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Theory of Knowledge

Reconstruction of Qur’anic Thoughts with an Attempt to Unify Rationalism and Empiricism

By S.M. Zakir Hussain (Bangladesh)

(Author’s e-mail: smzhussains@yahoo.com)

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A Good Writer Has Five Eyes!

Thought Trigger:

Do you know that you can learn to write very well without even learning to think in the so-called ‘efficient’ way? In other words, do you know that you can think deeply without thinking at all, and just by using your five eyes instead? If you don’t, you’ll have a lot of pleasure now.

What do you Express when you Write?

Just have a look inside your memory and experience. In your writing, especially if it is imaginative or descriptive or narrative, you just express what we can generally term ‘information’. Do you collect this information or just create it in the mind? Actually, we all collect information from the environment – first from the external environment, then from the inner. Now let’s see how.

Collecting Information is like Collecting Flowers and Fruit in the Garden:

When you look at the environment, you collect information with your eyes. There are bits of visual information. The types of information gathered are: DISTANCE, SIZE, HEIGHT, WIDTH, COLOR, and so forth. When you use your touch or feeling, you know whether something is HOT or COLD or SMOOTH or ROUGH and so forth.  In this manner, see how we process information with our five senses in the following table:

You can easily see that I have not mentioned ‘noun’ in the above list.  That’s because that is the primary information about which we gather other types of information.

So, How Should You Look?

Form now on, whenever observe anything outside or inside, simply keep in mind that you’re just LOOKING – with your eyes, ears, tongue, nose and feeling. Also bear in mind that the moment you’re doing so, you’re adding a number of words (adjectives, and verbs etc.) to your database. So start enriching your Vocabulary of Experience (VOE) by re-directing the ways you have so far built your Vocabulary of Words (VOW). Here’s how:

• Close your eyes and learn to ‘see’ the visible things with the other senses, which are: NOSE, TONGUE, TOUCH, and EAR.

• Use the above technique in the case of each of the other senses: for example, learn to HEAR the visible things by totally avoiding any kind of visualization even in your imagination. That’s because we, as far as we’re concerned with this article, haven’t yet known what imagination is.

The Real Power of Imagination:

If you do some homework in the above-mentioned way, the verbal-sensory database, which is very dynamic and has unlimited potential and will evolve or get enriched in you, is what we call IMAGINATION. So keep the following in mind:

• Every bit of sensory information is an IMAGE.

• The amalgamation of all types of such information is IMAGINATION.

• The ability that can fill in the gap of the absence of a sensory organ is called CREATIVITY.

The Beginning of CREATIVITY:

Real creativity begins when you keep one sense-organ stopped and start performing its actions to achieve your objective with the help of the others. In fact, if you have an objective before you can develop your imaginative ability, then, even if you accomplish the objective, you will probably not gain much. That is because a mind that can’t imagine effectively formulates unpromising objectives.

Just keep in mind that you are always ‘reading’ the book your senses are writing on your nervous system. Now get them to ‘write’ things for you. Make it happen that seeing is thinking.

Continued ...

Author of:

Secret Knowledge of the Qur'an