three basic components: pressure, pain and temperature.

All objective feelings are felt directly as either one or combination of the above basic feelings. All subjective feelings are coded feelings – they are coded based on the basic feelings enumerated above. This is how much perception is material. The chest is the site of the feeling.

When we look at the things we love and which equally are the motivating factors in life, they fall into two broad categories - there are few things that we love directly and there are many more things that we love indirectly.

Our love for the opposite sex for example, is an indirect love. Our love for the opposite sex is based on the feelings that we derive from such love – our actual love is for the feelings and not the stimulant.

Our indirect love for an object can result into another indirect love and the chain can keep on growing like that. Our practical life (which we call awareness) is dominated by this chain of love.

Ash-Shahwah is anything in human life that is loved directly. All other forms of love are based on Ash-Shahwah. The heart is only aware of ash-Shahwah.

To make the explanation clearer, ash-Shahwah can be looked upon as Pleasure.

Pleasure is inborn – we all entered the world with it and we do not have the ability to modify it. However, we can manipulate it.

Pain is naturally designed to serve as protection for pleasure – pain is therefore pleasure in this sense.

In our interaction with the universe, we find that certain things are naturally pleasurable - that is, they stimulate pleasure in us. Take for example, sweet taste and smell and the feeling of love – we did not make them pleasurable unlike some other things that we did.

Sugar and perfume are among the physical objects that are naturally attractive. In our discussion here, we can say that they come with the natural tagging of ash-Shahwah. They are among the primary motivating factors of life.

As soon as we are in touch with those objects in life that are pre-tagged, the heart reacts with either inclination or aversion depending on the tagging; so, they serve as the starter for the heart or life-cycle as we shall later come to understand insha Allah.

Apart from those objects that are pre-tagged, all other objects in life would have to pass through the process of tagging - it must be remembered that even a pre-tagged object can be re-tagged even to the displacement of the original tagging.


LEARNING
Learning is the name given to the process of tagging.

Every human being learns whether we are attentive or not. The process of tagging (known as learning) is a natural process – we call it thinking.

By curiosity, which is the natural urge to complete knowledge, human beings seek more information.

When we think, we are comparing, contrasting and computing. It is by comparing that we begin to have the idea of beauty. Beauty is among the Shahwah.

If gold were to be the first thing we come across in our life, we wouldn’t have loved it - we would have only registered it. There has to be something to be compared with gold before we can begin to form impressions for it.

As we come across other objects in life, the earlier ones are brought to be compared with the new ones – it is by this process that a strange thing becomes familiar and it is by the same process that we begin to have an idea of beauty.

Beauty, in a general sense, is anything that is more agreeing to the heart. Beauty therefore is a relative term.

We might not have considered gold to be attractive but not after comparing it to other stones. We need something ugly to detect beauty. This is how we attach meanings to sight and sound.

Perception of beauty is based on thought and that is why beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We may all naturally love uniform and regular shapes as well as rhythmical and soothing sound but some other experiences in life do interfere with our thought – that is where we have the differences.

Impression is the name given to an interpreted feeling or a thought. Our conscious life is dominated by the impressions we create.


“Be humble to the truth and you will be the most intelligent person.”
Luqman advised his children.

According to Encarta:
Research has shown that people form impressions of each other in two ways. Sometimes people make quick and effortless judgments based on others' physical appearance, facial expressions, or body language. Studies have shown, for example, that people who are physically attractive are perceived to be happy, warm, friendly, successful, confident, and well-adjusted. At other times, however, people form impressions based on a careful observation of a person’s behavior. According to this latter view, people act like amateur scientists, gathering and analyzing behavioral evidence before evaluating others. The explanations for behavior that people come up with are called attributions, and the theory that describes the process is called attribution theory.

Over the years, research into attribution has shown that when we explain the behavior of others, we tend to overestimate the role of personal factors and underestimate the influence of situations. This bias is so universal that it has been called the fundamental attribution error. In one demonstration of the fundamental attribution error, experimenters randomly assigned subjects to participate in a quiz show in the role of either questioner or contestant. Then in front of the contestant and an observer, the experimenters told the questioner to devise a set of difficult questions to ask the contestant. Not surprisingly, many of the questions—created from the questioner's own store of esoteric knowledge—stumped the contestant. Yet when asked to rate the general knowledge of both participants, observers consistently saw the questioners as more knowledgeable than the contestants. The observers failed to take the situational roles into account and attributed the behavior they witnessed to each person’s level of knowledge.

In forming impressions of others, people are subject to other biases as well. For example, a great deal of research shows that people are often slow to revise their first impressions of others even when those views are not supported by the evidence. Part of the problem is that once we form an impression of someone, we tend to interpret that person’s later behavior in ways that seem to fit our impression. Another problem is that our first impression of someone may shape the way we treat that person—which, in turn, may influence his or her actual behavior. This process is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy. In a classic illustration of this phenomenon, in 1968 American psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson told a group of elementary school teachers that certain students were on the verge of an intellectual growth spurt (in fact, these students were randomly chosen from their classes). By the end of the school year, these designated students—who had received more positive attention from the teachers—actually had higher average test scores than their peers.

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