Mind & Heart: Dialectic & Poetry

Frithjof Schuon writes:

Dialectic convinces us with ideas,

So that we may understand things abstractly; 

Poetry has feeling, works with images 

And seeks thereby to soften the austerity of thought — 

So that we may see the truth with our heart.

Genuine Leadership

Leader always leads without fear

Perception

Triumphs of Modern Man = Triumphs of an Animal

Computers are much more efficient at doing intelligent albeit mechanical work. (Although they're stupid.) Computer is made of matter. Dead matter can do things our brain can do. But they cannot do something humans do.

Animals similarly are very efficient and utilitarian at doing things, notes Alija A Izetbegovic. They do things with a very refined sense of pattern, timing and precise execution to survive. They care about what's useful to them; following codes written for them by Allah. They're intelligent too in this sense. Although I can't say if they can think like us.

What they can't do is art and exercise spirituality. These two feature of humans are at least 70,000 years old, as proven by cave paintings of that era. Animals don't know about rituals, prohibitions, sacrifices, irrationality, etc. Unlike animals, computers don't have feeling and emotions. I believe animals have emotions.

There's another subtle difference that proves humans are different from animals. It is when humans behave worse than animals, as per Qur'an. A squirrel, after sensing danger, would never say, "Hey bro, let's check the fire out there." It would run for its life. Humans are negligent, animals hardly are.

There's a old story. Once all animals revolted against man and took their case to Allah. They complained that man is a usurper of their resources. Man in his defense recounted his brilliant technological achievements. For each of his inventions, an animal would produce a parallel  Spider would compare his complex web with man's ability make structures. Bees would show their water-tight organization to be equivalent to, if not unmatchable, organizational skills of humans. Similarly, man exhausted everything he had, from communication systems to mineral extraction capabilities.

In the end, man said that he was the only carrier and transmitter of Divine Grace on earth, and that if he is go down, earth will be emptied of that resource. At that this point, all animals surrendered to the superiority of humans. Consciousness, spirituality and art are the reasons for man's hegemony on earth.

Hence all these material achievements of modern man - technological and organizational - are accidental to his true nature and function. He has lost his centre and origion, as per Frithjof Schuon, from which he still cannot escape as it's deeply part of his soul. Therefore, this superiority is no superiority. Animals can now directly compete with him, and rebel against him just like modern man has rebelled against Heaven.

Toxic Effects of Inferiority Complex in Pakistan (III)

Read part I and part II.

In South Africa there are two million whites against almost thirteen million native people, and it has never occurred to a single black to consider himself superior to a member of the white minority.

– Frantz Fanon

The feeling of inferiority of the colonized is the correlative to the European’s feeling of superiority. Let us have the courage to say it outright: It is the racist who creates his inferior.

– Frantz Fanon

(First quote of Fanon really shook our spines to the core. This thought has never occurred to us! We must confess. Ask yourself. The second one is a ‘proven’ psychological fact.)

There’s an undeniable existence of self-hatred, self-pity and total disregard for our Way (cultural and above all religious) present in many of us, especially those dazzled by all things ‘western’. Another term for this disease is Occidentosis. Speaking of which Jalal Al-i Ahmed writes in his famous Occidentosis: A Plague from West:

“Under [occidentosis] we are like strangers to ourselves, in our food and dress, our homes, our manners, our publications, and, most dangerous, our culture. We try to educate ourselves in the European style and strive to solve every problem as the Europeans would.”

Jalal has comprehensively summarized negative effects of westernization in various aspects of our individual and collectives lives which we’ll attempt to examine as following.

Read full article here.